Yeah, that's nice, but this is a smartcard we're talking about. It's not magnetic. I suppose if you hit it bad enough to induce a ton of current in it, you could fry it.
This type of card is a "get near the reader" RF induction read, not a "swipe through and read the magnetic track" read.
Dude, RPN isn't complex, it's SIMPLE; algebraic calculators are complex. Once you understand RPN, using an algebraic calculator seems totally complex, irritating, and bass-ackwards. I f'ing hate algebraic calculators; I screw up ALL THE TIME when using them. When I use an RPN calculator, I don't have to think about the calculation anymore; it just flows out exactly how I'm thinking about the problem.
That said, the calc in my bag is a TI. Why? Because I don't do much anymore that requires a calc, so it's 'good enough', and I bought it for $12 and I wouldn't really give a damn if I lost it. Also, my beloved HP-15C was lost in a move 10 years ago; I still miss it (is that pathetic or what?)
Hell, I record stuff at 16kbps MP3, though lately I've been using 40kbps. Why? It's NPR shows such as "Cartalk", "This American Life", "Science Friday" etc. I can fit up to 10 hours of such radio shows on the 64M base memory in my player.
For music, sure, I use Lame ABR MP3 averaging about 192Kbps. I'd use OGG but my little player I bought for $80 won't support it. I'd go higher but I don't listen in ideal situations, wouldn't benefit from the higher quality, and do like having more songs in memory.
If you go and ask a reasonable satellite dealer, they'll probably just give you the dishes. I asked the place I bought my dish network setup from, and they just gave me a couple of extra dishes they had laying around. 10 minutes talking and $0.
you can't have different standards for the same meaning
Exactly. Kilo means 10^3, Mega means 10^6.
If I say something weighs 10 kilo-ounces, should someone decide "well, ounces are usually grouped by 16, so he must really mean 64 pounds, or 1024 ounces."
Just because you come along and invent some new technology for which powers of 2 happen to be convenient doesn't mean you can just arbitrarily decide to co-opt a standard prefix to mean something different than it has meant in everything else for hundreds of years.
Besides, this would imply that you could never really know what anything meant unless you knew a fair amount about the technology. If someone who knew SI units but knew nothing about computers was told that a hard drive is 10 gigabytes, they'd assume it was 10,000,000,000 bytes.
This is another reason why I think this sort of thing is bogus. If the people who are buying this stuff know enough to know about measuring things by powers of two, then they know damn well that hard drives aren't measured that way. I don't know ANYONE who knows one and not the other. These people are just whiners trying to get some free litigation money.
I know they're not as desirable as Primestar dishes, but Dish Network and DirecTV dishes work also. I got a couple for free just by asking. Go to the place that you bought your satellite system from (What, you're on cable? Well, get with it!), and ask. My source said that they occasionally would have a spare dish from an installation, and after a few years in business they had a heap of them in the basement, still in the box. They were more than happy to let me walk out with a couple.
SI units have been around for hundreds of years. Kilo, mega, deci, etc have only been perverted to mean powers of two in the last couple of decades, and then only wrongly, and only in some parts of the computer industry.
Not magnetic fields. Electrostatic. The units I've seen use electrostatic fields. However, I don't think you could significantly affect them; the "paper" is inside a conductive cage (the front is a transparent conductor) so an outside field won't affect them. You'd have to hack into the controller.
I just got done listening to a couple of Card novels on MP3. I bought the books over a year ago but haven't gotten the time to read them. I put them on my MP3 player and listened while working around the house. Whenever I do this, I go buy a copy of the book I'm listening to, if I don't already have it. Unlike music, books are still an awesome deal for the money. I don't want to cheat the artist, I just want the info in the form that I can use best.
Not hard. In Windows, you can do it directly using SmartRipper or whatever, then DVD2AVI which directly outputs WAV files. Or you can cap it by "Tee'ing" the stream going to the sound card using Total Recorder and playing the movie, though that must be done in realtime (takes 2 hours to record a 2 hour movie).
Of course, neither of these give you the same thing as the soundtrack CD; they have the sounds from the movie on the track as well, which could be distracting without the movie to go along with it.
Also, you can get a Golf diesel that gets 49 MPG highway. Next time I need to buy a car, that'll probably be it. I really wanted a hybrid at first, but then I realized they were just a gadget and existing technologies could do just as well.
I understand that, at first, the car companies were selling these at a loss. Is that still true?
As far as mileage, you need to consider the increased cost of the vehicle versus what it costs you in gasoline. Of course, the hybrids may be cheating by giving the car away for cheaper, but anyway...
Compare a Diesel Golf to a hybrid, for example.
Diesel Golf, $17k, 45 MPG avg (from VW website, 42 city, 49 hwy for 4 door mode.)
Now, at this point, I started running around the web, looking for mileages. What I found tells me that the average user is getting between 40 and 50 MPG from Honda Civic and Toyota Prius hybrids. I was going to run some calcs on payback times, but obviously it's pointless. Some people are getting up to 75 MPG, but NOT REGULARLY. When they show their lifetime mileages, it falls below 50 MPG. This is so close to what you can get from a nice compact diesel that it seems to me that the hybrid is just a lot of stuff to break down without increasing your mileage.
Admittedly, the performance could be better in the hybrid than the diesel, I don't know. And the same VW Golf with a gas engine only gets about 28 MPG.
Also, are the emissions enough lower compared to a conventional high mileage car to make up for the environmental cost of manufacturing the batteries, extra control circuitry, etc, and doing end-of-life disposal of all of that junk?
On the contrary, I've read that Eolas is annoyed at Microsoft's chokehold on the browser market, and is in fact not discounting the possibility of using their position to further non-MS broswers. They could, for instance, say Microsoft can't have the technology, but free browsers can license it for free, non-free browsers can license it for $1 per user, or whatever they like.
Never work for an employer that demands your Social Security number;
Um, how are you going to do that, exactly? Employers are required to have your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, guess why? So they can pay your SOCIAL SECURITY TAX.
Use a fake one? Sure, as long as you don't mind that you're never going to be able to collect social security. Also I'd be very surprised if it wasn't a federal offense to falsify an SSN on SSA/tax forms.
If you work your whole life getting paid in cash under the table, that's fine. But in that case, identity theft probably isn't an issue for you, since you don't have any money in banks, don't have insurance, don't drive a car (legally anyway) etc.
Unless everyone gets digital inputs wired into their brains. Admittedly, you'd have to get nice high quality speakers and microphones to do the recording if it was DRMd right up to the speakers.
Either that or forbid upgrading. This could have the opposite effect that MS is hoping for. Some companies may instate a rule requiring the use of Office NO NEWER than Office XP or something.
Our company did something similar for a while. We were developing with Visual Studio 4.2 because 5.0 sucked rocks, and we couldn't buy 4.2 anymore, so we bought copies of 5.0 for new people and installed 4.2, leaving the 5.0's unopened on the shelf.
might make some Americans rethink their next votes
OK, it's almost too easy, but... That would require that they think in the first place. A huge percentage of Americans go to the poll and just vote how their union/church/whatever told them to.
This makes the south american government (which country was that? I can't remember) opinion even more convincing. It's bad enough that the government is using tax dollars to create documents which are not in open format; if they generate documents which CAN NOT be read in any format except for a proprietary, non-free format, I'd think they could be taken to court on it.
They could be forced to provide the documents in an open format on demand. I'm sure some slashdotters could generate so much demand for government workers to provide the documents in alternate formats that they might eventually cave and make PDF or something be the default document format for electronically published documents.
Why? As a programmer, what the HELL could they want you for that wouldn't wait until tomorrow? Yes, if you're a sysadmin and something breaks, or if you're in charge of something online, they may need you now. But if the boss decides to address bug #132203 that's been on the books for two months, I think he can wait until tomorrow.
I finally bought a cell phone for my wife and I to keep in contact easier. I tried to give it to my boss (I'm a programmer with some responsibility for an on-line service) but he refused to take it, saying that nothing was that important that it couldn't wait until tomorrow. He did take it eventually when I went on a 2 week vacation but he never called it, even when there was trouble; he found someone else to deal with it, even though he knew I could have handled it faster.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's nice, but this is a smartcard we're talking about. It's not magnetic. I suppose if you hit it bad enough to induce a ton of current in it, you could fry it.
This type of card is a "get near the reader" RF induction read, not a "swipe through and read the magnetic track" read.
Dude, RPN isn't complex, it's SIMPLE; algebraic calculators are complex. Once you understand RPN, using an algebraic calculator seems totally complex, irritating, and bass-ackwards. I f'ing hate algebraic calculators; I screw up ALL THE TIME when using them. When I use an RPN calculator, I don't have to think about the calculation anymore; it just flows out exactly how I'm thinking about the problem.
That said, the calc in my bag is a TI. Why? Because I don't do much anymore that requires a calc, so it's 'good enough', and I bought it for $12 and I wouldn't really give a damn if I lost it. Also, my beloved HP-15C was lost in a move 10 years ago; I still miss it (is that pathetic or what?)
Hell, I record stuff at 16kbps MP3, though lately I've been using 40kbps. Why? It's NPR shows such as "Cartalk", "This American Life", "Science Friday" etc. I can fit up to 10 hours of such radio shows on the 64M base memory in my player.
For music, sure, I use Lame ABR MP3 averaging about 192Kbps. I'd use OGG but my little player I bought for $80 won't support it. I'd go higher but I don't listen in ideal situations, wouldn't benefit from the higher quality, and do like having more songs in memory.
If you go and ask a reasonable satellite dealer, they'll probably just give you the dishes. I asked the place I bought my dish network setup from, and they just gave me a couple of extra dishes they had laying around. 10 minutes talking and $0.
you can't have different standards for the same meaning
Exactly. Kilo means 10^3, Mega means 10^6.
If I say something weighs 10 kilo-ounces, should someone decide "well, ounces are usually grouped by 16, so he must really mean 64 pounds, or 1024 ounces."
Just because you come along and invent some new technology for which powers of 2 happen to be convenient doesn't mean you can just arbitrarily decide to co-opt a standard prefix to mean something different than it has meant in everything else for hundreds of years.
Besides, this would imply that you could never really know what anything meant unless you knew a fair amount about the technology. If someone who knew SI units but knew nothing about computers was told that a hard drive is 10 gigabytes, they'd assume it was 10,000,000,000 bytes.
This is another reason why I think this sort of thing is bogus. If the people who are buying this stuff know enough to know about measuring things by powers of two, then they know damn well that hard drives aren't measured that way. I don't know ANYONE who knows one and not the other. These people are just whiners trying to get some free litigation money.
I know they're not as desirable as Primestar dishes, but Dish Network and DirecTV dishes work also. I got a couple for free just by asking. Go to the place that you bought your satellite system from (What, you're on cable? Well, get with it!), and ask. My source said that they occasionally would have a spare dish from an installation, and after a few years in business they had a heap of them in the basement, still in the box. They were more than happy to let me walk out with a couple.
BMW being the worst by overstating by 10mph at 60 and 100.
So those assholes doing 90 in BMWs actually think they're going 100? That's even worse.
SI units have been around for hundreds of years. Kilo, mega, deci, etc have only been perverted to mean powers of two in the last couple of decades, and then only wrongly, and only in some parts of the computer industry.
Not magnetic fields. Electrostatic. The units I've seen use electrostatic fields. However, I don't think you could significantly affect them; the "paper" is inside a conductive cage (the front is a transparent conductor) so an outside field won't affect them. You'd have to hack into the controller.
I just got done listening to a couple of Card novels on MP3. I bought the books over a year ago but haven't gotten the time to read them. I put them on my MP3 player and listened while working around the house.
Whenever I do this, I go buy a copy of the book I'm listening to, if I don't already have it. Unlike music, books are still an awesome deal for the money. I don't want to cheat the artist, I just want the info in the form that I can use best.
Not hard. In Windows, you can do it directly using SmartRipper or whatever, then DVD2AVI which directly outputs WAV files. Or you can cap it by "Tee'ing" the stream going to the sound card using Total Recorder and playing the movie, though that must be done in realtime (takes 2 hours to record a 2 hour movie).
Of course, neither of these give you the same thing as the soundtrack CD; they have the sounds from the movie on the track as well, which could be distracting without the movie to go along with it.
Also, you can get a Golf diesel that gets 49 MPG highway. Next time I need to buy a car, that'll probably be it. I really wanted a hybrid at first, but then I realized they were just a gadget and existing technologies could do just as well.
I understand that, at first, the car companies were selling these at a loss. Is that still true?
As far as mileage, you need to consider the increased cost of the vehicle versus what it costs you in gasoline. Of course, the hybrids may be cheating by giving the car away for cheaper, but anyway...
Compare a Diesel Golf to a hybrid, for example.
Diesel Golf, $17k, 45 MPG avg (from VW website, 42 city, 49 hwy for 4 door mode.)
Now, at this point, I started running around the web, looking for mileages. What I found tells me that the average user is getting between 40 and 50 MPG from Honda Civic and Toyota Prius hybrids. I was going to run some calcs on payback times, but obviously it's pointless. Some people are getting up to 75 MPG, but NOT REGULARLY. When they show their lifetime mileages, it falls below 50 MPG. This is so close to what you can get from a nice compact diesel that it seems to me that the hybrid is just a lot of stuff to break down without increasing your mileage.
Admittedly, the performance could be better in the hybrid than the diesel, I don't know. And the same VW Golf with a gas engine only gets about 28 MPG.
Also, are the emissions enough lower compared to a conventional high mileage car to make up for the environmental cost of manufacturing the batteries, extra control circuitry, etc, and doing end-of-life disposal of all of that junk?
On the contrary, I've read that Eolas is annoyed at Microsoft's chokehold on the browser market, and is in fact not discounting the possibility of using their position to further non-MS broswers. They could, for instance, say Microsoft can't have the technology, but free browsers can license it for free, non-free browsers can license it for $1 per user, or whatever they like.
Never work for an employer that demands your Social Security number;
Um, how are you going to do that, exactly? Employers are required to have your SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, guess why? So they can pay your SOCIAL SECURITY TAX.
Use a fake one? Sure, as long as you don't mind that you're never going to be able to collect social security. Also I'd be very surprised if it wasn't a federal offense to falsify an SSN on SSA/tax forms.
If you work your whole life getting paid in cash under the table, that's fine. But in that case, identity theft probably isn't an issue for you, since you don't have any money in banks, don't have insurance, don't drive a car (legally anyway) etc.
I can't believe that a dozen people responded to the original post and only one knew what he was even saying.
"$65 billion dollars" - think "redundancy" - expand that to words:
"sixty-five billion dollars dollars"
Along the same lines as ATM machine, PCB board, etc.
Hey, I'm glad he put that there. It was unobtrusive, and that's a damn cool thing; I might buy one next paycheck!
C) Not everyone read MSDS like they should.
I don't think MSDS rules existed in the time period they're talking about (mid-60's to late 70's).
Mandatory access to MSDS is relatively recent. A quick web search indicates that the OSHA "Hazard Communication" law came into effect in 1983.
Unless everyone gets digital inputs wired into their brains. Admittedly, you'd have to get nice high quality speakers and microphones to do the recording if it was DRMd right up to the speakers.
What advantage? The advantage of paying money for stuff that doesn't work? Penn & Teller pretty much disproved all that stuff.
Either that or forbid upgrading. This could have the opposite effect that MS is hoping for. Some companies may instate a rule requiring the use of Office NO NEWER than Office XP or something.
Our company did something similar for a while. We were developing with Visual Studio 4.2 because 5.0 sucked rocks, and we couldn't buy 4.2 anymore, so we bought copies of 5.0 for new people and installed 4.2, leaving the 5.0's unopened on the shelf.
might make some Americans rethink their next votes
OK, it's almost too easy, but...
That would require that they think in the first place. A huge percentage of Americans go to the poll and just vote how their union/church/whatever told them to.
This makes the south american government (which country was that? I can't remember) opinion even more convincing. It's bad enough that the government is using tax dollars to create documents which are not in open format; if they generate documents which CAN NOT be read in any format except for a proprietary, non-free format, I'd think they could be taken to court on it.
They could be forced to provide the documents in an open format on demand. I'm sure some slashdotters could generate so much demand for government workers to provide the documents in alternate formats that they might eventually cave and make PDF or something be the default document format for electronically published documents.
I have an iPod... IN MY MIND!h tml
http://www.theonion.com/previous_opinion1.
Why? As a programmer, what the HELL could they want you for that wouldn't wait until tomorrow? Yes, if you're a sysadmin and something breaks, or if you're in charge of something online, they may need you now. But if the boss decides to address bug #132203 that's been on the books for two months, I think he can wait until tomorrow.
I finally bought a cell phone for my wife and I to keep in contact easier. I tried to give it to my boss (I'm a programmer with some responsibility for an on-line service) but he refused to take it, saying that nothing was that important that it couldn't wait until tomorrow. He did take it eventually when I went on a 2 week vacation but he never called it, even when there was trouble; he found someone else to deal with it, even though he knew I could have handled it faster.