What this shows is that a true Chimera is possible mixing human and foreign DNAs. It's amazing that multiple DNA sequences can be supported by the body. Rejection becomes an issue but I'm curious if the body would be more accepting for foreign tissue if it's producing the tissue. The immune system obviously isn't designed to detect foreign DNA but the tissue the DNA is producing is foreign. I'm just curious how far this process can be taken before rejection becomes an problem?
You can learn anything but the Blender UI does suck and it is the least intuitive of the group. Lightwave is pretty straight forward for basic navigation and Maya is even easier in most ways. Maya is only difficult because it's so powerful. The main exception is Hypershade which I still find a headache to use. My rule of thumb for Maya is the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard. Things like physics are a pain in most packages but childsplay in Maya. Rigs are slow to set up but really easy to use once you put in the time. I spent days trying to figure out Blender and I never managed to get the basics down. Ya wanta see a really intuitive interface check out Modo. I got most of 103 down in two days and was doing cool stuff five minutes after I started. Since 201 it's gotten much more complicated so the learning curve is longer, not for modeling but the camera and rendering takes time. I'm not crazy about the camera set up and renderer. I find it's far more confusing than either Lightwave or Maya yet it has drastically less power and control. People rave about it but I just can't get used to it. Texturing can be a bit confusing but it mostly applies to rendering in Modo so I don't bother with it except for texture and bump maps. I've noticed other softwares slowly adopting Modo conventions and some tools unique to Modo. It's not an animator yet but it proves CG doesn't have to be UI hostile to artists. Every software needs improvement but you should be able to figure out basic navigation within the first hour with or without a manual to me to be considered in anyway intuitive. Maya and Lightwave you can figure out in five minutes and if you know Maya you pretty much know Modo navigation. I wish Lightwave would adopt that QWERTY convention. Blender will never be a contender until they fix the interface. Just saying everyone is wrong isn't productive and it certainly isn't going to get anyone to switch. If everyone except a small core of fans say the UI sucks hten guess what it probably does suck. People don't spend a small fortune on Maya as for status it's because it's powerful and intuitive to use. If I don't use it for months I can pick it back up fairly quickly. Zbrush is another one with an nonintuitive interface. If I'm away from it for a few months it takes me a couple of days to get back up to speed since it's a pain to do things like exporting maps and if you don't follow the list of steps properly the results are unuseable. The two worst interfaces in CG are Blender and Zbrush. I'd give Gamespace an honorable mention on that list for the godawful Icon based UI. The Icons mostly look like colored blobs so I wind up wasting a rediculous amount of time mousing over each one so I can see the text says. Bad idea for an interface.
You hack a device when they told you not to then you cry foul when they wipe out your hack and leave you without your phone? Ever read the service contract? On what basis are you planning to sue, "gee I didn't think they were serious Judge?" Under what legal president does that fall? Trying to hack a $500 phone comes with a fair amount of risk. If you didn't like the deal don't buy the phone. Simple enough. If you did and you hacked it and now you have a high tech paperweight you've got nothing to complain about other than your own stupidity.
I'm just a poor working stiff but I have easily 500+ CD and DVD backups going back 8+ years and some of those have data going going back to old 5 1/4" back ups. These days I also have multiple hard drive back up so there's a lot of redundancy. I'm planning to start a process of regularly archiving hard drives in a bank safety deposit box. With his kind of money hire some one to come in at least once a month to do back ups if you can't be bothered. Better yet set up a home network with the server in a safe. A home level server can be quite small and it'd be easy enough to make it tough for your average thief to get your data. It could also give you some fire protection as well. Also since he has a California home why on earth didn't he have a computer there with duplicate files? Did he have his life on a notebook computer? Blow a couple of hundred and hire a consultant and they'll make recommendations if you really are this clueless about computers. The guy's an editor and knows cameras so it's not like he's completely none tech.
At least they stopped circling the drain and went right for the sewer. No worries the other networks aren't far behind so they'll have lots of company soon enough. We've got all reality channels how soon till we have an all remake channel?
Wow! I guess those grapes really are sour. Just because you feel trapped doesn't mean everyone IS trapped. 90% of the users would be fine with Mac or Linux they are convinced they need Windows. The alternatives ARE better than they were 5 years ago. I've been gradually switching to Mac and other than the latest version of Firefox being a piece of crashing crap I've had good luck. Some software will never port over so I'll keep a Windows box and or dual boot one of my Macs but otherwise I'm jumping ship. Unless Microsoft pulls off a miracle and in the next year comes up with an exceptional OS a lot of people are going to get tired of it and they are going to see a big revenue drop. The tent pole used to be the OS but at this point Offic is keeping the company afloat. Vendors are already quietly releasing Linux machines finally. Mac is a bigger threat though. Why exactly do you hate Mac hardware other than the classic I can't build my own complaint? I just built two PC machines and I had driver and software problems with both systems. Macs are turn key in every sense of the word. It takes days to settle in a PC if you have no major problems it takes minutes with a Mac. I actually built a PC while I was setting up a Mac. I had all my software installed befoe I even have the OS installed on the PC and it was still several days before I was doing work on the machine. I'm not a fanboy I'm an agnostic. I just think Microsoft gets cut a lot of slack BY the fanboys. How hard would Mac be pounded on if it had these same issues? ME was a trainwreck eventhough I still remember fans defending it, Win 2000 was a decent OS and I still use it but I'm always still having OS troubles on that machine. XP is a pain and service pack 1 drives me nuts. Their idea of security seems to be to disable everything by default. I never have this happen on a Mac. From what I hear about Vista you couldn't give me a Vista machine unless I was allowed to format it and install win 2000. Hey give me the option and I'd still do some things in DOS but Vista isn't a step forward by any stretch of the imagination. You want the situation to change? Don't bother with Microsoft it's like telling Bush to pull out of Iraq. Contact software developers and pound on them about supporting Mac and linux, not just Linux but Mac and Linux. When Microsoft sees a serious threat then things will change. If you want to see them shake in their boots come up with an Office software that allows an easy migration that will work on all three systems. If 90% of the vendors supported Linux and Mac and there was an alternative to Office that corporations to easily migrate to Microsoft would be screwed. They have a monopoly and they know it. The problem is they are falling behind and as Mac gets cooler and more powerful and Linux gets more useable people will start migrating. Don't say thinks haven't gotten better in five years when there's 10X as many softwares supported in both Mac and Linux and most of my pro software is supported in one or both. Not everything is supported but a lot of stuff is supported. A perfect example to me is gaming. I tried installing WoW on a PC. It didn't work because of a video driver issue, the screen was shoved to the left. I tried updating the driver but it totally screwed up that machine and it still doesn't work right. Out of frustration I installed WoW on the Mac and it worked perfectly with no upgrades. Games aren't always better on the PC. I tried recently to install a game on a brand new PC with a brand new video card and had the exact same problem so I said that's it for PC games. Mac and Linux need to be better supported but I have maybe 5% of the trouble on the Mac as on the PCs. Most of the Mac trouble has been Firefox. Safari has gotten better so I'm switching over to it. Talking about some one shooting them selves in the foot lets talk Firefox. I was a huge fan but I'm considering going back to Explorer on the PCs and I already started shifting my addresses on the Mac to Safari. They need a fixed version very bad and very fast.
This suggests a solution to two problems. Build the wall along the border out of spent fuel cores. It'll provide a place for the waste and it'll make it easy to find illegal aliens, just use a Gieger Counter. Given the half life our border will be secure for thousands of years to come.
As much as I like VOIP Vonage is pretty sleazy to deal with. I kept having service interruptions so I finally cancelled my service. It took 20 minutes of threats of lawsuits before they would even agree to cancel the service. Over all it took 45 minutes of fighting and they were still trying to talk me out of it right up until I hung up on them. There are other and better services so it couldn't happen to a sleazier company as far as I'm concerned.
Who doesnt want to be a two legged stereotype?
on
The Fall Geek TV Lineup
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· Score: 4, Insightful
He may be a skinny Dilbert but Gates is also Narcessisstic and dull. There has to be a better geek poster child? Yes everyone wants the money but the point is who wants to be Bill Gates without the money? Hes a pain in the ass and people put up with him because he has money. Take away the money and all you are left with is the pain in the ass.
I'm curious about all the Apple bashing? Just look at the posts over the last few days and they have been numerous and by and large very negative. It was a boneheaded move dropping the price that much that quick but given the iPod Touch it was obvious it had to happen when it did. The real point was it was priced too high out of the gate and the drop should have only been a $100. Apple has tried to address this with the store credit. The point is half the whining was about price then after they drop the price steeply the whining shifts to the sudden price drop. Difficult to please much? I guess the biggest remaining complaint is the bundling with the provider but the simple solution is if it bothers you that much don't buy one. Just odd that a company that seems to be catering in some ways to computer and tech fans is getting so blasted. The OS is far more secure and stable than Windows and OSX has a massive potential. Microsoft has chosen "we're the biggest so you'll buy what we offer and like it" approach to customer service. Notice the lack of customer enthusiasm over that stance with Vista. I just say to cut Apple a little slack. It's a first generation product that has a huge potential. Since it's running OSX it's biggest limitations are battery life and chip speed, both are interconnected. It does have the potential to run desktop apps so in three to five years when chip technology catches up they'll be well positioned to take advantage of it. They did that with OSX and got flack for it early on but it turned out to be the right move and now they have a stunning, easy to use OS with lots of power and features Vista can only dream of. Also as I run my spyware software several times a day and deal with disk defragging and such I have to comment on how realitively maintainence free their products tend to be. I built several PC computers a few weeks ago and I'm still trying to iron out the bugs. My Mac I plugged in 18 months ago and I've barely touched it since except to allow updates once a month and install new software. I'm in it for the software not the daily OS fight that is Windows. iPhones are amazing for first generation and they are likely to be radically better in a couple of years. Try to see the price cut as a good thing. Would you be happier if they still cost $600? What if that meant the iPod Touch had to cost $500? Would that make you happier? Change is happening faster than ever so fast price drops shouldn't be seen as an evil empire issue. The had to set prices well before the release of the iPhone and my guess is the memory dropped faster and more than they expected. Obviously the costs wound up being lower than they thought so they passed on the savings and went for a larger market share since they were already set to hit their sales goal. Remember everyone laughing about their goal? No one is laughing now.
I'm sure this is redundant but none of the high mode posts had it and it's hard to read 200 posts just to avoid a "redundant" mod, but the biggest missing feature is movie support. It's kind of a bizarre ommission to me given Apples love of multimedia and the fact that most cell phones with a camera support movies. My last PDA I bought three years ago had a movie clip function. I'm fairly sure it'll be added in 2.0 but it was odd to see it missing from the launch given the cost of the phone. A lot of the requests are a little nitpicky but there are some things needed. I'm fairly sure the SDK issue will be addressed within the year since iPhones are here to stay. Memory is the single biggest complaint to have especially with movie support. For anyone complaining about needing 80 gig for their music collection ya might want to not complain so loud or the pirate squad will come knocking. Movies can suck down memory faster than anything though. I hear the 16 gig is coming out before the end of the year which gives me hope there may even be a 32 gig on the horizon. 16 gig is adequate but 32 gig would make me very happy. A lot of the issues seem more about tweaking a first generation device. With the price drop I think most of the harshest criticisms haven't really panned out and anyone would have to consider the iPhone a solid success. Having other service options would be a major one to me and more plans but it's a solid product and I kind of missed the window since I had to replace my phone just before they came out so I'm waiting until the next generation to break my contract.
The down side of ala carte is there are no guarantees so it's a major risk to produce content. When they do a series say Firefly there's a major investment in just doing the first episode. Generally they can't repay the first episode with one showing so they do it by getting an 8 to 12 episode guarantee. If there's no guarantee of a return then they'll be hesitant to do a pilot let alone a season's worth. Without a guaranteed time slot they have to heavily advertise so people will even know about the show. It means more money not less. Commercials suck and there's too many of them on current television but commercial contracts and guaranteed broadcast slots make producing a series possible. Sure some shows can be done that way but without guaranteed revenue most shows won't get made. One of the favored examples Firefly was considered a marginal show and was only produced because Joss had a solid track record so they were willing to take the risk. In an ala carte system they never would have taken the risk. Don't worry about producing numbers to show fans could have supported it. Go back in time and assume you'd never heard of Firefly. Will you put money up sight unseen to promise to buy the show without seeing an episode? Studios finance pilots all the time and few get produced as a series. I understand people think an ala carte system will save them money but the truth is radically less content will be produced and some of the things not produced are likely to be the next Firefly. The system is broken but there's no ideal solution.
Can we have a mod for ignorant? I know there's an underlying "what's the problem with it" if technology causes it, yes I know I'm getting flamed for this, but come on. Gee cool, so we loose New York and Florida as well as most of the world's coastal cities and half the world starves from famine, look on the bright side we got a cheaper way to move crap from China to Europe. Sounds like a deal to me! We aren't talking about more days of summer we're talking about extreme weather like the human species has never seen before. I've heard quotes as high as 18 degree rise in temperatures over the next 100 years, there is reason for that number. That will never happen for one major reason. Increase Ocean temperatures by two or three degrees and and you get a massive cloud build up. Cool you say see nature takes care of us. Wrong. That's nature getting pissed at you like in the old Warner Brothers cartoons were storm clouds formed over character's heads. Drop that little bomb shell of 2 to 3 degree rise in ocean temperatures on a climatologist and after he gets through telling you it'll never happen ask him what would happen. Force five hurricanes normally rare would become common and all storms would get dramatically more intense. Droughts would get worse in one area where as others would be flooded out which can be equally bad. A 3 degree rise would raise water levels several feet without even factoring in Arctic ice melting. We aren't talking end of the world but you can kiss your comfortable life good bye. I don't call half the people starving to death, loosing our coastal cities and a massive increase in storm intensity Hysteria. The radical numbers I heard five years ago are what the conservative people are saying now and no one knows how bad it could get because it's never happened this bad this fast in known history. Come on don't mark people insightful because they can't see the forest for the trees. Dude the trees are on fire and it's seriously time to wake up. Okay flame me.
Like most things there's good and bad so science often dismisses the good by lumping it in with the bad. The dilutions are snake oil. Other things aren't. I use a product called Oxy something, long unpronouncable name. It's essentially hepititus that's been freezed dried 400X to fragment it and render it harmless but the chemical markers are intact. Your body recognizes it and flips on the immune overdrive. Since I started using it eight years ago I haven't gotten a full blown cold or flu. When I start to feel the first symptoms I take and it always knocks it out of me. There's also the unfortunate lumping of herbal remedies in with some of the more out there parts of Homepathic preparations. The earliest drugs came from herbs and most of the early pharmecuticals came from herbal remedies they just refined and repackaged them. The important thing is to cherry pick what works from the wacky placebo effects. Eight years without a cold or flu isn't a placebo.
Technically if the table was higher the weight would be less. The mass is constant but weight is more of an interaction with the Earth's gravity. The higher you go the lower the gravity. The effect is enough to change time measurements on high mountains or high flying aircraft. I doubt there's any equipment sensitive enough to detect weight difference in an object that was moved several feet but there is a change. The shape of the earth is in flux so it's not impossible that that affected it. Gravity isn't even uniform over the surface so a measurement at a 100' above sea level in one location may not be the same at a 100' in another location. The ground would have changed height over a 100 years as well. More than likely it was either a measurement error or handling and gentle wiping of the object would be enough to cause the error. Far more likely than changes in gravity.
Hollywood has built far larger bombs. One of the largest was named Pluto Nash. Not many people have heard of it inspite of it not being a secret project. Smaller tactical bombs were created by the likes of Pauly Shore. Not as powerful but equally devasting at killing 90 minutes of your life.
They both figured out how to speed up searches and slow down the speed for search pages to load. I guess that's what passes for progress these days, two steps forward and two steps backward.
I was a seagate fanboy until 3 months ago. Lets just say that evening I could hear the (2 month old) 500gb seagate in my basement before I put the key in the door. (sounded like a circular saw)
It was just happy to see you and welcoming you home.
It's the computer equalant of tin cans and string. The string may be frayed but if you cut it you may never get it working again. It does make you wonder how much luck alien civilizations will have decrypting our signals if we have this much trouble communicating with our own technology? Can they possibly do it? Of coarse but how much effort will it take and are the shaved chimpanzes beaming I Love Lucky at them really worth their time and trouble to talk to? Or will our first communication with aliens be, "please resend episode 23, signal got garbled by solar flare."
Slashdot Mirror
What this shows is that a true Chimera is possible mixing human and foreign DNAs. It's amazing that multiple DNA sequences can be supported by the body. Rejection becomes an issue but I'm curious if the body would be more accepting for foreign tissue if it's producing the tissue. The immune system obviously isn't designed to detect foreign DNA but the tissue the DNA is producing is foreign. I'm just curious how far this process can be taken before rejection becomes an problem?
To keep things organized please post all gay jokes under this posting. Thank you for your cooperation.
Would this have happened if they voted Republican? It's not really a joke since Bush has snubbed California ever since the 2000 election.
You can learn anything but the Blender UI does suck and it is the least intuitive of the group. Lightwave is pretty straight forward for basic navigation and Maya is even easier in most ways. Maya is only difficult because it's so powerful. The main exception is Hypershade which I still find a headache to use. My rule of thumb for Maya is the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard. Things like physics are a pain in most packages but childsplay in Maya. Rigs are slow to set up but really easy to use once you put in the time. I spent days trying to figure out Blender and I never managed to get the basics down. Ya wanta see a really intuitive interface check out Modo. I got most of 103 down in two days and was doing cool stuff five minutes after I started. Since 201 it's gotten much more complicated so the learning curve is longer, not for modeling but the camera and rendering takes time. I'm not crazy about the camera set up and renderer. I find it's far more confusing than either Lightwave or Maya yet it has drastically less power and control. People rave about it but I just can't get used to it. Texturing can be a bit confusing but it mostly applies to rendering in Modo so I don't bother with it except for texture and bump maps. I've noticed other softwares slowly adopting Modo conventions and some tools unique to Modo. It's not an animator yet but it proves CG doesn't have to be UI hostile to artists. Every software needs improvement but you should be able to figure out basic navigation within the first hour with or without a manual to me to be considered in anyway intuitive. Maya and Lightwave you can figure out in five minutes and if you know Maya you pretty much know Modo navigation. I wish Lightwave would adopt that QWERTY convention. Blender will never be a contender until they fix the interface. Just saying everyone is wrong isn't productive and it certainly isn't going to get anyone to switch. If everyone except a small core of fans say the UI sucks hten guess what it probably does suck. People don't spend a small fortune on Maya as for status it's because it's powerful and intuitive to use. If I don't use it for months I can pick it back up fairly quickly. Zbrush is another one with an nonintuitive interface. If I'm away from it for a few months it takes me a couple of days to get back up to speed since it's a pain to do things like exporting maps and if you don't follow the list of steps properly the results are unuseable. The two worst interfaces in CG are Blender and Zbrush. I'd give Gamespace an honorable mention on that list for the godawful Icon based UI. The Icons mostly look like colored blobs so I wind up wasting a rediculous amount of time mousing over each one so I can see the text says. Bad idea for an interface.
You hack a device when they told you not to then you cry foul when they wipe out your hack and leave you without your phone? Ever read the service contract? On what basis are you planning to sue, "gee I didn't think they were serious Judge?" Under what legal president does that fall? Trying to hack a $500 phone comes with a fair amount of risk. If you didn't like the deal don't buy the phone. Simple enough. If you did and you hacked it and now you have a high tech paperweight you've got nothing to complain about other than your own stupidity.
I'm just a poor working stiff but I have easily 500+ CD and DVD backups going back 8+ years and some of those have data going going back to old 5 1/4" back ups. These days I also have multiple hard drive back up so there's a lot of redundancy. I'm planning to start a process of regularly archiving hard drives in a bank safety deposit box. With his kind of money hire some one to come in at least once a month to do back ups if you can't be bothered. Better yet set up a home network with the server in a safe. A home level server can be quite small and it'd be easy enough to make it tough for your average thief to get your data. It could also give you some fire protection as well. Also since he has a California home why on earth didn't he have a computer there with duplicate files? Did he have his life on a notebook computer? Blow a couple of hundred and hire a consultant and they'll make recommendations if you really are this clueless about computers. The guy's an editor and knows cameras so it's not like he's completely none tech.
At least they stopped circling the drain and went right for the sewer. No worries the other networks aren't far behind so they'll have lots of company soon enough. We've got all reality channels how soon till we have an all remake channel?
Wow! I guess those grapes really are sour. Just because you feel trapped doesn't mean everyone IS trapped. 90% of the users would be fine with Mac or Linux they are convinced they need Windows. The alternatives ARE better than they were 5 years ago. I've been gradually switching to Mac and other than the latest version of Firefox being a piece of crashing crap I've had good luck. Some software will never port over so I'll keep a Windows box and or dual boot one of my Macs but otherwise I'm jumping ship. Unless Microsoft pulls off a miracle and in the next year comes up with an exceptional OS a lot of people are going to get tired of it and they are going to see a big revenue drop. The tent pole used to be the OS but at this point Offic is keeping the company afloat. Vendors are already quietly releasing Linux machines finally. Mac is a bigger threat though. Why exactly do you hate Mac hardware other than the classic I can't build my own complaint? I just built two PC machines and I had driver and software problems with both systems. Macs are turn key in every sense of the word. It takes days to settle in a PC if you have no major problems it takes minutes with a Mac. I actually built a PC while I was setting up a Mac. I had all my software installed befoe I even have the OS installed on the PC and it was still several days before I was doing work on the machine. I'm not a fanboy I'm an agnostic. I just think Microsoft gets cut a lot of slack BY the fanboys. How hard would Mac be pounded on if it had these same issues? ME was a trainwreck eventhough I still remember fans defending it, Win 2000 was a decent OS and I still use it but I'm always still having OS troubles on that machine. XP is a pain and service pack 1 drives me nuts. Their idea of security seems to be to disable everything by default. I never have this happen on a Mac. From what I hear about Vista you couldn't give me a Vista machine unless I was allowed to format it and install win 2000. Hey give me the option and I'd still do some things in DOS but Vista isn't a step forward by any stretch of the imagination. You want the situation to change? Don't bother with Microsoft it's like telling Bush to pull out of Iraq. Contact software developers and pound on them about supporting Mac and linux, not just Linux but Mac and Linux. When Microsoft sees a serious threat then things will change. If you want to see them shake in their boots come up with an Office software that allows an easy migration that will work on all three systems. If 90% of the vendors supported Linux and Mac and there was an alternative to Office that corporations to easily migrate to Microsoft would be screwed. They have a monopoly and they know it. The problem is they are falling behind and as Mac gets cooler and more powerful and Linux gets more useable people will start migrating. Don't say thinks haven't gotten better in five years when there's 10X as many softwares supported in both Mac and Linux and most of my pro software is supported in one or both. Not everything is supported but a lot of stuff is supported. A perfect example to me is gaming. I tried installing WoW on a PC. It didn't work because of a video driver issue, the screen was shoved to the left. I tried updating the driver but it totally screwed up that machine and it still doesn't work right. Out of frustration I installed WoW on the Mac and it worked perfectly with no upgrades. Games aren't always better on the PC. I tried recently to install a game on a brand new PC with a brand new video card and had the exact same problem so I said that's it for PC games. Mac and Linux need to be better supported but I have maybe 5% of the trouble on the Mac as on the PCs. Most of the Mac trouble has been Firefox. Safari has gotten better so I'm switching over to it. Talking about some one shooting them selves in the foot lets talk Firefox. I was a huge fan but I'm considering going back to Explorer on the PCs and I already started shifting my addresses on the Mac to Safari. They need a fixed version very bad and very fast.
This suggests a solution to two problems. Build the wall along the border out of spent fuel cores. It'll provide a place for the waste and it'll make it easy to find illegal aliens, just use a Gieger Counter. Given the half life our border will be secure for thousands of years to come.
As much as I like VOIP Vonage is pretty sleazy to deal with. I kept having service interruptions so I finally cancelled my service. It took 20 minutes of threats of lawsuits before they would even agree to cancel the service. Over all it took 45 minutes of fighting and they were still trying to talk me out of it right up until I hung up on them. There are other and better services so it couldn't happen to a sleazier company as far as I'm concerned.
He may be a skinny Dilbert but Gates is also Narcessisstic and dull. There has to be a better geek poster child? Yes everyone wants the money but the point is who wants to be Bill Gates without the money? Hes a pain in the ass and people put up with him because he has money. Take away the money and all you are left with is the pain in the ass.
I'm curious about all the Apple bashing? Just look at the posts over the last few days and they have been numerous and by and large very negative. It was a boneheaded move dropping the price that much that quick but given the iPod Touch it was obvious it had to happen when it did. The real point was it was priced too high out of the gate and the drop should have only been a $100. Apple has tried to address this with the store credit. The point is half the whining was about price then after they drop the price steeply the whining shifts to the sudden price drop. Difficult to please much? I guess the biggest remaining complaint is the bundling with the provider but the simple solution is if it bothers you that much don't buy one. Just odd that a company that seems to be catering in some ways to computer and tech fans is getting so blasted. The OS is far more secure and stable than Windows and OSX has a massive potential. Microsoft has chosen "we're the biggest so you'll buy what we offer and like it" approach to customer service. Notice the lack of customer enthusiasm over that stance with Vista. I just say to cut Apple a little slack. It's a first generation product that has a huge potential. Since it's running OSX it's biggest limitations are battery life and chip speed, both are interconnected. It does have the potential to run desktop apps so in three to five years when chip technology catches up they'll be well positioned to take advantage of it. They did that with OSX and got flack for it early on but it turned out to be the right move and now they have a stunning, easy to use OS with lots of power and features Vista can only dream of. Also as I run my spyware software several times a day and deal with disk defragging and such I have to comment on how realitively maintainence free their products tend to be. I built several PC computers a few weeks ago and I'm still trying to iron out the bugs. My Mac I plugged in 18 months ago and I've barely touched it since except to allow updates once a month and install new software. I'm in it for the software not the daily OS fight that is Windows. iPhones are amazing for first generation and they are likely to be radically better in a couple of years. Try to see the price cut as a good thing. Would you be happier if they still cost $600? What if that meant the iPod Touch had to cost $500? Would that make you happier? Change is happening faster than ever so fast price drops shouldn't be seen as an evil empire issue. The had to set prices well before the release of the iPhone and my guess is the memory dropped faster and more than they expected. Obviously the costs wound up being lower than they thought so they passed on the savings and went for a larger market share since they were already set to hit their sales goal. Remember everyone laughing about their goal? No one is laughing now.
Green Martian, antenae and a fur bikini. Need I say more?
I'm sure this is redundant but none of the high mode posts had it and it's hard to read 200 posts just to avoid a "redundant" mod, but the biggest missing feature is movie support. It's kind of a bizarre ommission to me given Apples love of multimedia and the fact that most cell phones with a camera support movies. My last PDA I bought three years ago had a movie clip function. I'm fairly sure it'll be added in 2.0 but it was odd to see it missing from the launch given the cost of the phone. A lot of the requests are a little nitpicky but there are some things needed. I'm fairly sure the SDK issue will be addressed within the year since iPhones are here to stay. Memory is the single biggest complaint to have especially with movie support. For anyone complaining about needing 80 gig for their music collection ya might want to not complain so loud or the pirate squad will come knocking. Movies can suck down memory faster than anything though. I hear the 16 gig is coming out before the end of the year which gives me hope there may even be a 32 gig on the horizon. 16 gig is adequate but 32 gig would make me very happy. A lot of the issues seem more about tweaking a first generation device. With the price drop I think most of the harshest criticisms haven't really panned out and anyone would have to consider the iPhone a solid success. Having other service options would be a major one to me and more plans but it's a solid product and I kind of missed the window since I had to replace my phone just before they came out so I'm waiting until the next generation to break my contract.
The down side of ala carte is there are no guarantees so it's a major risk to produce content. When they do a series say Firefly there's a major investment in just doing the first episode. Generally they can't repay the first episode with one showing so they do it by getting an 8 to 12 episode guarantee. If there's no guarantee of a return then they'll be hesitant to do a pilot let alone a season's worth. Without a guaranteed time slot they have to heavily advertise so people will even know about the show. It means more money not less. Commercials suck and there's too many of them on current television but commercial contracts and guaranteed broadcast slots make producing a series possible. Sure some shows can be done that way but without guaranteed revenue most shows won't get made. One of the favored examples Firefly was considered a marginal show and was only produced because Joss had a solid track record so they were willing to take the risk. In an ala carte system they never would have taken the risk. Don't worry about producing numbers to show fans could have supported it. Go back in time and assume you'd never heard of Firefly. Will you put money up sight unseen to promise to buy the show without seeing an episode? Studios finance pilots all the time and few get produced as a series. I understand people think an ala carte system will save them money but the truth is radically less content will be produced and some of the things not produced are likely to be the next Firefly. The system is broken but there's no ideal solution.
Can we have a mod for ignorant? I know there's an underlying "what's the problem with it" if technology causes it, yes I know I'm getting flamed for this, but come on. Gee cool, so we loose New York and Florida as well as most of the world's coastal cities and half the world starves from famine, look on the bright side we got a cheaper way to move crap from China to Europe. Sounds like a deal to me! We aren't talking about more days of summer we're talking about extreme weather like the human species has never seen before. I've heard quotes as high as 18 degree rise in temperatures over the next 100 years, there is reason for that number. That will never happen for one major reason. Increase Ocean temperatures by two or three degrees and and you get a massive cloud build up. Cool you say see nature takes care of us. Wrong. That's nature getting pissed at you like in the old Warner Brothers cartoons were storm clouds formed over character's heads. Drop that little bomb shell of 2 to 3 degree rise in ocean temperatures on a climatologist and after he gets through telling you it'll never happen ask him what would happen. Force five hurricanes normally rare would become common and all storms would get dramatically more intense. Droughts would get worse in one area where as others would be flooded out which can be equally bad. A 3 degree rise would raise water levels several feet without even factoring in Arctic ice melting. We aren't talking end of the world but you can kiss your comfortable life good bye. I don't call half the people starving to death, loosing our coastal cities and a massive increase in storm intensity Hysteria. The radical numbers I heard five years ago are what the conservative people are saying now and no one knows how bad it could get because it's never happened this bad this fast in known history. Come on don't mark people insightful because they can't see the forest for the trees. Dude the trees are on fire and it's seriously time to wake up. Okay flame me.
Like most things there's good and bad so science often dismisses the good by lumping it in with the bad. The dilutions are snake oil. Other things aren't. I use a product called Oxy something, long unpronouncable name. It's essentially hepititus that's been freezed dried 400X to fragment it and render it harmless but the chemical markers are intact. Your body recognizes it and flips on the immune overdrive. Since I started using it eight years ago I haven't gotten a full blown cold or flu. When I start to feel the first symptoms I take and it always knocks it out of me. There's also the unfortunate lumping of herbal remedies in with some of the more out there parts of Homepathic preparations. The earliest drugs came from herbs and most of the early pharmecuticals came from herbal remedies they just refined and repackaged them. The important thing is to cherry pick what works from the wacky placebo effects. Eight years without a cold or flu isn't a placebo.
"Thank God I didn't go with the Sony batteries."
Technically if the table was higher the weight would be less. The mass is constant but weight is more of an interaction with the Earth's gravity. The higher you go the lower the gravity. The effect is enough to change time measurements on high mountains or high flying aircraft. I doubt there's any equipment sensitive enough to detect weight difference in an object that was moved several feet but there is a change. The shape of the earth is in flux so it's not impossible that that affected it. Gravity isn't even uniform over the surface so a measurement at a 100' above sea level in one location may not be the same at a 100' in another location. The ground would have changed height over a 100 years as well. More than likely it was either a measurement error or handling and gentle wiping of the object would be enough to cause the error. Far more likely than changes in gravity.
Hollywood has built far larger bombs. One of the largest was named Pluto Nash. Not many people have heard of it inspite of it not being a secret project. Smaller tactical bombs were created by the likes of Pauly Shore. Not as powerful but equally devasting at killing 90 minutes of your life.
That's 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit not Celsius. You're still gonna need one hell of a heat sink.
They both figured out how to speed up searches and slow down the speed for search pages to load. I guess that's what passes for progress these days, two steps forward and two steps backward.
It was just happy to see you and welcoming you home.
All I can say is Spiderman is fucked in the next film!
It's the computer equalant of tin cans and string. The string may be frayed but if you cut it you may never get it working again. It does make you wonder how much luck alien civilizations will have decrypting our signals if we have this much trouble communicating with our own technology? Can they possibly do it? Of coarse but how much effort will it take and are the shaved chimpanzes beaming I Love Lucky at them really worth their time and trouble to talk to? Or will our first communication with aliens be, "please resend episode 23, signal got garbled by solar flare."