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Question: what makes this device more appealing to you than a much better priced netbook? I asked because I looked at those and the average I saw with the keyboard dock was around $550. What I got instead was this EEE netbook which lets me run all my x86 software, gets 6 hours on the battery (If I use the full OS, it also has ExpressGate built in that lets me surf, listen to the tunes or watch videos off the HDD, and adds about 2 hours more to the battery) holds 8Gb of RAM, and cost me a whole $300 off of Tigerdirect. Oh and it does excellent HD and supposedly can play HL2 and Far Cry I (although I don't game on a little screen).

So what is it about the tablet FF that makes it worth the extra $250? Because I played with everything from an iPad to these cheapos and I honestly don't get it. I mean sure for specialized jobs like inventory I can see the appeal of an electronic notepad, but the 12.1 inch netbooks are both thin and light AND give me an actual keyboard and let me run x86 software. So I just don't get the appeal.

BTW if anyone is thinking of one? BUY IT. Those Brazos APUs are sweet, run ultra cool while making everything snappy, and ExpressGate rocks for when you just want to do surfing, mail, or chat. It is just 6 seconds from cold start to surfing with ExpressGate, too cool!

One of those tablets became the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. It's a gorgeous little Honeycomb tablet (currently 3.2.1) with IPS widescreen display and a docking keyboard option. It uses the dual-core nVidia Tegra 2 processor, 1GB RAM, and has a selection of ports you're unlikely to find all of on most other tablets: SDHC, microSDHC, miniHDMI, dual USB. Build quality is great and the color and texture are very nice. It has Flash and Netflix now, the full Google Android experience. The speakers are just awful, but there's really nothing bad about it otherwise. On Amazon 500+ people have given it an average of 4 stars. It's not been discounted much ever off its original $400, and appears to be selling quite well. I bought one and couldn't be happier about my return on investment - no fiddling with alternative flashing and rooting. It just works.

The next-gen version is likely to be one of the first quad-core "Kal-El" Tegra 3 tablets out this year, and rumor has it the one dock will work for both and battery life will be even better than the current 8-16 hours.

So not all of these were disastrous it appears. At least somebody got it right. I hear the Acer Iconia Tab is doing well too at its new $400 price point. Yes, the vast majority of the initial round of iPad challengers were quite wide of the mark. But we seem to be narrowing in on a family of choices that can move a lot of units at their various price points. Amazon's Kindle Fire looks to be interesting at $200.

Perhaps you should get the lyrics right. Just sayin...

Perhaps you may enjoy the reviews of this lovely product - I have the perfect gift now for my TMBG fan friends who have 3 kids.

And of course science fiction has gotten there first. The best one that I have read is "Floating Dogs" by Ian McDonald, a short story in a couple of different anthologies, including Future War (also has Second Variety by Dick and a story by Haldeman).

It is pretty easy to melt hard drive platters with a regular propane brazing torch. Aluminum melts at around 660C and I have done this to a number of drives without problem. If you don't think that propane provides enough heat then you can jump up to MAPP gas as that works with the same torch so all you have to do is change cans.

This is inexpensive and very effective. You can even do two at once with a 3" nail!

You should definitely check the DVD disks from Millenniata - they claim their disks can last centuries, if not millennia. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/08/2222208/start-up-claims-immortality-for-data-with-stone-like-disc There's a starter's kit on Amazon for just 285 $ http://www.amazon.com/Millenniata-Starter-Kit-M-WRITER-Printing/dp/B004I52204/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317326110&sr=8-1

My problem with Amazon S3 is the pricing structure. They charge for storage per month, plus transfer fees, plus system requests, and they want you to move large quantities of data using portable storage. Their pricing page says it all.

IT doesn't hurt that the Fire probably has too small a processor and too little memory to run a real browser

1.2GHz dual core ARM with 512MB of memory. That's plenty enough for a web browser. Plus, there are already multiple web browsers available on Amazon app store.

I didn't want to promote their product after catching them astroturfing, but an M-disc is a perfect solution for this.

Your point is valid, but I think you have at least one historical misconception there.

As I recall, the Conquistadors were most anxious that Red Indians should not be baptized, because they were socially restricted in the amount of inhuman cruelty they could visit on fellow Christians. Infanticide was a kindness compared to the way many non-Christians were treated.

Don't trust my unreliable memory, though. I recommend de las Casas for a first-hand description of the behaviour of Spaniards in the New World. De la Casas only presents the Spanish horror, and is sometimes criticized for ignoring native atrocities, but he's still well worth reading.

The use of SPDY does seem likely:

"Software Development Engineers - SPDY
SPDY is an open source network transport protocol which we have leveraged in the design of Amazon Silk. In this role, you will have end-to-end ownership of our use of SPDY. You will be expected to have strong familiarity with the protocol and to use that knowledge to come up with innovative ways to improve the customer experience. We're looking for strong team players who thrive in a startup-like environment where flexibility is essential and delivering rock solid, customer focused solutions is paramount."

http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/

Cross posting from my old comment. As per their help:

What about handling secure (https) connections? We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ ).

So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.

Iif they put themselves as a man in the middle that sees your banking account credentials, credit card numbers, etc, all their servers that are involved in this should be subject to the kind of security standards and regulations that are required of sites that handle credit card numbers...

What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ ).

So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.

I don't see how the decision to not include 3G in the Kindle Fire has anything to do with polish. True, your ebook reading experience isn't as seamless as it was with the original Kindle but you were compromising on that the moment you moved away from an E-Ink screen and accepted a battery life measured in hours instead of days. Unless they're buying it on pure hype, I don't think anybody is expecting the same reading experience on this device as the E-Ink Kindles, which is why Amazon still offers them. Anybody that can handle wifi on the Ipad 1/2 can handle it on this device.

You see the word "Android" once - when referring to Amazon's App Store for Android, and that's far down in the page.

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi/dp/B0051VVOB2/ref=amb_link_357575542_7?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-center-column&pf_rd_r=00NAMFF4675KA3CSQ3SB&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1321408942&pf_rd_i=507846

Funny thing is, you see "iPad" in the first feature.

Amazon is following the Apple playbook here: Focus on customer experience, and put your brand first.

What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ ).

So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200775440/

What about handling secure (https) connections?

We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com./

Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

I dunno about you but I'm not entirely thrilled by Silk here.

It's quite cheap and it's for a niche market, why would u compare it to x16 lol, it's pretty obvious zotac makes x16 cards along w everyone else, so why would you... f'in slashdot.

http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=nvidia+geforce+gt+520&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=7367667084&ref=pd_sl_4c2vcnzv38_b

For $50 to play at 1024 over 800 is probably worth it considering 800 looks so horrible.

You can get 30 days of Prime free without buying anything anyway. Note the "Start Your One Month Free Trial" button on the right side of the page.

That is false. Maybe /you/ can. I can't. I have had random Prime promotions in the past, but Amazon appears to only selectively offer them.

I mean really. Who's buying the iPad for the high quality camera and microphone.

And for the extra $300, you can buy a digital tape recorder and a digital camera, and have enough left over for dinner. I'm sure there's a site that can help you find those (except for dinner).

Obviously, you've never been a college student

I mean really. Who's buying the iPad for the high quality camera and microphone.

And for the extra $300, you can buy a digital tape recorder and a digital camera, and have enough left over for dinner. I'm sure there's a site that can help you find those (except for dinner).

Obviously, you've never been a college student

" (except for dinner)." http://www.amazon.com/grocery-breakfast-foods-snacks-organic/b/ref=sa_menu_gro12?ie=UTF8&node=16310101

Show me a better value 9.7" tablet than the iPad at $499 please.

http://www.amazon.com/ARCHOS-101-Internet-Tablet-8GB/dp/B00422W5QO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317228887&sr=8-1

And Archos 10.1 tablet for $259. Now it's just a matter of nitpicking if it's a better value or not. I can do all the things most people with an iPad do and I could almost buy 2 of them for the cost of 1 iPad.

I mean really. Who's buying the iPad for the high quality camera and microphone.

And for the extra $300, you can buy a digital tape recorder and a digital camera, and have enough left over for dinner. I'm sure there's a site that can help you find those (except for dinner).

You can get 30 days of Prime free without buying anything anyway. Note the "Start Your One Month Free Trial" button on the right side of the page.

Here's the link to the product page on Amazon if anyone is interested.

I'd like to point out the following:
1) iPhones are avaliable for almost nothing down (with contract) and an iPod touch can be ordered new for 200$
2) DLSR's are even cheaper with no need to have a contract
3) bitcoin is bullshit.

I'd like to point out the following:
1) iPhones are avaliable for almost nothing down (with contract) and an iPod touch can be ordered new for 200$
2) DLSR's are even cheaper with no need to have a contract
3) bitcoin is bullshit.

Telling you what the most important things they have to say is basically like trying to tell you what the most important thing a 2,000 year old library has to say. This book, by one of the most accomplished DSS scholars is worth getting if you are really curious:
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Sea-Scrolls-Today-rev/dp/080286435X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317177844&sr=1-2

People that keep talking about them as if they are a menace have probably never read any of them, and are probably looking for reasons to discount Christianity specifically, or theism generally. That's my hunch.

About the Jesus coming from Qumran thing. Jesus was from Galilee, born and raised. It is possible that he and or John the Baptist had run-ins with the Essenes (the group that we generally equate with those living in Qumran) at some point, either because there were Essenes in Galilee, or because John's itinerancy was in the Judaean wilderness after all, the same place as Qumran. To make things short, the message of Jesus and John were quite contrary to the teaching we find in the DSS.

In the future, as a good litmus test for these theories. Observe if the person saying them has a PhD, where they got it from, and what the PhD is in. There are all kinds of conspirators that have published outside the scholarly circles, with no peer review. They will either not have a PhD, have a PhD from some obscure Bible college, or have a PhD in something completely unrelated like geology or math.

Helmut Koester, a professor here at Harvard that has been teaching since the 1950's, and one of my advisors, has published one of the standards in the field with his introduction to Early Christianity: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3110149702

It is really unfair how good a scholar he is. He has been doing it so long he has essentially amassed the combined knowledge of two scholarly lifetimes, and it shows in his work. As far as Christianity in the East, that is East of the Roman Empire--this is the next boom in the field of Ancient Christian studies because it has not been explored that much. It's unfortunately quite difficult to give you the name of a scholarly monograph on the topic, but authors you might look out for are Adam Becker and Charles Stang. They both specialize in Ancient Christianity of the East. If you have access to an academic library or online journals the Syriac/Syrian Christian tradition and the Manichean tradition are probably what you will find the most fruitful in attempting to make any connections with Buddhism (though I wouldn't have high hopes for anything that accomplishes this). Syrian Orthodoxy is still around in India today as a matter of fact.

My Motorola docking station is pretty damn handy.

http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Vehicle-Charger-Retail-Packaging/dp/B0042I7AUE

It started out that way - but by the time Linus graduated in 1997, linux had become a huge thing, and I bet that if he hadn't made it the topic of his masters - he wouldn't have finished at all.

It started out as a method for Linus to access his work on the school Minix computers (source: Just for Fun). He later did use it as part of a Masters project for doing multi-architecture Operating systems, but that's it. It is mostly a development as a personal (prior to 1995, part-time/full-time without pay while he pursued academic degrees) and commercial (since 1995 when he's been paid to work full-time on it) project.

Reading suggestion: "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu, November 2010 http://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Information-Empires-Borzoi/dp/0307269930/ It's surprising how many people here don't know the history of telecom, recording, radio and motion pictures and how history suggests that early and active government regulation is required to avoid monopolies, cartels and barriers to entry. Government regulation can protect markets, competition and free enterprise. To many of us, the public Internet is the most important thing the human race has ever produced. Keeping an open public network is critical for human growth and free enterprise. We need to hold the FCC and carriers to provide Internet and wireless public networks that are open, regulated, common carriers for the greater public good and the greater economic good.

Yeah, because asking people to choose from six options (of which at least two or three probably apply to them -- most people who have a Facebook account probably also have a Google account, a Yahoo account, etc.) is super seamless. Like the man said, the key to usability is "don't make me think."

Not that I'm a fan of Spotify going Facebook-only -- I think it's a terrible move from a business perspective, because it means they now have a middleman standing between them and their customers, which means they live or die at the middleman's pleasure -- but from a usability perspective it's hard to argue that one button is less usable than six. And if you had to pick one of those six buttons to be the only way to log in, Facebook's massive user base probably makes it the choice least likely to result in potential users not being able to get in.

The Compleat Strategyst is an old but very good (not too mathematical) introduction to pure game theory.

Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays is a great series of books on the mathematics of games.

For AI, see previous reco's. For my money you can't go wrong with Russel/Norvig, unless you are looking specifically for AI that plays games.

The Compleat Strategyst is an old but very good (not too mathematical) introduction to pure game theory.

Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays is a great series of books on the mathematics of games.

For AI, see previous reco's. For my money you can't go wrong with Russel/Norvig, unless you are looking specifically for AI that plays games.

Martin Ford has already written a book on these very subjects that many of you might find interesting. Perhaps even worthy of a Slashvertisement as a "book review"? The Lights in the Tunnel

Err, microfilm tech was likel around at that point, and these things were so famous that folks would have been queuing up to pay for the effort to scan and disseminate them. Other methods would have been around.

It wouldn't have been profitable for those who speculated about the content in various books.

Also, in that day and age, you always have the experts go in first, make their translation, study and interpretation and dumb it down for the general populus in bookform for them to understand. 50 years ago, information was created, distributed and consumed very differently.

Relativity is based on the synchronization of clocks

This is an unfortunate and very common misconception. Most textbooks still follow the clock synchronization route to SR because that is how Einstein derived it in the first place. But as with most theories the oldest presentation and approach is usually not the best or most elegant one.

To derive SR all you need is some basic assumptions about space and time (homogeneity, isotropy) and one extra bit that you don't find in classical physics: The invariance of a particular speed in all inertial frames.

A nice presentation how this leads to SR can be found in this rather remarkable textbook that otherwise mostly deals with QM (Disclaimer: I am not the author nor do I know him or benefit otherwise from an endorsement).

Yet, there is even a more general approach to SR that can be taught on an introductory level. Here the assumption of an invariant speed is not required either and substituted by group law first principles that feel just as intuitively right as the assumption that space is homogeneous and isotrope. Namely we require that our transformations must always have an inverse one and a composition of them must result in the same class of transformations. Out pops SR.

This paper is really a thing of beauty. Professor who still teaches SR starting with clock synchronization should be punished to copy it by hand until their fingers bleed.

The sad thing is it has already been published 1976!

But to this day SR is still taught following Einstein's original convoluted path. Of course with the predictable results.

How can anyone take "cloud computing" seriously? It's really just a much less efficient version of the age old distributed computing paradigm. All it does is enable people who cannot wrap their heads around complex clustering topics to write extremely wasteful applications, and give management a new buzz-word dejour.

I take cloud computing pretty fucking seriously...

http://www.cloudcomputingzone.com/2011/04/amazon-builds-top-500-supercomputer-in-the-cloud/

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/30000-core-cluster-built-on-amazon-ec2-cloud.ars

That means... you need a 30k core supercomputer for a workday? You don't shell out hundreds of
thousands of dollars... you just pay the tidy sum of $10,232

Know what is the best thing about that?

Let's say you get 2 hrs into your sim and you realize you made a mistake in coding, forgot something,
saw initial results and realized you could trim things up to make it run better or turn out better results...

YOU TURN IT OFF AND SPEND NO MORE MONEY UNTIL YOU TURN IT BACK ON

Maybe all u cloud naysayers don't get it.

Tell ya what... http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ there is a free tier, 750 hours per month.
IF you're a numbers person you'll recognize that as safely above the 744 hours that are in a month.
However you can slice that 750 however you like... which means... you can run:
750 instances for an hour
1500 instances for a half hour or
3000 instances for 15 minutes
(you're not charged the first 10 minutes of running an instance [unless they've changed that])

try it... spark up a lamp instance, clone it a few hundred times, and hit it with a load tester,
or run something on it, see how fast you can calculate primes or find numbers in pi... I don't
care, but before saying... "I don't see how you can take it seriously... use it"

Maybe the naysayers are such because they cannot conceive of what you would use the cloud for?

-@|

Of course, once they realized that some fool of an intern ordered a Denon AKDL1 link cable (see first review)-- which of course unleashes all sorts of problematic physics-- everything became clear.

Once they replaced it with a link cable from best buy, the results were as expected.

There's a competing product that does a much better job of keeping kids from running away.

Good for you.

You're succeeding in an environment that was created by years of post-war investment in infrastructure and education, R&D, and industrialization. Pretty sure that most of that was done by people with post-secondary education.

You might even be able to coast through your career and earn enough to live on once the U.S. OAS is dead.

As a rhetorical question, are you creating anything while you're doing that? Something that will generate wealth? Or are you helping to recycle the diminishing wealth of your nation?

I suggest people read "That Used To Be Us" and then ask yourself if you are a creator or a server. Even with an IT degree, you're a server. Creators will help bring America back.

However, I seriously doubt that North American society has the desire to do what it takes to be great again. Just look at what we throw up for politicians and what we do to them if they try and do something right for our country. We have become narcissistic to a fault .

Good for you.

You're succeeding in an environment that was created by years of post-war investment in infrastructure and education, R&D, and industrialization. Pretty sure that most of that was done by people with post-secondary education.

You might even be able to coast through your career and earn enough to live on once the U.S. OAS is dead.

As a rhetorical question, are you creating anything while you're doing that? Something that will generate wealth? Or are you helping to recycle the diminishing wealth of your nation?

I suggest people read "That Used To Be Us" and then ask yourself if you are a creator or a server. Even with an IT degree, you're a server. Creators will help bring America back.

However, I seriously doubt that North American society has the desire to do what it takes to be great again. Just look at what we throw up for politicians and what we do to them if they try and do something right for our country. We have become narcissistic to a fault .

Well obviously it should be switch off during lessons. A full blown cell phone is probably cheaper than what you are suggesting.

how about this? $60. Sure not as cheap as the buy one get ones and free phones, but compared to the smartphones I've seen some kids playing with?

It's somewhat strange to compare Intel tablets with netbooks - why not with ARM tablets?

And yes, they are still more expensive, but it's worth looking at the reasons why. Intel tablets sold today are normally intended to run Win7, and do so with some reasonable performance and battery life. And delivering such on an Intel platform in a package that small is tough. You can have it for a price approaching that of high-end Honeycomb tablets, but it would sacrifice either perf or battery.

Now, with Win8, both factors are significantly affected. Battery life is better simply because Metro apps have lifecycle more suitable for a mobile device, where they can be forced to "hibernate" by the OS at any moment. Also, most APIs are asynchronous, meaning that it's much harder to write a pointless CPU-consuming loop or something equally silly. Perf is also similarly affected by designing the new stuff from scratch to match the goals.

This means that it is actually viable to make an Intel Win8 device with lower specs that would run Metro apps well and have decent battery life. It would still be able to run desktop apps - just not as well, and not for that long - but when most users would be using Metro on tablets for most of the time, it's nowhere as important.

Then also, Intel keeps saying that their next-gen mobile CPUs are so power-efficient that you can make cell phones with them. We'll see about that, but if true -and I sure hope it is - we may yet see 500g x86 tablets with 9 hours of battery life, running Win8 with classic desktop fallback.

Believe it or not, some of us actually prefer the feel, texture, and overall appearance of a BOOK. eBooks are nice and all but even when they're printed, they're no where near the same. I will admit: seeing all these Bargain Book stores around Ann Arbor and Lansing, MI selling Borders property for $.25 a piece really has quadrupled my book collection. I may die before I ever get a chance to read all of them. :)

It's a shame Amazon doesn't sell physical books then. Oh wait... http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books

It's a troubling sign of the times, I don't like seeing brick 'n' mortar book stores going belly up, I loved to spend a few hours on Saturday afternoons looking around.

An easy problem to solve.
1) Download several of these
2) Set one of those photos as your computer's desktop image
3) Glance at your desktop background occasionally while you do your shopping at Amazon.com

Also... http://www.amazon.com/X-Ray-Unauthorized-Autobiography-Ray-Davies/dp/0879516119