No one is going to pay $20 for a pack of AAAs that you can get for $4 and just have to replace in six months.
People already pay twice as much for lithium AAAs that are lighter and last longer. How much would people pay for something that you can recharge repeatedly for years to come, and that packs more power than a regular alkaline? Don't know, but there's probably a market if the price is "only" five times as much as regular batteries.
And don't forget about using this tech in your iPod or other portable energy-sucker. It wouldn't lose the ability to charge after a year, it would recharge a lot more quickly, yadda ya.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same fiber. In all the towns around me in MA, Verizon trucks were crawling down every street stringing fiber. When I ordered FIOS, they ran fiber from the pole to my house.
Googling for "Verizon fiber cost" turns up this article, which says
Verizon plans to roll out fiber-optic connections to every home and business in its 29-state territory over the next 10 to 15 years...It will cost $20 billion to $40 billion.
I suppose that's "free" for very small values of "billion".
I'm not being facetious; I'm trying to figure out the argument that Verizon (for example) spends billions to lay fiber to everyone's house, and then they should sell access to that bandwidth on par with what they would use it for.
Shouldn't they be able to recoup the cost somehow? Why should they be required to subsidize competitors?
Having said that, I think that once they sell internet service at a given bandwidth (15 Mbps on my FIOS plan), they should not be allowed to degrade service for Vonage or other IP service providers.
Yeah, we should have gone through a six-month source selection process to find the lowest bidder to help out after Katrina. That would have been way better than slapping money on the table to get food and shelter to those people.
While that may be good for this specific problem (and I don't know if it is), I hate that approach in general.
"Let the user decide" is usually a cop-out in UI design when the developers can't agree on the right way.
I almost always advocate Finding the Right Way and implementing that. Then after user testing (perhaps through an actual release cycle) you look at the feedback and see if you made the right choice.
The alternative is a billion stupid preferences saying "does this widget do this, or this?" That's laziness on the developer's part, and it makes for crappy UI and user experience.
OK, who pushed my button?:-)
To bring it back on topic, if, after thrashing this around in discussion, one technical approach is deemed better than the other, it would be silly to include the other as an option.
He's talking about a 4-hour plane ride in the middle of the night. Until you've tried it, shut up.
We have a DVD player in our minivan, and after you play I Spy for the first half-hour of a five-hour trip, having the kids watch a DVD is a life saver.
Otherwise, someone would have to die! (Dr. Evil voice there...)
Partial quote:
There is a widespread...impression that open source development is...a free-for-all among brilliant...individuals
I don't think it's that widespread, except amongst Open Source fans.:-)
The impression I usually see is that Open Source projects are done by guys who were laid off and need something to fill in the time between gaming sessions.
I once called 911 because there was a power line on the ground, slowly writhing, throwing sparks, starting a little smoke in some wet leaves. The 911 operator said I should call the power company because this wasn't an emergency. I said "you want me to wait until a little kid gets electrocuted?" She grumbled and called the power company herself. And the police -- a cop came and made sure nobody got killed while the power guys were coming.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD both are spec'd to use H.264 and some flavor of WMV, if I recall correctly.
I think that the quoted sentence means something like "when other codecs can beat the quality or bitrate of MPEG-2, then..." That is, when H.264 can do really clean HD video at 12 Mbps and MPEG-2 takes 19 Mbps, they'll start using H.264.
Now, I thought this was already true. But then, I only thought that from reading H.264 press releases.:-)
...allowing science to accurately predict events...
I'm sorry, where were the accurate predictions? The second paragraph of the actual article says
The evolution of the ice sheet, in the context of climate warming, is more rapid than has been predicted by models
From what I can tell, they missed by more than a factor of two. While that's in the same order of magnitude, I don't consider it particularly accurate.
The article goes on:
Rignot and Kanagaratnam say their calculations indicate that the Greenland melt currently contributes about two-hundredths of an inch (0.5 millimeters) to the annual 0.12-inch (3-millimeter) rise in global sea levels.
It looks like it'll be a while before sea levels rise appreciably.
So, does anyone have some links to actual climate change predictions, especially ones in a chain of predictions that have proven out?
I've seen a lot of "do you know what a six degree change will do to Kansas?!" But no, I don't know what that would do to Kansas. I've spent most of my life coding software, not studying biology or climate change. So please, someone, give a good couple of links to non-alarmist, non-"the coming catastrophe" kinds of articles. With predictions.
The fact that this is news (actual Mac OS X malware!) is amazing.
What it tells us, I'm not sure. Depending on your viewpoint it's either Wow, Mac OS X is so secure that it took till now to have a virus!orYeah yeah, Mac market share is so low that it took till now to have a virus.
The test of any scientific theory is its predictive ability. I have yet to see any real predictions that are less than 10 years out. While I haven't read "the literature" extensively, this topic gets enough media coverage that I would expect to hear about it (on/. if nowhere else) if someone had a track record of good predictions.
Saying that areas of the earth will become either signicantly warmer, colder, wetter, or dryer than previously is hardly a testable prediction.
Does anyone have any links to real predictions? Especially a series of predictions, some of which have already proven out?
Every year we have a cold snap, people say "global climate change". We have a heat wave -- "global climate change". Every section of the US that I've visited has the same phrase: "don't like the weather in [insert geographical area here]? just wait a day or two! yuk yuk!"
Show me the science. That means show me the testable predictions.
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Palm Source isn't owned by Palm. It's owned by a Japanese company whose name I can't remember.
TiVo's latest statement is "middle of 2006", but I think this is just buying time to keep Mac fans off their back for a while.
TiVo's hardware is unfortunately stuck in time. I just bought another TiVo (best of bad alternatives), and getting it up and running with a VoIP line was painful. At this point, TiVos should be using MPEG-4 or AVC, support HD content, have cablecard slots, and built-in ethernet and/or wireless.
Grrrr.
If Apple comes out with a PVR, I'll give away my TiVos in a heartbeat. (To family -- this isn't an offer to/. readers!)
From what I can tell, both of the above-linked apps rely on your TiVo already being hacked, with software installed on it.
It's annoying, that nobody's bothered to crack the format, probably because it's too easy to workaround on Windows. It's gotta be some tweak to MPEG2 that relies on the MAK.
Hopefully when Mac moves to Intel someone will come up with something that can do the same DirectShow filtering without actually having to use Windows.
The Prius "smart key" system is awesome. When you get close to the car, the interior lights turn on. When you touch the door handle, the door unlocks. (If you touch the driver's door handle, only the driver's door unlocks. If you touch the passenger door handle or the trunk handle, all the doors unlock.)
When you get out, close the door and push the little button on the door handle to lock the whole car.
To go, when you push the Start button to start the car, it checks to see if the key is in the interior of the car. If it is, the car starts.
You can turn the smart key system off. Then you have to actually insert the fob into the dashboard to start the car. How quaint.:-)
I absolutely love not having to take my keys out of my pocket.
I absolutely wish my house door handle were so smart.
The peanutpress DRM I helped design for ebooks was IMHO absolutely brilliant.:-)
We encrypted ebooks to the purchaser's name and credit card number.
You can lend a book to your family and close friends, either by trusting them with the unlock information, or by unlocking the book on their device yourself.
You can make backups, use it on any device our software ran on, copy portions of the text, etc.
It's as nearly perfect as any DRM I've seen. Too bad we were bought by Satan.
Slashdot Mirror
No one is going to pay $20 for a pack of AAAs that you can get for $4 and just have to replace in six months.
People already pay twice as much for lithium AAAs that are lighter and last longer. How much would people pay for something that you can recharge repeatedly for years to come, and that packs more power than a regular alkaline? Don't know, but there's probably a market if the price is "only" five times as much as regular batteries.
And don't forget about using this tech in your iPod or other portable energy-sucker. It wouldn't lose the ability to charge after a year, it would recharge a lot more quickly, yadda ya.
Last mile != backbone
Gee, no kidding. How does that address anything I had to say, or the post I replied to?
The point is Verizon is spending billions. "Last mile != backbone" doesn't add anything.
Hate to break it to you, but it wasn't Verizon.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same fiber. In all the towns around me in MA, Verizon trucks were crawling down every street stringing fiber. When I ordered FIOS, they ran fiber from the pole to my house.
Googling for "Verizon fiber cost" turns up this article, which says Verizon plans to roll out fiber-optic connections to every home and business in its 29-state territory over the next 10 to 15 years...It will cost $20 billion to $40 billion.
I suppose that's "free" for very small values of "billion".
While the link to info on CD-I (interactive CD) is interesting, maybe you were looking for the article on the CD?
From the all-knowing Wikipedia article:
At the end of the 1970s, Philips, Sony, and other companies presented prototypes of digital audio discs.
According to Philips, the Compact Disc was thus "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team."
Who was it that laid all the fiber?
I'm not being facetious; I'm trying to figure out the argument that Verizon (for example) spends billions to lay fiber to everyone's house, and then they should sell access to that bandwidth on par with what they would use it for.
Shouldn't they be able to recoup the cost somehow? Why should they be required to subsidize competitors?
Having said that, I think that once they sell internet service at a given bandwidth (15 Mbps on my FIOS plan), they should not be allowed to degrade service for Vonage or other IP service providers.
For those missing the sarcasm: :-)
Only the 17" MacBook Pro has the dual-layer burner. The 15" model can't fit one in.
I've found that taking longer and longer to get back to people effectively weans them off your support.
First time, answer them right away -- you've already done that.
Second time, take a couple of hours to get back to them.
Third, take a day or so.
You get the idea. :-)
By the time you reach stage four or five, they've realized they need to find another place to get their help.
"Let the user decide" is usually a cop-out in UI design when the developers can't agree on the right way.
I almost always advocate Finding the Right Way and implementing that. Then after user testing (perhaps through an actual release cycle) you look at the feedback and see if you made the right choice.
The alternative is a billion stupid preferences saying "does this widget do this, or this?" That's laziness on the developer's part, and it makes for crappy UI and user experience.
OK, who pushed my button? :-)
To bring it back on topic, if, after thrashing this around in discussion, one technical approach is deemed better than the other, it would be silly to include the other as an option.
Did you even read the post you responded to?
He's talking about a 4-hour plane ride in the middle of the night. Until you've tried it, shut up.
We have a DVD player in our minivan, and after you play I Spy for the first half-hour of a five-hour trip, having the kids watch a DVD is a life saver.
Otherwise, someone would have to die! (Dr. Evil voice there...)
I don't think it's that widespread, except amongst Open Source fans. :-)
The impression I usually see is that Open Source projects are done by guys who were laid off and need something to fill in the time between gaming sessions.
I once called 911 because there was a power line on the ground, slowly writhing, throwing sparks, starting a little smoke in some wet leaves. The 911 operator said I should call the power company because this wasn't an emergency. I said "you want me to wait until a little kid gets electrocuted?" She grumbled and called the power company herself. And the police -- a cop came and made sure nobody got killed while the power guys were coming.
Jeez.
I think that the quoted sentence means something like "when other codecs can beat the quality or bitrate of MPEG-2, then..." That is, when H.264 can do really clean HD video at 12 Mbps and MPEG-2 takes 19 Mbps, they'll start using H.264.
Now, I thought this was already true. But then, I only thought that from reading H.264 press releases. :-)
I believe that Tom Doherty of Tor bankrolled Baen, and AFAIK still owns a big chunk, possibly a majority.
As you said, SF publishing is a small world.
My answer is "because we stopped getting eaten if we can't run fast enough".
Most of the natural causes for physical evolution have been removed, or at least replaced with ones that are more subtle.
Our digestion is evolving? That doesn't seem as substantial as losing a tail or growing a third eye, for some reason. :-)
I'm sorry, where were the accurate predictions? The second paragraph of the actual article says
The evolution of the ice sheet, in the context of climate warming, is more rapid than has been predicted by models
From what I can tell, they missed by more than a factor of two. While that's in the same order of magnitude, I don't consider it particularly accurate.
The article goes on:
Rignot and Kanagaratnam say their calculations indicate that the Greenland melt currently contributes about two-hundredths of an inch (0.5 millimeters) to the annual 0.12-inch (3-millimeter) rise in global sea levels.
It looks like it'll be a while before sea levels rise appreciably.
So, does anyone have some links to actual climate change predictions, especially ones in a chain of predictions that have proven out?
I've seen a lot of "do you know what a six degree change will do to Kansas?!" But no, I don't know what that would do to Kansas. I've spent most of my life coding software, not studying biology or climate change. So please, someone, give a good couple of links to non-alarmist, non-"the coming catastrophe" kinds of articles. With predictions.
What it tells us, I'm not sure. Depending on your viewpoint it's either Wow, Mac OS X is so secure that it took till now to have a virus! or Yeah yeah, Mac market share is so low that it took till now to have a virus.
:-) for the humor-impaired.
Saying that areas of the earth will become either signicantly warmer, colder, wetter, or dryer than previously is hardly a testable prediction.
Does anyone have any links to real predictions? Especially a series of predictions, some of which have already proven out?
Every year we have a cold snap, people say "global climate change". We have a heat wave -- "global climate change". Every section of the US that I've visited has the same phrase: "don't like the weather in [insert geographical area here]? just wait a day or two! yuk yuk!"
Show me the science. That means show me the testable predictions.
ACCESS. See the PalmSource site.
I was going to mod this "funny", but then I wasn't sure.
You know that the underlying base of Mac OS X is BSD, right?
A friend once said "the net is large enough that somebody won't get the joke". Therefore, always use a smiley when you're telling a joke. :-)
TiVo's latest statement is "middle of 2006", but I think this is just buying time to keep Mac fans off their back for a while.
TiVo's hardware is unfortunately stuck in time. I just bought another TiVo (best of bad alternatives), and getting it up and running with a VoIP line was painful. At this point, TiVos should be using MPEG-4 or AVC, support HD content, have cablecard slots, and built-in ethernet and/or wireless.
Grrrr.
If Apple comes out with a PVR, I'll give away my TiVos in a heartbeat. (To family -- this isn't an offer to /. readers!)
If I understood this notation, maybe I'd understand this post... Anyone want to clarify?
It's annoying, that nobody's bothered to crack the format, probably because it's too easy to workaround on Windows. It's gotta be some tweak to MPEG2 that relies on the MAK.
Hopefully when Mac moves to Intel someone will come up with something that can do the same DirectShow filtering without actually having to use Windows.
When you get out, close the door and push the little button on the door handle to lock the whole car.
To go, when you push the Start button to start the car, it checks to see if the key is in the interior of the car. If it is, the car starts.
You can turn the smart key system off. Then you have to actually insert the fob into the dashboard to start the car. How quaint. :-)
I absolutely love not having to take my keys out of my pocket.
I absolutely wish my house door handle were so smart.
We encrypted ebooks to the purchaser's name and credit card number.
You can lend a book to your family and close friends, either by trusting them with the unlock information, or by unlocking the book on their device yourself.
You can make backups, use it on any device our software ran on, copy portions of the text, etc.
It's as nearly perfect as any DRM I've seen. Too bad we were bought by Satan.