Companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and HP all charge $0.80-$1.00 per gigabyte, sometimes even more, to preconfigure many of their systems with SSDs.
If your PC is easy to disassemble and is compatible with any 2.5"/M.2/m.SATA drive you can buy a cheap aftermarket drive like the 850 EVO (I've seen that 500GB hit $135). But if your machine is glued together (like the Surface Pro) or uses a non-standard interface (like the MacBook Air) you're pretty well screwed. Even M.2 compatibility is hit and miss, especially with all the variants (30/42/60/80/110mm length, M/B/M+B keying, SATA/PCI-e 2.0/3.0 x2/x4, AHCI/NVMe...)
Yes, the good old USA that brought us phone wiretapping, Comstock laws, and the Espionage act, immorality fears and the 'Production Code', the yellow peril and internment camps, red scares, McCarthyism and global proxy wars, prohibition, the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, the demonization of marijuana and psychedelics, the war on drugs, and on, and on... and don't get me started on slavery and civil rights.
From the Salem witch trials forward America has been famous for getting itself in a tizzy over imagined moral threats, then following through with the most draconian of knee-jerk responses.
(1) Most people don't understand the full ramifications of breaking encryption. If they knew the 'snoopers' could impersonate them, steal their accounts, etc, they likely would have responded differently. (2) In no situation was the majority of respondents in favor of 'snooping' without notification (3) Only in workplaces, schools and libraries were the majority willing to accept 'snooping' without consent (but with notification). (4) The majority were against government surveillance, even with notification and consent.
IMHO, most things should be legal, with appropriate notification and informed consent of those who might be negatively affected.
The fact that IE11 and Edge run SunSpider—and just SunSpider—so fast is rather suspicious... Feels like they optimized the engine for those specific routines until they could claim 'Twice as fast as other browsers!'
Er... refrigeration preserves the microorganisms in food, it just slows down their metabolism. Smoking, pickling and canning are all designed to sterilize food so that it can be stored at room temperature. And I'm fairly certain we eat more salt, smoke and preservatives than hunter-gatherers ever did.
Come to think of it, I need a browser plugin that randomly cuts off the end of sentences and replaces them with autocompleted words. Extra credit if the algorithm was trained on religious texts, trashy romance novels and operettas.
Was just about to post this. The biggest gains in computer performance over the past few decades came from increasing clock speeds and eliminating delays. We're pretty much to the limit of silicon clock speeds, and delays are low enough that it's hard to find new ways to reduce them—throwing more transistors at the problem won't help. Moore's Law hasn't stopped, it's just not relevant to CPU performance anymore.
And you know what? I don't mind. Software developers only optimize until their code is 'fast enough', and the 90s and 2000s were proof of that. Computers increased in speed a thousandfold yet ran as slow and buggy as ever (and twice as hot and noisy). Since performance began to plateau in the Core 2 days it's been a renaissance. My computers now 'feel' an order of magnitude faster than anything I had last decade, yet are incredibly quiet, slim and light, even pocketable. Devices I've owned for years are still (with the help of a SSD) perfectly usable. I'm no longer forced to upgrade every year or two just to be able to perform the same tasks at the same speed, and it feels great.
Of course, there are still situations where more performance would be beneficial, but luckily the tasks that really *need* more speed are usually very parallelizable and still benefit from more transistors. Specialized hardware like servers and GPUs are still improving at an impressive rate, and should stay on that trajectory for years to come.
The problem with ion drives is simple: F=mv and KE = 1/2mv^2.
The force (thrust) you get from a rocket is proportional to the velocity of its exhaust, but the energy you need goes up with the square of the velocity. The limitation on ion engines is the power source, not the engines themselves.
We are already using ion engines, though only for station-keeping (maintaining an existing orbit) or on small probes with big solar panels which can spend months or years performing orbital manoeuvres.
In order to provide app management and automatic login, Meldium must store some of your sensitive information on our servers. For user management, we may store your API keys, your username and password, or an OAuth credential.
A limited set of Meldium employees have access to the secure fleet and the master encryption keys
Due to the architecture of our system, it is technically possible for a Meldium employee to gain access to your secret data. As a matter of corporate policy, this kind of access is forbidden.
I, too, hope LastPass will be able to maintain their passion in the face of LogMeIn's corporate culture, but when it comes to security I will not trust to hope.
In fairness Meldium starts at 20 users for $24/mo.
Not that it matters for me as I've been burned by LogMeIn's user-hostile behaviour in the past. I don't trust them, and I sure as hell won't trust them with my passwords.
At least nVidia has significantly improved their heat/power troubles with Maxwell, and the 960m isn't that powerful.
I've said it before, but thin and powerful notebooks like this and the MBPs make me wish for reasonably priced Thunderbolt GPUs. This model even has the shiny 40Gbps TB3 port for one.
Actually, what I really want is for Microsoft to stick a TB port on their next Xbox and let me use it as a GPU.
Windows DPI scaling still sucks at non-integer multiples. 3840x2160 means you can run 1920x1080 @ 2x, while 3200x1800 and 2560x1440 mean you have to have things unreasonably small at 1x, annoyingly large at 2x, or blurry somewhere in between.
A three-judge panel concluded that the Bard team had raised strong arguments that the Harvard team had failed to consider and declared the team of inmates victorious.
Apparently the display isn't wireless, it just talks to a dedicated GPU in the base when the screen/tablet is docked. Should reduce latency, but unfortunately the GPU would be nice when using Photoshop et al. in tablet mode. The screen can also be flipped and attached backwards, for a faster--if unwieldy--tablet experience.
I wasn't too impressed with the pen demo on the SP4, seemed rather laggy, like what you'd expect from an iPad. Still waiting to see if the iPad Pro 'Pencil' is half as smooth as Apple's videos made it look.
It's not so bad... with the Surface RT people went in expecting it to be like a Windows laptop that ran Windows software. Here people have the expectation of the device being a phone that runs phone apps; having some of the functionality of a desktop is a bonus.
It still seems like a niche product, though; most people with expensive smartphones also have other, better productivity devices. Taking your smartphone, plus a dock, and carrying or hoping to borrow a screen, keyboard and mouse where you need them seems inconvenient at best. The best use case I can think of is giving your smartphone-toting kids a cheap but limited PC with a full-size browser, Microsoft Office for school assignments, and potentially other apps if developers are actually willing to invest in the niche platform.
The most interesting part of this (for me, at least) is the new Surface Book...could be a killer for creative work, a Surface Pro that's actually a goodlaptop.
That is, if there isn't perceptible lag in the wireless display, that would really hurt stylus use.
Companies have been "untruthful about abilities and reliability" since forever. Right now my onboard computer is reporting a fault in the AE-35 unit, which is impossible if you'd believe the manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft, and HP all charge $0.80-$1.00 per gigabyte, sometimes even more, to preconfigure many of their systems with SSDs.
If your PC is easy to disassemble and is compatible with any 2.5"/M.2/m.SATA drive you can buy a cheap aftermarket drive like the 850 EVO (I've seen that 500GB hit $135).
But if your machine is glued together (like the Surface Pro) or uses a non-standard interface (like the MacBook Air) you're pretty well screwed. Even M.2 compatibility is hit and miss, especially with all the variants (30/42/60/80/110mm length, M/B/M+B keying, SATA/PCI-e 2.0/3.0 x2/x4, AHCI/NVMe...)
Explain to me like I'm 5
If you insist.
Many computer manufacturers still charge ~$1/GB for SSDs.
Gods help you if your new machine takes an unusual SSD or is hard to disassemble.
I was not contrasting the USA with anything except its own romanticized past.
Yes, the good old USA that brought us phone wiretapping, Comstock laws, and the Espionage act, immorality fears and the 'Production Code', the yellow peril and internment camps, red scares, McCarthyism and global proxy wars, prohibition, the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, the demonization of marijuana and psychedelics, the war on drugs, and on, and on... and don't get me started on slavery and civil rights.
From the Salem witch trials forward America has been famous for getting itself in a tizzy over imagined moral threats, then following through with the most draconian of knee-jerk responses.
(1) Most people don't understand the full ramifications of breaking encryption. If they knew the 'snoopers' could impersonate them, steal their accounts, etc, they likely would have responded differently.
(2) In no situation was the majority of respondents in favor of 'snooping' without notification
(3) Only in workplaces, schools and libraries were the majority willing to accept 'snooping' without consent (but with notification).
(4) The majority were against government surveillance, even with notification and consent.
IMHO, most things should be legal, with appropriate notification and informed consent of those who might be negatively affected.
No, I think that would be a bit higher on the scale.
The fact that IE11 and Edge run SunSpider—and just SunSpider—so fast is rather suspicious... Feels like they optimized the engine for those specific routines until they could claim 'Twice as fast as other browsers!'
Er... refrigeration preserves the microorganisms in food, it just slows down their metabolism. Smoking, pickling and canning are all designed to sterilize food so that it can be stored at room temperature. And I'm fairly certain we eat more salt, smoke and preservatives than hunter-gatherers ever did.
When asked to form a sentence, the system can now output a single word and continues the prediction process to find related words
https://xkcd.com/1427/
Come to think of it, I need a browser plugin that randomly cuts off the end of sentences and replaces them with autocompleted words.
Extra credit if the algorithm was trained on religious texts, trashy romance novels and operettas.
Huh, I could have sworn Intel released a 4/4.4GHz chip a year and a half ago.
Or is this some copypasta I haven't seen before?
Was just about to post this. The biggest gains in computer performance over the past few decades came from increasing clock speeds and eliminating delays. We're pretty much to the limit of silicon clock speeds, and delays are low enough that it's hard to find new ways to reduce them—throwing more transistors at the problem won't help. Moore's Law hasn't stopped, it's just not relevant to CPU performance anymore.
And you know what? I don't mind. Software developers only optimize until their code is 'fast enough', and the 90s and 2000s were proof of that. Computers increased in speed a thousandfold yet ran as slow and buggy as ever (and twice as hot and noisy).
Since performance began to plateau in the Core 2 days it's been a renaissance. My computers now 'feel' an order of magnitude faster than anything I had last decade, yet are incredibly quiet, slim and light, even pocketable. Devices I've owned for years are still (with the help of a SSD) perfectly usable. I'm no longer forced to upgrade every year or two just to be able to perform the same tasks at the same speed, and it feels great.
Of course, there are still situations where more performance would be beneficial, but luckily the tasks that really *need* more speed are usually very parallelizable and still benefit from more transistors. Specialized hardware like servers and GPUs are still improving at an impressive rate, and should stay on that trajectory for years to come.
The problem with ion drives is simple: F=mv and KE = 1/2mv^2.
The force (thrust) you get from a rocket is proportional to the velocity of its exhaust, but the energy you need goes up with the square of the velocity. The limitation on ion engines is the power source, not the engines themselves.
We are already using ion engines, though only for station-keeping (maintaining an existing orbit) or on small probes with big solar panels which can spend months or years performing orbital manoeuvres.
It's a rocket with a ridiculously heavy intermediate stage that serves no function but to endanger lives if anything goes wrong.
I guess when you have a hammer...
Meldium's security FAQ is a joke:
In order to provide app management and automatic login, Meldium must store some of your sensitive information on our servers. For user management, we may store your API keys, your username and password, or an OAuth credential.
A limited set of Meldium employees have access to the secure fleet and the master encryption keys
Due to the architecture of our system, it is technically possible for a Meldium employee to gain access to your secret data. As a matter of corporate policy, this kind of access is forbidden.
I, too, hope LastPass will be able to maintain their passion in the face of LogMeIn's corporate culture, but when it comes to security I will not trust to hope.
In fairness Meldium starts at 20 users for $24/mo.
Not that it matters for me as I've been burned by LogMeIn's user-hostile behaviour in the past. I don't trust them, and I sure as hell won't trust them with my passwords.
Yes, and that's not a big deal for most games and applications.
At least nVidia has significantly improved their heat/power troubles with Maxwell, and the 960m isn't that powerful.
I've said it before, but thin and powerful notebooks like this and the MBPs make me wish for reasonably priced Thunderbolt GPUs. This model even has the shiny 40Gbps TB3 port for one.
Actually, what I really want is for Microsoft to stick a TB port on their next Xbox and let me use it as a GPU.
Windows DPI scaling still sucks at non-integer multiples. 3840x2160 means you can run 1920x1080 @ 2x, while 3200x1800 and 2560x1440 mean you have to have things unreasonably small at 1x, annoyingly large at 2x, or blurry somewhere in between.
A three-judge panel concluded that the Bard team had raised strong arguments that the Harvard team had failed to consider and declared the team of inmates victorious.
They're Bards.
It should be 'holocracy', but the word was a backformation from 'holarchy' by someone ignorant of Greek roots and/or attemting to be clever.
Apparently the display isn't wireless, it just talks to a dedicated GPU in the base when the screen/tablet is docked. Should reduce latency, but unfortunately the GPU would be nice when using Photoshop et al. in tablet mode. The screen can also be flipped and attached backwards, for a faster--if unwieldy--tablet experience.
I wasn't too impressed with the pen demo on the SP4, seemed rather laggy, like what you'd expect from an iPad. Still waiting to see if the iPad Pro 'Pencil' is half as smooth as Apple's videos made it look.
It's not so bad... with the Surface RT people went in expecting it to be like a Windows laptop that ran Windows software. Here people have the expectation of the device being a phone that runs phone apps; having some of the functionality of a desktop is a bonus.
It still seems like a niche product, though; most people with expensive smartphones also have other, better productivity devices. Taking your smartphone, plus a dock, and carrying or hoping to borrow a screen, keyboard and mouse where you need them seems inconvenient at best. The best use case I can think of is giving your smartphone-toting kids a cheap but limited PC with a full-size browser, Microsoft Office for school assignments, and potentially other apps if developers are actually willing to invest in the niche platform.
The most interesting part of this (for me, at least) is the new Surface Book...could be a killer for creative work, a Surface Pro that's actually a goodlaptop.
That is, if there isn't perceptible lag in the wireless display, that would really hurt stylus use.
Companies have been "untruthful about abilities and reliability" since forever. Right now my onboard computer is reporting a fault in the AE-35 unit, which is impossible if you'd believe the manufacturer.