First, listen to your costumer...
Costumer? LOL! I'm pretty sure most costumers wouldn't have the faintest clue about how to set up a database testing environment. They might know about floppy hats and masks, but not floppy disks and markup.
Sorry, dude. That was just the funniest typo I've seen in a long time.:-) I keep picturing some dude dressed like Will Shakespeare hunkering over a server, muttering "Verily, thou are a varlet!", or some such silliness.
Not that I'm condoning criminal behavior but, I can't help wondering if these HP execs did anything to the reporters that reporters haven't done to other execs. It seems almost inevitable that, sooner or later, some execs were bound to turn the tables, and use all the dirty little tricks that the press has been using on them for years.
Well, I'm with Monkelectric on this one. I don't think it's impossible, but I don't think these guys are telling the truth, either. The real problem here is that they've picked something that can't be ignored. Sure, they're probably pulling our chains, and we're probably wasting a lot of (not free) energy on this, but... what if it's real?
Oh, I know it's nice to be able to state, with absolute certainty, that something is impossible, but those statements are based on belief, not knowledge. They're almost always wrong, and the ones we haven't proven are wrong, yet, are still in testing. The only thing that's truly impossible is proving that something is impossible. That would require knowing everything, and we're not even in that neighborhood, yet.
As usual, I saw something completely different in that story than everyone else seems to have seen. Of course, that could be because everyone else is so sick of this issue that they didn't really read the article. Wouldn't surprise me. Personally, I haven't been paying attention because I already decided it was bad the first time I heard the phrase.
But, the thing that caught my eye was this statement; The DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent "effective means of access control." To me, the key word, there, is effective. As far as I'm concerned, if I can circumvent it, it isn't effective, Q.E.D.. Ok, I'm a bit of a geek, or I probably wouldn't be here, right? But I'm no bigtime cracker, and there are plenty of security measures I can't circumvent. I consider those measures to be "effective". Anything else seems to be fair game, according to that act. I suspect most judges would agree, if it were explained that way. At worst, it would depend on the outcome of one heck of a battle over the definition of the word "effective".
Yeah, apparently it's only the blonde (Oooh! Shiny!) bimbos who started the whole "diamonds are a girl's best friend" crap in the first place that can't figure out that a $4,000 flat panel TV is more desirable than a "diamond solitaire necklace", which can be purchased for $99 at any Zales Jewelers. I wonder if the stats would be the same if they specified "equal value".
Ok, I know this is going to be a wildly unpopular position with this audience, but AOL is not the anti-christ some of you make it out to be. How could it be, if Microsoft is? There can only be one. And, it does serve a valid and vital purpose; it keeps 19 million technophobes out of OUR hair.
There's no way we're going to keep uncle Homer and aunt Ginny off the web, and no real reason to want to. I can't remember the last time a search engine returned a page of someone's blurry photos of their cat. What we need is a way for them to access the web without our help! AOL used to provide that, and could again, if they'd get their heads out of their assets.
Sure, they've lost a ton of subscribers, but their membership is still equal to the populations of the five largest US cities, combined. Who uses AOL? You're kidding, right? Stop playing with your own ROOT long enough to get a clue about your neighbors. Everyone has DSL or Cable? Dream on. There are still plenty of people who don't have access to either, and plenty more who can't or won't spend that much on internet access. That $40 or $50 a month may be nothing to a highly paid techie, but it's a ridiculous chunk of money for someone scraping by on average pay when they can get 90% of the functionality for 40% off the cost. Dialup access is essentially free for most people, aside from the ISP charges.
I've recently had a real-world refresher course in what it's like to deal with dialup and dialup providers and, trust me, as bad as AOL may be, they're still better than the alternatives. Ever called an ISP's tech support and gotten connected to Bubba, whose six kids are all screaming over the blaring TV in the background, while he thumbs through the manual trying to find you an answer? I have. Apparently telecommuting has reached the sticks, even if broadband hasn't. Compared to that, AOL's support is a dream come true.
What AOL really needs to do is not pack more ads into less screen real estate, but get back to their roots. They dominated the ISP business by making it simple to connect, period. The content was always crap. Chatrooms have been supplanted by IMs. No one needs their guidance to find what they're looking for; all they need is Google.
The anti-virus and firewall apps are actually a good idea for the technophobes out there, who otherwise would probably be totally unprotected, but should definitely be optional. (I thought they were, but I could be wrong.) But they should dump the rest of the crap, and just do what they used to do best; make connecting simple and non-threatening for those who just want to turn it on, like a TV, and not have to worry about how it works.
They're not losing customers because of the content. They're losing them because they've lost sight of who their customer base is.
I agree. I'm a little surprised that you used biology, rather than code (or, god help us, StarGate), as your example, but it works pretty well. The point being that an "object" is not a thing, per se, but a concept; it is an intellectual construct, rather than a physical one and, therefore, can be of varying physical composition to suit the need. People do tend to get too hung up on their own perceptions of what constitutes a particular type of construct, in this case an "object", without actually being able to define it, in most cases.
MrNaz's definition, which I applaud him for providing, might be paraphrased as "In astrophysics an object is a parcel of matter of contiguous structure bound by atomic or molecular, but not magnetic or gravitic, forces and incorporating solid or liquid state matter, but not gaseous or plasmic matter. By that definition, the astrophysicists who referred to this construct as an object are clearly incorrect, since the construct relies on gas and dust as constituents; a clear violation of the definition. Of course, as someone else pointed out, this definition also eliminates stars from the class of constructs defined as objects, because they consist of plasma bound by gravity. One would think that would trouble astrophysicists.
I agree that "structure" would be a much closer approximation than "object", but even that has its problems, since it implies purpose. Personally, I think that the only label that can really be said to apply is "the region designated as (whatever they want to call it), which is defined by the boundaries blah, blah, blah..." Thinking of it as an object, or even a structure, has dangerous implications, such as the idea that we're referring to a cohesive agglomeration, rather than a completely random confluence of otherwise utterly unrelated elements.
Furthermore, a glance at the shape of the region, as shown in the article, makes it clear that this is not an object in the sense that we usually use the word. It clearly did not form according the laws, as we understand them, which guide the formation of other "celestial objects", such as galaxies. At best, this would appear to be a collision of galaxies, which no more qualifies the resulting mishmash as "an object" than the results of a multi-car pile up.
I am (somewhat) surprised it has taken this long to start to fall apart.
It didn't. It just took this long to kill someone. There were similar, though less deadly, and therefore less publicized, failures almost from day one.
Is it just me or does it seem like Amazon selected a book from an unknown author and made sure the public liked it.
No, it's not just you. That's exactly what they did. It's a morally shaky practice, but it's SOP in the publishing business to generated hype by any means possible and falsify sales numbers by overshipping, knowing that vast numbers of those books will be returned. But once they're shipped, they count. So, while I hate all this b*llsh!t and deception, it's not just Amazon, either. If the New York Times bestseller list is b*llsh!t (and it is!), why should Amazon's top seller list be any different? (Damn, I'm getting cynical in my old age. Oh, wait...I've been cynical since I was 12. Nevermind.)
Personally, I find it far weirder that they've gone into the Grocery business. I went to Amazon this morning, to see if I could hear a snippet of a new album, and there was Tony the Tiger, hawking cereal on the Amazon home page! What possible advantage could there be for the average person in ordering their corn flakes online, paying shipping charges, and waiting two weeks for them to show up? Are they going to order their milk from Amazon, too, and hope it get to them before turning into cheese or exploding in the back of a hot mail truck? I doubt it, so they're going to have to go to the store, anyway, so what's the point? And, what was Amazon thinking?
As for American Idol, am I going to trust a bunch of "Reality TV" (an oxymoron, if ever there was one) watchers to tell me what's good music? I don't think so. These are people who probably aren't even aware that the sound from their TVs is approximately as good as the sound from a Dollar Store radio, and wouldn't understand how that's relevant, or why that's a bad thing, if they were told. But, hey, these are the same people who gave us our current President, so how wrong could they be? Right?
...a new membrane configuration for S. mirabilis, one they say is unique because it is grounded in aerodynamics.
Ummm...are these the same aerodynamics theories that say bumblebees can't fly?
"At low flight speeds, there is no real reason to have a wing this shape, but delta wings work efficiently at fast speeds, especially supersonic," Dyke told LiveScience.
Is he really saying these little lizards were supersonic? Or even aspired to be? I guess that would explain the lizard-shaped splatmarks on the petrified trees.
Well, to be fair, most of the extinct species we know about, aside from those we wiped out ourselves, were wiped out by the same cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs. Or their descendants were, depending on the age of the fossil. But, as a general rule, most mutations DO have a negative survival value.
I was very surprised and pleased to see this story on SlashDot. For one thing, it offers so little opportunity for MS-bashing and ranting about the superiority of *nix users that no one even tried, making this story perhaps unique in the annals of Slashdot history.;-)
It's also nice to see something of low-tech, cultural interest, here. However, both the author and a number of/.rs seem to be boggled by the concept of King Tut valuing a piece of glass as a jewel. A jewel is nothing but a highly valued decoration, which may or may not be made of precious or semi-precious gemstone. In this case, neither the actual material, glass, nor the supposed material, amber, happens to actually be a stone.
And the "glass is glass" mindset seems to be near-universal, but that's like saying "music is music". In fact, there are a great many different types of glass, each with its own set of characteristics. Just a moment's thought will make this obvious to the most oblivious among us. I don't believe it's possible to be reading this without having, at some point in life, run across thermal shock resistant glass (borosilicate, one brand being Pyrex), tempered glass (as in a shattered car windshield), and "normal" plate glass. And, it may not have been obvious, but the coiled glass tubes in any stereotypical mad scientist's lab are yet another type.
These all have different chemical characteristics which make them as recognizably different, given the knowledge, as Bach from Bantu Tribal Drumming. The article dimurdoch linked to does a pretty good job of explaining this, but that reply is probably buried too deep for most people to see it. The meteorite explosion referred to is not supposition or theory; it's well-documented, though poorly known, fact and it provides about the only logical explanation for the chemical composition of this piece of glass.
As for Tut valuing it, yes, the Egyptians of 1300 BC were capable of making glass, but not glass like this! For one thing, the saying "Clear as glass" would have puzzled the heck out of any Egyptian of the period, if you could have translated it into ancient Egyptian for them. Ancient glass was not clear. Think porcelain, not windowpane. Centuries would pass before the glassmaking process was refined enough to produce clear glass by anything other than accident. What's the common, defining characteristic of all of the most precious stones, today? Clarity; they're all crystalline. There are other stones that are just as brightly colored that aren't anywhere near as valuable because they're opaque. You don't get that lovely glow that light passing through a gem produces. This glass isn't clear, by any means, but it's the next best thing; it's translucent, as are virtually all known gems of the period. In fact, most "gems" of the time were opaque stones we now consider semi-precious at best, such as lapis and carnelian. But, this piece of glass would have glowed a very royal gold.
Add in the fact that this piece of glass came from 1000 miles away at a time when most people lived their entire lives within 5 miles of their birthplace. Then consider the strange tales that must have accompanied this shard, of an inexplicable (at the time) sea of such glass chunks, the remnants of the Kebira crater impact.
Finally, think about what a truly odd material this was. It looks like the lightest colored amber, but is obviously not amber. It feels like glass, but is, at a guess, 10-15 times harder than the glass they knew how to make. (Tempered glass is about 8 times harder than plate glass.) Had they tried, they probably couldn't have produced enough heat to melt this glass. It certainly wouldn't have melted at anything close to the melting point of their glass. If they had tried, failed, and immediately dropped it, still glowing hot, into the coldest water they could find, it would not have exploded like their
That should read "HDTV adopters screwed by HD-disc rules"
Not really. I was a reasonably early HDTV adopter, and I don't feel like I got screwed. I've already gotten years of higher-than-standard-if-not-actually-high-def quality movie watching out of my HDTV. That's what I bought it for, and I'm not going to lose that functionality just because something newer comes along. People who bought theirs for receiving HDTV programming are not going to lose that functionality, either. Same for gamers.
I bought my TV over 3 years ago, and it has at least one digital input, so it would have to be a really early adopter (or a cheap @ss TV) that would lack the required inputs. I haven't seen anything that says it requires the latest type of digital input; just digital.
Will the image quality be higher - Only if you have the right hardware (the confusing HD standard means up and down sampling will reduce the quality even more if you HDTV isn't the right native resolution)
Native resolution is only an issue if you have a "fixed-pixel device"; a plasma or LCD display. If the scaling bothers you that much, avoid those technologies. It's nowhere near as bad as you seem to think, if properly implemented, either. (You can buy a $75 DVD player that scales just about flawlessy, so it's not hard or expensive, these days.) Or, just don't buy an HD/BluRay DVD player. I don't intend to. At least, not until the format war is over.
That whooshing sound you heard was the joke going over your head. I'm guessing you didn't read the whole post before replying to it because even the lower half of the population as defined by IQ would have gotten the joke when they read the last couple of lines.
Could it be that everyone using Firefox switched to Seamonkey?
Highly unlikely, even allowing for the fact that not "everyone using Firefox switched" to anything. It was only about 1/4 of one percent. But, I suspect you're on the right track. There are actually two factors you need to consider in a situation like this, though.
First, there's attrition. Even here on/. I've seen fans of FF bemoaning crashes and glitches in the latest release. A lot of them have switched to another browser and they, and those like them, are probably the main reason for the decline.
But, second, you also have to factor in the natural slowdown in new adopters. FF 1.5 has been out for quite a while, and most of the people who would be interested already know about it, and probably have tried it. You also have to remember that, much as you may hate it, FF wasn't stealing users away from IE at any great rate; it was mostly stealing them from other opensource browsers.
Once again I will return to browsing the internet with Firefox.
I did just the opposite; tried FF and went back to IE.
Would anyone care to share the secret of getting Firefox to work on WinXP? I wasn't very impressed with the UI, either, but if FF is less of a target for malware authors, I was willing to give it a try. So, I tried it, but it couldn't even render text properly, so I removed it and went back to using IE6.
I'm willing to join "the faithful", but the initiation has to be less painful than circumcision.
This is not about making software that runs on Windows systems. This is about making software that is compatible with Windows systems.
Sorry, I don't speak gibberish. What does "compatible with Windows systems" mean, if not software that runs on Windows?
The main objectives of the EU are to get the documentation required for alternative server software to be written that works with Microsoft clients...
I see you belong to the "If I say it often enough, it will stop being nonsense" school of... well... not thought, exactly.
...with Microsoft clients...
Which ones, for instance? Do you think you could stop using meaningless phrases?
...for alternative client software that works with Microsoft servers. Example: a proper AD implementation...
At last, something meaningful! So,what they want is for MS to teach them how to program servers to compete with MS's products. Why should they? The Windows architecture is better documented than the Acropolis, for crying out loud. All the APIs you need are public knowledge. Even the workings of the kernel are well known. You want Bill to code you a EuroWindows in Python, or something? MSLinux, perhaps? Stop whining and start coding, EU.
Ok, so if MS has been guilty of non-competitive business practices, deal with that. Fine them. Ban them if you want. But, the EU's demands are ridiculous. Here are some quotes from the EU spokesperson on this matter.
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes added that users needed more than just the code - they also need comprehensive instructions that would allow them to develop software compatible with Windows systems.
Ummm...there are plenty of instructions already available. Go to any bookstore. Buy a Technet subscription. Surf to MSDN.net. RTFM! Where did all these non-MS Windows apps come from, if we don't know how Windows works???
"Normally speaking, the source code is not the ultimate documentation of anything," she said.
It is on this planet. "[This is] precisely the reason why programmers are required to" deal with technical issues, like this. The rest of the world has no clue.
"[This is] precisely the reason why programmers are required to provide comprehensive documentation to go along with their source code."
BAAAHAAhahahahahahahaaahaaa! You're funny. "required"! "comprehensive"!! Stop, my sides already hurt from laughing.
There's a whole friggin' industry out there devoted to documenting how to program for Windows. Does the EU propose to put them out of business just because it's miffed at MS? What is it they really want?
Since no else has bothered, I suppose someone should tell you that vertebrae != skull. As someone pointed out elsewhere, that's technically incorrect grammar, anyway, but it refers to backbones, not headbones.
Average Interest in Seeing Full Frontal Geek Nudity = 0.0000000%
"Gyaaaaaaah! I'm blind! My eyes!...the horror...the horror..."
Doctor: What was the last thing you remember seeing?
Patient: I'm not sure. There was this flourescent white, bony-looking thing. It kind of looked like a cadaver that had died from having it's chest crushed in while it had the measles. And it was standing next to this enormous, wobbling mound of hair that smelled like pizza and unwashed socks.
...Apple gets a disproportionate amount of computer press...
Who cares? It's the media, and they live in their own little world. The only sensible response is to ignore them as much as possible. Personally, I think it's their desperation for ANYthing to talk about, other than MS or Oracle, that drives it. Who else is there?
But, the real reason I replied was to tell you that I totally agree with your sig. I'd be tempted to simply say "Amen", but...well...you understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually have no problem with paying this fine.... as long as the money comes out of the trillions we give to people who hate us as foreign aid.
First, listen to your costumer... Costumer? LOL! I'm pretty sure most costumers wouldn't have the faintest clue about how to set up a database testing environment. They might know about floppy hats and masks, but not floppy disks and markup. Sorry, dude. That was just the funniest typo I've seen in a long time. :-) I keep picturing some dude dressed like Will Shakespeare hunkering over a server, muttering "Verily, thou are a varlet!", or some such silliness.
Not that I'm condoning criminal behavior but, I can't help wondering if these HP execs did anything to the reporters that reporters haven't done to other execs. It seems almost inevitable that, sooner or later, some execs were bound to turn the tables, and use all the dirty little tricks that the press has been using on them for years.
Oh, I know it's nice to be able to state, with absolute certainty, that something is impossible, but those statements are based on belief, not knowledge. They're almost always wrong, and the ones we haven't proven are wrong, yet, are still in testing. The only thing that's truly impossible is proving that something is impossible. That would require knowing everything, and we're not even in that neighborhood, yet.
But, the thing that caught my eye was this statement; The DMCA makes it a crime to circumvent "effective means of access control." To me, the key word, there, is effective . As far as I'm concerned, if I can circumvent it, it isn't effective, Q.E.D.. Ok, I'm a bit of a geek, or I probably wouldn't be here, right? But I'm no bigtime cracker, and there are plenty of security measures I can't circumvent. I consider those measures to be "effective". Anything else seems to be fair game, according to that act. I suspect most judges would agree, if it were explained that way. At worst, it would depend on the outcome of one heck of a battle over the definition of the word "effective".
Yeah, apparently it's only the blonde (Oooh! Shiny!) bimbos who started the whole "diamonds are a girl's best friend" crap in the first place that can't figure out that a $4,000 flat panel TV is more desirable than a "diamond solitaire necklace", which can be purchased for $99 at any Zales Jewelers. I wonder if the stats would be the same if they specified "equal value".
There's no way we're going to keep uncle Homer and aunt Ginny off the web, and no real reason to want to. I can't remember the last time a search engine returned a page of someone's blurry photos of their cat. What we need is a way for them to access the web without our help! AOL used to provide that, and could again, if they'd get their heads out of their assets.
Sure, they've lost a ton of subscribers, but their membership is still equal to the populations of the five largest US cities, combined. Who uses AOL? You're kidding, right? Stop playing with your own ROOT long enough to get a clue about your neighbors. Everyone has DSL or Cable? Dream on. There are still plenty of people who don't have access to either, and plenty more who can't or won't spend that much on internet access. That $40 or $50 a month may be nothing to a highly paid techie, but it's a ridiculous chunk of money for someone scraping by on average pay when they can get 90% of the functionality for 40% off the cost. Dialup access is essentially free for most people, aside from the ISP charges.
I've recently had a real-world refresher course in what it's like to deal with dialup and dialup providers and, trust me, as bad as AOL may be, they're still better than the alternatives. Ever called an ISP's tech support and gotten connected to Bubba, whose six kids are all screaming over the blaring TV in the background, while he thumbs through the manual trying to find you an answer? I have. Apparently telecommuting has reached the sticks, even if broadband hasn't. Compared to that, AOL's support is a dream come true.
What AOL really needs to do is not pack more ads into less screen real estate, but get back to their roots. They dominated the ISP business by making it simple to connect, period. The content was always crap. Chatrooms have been supplanted by IMs. No one needs their guidance to find what they're looking for; all they need is Google.
The anti-virus and firewall apps are actually a good idea for the technophobes out there, who otherwise would probably be totally unprotected, but should definitely be optional. (I thought they were, but I could be wrong.) But they should dump the rest of the crap, and just do what they used to do best; make connecting simple and non-threatening for those who just want to turn it on, like a TV, and not have to worry about how it works.
They're not losing customers because of the content. They're losing them because they've lost sight of who their customer base is.
MrNaz's definition, which I applaud him for providing, might be paraphrased as "In astrophysics an object is a parcel of matter of contiguous structure bound by atomic or molecular, but not magnetic or gravitic, forces and incorporating solid or liquid state matter, but not gaseous or plasmic matter. By that definition, the astrophysicists who referred to this construct as an object are clearly incorrect, since the construct relies on gas and dust as constituents; a clear violation of the definition. Of course, as someone else pointed out, this definition also eliminates stars from the class of constructs defined as objects, because they consist of plasma bound by gravity. One would think that would trouble astrophysicists.
I agree that "structure" would be a much closer approximation than "object", but even that has its problems, since it implies purpose. Personally, I think that the only label that can really be said to apply is "the region designated as (whatever they want to call it), which is defined by the boundaries blah, blah, blah..." Thinking of it as an object, or even a structure, has dangerous implications, such as the idea that we're referring to a cohesive agglomeration, rather than a completely random confluence of otherwise utterly unrelated elements.
Furthermore, a glance at the shape of the region, as shown in the article, makes it clear that this is not an object in the sense that we usually use the word. It clearly did not form according the laws, as we understand them, which guide the formation of other "celestial objects", such as galaxies. At best, this would appear to be a collision of galaxies, which no more qualifies the resulting mishmash as "an object" than the results of a multi-car pile up.
It didn't. It just took this long to kill someone. There were similar, though less deadly, and therefore less publicized, failures almost from day one.
Personally, I find it far weirder that they've gone into the Grocery business. I went to Amazon this morning, to see if I could hear a snippet of a new album, and there was Tony the Tiger, hawking cereal on the Amazon home page! What possible advantage could there be for the average person in ordering their corn flakes online, paying shipping charges, and waiting two weeks for them to show up? Are they going to order their milk from Amazon, too, and hope it get to them before turning into cheese or exploding in the back of a hot mail truck? I doubt it, so they're going to have to go to the store, anyway, so what's the point? And, what was Amazon thinking?
As for American Idol, am I going to trust a bunch of "Reality TV" (an oxymoron, if ever there was one) watchers to tell me what's good music? I don't think so. These are people who probably aren't even aware that the sound from their TVs is approximately as good as the sound from a Dollar Store radio, and wouldn't understand how that's relevant, or why that's a bad thing, if they were told. But, hey, these are the same people who gave us our current President, so how wrong could they be? Right?
...a new membrane configuration for S. mirabilis, one they say is unique because it is grounded in aerodynamics. Ummm...are these the same aerodynamics theories that say bumblebees can't fly? "At low flight speeds, there is no real reason to have a wing this shape, but delta wings work efficiently at fast speeds, especially supersonic," Dyke told LiveScience. Is he really saying these little lizards were supersonic? Or even aspired to be? I guess that would explain the lizard-shaped splatmarks on the petrified trees.
Well, to be fair, most of the extinct species we know about, aside from those we wiped out ourselves, were wiped out by the same cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs. Or their descendants were, depending on the age of the fossil. But, as a general rule, most mutations DO have a negative survival value.
I was very surprised and pleased to see this story on SlashDot. For one thing, it offers so little opportunity for MS-bashing and ranting about the superiority of *nix users that no one even tried, making this story perhaps unique in the annals of Slashdot history. ;-)
/.rs seem to be boggled by the concept of King Tut valuing a piece of glass as a jewel. A jewel is nothing but a highly valued decoration, which may or may not be made of precious or semi-precious gemstone. In this case, neither the actual material, glass, nor the supposed material, amber, happens to actually be a stone.
It's also nice to see something of low-tech, cultural interest, here. However, both the author and a number of
And the "glass is glass" mindset seems to be near-universal, but that's like saying "music is music". In fact, there are a great many different types of glass, each with its own set of characteristics. Just a moment's thought will make this obvious to the most oblivious among us. I don't believe it's possible to be reading this without having, at some point in life, run across thermal shock resistant glass (borosilicate, one brand being Pyrex), tempered glass (as in a shattered car windshield), and "normal" plate glass. And, it may not have been obvious, but the coiled glass tubes in any stereotypical mad scientist's lab are yet another type.
These all have different chemical characteristics which make them as recognizably different, given the knowledge, as Bach from Bantu Tribal Drumming. The article dimurdoch linked to does a pretty good job of explaining this, but that reply is probably buried too deep for most people to see it. The meteorite explosion referred to is not supposition or theory; it's well-documented, though poorly known, fact and it provides about the only logical explanation for the chemical composition of this piece of glass.
As for Tut valuing it, yes, the Egyptians of 1300 BC were capable of making glass, but not glass like this! For one thing, the saying "Clear as glass" would have puzzled the heck out of any Egyptian of the period, if you could have translated it into ancient Egyptian for them. Ancient glass was not clear. Think porcelain, not windowpane. Centuries would pass before the glassmaking process was refined enough to produce clear glass by anything other than accident. What's the common, defining characteristic of all of the most precious stones, today? Clarity; they're all crystalline. There are other stones that are just as brightly colored that aren't anywhere near as valuable because they're opaque. You don't get that lovely glow that light passing through a gem produces. This glass isn't clear, by any means, but it's the next best thing; it's translucent, as are virtually all known gems of the period. In fact, most "gems" of the time were opaque stones we now consider semi-precious at best, such as lapis and carnelian. But, this piece of glass would have glowed a very royal gold.
Add in the fact that this piece of glass came from 1000 miles away at a time when most people lived their entire lives within 5 miles of their birthplace. Then consider the strange tales that must have accompanied this shard, of an inexplicable (at the time) sea of such glass chunks, the remnants of the Kebira crater impact.
Finally, think about what a truly odd material this was. It looks like the lightest colored amber, but is obviously not amber. It feels like glass, but is, at a guess, 10-15 times harder than the glass they knew how to make. (Tempered glass is about 8 times harder than plate glass.) Had they tried, they probably couldn't have produced enough heat to melt this glass. It certainly wouldn't have melted at anything close to the melting point of their glass. If they had tried, failed, and immediately dropped it, still glowing hot, into the coldest water they could find, it would not have exploded like their
I bought my TV over 3 years ago, and it has at least one digital input, so it would have to be a really early adopter (or a cheap @ss TV) that would lack the required inputs. I haven't seen anything that says it requires the latest type of digital input; just digital.
Native resolution is only an issue if you have a "fixed-pixel device"; a plasma or LCD display. If the scaling bothers you that much, avoid those technologies. It's nowhere near as bad as you seem to think, if properly implemented, either. (You can buy a $75 DVD player that scales just about flawlessy, so it's not hard or expensive, these days.) Or, just don't buy an HD/BluRay DVD player. I don't intend to. At least, not until the format war is over.
That whooshing sound you heard was the joke going over your head. I'm guessing you didn't read the whole post before replying to it because even the lower half of the population as defined by IQ would have gotten the joke when they read the last couple of lines.
Ummm...there are plenty of instructions already available. Go to any bookstore. Buy a Technet subscription. Surf to MSDN.net. RTFM! Where did all these non-MS Windows apps come from, if we don't know how Windows works???
It is on this planet. "[This is] precisely the reason why programmers are required to" deal with technical issues, like this. The rest of the world has no clue.
BAAAHAAhahahahahahahaaahaaa! You're funny. "required"! "comprehensive"!! Stop, my sides already hurt from laughing.
There's a whole friggin' industry out there devoted to documenting how to program for Windows. Does the EU propose to put them out of business just because it's miffed at MS? What is it they really want?
Since no else has bothered, I suppose someone should tell you that vertebrae != skull. As someone pointed out elsewhere, that's technically incorrect grammar, anyway, but it refers to backbones, not headbones.
Who cares? It's the media, and they live in their own little world. The only sensible response is to ignore them as much as possible. Personally, I think it's their desperation for ANYthing to talk about, other than MS or Oracle, that drives it. Who else is there?
But, the real reason I replied was to tell you that I totally agree with your sig. I'd be tempted to simply say "Amen", but...well...you understand.