Disclaimer: I haven't bought enough online to know whether what I do "works" or is "just lucky".
That said, here's my system: - Look for reviews about the product and the store separately - For each type of review, read (a) glowing reviews, (b) average reviews, and (c) negative reviews - For glowing reviews, ignore "me too"s and look for actual substance which might distinguish between vendors. Why were people happy? - Give average reviews a little more weight; look for general trends of what people expect - Give negative reviews the most weight; they seem to be the most honest. Why were people unhappy? Do they have valid points, or do they seem unreasonable?
In the end, reading online reviews is an exercise in human nature. Some people will cheat for or against; others have no perspective on reality and distort average to being awesome or horrible. Your job is to identify the reviews that are trustable; these usually contain details not found in glossy ads; they are usually plentiful, if a bit hard to find.
Its hard to express how little enthusiasm I have for this. I mean, the various BSD's have had Linux binary compatibility layers for what, 5 years or more?
So Sun's mightly Solaris is finally catching up to a dying OS? Ouch.;-)
Now that you mention it, I have vague memories of something like this. The Bonanza was within reach of inexperienced pilots such as doctors and lawyers. A few crashed. Litigation ensued. Being more than a blip on the radar, this played a part in moving away from the distinctive V tail design.
I understand your quip about the Comet. However, the Bonanza holds a record as the longest-produced aircraft ever, bar none. Most aviation types I've known saw the Bonanza as an almost ideal small plane. It was one of the great successes of aviation.
Could you please explain why people *wouldn't* want their plane to be remembered like the Bonanza?
I can, and it is still a bad experience. To that one site: this is 2005; there are no good reasons left for using applets as animated menus.
If the JVM were pre-loaded by the browser, these applets would be less bad. However, javascript, CSS, and friends have taken over as languages specialized for webpage content.
Back in the day, "real" computer manufacturers scoffed at Intel. IBM would only let them produce the chips for the PC after Intel found another manufacturer willing to produce the part in case Intel tanked. The PC was nothing to boast about compared to the mainframes of the day.
Slowly but surely, Intel grew to become the monster they are today. The turning point was somewhere near the Pentium II, when Intel machines were beginning to be used as engineering workstations. Profits truly are the source of competition and progress. Back then, the PC market was small, and improvements came quickly only because things were relatively simple. Now, everyone wants a piece of a growing pie, and companies are innovating as fast as possible.
The Olympics are a huge, multi-thousand-year-old event. Saying that you can't refer to the olympics in your advertising is basically saying that you can't state facts about what you legally provide without paying someone.
No; the modern Olympics were created less than a hundred years ago. Their original purpose was to glorify aristocracy, and they have adapted to glorifying consumerism and idol worship. The Olympics of today have no connection with ancient Greece.
I've not used one, but some large lecture classes at Illinois require this type of device upon enrollment. Apparently some professors/locals got the University to try them out. There was an article on them last school year in the Daily Illini
From the stories I heard in customer service lines at the bookstore, they were not popular. One problem was that they hadn't standardized yet, and students had to buy multiple incompatible devices or, worse yet, the model they needed wasn't available.
At least at the University level, people seem to think "kinda cool, but mostly overrated". The only real purpose I've heard is to require attendance/primitive participation.
These might be popular in elementary/middle school though. We had a couple "quiz show" systems when I went to school. Used sparingly, I remember enjoying them (when they worked). Used daily, they'd probably become boring fast.
Another article (don't remember the source) discussed using cell phone messaging for similar purposes. That almost seems reasonable, excepting that not everyone can afford one.
You're right; photo-chemical production of hydrogen is an interesting topic. So would be thermo-chemical production from nuclear sources instead of our current electrical production. As of today, the only forseeable methods of mass-producing hydrogen involve electrolysis (pure waste of energy) or reprocessing other fuels; and that isn't much to get excited over.
Unfortunately, most of the current hype is about using hydrogen to run electrical products. As you probably know, converting energy from one form to another is not 100% efficient. Thus, generating and storing hydrogen has to be significantly more efficient than just using electricity in the first place.
> Well well, we can tell who's a right winger. Uncalled for ad-hominem.
> Besides, electricity can be derived from anything these days.
I agree, but why waste electricity creating hydrogen? As the most versatile form of energy known to man, why not use it directly?
>... and farmlands will grow in size.... Thus, overall food output will increase...
Massive corporate farms with the requisite processing equipment would grow in size. The guys in small or dry countries wouldn't have a chance. Also, organic/sustainable farming would not be possible at this scale; fertilizers and pesticides would be needed in greater abundance.
Increasing demand is not a good way to increase supply. Unfortunately, most economic models show that increased supply comes only *after* an increase in price. Prices only decrease when a specialty product achieves economies of scale. I'd say farming is already rather large.
(my own cheap shot) Maybe you'd be happy if I cleared a few million acres down in the Amazon to grow your cheap biofuel.
"This product... might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel".
A *fuel* eh? Just like my lead-acid car battery is a fuel.
Wake up folks; water is the most stable chemical form of hydrogen and oxygen. Breaking water to form hydrogen is an inefficient (wasteful) process.
The only potentially viable way to generate hydrogen is to "burn" biomass or mined gasses/oils. Biomass has to be grown, thus putting a strain on farmland and possibly promoting world hunger (we'll burn their food for energy). There are cleaner, more efficient ways of extracting energy from petroleum than converting it to hydrogen.
Hydrogen is merely a "cool" idea for porkbelly projects. As a non-naturally ocurring fuel, it is a non-starter.
I can mail you a Slackware boot disk. It will cure all of Vista's problems, before it is even released.:)
That said, a lot more people would plug Windows holes (if for no other reason than to rid the world of zombies)... if MS would just free the source. But that would probably make poorly-written Perl code look good.;)
My point is that people are only giving philosophical arguments for these concepts, not hard evidence. It is one thing to give a philosophical interpretation of physical equations; it is quite different to state a philosophy that has no other backing than "it is observed".
Several ancient Greek schools of philosophy followed philosophical arguments to various ends, explaning such topics as the nature of gravitation and light; while wrong, they were'nt completely discredited a thousand years later. Vague arguments such as "Survival is, of course, a good step to reproductive advantage" have no place in science. However, they appear all too often in the pop-cult of Science.
Again I ask, what are the physical underpinnings of this philosophy called evolution? If your hand is empty, please quit preaching its authority.
As the AC pointed out, height increases are due to improvements in nutrition (mostly increases in protein) and have nothing to do with genetics. This is an easily verified fact; many immigrant families have children much larger than their parents, and children don't grow as big in countries where famines occur.
There have been several published papers which document this.
The creationists claim that all the biodiversity presently seen comes from speciation of a few animals that were temporarily stored in a wooden Ark. What I remember them hawking was that no new animal types have sprung into being; we've only seen small variations on the old ones.
This is a claim that most evolutionists would easily admit to; the discovery of a new species is usually attributed to it not having been found previously, and only extreme macroevolution could produce a new animal type in the few hundred years since people started categorizing flora and fauna.
I hear "the ring" and "the vows" get you a steady supply of extra features in First Life. Unfortunately, many players then spend most of their time slaying monsters, visiting shops, and re-arranging their inventory.
Apple is garnering hype (all publicity is good, right?) through the whole KHTML/WebCore thing. MS is standing on the sidelines with a free program it used to kill Netscape wondering why nobody uses says any words about its toy any more.
How could they make IE better? Why not join the crowd and fully release the source?
He's no genius, but Robbins has shown a knack for getting programs off the ground, generating hype, and garnering support. He made compiling cool again.
Often, that checkbox only affects the cookie policy. On a public box, cookies will not be set, or they will be set to a "session-only" expiration policy.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Many sites tell you to close the web browser after logging out so that the web browser will actually clear these cookies.
BTW, you can buy hardware keyloggers rather cheaply. You plug them in between the keyboard and the computer; they have on-board memory that records all the keystrokes ever entered. No need for user-detectable software.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I haven't bought enough online to know whether what I do "works" or is "just lucky".
That said, here's my system:
- Look for reviews about the product and the store separately
- For each type of review, read (a) glowing reviews, (b) average reviews, and (c) negative reviews
- For glowing reviews, ignore "me too"s and look for actual substance which might distinguish between vendors. Why were people happy?
- Give average reviews a little more weight; look for general trends of what people expect
- Give negative reviews the most weight; they seem to be the most honest. Why were people unhappy? Do they have valid points, or do they seem unreasonable?
In the end, reading online reviews is an exercise in human nature. Some people will cheat for or against; others have no perspective on reality and distort average to being awesome or horrible. Your job is to identify the reviews that are trustable; these usually contain details not found in glossy ads; they are usually plentiful, if a bit hard to find.
but the poster probably doesn't want another top-notch, ASCII-art dungeon game.
Its hard to express how little enthusiasm I have for this. I mean, the various BSD's have had Linux binary compatibility layers for what, 5 years or more?
;-)
So Sun's mightly Solaris is finally catching up to a dying OS? Ouch.
Speculation: was not water soluble, and hence not usable for bubbles?
Now that you mention it, I have vague memories of something like this. The Bonanza was within reach of inexperienced pilots such as doctors and lawyers. A few crashed. Litigation ensued. Being more than a blip on the radar, this played a part in moving away from the distinctive V tail design.
s htmls /2001/jun/true.html
For the other poster, here's a couple links:
http://www.frugalsworld.com/logbooks/logbook12-1.
http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/content/pastissue
He couldn't find the phrase since it was "fork-tailed doctor killer", *not* dentist.
I still think the Bonanza was a resounding success. It was that success which caused these problems in the first place.
I understand your quip about the Comet. However, the Bonanza holds a record as the longest-produced aircraft ever, bar none. Most aviation types I've known saw the Bonanza as an almost ideal small plane. It was one of the great successes of aviation.
Could you please explain why people *wouldn't* want their plane to be remembered like the Bonanza?
I can, and it is still a bad experience. To that one site: this is 2005; there are no good reasons left for using applets as animated menus.
If the JVM were pre-loaded by the browser, these applets would be less bad. However, javascript, CSS, and friends have taken over as languages specialized for webpage content.
Not a credible player.
Back in the day, "real" computer manufacturers scoffed at Intel. IBM would only let them produce the chips for the PC after Intel found another manufacturer willing to produce the part in case Intel tanked. The PC was nothing to boast about compared to the mainframes of the day.
Slowly but surely, Intel grew to become the monster they are today. The turning point was somewhere near the Pentium II, when Intel machines were beginning to be used as engineering workstations. Profits truly are the source of competition and progress. Back then, the PC market was small, and improvements came quickly only because things were relatively simple. Now, everyone wants a piece of a growing pie, and companies are innovating as fast as possible.
- Buy Antivirus for your cell phone
- Why we should all love corporate Linux
- MS supports good guys!
- Why you need a new digital camera... and its not about picture quality.
- Breaking story from America's Finest News Source.
What do these have in common? Corporate cheer-leading, perhaps?I want news, not ads for nerds.
That's what traditional beaded doorways are for. Plus they look cool.
That's why they issue the combat knife.
From the stories I heard in customer service lines at the bookstore, they were not popular. One problem was that they hadn't standardized yet, and students had to buy multiple incompatible devices or, worse yet, the model they needed wasn't available.
At least at the University level, people seem to think "kinda cool, but mostly overrated". The only real purpose I've heard is to require attendance/primitive participation.
These might be popular in elementary/middle school though. We had a couple "quiz show" systems when I went to school. Used sparingly, I remember enjoying them (when they worked). Used daily, they'd probably become boring fast.
Another article (don't remember the source) discussed using cell phone messaging for similar purposes. That almost seems reasonable, excepting that not everyone can afford one.
> I dunno, plants do a pretty good job of it.
You're right; photo-chemical production of hydrogen is an interesting topic. So would be thermo-chemical production from nuclear sources instead of our current electrical production. As of today, the only forseeable methods of mass-producing hydrogen involve electrolysis (pure waste of energy) or reprocessing other fuels; and that isn't much to get excited over.
Unfortunately, most of the current hype is about using hydrogen to run electrical products. As you probably know, converting energy from one form to another is not 100% efficient. Thus, generating and storing hydrogen has to be significantly more efficient than just using electricity in the first place.
> Well well, we can tell who's a right winger.
... and farmlands will grow in size. ... Thus, overall food output will increase ...
Uncalled for ad-hominem.
> Besides, electricity can be derived from anything these days.
I agree, but why waste electricity creating hydrogen? As the most versatile form of energy known to man, why not use it directly?
>
Massive corporate farms with the requisite processing equipment would grow in size. The guys in small or dry countries wouldn't have a chance. Also, organic/sustainable farming would not be possible at this scale; fertilizers and pesticides would be needed in greater abundance.
Increasing demand is not a good way to increase supply. Unfortunately, most economic models show that increased supply comes only *after* an increase in price. Prices only decrease when a specialty product achieves economies of scale. I'd say farming is already rather large.
(my own cheap shot) Maybe you'd be happy if I cleared a few million acres down in the Amazon to grow your cheap biofuel.
"This product ... might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel".
A *fuel* eh? Just like my lead-acid car battery is a fuel.
Wake up folks; water is the most stable chemical form of hydrogen and oxygen. Breaking water to form hydrogen is an inefficient (wasteful) process.
The only potentially viable way to generate hydrogen is to "burn" biomass or mined gasses/oils. Biomass has to be grown, thus putting a strain on farmland and possibly promoting world hunger (we'll burn their food for energy). There are cleaner, more efficient ways of extracting energy from petroleum than converting it to hydrogen.
Hydrogen is merely a "cool" idea for porkbelly projects. As a non-naturally ocurring fuel, it is a non-starter.
I can mail you a Slackware boot disk. It will cure all of Vista's problems, before it is even released. :)
;)
That said, a lot more people would plug Windows holes (if for no other reason than to rid the world of zombies)... if MS would just free the source. But that would probably make poorly-written Perl code look good.
My point is that people are only giving philosophical arguments for these concepts, not hard evidence. It is one thing to give a philosophical interpretation of physical equations; it is quite different to state a philosophy that has no other backing than "it is observed".
Several ancient Greek schools of philosophy followed philosophical arguments to various ends, explaning such topics as the nature of gravitation and light; while wrong, they were'nt completely discredited a thousand years later. Vague arguments such as "Survival is, of course, a good step to reproductive advantage" have no place in science. However, they appear all too often in the pop-cult of Science.
Again I ask, what are the physical underpinnings of this philosophy called evolution? If your hand is empty, please quit preaching its authority.
As the AC pointed out, height increases are due to improvements in nutrition (mostly increases in protein) and have nothing to do with genetics. This is an easily verified fact; many immigrant families have children much larger than their parents, and children don't grow as big in countries where famines occur.
There have been several published papers which document this.
The creationists claim that all the biodiversity presently seen comes from speciation of a few animals that were temporarily stored in a wooden Ark. What I remember them hawking was that no new animal types have sprung into being; we've only seen small variations on the old ones.
This is a claim that most evolutionists would easily admit to; the discovery of a new species is usually attributed to it not having been found previously, and only extreme macroevolution could produce a new animal type in the few hundred years since people started categorizing flora and fauna.
Would you care to express "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" in term of physical processes and not in romanticist language?
My skepticism would be greatly reduced.
Actual "article" here:0 401/103334/?ST=english
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
Quicksave? You'll want Undo more often.
I hear "the ring" and "the vows" get you a steady supply of extra features in First Life. Unfortunately, many players then spend most of their time slaying monsters, visiting shops, and re-arranging their inventory.
Kinda similar to a crowning in nethack.
I think you might be on to something.
Apple is garnering hype (all publicity is good, right?) through the whole KHTML/WebCore thing. MS is standing on the sidelines with a free program it used to kill Netscape wondering why nobody uses says any words about its toy any more.
How could they make IE better? Why not join the crowd and fully release the source?
He's no genius, but Robbins has shown a knack for getting programs off the ground, generating hype, and garnering support. He made compiling cool again.
Often, that checkbox only affects the cookie policy. On a public box, cookies will not be set, or they will be set to a "session-only" expiration policy.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Many sites tell you to close the web browser after logging out so that the web browser will actually clear these cookies.
BTW, you can buy hardware keyloggers rather cheaply. You plug them in between the keyboard and the computer; they have on-board memory that records all the keystrokes ever entered. No need for user-detectable software.