Just don't come back home in a few hundred years with a chip on your shoulder!
Chip on its shoulder? It's full of chips! I just hope it doesn't crash into an alien spacecraft that was programmed for terraforming (extraterraforming?), get its circuits mixed up, and come back to exterminate us. Especially if the "oya" is erased from its paint job.
Proof Readers: I'll skip that one, nothing that a spell check can't fix
Watt in the whirl ore ewe talking a boot? Dew knot truss yore spill chucker! That's what's wrong with most slashdot comments. A spell checker can't tell that your using the wrong word (yes, that was intentional). A spell checker doesn't know if you want to loose the dog or if you want to lose the dog. A spell checker won't tell you that your use of apostrophe's is retarded.
Take care of the Big Picture stuff and then do a major revision by the author for the Second Printing
I fucking HATE patches and the lazy bastards who issue them. Get it right the first time, damn it! If I'm paying full price for a book or an operating system the damned thing should WORK. You don't have to patch a new pair of jeans, do you?
Sometimes I wonder how much further ahead humanity would be if we built everything with the need to have it last decades before becoming nonfunctional, then I realize that with the rate technology has advanced, that is just not possible.
Sure it is. A 1964 Mustang may not be as safe or efficient as one built today, but it will still get you to work. How would any advances affect, say, a new stove, couch, refrigerator, table, etc?
Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles. So much of the global economy is dependent on people buying more things.
What's wrong with an economy that includes resale, so the poor can have stuff too?
Fortunately we do have examples (like the Voyager probes) of good engineering
Too bad all the good engineers seem to work for NASA. I have a vaccuum cleaner that's 57 years old that my dad bought when I was two, and it still works. I have a working food mixer that's just as old. When I was a teenager in the late sixties working at a drive-in theater, there was a refrigerator there that was manufactured in 1920 and was still in use. I bought a 12 inch Panasonic TV in 1968 that still worked in 2003 when I left it in a house I moved out of.
Meanwhile, I bought a refrigerator in 2000 that was dead by 2009, dryer I bought in 1995 that was no longer functional in 2008. The TV I bought in 2002 is already showing signs of old age.
Of course, back in the day they didn't make everything out of cheap plastics, and CEOs didn't earn 400 times what the factory workers did like they do now..
Some of us may be screaming at the top of their lungs that they should be cheaper. But there's plenty of people out there with enough money that they will buy the eBooks anyway.
I don't think that argument holds up. Those with the extra income are likely to buy hardcover books to display on bookshelves (rich people love flaunting their wealth, or nobody would buy a Lexus), and perhaps buying the ebook version as well. But there would be a LOT more money to be made from middle class people wo DO have to watch their budgets if the prices for ebooks weren't insane. There are a hell of a lot more middle class and poor people than there are rich people, or nobody would buy a used Ford.
Well, duh, of course delivery of electronic media is cheaper. That doesn't mean there's no collusion, or that someone isn't using unfair or unlawful business practices to sell them at a higher price than a free market would allow them to.
To me, that's not what's funny. What's funny is my old Logitech IR wireless keyboard stays alive for two years on two AAA carbon batteries. Why on earth would ten years be an improvement, especially if they're talking about an expensive battery? It only takes ten seconds to change them and they cost about fifty cents apiece.
The mouse, now, that's a different story; batteries last about a month. It takes the same size batteries as the keyboard, but they're rechargable and recharge in the mouse's holder. Give me a cordless mouse that will work for two years (let alone ten) without recharging and I'll be impressed.
In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the world's perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status quo. Along the way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do that all by himself.
Computers were the stuff of science fiction and wide-eyed articles about "electric brains." Few people had actually seen one. Only a handful had been built, among them the first computer, ENIAC, created by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s.
In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.
On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer -- a panel embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac.
By 8:30 p.m. ET -- long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes -- Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 -- a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.
Under pressure, Woodbury rejigged the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results -- an Eisenhower landslide.
Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.
In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.
This will never happen in my state, as we sell our senate seats at auction.
What state? The only state I know of where Senate seats are sold is here in Illinois. You did hear that Blago was sentenced yesterday to fourteen years in the federal pen for that very crime, didn't you? Likewise, our previous Governor (the one before Blago) is still in prison for selling commercial drivers licenses to unqualified drivers.
you get more then 2 parties. Make it cheaper to get on the ballot for governor and senate races.
There were five parties on the Presidential ticket in enough states last election that they had a mathematical chance of winning. The trouble is, media are controlled by the corporations, who have convinced everyone that a vote for a Green or a Libbie is a wasted vote. That way they only have to bribe two candidates.
You must be new here -- in the country, I mean. You've never been cheated by business? You're either really young or really lucky. Ever heard of OtherOS? You don't consider Sony removing a feature you've paid for to be fraud?
you can't pollute,
No? Why is no one in prison for that? You can bet your ass if you, a person, negligently did something like that you'ld be in prison for life.
you can't enslave people,
Tell that to anyone dependant on a paycheck when unemployment is 9%. Tell that to migrant farm workers.
you can't steal,
Ever heard of emminent domain?
What about negligent homicide? A mass murder and nobody went to prison for it.
Wanting to dismantle the federal EPA is brain-dead stupid. Pollution doesn't honor state lines. Wanting to dismantle the FDA si similarly moronic as most of your food and medicine comes from out of state.
just like the public sector is a completely inappropriate sector to place the production of food in!
Huh? You're batshit crazy, son. Nobody is asking for the government to go into the farming business! Take your meds and then a nap.
That was entertaining, kind of like "damning with faint praise". What you're saying is that you're harming me because you won't give me money for nothing.
What's worse, considering the OtherOS nonsense, it's like my selling you a car, removing the tires, then claiming you harmed me because you replaced the tires.
"If you think you understand quantum physics, then clearly you don't." -Paraphrased Richard Feynman quote
I don't think I understand it, so does that mean I do?
As to TFA, it led me to think that this could lead to more powerful and cheaper solar cells. This is an exciting time to be alive. I can see a future without those damned ugly poles and wires in the alley behind my house, with a beautiful solar paneled roof and an even more beautiful lack of an electric bill. Who knows watt will come of investigation into quantum mechanics?
Yeah, I know, they bought BOOST a couple of years ago IIRC. And to tell the truth, it tempts me to go ahead and pay $80 per month for unlimited data on a smartphone from Sprint because of that, despite the fact that I had bad experiences with Spring ten years ago. If they had unlimited talk and text I'd do it tomorrow.
And yet you immediately dismissed my "App support" argument. Convenient.
You never made an "app support" argument, or any other argument at all. And "app support" isn't a very good reason to pay a lot more for your hardware anyway.
Because they're short-sighted and know the price of everything but the value of nothing. If you don't value the things you buy beyond what they cost, then you're always going to have cheap crap.
Again, where is the extra value? And "app support" isn't much "value added", especially since Android is likely to surpass Apple in this; the app support is dependant on the developers, not Google or Apple. And from advertising alone (not Apple's or Android's), most now are supporting both platforms equally. "Get our app for your iPhone or Android!" is what I hear. Most of them also make me not like iPhone or Apple, since their apps are for functionality that any desktop web browser has out of the box.
The thing about Pirate Bay (actually I haven't used Pirate Bay) is that if I did use it and liked the movie, I'd wind up buying it. I did once attempt to use it when I wanted to see LOTR and it was sold out -- I'd waited 40 years for that movie. But the quality of the rip was so bad I shut it off after five minutes and waited fo rthe DVD. haven't bothered with TPB since.
Many great artists have gotten nothing whatever for their efforts, Van Gogh being the first to come to mind. Why should a talentless hack make money on his dreck when a great artist like Van Gogh only sold one painting, to his brother, for a pittance?
I figure if I don't want to compensate someone for entertaining me, I don't let them entertain me.
I don't tip the waitress until I get the check. If the service was bad, no tip. If I've heard a movie is a dog, I won't pay to watch it. If someone loans me a DVD of it (do you think that should be illegal?) I'll give it twenty minutes, if it seems good I'll keep watching. If it isn't entertaining, no way will they get my cash. If it's good I'll probably buy a copy.
It just doesn't seem right even if you don't believe in intellectual properties
Intellectual properties belong, according to the US Constitution, to everyone (including my own stuff; I've registered copyrights). The "content creator" simply has a "limited time" monopoly, and I think the founding fathers would not agree with the current life+75 years. Anything older than 30 (it was about 20 in 1900) I feel like they're stealing from the public, stealing from ME. The real pirates are the Hollywood thieves who have stolen our heritage.
BTW, you can find my book on BitTorrent. I have no objections to you downloading and reading it -- I put it there myself. As Cory Doctorow says, Nobody ever went broke from piracy but many artists have starved from obscurity. If, when I publish it in paper form I make money, then great. If not, then no big deal. Just writing it was rewarding.
"Doing spreadsheets or databases with only a few thousand records on a mainframe is wasteful." no, it isn't. In fact it has a ton of benefits over PCs.
Such as?
People use laptops for the home computers.
And why shouldn't they? Today's netbook is more powerful than a ten year old top of the line desktop. If all you need to do can be done easily on a laptop, why do you even need a desktop? Hell, in 2000 we used my now ex-wife's laptop as a DVD player, since you could plug it into the TV with an S-Video cable.
If all you have is a clawhammer and all you need to do is hammer nails, whay do you need a sledge?
Slashdot Mirror
Tubes are still used in guitar amplifiers. Do you have a microwave oven? Then you have at least one electronic vacuum tube.
The lesson: only you can ensure the integrity and persistence of your data. If even your employer can't, then who can?
Isn't that what he hired you to do? If he loses his data because he doesn't respect it, that's his problem, isn't it?
The world now is frankly amazing. Even cheap, nasty stuff is often better then the very best stuff available 20 or 30 years ago
Aside from cars and electronics, name one.
Just don't come back home in a few hundred years with a chip on your shoulder!
Chip on its shoulder? It's full of chips! I just hope it doesn't crash into an alien spacecraft that was programmed for terraforming (extraterraforming?), get its circuits mixed up, and come back to exterminate us. Especially if the "oya" is erased from its paint job.
Proof Readers: I'll skip that one, nothing that a spell check can't fix
Watt in the whirl ore ewe talking a boot? Dew knot truss yore spill chucker! That's what's wrong with most slashdot comments. A spell checker can't tell that your using the wrong word (yes, that was intentional). A spell checker doesn't know if you want to loose the dog or if you want to lose the dog. A spell checker won't tell you that your use of apostrophe's is retarded.
Take care of the Big Picture stuff and then do a major revision by the author for the Second Printing
I fucking HATE patches and the lazy bastards who issue them. Get it right the first time, damn it! If I'm paying full price for a book or an operating system the damned thing should WORK. You don't have to patch a new pair of jeans, do you?
Sometimes I wonder how much further ahead humanity would be if we built everything with the need to have it last decades before becoming nonfunctional, then I realize that with the rate technology has advanced, that is just not possible.
Sure it is. A 1964 Mustang may not be as safe or efficient as one built today, but it will still get you to work. How would any advances affect, say, a new stove, couch, refrigerator, table, etc?
Not to mention that we would have a totally different world economy if people weren't continually replacing perfectly functional items, from clothing to electronics to vehicles. So much of the global economy is dependent on people buying more things.
What's wrong with an economy that includes resale, so the poor can have stuff too?
Fortunately we do have examples (like the Voyager probes) of good engineering
Too bad all the good engineers seem to work for NASA. I have a vaccuum cleaner that's 57 years old that my dad bought when I was two, and it still works. I have a working food mixer that's just as old. When I was a teenager in the late sixties working at a drive-in theater, there was a refrigerator there that was manufactured in 1920 and was still in use. I bought a 12 inch Panasonic TV in 1968 that still worked in 2003 when I left it in a house I moved out of.
Meanwhile, I bought a refrigerator in 2000 that was dead by 2009, dryer I bought in 1995 that was no longer functional in 2008. The TV I bought in 2002 is already showing signs of old age.
Of course, back in the day they didn't make everything out of cheap plastics, and CEOs didn't earn 400 times what the factory workers did like they do now..
Some of us may be screaming at the top of their lungs that they should be cheaper. But there's plenty of people out there with enough money that they will buy the eBooks anyway.
I don't think that argument holds up. Those with the extra income are likely to buy hardcover books to display on bookshelves (rich people love flaunting their wealth, or nobody would buy a Lexus), and perhaps buying the ebook version as well. But there would be a LOT more money to be made from middle class people wo DO have to watch their budgets if the prices for ebooks weren't insane. There are a hell of a lot more middle class and poor people than there are rich people, or nobody would buy a used Ford.
The professors/teachers I had at college wouldn't do that
I only had one whose own book was required. It was, however, a very good tome and I still have my copy 35 years later.
Why vote to trade the frying pan for the fire?
Well, duh, of course delivery of electronic media is cheaper. That doesn't mean there's no collusion, or that someone isn't using unfair or unlawful business practices to sell them at a higher price than a free market would allow them to.
To me, that's not what's funny. What's funny is my old Logitech IR wireless keyboard stays alive for two years on two AAA carbon batteries. Why on earth would ten years be an improvement, especially if they're talking about an expensive battery? It only takes ten seconds to change them and they cost about fifty cents apiece.
The mouse, now, that's a different story; batteries last about a month. It takes the same size batteries as the keyboard, but they're rechargable and recharge in the mouse's holder. Give me a cordless mouse that will work for two years (let alone ten) without recharging and I'll be impressed.
What was old is new again.
This will never happen in my state, as we sell our senate seats at auction.
What state? The only state I know of where Senate seats are sold is here in Illinois. You did hear that Blago was sentenced yesterday to fourteen years in the federal pen for that very crime, didn't you? Likewise, our previous Governor (the one before Blago) is still in prison for selling commercial drivers licenses to unqualified drivers.
you get more then 2 parties. Make it cheaper to get on the ballot for governor and senate races.
There were five parties on the Presidential ticket in enough states last election that they had a mathematical chance of winning. The trouble is, media are controlled by the corporations, who have convinced everyone that a vote for a Green or a Libbie is a wasted vote. That way they only have to bribe two candidates.
The market comes with very strong regulations:
The Libbies want to dismantle those regulations.
You can't defraud people,
You must be new here -- in the country, I mean. You've never been cheated by business? You're either really young or really lucky. Ever heard of OtherOS? You don't consider Sony removing a feature you've paid for to be fraud?
you can't pollute,
No? Why is no one in prison for that? You can bet your ass if you, a person, negligently did something like that you'ld be in prison for life.
you can't enslave people,
Tell that to anyone dependant on a paycheck when unemployment is 9%. Tell that to migrant farm workers.
you can't steal,
Ever heard of emminent domain?
What about negligent homicide? A mass murder and nobody went to prison for it.
Wanting to dismantle the federal EPA is brain-dead stupid. Pollution doesn't honor state lines. Wanting to dismantle the FDA si similarly moronic as most of your food and medicine comes from out of state.
just like the public sector is a completely inappropriate sector to place the production of food in!
Huh? You're batshit crazy, son. Nobody is asking for the government to go into the farming business! Take your meds and then a nap.
I'll have to check them out, thanks.
almost like a pat on the head because he is the most outspoken opensores evangelist
Damn, I've been trolled. Go away, son, you bother me.
That was entertaining, kind of like "damning with faint praise". What you're saying is that you're harming me because you won't give me money for nothing.
What's worse, considering the OtherOS nonsense, it's like my selling you a car, removing the tires, then claiming you harmed me because you replaced the tires.
"If you think you understand quantum physics, then clearly you don't." -Paraphrased Richard Feynman quote
I don't think I understand it, so does that mean I do?
As to TFA, it led me to think that this could lead to more powerful and cheaper solar cells. This is an exciting time to be alive. I can see a future without those damned ugly poles and wires in the alley behind my house, with a beautiful solar paneled roof and an even more beautiful lack of an electric bill. Who knows watt will come of investigation into quantum mechanics?
(yes, that "typo" was a deliberate pun)
Yeah, I know, they bought BOOST a couple of years ago IIRC. And to tell the truth, it tempts me to go ahead and pay $80 per month for unlimited data on a smartphone from Sprint because of that, despite the fact that I had bad experiences with Spring ten years ago. If they had unlimited talk and text I'd do it tomorrow.
And yet you immediately dismissed my "App support" argument. Convenient.
You never made an "app support" argument, or any other argument at all. And "app support" isn't a very good reason to pay a lot more for your hardware anyway.
Because they're short-sighted and know the price of everything but the value of nothing. If you don't value the things you buy beyond what they cost, then you're always going to have cheap crap.
Again, where is the extra value? And "app support" isn't much "value added", especially since Android is likely to surpass Apple in this; the app support is dependant on the developers, not Google or Apple. And from advertising alone (not Apple's or Android's), most now are supporting both platforms equally. "Get our app for your iPhone or Android!" is what I hear. Most of them also make me not like iPhone or Apple, since their apps are for functionality that any desktop web browser has out of the box.
What apps do iPhone support that Android doesn't?
The thing about Pirate Bay (actually I haven't used Pirate Bay) is that if I did use it and liked the movie, I'd wind up buying it. I did once attempt to use it when I wanted to see LOTR and it was sold out -- I'd waited 40 years for that movie. But the quality of the rip was so bad I shut it off after five minutes and waited fo rthe DVD. haven't bothered with TPB since.
Many great artists have gotten nothing whatever for their efforts, Van Gogh being the first to come to mind. Why should a talentless hack make money on his dreck when a great artist like Van Gogh only sold one painting, to his brother, for a pittance?
I figure if I don't want to compensate someone for entertaining me, I don't let them entertain me.
I don't tip the waitress until I get the check. If the service was bad, no tip. If I've heard a movie is a dog, I won't pay to watch it. If someone loans me a DVD of it (do you think that should be illegal?) I'll give it twenty minutes, if it seems good I'll keep watching. If it isn't entertaining, no way will they get my cash. If it's good I'll probably buy a copy.
It just doesn't seem right even if you don't believe in intellectual properties
Intellectual properties belong, according to the US Constitution, to everyone (including my own stuff; I've registered copyrights). The "content creator" simply has a "limited time" monopoly, and I think the founding fathers would not agree with the current life+75 years. Anything older than 30 (it was about 20 in 1900) I feel like they're stealing from the public, stealing from ME. The real pirates are the Hollywood thieves who have stolen our heritage.
BTW, you can find my book on BitTorrent. I have no objections to you downloading and reading it -- I put it there myself. As Cory Doctorow says, Nobody ever went broke from piracy but many artists have starved from obscurity. If, when I publish it in paper form I make money, then great. If not, then no big deal. Just writing it was rewarding.
It bounces off of your walls as well. If you're listening to a live concert surround may be better, but not a studio recording.
"Doing spreadsheets or databases with only a few thousand records on a mainframe is wasteful."
no, it isn't. In fact it has a ton of benefits over PCs.
Such as?
People use laptops for the home computers.
And why shouldn't they? Today's netbook is more powerful than a ten year old top of the line desktop. If all you need to do can be done easily on a laptop, why do you even need a desktop? Hell, in 2000 we used my now ex-wife's laptop as a DVD player, since you could plug it into the TV with an S-Video cable.
If all you have is a clawhammer and all you need to do is hammer nails, whay do you need a sledge?