I hate to use the word idea for something that lacks any actual backing thought. This idea crops up every now and then among technologists who only experience nature between car and building, and is especially popular in Britain and western Europe, where no one would have to change their habits or language if this nonsense were put into place. A few things technologists do might improve, but all other parts of life would be thrown into unnecessary, lasting chaos. This idea is ultimately nothing more than selfishness among Asperger's types who never consider other people.
There are thousands of reasons why a single worldwide time zone is a massively bad idea. I'll restrict myself to one: in such a world, where would you put the international date line? With the current, well-working system, the line between today and tomorrow is drawn though the Pacific Ocean in such a way that no country or economic zone is itself divided into today portions and tomorrow portions. With a single time zone world, that line becomes the GMT line, which would place one part of England and indeed of London into today while the other half is in tomorrow. Not to mention dividing France, Spain and portions of Africa into two days. Try planning your meetings around that.
You don't seem to understand that the time zone system was made possible by technological changes. It's not some baggage that we carry from the caves, it was invented in the 1870's when transcontinental railroads in Canada and the US had to come up with reliable timetables. The technology that allowed near-simultaneous setting of clocks hundreds of miles apart was the telegraph. Before the railroads needed time zones, and before the telegraph made them possible, all time was local and was generally based on the position of the sun locally.
The imposition of a single worldwide time zone would require a complete break with parts of language and literature, in every human language. Words like dawn, noon, and midnight describe the position of the sun, and today, in every language, also describe roughly the same time of day. Dawn is about 0430 to 0730, depending on season, in the populated temperate zones, and that is true in all latitudes of those temperate zones. In your world, dawn would be 1230 to 1530 in one place and 2030 to 2330 in another, so the word dawn loses its current meaning to describe a time of day. Books written before the start of your brave new world would all use the old meaning of dawn and would assume the reader knows that dawn-colored sunlight is a rosy pink.
To schedule intercontinental meetings, I rely on timeanddate.com and its cross-time-zone scheduler. If that didn't exist, I'd have to do a little math. All airlines already compute their schedules internally in terms of GMT, then publish departure and arrival times in local time. It really isn't hard to live in a world that we have very wisely divided into naturally-occurring time zones.
Try sciencedaily.com. The research results I read about there show up on Slashdot a day or two later, and then another two days later on mainstream news sources, if at all.
This idea is exactly the sort of cynical, presumptive plot that the Right loves to dream up in their smoke-filled rooms. If you still believe in genuine democracy, then be willing to give it a chance to work.
This idea is based on the completely incorrect assumption that the majority of voters will come to their senses when faced with an Obama vs Palin choice. What evidence supports that? You really have no idea how venally and deliberately misinformed the majority of Americans are. One in four believes Obama was born in Kenya, for Christ's sake!
Palin is a horror and cannot be allowed anywhere near a nomination. Believe me, if she is nominated, a great many people will take it as a sign from God and will vote for her against their own logical selves, screaming NOOOO inside them.
Here's what I posted as a reply to this "expert's" article. It's now awaiting admin approval to appear as a comment. We'll see if it makes it.
================== While reading, I was thinking this was a well-written detective story. Then I got to the end and found out it's a story about a massive waste of time because you didn't follow standard procedures.
Here's how to save a few days next time: go to the motherboard manufacturer's website, get the list of supported CPUs for the motherboard you're trying to install. Then download and install the BIOS that supports that CPU. It really is that simple.
Asus is particularly good at providing a CPU support list for their motherboards. It took me entire minutes to find the lists for the P5Q3 and P5E3 Deluxe (not P5E3 Pro, as you wrote). The QX9650 is listed for both motherboards -- and in both cases, it is supported only as of a recent BIOS revision.
So all you had to do was download and install BIOS version 0204 or later for the first motherboard, the P5Q3, and I bet Win 7 would have installed correctly the first time.
As for the motherboard automatically making BIOS changes to match the fast DIMMs you installed, Asus motherboards do NOT do this by default. You must have left the BIOS in some sort of overclocker's mode.
Next time, look up and download the BIOS that supports the CPU you're trying to use. After installing it, use the BIOS setting that restores all other BIOS settings to their defaults. Then install the OS. THEN and only then, can you start tweaking BIOS settings.
Once again, the article was well written. But it's also an inadvertent confession. ==================
These solar-powered city lights look practical only for cities where it doesn't snow. Those flat panels set parallel to the ground will collect piles of snow in the winter, possibly for weeks on end. After the batteries drain, the street below simply is not lit, which is a safety hazard. And for you suburban dwellers who assume street lighting's purpose is to show drivers where the curbs are: its primary purpose in cities is to cut down on street crime. Unlit city streets are a safety hazard not as a matter of potential stubbed toes, but as a matter of life-or-death situations.
Pigeons will also find these nice flat surfaces a great place to land and, um, leave deposits. Adding a few spikes to each panel would cut down on that, or angling the panels to make them less of a landing zone.
But these are solvable problems. There is great hope that engineers and artists can combine forces to create practical but beautiful solar-powered city lights.
The article is Nature is very poorly researched. Half-identical twins resulting from double fertilization of a single egg has been known about for decades. I have a friend whose cousins were the first pair identified, back in the 60's. I am myself godfather of a pair of gorgeous four and a half year old half-identical twins, a brother and sister.
Peter Lada's font size change has made all the difference, and his design is now my favorite of the three -- by a hair.
I am swayed, however, by those who have commented that CmdrTaco's three contenders are all a whole lot like the current design, with elegance added. It would be nice to see some true start-over designs in the mix, as well.
Viewed with Firefox 1.5.0.3 under WinXP on a 1920x1200 pixel monitor. Browser
windows run normally at 1024 x 1050 pixels, with 800 x 1050 optional via a favelet.
All three:
Scale nicely between 800 and 1024 pixel browser widths.
Don't go haywire if the user changes displayed font sizes
(Ctrl + and Ctrl - in Firefox).
Michael Johnson's Design
Default font is too small. Not everyone is 18 with 20/10 vision. Trust me,
when you get over 40, it will happen to you, too.
This design manages to break something as simple as the PageUp and PageDown
keys. Even Ctrl+PageDown fails to get to the end of the page.
The redesigned favicon.ico is a bit in-your-face and does not use the site's
color scheme.
Jason Porrit's Design
This one gets my vote as the cleanest and most elegant.
The collapsible left column menus snap open and closed with no delay, and
the menus stay out of the way when not needed.
The subtle shadow box effect around each story cleanly and clearly separates
each story.
Peter Lada's Design
This one is a wee bit more cluttered than Porrit's, but is still clean and elegant.
This is a very close second.
The default font is again too small, but perhaps because of less whitespace,
it is less bothersome than Johnson's.
This one has the best treatment of the story headlines, with the headline
itself standing out clearly in white on dark green, while the section title and
Posted-by links are de-emphasized in light green on dark green.
The left side menus are collapsible like Porrit's, but they operate a bit
slower.
I gave up on D-Link around 1999. I bought a USB FM radio of theirs that required a device driver. Their device driver completely destabilized that system, which at the time was running Windows 2000. But worse that that, their uninstallation program failed to uninstall the device driver: it only got rid of their GUI tuner app.
I had to call in the services of a friend who writes Windows device drivers professionally. He was able to hunt down the shards of this offending driver and wipe it from the system. With the D-Link device driver finally gone, the system returned to its former stability.
Since then, I have blacklisted any device made or sold by D-Link, and have not looked back. I can see from PHK's story that D-Link or their suppliers still have the same level of programmer competence that they had when I gave up on them.
There was a Time-Life book series published in the 80s that did what you're describing. The series was published by subscription, where you got one book per month, each on a different facet of computers and networking.
I believe the series was called How Computers Work, or something similar. A library might have a copy of the series if you want to see how they did it.
Each book was heavy on graphics and professional illustrations, with text placed as a filler on the page. The text was simple, to the point, and did not play down to the reader.
I collected the whole series back then, to lend to people who asked beginner questions, and to have a ready supply of illustrations of the insides of computers. I gave away my series a while back, but it is worth tracking down as a good starting point for your book.
From the date in the quoted passage, it is clear that this is a brand-new provision that took effect five weeks ago. Tivo Corp was under no particular obligation to send a notice of this change of terms to long-time subscribers like me, who were not affected.
>> With TiVo's mounting price hikes,
>> service contracts, and 'features'
>> like self-deleting shows
Tivo does not have any of these.
There are no "mounting price hikes." The monthly and annual subscription prices have been stable for years, and the monthly fee for your second and subsequent Tivo in the same household has dropped.
There is no service contract in the sense that phrase is used in the cell phone business. If you want the Tivo service, you pay for it. When you stop wanting it, you stop paying for it. There is no contract that requires you to keep paying for it, and there is no early termination fee.
There are rules about keeping the service for a certain number of months in order to qualify for a rebate. That is ordinary business sense, so that you don't sign up, take their money, then cancel. That is not a contract.
Lastly, there is no "self-deleting show" feature. I am aware of the recent brouhaha over at TivoCommunity.com about Tivo's new compliance with Macrovision copy protection. A larger tempest in a teacup is hard to imagine. No one had any shows deleted. A few local stations were improperly encoding their shows with the wrong flag, and Tivo responded as it was designed to do. When Tivo Corp found out about it, they contacted those stations and got the problem fixed at its source, the stations.
Tivo is the only DVR system I know of that can follow a show to wherever it is pre-empted.
Recently, the show Lost was moved for one week only (at least in the Boston area) from its normal time slot on Wednesday night to Saturday night, to make room for a Red Sox playoff game. My Comcast DVR (which I have because it records HD) is dumb as dirt, and doesn't know anything about shows or seasons or episodes. Like a loud VCR (you should hear the disk whine on that box), all it knows about is day of the week and time. It completely missed the pre-empted Lost episode and tried to record some baseball for me instead.
By contrast, my Tivo knew it was a show in a series and found the new episode in its pre-empted Saturday slot, and recorded it normally for me, even though in standard def. But I didn't miss it.
I, too, have looked into building my own HD-capable DVR. But until one can follow shows around like Tivo, they're just noisy VCRs.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to use the word idea for something that lacks any actual backing thought. This idea crops up every now and then among technologists who only experience nature between car and building, and is especially popular in Britain and western Europe, where no one would have to change their habits or language if this nonsense were put into place. A few things technologists do might improve, but all other parts of life would be thrown into unnecessary, lasting chaos. This idea is ultimately nothing more than selfishness among Asperger's types who never consider other people.
There are thousands of reasons why a single worldwide time zone is a massively bad idea. I'll restrict myself to one: in such a world, where would you put the international date line? With the current, well-working system, the line between today and tomorrow is drawn though the Pacific Ocean in such a way that no country or economic zone is itself divided into today portions and tomorrow portions. With a single time zone world, that line becomes the GMT line, which would place one part of England and indeed of London into today while the other half is in tomorrow. Not to mention dividing France, Spain and portions of Africa into two days. Try planning your meetings around that.
You don't seem to understand that the time zone system was made possible by technological changes. It's not some baggage that we carry from the caves, it was invented in the 1870's when transcontinental railroads in Canada and the US had to come up with reliable timetables. The technology that allowed near-simultaneous setting of clocks hundreds of miles apart was the telegraph. Before the railroads needed time zones, and before the telegraph made them possible, all time was local and was generally based on the position of the sun locally.
The imposition of a single worldwide time zone would require a complete break with parts of language and literature, in every human language. Words like dawn, noon, and midnight describe the position of the sun, and today, in every language, also describe roughly the same time of day. Dawn is about 0430 to 0730, depending on season, in the populated temperate zones, and that is true in all latitudes of those temperate zones. In your world, dawn would be 1230 to 1530 in one place and 2030 to 2330 in another, so the word dawn loses its current meaning to describe a time of day. Books written before the start of your brave new world would all use the old meaning of dawn and would assume the reader knows that dawn-colored sunlight is a rosy pink.
To schedule intercontinental meetings, I rely on timeanddate.com and its cross-time-zone scheduler. If that didn't exist, I'd have to do a little math. All airlines already compute their schedules internally in terms of GMT, then publish departure and arrival times in local time. It really isn't hard to live in a world that we have very wisely divided into naturally-occurring time zones.
Try sciencedaily.com. The research results I read about there show up on Slashdot a day or two later, and then another two days later on mainstream news sources, if at all.
This idea is exactly the sort of cynical, presumptive plot that the Right loves to dream up in their smoke-filled rooms. If you still believe in genuine democracy, then be willing to give it a chance to work.
This idea is based on the completely incorrect assumption that the majority of voters will come to their senses when faced with an Obama vs Palin choice. What evidence supports that? You really have no idea how venally and deliberately misinformed the majority of Americans are. One in four believes Obama was born in Kenya, for Christ's sake!
Palin is a horror and cannot be allowed anywhere near a nomination. Believe me, if she is nominated, a great many people will take it as a sign from God and will vote for her against their own logical selves, screaming NOOOO inside them.
Here's what I posted as a reply to this "expert's" article. It's now awaiting admin approval to appear as a comment. We'll see if it makes it.
==================
While reading, I was thinking this was a well-written detective story. Then I got to the end and found out it's a story about a massive waste of time because you didn't follow standard procedures.
Here's how to save a few days next time: go to the motherboard manufacturer's website, get the list of supported CPUs for the motherboard you're trying to install. Then download and install the BIOS that supports that CPU. It really is that simple.
Asus is particularly good at providing a CPU support list for their motherboards. It took me entire minutes to find the lists for the P5Q3 and P5E3 Deluxe (not P5E3 Pro, as you wrote). The QX9650 is listed for both motherboards -- and in both cases, it is supported only as of a recent BIOS revision.
So all you had to do was download and install BIOS version 0204 or later for the first motherboard, the P5Q3, and I bet Win 7 would have installed correctly the first time.
As for the motherboard automatically making BIOS changes to match the fast DIMMs you installed, Asus motherboards do NOT do this by default. You must have left the BIOS in some sort of overclocker's mode.
Next time, look up and download the BIOS that supports the CPU you're trying to use. After installing it, use the BIOS setting that restores all other BIOS settings to their defaults. Then install the OS. THEN and only then, can you start tweaking BIOS settings.
Once again, the article was well written. But it's also an inadvertent confession.
==================
These solar-powered city lights look practical only for cities where it doesn't snow. Those flat panels set parallel to the ground will collect piles of snow in the winter, possibly for weeks on end. After the batteries drain, the street below simply is not lit, which is a safety hazard. And for you suburban dwellers who assume street lighting's purpose is to show drivers where the curbs are: its primary purpose in cities is to cut down on street crime. Unlit city streets are a safety hazard not as a matter of potential stubbed toes, but as a matter of life-or-death situations.
Pigeons will also find these nice flat surfaces a great place to land and, um, leave deposits. Adding a few spikes to each panel would cut down on that, or angling the panels to make them less of a landing zone.
But these are solvable problems. There is great hope that engineers and artists can combine forces to create practical but beautiful solar-powered city lights.
The article is Nature is very poorly researched. Half-identical twins resulting from double fertilization of a single egg has been known about for decades. I have a friend whose cousins were the first pair identified, back in the 60's. I am myself godfather of a pair of gorgeous four and a half year old half-identical twins, a brother and sister.
Peter Lada's font size change has made all the difference, and his design is now my favorite of the three -- by a hair.
I am swayed, however, by those who have commented that CmdrTaco's three contenders are all a whole lot like the current design, with elegance added. It would be nice to see some true start-over designs in the mix, as well.
Viewed with Firefox 1.5.0.3 under WinXP on a 1920x1200 pixel monitor. Browser windows run normally at 1024 x 1050 pixels, with 800 x 1050 optional via a favelet.
All three:
Michael Johnson's Design
Jason Porrit's Design
Peter Lada's Design
I gave up on D-Link around 1999. I bought a USB FM radio of theirs that required a device driver. Their device driver completely destabilized that system, which at the time was running Windows 2000. But worse that that, their uninstallation program failed to uninstall the device driver: it only got rid of their GUI tuner app.
I had to call in the services of a friend who writes Windows device drivers professionally. He was able to hunt down the shards of this offending driver and wipe it from the system. With the D-Link device driver finally gone, the system returned to its former stability.
Since then, I have blacklisted any device made or sold by D-Link, and have not looked back. I can see from PHK's story that D-Link or their suppliers still have the same level of programmer competence that they had when I gave up on them.
There was a Time-Life book series published in the 80s that did what you're describing. The series was published by subscription, where you got one book per month, each on a different facet of computers and networking.
I believe the series was called How Computers Work, or something similar. A library might have a copy of the series if you want to see how they did it.
Each book was heavy on graphics and professional illustrations, with text placed as a filler on the page. The text was simple, to the point, and did not play down to the reader.
I collected the whole series back then, to lend to people who asked beginner questions, and to have a ready supply of illustrations of the insides of computers. I gave away my series a while back, but it is worth tracking down as a good starting point for your book.
Good luck!
From the date in the quoted passage, it is clear that this is a brand-new provision that took effect five weeks ago. Tivo Corp was under no particular obligation to send a notice of this change of terms to long-time subscribers like me, who were not affected.
Nevertheless, I stand corrected, with thanks.
>> service contracts, and 'features'
>> like self-deleting shows
Tivo does not have any of these.
There are no "mounting price hikes." The monthly and annual subscription prices have been stable for years, and the monthly fee for your second and subsequent Tivo in the same household has dropped.
There is no service contract in the sense that phrase is used in the cell phone business. If you want the Tivo service, you pay for it. When you stop wanting it, you stop paying for it. There is no contract that requires you to keep paying for it, and there is no early termination fee.
There are rules about keeping the service for a certain number of months in order to qualify for a rebate. That is ordinary business sense, so that you don't sign up, take their money, then cancel. That is not a contract.
Lastly, there is no "self-deleting show" feature. I am aware of the recent brouhaha over at TivoCommunity.com about Tivo's new compliance with Macrovision copy protection. A larger tempest in a teacup is hard to imagine. No one had any shows deleted. A few local stations were improperly encoding their shows with the wrong flag, and Tivo responded as it was designed to do. When Tivo Corp found out about it, they contacted those stations and got the problem fixed at its source, the stations.
Tivo is the only DVR system I know of that can follow a show to wherever it is pre-empted.
Recently, the show Lost was moved for one week only (at least in the Boston area) from its normal time slot on Wednesday night to Saturday night, to make room for a Red Sox playoff game. My Comcast DVR (which I have because it records HD) is dumb as dirt, and doesn't know anything about shows or seasons or episodes. Like a loud VCR (you should hear the disk whine on that box), all it knows about is day of the week and time. It completely missed the pre-empted Lost episode and tried to record some baseball for me instead.
By contrast, my Tivo knew it was a show in a series and found the new episode in its pre-empted Saturday slot, and recorded it normally for me, even though in standard def. But I didn't miss it.
I, too, have looked into building my own HD-capable DVR. But until one can follow shows around like Tivo, they're just noisy VCRs.