That case is impractical. What happens if the power supply or motherboard decide it's time to put on a light show? Instant fire! That's a liability they will have to overcome. Current metal (and plastic to some extent) will contain small fires or explosions you might get from a PC. Think it's too far-fetched? I had an Abit VP6 that went up in flames a few years ago, and on another occasion an MGI "viper" power supply that caught fire (serves me right for using anything but sparkle)
Beyond that there are other practical concerns:
children will destroy it
not durable for moving
Won't hold up as long as plastic+metal
Will collapse when users pile stuff on the chassis
It will make a lousy footrest (I like to put my feet up)
It's ugly - worse than old beige cases
won't shield RFI/EMI - both incoming and outgoing (it will send unwanted interference and will receive unwanted interference)
They are available as "soft white" (yellowish like incandescents), "pure white" (about 3500K-4300K, very white without any hint of blue), "daylight" (blue-white like crappy "HID style" headlights (probably 6000K-7000K). It is probably the "daylight" ones you are annoyed by.
I dislike both the soft white and the daylight CFLs. I'll take soft white over the daylight any day, and the pure white are hard to find in most stores (you won't find them at Sprawl*Mart or K-Mart for example). Home Depot carries pure white CFLs though.
- CFLs have a warm-up time. Turn it on to read your paper, and you have to wait 5 minutes before you can see the writing. Turn it on to go down the basement stairs - and you can't see the steps because it's still too dim (a safety hazard).
For me it takes longer for my eyes to adjust to the new light level, open the book/paper, whatever. The 100 watt equivalent in the bathroom has the longest start-up time, and even it is pretty much instant on, just at ~40-60 watt equivalnet for the first 10 seconds.
I have a light meter and have measured warm-up time of various CFLs. All the ones I had (six models from four brands) were at full brightness by a minute and a half. I've never seen one which didn't immediately put out enough light for reading.
I'm sure that the "fire breathing" stories are extreme exaggerations. To this day there are animals which excrete peroxides and other substances which when mixed (when they hit the prey, usually small bugs) get really hot (to boiling temperatures) and/or become caustic. There is definitely a beetle still living today which does this (bombadier beetle, IIRC?) and there may be a couple of lizards with this kind of mechanism.
Could that have been an alligator-sized lizard, or maybe something slightly larger? If such a creature did coexist with man, it's not such a huge leap to see how the the "fire breathing" stories came about, now is it? If an animal can spit or squirt what becomes steam or an extremely corrosive alkaline or acid, speaking of such things as "breathing fire" is not really all that far off.
And yet, practically every grammar school library has a huge archive of National Pornographic, er, National Geographic subscriptions dating back to the '50s or earlier.
Sure, just as much as a UV or IR photograph is, or a radio telescope image, or an X-ray or MRI for that matter.
However, if you like, we could call it a "visual representation of an object using some property of elctromagnetic theory via apparatus applying that theory" - or, we could simply call it a photograph and not worry about what detection and imaging techniques were used.
"hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing."
Well if they stop doing that, how can they justify $50 bedpans, $50 toothbrushes, $50 puke buckets, and so forth? If it's just something you can pick up at the dollar store, then insurance companies will insist that is where the hospitals source them from.
It's far more profitable to go through the motions and appear to be safe, even though we're making humanity more fragile and the germs stronger in the process.
And another thing (related): why do some people go to the hospital for every little sniffle or tummy ache or other trivial illness (like a mild flu such as the H1N1 virus) and insist on antibiotics? Getting sick actually makes the immune system stronger over the long term (along with eating well, getting exercise, etc) because the body builds up more varied and versatile antibodies. If we keep shielding ourselves from colds, the flu, etc. eventually there will be a black plague-like outbreak because our immune systems won't "know" how to fight off infections.
So, deny an inexpensive claim, instead favoring an inferior-and-single-task solution costing 10x to 20x more? Not only are they superior to teletype-like machines in every single way, they give the disabled the ability to communicate from ANYWHERE, not just tied to a bulky single-purpose computer and hard telephone line.
Okay, if we get rid of money, do you really think people would work? I'm sure you'd find people to work in A/V, making music, making movies, and other arts, and running cruise ships, but what about real work? I sure wouldn't unless there were some reward for it.
They are knowingly selling Windows XP right now with known fatal, high priority defects. Also, once a fix is released (which should take all of a few minutes to recompile the code into the correct code branches) it's not like they have to retool a factory and throw away existing stock to get this fix into the channel. They just need to roll it into a.cab,.exe. or.msi file and post it on the Windows Update server. If they can force MSIE 7 and MSIE 8 and keep updating the "genuine advantage" garbage for XP, why can't they patch a fatal defect?
Also, how do you arrive at XP's being 15 years old? Is that the new Obama math or something, where increasing spending will not increase the deficit?
From shareholders' perspective level revenue is as bad as losing. They need to see GROWTH. The problem is Microsoft grew so huge that the only direction they can go is down. That is why they have been desperately trying to best Google (good luck with that!) and also have been vainly been trying to get into the music distribution market that Apple is enjoying huge success in, and why they are going to be opening "microsoft stores" next to every Apple store in major markets. Why? They are trying SOME way not just to delay their implosion, but to continue to grow.
It's easy to make science-related careers more popular: pay scientists more than poverty-level. Having passion for a career is one thing, but at the end of the day, passion doesn't put food on the table. The paycheck does.
I threw out build 224 only recently. That was an interesting build - most of the controls looked like motif widgets, including scroll bars and buttons, diamond-shaped radio buttons, and so forth.
Another interesting thing in that build was if you cd... it took you up two directory levels, cd.... would take you up three levels, and so forth.
The ntfs-3g driver is at least as stable as Microsoft's driver, with the major difference being that ntfs-3g runs on a more stable kernel (mach in the case of OS X, or the Linux kernel in the case of a "linux/gnu linux" system). In fact I can often pull data off a drive with ntfs-3g when Windows refuses to mount it.
"associating a piece of data with multiple categories [CC]"
Excuse me, but isn't there a TON of prior art in this arena, for example, RDBMS and object oriented database systems have done this from the very beginning. What the heck is an RDBMS good for if you can't actually use or display associated objects?
ZOMG! It's being done on a community building site! We'd better patent it because it's a revolutionary concept!
It should fail litmus tests for patents on several grounds:
* Prior art
* Obvious to those skilled in the trade
* is pretty much the whole point of HTML and RDBMS in the first place
* is the whole point of SQL
* is the whole point of being able to test variables if strcmp(strInformation1,strInformation2) {then do something with the result}, etc.
That the patent office granted a patent for associating related data objects at this point is an epic fail underscoring the need for real patent reform.
I have 5mbps upstream at the office, and 6mpbs upstream at home. It's not uncommon as you think, although from what I've heard southeastern asian countries make the broadband we have in the Boston area look like a joke. Here in the USA our infrastructure is woefully outdated, causing our internet connections to be much slower than those found in developing third-world countries. What we consider fast (22/5, 16/2, etc) would be considered substandard in many Southeast-Asian nations. They need the bandwidth, too, what with all of the "piracy"[sic] of Microsoft and Adobe software, and movies leaked from DVD replication factories.;)
Oh, you must be one of those self-hating white liberals! Jay Severin is right, you people really are that stupid.
How many colonies has America set up since WWII? How many people has America freed (or attempted to free in the cases of Vietnam and Korea - and yes, I know the Democrats got us involved in Vietnam through engineered situations but let's ignore that since it is irrelevant)? Didn't America free almost an entire continent way back in WWII? Hasn't every conflict America has gotten into in recent years resulted in more liberty for the citizens of the invaded country?
Are Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan now American colonies? Or, was Kuwait freed from aggressors, and were Iraq and Afghanistan freed from oppressive megalomaniac tyrants?
Don't get me wrong; I don't agree with the stated reasons for getting into the (second) Iraq war. If George DUHbya Bush were honest and said "Hussein is a douchebag and needs killin'" in classic Texas style, I'd have supported it. If he had said more eloquently "Hussein is an oppressive tyrant and we need to deal with him preemptively" I'd have supported that. However, Bush lied about WMD. I don't not support the war and not support the troops; I don't support the contrived reasons for getting into it when it was clear as day that there were many very real good reasons to terminate Hussein's regime.
Have you spoken with any troops who have gone there? I have. Several of my friends have done "tours" there. They all say the Iraqis are grateful for what was done.
It may be true that Iraqis are tired of our troops being there, but they're not afraid of dying for voting for the "wrong" candidate in elections any more, or voting the "wrong" way on any issues. If you think that is the result of imperialist tactics, I don't think that any rational discussion can be had with you.
Also, in case you missed it: China has carried out several acts of war against us in the last decade or so, one of those being colliding with and downing one of our EP-3 aircraft that was over international waters. Now, it's true that the EP-3 is a reconnaissance aircraft, but surveying foreign territories is SOP, for China, Russia, and America alike. You don't see us taking down Chinese aircraft, do you. China is an aggressor and why we treat them as most favored trading partner is beyond me.
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That case is impractical. What happens if the power supply or motherboard decide it's time to put on a light show? Instant fire! That's a liability they will have to overcome. Current metal (and plastic to some extent) will contain small fires or explosions you might get from a PC. Think it's too far-fetched? I had an Abit VP6 that went up in flames a few years ago, and on another occasion an MGI "viper" power supply that caught fire (serves me right for using anything but sparkle)
Beyond that there are other practical concerns:
They are available as "soft white" (yellowish like incandescents), "pure white" (about 3500K-4300K, very white without any hint of blue), "daylight" (blue-white like crappy "HID style" headlights (probably 6000K-7000K). It is probably the "daylight" ones you are annoyed by.
I dislike both the soft white and the daylight CFLs. I'll take soft white over the daylight any day, and the pure white are hard to find in most stores (you won't find them at Sprawl*Mart or K-Mart for example). Home Depot carries pure white CFLs though.
IKEA makes things on the cheap? Say it ain't so!
I've never experienced nor heard of that happening.
I have a light meter and have measured warm-up time of various CFLs. All the ones I had (six models from four brands) were at full brightness by a minute and a half. I've never seen one which didn't immediately put out enough light for reading.
I'm sure that the "fire breathing" stories are extreme exaggerations. To this day there are animals which excrete peroxides and other substances which when mixed (when they hit the prey, usually small bugs) get really hot (to boiling temperatures) and/or become caustic. There is definitely a beetle still living today which does this (bombadier beetle, IIRC?) and there may be a couple of lizards with this kind of mechanism.
Could that have been an alligator-sized lizard, or maybe something slightly larger? If such a creature did coexist with man, it's not such a huge leap to see how the the "fire breathing" stories came about, now is it? If an animal can spit or squirt what becomes steam or an extremely corrosive alkaline or acid, speaking of such things as "breathing fire" is not really all that far off.
And yet, practically every grammar school library has a huge archive of National Pornographic, er, National Geographic subscriptions dating back to the '50s or earlier.
Sure, just as much as a UV or IR photograph is, or a radio telescope image, or an X-ray or MRI for that matter.
However, if you like, we could call it a "visual representation of an object using some property of elctromagnetic theory via apparatus applying that theory" - or, we could simply call it a photograph and not worry about what detection and imaging techniques were used.
In order for many slashdotters to cease bathing, they would first have to start bathing.
Sorry, I saw a nit and had to pick it! ;)
"hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing."
Well if they stop doing that, how can they justify $50 bedpans, $50 toothbrushes, $50 puke buckets, and so forth? If it's just something you can pick up at the dollar store, then insurance companies will insist that is where the hospitals source them from.
It's far more profitable to go through the motions and appear to be safe, even though we're making humanity more fragile and the germs stronger in the process.
And another thing (related): why do some people go to the hospital for every little sniffle or tummy ache or other trivial illness (like a mild flu such as the H1N1 virus) and insist on antibiotics? Getting sick actually makes the immune system stronger over the long term (along with eating well, getting exercise, etc) because the body builds up more varied and versatile antibodies. If we keep shielding ourselves from colds, the flu, etc. eventually there will be a black plague-like outbreak because our immune systems won't "know" how to fight off infections.
So, deny an inexpensive claim, instead favoring an inferior-and-single-task solution costing 10x to 20x more? Not only are they superior to teletype-like machines in every single way, they give the disabled the ability to communicate from ANYWHERE, not just tied to a bulky single-purpose computer and hard telephone line.
Okay, if we get rid of money, do you really think people would work? I'm sure you'd find people to work in A/V, making music, making movies, and other arts, and running cruise ships, but what about real work? I sure wouldn't unless there were some reward for it.
And yet, it is still available through OEM channels. Maybe distributors are ordering it through a wormhole?
What's your problem? "infeasible" is perfectly cromulent!
They are knowingly selling Windows XP right now with known fatal, high priority defects. Also, once a fix is released (which should take all of a few minutes to recompile the code into the correct code branches) it's not like they have to retool a factory and throw away existing stock to get this fix into the channel. They just need to roll it into a .cab, .exe. or .msi file and post it on the Windows Update server. If they can force MSIE 7 and MSIE 8 and keep updating the "genuine advantage" garbage for XP, why can't they patch a fatal defect?
Also, how do you arrive at XP's being 15 years old? Is that the new Obama math or something, where increasing spending will not increase the deficit?
From shareholders' perspective level revenue is as bad as losing. They need to see GROWTH. The problem is Microsoft grew so huge that the only direction they can go is down. That is why they have been desperately trying to best Google (good luck with that!) and also have been vainly been trying to get into the music distribution market that Apple is enjoying huge success in, and why they are going to be opening "microsoft stores" next to every Apple store in major markets. Why? They are trying SOME way not just to delay their implosion, but to continue to grow.
It's easy to make science-related careers more popular: pay scientists more than poverty-level. Having passion for a career is one thing, but at the end of the day, passion doesn't put food on the table. The paycheck does.
Oops nope, it was beta 1 (build 122) that had the motif widget-like look and feel, not 224 (beta 2).
I threw out build 224 only recently. That was an interesting build - most of the controls looked like motif widgets, including scroll bars and buttons, diamond-shaped radio buttons, and so forth.
Another interesting thing in that build was if you cd ... it took you up two directory levels, cd .... would take you up three levels, and so forth.
The ntfs-3g driver is at least as stable as Microsoft's driver, with the major difference being that ntfs-3g runs on a more stable kernel (mach in the case of OS X, or the Linux kernel in the case of a "linux/gnu linux" system). In fact I can often pull data off a drive with ntfs-3g when Windows refuses to mount it.
What do you expect from minitruth (Ministry of Truth, for those who have not read 1984)
Excuse me, but isn't there a TON of prior art in this arena, for example, RDBMS and object oriented database systems have done this from the very beginning. What the heck is an RDBMS good for if you can't actually use or display associated objects?
ZOMG! It's being done on a community building site! We'd better patent it because it's a revolutionary concept!
It should fail litmus tests for patents on several grounds:
* Prior art
* Obvious to those skilled in the trade
* is pretty much the whole point of HTML and RDBMS in the first place
* is the whole point of SQL
* is the whole point of being able to test variables if strcmp(strInformation1,strInformation2) {then do something with the result}, etc.
That the patent office granted a patent for associating related data objects at this point is an epic fail underscoring the need for real patent reform.
I have 5mbps upstream at the office, and 6mpbs upstream at home. It's not uncommon as you think, although from what I've heard southeastern asian countries make the broadband we have in the Boston area look like a joke. Here in the USA our infrastructure is woefully outdated, causing our internet connections to be much slower than those found in developing third-world countries. What we consider fast (22/5, 16/2, etc) would be considered substandard in many Southeast-Asian nations. They need the bandwidth, too, what with all of the "piracy"[sic] of Microsoft and Adobe software, and movies leaked from DVD replication factories. ;)
This should invalidate all wireless communications patents, right? ;)
Oh, you must be one of those self-hating white liberals! Jay Severin is right, you people really are that stupid.
How many colonies has America set up since WWII? How many people has America freed (or attempted to free in the cases of Vietnam and Korea - and yes, I know the Democrats got us involved in Vietnam through engineered situations but let's ignore that since it is irrelevant)? Didn't America free almost an entire continent way back in WWII? Hasn't every conflict America has gotten into in recent years resulted in more liberty for the citizens of the invaded country?
Are Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan now American colonies? Or, was Kuwait freed from aggressors, and were Iraq and Afghanistan freed from oppressive megalomaniac tyrants?
Don't get me wrong; I don't agree with the stated reasons for getting into the (second) Iraq war. If George DUHbya Bush were honest and said "Hussein is a douchebag and needs killin'" in classic Texas style, I'd have supported it. If he had said more eloquently "Hussein is an oppressive tyrant and we need to deal with him preemptively" I'd have supported that. However, Bush lied about WMD. I don't not support the war and not support the troops; I don't support the contrived reasons for getting into it when it was clear as day that there were many very real good reasons to terminate Hussein's regime.
Have you spoken with any troops who have gone there? I have. Several of my friends have done "tours" there. They all say the Iraqis are grateful for what was done.
It may be true that Iraqis are tired of our troops being there, but they're not afraid of dying for voting for the "wrong" candidate in elections any more, or voting the "wrong" way on any issues. If you think that is the result of imperialist tactics, I don't think that any rational discussion can be had with you.
Also, in case you missed it: China has carried out several acts of war against us in the last decade or so, one of those being colliding with and downing one of our EP-3 aircraft that was over international waters. Now, it's true that the EP-3 is a reconnaissance aircraft, but surveying foreign territories is SOP, for China, Russia, and America alike. You don't see us taking down Chinese aircraft, do you. China is an aggressor and why we treat them as most favored trading partner is beyond me.