But the GP is talking about putting those computers to work on a problem, not about continuing to develop newer, better computers.
And if we wait before building a space elevator, how are we going to develop a "newer, better" space elevator?
The point is that you have to use what you have so that you can figure out how to make it better.
The first space elevator will probably be able to lift an anorexic gerbil into orbit. But that will give us the experience and know-how to make better space elevators.
In addition, I'm not sure the parent to your post is aware of the impact of 6 degrees of change on agricultural suitability and yields for major crops.
Care to provide some actual information or links to some?
The original article, and many others on this topic, are full of predictions of temperature increases, amounts of ice melts, etc. but are completely lacking in what this actually means.
Given the temp increases, yada ya, what actually happens? Can we no longer grow corn in Nebraska? Will Boston be underwater? How far underwater? How much does the coastline move in on the U.S.? How many people does that displace? What actually happens in Bangladesh? How long does it take for the water to rise?
I hate dire warnings with no description of the results.
Yeah, this "study" seems to be something whipped together over a weekend. Particularly:
Thus, for the purposes of this study, we were forced to restrict our searches to those queries that returned less than 1,000 results on both Yahoo! and Google.
So, anything popular gets tossed. What if Yahoo! indexes all the pages with popular search terms, but Google only indexes the first 1,000? I doubt very much that it's the case, but this whole approach seems suspect at best.
They threw out what is probably a huge chunk of the results they got, didn't tell us (that I can find) how much they threw out, then make conclusions based on the small sample left over. Seems like a very odd research method.
How can the submitter equate abortion as birth control with execution of serial killers?
The easy way to equate these is with the "all life is sacred" credo that some people profess to adhere to.
Of course, then you get into "what about bugs, grass and germs" thing, but I guess you could change it to "all human life is sacred". Then the question is, are fetuses and murderers "human"?
To me, the real question with regard to abortion is What is human? To me, a fertilized ovum is not a human, although if we had machines that could automatically gestate an ovum into a baby, I might decide otherwise. An 8th month fetus probably is human. Somewhere in there is a line which should be the acceptable limit of abortions.
Why not bump up the processor a little so we can watch Xvid and Ogg movies? Oh wait...no DRM to piss off your customers?
Yeah! Just like I can't listen to DRM-less MP3s on my iPod now! Oh, wait...
And customers are so "pissed off" that Apple just passed the 500 million song mark at the iTMS.
Give me a break.
And how does QuickTime or DRM take up "way more space than it needs too[sic]"?
I would expect Apple to use H.264, which stands up to any other codec in the quality per bitrate fight. Assuming they are actually doing a vPod, and that they can get a cheap custom processor for H.264 decoding, etc.
It'd be nice if they supported XViD, but if they don't support Ogg Snigfa or whatever the video codec is called, I don't think anyone will care. "Anyone" meaning "anyone who would be a paying customer" for a vPod.:-)
But to play internet sourced music, it needs a NIC, a hard drive and a decent prcessor. Thats a laptop.
So, clearly the iPod cannot be popular for playing music.:-)
Using the same sync model that the iPod uses, a (cheap) custom chip for H.264 decoding, and a larger color screen, a vPod could be possible. Whether it would be useful, or sell a lot is a different discussion.
Or we could be way off, and it may be an Airport Express doohickey that streams from your Mac to your TV, as revealed by as see on TV.:-)
More to the point they have failed to learn the lessons of 20 or so years ago.
Which lessons? A lot of software has copy protection on it. Most of the shareware I buy has a code I have to enter after I buy it. UT2K4 made me enter a code, then keep the DVD in the drive while I played it, at least through the first few versions. Microsoft and others have online activation crap.
All of this stuff can be circumvented, usually with a quick google.
So, it looks like the lesson learned has been "include copy protection, but don't make it too heinous on the customer, and don't bother trying to make it crackproof, because it won't be."
For the same reason you put locks on your doors (ain't gonna stop real burglars!) publishers put locks on their content.
Yes, it can be annoying, but in the days of perfect digital copies and high-bandwidth connections, keeping the honest people honest may be worthwhile. It's the publisher's content; they get to choose whether they want to lock it up or not.
Well, Castle in the Sky is one of the most boring Miyazaki movies. Even my kids don't like to watch it.
Atlantis, IMHO, is underrated, if only for the humor. Yeah, the story's nothing new, but the characters are engaging, and some parts make me laugh even though I've seen it a dozen times.
Don't get me started on the sad, sad release of Atlantis 2, or Tarzan 2, or Lion King 1 1/2, or Cinderella 2, or...
Please, show some information that supports this "fact". What's that? There is none? Thought so.
This article says that bittorrent traffic takes about a third of all the bandwidth on the net.
Now, you may think that this is from all those people downloading the latest Linux ISO, but unless you have "facts" (as you call them) to back this up, I'll believe that it's from people downloading much more popular content.
I agree. On my Yahoo page I have stock graphs (not just the quotes that Google gives you), mortgage rates, and news feeds hand-chosen from the wide variety that yahoo has listed.
I might be able to fake up some of these with tailored google searches, but why should I have to?
Also, I can't order the stock quotes the way I want; they're ordered the way google wants.:-(
I do like the layout dragging. Very nice.
Hopefully google will add more stuff to make the homepage more flexible.
I used to work with Lyman before he left the military-industrial complex to design pinball machines.
At the arcade in Tewksbury MA, he'd play a single game for a couple of hours, then take a break to smoke while me and a friend disposed of some of his free credits.:-)
He is absolutely an incredible player to watch; it really is art in motion.
Ah, the days of Terminator 2 and Addams Family. Those were good machines.
I've tried Vonage, Lingo and now AT&T CallVantage.
Vonage has good sound quality, a very nice web site for managing your account and phone features, and poor support. However, they were unable to transfer my landline phone number after 8 months, so I started looking around.
Lingo had not-so-great sound quality, never really played with the web site, and the support was pretty nice when I cancelled the account within the 30-day trial period. They seemed all ready to transfer my phone number.
CallVantage so far has the best call quality (as far as I can tell -- I never did any real Vonage vs. CallVantage comparisons), the web site is OK (not nearly as nice as Vonage, but it gets the job done), and I haven't had to contact support. They were able to transfer my landline number in 10 days.
I'm paying $5/month more for AT&T compared to Vonage, but I'm saving $20/month by finally getting rid of my landline, so I'm happy.
When I first set up CallVantage, I had to put the VoIP box outside my firewall, because the CallVantage site has to contact it to start the service. Once it was active, I put it back inside my firewall and haven't had any problems. Vonage's service and the Lingo service set up from the get-go with the box inside my firewall.
Why would anyone buy such a piece of equipment in preference over a good DLP projector?
Because a projector has to be mounted on the ceiling or somewhere, with power and video cables running to it, which many people would find much more inconvenient than having an LCD panel hanging on the wall.
For those that don't RTFA, the burgler broke into his flat on Feb 4th, 2005... and was sentenced 11 days later on Feb 15; the Brit's don't mess around!
Yeah, but if the guy who set up the webcam had actually been in the house and tried to stop the burglar, he'd be the one in jail, at least until recently.
Everything I've ever seen by him has been awful even by pulp SF standards.
Pro: Cory's stories (heh, a rhyme!) nail geekdom. My favorite is from 0wnz0red, in which the main character's CVS submit permissions are yanked. It's funny, for geeks.
Con: Every main character in every one of Cory's stories that I've read is a whiny SOB. In "I, Robot", the main character only cries once, which means that Cory's getting better.
Seriously, I hate everyone one of Cory's main characters. They're either whiny put-upon crybabies, or they're taken advantage of by their best friends/wives/other, or usually both. To me, that's the one thing keeping me from really liking Cory's writing. Yeah, the prose needs work, but that will get better with practice. Just stop making charactes that I hate reading about!
The popular Mac shareware email client I wrote about a decade ago was an SMTP server first (as well as client), then I added POP later. SMTP was the way to to transfer mail before all these fancy shmancy protocols for storing mail came along.
I tell my family that I'll support their machines for free, as long as they buy Macs. It's an absolute win-win -- if they use Macs, they don't need support, and I don't get bugged by them.:-)
My family members that use PCs either know what they're doing (more or less) or they stop being able to send email after a couple of months. Sad but true.
They assume I'm running my browser in 1200-by-whatever mode, which bites. Poor layout.
The default action when clicking on the map is to drag a selection, which I wouldn't pick as the default -- doing it by accident is too destructive to the display.
When you use the hand tool to drag the map around, all the street names disappear during the drag. Why? Poor design choice.
Sucky animated banners at the top of the page.
Map features render as overlays, popping in after you zoom out. I prefer Google's method of tiling from the center of the page on out, since that gives you all the data for the area of interest more often.
The initial zoom-in animation is kind of cool, but not really a useful feature.
The little toolbar window isn't a window. It has a title bar which led me to believe I could drag it elsewhere, but you can't.
I like the little rocket ship (is that what it is?) tool that gives you a quick zoom out and in to show context.
I like being able to point at a road and see a tooltip with its info.
Overall, map24 isn't bad, but Google has a good history of Doing the Right Thing, so they'll probably add whatever features they think they lack, but keep the interface clean.
In some areas the LEC just tells them to kiss off, we are not going to sell you numbers
Yeah, I had Vonage for 8 months, waiting for them to get my landline number transferred, but they couldn't do it. I signed up for AT&T CallVantage, and they transferred it in two weeks.
I don't know what the deal was, but I got fed up with waiting, plus getting absolutely no useful information out of Vonage support.
I'm paying $5 per month more for AT&T, but I'm saving $20 on being able to finally drop my landline, so I'm coming out way ahead.
Also, I think that the AT&T calls are clearer, but I haven't done any real side-by-side testing.
Slashdot Mirror
And if we wait before building a space elevator, how are we going to develop a "newer, better" space elevator?
The point is that you have to use what you have so that you can figure out how to make it better.
The first space elevator will probably be able to lift an anorexic gerbil into orbit. But that will give us the experience and know-how to make better space elevators.
Care to provide some actual information or links to some?
The original article, and many others on this topic, are full of predictions of temperature increases, amounts of ice melts, etc. but are completely lacking in what this actually means.
Given the temp increases, yada ya, what actually happens? Can we no longer grow corn in Nebraska? Will Boston be underwater? How far underwater? How much does the coastline move in on the U.S.? How many people does that displace? What actually happens in Bangladesh? How long does it take for the water to rise?
I hate dire warnings with no description of the results.
Use an apostrophe and an 's' to make a singular noun possessive.
"Surname" is a singular noun, the last time I checked. Ummmm, yep!
surname
I agree that the construction is somewhat awkward, but it's certainly acceptable.
Thus, for the purposes of this study, we were forced to restrict our searches to those queries that returned less than 1,000 results on both Yahoo! and Google.
So, anything popular gets tossed. What if Yahoo! indexes all the pages with popular search terms, but Google only indexes the first 1,000? I doubt very much that it's the case, but this whole approach seems suspect at best.
They threw out what is probably a huge chunk of the results they got, didn't tell us (that I can find) how much they threw out, then make conclusions based on the small sample left over. Seems like a very odd research method.
The easy way to equate these is with the "all life is sacred" credo that some people profess to adhere to.
Of course, then you get into "what about bugs, grass and germs" thing, but I guess you could change it to "all human life is sacred". Then the question is, are fetuses and murderers "human"?
To me, the real question with regard to abortion is What is human? To me, a fertilized ovum is not a human, although if we had machines that could automatically gestate an ovum into a baby, I might decide otherwise. An 8th month fetus probably is human. Somewhere in there is a line which should be the acceptable limit of abortions.
Anyway, back to the budding flamewar.
I "inherited" a set, but have never used them. Why, you ask?
Because they have a stereo jack for sound coming off them. And a composite video jack. And a power cord, going to the brick that plugs into the wall.
It's very possibly the worst implementation of a good idea I've yet seen. I'm not sure how to make it better, but hopefully Apple knows. :-)
Yeah! Just like I can't listen to DRM-less MP3s on my iPod now! Oh, wait...
And customers are so "pissed off" that Apple just passed the 500 million song mark at the iTMS.
Give me a break.
And how does QuickTime or DRM take up "way more space than it needs too[sic]"?
I would expect Apple to use H.264, which stands up to any other codec in the quality per bitrate fight. Assuming they are actually doing a vPod, and that they can get a cheap custom processor for H.264 decoding, etc.
It'd be nice if they supported XViD, but if they don't support Ogg Snigfa or whatever the video codec is called, I don't think anyone will care. "Anyone" meaning "anyone who would be a paying customer" for a vPod. :-)
But to play internet sourced music, it needs a NIC, a hard drive and a decent prcessor. Thats a laptop.
So, clearly the iPod cannot be popular for playing music. :-)
Using the same sync model that the iPod uses, a (cheap) custom chip for H.264 decoding, and a larger color screen, a vPod could be possible. Whether it would be useful, or sell a lot is a different discussion.
Or we could be way off, and it may be an Airport Express doohickey that streams from your Mac to your TV, as revealed by as see on TV. :-)
Which lessons? A lot of software has copy protection on it. Most of the shareware I buy has a code I have to enter after I buy it. UT2K4 made me enter a code, then keep the DVD in the drive while I played it, at least through the first few versions. Microsoft and others have online activation crap.
All of this stuff can be circumvented, usually with a quick google.
So, it looks like the lesson learned has been "include copy protection, but don't make it too heinous on the customer, and don't bother trying to make it crackproof, because it won't be."
For the same reason you put locks on your doors (ain't gonna stop real burglars!) publishers put locks on their content.
Yes, it can be annoying, but in the days of perfect digital copies and high-bandwidth connections, keeping the honest people honest may be worthwhile. It's the publisher's content; they get to choose whether they want to lock it up or not.
You mean like the Treo 650?
The thing's been getting great reviews. I have one, and it kicks butt. It's not the ideal phone, or the ideal PDA, but it's a very good combo device.
Whoever modded the parent as flamebait is a moron.
Well, when the parent puts "/flame on" in the post, I personally don't blame someone for modding it as flamebait.
Widespread piracy can be one way to capture marketshare, assuming it's not so bad to kill the actual business.
Atlantis, IMHO, is underrated, if only for the humor. Yeah, the story's nothing new, but the characters are engaging, and some parts make me laugh even though I've seen it a dozen times.
Don't get me started on the sad, sad release of Atlantis 2, or Tarzan 2, or Lion King 1 1/2, or Cinderella 2, or...
This article says that bittorrent traffic takes about a third of all the bandwidth on the net.
Now, you may think that this is from all those people downloading the latest Linux ISO, but unless you have "facts" (as you call them) to back this up, I'll believe that it's from people downloading much more popular content.
I agree. On my Yahoo page I have stock graphs (not just the quotes that Google gives you), mortgage rates, and news feeds hand-chosen from the wide variety that yahoo has listed.
I might be able to fake up some of these with tailored google searches, but why should I have to?
Also, I can't order the stock quotes the way I want; they're ordered the way google wants. :-(
I do like the layout dragging. Very nice.
Hopefully google will add more stuff to make the homepage more flexible.
Wow, emacs drags a 4-year-old athlon down to 1.66 Mhz? My TRS-80 Model I ran faster than that.
Now I know why I use vi, when I'm not using BBEdit.
For the humor impaired: :-)
At the arcade in Tewksbury MA, he'd play a single game for a couple of hours, then take a break to smoke while me and a friend disposed of some of his free credits. :-)
He is absolutely an incredible player to watch; it really is art in motion.
Ah, the days of Terminator 2 and Addams Family. Those were good machines.
Vonage has good sound quality, a very nice web site for managing your account and phone features, and poor support. However, they were unable to transfer my landline phone number after 8 months, so I started looking around.
Lingo had not-so-great sound quality, never really played with the web site, and the support was pretty nice when I cancelled the account within the 30-day trial period. They seemed all ready to transfer my phone number.
CallVantage so far has the best call quality (as far as I can tell -- I never did any real Vonage vs. CallVantage comparisons), the web site is OK (not nearly as nice as Vonage, but it gets the job done), and I haven't had to contact support. They were able to transfer my landline number in 10 days.
I'm paying $5/month more for AT&T compared to Vonage, but I'm saving $20/month by finally getting rid of my landline, so I'm happy.
When I first set up CallVantage, I had to put the VoIP box outside my firewall, because the CallVantage site has to contact it to start the service. Once it was active, I put it back inside my firewall and haven't had any problems. Vonage's service and the Lingo service set up from the get-go with the box inside my firewall.
Because a projector has to be mounted on the ceiling or somewhere, with power and video cables running to it, which many people would find much more inconvenient than having an LCD panel hanging on the wall.
Yeah, but if the guy who set up the webcam had actually been in the house and tried to stop the burglar, he'd be the one in jail, at least until recently.
It looks like someone hit Britain with a clue stick, finally. UK law lets homeowners kill intruders
Pro: Cory's stories (heh, a rhyme!) nail geekdom. My favorite is from 0wnz0red, in which the main character's CVS submit permissions are yanked. It's funny, for geeks.
Con: Every main character in every one of Cory's stories that I've read is a whiny SOB. In "I, Robot", the main character only cries once, which means that Cory's getting better.
Seriously, I hate everyone one of Cory's main characters. They're either whiny put-upon crybabies, or they're taken advantage of by their best friends/wives/other, or usually both. To me, that's the one thing keeping me from really liking Cory's writing. Yeah, the prose needs work, but that will get better with practice. Just stop making charactes that I hate reading about!
The popular Mac shareware email client I wrote about a decade ago was an SMTP server first (as well as client), then I added POP later. SMTP was the way to to transfer mail before all these fancy shmancy protocols for storing mail came along.
I tell my family that I'll support their machines for free, as long as they buy Macs. It's an absolute win-win -- if they use Macs, they don't need support, and I don't get bugged by them. :-)
My family members that use PCs either know what they're doing (more or less) or they stop being able to send email after a couple of months. Sad but true.
OK, I checked it out.
Overall, map24 isn't bad, but Google has a good history of Doing the Right Thing, so they'll probably add whatever features they think they lack, but keep the interface clean.
Yeah, I had Vonage for 8 months, waiting for them to get my landline number transferred, but they couldn't do it. I signed up for AT&T CallVantage, and they transferred it in two weeks.
I don't know what the deal was, but I got fed up with waiting, plus getting absolutely no useful information out of Vonage support.
I'm paying $5 per month more for AT&T, but I'm saving $20 on being able to finally drop my landline, so I'm coming out way ahead.
Also, I think that the AT&T calls are clearer, but I haven't done any real side-by-side testing.
Would some other people please hop on the torrent for the HD LoTR sample? I'm getting a whopping 1.5 K/s down and 6.8 K/s up. :-)