Re:"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws...
on
Energy From Vibrations
·
· Score: 0, Funny
I suppose it's all in how you read it... Note the word 'extended' though. In my dictionary, 'extended' does not equate to 'infinite.'
Slashdot laziness takes an all time low - now people aren't even bothering to read the post itself. What next, just read the headline? The first word of the headline? The first letter?
This really isn't that helpful in terms of actual, factual information, links, etc., but I seem to remember that I learned about women having a slightly lower capacity for spacial relationship from some sort of exam I took in high school. A standardized test, I'm quite sure.
The problems involved looking at an object drawn in three dimensions and asked you what the proper view of that item would be if you rotated the thing 180 degrees, so you were looking at the backside. Others *might* have involved two views drawn in two dimensions, where you were supposed to figure out what the object looked like in 3D.
Either way, I specifically remember the test out-right stating that women would score lower on 'this section of the exam.' I don't remember if they also said that because of this, things were curved, or not.
Actually, whether or not the rest of what you said is true, it seems to me that digital projectors would in fact offer at least one benefit: artifacts, or the lack thereof.
If film artifacts are removed from the original film before it's encoded onto the disc, then they're gone for good. No degredation of the film over the period from release date to final showing due to handling and the simple running of the reels through the machine.
Plus, and this is totally unresearched, it seems to me that digital projectors would eventually pay for themselves. Imagine if the theater could hire just one person to que up the discs for movies to be played in a theater over the course of a day, week, or month. Then, that same person sits in one central 'control room' and presses a button to start and stop movies. This means no one sitting in the projection booth, forgetting to switch reels, or forgettiing to change the audio levels, or God only knows what else (Fight Club, anyone).
Opera released a version of their browser - the fark edition or something like that - that, when accessing the MSN site, runs the contents through a translator of sorts and basically screws up the content. This was in responce to Microsoft deliberately making sure that anyone using Opera to access their site wouldn't be able to make much use of it, and for no reason other than the fact that they felt like it.
If I understand correctly, can't you just use third party billing to have the... uhm... third party pay for a call between you and your buddy in, say, Brazil?
So we had this old 15" monitor that, after living a nice long life (started out on a 486 purchased when a 486 was 'top of the line, nobody else had one' top of the line). Anyway, one night a couple of years ago, after it died, we took it out to an abandoned field, along with a wooden baseball bat.
After my friends got in a few swings, I decided to go for the glass instead of the case.
It broke on the first swing. So did the bat. And I thought for sure my wrist was at least fractured. Ouch. That was pretty much the end of the game. We took what was left of the bat and proceeded to fall farther down the evolutionary ladder, smashing away at the bits and pieces of the poor monitor like ape-men, until we'd had enough.
I took pictures the next day of the mess we had made. The day after that, cleaning crews had cleaned the entire mess up. And that, was that.
Why package 45 shitty [insert software type here] ones in a distro? Choice, my man, choice.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, the parent is 100% on the money. Linux wasn't, isn't, and probably never will be ready for the masses, because the masses want things to just work. Now, before everyone jumps on their anti-microsoft steed screaming 'Microsoft's stuff never does what I want it to do,' remember the following:
1) As crappy as it might be, Microsoft offers real, live human support for their products, assuming you purchase them and don't pirate.
2) If something doesn't work, one doesn't have to play 'find the config file and learn how to use whatever sort of configuration options the author decided to implement.' One simply a) doesn't use the product and returns it or b) finds someone to get it to work for them, which is much more likely if they're running Windows or MacOS than if they're running linux.
3) Why *are* there so many different ways of doing things in Linux? How about one or two *good* ways, instead of half a dozen not-so-good ones?
Joe user wants things to work. He wants to go to Best Buy, grab the latest game, gadget, whatnot, and he wants to go home, plug it in, idely stand by while it installs God-knows-what spy-ware, and then he wants to use the product, even if he has to jump through a few hoops to do so.
And probably the biggest reason why Linux will never make it to the main stream population: UI design. Sure, Apple's got a better one than Microsoft... Or is it the other way around? The truth is, it doesn't matter - they have the money and resources to hire someone who knows a thing or two about UI design, and they have the same money and resources to conduct focus groups and research and all those things that open source simply can't do, and they can figure out what works the best for the most number of people, and not just the geeks and their playmates who happen to have written the software.
Figure you start out all CD's at the price of... $5 and a max price of, say, the current $18. Every time x number of a particular CD are sold, jack up the price of that album by a small amount until you hit the limit.
This would accomplish two things: First, the RIAA would still get the same amount of money it does today from the popular stuff like Britney and whatnot since the price would very quickly rise to the max based upon demand. Second, it would encourage people to buy less popular stuff, thus increasing the exposure of less popular bands. As this exposure increased, the cost of that bands CD would rise, and the RIAA would earn potentially more money than it does currently because more music would become popular, which would result in more people buying more CD's with the music they like.
But then again, a system like that would also force innovation - bands would have to constantly produce new and exciting content to keep people from simply not buying the CD anymore when it hits the max. And don't forget about the innovation that is bred but simply never put to show using the current method of pricing.
But what do I know - I listen to bands like String Cheese, The Motet, and Keller Williams. I support these bands through concert tickets and purchasing somewhat over-priced murchandise. In exchange, they let me download perfect digital copies of *most* of their music, such as all the concerts they've ever played. Pretty sweet deal, if you ask me, especially since they're not cookie cutter bands, of the mentality that the best way to play music is to play it exactly the same, every single time.
Because a monitor is no different than a standard sheet of paper. Sure, you can cut it to all shapes and sizes, but in the end, when you want to convey a lot of information quickly, that piece of paper is, 9 times out of 10, going to be in the shape of some sort of rectangle.
Unless you're going to use the monitor exclusively for displaying iTunes plug-ins, or some sort of custom GUI that doesn't really have to convey large volumes of information, it's going to be a rectangle.
I mean, imagine reading/. on a round display. The middle of the screen would have a nice long line of text, and as you went toward the top or botton, there would be fewer and fewer words per line. It'd get real old, real fast.
Dragon-Half... Ha! Now that's some funny @#$%... To any anime fans who have never seen this, I recommend you go find yourself a copy. There are only two episodes, BTW.
While I do tend to agree - Mac users will almost always be Mac users - I don't agree that Adobe is totally unbiased when it comes to software releases.
Photoshop 7 is pretty good, but it's all downhill from there.
Illustrator 10 for OS X is perhaps the shoddiest piece of software I've ever had to run - half the time when I launch it, it forgets what palettes I had open. Whenever I double-click a file to both open the file and launch Illustrator (i.e., Illustrator isn't running yet) I get one but not the other - Illustrator starts up, but the damn file doesn't open, and I have to double-click it again. Finally, it crashes. Design software should never crash - and if it does, there should be an auto-save feature as an option.
Photoshop, in all the years I've been running it, on the PC and the Mac, has never once crashed. Illustrator crashes every Tuesday...
I've had no experience with the other programs people mention, and though I do love my Mac, I will agree that software companies certainly don't give the same attention to Mac versions of their software that they do the PC versions.
Read those words. Yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of the release of OS X to the public. 2 Years.
Quark is dead. I mean, sure, all the old blokes who are still running OS 9 in their print and design shops are probably still doing Quark 5 or (yipes) 4, and they'll probably switch to 6 when it comes out. But the new designers entering the field - and any of the print shops who switched to OS X - are more likely than not going to use and/or prefer InDesign. Hell, at my school, you can't even run Quark in classic anymore - it's all InDesign.
So yeah, it's an update, but certainly not a significant one.
I think your analogy is a bit off. After all, a dictator can't exactly knock on God's/Nature's door and say "You have commited a crime against the state - you have made it cold. For this, you will be punished."
On the other hand, your analogy does hold a bit of water, since niether "truth" nor "cold" is absolute - what's "true" for one (wo)man might not be "true" for the next, and what's "cold" for a Californian might not be for a Michigander...
I'm not sure about cell, but my caller ID here *always* displays the number... Just sometimes, it doesn't include a name (or the right name for that matter).
Wait, wait, wait... Couldn't you just get a 900 number associated to your phone, and post that all over town? Every time the cops call you, if they wanted to talk to you, they'd have to agree to the charge (or can they just bill you without asking - even better)... Pure profit, at the expense of the government.
So basically, rather than taking the time to track these folks down, they're just going to annoy the culprits into submission...?
At first, I was going to say "why not just turn the phone off?"
But phone being off -> no incoming business calls either. Turn the phone on -> be spammed by police and have your minutes wasted. Turn yourself in -> no more spam + you getting a fine + you no longer hanging stickers.
But couldn't you just block whatever number the cops are calling from?
Well, not all Mac users are superstitious - I'm certainly not at least. Nor have I had any problems with the battery in my iBook - probably because I keep it tilted at a 15 degree angle and never use it after dark...:o)
My father once suggested a paintball system wherein everyone carried a paint-ball gun. If you drive like an asshole, people nail you. If you get over a certain number of hits, and a cop sees you, you get a ticket.
Of course, paint washes off, and there'd be no way to keep people from abusing the system... but it'd certainly be a great way to relieve the frustration...
"What's that... on the cell phone...?"::stomps the gas pedal while rolling down the window::
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it's all in how you read it... Note the word 'extended' though. In my dictionary, 'extended' does not equate to 'infinite.'
Slashdot laziness takes an all time low - now people aren't even bothering to read the post itself. What next, just read the headline? The first word of the headline? The first letter?
This really isn't that helpful in terms of actual, factual information, links, etc., but I seem to remember that I learned about women having a slightly lower capacity for spacial relationship from some sort of exam I took in high school. A standardized test, I'm quite sure.
The problems involved looking at an object drawn in three dimensions and asked you what the proper view of that item would be if you rotated the thing 180 degrees, so you were looking at the backside. Others *might* have involved two views drawn in two dimensions, where you were supposed to figure out what the object looked like in 3D.
Either way, I specifically remember the test out-right stating that women would score lower on 'this section of the exam.' I don't remember if they also said that because of this, things were curved, or not.
Ha. That definately made my night a little brighter. Thanks.
Actually, whether or not the rest of what you said is true, it seems to me that digital projectors would in fact offer at least one benefit: artifacts, or the lack thereof.
If film artifacts are removed from the original film before it's encoded onto the disc, then they're gone for good. No degredation of the film over the period from release date to final showing due to handling and the simple running of the reels through the machine.
Plus, and this is totally unresearched, it seems to me that digital projectors would eventually pay for themselves. Imagine if the theater could hire just one person to que up the discs for movies to be played in a theater over the course of a day, week, or month. Then, that same person sits in one central 'control room' and presses a button to start and stop movies. This means no one sitting in the projection booth, forgetting to switch reels, or forgettiing to change the audio levels, or God only knows what else (Fight Club, anyone).
Opera released a version of their browser - the fark edition or something like that - that, when accessing the MSN site, runs the contents through a translator of sorts and basically screws up the content. This was in responce to Microsoft deliberately making sure that anyone using Opera to access their site wouldn't be able to make much use of it, and for no reason other than the fact that they felt like it.
If I understand correctly, can't you just use third party billing to have the... uhm... third party pay for a call between you and your buddy in, say, Brazil?
No, but the "cable" more than likely would be, high tensile strength and all. At least, this seems to be where all the ideation seems to be going...
Actually...
So we had this old 15" monitor that, after living a nice long life (started out on a 486 purchased when a 486 was 'top of the line, nobody else had one' top of the line). Anyway, one night a couple of years ago, after it died, we took it out to an abandoned field, along with a wooden baseball bat.
After my friends got in a few swings, I decided to go for the glass instead of the case.
It broke on the first swing. So did the bat. And I thought for sure my wrist was at least fractured. Ouch. That was pretty much the end of the game. We took what was left of the bat and proceeded to fall farther down the evolutionary ladder, smashing away at the bits and pieces of the poor monitor like ape-men, until we'd had enough.
I took pictures the next day of the mess we had made. The day after that, cleaning crews had cleaned the entire mess up. And that, was that.
I'll put up a second vote for the 825 - 5 color cart, paper can be roll-fed in, and it has a built in flash card reader. Print quality is stunning.
However, I recently bought a non-epson refill cart for this thing, and for some reason, red doesn't work at all. Very annoying. Very...
[sarcasm]
Why package 45 shitty [insert software type here] ones in a distro? Choice, my man, choice.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously, the parent is 100% on the money. Linux wasn't, isn't, and probably never will be ready for the masses, because the masses want things to just work. Now, before everyone jumps on their anti-microsoft steed screaming 'Microsoft's stuff never does what I want it to do,' remember the following:
1) As crappy as it might be, Microsoft offers real, live human support for their products, assuming you purchase them and don't pirate.
2) If something doesn't work, one doesn't have to play 'find the config file and learn how to use whatever sort of configuration options the author decided to implement.' One simply a) doesn't use the product and returns it or b) finds someone to get it to work for them, which is much more likely if they're running Windows or MacOS than if they're running linux.
3) Why *are* there so many different ways of doing things in Linux? How about one or two *good* ways, instead of half a dozen not-so-good ones?
Joe user wants things to work. He wants to go to Best Buy, grab the latest game, gadget, whatnot, and he wants to go home, plug it in, idely stand by while it installs God-knows-what spy-ware, and then he wants to use the product, even if he has to jump through a few hoops to do so.
And probably the biggest reason why Linux will never make it to the main stream population: UI design. Sure, Apple's got a better one than Microsoft... Or is it the other way around? The truth is, it doesn't matter - they have the money and resources to hire someone who knows a thing or two about UI design, and they have the same money and resources to conduct focus groups and research and all those things that open source simply can't do, and they can figure out what works the best for the most number of people, and not just the geeks and their playmates who happen to have written the software.
Actually, this isn't a bad idea.
Figure you start out all CD's at the price of... $5 and a max price of, say, the current $18. Every time x number of a particular CD are sold, jack up the price of that album by a small amount until you hit the limit.
This would accomplish two things: First, the RIAA would still get the same amount of money it does today from the popular stuff like Britney and whatnot since the price would very quickly rise to the max based upon demand. Second, it would encourage people to buy less popular stuff, thus increasing the exposure of less popular bands. As this exposure increased, the cost of that bands CD would rise, and the RIAA would earn potentially more money than it does currently because more music would become popular, which would result in more people buying more CD's with the music they like.
But then again, a system like that would also force innovation - bands would have to constantly produce new and exciting content to keep people from simply not buying the CD anymore when it hits the max. And don't forget about the innovation that is bred but simply never put to show using the current method of pricing.
But what do I know - I listen to bands like String Cheese, The Motet, and Keller Williams. I support these bands through concert tickets and purchasing somewhat over-priced murchandise. In exchange, they let me download perfect digital copies of *most* of their music, such as all the concerts they've ever played. Pretty sweet deal, if you ask me, especially since they're not cookie cutter bands, of the mentality that the best way to play music is to play it exactly the same, every single time.
Thank you. That made my day, as sad as that sounds.
Why?
/. on a round display. The middle of the screen would have a nice long line of text, and as you went toward the top or botton, there would be fewer and fewer words per line. It'd get real old, real fast.
Because a monitor is no different than a standard sheet of paper. Sure, you can cut it to all shapes and sizes, but in the end, when you want to convey a lot of information quickly, that piece of paper is, 9 times out of 10, going to be in the shape of some sort of rectangle.
Unless you're going to use the monitor exclusively for displaying iTunes plug-ins, or some sort of custom GUI that doesn't really have to convey large volumes of information, it's going to be a rectangle.
I mean, imagine reading
Dragon-Half... Ha! Now that's some funny @#$%... To any anime fans who have never seen this, I recommend you go find yourself a copy. There are only two episodes, BTW.
While I do tend to agree - Mac users will almost always be Mac users - I don't agree that Adobe is totally unbiased when it comes to software releases.
Photoshop 7 is pretty good, but it's all downhill from there.
Illustrator 10 for OS X is perhaps the shoddiest piece of software I've ever had to run - half the time when I launch it, it forgets what palettes I had open. Whenever I double-click a file to both open the file and launch Illustrator (i.e., Illustrator isn't running yet) I get one but not the other - Illustrator starts up, but the damn file doesn't open, and I have to double-click it again. Finally, it crashes. Design software should never crash - and if it does, there should be an auto-save feature as an option.
Photoshop, in all the years I've been running it, on the PC and the Mac, has never once crashed. Illustrator crashes every Tuesday...
I've had no experience with the other programs people mention, and though I do love my Mac, I will agree that software companies certainly don't give the same attention to Mac versions of their software that they do the PC versions.
Quark 6 is Alpha...
Read those words. Yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of the release of OS X to the public. 2 Years.
Quark is dead. I mean, sure, all the old blokes who are still running OS 9 in their print and design shops are probably still doing Quark 5 or (yipes) 4, and they'll probably switch to 6 when it comes out. But the new designers entering the field - and any of the print shops who switched to OS X - are more likely than not going to use and/or prefer InDesign. Hell, at my school, you can't even run Quark in classic anymore - it's all InDesign.
So yeah, it's an update, but certainly not a significant one.
I think that's the way it works - not owning a cell myself, I couldn't say for sure though.
I think your analogy is a bit off. After all, a dictator can't exactly knock on God's/Nature's door and say "You have commited a crime against the state - you have made it cold. For this, you will be punished."
On the other hand, your analogy does hold a bit of water, since niether "truth" nor "cold" is absolute - what's "true" for one (wo)man might not be "true" for the next, and what's "cold" for a Californian might not be for a Michigander...
I'm not sure about cell, but my caller ID here *always* displays the number... Just sometimes, it doesn't include a name (or the right name for that matter).
Wait, wait, wait... Couldn't you just get a 900 number associated to your phone, and post that all over town? Every time the cops call you, if they wanted to talk to you, they'd have to agree to the charge (or can they just bill you without asking - even better) ... Pure profit, at the expense of the government.
So basically, rather than taking the time to track these folks down, they're just going to annoy the culprits into submission...?
At first, I was going to say "why not just turn the phone off?"
But phone being off -> no incoming business calls either. Turn the phone on -> be spammed by police and have your minutes wasted. Turn yourself in -> no more spam + you getting a fine + you no longer hanging stickers.
But couldn't you just block whatever number the cops are calling from?
Well, not all Mac users are superstitious - I'm certainly not at least. Nor have I had any problems with the battery in my iBook - probably because I keep it tilted at a 15 degree angle and never use it after dark... :o)
I think the parent is referring to the battery-killing-10.2.4 issue mentioned on Slashdot a week or so back.
Now, whether the parent is simply perpetuating the lie, or if Apple really did drop the ball is up to you to figure out.
My father once suggested a paintball system wherein everyone carried a paint-ball gun. If you drive like an asshole, people nail you. If you get over a certain number of hits, and a cop sees you, you get a ticket.
::stomps the gas pedal while rolling down the window::
Of course, paint washes off, and there'd be no way to keep people from abusing the system... but it'd certainly be a great way to relieve the frustration...
"What's that... on the cell phone...?"
THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!
"Ahhh..."
They've also got Gooogle under their belt.