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Not just them, if you want a nice warm guitar sound for recording tubes in at the very least the pre-amp stage are the way to go. Like I always say "Tubes for the guitarists, solid state for the bass" as it is hard to get the lows we 5 string players hit on a tube without fuzz. Each tech has its uses.

As for TFA, could be it be they no longer have a pony in the race? IBM still sells mainframe and that tech is a hell of a lot older than the PC. Personally I see PCs growing it simply takes a little education of the public. One of the biggest niches I got going right now is HTPCs simply because most folks didn't realize how damned easy it is to hook a modern PC to a TV. and with nice triple and even quad kits starting at $200 it really doesn't take much of an investment to set up what I call a "family center PC" where you have everything from the kids DVD ripped into .avis to the wife's FB games to hubby's shooters in one location.

With Win 7 and Netflix/Hulu loaded up , I recommend the excellent tunerfree MCE all plugged into their new 1080p TV over HDMI with a wireless keyboard/mouse or this excellent Lenovo Keymote you can easily have a damned nice system that will be rock solid and last for MANY years for less than $500.

So there is plenty of market left for PCs, it is simply the PC OEMs haven't been marketing the product well. They have been pushing craptastic laptops because they know they don't last any time at all and thus can get repeat business, but folks are getting tired of spending several hundred every couple of years because those little plastic craptastics burn up or die. As for desktops for the jobs most folks have anything dual or better is "good enough" even for MMOs and the OEMs haven't been advertising how butt simple it is to turn a PC into a media center for in most cases ZERO added cost. I personally advise my customers to let me add a cheap HD48xx just for the superior gaming and HD video trascoding, but nearly every board today can do 1080P over HDMI.

But I don't see PCs going anywhere, if anything I see them growing. Now where once there was one PC you now have several, and thanks to those media tanks like WDTV and Nbox my customers are learning how easy it is to rip their media and have it all in one location which makes them want the more powerful and versatile machines. Hell I watched a customer's 8 year old walk in from school, plop down with the keymote and had her show loaded WMC in seconds. Like her mom said "Having a single machine that is so easy to work that the kids can put on a show while I'm cooking supper? Worth every penny". When she saw how her new Nbox let her hubby have all the kids DVDs loaded into a single box in the kids room to where they wouldn't have to deal with no more crying because the little one scratched Dora again? i thought she was gonna do a happy dance. Having a good HTPC really transforms a house and makes everything "click and go" simple.

So if anything I'd say PCs are gonna grow especially as all those P4s finally die out with XP and folks look to see what kinds of extra features they can get.

allright then I guess it's all good. I understand your basis, it sounds like you were just being devils advocate, fair enough, someone had to, I guess... I don't think you give yourself and other members of your species enough credit though, you might find that under the appropriate stresses you'd find your way through. Same drive that got you through college (I'm assuming since you're posting on slashdot) would likely get you through physical hardships. BTW, you could probably survive on less than an acre of land if you took care of that land like your life depended on it. Here's some discussion and a book it points at:
http://ask.metafilter.com/77287/How-much-land-does-a-person-need
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580082335/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/

available at Amazon

Grandparent was just incompetent in the search. Here's an actual USB powered vacuum

Additionally, David Wolber may just be upset because he won't be selling any more books...

You mean like this.

For only $3000 or so? It's a steal. Looks awesome, but I think I'll be watching with the naked eye this weekend.

My Nokia N810 (circa 2007/2008) http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page/B000Y4AH3C-multimedia.jpg is rectangularly-shaped with rounded corners and a headphone jack. Is that what Apple is suing about?

The source is a book called "How Much Is That in Real Money?: A Historical Price Index for Use As a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States", by John McClusker.

He used historical records to find the purchasing power of money (as close as you can figure such things; you can't directly compare things that did not exist in the past) from 1665 through 1991.

I take exception to one graph he shows, however, which is supposed to represent inflation/deflation on pretty much an annual basis, over 150 yers ago. The chart swings wildly one way, then another, from year to year. I think he was actually charting just certain economic indicators, not the actual inflation or deflation for a given year, since his own charts show those things to be relatively flat at any larger time scale.

After seeing some of the charts being referenced by a number of different sources, I had to buy the book. I'm still waiting for it to arrive. I want to verify that it shows what it purports to show.

If you look over the last 15 years, we've gone from really noddy 2D games

You mean like this 2D game starring Noddy that runs on an ARM based handheld?

To have fun, cover your Minty MP3 player with a Garmin GPS shell.

"And they do make 8Gb and even 16Gb DIMMS:
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-ValueRAM-240-pin-PC3-8500-registered/dp/B003C015ZY

But you will likely find that many (if not most) motherboard chipsets do not support them. This is a chipset and bios coding issue more than anything else."

Isn't that server RAM?

A few 8GB DDR3-SODIMMs have showed up (not really interested in anything other than laptops myself, these days), but Sandy Bridge memory controllers seem to be a bit finicky, with Intel only having specified one or two dual core chips and a few of the quad cores for over 8GB of memory.

The regular desktop space should probably have 8GB DIMMs too by now...

For those of you who are not familiar with that situation basically there was hyper inflation similar to what happened in Zimbabwe. At one point it became cheaper to burn paper money than to burn coal or other things for heating. Collecting the inflationary money from this era is an interesting sub category of coin/currency collecting and it isn't too expensive compared to other sub categories. I did it for a while and the old Notgelds could be purchased at a bulk rate of about a $1 for between 100 to 1000 of the notes inflationary currency is fun to collect since you can get some notes with huge numbers on them. I later moved on to war time currencies since there are some even more obscure ones and I was spending more on storing those inflationary currencies than they were worth (most would fit into the page of sleeves for baseball cards and the pages would cost more than the number of notes I could stuff in one).

They sell capacitive Styli (styluses?) for capacitive touchscreens. This isn't one, but you can find them. The capacitive styluses are for using the tablet with gloves on, or women with long fingernails, or people fussy about fingerprints. Capacitive touchscreens aren't good for pen input for the reasons you said - you want a resistive touchscreen for that. Resistive touchscreens aren't good for multi-touch though. It sounds like the iPad, TouchPad, Transformer, Xoom and Galaxy tabs are not for you. Fortunately resistive touchscreen tablets are much cheaper.

I haven't tried that one by the way - but search for "resistive touchscreen tablet" and you should find something that meets your needs.

Thanks! Have you tried a generic touchscreen stylus on it (e.g., http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0028YFQ5U)? What I hear is that while a lot of tablet touchscreen are good for fingers, their resolution and response time is too poor to make effective hand-writing capture devices.. All input welcome!

Voila!

Perhaps it would have been more accurate for me to say instead "victim flavor of the month". My point is that with broad enough rationalizations and definitions, ANYONE is a "victim" - which seems to suit both sides of the political fence.
Certainly they have been victims. But to suggest that 'white males' somehow float through life on a cushion of privilege, power, and ease is farcical.
As far as the last time a straight white mail was harmed by his skin color? How about 20 recent examples sustained by the USSC? http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-new-haven-firefighters-20110729,0,7391797.story
To suggest that white males aren't harmed by minority/gender hiring quotas - primarily the domain of government/education - is prima facie absurd.
Of course, the rebuttal is that it's 'compensatory' which is a pretty damn slippery slope. As far as less-formal matters, I'd challenge any white guy to walk through Compton at night. As a black man I *might* make it. Whitey? No chance.

The point is that ANYONE can be a victim, if you're enough of a narcissist. Find me an American-born black today that's actually 'suffered' from Slavery - that doesn't stop it broadly being used for crass politics and the culture of victimhood useful to the black political leadership (on the left - there is none on the right, AFAIK). For what it's worth, whites were bought and sold as chattel slaves in the North African markets into the 19th century. http://www.amazon.com/Christian-Slaves-Muslim-Masters-Mediterranean/dp/1403945519

I couldn't care less about his skin color, frankly. The PC pandering I see here is the suggestion that they might make him gay - from the Archie comic, to metrosexuals, to Hollywood, to Dumbledore, there's a clear trend toward 'gaying up'
everything pop culture. Whether this is simply a sort of race among the superficial to be au courant, or indicative of a directed effort at 'mainstreaming' homosexuality is unclear.

But I need access to a data center with thousands of servers, petabytes of storage, and gigabits/s of bandwidth to demonstrate it.

Ok done! You can find it here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Can't wait to see your demo!

This is not free, the kit to hook up to your electricity is $150. I don't purposely leave things on so I don't think I could turn off enough electrical appliances to ever save that $150, it's not like I could turn off the A/C, fridge, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986

To second that book recommendation. Great post.

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
"Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits. It is one of many positive illusions relating to the self, and is a phenomenon studied in social psychology. Illusory superiority is often referred to as the above average effect. Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error, sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the children are above average")."

A complementary regression-towards-the-mean effect is that the most really competent people tend to overestimate how competent their peers are relative to themselves.

There are two common ways around this:

One is two create a "dummy" Google Account that you use only to access things like the Android Market and Contact Sync.

Alternatively you can skip using a Google Account altogether, and get your apps from something like the Amazon Appstore. You won't have an automatic backup of your app and contact data at that point, but from there you can always root the phone and then install something like Titanium Backup.

Northern Han emigree? Let's see. Chauvinism? Check. An inability to accept even indirect cultural criticism? Check. A willingness to whine about racism? Check. An inability to articulate a contrary thought without reducing it to violence or swearing? Check.

FhnuZoag, you are a caricature of the Ugly Chinaman. Look in the mirror. You are what Bo Yang was warning of.

"People who start off vowing to "change it from the inside" almost always end up just becoming corrupted themselves."

Yes, that is a big risk. You are right that institutions have their own internal dynamics. Langdon Winner talks about this, how a person not filling their role in an organization will be replaced like we might swap out a bad memory stick in a computer. So does Noam Chomsky when he talks about "What makes the mainstream media mainstream".

There are no easy answers, though I tried to "think outside the box" with some of my essays that I linked to.

There is also some useful advice in books like these:
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
    http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun-at-Work-Livingston/dp/0937063053

But others might suggest that total institutional collapse will be the only way "forward":
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

But I'm not sure we have that "luxury" considering how many WMDs the USA has stockpiled... It would be better and less risky to find a transformational or transcendent way forward to something better.

Better suggestions always welcome.
   

Arduino killer? Maybe for .Net hipsters with over-rich parents...

No, not for .net hipsters, just for hyperbole-loving bloggers. Remember, for only $5 more than an Arduino UNO you can get a FEZ Panda. The ".net micro framework" has been around for several years (it was originally known as SPOT). Remember the Fossil smart watch? That's where this all started out.

Sigh. I wish I had a contract - my app has been live now on Amazon for 4 days or so, and I've yet to have a single download. How does one go marketing an app anyway? I'd have preferred to put it into googles marketplace, but they don't pay royalties to South African developers (guess what I am!).

Shameless plug anyway

MIT was commissioned decades ago to study the 'Limits to Growth' by the Club of Rome. The created a simulation and published a description of their efforts in 1972. Then updated the program and its parameters 30 years later and published again. It's very interesting. The authors made it accessible and understandable. The conclusions are not what you might expect, especially if you are just itching for an argument like so many here seem to be.

Man has become the dominate actor in the natural global system, and we have choices to make regarding our future. We can seek to understand our cumulative effect or we can bungle in what's left of jungle, fiddle while home burns or just party like it's 1999. If you're interested enough to read a grown up book, here's a chance.

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

Last time I checked, If I rent a web server and I create streaming content on it, then it is me and not my hosting service that create the streaming content.

If I now rent a dvd player with SSH or HTTP / SSL connection and I log into my rented box and flip the switch to start a stream, who is it that now create the stream? My service provider or me?

Notice that there is already several DVD players on the market that allows you to output the movie to your TV using Wifi and streaming:
(Example: http://www.amazon.com/LG-BD690-Wireless-Network-Blu-ray/dp/B004OF9XMI )

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

You'll get about 100 more points if you ask him on G+

https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts

One of his recent blog / G+ posts is kinda relevant to this discussion:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514

Well since Eric Raymond, who wrote the book, is using Google+ and is blogging about it (entries here, here, here and here), maybe someone should ask him.

$400? It looks like a 3-pack of upgrade licenses is $140 at Amazon. Or is that not an option for some reason?

It is only when prostitution is considered a crime by society do the incentives to commit prostitution create situations where we end up with victims (pimps exploiting runaways, sex-trafficking, etc.)

Wrong. Pimping and human trafficking are about profit, period (from the perspective of the trafficker). The risk/reward ratio, as compared to smuggling drugs or guns, is much more favorable--and a lot of cops and laypeople are not going to recognize or report trafficking. That is true regardless of whether prostitution is legal, and legalizing prostitution makes it harder, not easier, to end trafficking.

If someone can rent a girl's body out, make a fortune, never have to pay her, and have only a very tiny chance of getting arrested (because, among other things, people think prostitution is a victimless crime), then they will do that regardless of whether prostitution is legal. Even if--and I stress the if--you had great certification programs for high-end and even middle-price prostitutes, where someone actually had to (for example) check a registered database before paying, it will not get rid of the problem that puts millions of teens around the world and hundreds of thousands in the US at risk every year. It will actually normalize the activity in the minds of buyers and sometimes-unknowing rapists who can't afford the high end legalized market.

Prostitution in and of itself is a victimless crime. If two consenting adults decide to exchange money for sex, where is the crime?

If two consulting adults decide to exchange money for sex, maybe--maybe--there's no problem. But when it becomes a common practice, there is a problem. When prostitution becomes legalized in an area, demand outstrips supply, prices go up enough that traffickers move in, and traffickers also provide services that registered prostitution doesn't, such as not using condoms, etc... The result is a high concentration of trafficking and a society that, in that area, looks the other way even more than society normally does.

The problem is not the consenting adults. The problem is that most of the time, even if a buyer cares, he will not even know whether the other person is a consenting adult. It is *easy* for man to rationalize abuse and even rape. Just as it is easy for the actual traffickers to rationalize their behavior, their buying and selling of women--their slave trade.

Check out River of Innocents for a primer. Or look up the Polaris Project.

That's what I thought. Here's Amazon's best seller list in post-paid cell phones. Notice the list is dominated by high-end Android handsets. Here's an article from a while back showing the same thing.

You realize that that list doesn't have any iPhones on it at all?

from the CDN article YOU quoted:

But Amazon (AMZN) also carries mobile phones from all of the big four US carriers. Just about every make and model, with the notable exception of Apple's (AAPL) iPhone (a strange omission because Amazon carries both AT&T (T) smartphones and Apple iPods) can be purchased from Amazon.

So if you don't have iPhones to sell (or at least compare in the list) it's kinda hard to make any comparative claims.

I have no cite

That's what I thought. Here's Amazon's best seller list in post-paid cell phones. Notice the list is dominated by high-end Android handsets. Here's an article from a while back showing the same thing.

Your personal experience means squat and it would be great (and make for a more honest dialog) if you wouldn't pretend like it does.

It is possible that it was science, and then a whole bunch of name callers joined in. That would be a historical question, which has been researched. There is a book on it (which also explains the science of the name calling), but this one hour talk sums up the history concisely.

Standardising on a non-free operating system thus encouraging people to download rootkitted warez.
Most people worldwide genuinely can't pay $250+ for an operating system.

The whole 1080p thing has obliterated decent computer monitor resolutions. I don't give a rat's buttock about TVs and BluRays and home theater setups and all that crap, but the faster the mainstream media tech goes beyond 1080p, the faster I can have cheap high resolution computer monitors again.

1080 is low resolution garbage when it comes to desktop displays.

Worse than 1080p resolution limitations is the whole 16:9 craze in monitors.... what a useless ratio for work. I really would welcome back the 4:3, although I'm currently putting up with two 16:10 ratio monitors tilted 90degrees (using dual-monitor clamp and a displaylink device)

• Learning the history of how these types of debates occur
• Reading the academic discourse on the topic

A very clear pattern emerges with remarkable speed.

You are correct that a nerve has been hit -- there is plain old bloody-mindedness at play. But your analysis is wrong. Read the book, and learn the history of how the politically savvy bully scientists who are generally just interested in the facts of their domain.

Both sides call each other names.

The argument of the relative middle ground is *precisely* how astro-turf organisations like Heartland and Marshall spread FUD. They take an extreme position, drum up a lot of noise, and then watch as "reasonable" people say "the truth must be somewhere in-between". This has been documented in history time and time again, and is orchestrated by the same people. It is really fascinating to learn about how this part of the public discourse works.

One of the interesting things about all of this is that key people, such as Frank Luntz freely admit that they are manipulating the discourse on climate change, and it simply makes no difference.

The fact that he also broke all traces of the image now kinda makes it suspicious to me.

Maybe it was something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B000001FDI/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=5174&s=music

Also gold plated ethernet cables will make IE 7 on Joes laptop scream and look fluid like IE 9 or chrome.

The Denon AKDL1 is obviously the pinnacle of Ethernet cables, but no gold plating. It will make Joe's laptop scream like versions of IE that have yet to have been envisioned. For what it costs, it must use some kind of wormhole technology.

If we don't collapse economically thanks to the US senate, there is some small hope that justice and liberty can be restored in time. America needs a valid liberal progressive party instead of the conservative democrats and regressive republicans.

If you think the Democrats are conservative, the United States needs "a valid liberal progressive party" like it needs forced labor camps. You are far too ready to take The Road to Serfdom.

I don't trust either side on the science

There is only one side to the science. The other side talk and don't listen. They are not scientists, except for a handful such as Roy Spencer. You can count them on one hand, and they publish peer reviewed work, and what they publish really has nothing to do with the spin that is put on it.

You can read about it in this book if you are really interested.

As for the paranoid/cynical content of your post -- go take some political studies courses at university. It is fascinating stuff, and the world is far more interesting then we could ever fantasize about. Nothing is what it seems in politics, but at a certain level, everything is as it seems. Politics is really complex and very interesting.

I happen to have a journalist acquaintance who wrote a pretty good book about dog cloning in Korea. I can tell you you're both right and wrong. You will see the adorable beagle mentioned in the post just below. What you won't see, and (just as you say) won't want to see are the many dogs sacrificed for the project. Although Seoul and other cities are home to pampered pets, dogs are also a livestock commodity in Korea, and if you want to do a bit of research, you won't have any trouble getting all the dogs you want, and nobody will particularly care where they go.

We could've easily produced the first cloned dog right here in the United States, and researchers in Texas knew that. They also knew, full well, that Americans wouldn't stand for what had to be done in order to accomplish the feat.

In any event, if you like dogs, "Dog, Inc." is a pretty good read.

I enjoy reading the articles on Slashdot, following the links, and then looking around on the websites of the links that hold the science-related articles. Besides many of the blogs mentioned, I enjoy Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/ although it is mainly tech, video games, tech policy (I particularly like the Law & Disorder section), and physics.

Not to sound unoriginal, but that's the only one off the top of my head that I can think of that hasn't been mentioned. Before the pay wall, I read a lot of the New York Times sections on Technology, Science, and Medical Science (yes, the New York Times if heavily liberal but I don't mind so much personally - stay out of the Opinion section if you are not a fan). I also usually skim the USA Today's Science section, and read Wired, PhysOrg, and the NASA blogs (http://www.nasa.gov/).

Also, a book I am reading now called 'Who's Afraid of Schrödinger's Cat' by Ian Marshall and Danah Zohar (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Afraid-Schr%C3%B6dingers-Guide-Science-Thinking/dp/0688161073 ) is a very enjoyable overview of a lot of what they call the 'New Thinking'. Unfortunately it was published in 1997, so its a little behind (as am I), but still a very good read for the scientific layman.

One has to consider, then, why "blacks" aren't as 'smart' as whites or Asians, now, then

Go read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ideas like northern Europeans conquered the globe because we're smarter, or we're smarter because it's harder to live in cold climates are rubbish. This book is pretty long, and has big words. Don't hurt your brain.

Stephen Baxter's Titan has an asteroid being used as a KE weapon.

Keep in mind that this does not just happen in China. I can think offhand of human trafficking rings in the United States (Times Square, San Diego, LA, Ohio, Florida, the DC-Maryland Corridor, New Jersey, and many other places), Europe (Germany, Britain, Italy, Albania, Moldova, to name a few), Asia (Russia, China, Korea, Tawain) and more.

In the United States, for example, several hundred thousand teens are at high risk of being trafficked each year.

See River of Innocents for a good primer on the subject.

Glad you found that interesting, if, admittedly, pessimistic. While the text is not on his website like the Underground History of American Education book, this other book by him talks more about his own teaching experience, including breaking the "rules" on behalf of his students, and offers more solutions
    "A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto"
    http://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Teacher-American-Schooling/dp/1893163210
"John Taylor Gatto analyzes the roots of the modern American education system, detailing how it was designed to foster economic interests and facilitate management of the labor force. He then outlines ways to revitalize the system, advocating greater emphasis on critical analysis, creativity, practicality, and real-world exposure in the curriculum. He also calls on educators and administrators to acknowledge young people's need for a spiritual and ethical framework upon which to build a good life."

Another book by him as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487

It's always an issue with a problematical institution -- do you tell all the good caring people to leave and so it gets worse, or do you ask the people to care to hang in there and make it not as bad as it could have been while still letting it grind on? It's a tough situation. At least understanding it better may help in avoiding burnout. One important thing to remember about burnout is that it generally only happens to the people who really care. So, if you look around you and see people who look burned out, remember each of them was a person capable of caring and who probably still does, deep down.

Hope you and your students are getting your vitamin D if you all are indoors a lot. The human body is not well adapted to spending most of the day indoors and then traveling around in enclosed vehicles.

Glad you found that interesting, if, admittedly, pessimistic. While the text is not on his website like the Underground History of American Education book, this other book by him talks more about his own teaching experience, including breaking the "rules" on behalf of his students, and offers more solutions
    "A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto"
    http://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Teacher-American-Schooling/dp/1893163210
"John Taylor Gatto analyzes the roots of the modern American education system, detailing how it was designed to foster economic interests and facilitate management of the labor force. He then outlines ways to revitalize the system, advocating greater emphasis on critical analysis, creativity, practicality, and real-world exposure in the curriculum. He also calls on educators and administrators to acknowledge young people's need for a spiritual and ethical framework upon which to build a good life."

Another book by him as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/0865714487

It's always an issue with a problematical institution -- do you tell all the good caring people to leave and so it gets worse, or do you ask the people to care to hang in there and make it not as bad as it could have been while still letting it grind on? It's a tough situation. At least understanding it better may help in avoiding burnout. One important thing to remember about burnout is that it generally only happens to the people who really care. So, if you look around you and see people who look burned out, remember each of them was a person capable of caring and who probably still does, deep down.

Hope you and your students are getting your vitamin D if you all are indoors a lot. The human body is not well adapted to spending most of the day indoors and then traveling around in enclosed vehicles.