by "tightly focused beams" I meant tightly focused radio transmissions, a la the Pringlenet, AKA an 802.11 transmitter in a cylindrical waveguide that can bost the range from feet to miles.
Thing that puzzles me is this: why does 2 gigs of transmitted data cost more than a meg? Do transmitted packets really cost all that much more, or is it cost accounting, i.e. nonsense?
Legal advice may not be necessary if they never share a broadband pipe, or even a modem, that connects to another ISP, telecom, or whatever.
The idea I've always promulgated is this: build a new internet using the wireless tech. Eventually lasers or tightly focused beams can provide backbones through which local WANs can communcate.
The Internet has been taken over by corporations and the guv'mint. The flimsy yet powerful excuses of hackers, child porn and terrorists were enough to get our doors kicked down.
Damn the Internet, damn the law, and gawd damn the lawyers. Let's bring the joy back to our world again. Get a kilt and some blue paint. Time to moon the emmeny.
I am moved to ammend my earlier remarks... yes, you can pick yourself up by educating yourself, even at a late age. Of course.
Curious tho, as to how well the janitor is doing, even with his degree. I really wish him well.
But that kind of will is not common. If you are from a poor family, in wealth or in imagination, it's, literally, hard to conceive of what that janitor did.
There aren't many "janitor"/comp sci's out there. But if there are, I hope they speak up in this thread. How'd it work out for you? How about this recession especially; are you hurt in the job market because of your past?
Bush II never "supported" the Taliban regime, as it wasn't even the recognized government of Afghanistan.
And please, don't mention the millions of dollars given in aid, that wasn't for the Taliban, but for humanitarian aid.
Okay, speedy typing and the need to make a point streamlines my statements. No, Bush was not recognizing the government of Afghanistan. He only dealt with them for getting a deal on declaring opium against the Will of God for our War on Drugs, and for access to natural gas and oil.
But he did deal with them. He did not refuse to deal with them 'cause of terrorist ties, or the way they treat their women. He dealt with them to get things he wanted.
It's been thought that the humanitarian aide was granted in exchange for the "Will of God" pronouncement against opium. I rather agree.
Hold on there, Ayn Rand. Positive Mental Attitudes do not rock the world all the time.
You can go to school and improve yourself. If you are 19 - 25. Beyond that, in high tech as in other fields, you are SCREWED because of age discrimination.
Move to places that are cheaper to live in? Why do you think they are cheaper to begin with? There are no bloody jobs there! The few that do exist pay min wage! YOU try living on 5.15 and hour, and improve yourself... yes, I did it once,dirt poor and supporint my mom, but I was twenty. I didn't have a kid, and I had a pretty good education considering.
Not everyone grew up in a 'burb with good schools. If you didn't, you ain't getting a better job. You ain't goin' to school, and you ain't gonna get rich.
But in Europe they manage to have decent pay and decent lives, even at the bottom of the pay scale. And somehow, the government doesn't collapse, businesses stay alive and profitable.
Maybe the corelation between good pay an higher unemployment is true. But I doubt the pro-biz groups sponsoring those studies commissioned studies of the miseries caused by low/no-pay no-security jobs.
Under-employment's costs are not quantified because no one wants them to be.
A human being should not be cheated and gamed with just because he/she were not born in a nice suburb with a fat tax base to fund the schools.
God, this new century's well-employed children sound like the wealthy scions of 19th century moguls.
Not everyone gets the golden elevator. People on that elevator are lucky, not deserving.
People who are not software engineers or accounting/marketing sharks do not thus deserve being cheated of their wages and in general treated like chain gang escapees. We had something in this country called "unions" once who would help the non-engineers get more than 1000 bucks a month to raise a family. Those unions are now for all intents and purposes illegal, banned.
Damme if it doesn't make me want a hammer and sickle sometimes. Arrogance from the top is far harder to take than arrogance from a union official; the well-paid denigrator of unions has no business blocking the ability of low-paid people to improve their position by collective bargaining. It's grotesque.
We the Somalis brave? They lost thousands to our 18, and kept coming. They were definitely motivated to die for their cause.
We our Rangers and Delta men brave as well? Do you really have to ask? I saw the movie. Tho it is definitely cleaned up a bit to take out the more ambigious morality of desperate soldiers outnumbered hundreds to one, they fought like heroes, and all honor to them.
To really answer your point and stay on-thread, I'd say the movie would still be a 4/5 or 5/5 even wihout 9-11. It's intense, and has the advantage of a real story that happened to people we may know.
When I hear these terms thrown around, I get very nervous. Check your pockets, and watch the news more carefully, because there is bullshit afoot.
It is possible to not be anti-military, and not be a traitor, and still look the truth in the eyes and spit. Are we killing civilians? How will we ever know? They've banned newsmen from the war. Another red flag that bullshit is afoot.
Your distinction between Bush's and Clinton's administration is strained at best. And I include "Bush II: The Unintended President" as well in the administration list.
Clinton most certainly was spurred on by humanitarian motives. The warlords had turned the horror of a famine into a hell of intentional genocide. The only way out, to save maximum lives, was to destroy the warlords -- a huge task. Could the Clinton administration have done it? No, not with hysterical undermining of his authority at every turn in the military, the Congress, and the newly radicallized media channels. A President needs cooperation, and without it he is trying to sail a boat without being able to tack when necessary.
He bailed. Probably with the concurrence of his staff, both civilian and military.
Nation building? What exactly is Bush W. doing right now in Afghanistan? He has killed and imprisoned the leadership of the country whom he formerly supported, and replaced it with the warlords that people hated so much before the Taliban drove them out.
Remember also that Afghanistan did not attack us. A distributed network of fundementalists did. But we can't really get them, so we got the Afghanis instead.
So we are building a nation NOW in Afghanistan, with the warlords who had tortured their people in the early nineties. Oh my aching head...
So watch the mission creep. It happens. But in the case of the Somalis, we were really trying to save them from genocide. Demonizing, tiredly, President Clinton, is silly. We had not nothing to gain in Somalia but the ability to look at ourselves in the mirror. We didn't save people from Pol Pot, or the Serbs (until far too late), or even the poor people in the German concentration camps, not until it was far too late. We didn't care to know they were dying at the time it was happening. The Somali situation was being broadcast live. We couldn't deny the truth. Children were being tortured to death by starvation, and we could stop it.
At least in Somalia we actually captured the bad guy.
We went into Somali to save our souls; no one said it would be easy.
The crypto is already out. Forbidding "export"? Why? It's like banning the export of algebra.
The fallacy mayhap is a result of the acceptance of the concept of non-things like "intellectual property". Since a song or a story has the cache of an actual physical object under the new batch of laws, somehow cryptological methods are also like physical objects, and can be stopped at the border by Customs if they find it hidden in someone's suitcase.
Like all "Homeland Security" notions, banning the immaterial mathematics of crypto only satisfies the need for people to feel safer. If that shoeboy had used 128-bit encryption, the calls for programmer blood would be deafening us. But, remember, he wouldn't need crypto to bring a shoe on the plane, so all the possible recriminations would have been for naught.
The objust of terrorism is to bring terror to your enemy, to disrupt and destroy and distract, and it looks like the collective consciousness of the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia are falling into the state of panic and foolishness desired.
Actually, use of the public airways is a government-controlled business; the networks get, free of charge, granted broad swaths of spectrum to broadcast. And print money.
What is done with that grant of OUR bandwidth, granted by OUR good grace through our representatives, is OUR business.
These businesses are dictating terms to the people of the United States. This should not be. They have been made wealthy through our largess, and they therefore have the responsibility to us owners to provide content as we bloody see fit.
They do not own the airwaves. We do. The market is not free in this situation. The almost religious movement to dereg the market has led us to this -- they are locking up our TV's.
The point is, if this flies legally and commercially, you won't have a choice but to buy their product under their rules. All manufacturers of music CD's will use this boilerplate. Your "choice" is: submit, or never buy music again.
Should everyone who has a beer be put on a work detail for two weeks?
Should you be executed for fighting while drunk? If so, exactly how many teenagers would make it past the age of 17?
Should you pay a >$5000US file for getting drunk in any way and showing up in public and "disturbing" someone? Would the fact that you may disturb someone just by being drunk make you eligible for the police to confiscate your home?
Remember, if you don't pay the fine, you go to jail, AND get all your stuff taken away, AND you lose your job, AND in some states can never vote again, AND if you try to run away from jail they will indeed shoot you in the back and kill you. Your blood will be spurting between your shaking fingers as you die, and your last thought will be the words of some poster saying you should be executed for being drunk...
Isn't all this insane?? Hows does marijuana inspire such madness in the American mind? There is no thinking, just reactionary nonsense that destroys millions of people's lives.
The productivity and lifetime lost due to such breathtakingly mindless laws must be measured in hundreds of thousands of man-years and a good fraction of a trillion dollars. Not to mention the loss of respect for the law, due to the fact, and it is a fact, that marijuana is ridiculously harmless, and sober and respectible people make up laws to annihilate people who use it, for no reason discernable to anyone. All fear, all legends, all unprovable... just jails, laws, and more jails.
When alchohol is freely available, kills and injures millions, and for some reason we have adapted our culture to it with little comment. Because its America's Drug, and God help anyone who takes it away.
I'm sorry, but mindlessness on this scale is a horror.
As you and another poster mentioned, the stackable option is a VERY logical method for building a PC. Think of a stereo rack. Nobody seems to mind the look of them.
I'd say something about 10"W X 10"D X 2-3"H in size.
It would look like a stack of books -- hell, you could be artistic and actually make them look like books.
I'd imagine something like this:
Layer one (bottom): the power supply. With its own intelligent controller of course.
Layer two: the processor and RAM. A nice AMD chip and some standard video, networking, and sound built in, just in case you don't have:
Layer three: the sound/and/or/video box: contains a powerful video card and mahap sound as well.
Layer three: Hard drive. Of course, you could have many of these. Stack 'em high. RAID? no problem, built-in. IDE? Why bother? Use Firewire: it's Good Enough, as Pournelle would say. As an alternative, for a lot more money, you could have a RAMdrive module instead of a spinning disk. Choices are fun. Want more memory in your RAMdrive? Pop the unit open, add RAM. Or just add a new RAMdrive unit for a few bucks.
Layer four, optional: NIC. Or router, or a switch; the networking module in general. Hell, put the firewall in this box. Want to change your PC to a server? Drop this module onto the stack. The PC autoconfigs and makes it so.
Layer five thru infinity: CD-ROM. DVD. Burners. Tape machines. Audio tape unit. Minidisk. How about this: a VHS tape drive, so you could rip your videos.
The cool thing is that as new media are created, you could simply drop the new add-on "book" to your stack.
As you have said, you could use Firewire for most of this. I know, AGP and other busses don't work that way, but maybe video and such should migrate to a new bus.
Something I could originally add here would be more pie-in-the-sky, but how about this: the units could communicate by ruby laser. Every unit, when stacked, would have a port pointed up on the top side, and a port pointing downwards on the bottom. The lasers would align when the Lego(TM) pegs snap together. No matter how you rearrange the stack, communication establishes and everything works.
And yes, you'd use Linux, of course.
The stack idea works in home entertainment systems. Could work nicely in PCs. To think of it, if you have a mini stack with a monster CPU, hard drives, audio, DVD video, VHS player, audio cassette tape, Minidisc, AM/FM tuner, TV tuner, you name it... what the hell do we need the old home entertainment system for? Okay, add an amplifier to the stack, and you are rocking.
I think that my last point might explain why Sony et al don't make stacking PC systems:) We wouldn't need the big black stacks of electronics anymore to watch a movie.
I'd guess from other posts that some manufacturers make things like what we imagine, but mostly for industrial use.
A PC built like this could be as cheap as $200 US, for just the processor/power supply/HDD stock, or as expensive as you want to make it.
Hmm. Could hardware make the transition to Open Source as well? Could the bus could be generic Firewire 2, and could we roll our own hardware?
Minor? Let's shove a railroad spike into your wrist and do an interview with ya afterwards.
Lemme guess... you're between 20 and 35, and don't believe you'll ever die or feel real pain, or more importantly, lose your job because of pain.
Making a person who gets carpal on the job live on welfare for the rest of her life is not a victory for disabled people everywhere, and as for freedom... freedom for whom? For her? Exactly whose freedom are you talking about? The freedom to scream when you bend your wrist? The freedom to be canned after the job hurts you at last to the point you can't do it?
Or is it the freedom of some yungyun to make lots of cash on the stock of the companies who no longer need to pay for such injuries?
The concept isn't efficiency. That stick has beaten govmint's head enuf already, thanks.
The idea isn't to make it efficient. Enron was efficient, @Home was, Amazon was, and they took it betwwen the eyes.
Guvmint projects and funds created the telephone. Railroad. It created at the cost of (adjusted for inflation) trillions the road system that even today requires hundreds of billions yearly, at all guvmint levels, to maintain, and I don't see anyone paying monthly payments for using it.
Cost accounting, and efficiency, are entirely subjective. It depends on what you want to deem a cost.
Did you notice the lockstep increase in long distance charges about a week ago?
It's like the "Lowest Prices Every Day!" signs you see in some stores. A meaningless statement without the comparison.
We're being gouged, people! They are making fortunes on our asses, and we are getting terrible, restricted, and ultimately censored and monitored communications for all our money.
Put it on a shelf over your desk... problem solved!
Seriously, I always thought that a swing-arm flatscreen mounted on a wall, or a BIG one mounted like a mirror, would be the ideal desktop display.
And Jobs and Co. do have the right idea -- PC's do not have to be behemoths anymore. I think that giant boxen have more to do with Freudian theory than actual utility.
Slashdot Mirror
by "tightly focused beams" I meant tightly focused radio transmissions, a la the Pringlenet, AKA an 802.11 transmitter in a cylindrical waveguide that can bost the range from feet to miles.
Thing that puzzles me is this: why does 2 gigs of transmitted data cost more than a meg? Do transmitted packets really cost all that much more, or is it cost accounting, i.e. nonsense?
Legal advice may not be necessary if they never share a broadband pipe, or even a modem, that connects to another ISP, telecom, or whatever.
The idea I've always promulgated is this: build a new internet using the wireless tech. Eventually lasers or tightly focused beams can provide backbones through which local WANs can communcate.
The Internet has been taken over by corporations and the guv'mint. The flimsy yet powerful excuses of hackers, child porn and terrorists were enough to get our doors kicked down.
Damn the Internet, damn the law, and gawd damn the lawyers. Let's bring the joy back to our world again. Get a kilt and some blue paint. Time to moon the emmeny.
I am moved to ammend my earlier remarks... yes, you can pick yourself up by educating yourself, even at a late age. Of course.
Curious tho, as to how well the janitor is doing, even with his degree. I really wish him well.
But that kind of will is not common. If you are from a poor family, in wealth or in imagination, it's, literally, hard to conceive of what that janitor did.
There aren't many "janitor"/comp sci's out there. But if there are, I hope they speak up in this thread. How'd it work out for you? How about this recession especially; are you hurt in the job market because of your past?
Interesting.
Okay, speedy typing and the need to make a point streamlines my statements. No, Bush was not recognizing the government of Afghanistan. He only dealt with them for getting a deal on declaring opium against the Will of God for our War on Drugs, and for access to natural gas and oil.
But he did deal with them. He did not refuse to deal with them 'cause of terrorist ties, or the way they treat their women. He dealt with them to get things he wanted.
It's been thought that the humanitarian aide was granted in exchange for the "Will of God" pronouncement against opium. I rather agree.
Okay, so my spelling breaks down under speed.
Hold on there, Ayn Rand. Positive Mental Attitudes do not rock the world all the time.
You can go to school and improve yourself. If you are 19 - 25. Beyond that, in high tech as in other fields, you are SCREWED because of age discrimination.
Move to places that are cheaper to live in? Why do you think they are cheaper to begin with? There are no bloody jobs there! The few that do exist pay min wage! YOU try living on 5.15 and hour, and improve yourself... yes, I did it once,dirt poor and supporint my mom, but I was twenty. I didn't have a kid, and I had a pretty good education considering.
Not everyone grew up in a 'burb with good schools. If you didn't, you ain't getting a better job. You ain't goin' to school, and you ain't gonna get rich.
But in Europe they manage to have decent pay and decent lives, even at the bottom of the pay scale. And somehow, the government doesn't collapse, businesses stay alive and profitable.
Maybe the corelation between good pay an higher unemployment is true. But I doubt the pro-biz groups sponsoring those studies commissioned studies of the miseries caused by low/no-pay no-security jobs.
Under-employment's costs are not quantified because no one wants them to be.
They could expect to change it by bargaining collectively; but that's pretty much illegal now.
Sigh.
A human being should not be cheated and gamed with just because he/she were not born in a nice suburb with a fat tax base to fund the schools.
God, this new century's well-employed children sound like the wealthy scions of 19th century moguls.
Not everyone gets the golden elevator. People on that elevator are lucky, not deserving.
People who are not software engineers or accounting/marketing sharks do not thus deserve being cheated of their wages and in general treated like chain gang escapees. We had something in this country called "unions" once who would help the non-engineers get more than 1000 bucks a month to raise a family. Those unions are now for all intents and purposes illegal, banned.
Damme if it doesn't make me want a hammer and sickle sometimes. Arrogance from the top is far harder to take than arrogance from a union official; the well-paid denigrator of unions has no business blocking the ability of low-paid people to improve their position by collective bargaining. It's grotesque.
The fight did drag on and on. It's the truth.
We the Somalis brave? They lost thousands to our 18, and kept coming. They were definitely motivated to die for their cause.
We our Rangers and Delta men brave as well? Do you really have to ask? I saw the movie. Tho it is definitely cleaned up a bit to take out the more ambigious morality of desperate soldiers outnumbered hundreds to one, they fought like heroes, and all honor to them.
To really answer your point and stay on-thread, I'd say the movie would still be a 4/5 or 5/5 even wihout 9-11. It's intense, and has the advantage of a real story that happened to people we may know.
"Anti-American" -- "Anti-military"...
When I hear these terms thrown around, I get very nervous. Check your pockets, and watch the news more carefully, because there is bullshit afoot.
It is possible to not be anti-military, and not be a traitor, and still look the truth in the eyes and spit. Are we killing civilians? How will we ever know? They've banned newsmen from the war. Another red flag that bullshit is afoot.
Your distinction between Bush's and Clinton's administration is strained at best. And I include "Bush II: The Unintended President" as well in the administration list.
Clinton most certainly was spurred on by humanitarian motives. The warlords had turned the horror of a famine into a hell of intentional genocide. The only way out, to save maximum lives, was to destroy the warlords -- a huge task. Could the Clinton administration have done it? No, not with hysterical undermining of his authority at every turn in the military, the Congress, and the newly radicallized media channels. A President needs cooperation, and without it he is trying to sail a boat without being able to tack when necessary.
He bailed. Probably with the concurrence of his staff, both civilian and military.
Nation building? What exactly is Bush W. doing right now in Afghanistan? He has killed and imprisoned the leadership of the country whom he formerly supported, and replaced it with the warlords that people hated so much before the Taliban drove them out.
Remember also that Afghanistan did not attack us. A distributed network of fundementalists did. But we can't really get them, so we got the Afghanis instead.
So we are building a nation NOW in Afghanistan, with the warlords who had tortured their people in the early nineties. Oh my aching head...
So watch the mission creep. It happens. But in the case of the Somalis, we were really trying to save them from genocide. Demonizing, tiredly, President Clinton, is silly. We had not nothing to gain in Somalia but the ability to look at ourselves in the mirror. We didn't save people from Pol Pot, or the Serbs (until far too late), or even the poor people in the German concentration camps, not until it was far too late. We didn't care to know they were dying at the time it was happening. The Somali situation was being broadcast live. We couldn't deny the truth. Children were being tortured to death by starvation, and we could stop it.
At least in Somalia we actually captured the bad guy.
We went into Somali to save our souls; no one said it would be easy.
Isn't the adjective "bad" redundant?
Get an analog-to-digital-to-analog converter box. The picture is cleaned up en route, I am told.
Anyone use this? They cost about fifty bucks US at electronic stores.
The crypto is already out. Forbidding "export"? Why? It's like banning the export of algebra.
The fallacy mayhap is a result of the acceptance of the concept of non-things like "intellectual property". Since a song or a story has the cache of an actual physical object under the new batch of laws, somehow cryptological methods are also like physical objects, and can be stopped at the border by Customs if they find it hidden in someone's suitcase.
Like all "Homeland Security" notions, banning the immaterial mathematics of crypto only satisfies the need for people to feel safer. If that shoeboy had used 128-bit encryption, the calls for programmer blood would be deafening us. But, remember, he wouldn't need crypto to bring a shoe on the plane, so all the possible recriminations would have been for naught.
The objust of terrorism is to bring terror to your enemy, to disrupt and destroy and distract, and it looks like the collective consciousness of the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia are falling into the state of panic and foolishness desired.
Actually, use of the public airways is a government-controlled business; the networks get, free of charge, granted broad swaths of spectrum to broadcast. And print money.
What is done with that grant of OUR bandwidth, granted by OUR good grace through our representatives, is OUR business.
These businesses are dictating terms to the people of the United States. This should not be. They have been made wealthy through our largess, and they therefore have the responsibility to us owners to provide content as we bloody see fit.
They do not own the airwaves. We do. The market is not free in this situation. The almost religious movement to dereg the market has led us to this -- they are locking up our TV's.
Enough of this.
The point is, if this flies legally and commercially, you won't have a choice but to buy their product under their rules. All manufacturers of music CD's will use this boilerplate. Your "choice" is: submit, or never buy music again.
Should everyone who has a beer be put on a work detail for two weeks?
Should you be executed for fighting while drunk? If so, exactly how many teenagers would make it past the age of 17?
Should you pay a >$5000US file for getting drunk in any way and showing up in public and "disturbing" someone? Would the fact that you may disturb someone just by being drunk make you eligible for the police to confiscate your home?
Remember, if you don't pay the fine, you go to jail, AND get all your stuff taken away, AND you lose your job, AND in some states can never vote again, AND if you try to run away from jail they will indeed shoot you in the back and kill you. Your blood will be spurting between your shaking fingers as you die, and your last thought will be the words of some poster saying you should be executed for being drunk...
Isn't all this insane?? Hows does marijuana inspire such madness in the American mind? There is no thinking, just reactionary nonsense that destroys millions of people's lives.
The productivity and lifetime lost due to such breathtakingly mindless laws must be measured in hundreds of thousands of man-years and a good fraction of a trillion dollars. Not to mention the loss of respect for the law, due to the fact, and it is a fact, that marijuana is ridiculously harmless, and sober and respectible people make up laws to annihilate people who use it, for no reason discernable to anyone. All fear, all legends, all unprovable... just jails, laws, and more jails.
When alchohol is freely available, kills and injures millions, and for some reason we have adapted our culture to it with little comment. Because its America's Drug, and God help anyone who takes it away.
I'm sorry, but mindlessness on this scale is a horror.
As you and another poster mentioned, the stackable option is a VERY logical method for building a PC. Think of a stereo rack. Nobody seems to mind the look of them.
:) We wouldn't need the big black stacks of electronics anymore to watch a movie.
I'd say something about 10"W X 10"D X 2-3"H in size.
It would look like a stack of books -- hell, you could be artistic and actually make them look like books.
I'd imagine something like this:
Layer one (bottom): the power supply. With its own intelligent controller of course.
Layer two: the processor and RAM. A nice AMD chip and some standard video, networking, and sound built in, just in case you don't have:
Layer three: the sound/and/or/video box: contains a powerful video card and mahap sound as well.
Layer three: Hard drive. Of course, you could have many of these. Stack 'em high. RAID? no problem, built-in. IDE? Why bother? Use Firewire: it's Good Enough, as Pournelle would say. As an alternative, for a lot more money, you could have a RAMdrive module instead of a spinning disk. Choices are fun. Want more memory in your RAMdrive? Pop the unit open, add RAM. Or just add a new RAMdrive unit for a few bucks.
Layer four, optional: NIC. Or router, or a switch; the networking module in general. Hell, put the firewall in this box. Want to change your PC to a server? Drop this module onto the stack. The PC autoconfigs and makes it so.
Layer five thru infinity: CD-ROM. DVD. Burners. Tape machines. Audio tape unit. Minidisk. How about this: a VHS tape drive, so you could rip your videos.
The cool thing is that as new media are created, you could simply drop the new add-on "book" to your stack.
As you have said, you could use Firewire for most of this. I know, AGP and other busses don't work that way, but maybe video and such should migrate to a new bus.
Something I could originally add here would be more pie-in-the-sky, but how about this: the units could communicate by ruby laser. Every unit, when stacked, would have a port pointed up on the top side, and a port pointing downwards on the bottom. The lasers would align when the Lego(TM) pegs snap together. No matter how you rearrange the stack, communication establishes and everything works.
And yes, you'd use Linux, of course.
The stack idea works in home entertainment systems. Could work nicely in PCs. To think of it, if you have a mini stack with a monster CPU, hard drives, audio, DVD video, VHS player, audio cassette tape, Minidisc, AM/FM tuner, TV tuner, you name it... what the hell do we need the old home entertainment system for? Okay, add an amplifier to the stack, and you are rocking.
I think that my last point might explain why Sony et al don't make stacking PC systems
I'd guess from other posts that some manufacturers make things like what we imagine, but mostly for industrial use.
A PC built like this could be as cheap as $200 US, for just the processor/power supply/HDD stock, or as expensive as you want to make it.
Hmm. Could hardware make the transition to Open Source as well? Could the bus could be generic Firewire 2, and could we roll our own hardware?
You all tell me.
Minor? Let's shove a railroad spike into your wrist and do an interview with ya afterwards.
Lemme guess... you're between 20 and 35, and don't believe you'll ever die or feel real pain, or more importantly, lose your job because of pain.
Making a person who gets carpal on the job live on welfare for the rest of her life is not a victory for disabled people everywhere, and as for freedom... freedom for whom? For her? Exactly whose freedom are you talking about? The freedom to scream when you bend your wrist? The freedom to be canned after the job hurts you at last to the point you can't do it?
Or is it the freedom of some yungyun to make lots of cash on the stock of the companies who no longer need to pay for such injuries?
The concept isn't efficiency. That stick has beaten govmint's head enuf already, thanks.
The idea isn't to make it efficient. Enron was efficient, @Home was, Amazon was, and they took it betwwen the eyes.
Guvmint projects and funds created the telephone. Railroad. It created at the cost of (adjusted for inflation) trillions the road system that even today requires hundreds of billions yearly, at all guvmint levels, to maintain, and I don't see anyone paying monthly payments for using it.
Cost accounting, and efficiency, are entirely subjective. It depends on what you want to deem a cost.
Low priced compared to what?
Did you notice the lockstep increase in long distance charges about a week ago?
It's like the "Lowest Prices Every Day!" signs you see in some stores. A meaningless statement without the comparison.
We're being gouged, people! They are making fortunes on our asses, and we are getting terrible, restricted, and ultimately censored and monitored communications for all our money.
Thanks, dereg, indeed. Thank you for Enron, too.
Then, how do Canadians get broadband for so cheap?
Put it on a shelf over your desk... problem solved!
Seriously, I always thought that a swing-arm flatscreen mounted on a wall, or a BIG one mounted like a mirror, would be the ideal desktop display.
And Jobs and Co. do have the right idea -- PC's do not have to be behemoths anymore. I think that giant boxen have more to do with Freudian theory than actual utility.