Portable desktop indeed, and better for LAN parties!
I've preferred laptops almost exclusively since 1999. My current machine now is as follows:
* OS: Windows XP Pro (yes, yes, I know)
* CPU: Pentium M 770(2.13GHz), 533MHz FSB
* Chipset: Intel 915PM+ICH6M
* HDD: 100GB Seagate 5400RPM
* RAM: Kingston 1GB DDR2 533, x2
* Video Card: nVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 128MB
* Other: Logitech MX518.
It may not sound like much, but it plays Oblivion, the HL2 episodes and Doom 3 at average-ish quality, and far better than my fiance's desktop computer. I've seen it out perform computers with processors up to 2.6ghz with slightly better video cards, mainly because it was a fairly dry minimum windows install, and thus has fewer background processes. It has a beautiful high-rez wide screen, which accommodates a full size keyboard. I keep it propped up at an angle (the only thing the vantec lapcool is good for) and at a good height to make it fairly ergonomic - history of carpal tunnel, and I don't even notice. Plus, I can take it back and forth when I travel between college and my home state (which said fiance lives in) with relative ease. I haven't had a wireless problem since the last time I updated the driver for my card. That's the number one problem I've run into, both for myself and in helping others - severely out of date NIC drivers. Other than that, it's got the convenience of portability, plus the comfort of a desktop. All this is accomplished using only accessories that do, in fact, fit in the average laptop carrying case. Maybe that's the future: sacrifice the quest for the newest mini-something in order to have comfort, quality AND convenience.
Hey now!
I got forced into moving to a fairly remote area of the deep south about a year ago.
Some of the locals would try to take you to court for using images of their family like that!
Lucky for you, I don't think many of them are/. readers. The internet is so new here, this county only got cable modems within the last two years.
See, you're ignoring the percentage of us with 3 ghz processors, 2-4 gb ram, and reasonable video cards... stuffed into a laptop. How do you know the laptop won't just replace the desktop? The only thing that makes it difficult is inadequate cooling, and in time, I'm sure we can fix that.
I'm currently typing on a laptop capable of playing oblivion at almost full quality, and I'm not the only college student I know who does. It makes getting together a LAN party so much easier...
a) You can't spell. Or use grammar. "why it work"?
b) I know that's how we discover new drugs, because I spent a good chunk of my late childhood as a lab rat for new drugs for tourettes syndrome. Turns out, those drugs made me lose my physical sense of balance, and were eventually used to treat a completely unrelated disorder. Don't tell me that's not how we do this, because it is. Experimental medicine is VERY real, and regular patients get treated with it all the time, in spite of the risks.
I wish someone would have made this distinction.
I use herbal medicine on a somewhat-regular basis, and I somewhat resent how much it gets mixed in with homeopathy.
Plants certainly do have measurable results. Mainstream culture mostly remembers the bad ones. (see: marijuana, opium, morphine, ephedra) This then, is certainly not meaningless quackery, and does not deserve to get mixed in with homeopathy, even though both technically fall under the "Alternative Medicine" umbrella.
Most of our drugs are based on isolating one or two chemicals from a plant, making them more concentrated, and then finding out what they do. Granted, we've made a lot of progress that way, but that doesn't negate the fact that we DO NOT make drugs based on what we need to cure, but rather discover the drug and then figure out what, if anything, it cures. If we're unlucky, though, we've just discovered new ways to cause death.
If you ask me, all science has an element of a leap of faith to it. We often do stupid irrational things to reach new discoveries, and ingesting unknown substances is one of the biggest... but the payoff! A moment of awe when we figure out even just one piece of this incredible puzzle, when we look at the code of life itself and actually understand a small fraction of it for the first time. While I don't like homeopathy, psychics, etc, I also don't like it when someone on the opposite end of the spectrum forgets that we don't know everything. It's neither all mystery nor mostly-discovered. Too many people categorize and reject - and this goes for those who reject science as well as those who claim All alternative medicine is like homeopathy, or that it's all placebo effect. I love skepticism. Without it, we would not have healthy minds. I love mystery. Without it life would lose some of it's beauty.
Long live discovery.
I can understand that it would be dehumanizing when it comes to kids, but I'm suprised no one pointed out one of the obvious, more "human" benefits of robots working with the elderly. It helps them retain dignity and a sense of pride / self sufficiency. They don't have to feel like they have to be asking a human for help all the time. Also, with the more... incapable ones... they also don't have to feel demeaned by such things as having a human bathe them, etc. once the technology gets to a higher level. It's a machine, a tool, like a shower, or a bathtub, or the tv - which they're used to already - so it wouldn't have feel scary or like an invasion of privacy if done right. Humans, however, by definition, invade privacy by being present at embarassing times.
It's about a lust for power. As a libertarian, I tend to be
fair to capitalism, as long as it stays within the
boundaries of good ethics.
During the industrial revolution and earlier part of the last
century, it was more simple. Your mind designed something-
a lightbulb, the first radio, you produced a prototype, you
hired people to produce more, and you got paid based on the
value of your ideas, and the value of your products - the
catch being that competetors are too. You build a
mousetrap, and if they build a better one... well, the
power's in the hands of the customers.
Then we evolved mass media advertising, technology, and
non-tangible goods, and things became more complicated.
Market visibility becomes an issue as the marketplace
becomes wider. So little people who are hardworking and
make good products and want to compete start hiring the big
people to help them with this... some to help them become
visible, and others as a shield help to protect them legally. This becomes
more and more of a corporate thing, and the little people
tend to become just visible enough to get bought out, and
the larger companies show off what the little companies did
and say "see, we can take credit for this now." In the
meantime the little company sadly, in some cases, mutates
to the form of "productivity" the new parent company had:
producing mostly crap, but lots of it.
Then you get people like the RIAA, doing this for musicians
or the movie industry. But with digital media becoming
prevalent, they don't have as much to hold on to.
At the billion dollar level, it's not about the few hundred
thousand. It's about control. File sharing deals a blow
because the most popular files are the easiest ones to
find... the catch being if you want to find music by an
obscure enough artist, you *have* to buy it. This
eventually leads to musicians who are outside the "current
realm of control" getting enough money to do things like
produce videos, which gets them seen... which is a threat
if they don't have a sellout pricetag. The RIAA doesn't
want enough competetors joining together to produce a
bigger competetor that could take them down off their high
mountain.
Good capitalism wants its competitor to have enough of a
chance to make life interesting, but will work hard to beat
it. This "working hard" should not involve dirty tricks or
absolute control of the media outlets used to advertise,
but the problem here is that the industry in question IS
the media. It turns business into little more than
politics, which is part of why the american system is in
need of reform.
This is all IMHO, though, since I'm neither a lawyer nor in
the media.
If the uninformed stayed home, a third party would stand a better chance.
After all, the uninformed tend to run in packs.
Most of the people who vote a straight party ticket aren't necessairly all that informed either. They're just following propaganda.
"I'm a Republican becuse Jesus is too! And they stand for family! And I love my family! And I hate taxes!"
"I'm a Democrat because otherwise children would starve, we'd always be at war, and the minorites would be put in concentration camps!"
I'd be willing to bet at least half of the voters for both don't really think beyond slogans, but then, that's politics.
Slashdot Mirror
Portable desktop indeed, and better for LAN parties!
I've preferred laptops almost exclusively since 1999. My current machine now is as follows:
* OS: Windows XP Pro (yes, yes, I know)
* CPU: Pentium M 770(2.13GHz), 533MHz FSB
* Chipset: Intel 915PM+ICH6M
* HDD: 100GB Seagate 5400RPM
* RAM: Kingston 1GB DDR2 533, x2
* Video Card: nVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 128MB
* Other: Logitech MX518.
It may not sound like much, but it plays Oblivion, the HL2 episodes and Doom 3 at average-ish quality, and far better than my fiance's desktop computer. I've seen it out perform computers with processors up to 2.6ghz with slightly better video cards, mainly because it was a fairly dry minimum windows install, and thus has fewer background processes. It has a beautiful high-rez wide screen, which accommodates a full size keyboard. I keep it propped up at an angle (the only thing the vantec lapcool is good for) and at a good height to make it fairly ergonomic - history of carpal tunnel, and I don't even notice. Plus, I can take it back and forth when I travel between college and my home state (which said fiance lives in) with relative ease. I haven't had a wireless problem since the last time I updated the driver for my card. That's the number one problem I've run into, both for myself and in helping others - severely out of date NIC drivers. Other than that, it's got the convenience of portability, plus the comfort of a desktop. All this is accomplished using only accessories that do, in fact, fit in the average laptop carrying case. Maybe that's the future: sacrifice the quest for the newest mini-something in order to have comfort, quality AND convenience.
Hey now!
/. readers. The internet is so new here, this county only got cable modems within the last two years.
I got forced into moving to a fairly remote area of the deep south about a year ago.
Some of the locals would try to take you to court for using images of their family like that!
Lucky for you, I don't think many of them are
See, you're ignoring the percentage of us with 3 ghz processors, 2-4 gb ram, and reasonable video cards... stuffed into a laptop. How do you know the laptop won't just replace the desktop? The only thing that makes it difficult is inadequate cooling, and in time, I'm sure we can fix that.
I'm currently typing on a laptop capable of playing oblivion at almost full quality, and I'm not the only college student I know who does. It makes getting together a LAN party so much easier...
a) You can't spell. Or use grammar. "why it work"? b) I know that's how we discover new drugs, because I spent a good chunk of my late childhood as a lab rat for new drugs for tourettes syndrome. Turns out, those drugs made me lose my physical sense of balance, and were eventually used to treat a completely unrelated disorder. Don't tell me that's not how we do this, because it is. Experimental medicine is VERY real, and regular patients get treated with it all the time, in spite of the risks.
I wish someone would have made this distinction. I use herbal medicine on a somewhat-regular basis, and I somewhat resent how much it gets mixed in with homeopathy. Plants certainly do have measurable results. Mainstream culture mostly remembers the bad ones. (see: marijuana, opium, morphine, ephedra) This then, is certainly not meaningless quackery, and does not deserve to get mixed in with homeopathy, even though both technically fall under the "Alternative Medicine" umbrella. Most of our drugs are based on isolating one or two chemicals from a plant, making them more concentrated, and then finding out what they do. Granted, we've made a lot of progress that way, but that doesn't negate the fact that we DO NOT make drugs based on what we need to cure, but rather discover the drug and then figure out what, if anything, it cures. If we're unlucky, though, we've just discovered new ways to cause death. If you ask me, all science has an element of a leap of faith to it. We often do stupid irrational things to reach new discoveries, and ingesting unknown substances is one of the biggest... but the payoff! A moment of awe when we figure out even just one piece of this incredible puzzle, when we look at the code of life itself and actually understand a small fraction of it for the first time. While I don't like homeopathy, psychics, etc, I also don't like it when someone on the opposite end of the spectrum forgets that we don't know everything. It's neither all mystery nor mostly-discovered. Too many people categorize and reject - and this goes for those who reject science as well as those who claim All alternative medicine is like homeopathy, or that it's all placebo effect. I love skepticism. Without it, we would not have healthy minds. I love mystery. Without it life would lose some of it's beauty. Long live discovery.
I can understand that it would be dehumanizing when it comes to kids, but I'm suprised no one pointed out one of the obvious, more "human" benefits of robots working with the elderly. It helps them retain dignity and a sense of pride / self sufficiency. They don't have to feel like they have to be asking a human for help all the time. Also, with the more... incapable ones... they also don't have to feel demeaned by such things as having a human bathe them, etc. once the technology gets to a higher level. It's a machine, a tool, like a shower, or a bathtub, or the tv - which they're used to already - so it wouldn't have feel scary or like an invasion of privacy if done right. Humans, however, by definition, invade privacy by being present at embarassing times.
It's not about greed...
It's about a lust for power. As a libertarian, I tend to be fair to capitalism, as long as it stays within the boundaries of good ethics.
During the industrial revolution and earlier part of the last century, it was more simple. Your mind designed something- a lightbulb, the first radio, you produced a prototype, you hired people to produce more, and you got paid based on the value of your ideas, and the value of your products - the catch being that competetors are too. You build a mousetrap, and if they build a better one... well, the power's in the hands of the customers.
Then we evolved mass media advertising, technology, and non-tangible goods, and things became more complicated. Market visibility becomes an issue as the marketplace becomes wider. So little people who are hardworking and make good products and want to compete start hiring the big people to help them with this... some to help them become visible, and others as a shield help to protect them legally. This becomes more and more of a corporate thing, and the little people tend to become just visible enough to get bought out, and the larger companies show off what the little companies did and say "see, we can take credit for this now." In the meantime the little company sadly, in some cases, mutates to the form of "productivity" the new parent company had: producing mostly crap, but lots of it.
Then you get people like the RIAA, doing this for musicians or the movie industry. But with digital media becoming prevalent, they don't have as much to hold on to.
At the billion dollar level, it's not about the few hundred thousand. It's about control. File sharing deals a blow because the most popular files are the easiest ones to find... the catch being if you want to find music by an obscure enough artist, you *have* to buy it. This eventually leads to musicians who are outside the "current realm of control" getting enough money to do things like produce videos, which gets them seen... which is a threat if they don't have a sellout pricetag. The RIAA doesn't want enough competetors joining together to produce a bigger competetor that could take them down off their high mountain.
Good capitalism wants its competitor to have enough of a chance to make life interesting, but will work hard to beat it. This "working hard" should not involve dirty tricks or absolute control of the media outlets used to advertise, but the problem here is that the industry in question IS the media. It turns business into little more than politics, which is part of why the american system is in need of reform.
This is all IMHO, though, since I'm neither a lawyer nor in the media.
If the uninformed stayed home, a third party would stand a better chance. After all, the uninformed tend to run in packs. Most of the people who vote a straight party ticket aren't necessairly all that informed either. They're just following propaganda. "I'm a Republican becuse Jesus is too! And they stand for family! And I love my family! And I hate taxes!" "I'm a Democrat because otherwise children would starve, we'd always be at war, and the minorites would be put in concentration camps!" I'd be willing to bet at least half of the voters for both don't really think beyond slogans, but then, that's politics.