There's a point at which you're so reviled that any attempt to make yourself look less despicable only feeds into the negative view the public has of you.
Yet we still buy their gas because we have no other practical alternatives. And you wonder why they don't care...
That's the rub, though. Half of the U.S. has working T-Mobile and half has working AT&T. Where I live, I'm lucky and get both, but it's common to have only one work reliably where you live. Plus, AT&T, knowing that they have a lock on these phones does charge a lot of money per month. And the fact that they cap you at 2GB, then charge $10 a GB after that, feels usurious. There is a 5GB option, but at $60 plus phone service and fees, it's essentially $100 a month. T-mobile charges a little more($40), but it's 5GB and unlimited if there's a hotspot. No phone service is required if you just want it to be a net-connected PDA type device.
Even a little competition would see the pricing drop by 30-40%, I bet. And that's the main reason to want to also have T-mobile as an option. By adding T-mobile, AT&T customers will also see lower prices. win-win scenario. Well, except for AT&T, which has been raking in a lot of money from this deal for several years, now.
My guess is that they want to sell this in Europe and Japan as well, so those frequencies are all but required. But whether it will be unlocked/available for U.S. customers remains to be seen. So I see two possible scenarios:
1: You have to buy a Euro-spec version for full price (similar to certain high-end Nokia models) but can then run it on any network. 2: Apple tells AT&T where to stick it since the moment they allow every carrier to have it, their sales will almost double. AT&T is a deal-breaker for a lot of customers.
I'm betting on #2 happening real soon. They are exactly like Sony in that way - predictably greedy. And, yes, despite the fact that I don't like Apple as a company, I'll buy one the second I can get it to work with T-Mobile.
The main reason they sterilize their probes is to get "cleaner" data and no risk of contamination of future probe readings. After all, one cell is all they need to find. Any false-positive will be a disaster that they'd never live down.
Traditional Awamori(40-50 proof varieties) is distilled without heat and often aged by concentrating it with older batches as a "seed" and is truly a zero-tech, if time consuming process(a batch takes 3-10 years to make, same as whiskey or good scotch). I'm not sure what method those three companies are using(all on one tiny island in Japan - go figure) to further distill the Awamori to 120 proof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni - of note - well, the ONLY thing of note about the tiny island other than it being the westernmost island in Japan - is the three distilleries that make hanazake.
Note - a lot of modern Awamori is distilled using modern techniques to speed up the process, but it's possible to do in one batch/step, like Scotch or Whiskey.
It's basically rice whiskey, or close to it. Again, doing the same thing with traditional beer should be fairly simple, though I suspect it would be nearly undrinkable by itself due to the extreme bitterness of concentrated hops combined with the high alcohol content.
In this case, there are 4 different orderings that would have yielded a positive result (the two treatment hives failing to thrive, in either order relative to the control hives in either order), so p = 0.16.
Still, considering that we have no other even semi-plausible reasons that we have found to date, having it be significant at even a.20 level should at least warrant further study. Its not like it's going to cost millions to put a few hives near a few cell phone towers and see what happens.
Not necessarily. A lot of businesses are forced to advertise in the "dealer" section for car sales. Expanding this to most of the other categories has been talked about by CL users for several years now, as they generally want to avoid businesses using CL as a source of free advertising. It would be fairly simple for CL to implement this and comply(at least on the surface) with the IRS' wishes. It would also reduce the spam by an enormous amount. As it is, you have to put at least half a dozen "-foo" modifiers in any search field to get rid of spam and junk.
Yes, but consider that they upper-end group in your example is less than 1/3 of the potential market.
Fanless means low speeds or even *under-clocking* the FSB to keep temps down, so cheap and functional CPUs are the norm. The second group also is concerned with a budget. The third doesn't care and skips this middle-ground entirely.
Sure, this move by Intel helps some people, but AMD has a full line for the other two groups already in place. It really does strike me as a GM type move. Nice effort, but a bit too late to the ball game.
Or in other words, Intel will sell more CPUs than AMD if they can convince the world that they have a bigger penis. Nobody wants their CPU to come from small penis guy, or to imply that they are one.
Except that, as GM learned, when you're impotent, the customers figure out that you're a non-player pretty quick. The Corvette no longer sells anything except for itself. In simple terms, the Intel pricing structure completely misses the overclocker's market segment. The average person who wants this feature easily enabled like this isn't going to spend much more than $100 in the first place if they can possibly help it. Their "goal" is to make the cheap as dirt CPU work like the $300 one.
I think the comment about Sigourney Weaver is insightful, because the reality is that anyone who is a career military person is almost always going to look just like another person on the street looks-wise. The make-up and glitz and so on shouldn't be patterned after Star Trek, where everyone in the future is a model - and everything is clean and polished, but more like Pitch Black where everyone is more of a normal person caught in a bad situation.
Shoot, for the most part, just look at the original Star Wars(if you can find an original version to rent any more, that is... (shakes head sadly). They used mostly B actors and kept the dirt and grime in. And it added a lot to the story. What I'm afraid we'll see is movie star quality actors parading around in their shiny ship and then a bunch of CGI battle scenes.
In other words, Starship Troopers all over again, but with 1/4 the lighting and some rain thrown in for "effect". Ick.
I love the translate this page option. Nothing else out there has this and while Google's version generally is so-so, it still works well enough to navigate through, say, a foreign auto maker's site or a university in Germany or wherever you need to go to. European languages are especially well done and almost read like English.
Firefox and IE - no option. And, given the way that the world is becoming more and more interconnected, it's really no longer adequate to have an English-only browser.
That said, the cheapest ink is made by Canon. The ink is a whopping $4 a cartridge online, or about $6-7 if it requires a chip. That's still expensive, but it shows you how full of it HP is.
That said, though, get a color laser printer. All of them now do Postscript as well, which is a god-send that is often overlooked. This alone makes it worth getting a laser printer. But now you can get color lasers for $250 or less. Note - the model to look for is the Samsung CLP315 - it's not very fast, but it has fairly inexpensive toner and can be found for about $150 or so. Better 315W is a bit more expensive, but does networking and so on. Figure $250 new for it.
It must be at least once a month now that we hear about some advance in solar technology. And yet there are zero of these new cheap and highly efficient options actually in production at the moment.
Progress in a lab is one thing. We need it in the marketplace for it to really have any impact.
Now... adding an additional pixel to the equation you get more range in the blues while having strong yellows. Which means wider reds without sacrificing blues and cyans, and wider greens without sacrificing blues and magentas.
Correct. Optimally, you would have a six component per pixel setup, but that's needlessly impractical. The reason they chose yellow is because blue is the most common color and it causes a lot of deterioration in the image's contrast levels.(barring really expensive sets like the Pioneer Elite series which automatically adjust the contrast and light levels to match the room you are in)
No, I know, but they don't generally regulate outer space, which is the real long-term goal of the U.S.(along with regulating the entire rest of the planet apparently)
Exactly right. "Helping out" is rarely appreciated by the anal self-interested managers above you and it just needlessly draws attention to yourself in case anything ever goes wrong. On top of that, you're getting nothing out of it.
Don't fix stuff for free. Don't volunteer to do stuff. If you really want to be like that, do your own consulting and get paid for it. Otherwise you at best end up as everyone's "fix it" person/slave and have to do extra work for the same pay, or you get yourself in a lot of trouble for sticking your nose where it doesn't belong.
Your first question should have been "Am I getting paid money to do this?" If no, then keep your head down and deal with it. BTW, a Blackberry is the perfect solution since it has built-in encryption options.
The FAA is completely different, though, in that it deals with air travel. It is now deciding that you have to deal with it when you decide to go into space? If I launched my spacecraft from Iceland, France, Japan, or pretty much anyplace else, I'd not have to deal with any of it.
While other countries have their issues, it seems as if the U.S. can't help but create miles of needless paperwork and agencies to control everything that they can. Now they are trying to control access to space. Just moving your company to Canada would save you from this added layer of bureaucracy. It's not just China - we're having a major brain-drain in all technical fields to countries that allow for less restrictions on your business and ability to create new products and technologies.
Exactly how is it "commercial" if the government forces everyone to jump through their hoops and use their services? And you wonder why everyone is moving to China.
The tricky part here, though, is "California". The laws there are such that you have to pay money owed under a legal contract, period. But you can only recover actual damages and interest. Nothing else. Their inclusion of "punitive damages" and the insane amount is just as likely to get the thing thrown out by a judge. Just watch most of those TV court shows - they tend to be filmed in California or New York, both of which almost every other episode have the judge explain to the plaintiff (for the thousandth time) that "pain and damages" and the like aren't recoverable there.
I put the real bill at closer to maybe 50 million, which is still a lot of cash. My guess is that they are hoping to settle out of court since Activision knows they are going to be found guilty of something the second the lawyers go through their emails and documents. Again, California's laws are a PITA to deal with and it has some of the nastiest chain-of-evidence and E-discovery laws. If you hide anything, you're meat. If you destroy anything, you're toast. If you "forgot" to keep the old emails, you essentially lose the case by default. And the guys really do show up with the police in tow if required and haul your entire backups off to get analyzed by firms that are so good at this stuff that nothing short of god-level encryption will save you.
Basic summary - don't do business in California if you plan to screw your partners or employees. You lose every single time. The only question is - how much will Activision have to settle for.
Where I last worked, we routinely dealt with issues like this as well(legal field - chain of evidence and all). It's high time that the computer industry took security concerns as a serious matter. And, no, they really don't. I have a friend who worked in the field working with security for major fortune 500 companies and the state of the security was a complete joke. And the threats are a dozen times worse than the public imagines. Yet they do nothing until there's a problem.
Well, hitting them in their pocketbook? That's effective 100% of the time in getting their attention.
There's also this issue, which is a real problem for MLC drives.
The average time where it starts to experience problems when using it like the original poster wanted to is very very short. Reads are fine, but writing crawls to very slow speeds. Some tests have shows that for swap space usage, this can happen in days.
**an excerpt** Until Intel tweaks their write combining algorithms and revises their released firmware, there are ways to minimize your chances of falling into the fragmentation black hole. Here are some things to avoid:
* Disk partitions not properly aligned with flash block boundaries (to be covered in another article).
* Heavy temporary file activity (think temporary internet files).
* Heavy page / swap activity.
* Applications that write random small chunks, even within a larger file (i.e. BitTorrent / Steam).
* Running *any* disk defragment utility (DON'T DO IT!).
**** In short, SSDs are not recommended at all with current OSs for swap and similar tasks if you care about long-term speed and performance. There's a reason ramdisks exist, and technically for his intended use, he probably only needs 4GB or so, if that. He might be able with a 64 bit OS to actually just buy more RAM and partition off a chunk as a ramdisk for less money. (say 12GB primary and 4GB temp/swap space) Back up the data space every day to a flash drive. As a bonus, he'll not have any issue either with i/o bandwidth. Even SATA2 is horrendously slow compared to on-board RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a point at which you're so reviled that any attempt to make yourself look less despicable only feeds into the negative view the public has of you.
Yet we still buy their gas because we have no other practical alternatives. And you wonder why they don't care...
That's the rub, though. Half of the U.S. has working T-Mobile and half has working AT&T. Where I live, I'm lucky and get both, but it's common to have only one work reliably where you live. Plus, AT&T, knowing that they have a lock on these phones does charge a lot of money per month. And the fact that they cap you at 2GB, then charge $10 a GB after that, feels usurious. There is a 5GB option, but at $60 plus phone service and fees, it's essentially $100 a month. T-mobile charges a little more($40), but it's 5GB and unlimited if there's a hotspot. No phone service is required if you just want it to be a net-connected PDA type device.
Even a little competition would see the pricing drop by 30-40%, I bet. And that's the main reason to want to also have T-mobile as an option. By adding T-mobile, AT&T customers will also see lower prices. win-win scenario. Well, except for AT&T, which has been raking in a lot of money from this deal for several years, now.
My guess is that they want to sell this in Europe and Japan as well, so those frequencies are all but required. But whether it will be unlocked/available for U.S. customers remains to be seen. So I see two possible scenarios:
1: You have to buy a Euro-spec version for full price (similar to certain high-end Nokia models) but can then run it on any network.
2: Apple tells AT&T where to stick it since the moment they allow every carrier to have it, their sales will almost double. AT&T is a deal-breaker for a lot of customers.
I'm betting on #2 happening real soon. They are exactly like Sony in that way - predictably greedy. And, yes, despite the fact that I don't like Apple as a company, I'll buy one the second I can get it to work with T-Mobile.
The main reason they sterilize their probes is to get "cleaner" data and no risk of contamination of future probe readings. After all, one cell is all they need to find. Any false-positive will be a disaster that they'd never live down.
Traditional Awamori(40-50 proof varieties) is distilled without heat and often aged by concentrating it with older batches as a "seed" and is truly a zero-tech, if time consuming process(a batch takes 3-10 years to make, same as whiskey or good scotch). I'm not sure what method those three companies are using(all on one tiny island in Japan - go figure) to further distill the Awamori to 120 proof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yonaguni - of note - well, the ONLY thing of note about the tiny island other than it being the westernmost island in Japan - is the three distilleries that make hanazake.
Note - a lot of modern Awamori is distilled using modern techniques to speed up the process, but it's possible to do in one batch/step, like Scotch or Whiskey.
http://www.sake-world.com/html/shochu-awamori.html
It's basically rice whiskey, or close to it. Again, doing the same thing with traditional beer should be fairly simple, though I suspect it would be nearly undrinkable by itself due to the extreme bitterness of concentrated hops combined with the high alcohol content.
This has already been done. With fermentation and old-school (no tech) technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awamori
This is normally 40-50 proof, but one variety, Hanazake, is 120 proof.
It's not normally exported outside of Japan, so almost nobody knows of it.
Using the same techniques, they should easily be able to get 100 proof beer. But it's not like this is something that hasn't been done before.
And what does using 40 or 100 hives cost? It's not like there's a shortage of eccentric backyard scientists and engineers in the U.K.
In this case, there are 4 different orderings that would have yielded a positive result (the two treatment hives failing to thrive, in either order relative to the control hives in either order), so p = 0.16.
Still, considering that we have no other even semi-plausible reasons that we have found to date, having it be significant at even a .20 level should at least warrant further study. Its not like it's going to cost millions to put a few hives near a few cell phone towers and see what happens.
I was curious if any privately owned(non-corporate or government) machines made the list, and where they placed.
Not necessarily. A lot of businesses are forced to advertise in the "dealer" section for car sales. Expanding this to most of the other categories has been talked about by CL users for several years now, as they generally want to avoid businesses using CL as a source of free advertising. It would be fairly simple for CL to implement this and comply(at least on the surface) with the IRS' wishes. It would also reduce the spam by an enormous amount. As it is, you have to put at least half a dozen "-foo" modifiers in any search field to get rid of spam and junk.
Yes, but consider that they upper-end group in your example is less than 1/3 of the potential market.
Fanless means low speeds or even *under-clocking* the FSB to keep temps down, so cheap and functional CPUs are the norm. The second group also is concerned with a budget. The third doesn't care and skips this middle-ground entirely.
Sure, this move by Intel helps some people, but AMD has a full line for the other two groups already in place. It really does strike me as a GM type move. Nice effort, but a bit too late to the ball game.
Or in other words, Intel will sell more CPUs than AMD if they can convince the world that they have a bigger penis. Nobody wants their CPU to come from small penis guy, or to imply that they are one.
Except that, as GM learned, when you're impotent, the customers figure out that you're a non-player pretty quick. The Corvette no longer sells anything except for itself. In simple terms, the Intel pricing structure completely misses the overclocker's market segment. The average person who wants this feature easily enabled like this isn't going to spend much more than $100 in the first place if they can possibly help it. Their "goal" is to make the cheap as dirt CPU work like the $300 one.
I think the comment about Sigourney Weaver is insightful, because the reality is that anyone who is a career military person is almost always going to look just like another person on the street looks-wise. The make-up and glitz and so on shouldn't be patterned after Star Trek, where everyone in the future is a model - and everything is clean and polished, but more like Pitch Black where everyone is more of a normal person caught in a bad situation.
Shoot, for the most part, just look at the original Star Wars(if you can find an original version to rent any more, that is... (shakes head sadly). They used mostly B actors and kept the dirt and grime in. And it added a lot to the story. What I'm afraid we'll see is movie star quality actors parading around in their shiny ship and then a bunch of CGI battle scenes.
In other words, Starship Troopers all over again, but with 1/4 the lighting and some rain thrown in for "effect". Ick.
Of course you can use a translation add-on, but it's not as easy and seamless. Nor are the other tools as good.
I love the translate this page option. Nothing else out there has this and while Google's version generally is so-so, it still works well enough to navigate through, say, a foreign auto maker's site or a university in Germany or wherever you need to go to. European languages are especially well done and almost read like English.
Firefox and IE - no option. And, given the way that the world is becoming more and more interconnected, it's really no longer adequate to have an English-only browser.
That said, the cheapest ink is made by Canon. The ink is a whopping $4 a cartridge online, or about $6-7 if it requires a chip. That's still expensive, but it shows you how full of it HP is.
That said, though, get a color laser printer. All of them now do Postscript as well, which is a god-send that is often overlooked. This alone makes it worth getting a laser printer. But now you can get color lasers for $250 or less. Note - the model to look for is the Samsung CLP315 - it's not very fast, but it has fairly inexpensive toner and can be found for about $150 or so. Better 315W is a bit more expensive, but does networking and so on. Figure $250 new for it.
It must be at least once a month now that we hear about some advance in solar technology. And yet there are zero of these new cheap and highly efficient options actually in production at the moment.
Progress in a lab is one thing. We need it in the marketplace for it to really have any impact.
Now... adding an additional pixel to the equation you get more range in the blues while having strong yellows.
Which means wider reds without sacrificing blues and cyans, and wider greens without sacrificing blues and magentas.
Correct. Optimally, you would have a six component per pixel setup, but that's needlessly impractical. The reason they chose yellow is because blue is the most common color and it causes a lot of deterioration in the image's contrast levels.(barring really expensive sets like the Pioneer Elite series which automatically adjust the contrast and light levels to match the room you are in)
No, I know, but they don't generally regulate outer space, which is the real long-term goal of the U.S.(along with regulating the entire rest of the planet apparently)
If you were "trying to help out" then stop. NOW.
Exactly right. "Helping out" is rarely appreciated by the anal self-interested managers above you and it just needlessly draws attention to yourself in case anything ever goes wrong. On top of that, you're getting nothing out of it.
Don't fix stuff for free. Don't volunteer to do stuff. If you really want to be like that, do your own consulting and get paid for it. Otherwise you at best end up as everyone's "fix it" person/slave and have to do extra work for the same pay, or you get yourself in a lot of trouble for sticking your nose where it doesn't belong.
Your first question should have been "Am I getting paid money to do this?" If no, then keep your head down and deal with it. BTW, a Blackberry is the perfect solution since it has built-in encryption options.
The FAA is completely different, though, in that it deals with air travel. It is now deciding that you have to deal with it when you decide to go into space? If I launched my spacecraft from Iceland, France, Japan, or pretty much anyplace else, I'd not have to deal with any of it.
While other countries have their issues, it seems as if the U.S. can't help but create miles of needless paperwork and agencies to control everything that they can. Now they are trying to control access to space. Just moving your company to Canada would save you from this added layer of bureaucracy. It's not just China - we're having a major brain-drain in all technical fields to countries that allow for less restrictions on your business and ability to create new products and technologies.
Exactly how is it "commercial" if the government forces everyone to jump through their hoops and use their services? And you wonder why everyone is moving to China.
The tricky part here, though, is "California". The laws there are such that you have to pay money owed under a legal contract, period. But you can only recover actual damages and interest. Nothing else. Their inclusion of "punitive damages" and the insane amount is just as likely to get the thing thrown out by a judge. Just watch most of those TV court shows - they tend to be filmed in California or New York, both of which almost every other episode have the judge explain to the plaintiff (for the thousandth time) that "pain and damages" and the like aren't recoverable there.
I put the real bill at closer to maybe 50 million, which is still a lot of cash. My guess is that they are hoping to settle out of court since Activision knows they are going to be found guilty of something the second the lawyers go through their emails and documents. Again, California's laws are a PITA to deal with and it has some of the nastiest chain-of-evidence and E-discovery laws. If you hide anything, you're meat. If you destroy anything, you're toast. If you "forgot" to keep the old emails, you essentially lose the case by default. And the guys really do show up with the police in tow if required and haul your entire backups off to get analyzed by firms that are so good at this stuff that nothing short of god-level encryption will save you.
Basic summary - don't do business in California if you plan to screw your partners or employees. You lose every single time. The only question is - how much will Activision have to settle for.
Where I last worked, we routinely dealt with issues like this as well(legal field - chain of evidence and all). It's high time that the computer industry took security concerns as a serious matter. And, no, they really don't. I have a friend who worked in the field working with security for major fortune 500 companies and the state of the security was a complete joke. And the threats are a dozen times worse than the public imagines. Yet they do nothing until there's a problem.
Well, hitting them in their pocketbook? That's effective 100% of the time in getting their attention.
The issue of wear is only properly addressed IF the load-leveling is working properly and the same few blocks aren't getting hammered all day long.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&pid=1
There's also this issue, which is a real problem for MLC drives.
The average time where it starts to experience problems when using it like the original poster wanted to is very very short. Reads are fine, but writing crawls to very slow speeds. Some tests have shows that for swap space usage, this can happen in days.
**an excerpt**
Until Intel tweaks their write combining algorithms and revises their released firmware, there are ways to minimize your chances of falling into the fragmentation black hole. Here are some things to avoid:
* Disk partitions not properly aligned with flash block boundaries (to be covered in another article).
* Heavy temporary file activity (think temporary internet files).
* Heavy page / swap activity.
* Applications that write random small chunks, even within a larger file (i.e. BitTorrent / Steam).
* Running *any* disk defragment utility (DON'T DO IT!).
****
In short, SSDs are not recommended at all with current OSs for swap and similar tasks if you care about long-term speed and performance. There's a reason ramdisks exist, and technically for his intended use, he probably only needs 4GB or so, if that. He might be able with a 64 bit OS to actually just buy more RAM and partition off a chunk as a ramdisk for less money. (say 12GB primary and 4GB temp/swap space) Back up the data space every day to a flash drive. As a bonus, he'll not have any issue either with i/o bandwidth. Even SATA2 is horrendously slow compared to on-board RAM.