I dare you to drive to the middle nowhere in Iowa...
I've driven to the middle of nowhere in Iowa several times from the good 'ol silicon valley, and I gotta say that these huge corn-fed iowans are more than capable of bashing shells! They are pretty into their monoculture though.
I agree with the parent insofar as it is clear that many people seem to have a typical fanboy attitude with Apple. They confuse "making a better product" with "being a better company". I would gladly argue that for many people's needs Apple makes a better product. That is why I own a mac. But saying that you own a mac because Apple is a better company is walking on thin ice.
If making a point about the quality of one's character is paramount to you, why would you not use GNU products? I've yet to see a GNU developer sue someone for infringing on trade secrets! (I'm not saying they're not fine pieces of software for some purposes as well.)
For anything even remotely serious you need to move to Matlab or Tecplot and some custom Fortran/C/Perl or some other software designed for storing and analyzing large data sets. But for simple quick analysis and trend-finding it's hard to argue that OOo compares to Excel. I tend to like Matlab for the small tasks too, just because of its flexibility, but Excel is very quick and easy when you "just need to plot it".
This is the major weakness of OOo for me, and I'd really like to see it improved, or maybe an Apple entry into the market just to spread the wealth a bit.
As a "rocket science" student, I can safely say that those unit conversions do get pounded into us a fair bit in school, and there is really no excuse for not being unit-aware. For four years now I've been doing practically everything in mixed units, with things switching metric-imperial and back every problem, or even within a problem.
The NRO is so closely tied to the CIA that they might as well be part of the CIA. The CIA came to my school to give a talk once, but what they were actually talking about (the CORONA program), was actually NRO work. In my mind the NRO is effectively a branch of the CIA.
As for why they appear to be such a money-hole, you might consider for a moment what they do. From the wikipedia: "The NRO was established in 1960 to develop the nation's revolutionary satellite reconnaissance systems." Now if you think back to the state of satellite launch systems in 1960, and even today, it was and is risky business. These days when a launch platform manages to successfully launch 10 payloads in a row it's considered an astounding success. ( Look at Boeing's Delta III which failed on its first 2/3 launches).
The NRO in particular, unlike NASA, launches a lot of relatively low value payloads (nothing alive on board) into LEO which means they are using systems which are less failsafe (and cheaper), than stuff like the Apollo program used. I'm not saying the NRO is an effective government organization, but there may be some reasons for their relatively high failure rate, if you can call it that.
I don't consider 1.5 to be a small value of 2. I think 1.5 should be considered a moderately sized value of 1. But then again that means that -0.0001 would be a small value of -1, and -1.1 would be a very large value of -2.
Perhaps we should discard this notation altogether?
He didn't actually say discarded, what he said they would be repaired at government depots or replaced.
And when these government replace a laptop, what are they going to do with the old unit? I am simply pointing out that there is a great possibility that they would be junked.
You're kidding right?.. So projects like Computer Aid International should be banned. Incidentally the cost of these free computers usually works out at around £10,720 per 20ft container.
Far from it, I think these projects are providing an invaluable service and I applaude them for that. However, I am wondering (aloud) if anyone has taken into consideration the long-term post-mortem impact of this additional 10% of the world's laptops being placed in countries with even less of an infrastructure for disposing of waste electronics than those that have traditionally had all the laptops.
I mention this not because I think some action should be taken against OLPC, but because I think that if anyone wants to make a point out of acquiring the old defunct laptops they could provide a further service to these countries.
One thing that I notices when I read the article is that the distributors were suggesting that for most failures other than an LCD failure the thing would probably just be discarded.
That suggests that in the not to distant future we could have millions of these things in the dumps of the third-world countries ill-equipped to process the waste. There is no mention of whether this has been considered, or if these devices may be RoHS compliant. I kind of doubt it, considering the (slightly at present) higher cost of RoHS compliant equipment and manufacturing.
That was my first thought when I saw this thing too. If I could modify it to also serve as a pcb mill then this thing would be invaluable. Think of the things you could build with quick custom pcbs and silicone cases. Since the #1 thing a pcb mill needs is motors that allow it 3DOF movement, I'd think it'd be possible to make one of these pull double duty with some swapout of parts. I haven't looked at the schematics yet, but it looks real attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
why in the world was this +3 Funny?
I dare you to drive to the middle nowhere in Iowa...
I've driven to the middle of nowhere in Iowa several times from the good 'ol silicon valley, and I gotta say that these huge corn-fed iowans are more than capable of bashing shells! They are pretty into their monoculture though.
I agree with the parent insofar as it is clear that many people seem to have a typical fanboy attitude with Apple. They confuse "making a better product" with "being a better company". I would gladly argue that for many people's needs Apple makes a better product. That is why I own a mac. But saying that you own a mac because Apple is a better company is walking on thin ice.
If making a point about the quality of one's character is paramount to you, why would you not use GNU products? I've yet to see a GNU developer sue someone for infringing on trade secrets! (I'm not saying they're not fine pieces of software for some purposes as well.)
For anything even remotely serious you need to move to Matlab or Tecplot and some custom Fortran/C/Perl or some other software designed for storing and analyzing large data sets. But for simple quick analysis and trend-finding it's hard to argue that OOo compares to Excel. I tend to like Matlab for the small tasks too, just because of its flexibility, but Excel is very quick and easy when you "just need to plot it".
This is the major weakness of OOo for me, and I'd really like to see it improved, or maybe an Apple entry into the market just to spread the wealth a bit.
As a "rocket science" student, I can safely say that those unit conversions do get pounded into us a fair bit in school, and there is really no excuse for not being unit-aware. For four years now I've been doing practically everything in mixed units, with things switching metric-imperial and back every problem, or even within a problem.
The NRO is so closely tied to the CIA that they might as well be part of the CIA. The CIA came to my school to give a talk once, but what they were actually talking about (the CORONA program), was actually NRO work. In my mind the NRO is effectively a branch of the CIA.
As for why they appear to be such a money-hole, you might consider for a moment what they do. From the wikipedia: "The NRO was established in 1960 to develop the nation's revolutionary satellite reconnaissance systems." Now if you think back to the state of satellite launch systems in 1960, and even today, it was and is risky business. These days when a launch platform manages to successfully launch 10 payloads in a row it's considered an astounding success. ( Look at Boeing's Delta III which failed on its first 2/3 launches).
The NRO in particular, unlike NASA, launches a lot of relatively low value payloads (nothing alive on board) into LEO which means they are using systems which are less failsafe (and cheaper), than stuff like the Apollo program used. I'm not saying the NRO is an effective government organization, but there may be some reasons for their relatively high failure rate, if you can call it that.
I don't consider 1.5 to be a small value of 2. I think 1.5 should be considered a moderately sized value of 1. But then again that means that -0.0001 would be a small value of -1, and -1.1 would be a very large value of -2.
Perhaps we should discard this notation altogether?
He didn't actually say discarded, what he said they would be repaired at government depots or replaced.
And when these government replace a laptop, what are they going to do with the old unit? I am simply pointing out that there is a great possibility that they would be junked.
You're kidding right? .. So projects like Computer Aid International should be banned. Incidentally the cost of these free computers usually works out at around £10,720 per 20ft container.
Far from it, I think these projects are providing an invaluable service and I applaude them for that. However, I am wondering (aloud) if anyone has taken into consideration the long-term post-mortem impact of this additional 10% of the world's laptops being placed in countries with even less of an infrastructure for disposing of waste electronics than those that have traditionally had all the laptops.
I mention this not because I think some action should be taken against OLPC, but because I think that if anyone wants to make a point out of acquiring the old defunct laptops they could provide a further service to these countries.
Did anyone notice that the EU seems to have different priorities than us (US)?
One thing that I notices when I read the article is that the distributors were suggesting that for most failures other than an LCD failure the thing would probably just be discarded.
That suggests that in the not to distant future we could have millions of these things in the dumps of the third-world countries ill-equipped to process the waste. There is no mention of whether this has been considered, or if these devices may be RoHS compliant. I kind of doubt it, considering the (slightly at present) higher cost of RoHS compliant equipment and manufacturing.
And of course the perennial engineering favorite, the slug.
Occasionally when I'm tired I still get thrown off by lb-f and lb-m.
That was my first thought when I saw this thing too. If I could modify it to also serve as a pcb mill then this thing would be invaluable. Think of the things you could build with quick custom pcbs and silicone cases. Since the #1 thing a pcb mill needs is motors that allow it 3DOF movement, I'd think it'd be possible to make one of these pull double duty with some swapout of parts. I haven't looked at the schematics yet, but it looks real attractive.
If only I had realized this before Mr. Gates, I could be the multi-gazillionaire.