But even with Tesla aside, this isn't new... it's just not as vastly useful as people re-discovering it seem to think it is. It doesn't work over gigantic distances, only moderate ones, and there's no engineering you can do to get around that.
The misunderstanding a lot of people have is that they think Tesla was chasing *truly* wireless power - when in fact this was probably never his goal. Tesla was always chasing after something he called "longitudinal waves" in an attempt to perform worldwide "wireless" power transmission - he even called one of his companies World Wireless.
Tesla certainly wasn't foolish enough to believe this distance was possible with purely wireless transmission, but instead investigated single-wire transmission systems using the ground as the single wire. His initial success at single-wire transmission was at Colorado Springs in 1900 with three lightbulbs in a closed circuit loop with no power source and a transmission source a hundred feet away. In this experiment, as in his later vacuum tube powering experiment performed at considerably greater distances (eventually miles away), the objects in question were always had a metallic contact with the ground.
Take a look at figures 3, 6, and 7 on this page: http://amasci.com/tesla/tmistk.html. This seems the most likely explanation for the experiments at Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe. Wardenclyffe in particular is where we find Tesla sinking iron rods 300 feet into the ground, burning out local power station dynamos with his energy demands, and constructing a massive omnidirectional transmission tower.
The reasonable conclusion from all this is that Tesla was always pursuing single-wire transmission schemes in which literally the entire Earth itself was the single wire, and the transmission medium for the wireless component was the entire ionosphere. "World Wireless" seems to have been meant quite literally, which was in keeping with all we know about Tesla's personality. Unfortunately, as we all know, Tesla needed something like an order of magnitude more funding than JP Morgan was willing to provide - particularly after Marconi.
Beyond that, though, Morgan would have probably pulled the project even if Tesla had gotten it working: if single-wire worldwide transmission was in fact his intention, it would've been impossible to meter consumption on a per-user basis.
Yeah, the original post is terrible. If he was *really* trying to get people to needlessly hyperventilate he should have titled it "A GNU/Linux distro needing BSD to install?!?!"
That's the most damning thing about this - myself and several friends have used Zicam heavily over the past year. It *really* works if you're in a super-high-stress job that exposes you to a lot of colds/flu (med student, floor trader for a brokerage, constantly traveling for business, etc.).
I got a vicious cold last weekend and would not be traveling right now if it weren't for the stuff, and the universal reaction from the group of people I just IM'd to make sure they knew was, "Crap... it's *almost* worth it."
It's not almost worth it, of course, but the one thing I'll say for Zicam is that it definitely does what it claims to do.
Couldn't you perform the detection by measuring the delta of the state?
On booting Windows 95, attempt to read from the floppy drive. If there's no disk, then take whatever that hardware state is - whether 1 or 0 - as the 'base' value, and periodically check to see if that value has changed.
I may be missing something but it seems like the appropriate trigger isn't the specific value of the flag, but rather the setting of said flag.
Actually, given the relative power of the two factions over time and BoB's level of entrenchment in very rich, very central parts of the gamespace, a better analogy might be Google taking down Microsoft through the same methods. I stopped playing EVE three years ago and even I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when I read this news. BoB was *THE* all-pervading massive enclave of successful assholes in the game, and despite recent losses were still the largest power. Unbelievable.
A year before Bioshock shipped, I applied for a QA position at Irrational Boston. After five years of unemployment, I still have no idea why they hired me, but I wasn't about to argue. Fast-forward three months in QA, some game balance analysis writeups I'd done caught Ken Levine's eye and gave him the impression I was quasi-literate. For my part, I simply didn't have the heart to correct him.
A month later I was working fulltime on script proofing, then editing, story structure, helping direct voiceover recording sessions, and finally voiceover production (take selection & compositing).
So, some tips: 1) Get a QA position at a development studio where you are actually working hand in hand with the developers. Do NOT get a QA position at a publisher's degenerate nerd stockyard - busing tables or suicide would be preferable to that.
2) Get your foot in the door any way you can, no matter how low or menial you have to start, and once you're inside show them what you're capable of. Without pissing off your manager.
This is a young industry, there's a lot of movement potential if you've got the chops. Get out there and amaze people.
I'm kind of curious about all this. It seems like the threshold to rapid manufacture/prototyping is being drastically lowered every day. I've seen past Slashdot stories about assembling prototyping machines for a few thousand dollars. Slap a few small motors, some wheels, and a manipulator arm on these 3D plotters and you really might start to have something . . .
Besides a low nine figures in funding, a small army of engineers - mechanical, electrical, and especially software, and an iron mine near a river (for easy hydro power), what would be required to setup an honest to God working Von Neumann machine?
I should mention I'm not slagging Valve - TF2 is the best multiplayer game I've played in basically forever. It's just that from a functional perspective people generally use round-based multiplayer games as if they were pornography. I'm not sure whether that's unfortunate or really the entire point, though.
Full disclosure: I worked heavily on the production of Bioshock's voiceover, so I have a bit of an opinion on this topic.
My own take is that gaming is a very broad medium - possibly even beyond film. We see in the film industry a single medium containing both Requiem For A Dream and Dumb and Dumberer. Miller's Crossing and Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit.
Games (not "entertainment software", games, damnit) cover a similar spectrum, even if the high-brow fare is a bit thin on the ground right now. Such was the case for film when that industry was gaming's current age.
At this point in time much of the gaming industry occupies the same functional niche as pornography - people go home after an exhausting day at work, have a beer, demolish noobs on Team Fortress 2 to relax, and then go to bed. But the existence of pornography in film does not prevent that medium from providing works of real intellectual and artistic substance. Neither does gaming as pornography - both literally and metaphorically - hinder the development of deeper experiences.
I think if anything gaming provides the potential for experiences of greater power than film because we can develop both narrative-driven and sandbox experiences for our audience. We've seen the promise of the latter in GTA*, Oblivion, and I believe we'll see more of it in Spore. We've witnessed an outstanding achievement in the former named Call of Duty 4 - and my hat is off to Infinity Ward for such an amazing work. Beyond the singleplayer, massively multiplayer games can also provide a great range of experiences - from Ultima Online's open-ended fantasy simulation to Planetside's extremely structured gameplay.
We will get gaming to the level where it can be taken seriously as a work of art. We are getting it to that level. Right this moment. Your patience, please.:)
*I am a Take 2 employee, blah blah blah the opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of my employer etc. etc. ad nauseum.
IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.
One fortunate consequence of this is that smaller black holes 'evaporate' more quickly, and the microscopic black holes we'll likely be generating at the Large Hadron Collider will cease to exist before they've even had sufficient time to absorb a neutrino.
Modern consoles require authentication keys from discs before they will run the content on them. These keys are doled out by the console manufacturer. Different SKU = different key = new run through the platform owner's (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) certification process. No modern console manufacturers allow AO or unrated games on their systems to prevent liability from shrieking parents/tarnishing of the company image.
Speaking as a diehard gamer still smoldering over the entire 3.x debacle . . . No. All of these, especially the ECL garbage, were really good revisions.
I suppose somebody should explain it for the newbs who are passingly curious:
Thirty levels instead of twenty basically means there's more headroom for higher-level adventuring before normal players have to worry about abtruse and convoluted 'epic character' rulesets/feats/whatever that often feel very non-canon.
No more XP costs for magic items creation means that you no longer lose experience points (gained by running quests, killing monsters) whenever you create a magic item. This is a Really Good Thing(tm) because it would invariably mean that the one person in each group who got saddled with building a character capable of crafting specialized magic weapons for everyone got shafted good and hard when the time came to start whipping up custom +5 swords of Destroy All Life that cast Karsus Avatar three times a day (injoke, sorry).
Feats were basically very generalized character bonus property snapons that you would add (on average) every three levels. This could be anything from improving your character's skill at the short sword (Weapon Focus: Short Sword), to them gaining the general ability to to double the duration of beneficial spells (although doing so made them harder to cast). Prestige classes were basically specialized variants of the normal basic classes (or occupations, examples of classes would be fighter, mage, thief, etc.) that had special properties: examples include the "Frenzied Berserker" spinoff of the Barbarian, the "Assassin" spinoff of the Rogue, and so forth. Canon prestige classes were *in general* slightly weaker than the base classes they were derived from, but if used very very carefully in moderate proportions could be game-breakingly powerful (Fighter/Bard/Red Dragon Disciple/Frenzied Berserker players will know exactly what I am talking about). Both of those systems apparently got folded in to class-specific development trees, which is very similar to how (surprise!) World of Warcraft handles this basic concept.
Racial Bonus system shedding ECL: ECL stands for Effective Character Level. With so many different races/sub-races in D&D it was impossible to keep them all balanced, so certain 'uber' races like Aasimar, Tieflings, Drow, and Deep Gnomes were assigned Effective Character Levels. What this basically meant was that they got pushed back one to three levels on the experience tree so that at the point where a human character was level 5, a drow party member of theirs was likely to be 3. Given the degree to which levels are the beginning and end of a character in D&D (particularly spell-casting classes, double-particularly sorcerers) this could make things very un-fun, especially in the upper game where levels are few and far inbetween. Getting rid of this comes as a massive relief to me, as it's always struck me as the single least pleasant 3.x convention.
The final bit is just cleaning up some of the more ridiculous skills out there which nobody uses.
In general, all of this is *hugely* positive news for D&D fans. I hope to God clerics got toned back a bit as well, but that might be asking for too much.
It's Yahoo message boards. I 100% guarantee that anybody smart enough to have an opinion worth considering is not affected in the least by this - so why does it matter?
How realistic is it to expect a Windows user to run their OS as non-root?
About two months ago I tried it. It was absolutely fucking horrible, and just a colossal pain in the ass. It may just be because I'm constantly installing/uninstalling both software and hardware, tweaking the system settings, etc. but it was flat out unusable. I've managed to avoid getting any virii, trojans, rootkits, etc. for the past decade - but even if I were to have to do a completely random system wipe once a year (in addition to my four quarterly reformats each year) I would still be way, way ahead in productivity compared to running as admin.
Speaking as a white male caucasian and die-hard fan, Star Trek is pretty fucking offensive in its borrowing of racial stereotypes.
Klingons - black skin, brutish, unintelligent, hyper-aggressive, extremely athletic and possessed of a mystical earthy wisdom that's a direct rip of the "magic negro" phenomenon. They're a condensed version of every stereotype about Africans.
Romulans - intelligent, devious, amoral, harsh semi-collectivist government, yellow skin, slanty features, related to 'emotionless' creatures. Condensed version of every stereotype about Asians.
Ferengi - greed-obsessed swindlers of the lowest sort with bulbous ugly noses, comical ears, and they are constantly lusting for Federation (read: Caucasian) women.
It's all there, plain as day. Obviously in the Klingon case there's been importation of 'good' cultural elements like an honor system, etc., but the basic stereotypes are glaring. Tolkein doesn't score much better, either. At least Dune, as the nerd classics go, has the decency to glorify a non-European race.
I was starting to get the tingling in the nerves of my right hand recently at 25 - and I've spent nearly every day, at least 12 hours, on the keyboard since highschool. Sometimes I'll go a few months, solid, in front of the screen 16/7. At first I thought it was just age and wear and tear on my wrists, but then I noticed something - the new high-back executive chair I bought sat lower, at its maximum height, than my previous chair.
So I bought a new chair that sat higher with higher armrests, and haven't had even a whisper of a problem since. I'm convinced the problem is largely one of ergonomics and posture.
Massachusetts may be liberal, but it's also money. That goes triple for Cape Cod. The problem you're encountering here is people who are liberal in the sense that they don't care what the poor do in their bedrooms, but they sure as hell don't want their precious view spoiled.
This may come as a shock, but the left does not have a monopoly on overly wealthy hypocritical asshats who will be the death of us all.
They've actually been doing the coupons a lot less lately for laptops, but their sales still stack when they do. I placed my order at 5AM CST on the 6th, when there was a 20% off/free shipping sale and they were offering a free 1GB upgrade on the E1505. The $450 coupon stacked *after* taking those into account (but did not stack with a different $200 coupon), which is how I was able to get the machine for $1065. That's probably unfair because it was only right then (April 5th ending 6AM CST on the 6th) that you could pull it off. I highly doubt I'll ever pull off that kind of coup again - I was floored when the order went through. That said, it demonstrates what you can pull off with Dell when patient.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody already mashed this trailer up with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" - it works disturbingly well.
--Ryv
But even with Tesla aside, this isn't new... it's just not as vastly useful as people re-discovering it seem to think it is. It doesn't work over gigantic distances, only moderate ones, and there's no engineering you can do to get around that.
The misunderstanding a lot of people have is that they think Tesla was chasing *truly* wireless power - when in fact this was probably never his goal. Tesla was always chasing after something he called "longitudinal waves" in an attempt to perform worldwide "wireless" power transmission - he even called one of his companies World Wireless.
Tesla certainly wasn't foolish enough to believe this distance was possible with purely wireless transmission, but instead investigated single-wire transmission systems using the ground as the single wire. His initial success at single-wire transmission was at Colorado Springs in 1900 with three lightbulbs in a closed circuit loop with no power source and a transmission source a hundred feet away. In this experiment, as in his later vacuum tube powering experiment performed at considerably greater distances (eventually miles away), the objects in question were always had a metallic contact with the ground.
Take a look at figures 3, 6, and 7 on this page: http://amasci.com/tesla/tmistk.html. This seems the most likely explanation for the experiments at Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe. Wardenclyffe in particular is where we find Tesla sinking iron rods 300 feet into the ground, burning out local power station dynamos with his energy demands, and constructing a massive omnidirectional transmission tower.
The reasonable conclusion from all this is that Tesla was always pursuing single-wire transmission schemes in which literally the entire Earth itself was the single wire, and the transmission medium for the wireless component was the entire ionosphere. "World Wireless" seems to have been meant quite literally, which was in keeping with all we know about Tesla's personality. Unfortunately, as we all know, Tesla needed something like an order of magnitude more funding than JP Morgan was willing to provide - particularly after Marconi.
Beyond that, though, Morgan would have probably pulled the project even if Tesla had gotten it working: if single-wire worldwide transmission was in fact his intention, it would've been impossible to meter consumption on a per-user basis.
Yeah, the original post is terrible. If he was *really* trying to get people to needlessly hyperventilate he should have titled it "A GNU/Linux distro needing BSD to install?!?!"
That's the most damning thing about this - myself and several friends have used Zicam heavily over the past year. It *really* works if you're in a super-high-stress job that exposes you to a lot of colds/flu (med student, floor trader for a brokerage, constantly traveling for business, etc.).
I got a vicious cold last weekend and would not be traveling right now if it weren't for the stuff, and the universal reaction from the group of people I just IM'd to make sure they knew was, "Crap... it's *almost* worth it."
It's not almost worth it, of course, but the one thing I'll say for Zicam is that it definitely does what it claims to do.
Damn.
Hey, maybe Iran or North Korea would let us borrow some of theirs!
Couldn't you perform the detection by measuring the delta of the state?
On booting Windows 95, attempt to read from the floppy drive. If there's no disk, then take whatever that hardware state is - whether 1 or 0 - as the 'base' value, and periodically check to see if that value has changed.
I may be missing something but it seems like the appropriate trigger isn't the specific value of the flag, but rather the setting of said flag.
--Ryvar
Actually, given the relative power of the two factions over time and BoB's level of entrenchment in very rich, very central parts of the gamespace, a better analogy might be Google taking down Microsoft through the same methods. I stopped playing EVE three years ago and even I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when I read this news. BoB was *THE* all-pervading massive enclave of successful assholes in the game, and despite recent losses were still the largest power. Unbelievable.
Here's my experience:
A year before Bioshock shipped, I applied for a QA position at Irrational Boston. After five years of unemployment, I still have no idea why they hired me, but I wasn't about to argue. Fast-forward three months in QA, some game balance analysis writeups I'd done caught Ken Levine's eye and gave him the impression I was quasi-literate. For my part, I simply didn't have the heart to correct him.
A month later I was working fulltime on script proofing, then editing, story structure, helping direct voiceover recording sessions, and finally voiceover production (take selection & compositing).
So, some tips:
1) Get a QA position at a development studio where you are actually working hand in hand with the developers. Do NOT get a QA position at a publisher's degenerate nerd stockyard - busing tables or suicide would be preferable to that.
2) Get your foot in the door any way you can, no matter how low or menial you have to start, and once you're inside show them what you're capable of. Without pissing off your manager.
This is a young industry, there's a lot of movement potential if you've got the chops. Get out there and amaze people.
--Ryvar
You're assuming that there will be dollars in 2010. Given the way things stand right now, I wouldn't accept that as a given.
I think I'll vote via absentee ballot and send it via registered mail. Paranoid? Maybe.
If this story is true, then I can't think of anything more foolish than purposefully drawing attention to oneself.
Moreover, isn't there a simple workaround in padding your ssh/scp packets and adding a random 10% chance of +1-25ms delay between packets?
I'm kind of curious about all this. It seems like the threshold to rapid manufacture/prototyping is being drastically lowered every day. I've seen past Slashdot stories about assembling prototyping machines for a few thousand dollars. Slap a few small motors, some wheels, and a manipulator arm on these 3D plotters and you really might start to have something . . .
Besides a low nine figures in funding, a small army of engineers - mechanical, electrical, and especially software, and an iron mine near a river (for easy hydro power), what would be required to setup an honest to God working Von Neumann machine?
I should mention I'm not slagging Valve - TF2 is the best multiplayer game I've played in basically forever. It's just that from a functional perspective people generally use round-based multiplayer games as if they were pornography. I'm not sure whether that's unfortunate or really the entire point, though.
Full disclosure: I worked heavily on the production of Bioshock's voiceover, so I have a bit of an opinion on this topic.
:)
My own take is that gaming is a very broad medium - possibly even beyond film. We see in the film industry a single medium containing both Requiem For A Dream and Dumb and Dumberer. Miller's Crossing and Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit.
Games (not "entertainment software", games, damnit) cover a similar spectrum, even if the high-brow fare is a bit thin on the ground right now. Such was the case for film when that industry was gaming's current age.
At this point in time much of the gaming industry occupies the same functional niche as pornography - people go home after an exhausting day at work, have a beer, demolish noobs on Team Fortress 2 to relax, and then go to bed. But the existence of pornography in film does not prevent that medium from providing works of real intellectual and artistic substance. Neither does gaming as pornography - both literally and metaphorically - hinder the development of deeper experiences.
I think if anything gaming provides the potential for experiences of greater power than film because we can develop both narrative-driven and sandbox experiences for our audience. We've seen the promise of the latter in GTA*, Oblivion, and I believe we'll see more of it in Spore. We've witnessed an outstanding achievement in the former named Call of Duty 4 - and my hat is off to Infinity Ward for such an amazing work. Beyond the singleplayer, massively multiplayer games can also provide a great range of experiences - from Ultima Online's open-ended fantasy simulation to Planetside's extremely structured gameplay.
We will get gaming to the level where it can be taken seriously as a work of art. We are getting it to that level. Right this moment. Your patience, please.
*I am a Take 2 employee, blah blah blah the opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of my employer etc. etc. ad nauseum.
IANAP, but as I understand it, Hawking radiation is caused by virtual particles pairs being created such that rather than annihilating each other and returning local space to a base 'zero' state, one of the pair escapes the singularity's gravity and the other does not.
One fortunate consequence of this is that smaller black holes 'evaporate' more quickly, and the microscopic black holes we'll likely be generating at the Large Hadron Collider will cease to exist before they've even had sufficient time to absorb a neutrino.
Modern consoles require authentication keys from discs before they will run the content on them. These keys are doled out by the console manufacturer. Different SKU = different key = new run through the platform owner's (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) certification process. No modern console manufacturers allow AO or unrated games on their systems to prevent liability from shrieking parents/tarnishing of the company image.
Speaking as a diehard gamer still smoldering over the entire 3.x debacle . . . No. All of these, especially the ECL garbage, were really good revisions.
I suppose somebody should explain it for the newbs who are passingly curious:
Thirty levels instead of twenty basically means there's more headroom for higher-level adventuring before normal players have to worry about abtruse and convoluted 'epic character' rulesets/feats/whatever that often feel very non-canon.
No more XP costs for magic items creation means that you no longer lose experience points (gained by running quests, killing monsters) whenever you create a magic item. This is a Really Good Thing(tm) because it would invariably mean that the one person in each group who got saddled with building a character capable of crafting specialized magic weapons for everyone got shafted good and hard when the time came to start whipping up custom +5 swords of Destroy All Life that cast Karsus Avatar three times a day (injoke, sorry).
Feats were basically very generalized character bonus property snapons that you would add (on average) every three levels. This could be anything from improving your character's skill at the short sword (Weapon Focus: Short Sword), to them gaining the general ability to to double the duration of beneficial spells (although doing so made them harder to cast). Prestige classes were basically specialized variants of the normal basic classes (or occupations, examples of classes would be fighter, mage, thief, etc.) that had special properties: examples include the "Frenzied Berserker" spinoff of the Barbarian, the "Assassin" spinoff of the Rogue, and so forth. Canon prestige classes were *in general* slightly weaker than the base classes they were derived from, but if used very very carefully in moderate proportions could be game-breakingly powerful (Fighter/Bard/Red Dragon Disciple/Frenzied Berserker players will know exactly what I am talking about). Both of those systems apparently got folded in to class-specific development trees, which is very similar to how (surprise!) World of Warcraft handles this basic concept.
Racial Bonus system shedding ECL: ECL stands for Effective Character Level. With so many different races/sub-races in D&D it was impossible to keep them all balanced, so certain 'uber' races like Aasimar, Tieflings, Drow, and Deep Gnomes were assigned Effective Character Levels. What this basically meant was that they got pushed back one to three levels on the experience tree so that at the point where a human character was level 5, a drow party member of theirs was likely to be 3. Given the degree to which levels are the beginning and end of a character in D&D (particularly spell-casting classes, double-particularly sorcerers) this could make things very un-fun, especially in the upper game where levels are few and far inbetween. Getting rid of this comes as a massive relief to me, as it's always struck me as the single least pleasant 3.x convention.
The final bit is just cleaning up some of the more ridiculous skills out there which nobody uses.
In general, all of this is *hugely* positive news for D&D fans. I hope to God clerics got toned back a bit as well, but that might be asking for too much.
--Ryv
It's Yahoo message boards. I 100% guarantee that anybody smart enough to have an opinion worth considering is not affected in the least by this - so why does it matter?
--Ryv
How realistic is it to expect a Windows user to run their OS as non-root?
About two months ago I tried it. It was absolutely fucking horrible, and just a colossal pain in the ass. It may just be because I'm constantly installing/uninstalling both software and hardware, tweaking the system settings, etc. but it was flat out unusable. I've managed to avoid getting any virii, trojans, rootkits, etc. for the past decade - but even if I were to have to do a completely random system wipe once a year (in addition to my four quarterly reformats each year) I would still be way, way ahead in productivity compared to running as admin.
It's simply not worth the hassle.
--Ryvar
Speaking as a white male caucasian and die-hard fan, Star Trek is pretty fucking offensive in its borrowing of racial stereotypes.
Klingons - black skin, brutish, unintelligent, hyper-aggressive, extremely athletic and possessed of a mystical earthy wisdom that's a direct rip of the "magic negro" phenomenon. They're a condensed version of every stereotype about Africans.
Romulans - intelligent, devious, amoral, harsh semi-collectivist government, yellow skin, slanty features, related to 'emotionless' creatures. Condensed version of every stereotype about Asians.
Ferengi - greed-obsessed swindlers of the lowest sort with bulbous ugly noses, comical ears, and they are constantly lusting for Federation (read: Caucasian) women.
It's all there, plain as day. Obviously in the Klingon case there's been importation of 'good' cultural elements like an honor system, etc., but the basic stereotypes are glaring. Tolkein doesn't score much better, either. At least Dune, as the nerd classics go, has the decency to glorify a non-European race.
--Ryvar
I was starting to get the tingling in the nerves of my right hand recently at 25 - and I've spent nearly every day, at least 12 hours, on the keyboard since highschool. Sometimes I'll go a few months, solid, in front of the screen 16/7. At first I thought it was just age and wear and tear on my wrists, but then I noticed something - the new high-back executive chair I bought sat lower, at its maximum height, than my previous chair.
So I bought a new chair that sat higher with higher armrests, and haven't had even a whisper of a problem since. I'm convinced the problem is largely one of ergonomics and posture.
--Ryvar
Massachusetts may be liberal, but it's also money. That goes triple for Cape Cod. The problem you're encountering here is people who are liberal in the sense that they don't care what the poor do in their bedrooms, but they sure as hell don't want their precious view spoiled.
This may come as a shock, but the left does not have a monopoly on overly wealthy hypocritical asshats who will be the death of us all.
--Ryvar
I thought we here at slashdot were 1337 enough to build out own computers and pirate the OSs.
We are. All four of the desktops my wife and I use are machines I built.
So why are we comparing a mac to a dell anyway?
Because we're discussing laptops, which do not have the same degree of modularity as a desktop.
Oh ya, and you can install OS X on a windows box [wired.com] making any software arguments irrelevant.
Yes, but not legally. At least, not according to Apple's legal attack lawyer-ninjas.
--Ryvar
They've actually been doing the coupons a lot less lately for laptops, but their sales still stack when they do. I placed my order at 5AM CST on the 6th, when there was a 20% off/free shipping sale and they were offering a free 1GB upgrade on the E1505. The $450 coupon stacked *after* taking those into account (but did not stack with a different $200 coupon), which is how I was able to get the machine for $1065. That's probably unfair because it was only right then (April 5th ending 6AM CST on the 6th) that you could pull it off. I highly doubt I'll ever pull off that kind of coup again - I was floored when the order went through. That said, it demonstrates what you can pull off with Dell when patient.
--Ryvar