Well... actually I have no idea. You may be right.
However, whether we came by it through intentional breeding to cultivate certain characteristics, or just bred one or a small number of pre-existing lines that we liked the characteristics of, we've still made ourselves dependent on a very large number of bees with very similar genetics, which lends itself to epidemics.
So the subject line may be slightly off, but I think the basic point I was going for still stands.
This is what you get when you breed monocultures of plants or animals. A single disease or problem that wipes out your entire supply. Trying to determine the specific cause is all well and good, but ultimately somewhat beside the point. If we don't want to have this kind of problem we need to purposefully breed for biodiversity so that one pathogen is less likely to destroy an entire industry. I sincerely hope the entire agricultural industry, and others, really comprehend what it is they should be learning from this and change their priorities a bit before the same thing hits say, the entire corn supply.
Re:Searchability trumps all of those features...
on
What's In Your Inbox?
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· Score: 1
I used Winamp 2.8 till I got iTunes, and never went back. Actually, I found the 3.x line of winamp so asthetically pleasing I kept using 2.8 when it came out. Oh well, to each their own.
I'm hooked on iTunes (dispite quite a few annoyances) for one simple reason: I can find anything by typing about 2-5 characters into a search box. I sort by genre, rating, etc, occasionally, but rarely to find something in particular. I want basically the same functionality in an e-mail client. I don't need a dozen levels of "priority", just give me text search and I'm happy.
At first I thought my computer had reverted to XPs Fisher Price look on me (I usually keep it set to classic), but then I realized I'm running gentoo at the moment... and that even XP doesn't like ponies.
At a press conference on Friday, Bill Gates, the (sometimes) richest man in the world, mocked the One Laptop for Every Child initiative for it's proto-type $100 laptop. "It's a lame design," said Gates, "Don't they know computers with 7" screens need to lack a keyboard to be revolutionary?" The CEO went on to explain that the real cost of computing came from the time it takes programmers to develop revolutionary software like Clippy(tm), not the hardware, which for cheep end computers these days is "a minor $400 expence anybody can afford". In conclusion, Gates recommended that third world school districts like that of the Iyam Hugaari province in southeastern Nigeria, "Really aught to quit penny pinching and buy their kids XBox 360s" which he described as "hav[ing] some real computing power".
Get a decent CPU. Get a lot of RAM. Get a big Harddrive. Get a DVD burner. Get other bells and whistles as you wish. Modern PCs are media centers already, even $500 models.
$$$$ for nothing but higher res? Sure, guys. Sure.
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The more I hear, the more I think both of these formats are toast.
The move from tape to optical had a lot of obvious advantages for end users. By comparison, the only real advantages to either Blu-ray or HD-DVD are 1) resolution, and 2) disc capacity. That's really not much to start with.
Capacity is only particularly relevant as A) the means to provide said higher res, and B) for people using these discs for their own personal data, which won't likely be effected by all these 'protection' racketsschemes. For raw data storage, BD or HD-DVD will take off when the drives are comodity items with decent burn times, and the discs have a comparable $/GB to DVDs.
As for resolution, here's the thing: didn't I read a while back on slashdot that some study found that only 50% of US households with "Hi-def" capable TVs had their systems set up properly to view anything in hi-def, and from the sound of it most of them were oblivious?
Now tell me... if the only really notable advantage of Blu-ray or HD-DVD over normal DVDs, when it comes to renting or buying videos, is resolution... and half the population can't even tell if their systems are set up to display hi-def content... and the DRM is such that nobody who's bought 'hi-def' hardware yet is going to actually get hi-def (my understanding is that if you don't have a fully HDCP compliant system, you get a degraded image, ie, lower res)... is it just me, or is most of the population going to buy a new optical drive, rent one BD or HD-DVD, not notice anything impressive cause their system isn't set up right, and go back to DVDs cause they're cheaper rentals?
$40 will get you a DVD drive you can stick in any vaguely recent desktop computer. A stand-alone DVD player that can hook up to pretty much any TV is probably cheaper than that. A new format that offers basically nothing but higher res, and requires thousands (in the next year) or several hundreds (any time remotely soon) of dollars of upfront expense on hardware upgrades to get that one advantage, which you also have to re-purchace all your media to get... I'm just not seeing it.
Fortunately, all the companies involved have put way too much into this to let it drop that easy, so hopefully they'll stick it out long enough to produce comodity priced products for those of us who are really just interested in the higher capacity optical media.
See the thing is though, this is the first vaporware I've ever tried that can import my entire music collection and play it quite well. Also, it plays music off my iPod if I tell it my iPod is a harddrive, regardless of my iPod not being set to 'harddrive' mode or whatever.
Pretty damn good for a 'user preview' release.
I believe autism is one of the disorders there is a much higher chance of having in a pregnancy when the woman is over 30 years old or so, which could have a strong correlation to "analytical" (educated) couples who were in school till they were 30.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... actually I have no idea. You may be right. However, whether we came by it through intentional breeding to cultivate certain characteristics, or just bred one or a small number of pre-existing lines that we liked the characteristics of, we've still made ourselves dependent on a very large number of bees with very similar genetics, which lends itself to epidemics. So the subject line may be slightly off, but I think the basic point I was going for still stands.
This is what you get when you breed monocultures of plants or animals. A single disease or problem that wipes out your entire supply. Trying to determine the specific cause is all well and good, but ultimately somewhat beside the point. If we don't want to have this kind of problem we need to purposefully breed for biodiversity so that one pathogen is less likely to destroy an entire industry. I sincerely hope the entire agricultural industry, and others, really comprehend what it is they should be learning from this and change their priorities a bit before the same thing hits say, the entire corn supply.
I used Winamp 2.8 till I got iTunes, and never went back. Actually, I found the 3.x line of winamp so asthetically pleasing I kept using 2.8 when it came out. Oh well, to each their own.
I'm hooked on iTunes (dispite quite a few annoyances) for one simple reason: I can find anything by typing about 2-5 characters into a search box. I sort by genre, rating, etc, occasionally, but rarely to find something in particular. I want basically the same functionality in an e-mail client. I don't need a dozen levels of "priority", just give me text search and I'm happy.
"They conclude that 60 million Americans can be called 'intellectually curious.' Intellectually, I'm curious what that makes the rest of them."
heterolectual, homolectual, bilectual, and transliterate.
Firefox, thunderbird, gaim, xchat, vlc, itunes, freeciv... wait... er... windows specific, huh...
At first I thought my computer had reverted to XPs Fisher Price look on me (I usually keep it set to classic), but then I realized I'm running gentoo at the moment... and that even XP doesn't like ponies.
"Richest Man In World Mocks Poor Mans Computer"
At a press conference on Friday, Bill Gates, the (sometimes) richest man in the world, mocked the One Laptop for Every Child initiative for it's proto-type $100 laptop. "It's a lame design," said Gates, "Don't they know computers with 7" screens need to lack a keyboard to be revolutionary?" The CEO went on to explain that the real cost of computing came from the time it takes programmers to develop revolutionary software like Clippy(tm), not the hardware, which for cheep end computers these days is "a minor $400 expence anybody can afford". In conclusion, Gates recommended that third world school districts like that of the Iyam Hugaari province in southeastern Nigeria, "Really aught to quit penny pinching and buy their kids XBox 360s" which he described as "hav[ing] some real computing power".
Hmm... you're right. I have this funny way of forgetting that anybody cares about TV anymore. :-D
1. Build homemade PC.
2. Insert Media.
Get a decent CPU. Get a lot of RAM. Get a big Harddrive. Get a DVD burner. Get other bells and whistles as you wish. Modern PCs are media centers already, even $500 models.
The more I hear, the more I think both of these formats are toast.
The move from tape to optical had a lot of obvious advantages for end users. By comparison, the only real advantages to either Blu-ray or HD-DVD are 1) resolution, and 2) disc capacity. That's really not much to start with.
Capacity is only particularly relevant as A) the means to provide said higher res, and B) for people using these discs for their own personal data, which won't likely be effected by all these 'protection' racketsschemes. For raw data storage, BD or HD-DVD will take off when the drives are comodity items with decent burn times, and the discs have a comparable $/GB to DVDs.
As for resolution, here's the thing: didn't I read a while back on slashdot that some study found that only 50% of US households with "Hi-def" capable TVs had their systems set up properly to view anything in hi-def, and from the sound of it most of them were oblivious?
Now tell me... if the only really notable advantage of Blu-ray or HD-DVD over normal DVDs, when it comes to renting or buying videos, is resolution... and half the population can't even tell if their systems are set up to display hi-def content... and the DRM is such that nobody who's bought 'hi-def' hardware yet is going to actually get hi-def (my understanding is that if you don't have a fully HDCP compliant system, you get a degraded image, ie, lower res)... is it just me, or is most of the population going to buy a new optical drive, rent one BD or HD-DVD, not notice anything impressive cause their system isn't set up right, and go back to DVDs cause they're cheaper rentals?
$40 will get you a DVD drive you can stick in any vaguely recent desktop computer. A stand-alone DVD player that can hook up to pretty much any TV is probably cheaper than that. A new format that offers basically nothing but higher res, and requires thousands (in the next year) or several hundreds (any time remotely soon) of dollars of upfront expense on hardware upgrades to get that one advantage, which you also have to re-purchace all your media to get... I'm just not seeing it.
Fortunately, all the companies involved have put way too much into this to let it drop that easy, so hopefully they'll stick it out long enough to produce comodity priced products for those of us who are really just interested in the higher capacity optical media.
Wow!
Previously undiscovered, unlooted tomb, discovered and looted! W00t!
See the thing is though, this is the first vaporware I've ever tried that can import my entire music collection and play it quite well. Also, it plays music off my iPod if I tell it my iPod is a harddrive, regardless of my iPod not being set to 'harddrive' mode or whatever. Pretty damn good for a 'user preview' release.
I believe autism is one of the disorders there is a much higher chance of having in a pregnancy when the woman is over 30 years old or so, which could have a strong correlation to "analytical" (educated) couples who were in school till they were 30.
Or, you know, demand towns and cities organized such that they live fairly close to where they work.