gallerytungsten

Only 24GB of RAM?

The current Mac Pro officially supports 64GB and 3rd parties offer upgrades to 128GB.

Even the 2006 models can be upgraded to 32GB.

You build your house in an area that is not governed by a building code. No permits, no inspections, do your own thing at your own risk. This generally means a rural area.

In addition to the other replies, Final Draft gives you "industry standard" formatting; and easy file interchange within the industry.

It appears Hotz will now deploy his system in China, where the regulations on such devices are surely more lax. Looks like a good move for extended testing without pesky government scrutiny.

re: what's the big deal with a DSLR?

1. Full manual control. I can dial in exactly the combination of f-stop and exposure that I want.

2. Manual focus. With a split-ring screen in the viewfinder, focus can be very precise and exactly where I want it. Both for getting the right part of the image sharp, and controlling depth of field.

3. Interchangeable prime lenses. Changing lenses makes a big difference in the results. Different lenses do different things: a fisheye, a wide-angle, a macro lense; each is really great in one particular area.

4. Lots of accessories. You can turn a DSLR into a decent rig for shooting pro quality videos or a low budget film, if that's your thing. You can add extra batteries, extra storage, and so on.

You know what word doesn't appear in that story?

Spam.

Mailchimp is a company that provides lots of unsolicited commercial emails. In other words, spam. You can dress it up and call it "marketing software for small businesses" but that doesn't change the essential fact: Mailchamp is a spammer. Is it any surprise that spamming is profitable?

I've received hundreds of Mailchimp emails. Not once did I sign up for any of those lists.

Does Mailchimp make it easy to unsubscribe? Sure. But that doesn't change the fact that they are spammers, and that if you want to send spam with some semi-plausible deniability that you're a spammer, Mailchimp is probably a good choice.

Of course, this story, like nearly all "business news" stories, is very likely the work of a highly paid public relations agency. That is one more reason that the word "spam" does not appear in this story.

An article from the recording world, with a similar perspective:

http://tapeop.com/columns/end-rant/115/

I have a Powerbook G3, running Word 5.1 on OS 9. The sole function is "writing machine." It's around 20 years old, and still runs just fine. It's a lot more convenient than an IBM Selectric, although not quite as fast. The Selectric never lagged.

re: FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits

The "good bits" are things like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark.

Sure, I'm aware there are alternatives like Gimp and [whatever]. But the alternatives are kludges for edge case experts; and not for people who need to Get Stuff Done.

PS. I operate a FreeBSD server. It's great for that.

We see these stories over and over.

The lesson is obvious: host your most important content on your own server that you control; and make backups.

Some people will say that self-hosting isn't a practical solution. But when the alternative is the potential for devastating data loss, it seems eminently reasonable.

It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

If academics got organized to the point of establishing new journals, with legit peer review, they could make all of the information free. Which it wants to be, right?

Obviously, there is the problem of establishing the credibility of these new "free journals," which is a serious obstacle for the reputation-based "publish or perish" pecking order of academia.

But once such a movement is established, it could eventually crush the paid journals and their rent-seeking profits. The captive journals would also eventually emancipate themselves and come around to this free information model.

Since such free journal articles would also be available on sites like Sci-Hub, the transition to (almost) totally free academic publishing could be unstoppable.

Gold is found on printed circuit boards and components, typically used to electroplate connectors, so that they won't fail due to corrosion.

"The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it."

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore

Shades of the Soviet Union, which required passports for internal travel.

Is it society that would be benefiting from Harsh taking away Keen's domain? Or is it Harsh? By defining the benefit as being to "society" one might sound noble while masking the reality: Harsh is attempting to steal Keen's domain name in a sleazy and opportunistic fashion. Defining this kind of hijacking as a benefit to society is misdirection at best.

I was about to post the exact same thought. Obviously, there is a gem of an idea here. Who will MVP the Startup Pranking website first?

USA absinthe is nothing like the real thing - it is more like drinking Pernod. In Switzerland, where Absinthe originates, the thujone level is 100x (?) what you get in the u.s.

Sorry, but this is not close to being correct. Thujone is largely left behind by the distillation process as it's a heavy compound. Tests of decades-old pre-ban absinthes gave the same results. Modern tests by GC-MS (required by the Feds for US absinthe approval) prove the same thing. The idea of heavy thujone content is largely a marketing tactic, used to hype some Euro absinthes. The quality of US absinthes is very high. There are some one hundred of them distilled in the USA, and many are based on traditional French recipes from the 1800s.

Source: I distill absinthe.

List of USA absinthes: http://realabsinthe.blogspot.com/2008/07/list-of-absinthes-a...

TTB Circular regarding absinthe: http://www.ttb.gov/industry_circulars/archives/2007/07-05.ht...

Magic is really just a concierge service via text message. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not revolutionary.

To really make it work and to scale rapidly, they might think about a franchise model, so that franchises can be started in numerous locations by people who actually know the local area.

Magic could make plenty of money providing a reliable and customizable back-end service for local operators.

I used to have this great little compact cell phone made by Sony. At some point, it just stopped making calls, and Sprint's explanation was that their network no longer supported this phone.

Gomorrah is easily one of the best books I've read (and re-read) in the last ten years. Saviano beautifully sums up why at the end of the article.

"This is the power of the non‑fiction novel, the kind of book I’ve tried to write. To tell true stories with the rigour of a journalist and the literary style of a novelist."

Have you ever tried to copy a painting? Try it sometime, you'll learn a lot.

It appears that there is a huge business opportunity for someone to find a way to defeat this type of tracking. Of course, it would probably need to be a subscription type of service, which bodes well for steady recurring revenue.

This used to be published as "Survival, Evasion, and Escape" with the same field manual number. I have an old printed copy dated 1969 which includes the missing Evasion and Escape sections.

For far more than a hint, I recommend reading all four of James Bamford's books.

If you want to distill fuel alcohol, you do need a permit. Without a permit, it's illegal.

I mentioned fire in relation to a "problem" with home distilling, not as a legal issue, although fire codes related to distilling are quite extensive and restrictive.

I also mentioned the revenue issue in several other comments.

The so-called "moral" issue is generally only relevant to consumption, not distilling, and only at the state level or below, where some states have "dry" counties and other restrictions on access.

In the case of freeze distillation, the punishment would be for evasion of (Federal and state) excise taxes, along with distillation without the proper permits. If some law enforcement agency busted your freezer, they'd probably come up with some other violations on top of those obvious ones.

In reality, I think the likelihood of a "freezer bust" and consequent punishment is pretty low. Moonshine busts are generally carried out on the state level, and the typical charges are possession and transportation of untaxed spirits.

I mentioned fires as a point I would be concerned about.

While distilling is heavily regulated at the Federal, state, and local levels, the Feds did not ban it due to concerns over fire safety. Rather, a chief reason is "to protect the revenue," which, in the case of Federal excise taxes, is substantial. ($13.50 per proof gallon; a proof gallon is 1 gallon at 50% ABV.)

The Feds don't really concern themselves with fire safety. Rather, just as you desire, that's regulated at the state and local level. The TTB outlook is that you have to satisfy the local and state levels as far as fire safety is concerned.

Among other reasons, it's relatively easily to have a catastrophic fire. Unlike winemaking and brewing, where your end product will be in the range of 4% to 13% ABV, which generally won't burn, you can easily distill to 150 proof (75% ABV) with a simple pot still (or 190 proof with a column still).

150 proof is a highly flammable liquid. The vapor is flammable. If you have a vapor leak it can ignite. The flame is invisible. In other words, it's not something to take lightly.

In the micro distilling industry, I personally know of a half dozen fires over the past couple years. It's easy for something to go wrong very, very quickly.

Here is an article on the most recent fire: http://newsok.com/blast-rocks-moore-distillery/article/49079...

A brief trip to the AmazonSupply site reveals that it's definitely not ready for prime time. After doing an initial search, a somewhat random selection of products in the category were displayed. But whenever I clicked through to the detail page, I got an error that the page did not exist.

Also, there was one really hilarious whopper in the story that deserves some attention:

"If there’s one company standing in Amazon’s way, it’s Chicago-based industrial supplies giant W.W. Grainger. With $9.4 billion in revenues it’s definitely the business to beat, controlling an estimated 6% of the entire B2B market. With a robust e-commerce operation."

While Grainger is a serious competitor, their actual competitive advantage is that they have numerous local outlets that you can actually visit. If the local store doesn't have something, they'll send it to your local store at no charge.

With that said, Grainger's site isn't particularly great, although visiting it just now, it seems they may have improved the usability a bit. I'd hardly characterize it as a "robust e-commerce operation."

The real competitor, at least on the web, is McMaster-Carr. Their product selection is vast; their prices are usually better than Grainger; their delivery is incredibly speedy, with orders typically arriving the next day, even with standard shipping. On top of that, their site is amazingly good for drilling down and finding exactly what you need.

I used to deal with this issue of PC PageMaker disks in a Mac & Quark world at a service bureau back in the day. The problem was that PageMaker had unpredictable results when printing to an imagesetter.

I would open the file in Mac PageMaker, delete all the graphics, save the pages as EPS, then rebuild in Quark. Quark had this great Xtension that let you place the output with great precision on the imagesetter film roll.