And yet today, in China, it is cheaper to hire a guy to turn a ball valve than it is to buy a PLC and a solenoid valve. And when competing on price Chinese manufacturing seems quite competitive with the rest of the world.
At some point I'm sure wages in China will cause this to invert, but given the growth-at-all-costs position the government is taking I doubt it will be soon. And by the time it does there will probably be another source of inexpensive labor to pick up where they left off.
I was on one of their DC-9s leaving Cape Town once and the pilot oversteered turning onto the runway. He ended up going on around, 360 degrees, never backed off the throttle, and taking off. I got the feeling that wasn't his first time.
The problem, as usual, is that the graphics will eventually affect how they look at things and silly cartoonish graphics aren't going to further anyone's understanding.
The green circles are all the same size. If the Landroid that fell down into the sewer can effectively cover the same area as the one clinging to the side of the building, this must be some new wireless LAN technology I've never seen before.
And the warfighters who are trying to communicate, they both look like Meatloaf wearing a cookpot on his head.
Why is the droid standing on the deck of cards in every graphic? Surely that must be to give us a sense of scale, to show us that we aren't talking about a regular deck of cards here but one about 2 stories tall, twice the size of our cookpot headed giant Meatloaf warfighters.
Wouldn't a line drawing of a city been better than a photo?
Anyway, I guess the thing touched a nerve. These same graphics could be done in probably half the time and be twice as informative if the emphasis was placed on conveying information instead of being cartoonish.
Please tell me that the network layout graphics in the linked PDF were not created by an adult working for the US Government.
Seriously, the little guy running with a rifle icon, that has to be from some grade school art contest. No one could possibly think those are functional informational graphics intended for grown ups.
The features they borrowed from OS X added to the desktop are awesome Yeah, just imagine if you had all the rest of OSX! I assure you, it is a much nicer experience than Vista.
I ran a couple of Vista betas and RC1. Vista's UI (sans Aero) is definitely an improvement over XP but that isn't saying a lot. Out of the box XP's desktop looked like a bag of M&Ms.
What Microsoft has yet to fix is all of the clutter. Yes Vista, I know a new USB device has been plugged in, I'm the one who plugged it in. Great, you have determined that its name is OEM CARD RDR 4-in-1. Now you've installed a drive. Now another. And then two more. Now you are notifying me that my hardware is ready to use. And if there are files on the card in the reader it keeps going. And if the files happen to be photos it is best to just unplug the machine as fast as possible.
Even with a 21" widescreen, desktop real estate (not to mention my attention) is too precious to waste by continuously blitting little messages at me from the system tray. And I'm trying to work up here, I don't want to read about participating in the User Experience Improvement Program.
Don't even get me started about managing focus stealing in any kind of intelligent way.
For my desktop purposes, OSX is well ahead of everything else. Ubuntu's latest release is quite nice, and it finally seems to be improving at a faster pace than the competition. But Windows seems to have stalled out. I haven't enjoyed using a Windows machine since the early Win2K days.
I think that is some kind of perversion of brand loyalty.
Many people derive a large part of their identity from the brands of product they buy and view any negative commentary on those brands and directed at them personally. If a guy has Windows computers, a Windows handheld, a Windows DVR, and knows a hell of a lot about Windows, and you tell him that Windows sucks he may, at the very least, see that as an attack on his consumer acumen and lash out at you.
Then you have the people driving Dodge vehicles with graphics of Calvin pissing on a Ford logo. Or vice versa. And Nascar fans. Or sports fans in general. I enjoy handmade cutlery and every so often visit web forums dedicated to just that. The brand loyalty people are there even, as this thread will clearly show.
In a psychological sense Fanboyism is a lot deeper than the article suggests, and it is a consequence of a culture as materialistic as Western culture tends to be.
In some cases yes, if you consider engineered pesticide resistant crops that can't reproduce on their own to be sustainable.
But I thought we were on animal farms, in which case maintainingwastewatersystems appears to cost too much as well.
Nevermind that factory farming leads us to do insane things: Lettuce from national fast food chain Taco Bell makes people ill all over the country. A crazy stroke of coincidence? No, they buy the most of their lettuce from one single farm in California and ship it all across America. And this isn't some secret moon lettuce from the future that chops itself, it is the same stuff that virtually anyone with a patch of dirt big enough to stand on can grow by just throwing seeds out, then kicking back and doing mostly nothing.
Taken as a whole, the practice is probably not in everyone's best interest.
If only Nature would stop producing egocentric idiots she could save herself!
You'd think something smart enough to build a Platypus would not be getting outwitted by idiots, but you sure do seem to know what you are writing about.
It is impossible to explain hunting to someone who does not hunt.
I don't speak Mande but I've had deeper communications about hunting with Mande speaking subsistence hunters than English speaking subsistence McDonaldsers.
If you think that pigs and turkeys in factory farms don't have an impact on the surrounding ecosystem you are living in a fantasy world. Many would argue that current factory farming practices are not sustainable.
I would also guess that the Inuit people couldn't care any less about whether there are enough whales to supply you with Animal Planet specials about whales to watch from your climate controlled living room. They are probably more concerned with the continued existence of whales due to their cultural connections being deeper than regular visits to Pier One's nautical themed knick knack department.
Since all we have is her decision in the case, I'd have to assume that the in court arguments made it around to the fact that TorrentSpy isn't logging connections to their server therefore the logs requested by the MPAA do not exist. The MPAA probably made the argument that the data did indeed exist (it appears the location they chose was in RAM), but it just wasn't being captured.
The order is far closer to an order to maintain logs than it is a request to pull the RAM out of the server and mail in. But being dramatic about how stupidly stupid the MPAA is and Judges and everybody but Slashdot geeks is much more fun than actually reading and understanding a court order.
What is most worrisome about the ruling, if everyone would shut up about physical RAM chips, is that a transient collection of 1s and 0s is considered a 'document'.
I have heard this Overton Window concept described many times, and thought a lot about it myself, but I didn't know that it had been formalized like this. Nice link, even if it is Wikipedia.
I'm in the US and I'm running Opera Mobile and Google Maps on a RAZR. I have no idea if my provider 'let' me, although since I downloaded them both over their data network I assume they are OK with it.
And I don't think it is significant because all it is is talk.
A man with $1.5 billion goes through Starbucks to put out an album and acts like it is some heroic act of casting off his chains? Big deal. Like Starbucks isn't another cog in the machine.
If the guy believes that the traditional music industry is a lost cause maybe he could go the Slashdot way and toss together an album in the professional recording studio he almost certainly already owns and point everyone toward the torrent. Then maybe add 'come see me live'. Then we could somehow gauge whether the business model recommendations of the Slashdot crowd, almost none of whom own any actual businesses, can usurp the RIAA's crown.
Short of that this is just grandstanding to boost his ego and thumb his nose at EMI.
And the contention that it is unreasonable to expect lawmakers to understand the law that they vote YES to is legally absurd. I agree that that is how it is supposed to be. But in a world where everything works as it is supposed to this thread wouldn't even exist. Congress would just legislate that birds sing and flowers bloom and all the water in the land was pure and drinkable, and it would just be so. Janjaweed soldiers would wake up and think This kill everybody who isn't Janjaweed thing is just fucking stupid and then they'd go back to sleep.
But in the real world, lawmakers don't even read a good chunk of the laws they pass, let alone understand them even if they could. It is absurd no doubt, but it is what it is.
Because it would be impossible for the people who pass laws to 'completely understand' every single thing they legislate about.
Here is part 85.6 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It concerns itself with the Interstate movement of pseudorabies vaccinate swine, except swine from qualified negative gene-altered vaccinated herds, not known to be infected with or exposed to pseudorabies. It has 500 words or so and it is the 6th part of a 13 part section specifically about Pseudorabies, all of which is a small part of subchapter that makes up Title 9, which is specifically about Animals and Animal Products and has somewhere around 70 of the previously described parts organized into something like 15 subchapters.
And these are just the Federal regs for animal related adventures. States, municipalities, and whatever else we've organized ourselves into also have regs about animals and animal products. We have a lot of seats to fill in the governmental machine and I doubt we're going to find enough animal experts who will show up on the right day to go over all this stuff.
The idea that legislators or judges or whomever should be experts, or even more familiar than the average person, with a subject in front of them is just not viable. Turn on CSPAN. See if you can watch that crap for 8 hours a day or however long legislative sessions last, and pay attention the whole time. The only reason I can imagine a human being voluntarily subjecting themselves to a lifetime of that would be because they see an opportunity to rob us all blind in the process. And people like that really aren't motivated to understand what a routing table is unless there is a pot of gold at the end of the routing table rainbow and they can't figure another way to get hold of it.
There is a tremendous amount of money to be made by making people afraid. The internet is just one of the many angles on that and we've hired the best professionals money can buy to legislate that fear into existence.
I'm not sure about that. Adobe's CS is a big set of apps and their user base is mostly concerned with cranking out a lot of work as quickly as possible, so any major changes aren't likely to start there.
Where you might see a glimpse of the future is with an application like Photoshop Lightroom. In terms of UI it a pretty serious departure from the CS style of having collections of buttons floating everywhere, but it still packs in most of the tools a photographer needs. While there are still things I have to use Photoshop for, and I didn't much care for Lightroom at first, after getting used to the UI and the way the work flows I think it is a serious improvement.
Backups not getting done is a certainly a problem but even for the average person at home the process for digital is easier and requires less hardward. One can buy a 500GB NAS for not much more than $100 and it will hold more digital photos than I can make with that same $ value of photographic paper, developer, fixer, etc etc. If your house burns down neither backup method will help much.
The most socially important photographic project in the history of the US, probably in the history of the world, is generally called the FSA Project. In an inexplicable fit of governmental foresight The Farm Service Agency hired a bunch of spectacular photographers to wander around the country with spectacular cameras and photograph the goings on surrounding the Resettlement in the late 30s. So the Library of Congress ends up with a quarter million negatives that end up getting transferred to various different storage areas and bunkers and such. Due to poor storage conditions most of the negatives are presently in bad shape and the only way to save them is to digitize them all. The nice side benefit to that is I can go to the LoC's web site and download hi res TIFFs.
So anyway, if the LoC can't take care of the most important set of negatives they have, I don't have a lot of confidence that too many other outfits can either. I'm less worried about backups not getting done than I am about camera raw formats. If I were out campaigning for anything in the photography world, it'd be for camera manfacturers to pick an open raw format and stick to it.
Probably for reasons similar to why people keep printing books. But despite that I would venture a guess that these days more family snapshots end up in an electronic album than a print album.
Many pro photographers, myself included, will tell you that you have no idea how good a photo is until it is printed. While that isn't necessarily true for everything it tends to hold up pretty well because the resolution of electrified displays is relatively low. What looks like good focus when zoomed in on your computer screen can sometimes fall apart in a printed enlargement.
Most art photography sales are still in the form of prints that people are hanging on walls. Increasingly I'm seeing requests for raw files that people want to serve up to screens like digital signage. I sold a few to a guy who has a couple of dozen screens built into the walls in his house and he uses a Helios system to pick which photos he wants displayed where. I think it looks half as good as prints would, and probably cost 10 times as much, but it scores some serious geekery points. I await the day he wants a photo taken with my Phase One back, I'd like to see his system handle that.
Anyway, yes, prints are starting to fall out of favor across the board. Some of us will keep shooting film and making prints from it or digital but the overall market is moving elsewhere.
Unless, of course, the Discovery documentary you watched was a propaganda piece carefully orchestrated by the FBI (or whomever) specifically designed to make you think that the magic bullet people are wrong so that you will dismiss their arguments and accept the official story!
You'll have to pardon me for that, the X Files movie is available On Demand on my cable system and I keep watching bits and pieces of it.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet today, in China, it is cheaper to hire a guy to turn a ball valve than it is to buy a PLC and a solenoid valve. And when competing on price Chinese manufacturing seems quite competitive with the rest of the world.
At some point I'm sure wages in China will cause this to invert, but given the growth-at-all-costs position the government is taking I doubt it will be soon. And by the time it does there will probably be another source of inexpensive labor to pick up where they left off.
Man, I'm glad that guy showed up to point that out because my entire life up until now didn't get the job done.
I have a Phase One P45 back and it produces DNGs around 80MB. Convert them to a TIFF and they go over 200MB.
Maybe this is targeted at professional photographers with imbecile clients who think the internet consists of only web sites?
1time pilots enjoy that as well.
I was on one of their DC-9s leaving Cape Town once and the pilot oversteered turning onto the runway. He ended up going on around, 360 degrees, never backed off the throttle, and taking off. I got the feeling that wasn't his first time.
Azikho lo nonsense, indeed.
The problem, as usual, is that the graphics will eventually affect how they look at things and silly cartoonish graphics aren't going to further anyone's understanding.
The green circles are all the same size. If the Landroid that fell down into the sewer can effectively cover the same area as the one clinging to the side of the building, this must be some new wireless LAN technology I've never seen before.
And the warfighters who are trying to communicate, they both look like Meatloaf wearing a cookpot on his head.
Why is the droid standing on the deck of cards in every graphic? Surely that must be to give us a sense of scale, to show us that we aren't talking about a regular deck of cards here but one about 2 stories tall, twice the size of our cookpot headed giant Meatloaf warfighters.
Wouldn't a line drawing of a city been better than a photo?
Anyway, I guess the thing touched a nerve. These same graphics could be done in probably half the time and be twice as informative if the emphasis was placed on conveying information instead of being cartoonish.
Please tell me that the network layout graphics in the linked PDF were not created by an adult working for the US Government.
Seriously, the little guy running with a rifle icon, that has to be from some grade school art contest. No one could possibly think those are functional informational graphics intended for grown ups.
And the green clouds?
I ran a couple of Vista betas and RC1. Vista's UI (sans Aero) is definitely an improvement over XP but that isn't saying a lot. Out of the box XP's desktop looked like a bag of M&Ms.
What Microsoft has yet to fix is all of the clutter. Yes Vista, I know a new USB device has been plugged in, I'm the one who plugged it in. Great, you have determined that its name is OEM CARD RDR 4-in-1. Now you've installed a drive. Now another. And then two more. Now you are notifying me that my hardware is ready to use. And if there are files on the card in the reader it keeps going. And if the files happen to be photos it is best to just unplug the machine as fast as possible.
Even with a 21" widescreen, desktop real estate (not to mention my attention) is too precious to waste by continuously blitting little messages at me from the system tray. And I'm trying to work up here, I don't want to read about participating in the User Experience Improvement Program.
Don't even get me started about managing focus stealing in any kind of intelligent way.
For my desktop purposes, OSX is well ahead of everything else. Ubuntu's latest release is quite nice, and it finally seems to be improving at a faster pace than the competition. But Windows seems to have stalled out. I haven't enjoyed using a Windows machine since the early Win2K days.
I think that is some kind of perversion of brand loyalty.
Many people derive a large part of their identity from the brands of product they buy and view any negative commentary on those brands and directed at them personally. If a guy has Windows computers, a Windows handheld, a Windows DVR, and knows a hell of a lot about Windows, and you tell him that Windows sucks he may, at the very least, see that as an attack on his consumer acumen and lash out at you.
Then you have the people driving Dodge vehicles with graphics of Calvin pissing on a Ford logo. Or vice versa. And Nascar fans. Or sports fans in general. I enjoy handmade cutlery and every so often visit web forums dedicated to just that. The brand loyalty people are there even, as this thread will clearly show.
In a psychological sense Fanboyism is a lot deeper than the article suggests, and it is a consequence of a culture as materialistic as Western culture tends to be.
In some cases yes, if you consider engineered pesticide resistant crops that can't reproduce on their own to be sustainable.
But I thought we were on animal farms, in which case maintaining wastewater systems appears to cost too much as well.
Nevermind that factory farming leads us to do insane things: Lettuce from national fast food chain Taco Bell makes people ill all over the country. A crazy stroke of coincidence? No, they buy the most of their lettuce from one single farm in California and ship it all across America. And this isn't some secret moon lettuce from the future that chops itself, it is the same stuff that virtually anyone with a patch of dirt big enough to stand on can grow by just throwing seeds out, then kicking back and doing mostly nothing.
Taken as a whole, the practice is probably not in everyone's best interest.
If only Nature would stop producing egocentric idiots she could save herself!
You'd think something smart enough to build a Platypus would not be getting outwitted by idiots, but you sure do seem to know what you are writing about.
It is impossible to explain hunting to someone who does not hunt.
I don't speak Mande but I've had deeper communications about hunting with Mande speaking subsistence hunters than English speaking subsistence McDonaldsers.
If you think that pigs and turkeys in factory farms don't have an impact on the surrounding ecosystem you are living in a fantasy world. Many would argue that current factory farming practices are not sustainable.
I would also guess that the Inuit people couldn't care any less about whether there are enough whales to supply you with Animal Planet specials about whales to watch from your climate controlled living room. They are probably more concerned with the continued existence of whales due to their cultural connections being deeper than regular visits to Pier One's nautical themed knick knack department.
Since all we have is her decision in the case, I'd have to assume that the in court arguments made it around to the fact that TorrentSpy isn't logging connections to their server therefore the logs requested by the MPAA do not exist. The MPAA probably made the argument that the data did indeed exist (it appears the location they chose was in RAM), but it just wasn't being captured.
The order is far closer to an order to maintain logs than it is a request to pull the RAM out of the server and mail in. But being dramatic about how stupidly stupid the MPAA is and Judges and everybody but Slashdot geeks is much more fun than actually reading and understanding a court order.
What is most worrisome about the ruling, if everyone would shut up about physical RAM chips, is that a transient collection of 1s and 0s is considered a 'document'.
I have heard this Overton Window concept described many times, and thought a lot about it myself, but I didn't know that it had been formalized like this. Nice link, even if it is Wikipedia.
I'm in the US and I'm running Opera Mobile and Google Maps on a RAZR. I have no idea if my provider 'let' me, although since I downloaded them both over their data network I assume they are OK with it.
And I don't think it is significant because all it is is talk.
A man with $1.5 billion goes through Starbucks to put out an album and acts like it is some heroic act of casting off his chains? Big deal. Like Starbucks isn't another cog in the machine.
If the guy believes that the traditional music industry is a lost cause maybe he could go the Slashdot way and toss together an album in the professional recording studio he almost certainly already owns and point everyone toward the torrent. Then maybe add 'come see me live'. Then we could somehow gauge whether the business model recommendations of the Slashdot crowd, almost none of whom own any actual businesses, can usurp the RIAA's crown.
Short of that this is just grandstanding to boost his ego and thumb his nose at EMI.
But in the real world, lawmakers don't even read a good chunk of the laws they pass, let alone understand them even if they could. It is absurd no doubt, but it is what it is.
Because a more direct and effective route would be to skip right over religion and go straight to being be anti-falsehood promotion?
Because it would be impossible for the people who pass laws to 'completely understand' every single thing they legislate about.
Here is part 85.6 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It concerns itself with the Interstate movement of pseudorabies vaccinate swine, except swine from qualified negative gene-altered vaccinated herds, not known to be infected with or exposed to pseudorabies. It has 500 words or so and it is the 6th part of a 13 part section specifically about Pseudorabies, all of which is a small part of subchapter that makes up Title 9, which is specifically about Animals and Animal Products and has somewhere around 70 of the previously described parts organized into something like 15 subchapters.
And these are just the Federal regs for animal related adventures. States, municipalities, and whatever else we've organized ourselves into also have regs about animals and animal products. We have a lot of seats to fill in the governmental machine and I doubt we're going to find enough animal experts who will show up on the right day to go over all this stuff.
The idea that legislators or judges or whomever should be experts, or even more familiar than the average person, with a subject in front of them is just not viable. Turn on CSPAN. See if you can watch that crap for 8 hours a day or however long legislative sessions last, and pay attention the whole time. The only reason I can imagine a human being voluntarily subjecting themselves to a lifetime of that would be because they see an opportunity to rob us all blind in the process. And people like that really aren't motivated to understand what a routing table is unless there is a pot of gold at the end of the routing table rainbow and they can't figure another way to get hold of it.
There is a tremendous amount of money to be made by making people afraid. The internet is just one of the many angles on that and we've hired the best professionals money can buy to legislate that fear into existence.
I'm not sure about that. Adobe's CS is a big set of apps and their user base is mostly concerned with cranking out a lot of work as quickly as possible, so any major changes aren't likely to start there.
Where you might see a glimpse of the future is with an application like Photoshop Lightroom. In terms of UI it a pretty serious departure from the CS style of having collections of buttons floating everywhere, but it still packs in most of the tools a photographer needs. While there are still things I have to use Photoshop for, and I didn't much care for Lightroom at first, after getting used to the UI and the way the work flows I think it is a serious improvement.
Backups not getting done is a certainly a problem but even for the average person at home the process for digital is easier and requires less hardward. One can buy a 500GB NAS for not much more than $100 and it will hold more digital photos than I can make with that same $ value of photographic paper, developer, fixer, etc etc. If your house burns down neither backup method will help much.
The most socially important photographic project in the history of the US, probably in the history of the world, is generally called the FSA Project. In an inexplicable fit of governmental foresight The Farm Service Agency hired a bunch of spectacular photographers to wander around the country with spectacular cameras and photograph the goings on surrounding the Resettlement in the late 30s. So the Library of Congress ends up with a quarter million negatives that end up getting transferred to various different storage areas and bunkers and such. Due to poor storage conditions most of the negatives are presently in bad shape and the only way to save them is to digitize them all. The nice side benefit to that is I can go to the LoC's web site and download hi res TIFFs.
So anyway, if the LoC can't take care of the most important set of negatives they have, I don't have a lot of confidence that too many other outfits can either. I'm less worried about backups not getting done than I am about camera raw formats. If I were out campaigning for anything in the photography world, it'd be for camera manfacturers to pick an open raw format and stick to it.
Probably for reasons similar to why people keep printing books. But despite that I would venture a guess that these days more family snapshots end up in an electronic album than a print album.
Many pro photographers, myself included, will tell you that you have no idea how good a photo is until it is printed. While that isn't necessarily true for everything it tends to hold up pretty well because the resolution of electrified displays is relatively low. What looks like good focus when zoomed in on your computer screen can sometimes fall apart in a printed enlargement.
Most art photography sales are still in the form of prints that people are hanging on walls. Increasingly I'm seeing requests for raw files that people want to serve up to screens like digital signage. I sold a few to a guy who has a couple of dozen screens built into the walls in his house and he uses a Helios system to pick which photos he wants displayed where. I think it looks half as good as prints would, and probably cost 10 times as much, but it scores some serious geekery points. I await the day he wants a photo taken with my Phase One back, I'd like to see his system handle that.
Anyway, yes, prints are starting to fall out of favor across the board. Some of us will keep shooting film and making prints from it or digital but the overall market is moving elsewhere.
Almost certainly plenty of people cheered Lincoln's death back then, they just weren't the people who wrote our history books.
Even today there are people who can make a convincing case that Lincoln was just as crooked and underhanded, if not more so, than Bush.
Unless, of course, the Discovery documentary you watched was a propaganda piece carefully orchestrated by the FBI (or whomever) specifically designed to make you think that the magic bullet people are wrong so that you will dismiss their arguments and accept the official story!
You'll have to pardon me for that, the X Files movie is available On Demand on my cable system and I keep watching bits and pieces of it.