The Tesla is not vapor. I've sat in one of them! A couple of months ago, a friend of mine invited me to tour his RF emmissions testing facility, where he pointed out a room used for testing cars.
The conversation went like this:
ME: Cars really need to have EMF tested?
HIM: Well, apparently with all the new electronics in SUVs manufacturers are worried about interference.
ME: What kind of SUV will fit under that antenna? My hybrid won't even fit under that thing!
HIM: A really small one...?
ME: Are you testing the Tesla?
HIM: We do not talk about our clients.
At that point, I learned that my friend has a very bad poker face.
The amount of time you need colour is pitiful, and for home use (business should not be using inkjet, no excuse) it's virtually all for photos - that's the only real time a laser can't cut it, when you want a small glossy. Then, taking your photos on a card down to the local supermarket works out much, much, much cheaper. My brother bought a load of second-hand HP Laserjet 4MV's on eBay - all ex-business, all done about 100,000 pages minimum, all still going strong five years later and toner is dirt cheap and easy to come by. This is a person who prints out 50 copies of 100-page brochures every week.
It all depends on printing needs...
I realized that most of my printing needs were for Google Maps / Mapquest, which really are easier to read when done in color. After I bought a GPS, my printing needs are an occasional photo or reservation confirmation. I'd much rather have the ability to print the photo on equipment that I can control then run around for a $0.10 photo.
It is only a matter of time before someone offered inexpensive ink. It was obvious that HP was taking extreme measures to prevent someone from competing in that space.
This shows how important regulation of businesses we need to have. Too many people don't want to get involved in anything (government or otherwise). It is sad that the people who run these businesses feel they don't have to be accountable at all to anyone about how they run their business.
One night, when my Epson refused to print because it claimed that it was "out of Ink", I rushed out to buy one of the new Kodak printers that uses cheap ink cartridges...
BIG MISTAKE! I should have returned the sucker, but I don't do a lot of printing, so I didn't realize how much of a POS it was until after the store's return policy ended.
The Kodak's print quality is OK, but the real problem is that about 10% of the time the printer will just stop working for a few days. It'll spit out nothing but blank paper with a few dim lines.
The scanner drivers for the Mac are also seriously defective. Whenever I try to scan, it will disconnect all of my USB devices, including my external hard drive! It's left my mouse inoperable.
Who the hell buys ANY cable from a retailer like Best Buy or Circuit City? Want something worse then USB? Consider Cat5. I love seeing a 25 foot patch cord thats going for anywhere from $25-$40. $1/foot to $1.6/foot. WTF is that? I can buy a thousand feet of the shit for around $80 ($0.08/foot). Yeah, they should get some mark-up for them, but that much?
Last year I helped my father buy an LCD TV and a DVD player. The salesman sold us an $80 DVD player, and tried to sell us a $100 HDMI cable.
If my father wasn't there, I would have told the salesman that no cable is worth more then the electronic device!
Enough with the 24/96 wet dreams. Yes, 24/96 does offer real advantages for mixing houses in terms of being able to normalize levels generated by different sources and reducing the complexity of filters. But 16/44.4 is perfectly fine for home audio playback.
Have you ever listened to any of the 24/96 recordings? They sound great!
Honestly, with modern "lossy" codecs, there really is no point in downsampling to 16-bit. Lossy audio uses fourier transforms, which work on floating point numbers instead of integers. AAC will encode to the same bitrate for both 16-bit and 20-bit.
Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. That is 100% true. But in the real world, if you are sampling a digital recorder at 44Khz how do you ensure that NOTHING above 22Khz gets to the analog to digital converter? You need a strong analog filter but there are no filters that have an exactly square cut off Maybe let's say you have a 24db per octave filter. This mens you will have only attenuated the higher frequencies, not eliminated them. Same on playback. You need a theoretically perfect analog filter to playback. Such analog filers do not exist. The way they get around all this is to sample at 96 or 128Khz. If you do this then real-world analog filters can be used.
So, couldn't you use a 192khz ADAC and an ideal digital filter to get it down to 48khz?
My 96khz DVD-Audio disks have much better sounding cymbals then their CD equivilents. I'm not sure if it's due to the higher output sampling rate, higher bit density, or 5.1; but I will say that I prefer higher sampling rates when available.
He will disappoint you. Bank on it. The other 99.99% of us will, however, probably like it.
I hope he keeps it to a reasonable length. His version of King Kong was so damn drawn out, I'm tempted to skip seeing PJ's version of "The Hobbit" unless each film is under 2 and 1/2 hours.
I don't mean to be offensive but it seems from my POV in the UK that Americans (and other countries like Australia?) need to stop putting such damn big engines in cars/pickups. I mean seriously, there is no need for everyone to own a vehicle with a 3.0 litre or bigger engine. A big engine in a normal car (non sport) in the UK is around 2.0 litre?
Hey! We need our big-ass engines as a way to advertise our giant penises! To an American male, a big-honking-engine is penis-wagging.
Apple has largely solved this problem with two major things. First, all systems ship in single button configuration, so developers almost never require right-clicking for any action. (aside from one pro graphics company and a few bad ports of Windows/Linux apps). This means everything accessed by right-clicking is a secondary way to get to that function and can be used for quick shortcuts. The second thing they did was the invention of the mighty mouse. It isn't perfect and I don't use one myself, but they change a mouse from single button to multi-button in software, so different users of the same hardware can have either a simple mouse or an advanced mouse. This is the best thing ever for public machines, family computers, and other shared systems.
I actualy like the way that Apple does context menus in Mac Mail. (Some web apps also follow this pattern.)
In Mac Mail, when the mouse is hovered over an item that has a context menu, like an email address, it gets highlighted and a little arrow appears on the right. Clicking on the arrow displays the context menu. It's nice because there's no confusion between right and left, and it's obvious when there's a context menu.
A second advice would be to keep abstractions as simple as possible. Think "What do I need and what API do I need to do that?". If you can get away with an API with only an init function and a "worker" function, then be my guest! K.I.S.S. is very important. Again, to make things as simple as possible requires a lot of thinking.
I hear that! Too many abstractions can ultimatly make things worse, especially if the abstraction layers are highly specialized and take hours to debug!
Sure, I could watch it on my computer, but I just don't like it and feel that (other than here on slashdot) I am not in the minority. I also, like most people (again other than those on slashdot) don't have a media center type PC hooked up to my main living room TV. I know how to do I, and could do it, but it is a lot of hassle and expense when I can just rent/buy dvd's and put them in my already connected DVD player (that, by the way, I don't have to worry about security updates, blue screens, Linux configuration files, hard drive failures, etc.). Maybe as the media pc "appliances" become more common, this will become more of a reality, but I think right now, most people just don't want to watch a downloaded movie. (and don't even get me started on the likely DRM issues that would come with such a service)
I took my old WinXP laptop and hooked it up to my TV using a VGA-in on the back. It's great for DVDs and YouTube, but it can't do much else. The laptop just isn't powerful enough to handle Netflix's streaming software, nor can it handle HD resolutions. In addition, the wireless keyboard, VGA cable, and USB digital audio adaptor cost more then an el'cheapo DVD player.
I think I have to agree with you, computers aren't ready for the living room. A HTPC that does what I want costs more then $2000 and might be hampered by DRM.
Having been modded as redundant I feel need to elaborate. (Sorry was in a strange rush to get my first ever first post) We are talking about high school children now - and as such the emphasis is surely on the do's and don't of good graphic design, its about teaching kids good techniques, and style. This in my opinion is best performed using tools which are freely available to the children so that they can go away and practice what they have been taught. Using the latest version of Photoshop is likely to hinder their ability to practice as not many highschool kids in my experiance have the money to drop on the latest and greatest Adobe produce, sure they can go and download a copy from a torrent site - but is this something which we should encourage, all be it indirectly. If you use GIMP and the other Open Source software which are freely available, they can practice techniques and gain a good insight into the design - before they go on and perfect those skills in higher education. Where they may have the budget to purchase the latest over priced packages.
When I was in high school we didn't use the "latest and greatest" software. In 1997-1998, when the world was well into the Windows and Java era, I spent a year using Borland's Turbo Pascal for DOS. We still were able to learn about linked lists and binary trees!
Does the newer software have features that you really need? Are the open-source versions easy enough to use?
If there is one thing I've seen on The Linux Games Tome, its that it only takes a few people to build a MMORPG. If anything, they should just use the quarter of a million to mobilize some open source programmers around a game that is open source.
I think World of Warcraft has something like 64,000 objectives within the game.
I don't mean to sound insulting or presumptuous, and I don't claim to know nearly enough about you or your work to make this claim with much accuracy, but perhaps you have adult ADD? I know someone who has it, and described nearly exactly what you said. They can't block out sound/visual input well and basically any sensory input not related to the task at hand, and once they get side tracked they have a hard time being able to regain focus.
It could just as well be Asperger's, which is believed to be quite common with computer programmers. The "So you have an employee with Asperger's" flier specifically states to let him/her wear headphones to avoid distractions.
Be careful, as ADD and Asperger's are easily confused.
Assume we take evolution as fact - then after discarding the whole Adam&Eve bit, the religious can easily drop back to "but God -designed- evolution". There's your ID right there.
I personally find ID hard to accept because the body is so complex that the only way to "intelligently design" it is to use evolutionary techniques. When you start seeing the stuff that comes out of genetic programming, it becomes clear that the intelligent design argument will eventually re-create evolution.
By the way, don't discard Adam & Eve. It's NOT an alternative to evolution. It's really historical fiction about the first man and woman to evolve. It's too bad that religious nuts tout "Adam & Eve" as a factual account of the origin of man; because it's a nice story and provides good philosophy.
In the end, even if you can explain every single thing except the "why did the big bang happen?" (assuming the big bang theory is the correct one), then the religious can still say "God made it, and therefore everything, happen".
Have you read books that promote Big Bang theory? Assuming there was a Big Bang, there has to be God; although it leaves the definition of God as 100% subjective. You are perfectly free to define God as "the cause of The Big Bang," just like you are perfectly free to believe that God is a flying monster made of spaghetti. Thus, if there was a Big Bang, it means that the religious can not claim that their interpretation of God is in any way better then your interpretation.
I don't know why they haven't jumped on board years ago. You mean we get to sell music without the overhead of a physical plant to produce discs/tapes/whatever, without a transportation infrastructure to deliver the product to retailers, without having to share the profit with stores? What's the catch?
It's simple, really. The record execs are trying to make money by doing little work. The complexity of physical distribution allows them to skim their profits out of the inefficiencies of the inherent waste in the system.
Digital distribution means that record execs will be cut out of the loop!
Is the "stolen" code an example of how to use an API? A product that I work with uses the Capicom hashing DLL. The calls to Capicom look JUST like the web examples, but that's how you use the API. There's not much you can do except change variable names and put the URL of the source in a comment.
There are already ultra-cheap DVDs without ads. Target's $1 bin usually has stacks of them.
If someone has the bandwidth to support displaying on-demand ads, wouldn't the money on the ad-ridden DVD be better spent for an on-demand movie? Most of them are in the $3-$5 range.
I hope you are not suggesting that I wait until after a site sends something to my profile to have means to stop it? This would be ok, if you alone are notified of the attempt before it can be successfully carried out. What if someone doesn't notice the little blip they put up on the external site? Can they still block others from seeing something even if its only once? I won't have to worry about this because my account is registered with an email I don't use for shopping, so I am asking because I can only find out from others experiences. That at least is the point most people here are getting at.
Anything other than having the default be no consent, there seems to be something wrong with this model. I think this may mean people will start shopping with a non-facebook registered email address.
My solution from a while ago was to create a new email address for every site I register with (it is a mail forwarder - i don't actually check dozens of email addresses). This gives me the ability to delete the address if it starts getting too much spam (selling of email addresses was one of the original reasons for me to do this). a sideeffect is that it hinders (though does not block) sharing of my info amongst businesses.
It doesn't work. Last night I bought something from Zappos using a different email address, and it appeared on my Facebook profile automatically. It must have used a cookie or my existing session.
I don't mind telling my friends that I bought a green sweatshirt, or a new pair of Heeleys... I don't want to worry about opting out when I purchase items that I'd rather keep secret.
My username, GWBasic, is an old version of Basic used on DOS-based computers before QBasic and Visual Basic. For some reason, my personal home page shows up when someone googles for "GWBasic." Occasionally, I get emails looking for tech support...
From what I hear, it is true that wild turkey tastes different then domesticated; this is to be expected because of selective breeding and a different lifestyle.
Ever read Darwin's descriptions of the different varieties of pigeons? He found that when he cross-bred very different varieties of domesticated pigeons, they resembled wild pigeons. This lead him to conclude that all of the specific traits of domesticated pigeons were in wild pigeons, but only showed themselves when pigeons with the desired traits were mated together. The same could be said for domesticated turkeys; cross-breeding different domesticated turkeys will probably yield turkeys that are similar to wild turkeys from the Northeastern United States.
I'm a big fan of Pandora. You can type in a band name or song name that you like, and it'll start playing similar music. A lot of the music will come from non-mainstream bands.
I have never understood why we have turkey at Christmas (I'm a UKian not an American so I don't do thanks giving but it applies), it's a very poor meat and far too large for the average family, so how come we do it?
The turkey is native to the Northeastern United States, which were the first states to be settled. A few years ago, a family of turkeys spent an afternoon in my parents' back yard, eating worms!
Turkeys tend to be good for feeding an extended family, as opposed to the nuclear family.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tesla is not vapor. I've sat in one of them! A couple of months ago, a friend of mine invited me to tour his RF emmissions testing facility, where he pointed out a room used for testing cars.
The conversation went like this:
ME: Cars really need to have EMF tested?
HIM: Well, apparently with all the new electronics in SUVs manufacturers are worried about interference.
ME: What kind of SUV will fit under that antenna? My hybrid won't even fit under that thing!
HIM: A really small one...?
ME: Are you testing the Tesla?
HIM: We do not talk about our clients.
At that point, I learned that my friend has a very bad poker face.
Now we can actually use Futurama's solution to global warming! All we need to do is bring the glacier back here and stick it in the ocean!
It all depends on printing needs...
I realized that most of my printing needs were for Google Maps / Mapquest, which really are easier to read when done in color. After I bought a GPS, my printing needs are an occasional photo or reservation confirmation. I'd much rather have the ability to print the photo on equipment that I can control then run around for a $0.10 photo.
One night, when my Epson refused to print because it claimed that it was "out of Ink", I rushed out to buy one of the new Kodak printers that uses cheap ink cartridges...
BIG MISTAKE! I should have returned the sucker, but I don't do a lot of printing, so I didn't realize how much of a POS it was until after the store's return policy ended.
The Kodak's print quality is OK, but the real problem is that about 10% of the time the printer will just stop working for a few days. It'll spit out nothing but blank paper with a few dim lines.
The scanner drivers for the Mac are also seriously defective. Whenever I try to scan, it will disconnect all of my USB devices, including my external hard drive! It's left my mouse inoperable.
Last year I helped my father buy an LCD TV and a DVD player. The salesman sold us an $80 DVD player, and tried to sell us a $100 HDMI cable.
If my father wasn't there, I would have told the salesman that no cable is worth more then the electronic device!
Have you ever listened to any of the 24/96 recordings? They sound great!
Honestly, with modern "lossy" codecs, there really is no point in downsampling to 16-bit. Lossy audio uses fourier transforms, which work on floating point numbers instead of integers. AAC will encode to the same bitrate for both 16-bit and 20-bit.
So, couldn't you use a 192khz ADAC and an ideal digital filter to get it down to 48khz?
My 96khz DVD-Audio disks have much better sounding cymbals then their CD equivilents. I'm not sure if it's due to the higher output sampling rate, higher bit density, or 5.1; but I will say that I prefer higher sampling rates when available.
That obstacle course looks like it could be a level in Super Mario Galaxy. Instead of Mario grabbing the star, the squirrel grabs the nut!
I hope he keeps it to a reasonable length. His version of King Kong was so damn drawn out, I'm tempted to skip seeing PJ's version of "The Hobbit" unless each film is under 2 and 1/2 hours.
Hey! We need our big-ass engines as a way to advertise our giant penises! To an American male, a big-honking-engine is penis-wagging.
I actualy like the way that Apple does context menus in Mac Mail. (Some web apps also follow this pattern.)
In Mac Mail, when the mouse is hovered over an item that has a context menu, like an email address, it gets highlighted and a little arrow appears on the right. Clicking on the arrow displays the context menu. It's nice because there's no confusion between right and left, and it's obvious when there's a context menu.
I hear that! Too many abstractions can ultimatly make things worse, especially if the abstraction layers are highly specialized and take hours to debug!
I took my old WinXP laptop and hooked it up to my TV using a VGA-in on the back. It's great for DVDs and YouTube, but it can't do much else. The laptop just isn't powerful enough to handle Netflix's streaming software, nor can it handle HD resolutions. In addition, the wireless keyboard, VGA cable, and USB digital audio adaptor cost more then an el'cheapo DVD player.
I think I have to agree with you, computers aren't ready for the living room. A HTPC that does what I want costs more then $2000 and might be hampered by DRM.
When I was in high school we didn't use the "latest and greatest" software. In 1997-1998, when the world was well into the Windows and Java era, I spent a year using Borland's Turbo Pascal for DOS. We still were able to learn about linked lists and binary trees!
Does the newer software have features that you really need? Are the open-source versions easy enough to use?
I think World of Warcraft has something like 64,000 objectives within the game.
It could just as well be Asperger's, which is believed to be quite common with computer programmers. The "So you have an employee with Asperger's" flier specifically states to let him/her wear headphones to avoid distractions.
Be careful, as ADD and Asperger's are easily confused.
I personally find ID hard to accept because the body is so complex that the only way to "intelligently design" it is to use evolutionary techniques. When you start seeing the stuff that comes out of genetic programming, it becomes clear that the intelligent design argument will eventually re-create evolution.
By the way, don't discard Adam & Eve. It's NOT an alternative to evolution. It's really historical fiction about the first man and woman to evolve. It's too bad that religious nuts tout "Adam & Eve" as a factual account of the origin of man; because it's a nice story and provides good philosophy.
In the end, even if you can explain every single thing except the "why did the big bang happen?" (assuming the big bang theory is the correct one), then the religious can still say "God made it, and therefore everything, happen".Have you read books that promote Big Bang theory? Assuming there was a Big Bang, there has to be God; although it leaves the definition of God as 100% subjective. You are perfectly free to define God as "the cause of The Big Bang," just like you are perfectly free to believe that God is a flying monster made of spaghetti. Thus, if there was a Big Bang, it means that the religious can not claim that their interpretation of God is in any way better then your interpretation.
It's simple, really. The record execs are trying to make money by doing little work. The complexity of physical distribution allows them to skim their profits out of the inefficiencies of the inherent waste in the system.
Digital distribution means that record execs will be cut out of the loop!
Is the "stolen" code an example of how to use an API? A product that I work with uses the Capicom hashing DLL. The calls to Capicom look JUST like the web examples, but that's how you use the API. There's not much you can do except change variable names and put the URL of the source in a comment.
This is silly
It doesn't work. Last night I bought something from Zappos using a different email address, and it appeared on my Facebook profile automatically. It must have used a cookie or my existing session.
I don't mind telling my friends that I bought a green sweatshirt, or a new pair of Heeleys... I don't want to worry about opting out when I purchase items that I'd rather keep secret.
My username, GWBasic, is an old version of Basic used on DOS-based computers before QBasic and Visual Basic. For some reason, my personal home page shows up when someone googles for "GWBasic." Occasionally, I get emails looking for tech support...
Actually, domesticated turkeys come from North America. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Turkey and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_turkey. Domesticated turkey descends from Meleagris gallopavo, which is the North American breed.
From what I hear, it is true that wild turkey tastes different then domesticated; this is to be expected because of selective breeding and a different lifestyle.
Ever read Darwin's descriptions of the different varieties of pigeons? He found that when he cross-bred very different varieties of domesticated pigeons, they resembled wild pigeons. This lead him to conclude that all of the specific traits of domesticated pigeons were in wild pigeons, but only showed themselves when pigeons with the desired traits were mated together. The same could be said for domesticated turkeys; cross-breeding different domesticated turkeys will probably yield turkeys that are similar to wild turkeys from the Northeastern United States.
I'm a big fan of Pandora. You can type in a band name or song name that you like, and it'll start playing similar music. A lot of the music will come from non-mainstream bands.
The turkey is native to the Northeastern United States, which were the first states to be settled. A few years ago, a family of turkeys spent an afternoon in my parents' back yard, eating worms!
Turkeys tend to be good for feeding an extended family, as opposed to the nuclear family.