Dell is still honoring whatever warranty you bought. They stopped offereing EXTENDED warranties including Complete Care. So what? They probably removed it due to lack of demand. Geeks don't pay for warranties anyway, do they? Why train and staff an Ubuntu tech support queue for the three people who bought an extended ubuntu warranty? Not exactly a sound financial decision. Man this is people getting really worked up for a one liner on idea storm. Wow.
Dell expects to sell about 20,000 units annually. That's less than 1% of its overall consumer business. Anyone who had anything in their posts thinking that Dell was going to try to 'convert' customers from Windows to Linux is really just speculating in the absence of fact. Dell is attempting to add incramental market share to their consumer business by reaching out to a new market.
I really take issue with people who have no idea how the political system works, but feel compelled to comment on it anyway, so I must respond. Voting for Ralph Nader is not "throwing away" a vote. First of all, voting is at most a symbolic act, the same lobbyists will control the same corporate will as existed before you cast your ballot. Ignoring that reality, Ralph Nader needs only 5% of the vote to qualify for over 12 million dollars in federal funds for 2004 and be on the ballot automatically in every state in America. You cannot change a country with one election, or with one man. But, if Nader can garner enough support(without evening running more than 260,000 people voted for him in 1996) then perhaps, local green candidates might have a fighting chance, where the real change takes place. It doesn't start in the white house or capital hill, it starts on your school boards, and your PTA's. We're talking about affecting a country for real, social change, not trying to win passage of some uninformed, hackneyed legislation. Dug, The Two Party System-Unsafe at any speed.
There is really only one application for a triany(or larger) system of computing, artificial intelligence. With some of the chemical computers in the works, that would move at nearly instantaneous speeds, the only way to get better computing power is for the computer to know what you want before you do. There is a lot of work going into artificial intelligence, mainly by a group called the "Singultarians." http://pobox.com/~sentinence/singularity.html With a multi-nary computer system, you could possibly simulate the computing power of the human brain. Some people (like me!) think that the only way you can effectively simulate a human brian would require a quantum computer, which thev've been making some really interesting inroads into lately.
I don't see much use for nanotechnology as a computer system, its far too powerful for that application. What your likely to see with nanotechnology are a bunch of self-replicating builder bots, building things from the atomic level up, rather than the melecular level(or greater) down as we do now.
Quantum computers on the other hand, have a lot of potential for the trinary(or more) structure. The way a quantum computer works (waaaaaaaay oversimplified for brevity) is rather than the processing actually being done in this dimension, it gets shipped off to other universes, computed, and then all we get is the result, without doing any of the physical work. Mostly they are looking towards quantum computers for data encryption, but thats really only the tip of the iceberg.
Slashdot Mirror
Dell is still honoring whatever warranty you bought. They stopped offereing EXTENDED warranties including Complete Care. So what? They probably removed it due to lack of demand. Geeks don't pay for warranties anyway, do they? Why train and staff an Ubuntu tech support queue for the three people who bought an extended ubuntu warranty? Not exactly a sound financial decision. Man this is people getting really worked up for a one liner on idea storm. Wow.
Dell expects to sell about 20,000 units annually. That's less than 1% of its overall consumer business. Anyone who had anything in their posts thinking that Dell was going to try to 'convert' customers from Windows to Linux is really just speculating in the absence of fact. Dell is attempting to add incramental market share to their consumer business by reaching out to a new market.
What the hell does that mean? You quote Einstein and think you've made some kind of point..
I really take issue with people who have no idea how the political system works, but feel compelled to comment on it anyway, so I must respond. Voting for Ralph Nader is not "throwing away" a vote. First of all, voting is at most a symbolic act, the same lobbyists will control the same corporate will as existed before you cast your ballot. Ignoring that reality, Ralph Nader needs only 5% of the vote to qualify for over 12 million dollars in federal funds for 2004 and be on the ballot automatically in every state in America. You cannot change a country with one election, or with one man. But, if Nader can garner enough support(without evening running more than 260,000 people voted for him in 1996) then perhaps, local green candidates might have a fighting chance, where the real change takes place. It doesn't start in the white house or capital hill, it starts on your school boards, and your PTA's. We're talking about affecting a country for real, social change, not trying to win passage of some uninformed, hackneyed legislation. Dug, The Two Party System-Unsafe at any speed.
There is really only one application for a triany(or larger) system of computing, artificial intelligence. With some of the chemical computers in the works, that would move at nearly instantaneous speeds, the only way to get better computing power is for the computer to know what you want before you do. There is a lot of work going into artificial intelligence, mainly by a group called the "Singultarians." http://pobox.com/~sentinence/singularity.html With a multi-nary computer system, you could possibly simulate the computing power of the human brain. Some people (like me!) think that the only way you can effectively simulate a human brian would require a quantum computer, which thev've been making some really interesting inroads into lately.
I don't see much use for nanotechnology as a computer system, its far too powerful for that application. What your likely to see with nanotechnology are a bunch of self-replicating builder bots, building things from the atomic level up, rather than the melecular level(or greater) down as we do now.
Quantum computers on the other hand, have a lot of potential for the trinary(or more) structure. The way a quantum computer works (waaaaaaaay oversimplified for brevity) is rather than the processing actually being done in this dimension, it gets shipped off to other universes, computed, and then all we get is the result, without doing any of the physical work. Mostly they are looking towards quantum computers for data encryption, but thats really only the tip of the iceberg.