I just went to both sites and priced up similar machines... no extra software outside of OS, equalized the processors, RAM, and hard drives, no monitor, added a mouse and KB to the Mac (incl with the Dell), and tried to keep everything else on par:
Dell Studio Hybrid: $569
Mac Mini: $847
Now I did it pretty quickly but I think I got them fairly equal.
I had several rendering gliches and took it down lock stock and barrel inside 10 minutes. So much for tab isolation:) It's not ready yet... but with the feedback they got from my spectacular crash maybe it will be in time.
I just open task manager, kill the EXE process which ends the service, and then remove it via MSConfig... and it's gone. I also do delete the EXE just to keep Google apps from restarting it.
I think he was joking on the literal "ripped off" comment. It is a great service though, got a decent refund on a camera a week after I bought it once from Future Shop.
Perhaps it speaks ill of my skills but usually the first place I look is at my application / query structure. Most modern DBs have enough raw speed to pull off large tasks in amazingly short amount of times. Typically I look towards how I am managing the tool first as this frequently yields the desired gains and nets me more experience as well. Because slow queries always deal with large amounts of data, small "mistakes" have exponential effects... thus small improvements offer the same reward.
Only when that fails to I go further into modifications of the hardward / DB engine, etc. as required.
The front side thing I can see as you slow the orbital velocity thus causing the orbit to drop. I wonder how many of these items they could hit that accurately.
The bottom side part is very interesting... might have some idle reading to do tonight.
I am not rocket scientist but I am curious about this one:
"The laser would only singe the surface of an object in space, but that tiny burn could still help point it downward, Dr. Campbell says"
How does one singe and object from below and expect the resultant force on the object to move it down? I would expect you would get off-gassing from the burnt bottom side which would nudge it higher. If the object was rotating (which I'm sure close to 100% of them are) you would end up with an unpredictable resultant force on the object. On the surface it seems to me that the laser technique would at best produce a pseudo random result and at worst push the object higher.
I'm sure it is being thought through by minds much more experienced in such things than mine... just makes me curious how that works.
Someone make that version... I'll buy it.:)
(I suspect at some point in time they will be remade as everything is in Hollywood eventually. If it happens late enough in my lifetime perhaps this is how I'll remember the originals too)
This would be much too big of a blow to touch interfaces in general, someone will fight it hard. And once they do they only need one solid case of "prior art" to kill it, and there are tons of touch devices out before the filing of this patent. Apple may try but it won't stick.
While I agree with you, you can still type a URL into the Windows Explorer address bar and be on the web with the IE rendering engine while IExplore.exe is not running.
As said though, I do agree that in all practical senses removing the basic 'application' used to access the IE engine will be the only practical alternative.
I would be very interested to see how Microsoft would go about even trying to remove IE. At best I would think they could extract the GUI wrapper for the engine that most people call "IE"... but the core rendering engine is required for many other components such as the help system for example. Being forced to remove the rendering engine from Windows would be like taking out the bottom brick in Jenga.
I haven't had time to try this but if they are just sitting on top of everyone else's rendering engines then how can they claim to be faster than any of them?
Is the challenge not fundamentally flawed? The rules require that the drive be returned after 3 days in the same condition it was sent in. This immediately precludes invasive methods of data recovery and requires the firm to use only the drive's on board electronics to access it. The drive's on-boards are not going to pick up any residual magnetism in the platters as they over-wrote the data. They are only sensitive enough to read the residual field they applied in the first place. (obvious by design) If the default heads picked up residual traces of previous data all our hard drives would be pretty useless, wouldn't they?
By adding this requirement you handicap the recovery firms to an extent that obviously they won't try it. The proper way to do this would be to have a series of drives available that can be put through proper invasive data recovery processes.
A true HD add a negligible amount of weight and no additional size. It has nothing to do with Small, it has to do with battery life. That however should be a consumer choice. A HD option should be offered for the customer who needs storage capacity on site and doesn't care about the limited life / can run off a plug. To just offer small SSD's for the power issue is very narrow minded of DELL. Myself, their limited capacity would be a deal breaker for me. I carry around an Acer Aspire ONE and it's 120 Gig is put to full use.
If one or more of your tabs do crash, your tabs are automatically reloaded and you are returned to whatever page you were on before the crash.
So if you come across a page that crashes IE8 every time, when you reload IE it will reload that page and crash it again leaving the typical user unable to restart IE:)
Print out the Hex code of your images on paper and include a printed copy of the JPEG filespec outline:)
Really, will CD's/DVD's not work? I can't image they would be unreadable... to my knowledge they primarily suffer from light degradation which wouldn't be an issue here. We can still read 8-tracks from the 70's and they were a short lived standard. The CD is hardly going to become some mystical item in another 20 years considering how long they have been (and continue to be) a standard.
I am very much looking forward to what comes out of the LHC. It's been wonderful to watch its construction and that's only a fraction of the satisfaction its discoveries will provide.
Excellent... off to the hardware store to start picking up parts this weekend. I wonder if my local electric company is going to mind the extra drain... no matter, the black hole in my back yard will swallow them soon enough.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I just went to both sites and priced up similar machines... no extra software outside of OS, equalized the processors, RAM, and hard drives, no monitor, added a mouse and KB to the Mac (incl with the Dell), and tried to keep everything else on par:
Dell Studio Hybrid: $569
Mac Mini: $847
Now I did it pretty quickly but I think I got them fairly equal.
"Normally" is a pretty subjective term to base a measurement system on.
I had several rendering gliches and took it down lock stock and barrel inside 10 minutes. So much for tab isolation :) It's not ready yet... but with the feedback they got from my spectacular crash maybe it will be in time.
Parent Mod +1... I would if I had points at the moment.
I just open task manager, kill the EXE process which ends the service, and then remove it via MSConfig... and it's gone. I also do delete the EXE just to keep Google apps from restarting it.
I think he was joking on the literal "ripped off" comment. It is a great service though, got a decent refund on a camera a week after I bought it once from Future Shop.
Perhaps it speaks ill of my skills but usually the first place I look is at my application / query structure. Most modern DBs have enough raw speed to pull off large tasks in amazingly short amount of times. Typically I look towards how I am managing the tool first as this frequently yields the desired gains and nets me more experience as well. Because slow queries always deal with large amounts of data, small "mistakes" have exponential effects... thus small improvements offer the same reward.
Only when that fails to I go further into modifications of the hardward / DB engine, etc. as required.
The front side thing I can see as you slow the orbital velocity thus causing the orbit to drop. I wonder how many of these items they could hit that accurately.
The bottom side part is very interesting... might have some idle reading to do tonight.
I am not rocket scientist but I am curious about this one:
"The laser would only singe the surface of an object in space, but that tiny burn could still help point it downward, Dr. Campbell says"
How does one singe and object from below and expect the resultant force on the object to move it down? I would expect you would get off-gassing from the burnt bottom side which would nudge it higher. If the object was rotating (which I'm sure close to 100% of them are) you would end up with an unpredictable resultant force on the object. On the surface it seems to me that the laser technique would at best produce a pseudo random result and at worst push the object higher.
I'm sure it is being thought through by minds much more experienced in such things than mine... just makes me curious how that works.
You mean that little tiny Spot in the G area? Is it that much of a surprise it took these men so long to find it?
someone ground the reflector to the correct shape!
I too can't wait for the first images... it is a great time to be alive if you love learning more about the world / universe around us.
Someone make that version... I'll buy it. :)
(I suspect at some point in time they will be remade as everything is in Hollywood eventually. If it happens late enough in my lifetime perhaps this is how I'll remember the originals too)
This would be much too big of a blow to touch interfaces in general, someone will fight it hard. And once they do they only need one solid case of "prior art" to kill it, and there are tons of touch devices out before the filing of this patent. Apple may try but it won't stick.
While I agree with you, you can still type a URL into the Windows Explorer address bar and be on the web with the IE rendering engine while IExplore.exe is not running. As said though, I do agree that in all practical senses removing the basic 'application' used to access the IE engine will be the only practical alternative.
I would be very interested to see how Microsoft would go about even trying to remove IE. At best I would think they could extract the GUI wrapper for the engine that most people call "IE"... but the core rendering engine is required for many other components such as the help system for example. Being forced to remove the rendering engine from Windows would be like taking out the bottom brick in Jenga.
I never drink coffee. I can't remember why though.
Someone missed the fact this was made by The Onion and therefore is all a joke :)
Ha... touche.
I haven't had time to try this but if they are just sitting on top of everyone else's rendering engines then how can they claim to be faster than any of them?
Is the challenge not fundamentally flawed? The rules require that the drive be returned after 3 days in the same condition it was sent in. This immediately precludes invasive methods of data recovery and requires the firm to use only the drive's on board electronics to access it. The drive's on-boards are not going to pick up any residual magnetism in the platters as they over-wrote the data. They are only sensitive enough to read the residual field they applied in the first place. (obvious by design) If the default heads picked up residual traces of previous data all our hard drives would be pretty useless, wouldn't they?
By adding this requirement you handicap the recovery firms to an extent that obviously they won't try it. The proper way to do this would be to have a series of drives available that can be put through proper invasive data recovery processes.
A true HD add a negligible amount of weight and no additional size. It has nothing to do with Small, it has to do with battery life. That however should be a consumer choice. A HD option should be offered for the customer who needs storage capacity on site and doesn't care about the limited life / can run off a plug. To just offer small SSD's for the power issue is very narrow minded of DELL. Myself, their limited capacity would be a deal breaker for me. I carry around an Acer Aspire ONE and it's 120 Gig is put to full use.
Crash recovery
If one or more of your tabs do crash, your tabs are automatically reloaded and you are returned to whatever page you were on before the crash.
So if you come across a page that crashes IE8 every time, when you reload IE it will reload that page and crash it again leaving the typical user unable to restart IE :)
Print out the Hex code of your images on paper and include a printed copy of the JPEG filespec outline :)
Really, will CD's/DVD's not work? I can't image they would be unreadable... to my knowledge they primarily suffer from light degradation which wouldn't be an issue here. We can still read 8-tracks from the 70's and they were a short lived standard. The CD is hardly going to become some mystical item in another 20 years considering how long they have been (and continue to be) a standard.
I am very much looking forward to what comes out of the LHC. It's been wonderful to watch its construction and that's only a fraction of the satisfaction its discoveries will provide.
Excellent... off to the hardware store to start picking up parts this weekend. I wonder if my local electric company is going to mind the extra drain... no matter, the black hole in my back yard will swallow them soon enough. ;)