Excessive spending on a wedding may also reflect a "prince/princess" mentality, where people see their wedding day as the beginning of some great romantic journey straight out of a Disney movie. Many younger people jump into marriage without an understanding about what marriage really is. When the rather dreary realities of life set in and don't match their preconceptions, the entire marriage can fall apart. An expensive wedding can be an indicator of that mindset.
My sister dropped over $30k on my nieces wedding, only to be floored when my niece divorced her husband just three years later. Her excuse? He wasn't "romantic anymore". She wanted a fairytale romance with a "happily ever after", and thought that something was wrong with her marriage when "happily ever after" turned into "working to pay the bills", "only vacationing twice a year", "what do you mean, I should get a job too?" and "my adorable Prince Charming husband works 14 hours a day to make ends meet and is so tired when he gets home that he has no time for meeeee *whine*".
FWIW, the Windows logo on the XPS 18 is the updated version of the Super (Windows) button, and it's an active part of the tablet. Pressing it returns you to the Start screen so that you can change programs or launch something new (or hide you pr0n from the GF when she walks into the room). The button exists on all Win8 tablets because MS requires it.
My office was on the pre-launch wait list and we got some of the first XPS 18's Dell shipped. For your average person, with average computer needs, it's actually a really nice solution. First off, this really isn't meant to be used like a typical tablet, and is more of a "lap computer". The foldout legs allow it to work beautifully as a presentation piece (I've been using it to do R&D demos), and when reversed it actually makes a very nice tabletop touchscreen.
Is it the most powerful computer in the world? No. Mine is the i5 with 8Gb and it's performance is about average for a modern desktop computer. You're not going to run the latest games with everything cranked all the way up (the lack of discreet graphics puts an end to that), but my son plays SW:ToR and it averages about 40fps with everything turned up. That's nothing amazing, but it's really not bad either. You have to remember that the XPS 18 isn't meant to compete with powerful desktops...it's an Ultrabook in a tablet form factor, and it delivers Ultrabook level performance. When viewed through that lens, the performance is just fine. On the Windows partition, I've run everything from Office to Visual Studio with no real complaints.
The battery life on mine has been fairly good. From a full charge, it will do about 4.5-5 hours of light duty work (web browsing, etc) with the screen brightness turned down a bit. When my son was playing SW:TOR, he got about two hours out of it with the brightness all the way up. That's not the greatest, but you have to remember that we're talking about an 18" 1080 screen.
The portability is actually better than you would expect as well. You're not going to be walking around using it in your hand like an iPad, but it's very well balanced and much easier to handle than it looks. I purchased the messenger bag style case for mine, and usually carry it around like a laptop. When I'm moving around the room, I just tuck it under my arm, where it feels much lighter than its advertised 5lb weight. The back of the XPS 18 is metal, there's a heavy rubber bumper all the way around, and the "gator glass" screen is slightly flexible, which make it fairly durable. Mine has already taken a few falls without any marks or damage.
There are a couple of things I'm less than thrilled about. The power button is poorly placed and is exceptionally easy to accidentally press by hand. I had to reconfigure it in both Win8 and Xubuntu (yes, it dual boots just fine) to ignore inputs from the power button entirely. The foldout legs are well built and seem like they'll last a while, but Dell's folding mechanism uses a poorly designed magnetic holder. Basically they placed magnets on the back of the legs and then placed the regulatory stickers over the top of them to hold them in place. It took two weeks for the stickers on one to peel loose, after which the leg began flopping out on me. It was an easy fix with a bit of superglue, but it was a disappointing to see them cheap out on such a simple detail. Like others, I'm also disappointed in their choice to use a 5400RPM hard drive over a SSD, or even a 7200. The HDD is probably the biggest performance killer in the design. Finally, I'm irritated that, even after a month of tweaking, I haven't managed to get the touchscreen working in Xubuntu 12 LTS. I don't know what Dell did with the drivers for this thing, but none of the standard Linux touchscreen drivers work at all. Because of that, you can only use Linux on it when it's sitting at its base station with the physical keyboard and mouse. It makes a fine Xubuntu workstation when sitting on the base, but I'd really like to get the touchscreen working on it so I can use it as a tablet.
All in all though, I'm fairly satisfied with it. I'm not going to use it to replace my desktop, but since getting it a month ago I've nearly stopped using my previous tablet (Xoom) and have completely stopped carrying my Ultrabook around. My Apple wielding co-workers have largely reported the same. If Dell would offer this in a 15" version a
Any idiot can get elected to a city council, especially in a smaller city like Berkeley, just by hobnobbing with some neighbors and getting his name out there. I used to know a city councilman who was LITERALLY a used car salesman by trade. The guy lacked any political skills whatsoever, and he wasn't exactly "intellectually gifted", but he had the whole schmoozing thing down pat. He ran in an off-year election, and got in with about 500 votes.
I'll get worked up when I hear a state legislator, or a governor, or a congressman advocating something like this. But I'm not going to worry about the personal opinion of a two-bit councilman who represents a few dozen blocks from one unimportant city.
I've always thought that this was the simplest solution to it. Keep the death penalty, but remove the power of the judiciary to apply it. A judge can sentence a killer to life in prison, but the killer has the power to decide how long that will be. They can spend the rest of their lives in a cage, or they can request execution if they want the easy way out. If you want to remove the possibility of a decision made under duress, or want to enforce a mandatory minimum punishment, just stipulate that they can't request it for 10 years or so.
I don't see the objection to hoarding. I have CFL's in much of my home, but there are a few spots where I simply prefer the light and warmth of incandescents. For those spots, I bought a few cases of my preferred bulbs and stuck them in the attic. Barring power surges, I figure that I purchased a 30 year supply for about $100.
Of course he said something. I said something. Several other employees said something. There were a number of us who weren't exactly thrilled to work in an office that often resembled a frathouse more than a place of business. Nobody said anything about suing or threatened to call in the EEOC, but management clearly understood that there were people who were less than happy with the situation. They chose to ignore the fact that some of their employees didn't like the behavior, and they paid the price for their choice. A managers job is to manage, which means preventing this sort of situation. When they failed to intervene, they demonstrated their inability to perform the job. When the other two "instigating" employees chose to bring Playboys to work, email hardcore porn around the office, and insult anyone who asked not to see it (actually calling us "whiners" in one email), they demonstrated an ongoing disrespect for their fellow employees.
They didn't lose their jobs because of "words". They lost their jobs because they couldn't be professionals. If you can't behave like a mature adult, don't get pissed off when people stop treating you like one.
Actually, any manager that is allowing this kind of behavior to occur is asking for trouble, no matter what the makeup of the group is. Many years ago I worked for a smallish all-male consulting company that allowed a LOT of sexually unprofessional behavior to occur. We're talking "Playboys in the magazine rack in the lunchroom" kind of unprofessional behavior. Several of us weren't thrilled about it, but there really wasn't a lot of complaining.
One of the male software engineers left the company after about a year. Several weeks later, the company was hit by a lawsuit. Turned out that he was gay (nobody had ANY clue) and found the workplace to be sexually hostile. The guy walked away with a healthy settlement, both managers were fired, two other employees were fired along with them, and the work atmosphere went down the tubes.
Sexual discrimination suits don't require there to be a gender difference, and even an employee who seems OK with sexualized behavior can later sue over it if they change their mind (or simply want to make a few bucks). Only a complete moron would allow this kind of behavior in their company.
In November 1993 the owner of a local computer store (and a friend of mine) asked me whether it would be possible to sell computer parts over the Internet. In December 1993 that site went live and was among the first retailers on the Internet (Bottomline Computers...Discount computer parts that protect your company's bottom line!) The system was only semi-automated, as the server simply wrote the transaction to a text file, encrypted it, and emailed the encrypted file to the owner for manual processing, but that was a state-of-the-art bleeding edge concept at the time.
The site flopped and was shut down less than a year later. Back in early 1994 most people still equated online shopping with catalog shopping, with visions of dodgy JC Whitney parts and cheap knockoffs dancing in their heads. It was still an untrusted concept.
I never even thought about patenting e-commerce. I could have been rich! (of course, I seem to recall looking at a few other sites doing similar things as part of the development process, so I'm 99% sure we weren't actually the first).
It occurred to me that demonstrating the NEED for SOPA might be the point of this entire exercise. Megaupload unquestionably aided piracy, but it was also a legitimate business that had millions of legitimate users. The owner and operators of the site may be able to convince a judge or jury that the primary purpose of the site was NOT piracy, but was simply incidental to the operation of that type of service. If they can convince the judges in their home countries of that, they won't be extradited. If they can convince U.S. juries of that, they won't be convicted. In order to prosecute these guys, the U.S. will have to prove that piracy was the primary reason for the sites existence, and that could be tough to do. They still have a pretty decent shot at walking away from this.
And if they get off, you can bet the halls of Congress will echo with, "See, we DO NEED SOPA! Our laws are obviously inadequate if we can't even shut down a pirate site like Megaupload!"
The position of the U.S. government is that these are foreign nationals operating a criminal enterprise within the United States. From a legal standpoint, it's no different than issuing warrants for foreign drug kingpins who ship drugs to the United States. They're not prosecuting foreigners for their actions overseas, but they are charging foreigners for the actions they are initiating within the borders of the United States itself.
Osama bin Laden never set foot in the U.S. either. We still had arrest warrants out for him, even before 9/11, for acts of terrorism he initiated on U.S. soil (the '93 WTC attack) and on foreign U.S. locations (embassies, Khobar, etc). While we're talking about two vastly different types of crime, the legal principle behind the charges is the same. If you direct criminal actions within the United States from a foreign location, you become subject to U.S. law because you are committing activities within the country.
By placing a datacenter within the borders of the United States, MegaUpload's management placed itself within the jurisdiction of U.S. law for any actions occurring within that datacenter. This isn't a purely U.S. thing either...pretty much every country on the planet recognizes this same legal principle. When you choose to operate a business within a nation, you are also making a choice to subject yourself to that nations laws.
There's only one way around this that I know of, and that's to insulate via foreign subsidiaries. Many multinational corps use subsidiaries to avoid this exact problem. In Megaupload's case, I don't see how they could have fit that into their business model.
If there's one lesson to take away from all of this, it's simply that you should check a nations laws before opening up a business there. If something is legal in your home country, and illegal in the country next door, it's probably a BAD IDEA to start opening offices in the neighboring country. MegaUpload was stupid to open a datacenter in the United States, the MPAA/RIAA's home turf.
As a longtime software developer and all around computer power user, I find my tablet to be fairly useless. It has a lousy onscreen keyboard, runs limited applications, and can't really be used to do MANY of the really cool things that I've spent the past 20 years doing on computers.
My wife, on the other hand, is a technophobe schoolteacher, and is rarely seperated from it nowadays. It gives her a simple way to do her pointless social and entertainment things...Facebook, email, Youtube, etc...without having to deal with all of that "computery" stuff. If you ask her, she'll tell you that it's the greatest bit of technology ever invented.
But the real eye opener came from my kids, including my about-to-go-to-college daughter who is incredibly computer literate and who I taught the fundamentals of BASIC coding when she was only four years old. To her, and my 14 year old son, it's just another computing device. There are some things that are better on computers, and some things that are better on tablets (who wants to watch a streaming movie on a laptop with a keyboard in the way?) To them, the entire discussion is silly, as both devices have their own purposes. The kids simply move back and forth between them without a second thought.
We are contrained by the limits of our own prejudices and experiences.
They're also good at keeping small veggie gardens warm. I live in a part of California that freezes 10-15 days a year, and not all at once. I have a four 50sf raised bed veggie gardens behind my house, and if they're properly tented, I can grow year round (tomatoes, melons, lettuce, zucchini, beans, radish, asparagus, and a half dozen others.) I toss a 60 watt tough duty bulb in a waterproof droplight casing into each of the gardens to keep them warm when the temps drop below freezing, and keep a small 25 watt bulb burning in the gardens when we get sustained temps under 40. A single 60 watt bulb is more than sufficient to keep the garden above freezing, and to keep the plants alive. A single 25 watt bulb generates enough heat to raise the internal temp by 15-20 degrees.
You can't do that with a CFL and dedicated heaters would burn a LOT more power. They would also be very unsafe...a bulb in a water-resistant housing can be used outdoors in the rain...find a space heater that can do the same thing without creating an electrocution risk.
I work in a university environment and have been programming for...a while...so when my son's Boy Scout troop approached me about teaching programming to some interested boys, I did a ton of research and came up with Alice.
If the goal is to teach programming concepts and logic, then it doesn't get much better than Alice. The course materials are already written, the language is easy to use, it's supported by Carnegie Mellon, and it's completely free.
The greatest thing about Alice is that it's an entirely visual environment, and it gives immediate visual feedback to the students which is PERFECT for younger learners. Instead of scaring students off by throwing them straight into code-hell by forcing them to learn the syntax of Language X just to print "Hello World" to the screen, Alice allows students to learn the concepts of programming in an entirely mouse-driven environment...and they get to watch video animations generated by their software within minutes of starting. That sort of simplicity and feedback keeps younger learners interested and hooks kids who might otherwise see it all as "greek".
The only complaint I had from the group was that I had only three computers to teach eight boys...they were literally shoving each other out of the way to get a chance to program. That's probably the best endorsement anyone could give it.
Some people might complain that Language X or Language Y is better, but the reality is that you're teaching kids, and that any language they are taught today will be abandoned or heavily revised long before any of them are ready to jump into the field. As a teacher, you're better off teaching them in an environment where they can focus on concepts, and NOT syntax.
Go to Alice.Org>About>What is Alice and watch the video at the bottom. It shows the language in action, shows the feedback, and demonstrates the concepts it promotes.
What about 5.25 inch or 8 inch floppies? How would you access one of those these days?
A quick search for 5.25" floppy drives on Ebay turns up dozens of them for sale right now, many for under $10.
Again, though, keep in mind that we're talking 25 years here, not 50. In 1983 the 5.25 inch floppy drive had been on the market for seven years, and the three and a half inch for one year. Most Slashdotters probably still have a drive capable of reading a 1983-written 3.5" single sided floppy installed in their computer, or at worst sitting in a drawer nearby. By 1983 (25 years ago) the 8" floppy was already considered legacy hardware, and NOBODY would have written archival files to one for the very reason you are illustrating.
I was going to post that myself. Many of the traditionally developed photos in my album started off in my digital camera, but I had a local photography shop do my prints for me. They are exposed as negatives using the same methods as traditional film photography, and the resulting prints can't be distinguished from their film-captured peers. These photos, like all color photos, will be stable for 50 years or more. If they are projected onto black and white paper, they can be stable for 200 years or more.
I think that's overkill. Keep in mind that 25 is not an incredibly long time. You might have to hunt around a little today to find a punch card reader or a reel drive to read media from 1983, but you CAN still find the equipment to do it with. It's also safe to assume that we'll all be speaking english in 25 years, so a simple piece of laminated cardstock describing the technical requirements is all that's neccesary.
Personally, I'd just use a DVD-R. With the huge current installed base of DVD's and Blu-Ray players that are compatible with the format, it's reasonable to believe that the format will still be readable in 25 years. I would, however, take a few precautions. First, I'd only use a Mitsui MAM-A archival DVD-R. They use a nonreactive gold layer to preserve data, and should be stable for 100 years or so. Second, I'd put the data on the disks in multiple formats. I'd build them into a standard sequential video file, and then I'd have redundant copies of the images on the disks in multiple formats. One folder would have GIF copies, one RAW, one JPEG, one WBMP, etc. The odds are pretty good that at least one of the formats (probably more) will still be readable in 25 years.
Next, I'd put multiple copies of the disk into the capsule. If data errors did occur, redundant copies would allow future readers to reconstruct the files by combining good areas of the various disks.
Finally, I'd try to find an airtight case to place the disks in, and I'd toss in a couple of oxygen absorbers for good measure. That should help to fend off any surface oxidation.
You've only changed jobs twice? Sheesh, I'm on job 17 since joining Slashdot.
I remember being very depressed when the admins told me that I couldn't change my user name and that I had to re-register if I wanted a new login. I had to give up my four digit ID for one of those newbie-branding FIVE digit numbers. How times have changed.
I still wish I could remember my 4 digit login though. I could probably Ebay it for a few bucks:)
No, MS still offers offsite licensing for large customers. My employer has home licenses (we refer to them as work-at-home licenses) available for all 1400 of our employees. It even covers OS upgrades for XP and Vista.
It all depends on how much clout you have with them. I work at a college, and between our employees computers, our students computers, and the many hundreds of lab computers around campuses, the multi-year contract for our site is worth millions. With money like that on the line, it's pretty easy to get them to concede enough offsite licenses to cover the few hundred employees actually willing to use them.
Possibly, but without some fairly energy intensive filtration the water will eventually leach toxic amounts of salts and other minerals from the soil. Dirt, after all, is simply a combination of decayed biological matter and pulverized stone (minerals). Both of those contain elements that will eventually leak out into the water.
Since it's virtually impossible to completely "seal" a system like this, the agricultural complex will have to be topped up from time to time. To see the long term effects of this, just look at any salt lake in the world. For an even more accurate example, look at the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge in California. The marshlands there were created using runoff from surrounding agricultural fields. That water leached naturally occurring selenium, salts, and other minerals from the soil, which built up in the ground over time as the water evaporated away or soaked into the aquifier. After only 11 years, the water and soil were so toxic the refuge was declared a disaster area that cost over $50 million to clean up (the topsoil itself had become toxic waste).
It is possible to filter these minerals from the water, but doing so will require a LOT of energy. Considerably more than they'll get from those solar panels.
Indeed. I work at a mid sized college and subtitles have been an ongoing issue for distance education. We currently have a telecourse system that REQUIRES students to check out physical DVD's and VHS tapes to complete their for-credit classes. These DVD's generally all have existing SAP and CC tracks to accomodate our legal obligations and to serve the widest possible audience. We would love to put these videos online, but it there is no straightforward way of transferring that information from the existing physical media into an online-capable one. Our options seem to be re-captioning everything, or spending an enormous amount of money to have people with specialized equipment do it for us. Those might be reasonable options for organizations with one or two tapes, or with millions of dollars of spare budget, but for state run colleges looking at video libraries containing thousands of hours of video, it's simply not an option.
So for now, and for the forseeable future, our students will still be required to check out the physical tapes and DVD's. That means waiting lists for tapes, limited viewing times, and continuing expenses to replace the tapes and DVD's as they wear out.
How are they to change? The regions these people live in are too cold to support enough land based agriculture to survive, and shippping food up from warmer climates is terribly expensive. Without a local export economy, the people there can't AFFORD food grown elsewhere. No company is going to relocate its manufacturing base north of the Arctic Circle, so these people either have to exist as hunters, or exist as welfare recipients. They choose to maintain some dignity and keep their native culture operating.
The Intuit whale take is below the species replacement rate, so they aren't putting the bowheads survival in any danger.
Actually, the Earths convective mantle may be a byproduct of its plate tectonics, and not the other way around. Venus provides us with an excellent example of this, as it is in many ways a geologic twin of the Earth...minus the impact and big moon. Venus has a molten core and geologic activity (it's covered in volcanoes), but no tectonics. Why? Because there is no convection in the mantle. That's also why Venus has no magnetic field. The creation of a dynamo for an electric field requires a metal conductive core, rotation, and convection in the mantle. Magnetic analysis of the planet indicates that it has a conductive metal core, and its rotation, while slow, is sufficient to generate a field of some intensity.
So why no magnetic field? No convection. Why no convection? Two possibilities. 1) The lack of tidal stresses from a comparatively large moon permitted its mantle to largely solidify already, as happened on Mars. 2) On the other hand, the LACK of tectonics may have deprived the core of a way to vent excess heat. Convection happens on Earth because the top of the mantle is cooler than the bottom, and the top is cooler BECAUSE it can let off heat through tectonics. It's a self perpetuating process. With Venus, the lack of tectonics deprived the mantle of any heat release sources other than volcanism. This would permit the Venusian mantle to get much hotter than the mantle on our own planet. The increased heat without outlet would lead to a mantle far more uniform in temperature...and a mantle that is uniformly hot will have no convection.
So it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Something fractured the early crust of our planet, permitting subduction. Subduction and tectonics in general introduced temperature irregularities into our mantle, which kicked off convection. Convection then drove tectonic activities by itself.
A protoplanet under bombardment would have a fairly consistent mantle temperature once bombardment began to ease. Energy imparted from impacts would spread throughout the body, and cooling would occur uniformly at the outer edges of the planet where the molten material came into contact with space. The planet would then begin cooling from the outside in, resulting in a relatively uniform crust. Again, you merely need to look at all of the other terrestrial bodies in our own solar system to confirm the model.
It appears that something "else" is required to kickstart plate tectonics. The only really major thing we can identify, that fits the models, is our moon. The giant impactor which blasted lunar material away from the Earth disrupted the mantles temperature and blasted away a signifigant portion of the lighter material which should have formed our crust. The glancing blow which the models suggest would have been required for the Giant Impactor theory would have also left the side of the planet opposite the impact relatively unscathed (aside from the many millenia of debris impacts which certainly followed). As an added bonus, the newly formed moon around the planet, comparatively large and in a tight orbit, would have induced tidal forces which helped (and still help today) to keep the mantle moving.
No impact = No giant moon, no disruption of the even cooling of the surface, no disruption of the mantle, no convection, and no tectonics. Geologically, the Earth would be Venus, only covered in 1-2 kilometers of water and with a more temperate atmospheric blanket (it would probably be a far colder planet than it is today). Aside from a volcanic island or two, the planet would be a big orbiting ball of water.
Interestingly, any truly "Earthlike" planets we find ARE more likely to be covered in water. We have oceans here on Earth only because we also have continents. While the exact origins of the continents are still debated, the one common theory is that they're remnants of the same impact that formed the moon e.g. the impact blew off much of the surface of the original Earth, and that our "continents" were formed from the portion of the original crust that wasn't destroyed. Since the new crust was formed from denser materials deeper in the planets core, the lighter original crust rode higher on the mantle than the rest of it. That original crust cracked apart, became the foundations (cratons) for the continents we have today...or at least kicked off a cycle of crustal formation that lead to the continents we have today. Comparable planets in our Solar System that did not experience similar impacts (Mars and Venus) have relatively flat surfaces and nothing resembling continents.
What if that impact had never occurred? The Earths surface would be level, like the other terrestrial planets, and instead of the water settling into the lower basins (the oceans), it would cover the entire surface of the planet to a depth of several kilometers. Only a few of today's highest peaks would extend above that water level. Those peaks, in all likelihood, wouldn't exist either. Not only would the tectonics needed for their formation be absent, but a world without continents would have monster surface waves and erosion would scrub them below the waterline in a few million years. If there were ANY life here, it would be no more advanced than the fish which exist today.
Unfortunately, if we DO ever get out into space and find "Earth-like" planets of comparable mass and temperature, they will probably be water-bound just as the Earth would have been.
Slashdot Mirror
Excessive spending on a wedding may also reflect a "prince/princess" mentality, where people see their wedding day as the beginning of some great romantic journey straight out of a Disney movie. Many younger people jump into marriage without an understanding about what marriage really is. When the rather dreary realities of life set in and don't match their preconceptions, the entire marriage can fall apart. An expensive wedding can be an indicator of that mindset.
My sister dropped over $30k on my nieces wedding, only to be floored when my niece divorced her husband just three years later. Her excuse? He wasn't "romantic anymore". She wanted a fairytale romance with a "happily ever after", and thought that something was wrong with her marriage when "happily ever after" turned into "working to pay the bills", "only vacationing twice a year", "what do you mean, I should get a job too?" and "my adorable Prince Charming husband works 14 hours a day to make ends meet and is so tired when he gets home that he has no time for meeeee *whine*".
It's the fallout from the princess culture, imho.
FWIW, the Windows logo on the XPS 18 is the updated version of the Super (Windows) button, and it's an active part of the tablet. Pressing it returns you to the Start screen so that you can change programs or launch something new (or hide you pr0n from the GF when she walks into the room). The button exists on all Win8 tablets because MS requires it.
My office was on the pre-launch wait list and we got some of the first XPS 18's Dell shipped. For your average person, with average computer needs, it's actually a really nice solution. First off, this really isn't meant to be used like a typical tablet, and is more of a "lap computer". The foldout legs allow it to work beautifully as a presentation piece (I've been using it to do R&D demos), and when reversed it actually makes a very nice tabletop touchscreen.
Is it the most powerful computer in the world? No. Mine is the i5 with 8Gb and it's performance is about average for a modern desktop computer. You're not going to run the latest games with everything cranked all the way up (the lack of discreet graphics puts an end to that), but my son plays SW:ToR and it averages about 40fps with everything turned up. That's nothing amazing, but it's really not bad either. You have to remember that the XPS 18 isn't meant to compete with powerful desktops...it's an Ultrabook in a tablet form factor, and it delivers Ultrabook level performance. When viewed through that lens, the performance is just fine. On the Windows partition, I've run everything from Office to Visual Studio with no real complaints.
The battery life on mine has been fairly good. From a full charge, it will do about 4.5-5 hours of light duty work (web browsing, etc) with the screen brightness turned down a bit. When my son was playing SW:TOR, he got about two hours out of it with the brightness all the way up. That's not the greatest, but you have to remember that we're talking about an 18" 1080 screen.
The portability is actually better than you would expect as well. You're not going to be walking around using it in your hand like an iPad, but it's very well balanced and much easier to handle than it looks. I purchased the messenger bag style case for mine, and usually carry it around like a laptop. When I'm moving around the room, I just tuck it under my arm, where it feels much lighter than its advertised 5lb weight. The back of the XPS 18 is metal, there's a heavy rubber bumper all the way around, and the "gator glass" screen is slightly flexible, which make it fairly durable. Mine has already taken a few falls without any marks or damage.
There are a couple of things I'm less than thrilled about. The power button is poorly placed and is exceptionally easy to accidentally press by hand. I had to reconfigure it in both Win8 and Xubuntu (yes, it dual boots just fine) to ignore inputs from the power button entirely. The foldout legs are well built and seem like they'll last a while, but Dell's folding mechanism uses a poorly designed magnetic holder. Basically they placed magnets on the back of the legs and then placed the regulatory stickers over the top of them to hold them in place. It took two weeks for the stickers on one to peel loose, after which the leg began flopping out on me. It was an easy fix with a bit of superglue, but it was a disappointing to see them cheap out on such a simple detail. Like others, I'm also disappointed in their choice to use a 5400RPM hard drive over a SSD, or even a 7200. The HDD is probably the biggest performance killer in the design. Finally, I'm irritated that, even after a month of tweaking, I haven't managed to get the touchscreen working in Xubuntu 12 LTS. I don't know what Dell did with the drivers for this thing, but none of the standard Linux touchscreen drivers work at all. Because of that, you can only use Linux on it when it's sitting at its base station with the physical keyboard and mouse. It makes a fine Xubuntu workstation when sitting on the base, but I'd really like to get the touchscreen working on it so I can use it as a tablet.
All in all though, I'm fairly satisfied with it. I'm not going to use it to replace my desktop, but since getting it a month ago I've nearly stopped using my previous tablet (Xoom) and have completely stopped carrying my Ultrabook around. My Apple wielding co-workers have largely reported the same. If Dell would offer this in a 15" version a
Any idiot can get elected to a city council, especially in a smaller city like Berkeley, just by hobnobbing with some neighbors and getting his name out there. I used to know a city councilman who was LITERALLY a used car salesman by trade. The guy lacked any political skills whatsoever, and he wasn't exactly "intellectually gifted", but he had the whole schmoozing thing down pat. He ran in an off-year election, and got in with about 500 votes.
I'll get worked up when I hear a state legislator, or a governor, or a congressman advocating something like this. But I'm not going to worry about the personal opinion of a two-bit councilman who represents a few dozen blocks from one unimportant city.
I've always thought that this was the simplest solution to it. Keep the death penalty, but remove the power of the judiciary to apply it. A judge can sentence a killer to life in prison, but the killer has the power to decide how long that will be. They can spend the rest of their lives in a cage, or they can request execution if they want the easy way out. If you want to remove the possibility of a decision made under duress, or want to enforce a mandatory minimum punishment, just stipulate that they can't request it for 10 years or so.
I don't see the objection to hoarding. I have CFL's in much of my home, but there are a few spots where I simply prefer the light and warmth of incandescents. For those spots, I bought a few cases of my preferred bulbs and stuck them in the attic. Barring power surges, I figure that I purchased a 30 year supply for about $100.
Of course he said something. I said something. Several other employees said something. There were a number of us who weren't exactly thrilled to work in an office that often resembled a frathouse more than a place of business. Nobody said anything about suing or threatened to call in the EEOC, but management clearly understood that there were people who were less than happy with the situation. They chose to ignore the fact that some of their employees didn't like the behavior, and they paid the price for their choice. A managers job is to manage, which means preventing this sort of situation. When they failed to intervene, they demonstrated their inability to perform the job. When the other two "instigating" employees chose to bring Playboys to work, email hardcore porn around the office, and insult anyone who asked not to see it (actually calling us "whiners" in one email), they demonstrated an ongoing disrespect for their fellow employees.
They didn't lose their jobs because of "words". They lost their jobs because they couldn't be professionals. If you can't behave like a mature adult, don't get pissed off when people stop treating you like one.
Actually, any manager that is allowing this kind of behavior to occur is asking for trouble, no matter what the makeup of the group is. Many years ago I worked for a smallish all-male consulting company that allowed a LOT of sexually unprofessional behavior to occur. We're talking "Playboys in the magazine rack in the lunchroom" kind of unprofessional behavior. Several of us weren't thrilled about it, but there really wasn't a lot of complaining.
One of the male software engineers left the company after about a year. Several weeks later, the company was hit by a lawsuit. Turned out that he was gay (nobody had ANY clue) and found the workplace to be sexually hostile. The guy walked away with a healthy settlement, both managers were fired, two other employees were fired along with them, and the work atmosphere went down the tubes.
Sexual discrimination suits don't require there to be a gender difference, and even an employee who seems OK with sexualized behavior can later sue over it if they change their mind (or simply want to make a few bucks). Only a complete moron would allow this kind of behavior in their company.
Probably less than 1/10000th the number of rabbits that were sacrificed for dinner plates last night alone.
In November 1993 the owner of a local computer store (and a friend of mine) asked me whether it would be possible to sell computer parts over the Internet. In December 1993 that site went live and was among the first retailers on the Internet (Bottomline Computers...Discount computer parts that protect your company's bottom line!) The system was only semi-automated, as the server simply wrote the transaction to a text file, encrypted it, and emailed the encrypted file to the owner for manual processing, but that was a state-of-the-art bleeding edge concept at the time.
The site flopped and was shut down less than a year later. Back in early 1994 most people still equated online shopping with catalog shopping, with visions of dodgy JC Whitney parts and cheap knockoffs dancing in their heads. It was still an untrusted concept.
I never even thought about patenting e-commerce. I could have been rich! (of course, I seem to recall looking at a few other sites doing similar things as part of the development process, so I'm 99% sure we weren't actually the first).
It occurred to me that demonstrating the NEED for SOPA might be the point of this entire exercise. Megaupload unquestionably aided piracy, but it was also a legitimate business that had millions of legitimate users. The owner and operators of the site may be able to convince a judge or jury that the primary purpose of the site was NOT piracy, but was simply incidental to the operation of that type of service. If they can convince the judges in their home countries of that, they won't be extradited. If they can convince U.S. juries of that, they won't be convicted. In order to prosecute these guys, the U.S. will have to prove that piracy was the primary reason for the sites existence, and that could be tough to do. They still have a pretty decent shot at walking away from this.
And if they get off, you can bet the halls of Congress will echo with, "See, we DO NEED SOPA! Our laws are obviously inadequate if we can't even shut down a pirate site like Megaupload!"
That may the plan, after all.
The position of the U.S. government is that these are foreign nationals operating a criminal enterprise within the United States. From a legal standpoint, it's no different than issuing warrants for foreign drug kingpins who ship drugs to the United States. They're not prosecuting foreigners for their actions overseas, but they are charging foreigners for the actions they are initiating within the borders of the United States itself.
Osama bin Laden never set foot in the U.S. either. We still had arrest warrants out for him, even before 9/11, for acts of terrorism he initiated on U.S. soil (the '93 WTC attack) and on foreign U.S. locations (embassies, Khobar, etc). While we're talking about two vastly different types of crime, the legal principle behind the charges is the same. If you direct criminal actions within the United States from a foreign location, you become subject to U.S. law because you are committing activities within the country.
By placing a datacenter within the borders of the United States, MegaUpload's management placed itself within the jurisdiction of U.S. law for any actions occurring within that datacenter. This isn't a purely U.S. thing either...pretty much every country on the planet recognizes this same legal principle. When you choose to operate a business within a nation, you are also making a choice to subject yourself to that nations laws.
There's only one way around this that I know of, and that's to insulate via foreign subsidiaries. Many multinational corps use subsidiaries to avoid this exact problem. In Megaupload's case, I don't see how they could have fit that into their business model.
If there's one lesson to take away from all of this, it's simply that you should check a nations laws before opening up a business there. If something is legal in your home country, and illegal in the country next door, it's probably a BAD IDEA to start opening offices in the neighboring country. MegaUpload was stupid to open a datacenter in the United States, the MPAA/RIAA's home turf.
As a longtime software developer and all around computer power user, I find my tablet to be fairly useless. It has a lousy onscreen keyboard, runs limited applications, and can't really be used to do MANY of the really cool things that I've spent the past 20 years doing on computers.
My wife, on the other hand, is a technophobe schoolteacher, and is rarely seperated from it nowadays. It gives her a simple way to do her pointless social and entertainment things...Facebook, email, Youtube, etc...without having to deal with all of that "computery" stuff. If you ask her, she'll tell you that it's the greatest bit of technology ever invented.
But the real eye opener came from my kids, including my about-to-go-to-college daughter who is incredibly computer literate and who I taught the fundamentals of BASIC coding when she was only four years old. To her, and my 14 year old son, it's just another computing device. There are some things that are better on computers, and some things that are better on tablets (who wants to watch a streaming movie on a laptop with a keyboard in the way?) To them, the entire discussion is silly, as both devices have their own purposes. The kids simply move back and forth between them without a second thought.
We are contrained by the limits of our own prejudices and experiences.
They're also good at keeping small veggie gardens warm. I live in a part of California that freezes 10-15 days a year, and not all at once. I have a four 50sf raised bed veggie gardens behind my house, and if they're properly tented, I can grow year round (tomatoes, melons, lettuce, zucchini, beans, radish, asparagus, and a half dozen others.) I toss a 60 watt tough duty bulb in a waterproof droplight casing into each of the gardens to keep them warm when the temps drop below freezing, and keep a small 25 watt bulb burning in the gardens when we get sustained temps under 40. A single 60 watt bulb is more than sufficient to keep the garden above freezing, and to keep the plants alive. A single 25 watt bulb generates enough heat to raise the internal temp by 15-20 degrees.
You can't do that with a CFL and dedicated heaters would burn a LOT more power. They would also be very unsafe...a bulb in a water-resistant housing can be used outdoors in the rain...find a space heater that can do the same thing without creating an electrocution risk.
I work in a university environment and have been programming for...a while...so when my son's Boy Scout troop approached me about teaching programming to some interested boys, I did a ton of research and came up with Alice.
If the goal is to teach programming concepts and logic, then it doesn't get much better than Alice. The course materials are already written, the language is easy to use, it's supported by Carnegie Mellon, and it's completely free.
The greatest thing about Alice is that it's an entirely visual environment, and it gives immediate visual feedback to the students which is PERFECT for younger learners. Instead of scaring students off by throwing them straight into code-hell by forcing them to learn the syntax of Language X just to print "Hello World" to the screen, Alice allows students to learn the concepts of programming in an entirely mouse-driven environment...and they get to watch video animations generated by their software within minutes of starting. That sort of simplicity and feedback keeps younger learners interested and hooks kids who might otherwise see it all as "greek".
The only complaint I had from the group was that I had only three computers to teach eight boys...they were literally shoving each other out of the way to get a chance to program. That's probably the best endorsement anyone could give it.
Some people might complain that Language X or Language Y is better, but the reality is that you're teaching kids, and that any language they are taught today will be abandoned or heavily revised long before any of them are ready to jump into the field. As a teacher, you're better off teaching them in an environment where they can focus on concepts, and NOT syntax.
Go to Alice.Org>About>What is Alice and watch the video at the bottom. It shows the language in action, shows the feedback, and demonstrates the concepts it promotes.
What about 5.25 inch or 8 inch floppies? How would you access one of those these days?
A quick search for 5.25" floppy drives on Ebay turns up dozens of them for sale right now, many for under $10.
Again, though, keep in mind that we're talking 25 years here, not 50. In 1983 the 5.25 inch floppy drive had been on the market for seven years, and the three and a half inch for one year. Most Slashdotters probably still have a drive capable of reading a 1983-written 3.5" single sided floppy installed in their computer, or at worst sitting in a drawer nearby. By 1983 (25 years ago) the 8" floppy was already considered legacy hardware, and NOBODY would have written archival files to one for the very reason you are illustrating.
I was going to post that myself. Many of the traditionally developed photos in my album started off in my digital camera, but I had a local photography shop do my prints for me. They are exposed as negatives using the same methods as traditional film photography, and the resulting prints can't be distinguished from their film-captured peers. These photos, like all color photos, will be stable for 50 years or more. If they are projected onto black and white paper, they can be stable for 200 years or more.
I think that's overkill. Keep in mind that 25 is not an incredibly long time. You might have to hunt around a little today to find a punch card reader or a reel drive to read media from 1983, but you CAN still find the equipment to do it with. It's also safe to assume that we'll all be speaking english in 25 years, so a simple piece of laminated cardstock describing the technical requirements is all that's neccesary.
Personally, I'd just use a DVD-R. With the huge current installed base of DVD's and Blu-Ray players that are compatible with the format, it's reasonable to believe that the format will still be readable in 25 years. I would, however, take a few precautions. First, I'd only use a Mitsui MAM-A archival DVD-R. They use a nonreactive gold layer to preserve data, and should be stable for 100 years or so. Second, I'd put the data on the disks in multiple formats. I'd build them into a standard sequential video file, and then I'd have redundant copies of the images on the disks in multiple formats. One folder would have GIF copies, one RAW, one JPEG, one WBMP, etc. The odds are pretty good that at least one of the formats (probably more) will still be readable in 25 years.
Next, I'd put multiple copies of the disk into the capsule. If data errors did occur, redundant copies would allow future readers to reconstruct the files by combining good areas of the various disks.
Finally, I'd try to find an airtight case to place the disks in, and I'd toss in a couple of oxygen absorbers for good measure. That should help to fend off any surface oxidation.
You've only changed jobs twice? Sheesh, I'm on job 17 since joining Slashdot.
:)
I remember being very depressed when the admins told me that I couldn't change my user name and that I had to re-register if I wanted a new login. I had to give up my four digit ID for one of those newbie-branding FIVE digit numbers. How times have changed.
I still wish I could remember my 4 digit login though. I could probably Ebay it for a few bucks
No, MS still offers offsite licensing for large customers. My employer has home licenses (we refer to them as work-at-home licenses) available for all 1400 of our employees. It even covers OS upgrades for XP and Vista.
It all depends on how much clout you have with them. I work at a college, and between our employees computers, our students computers, and the many hundreds of lab computers around campuses, the multi-year contract for our site is worth millions. With money like that on the line, it's pretty easy to get them to concede enough offsite licenses to cover the few hundred employees actually willing to use them.
Possibly, but without some fairly energy intensive filtration the water will eventually leach toxic amounts of salts and other minerals from the soil. Dirt, after all, is simply a combination of decayed biological matter and pulverized stone (minerals). Both of those contain elements that will eventually leak out into the water.
Since it's virtually impossible to completely "seal" a system like this, the agricultural complex will have to be topped up from time to time. To see the long term effects of this, just look at any salt lake in the world. For an even more accurate example, look at the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge in California. The marshlands there were created using runoff from surrounding agricultural fields. That water leached naturally occurring selenium, salts, and other minerals from the soil, which built up in the ground over time as the water evaporated away or soaked into the aquifier. After only 11 years, the water and soil were so toxic the refuge was declared a disaster area that cost over $50 million to clean up (the topsoil itself had become toxic waste).
It is possible to filter these minerals from the water, but doing so will require a LOT of energy. Considerably more than they'll get from those solar panels.
Indeed. I work at a mid sized college and subtitles have been an ongoing issue for distance education. We currently have a telecourse system that REQUIRES students to check out physical DVD's and VHS tapes to complete their for-credit classes. These DVD's generally all have existing SAP and CC tracks to accomodate our legal obligations and to serve the widest possible audience. We would love to put these videos online, but it there is no straightforward way of transferring that information from the existing physical media into an online-capable one. Our options seem to be re-captioning everything, or spending an enormous amount of money to have people with specialized equipment do it for us. Those might be reasonable options for organizations with one or two tapes, or with millions of dollars of spare budget, but for state run colleges looking at video libraries containing thousands of hours of video, it's simply not an option.
So for now, and for the forseeable future, our students will still be required to check out the physical tapes and DVD's. That means waiting lists for tapes, limited viewing times, and continuing expenses to replace the tapes and DVD's as they wear out.
How are they to change? The regions these people live in are too cold to support enough land based agriculture to survive, and shippping food up from warmer climates is terribly expensive. Without a local export economy, the people there can't AFFORD food grown elsewhere. No company is going to relocate its manufacturing base north of the Arctic Circle, so these people either have to exist as hunters, or exist as welfare recipients. They choose to maintain some dignity and keep their native culture operating.
The Intuit whale take is below the species replacement rate, so they aren't putting the bowheads survival in any danger.
Actually, the Earths convective mantle may be a byproduct of its plate tectonics, and not the other way around. Venus provides us with an excellent example of this, as it is in many ways a geologic twin of the Earth...minus the impact and big moon. Venus has a molten core and geologic activity (it's covered in volcanoes), but no tectonics. Why? Because there is no convection in the mantle. That's also why Venus has no magnetic field. The creation of a dynamo for an electric field requires a metal conductive core, rotation, and convection in the mantle. Magnetic analysis of the planet indicates that it has a conductive metal core, and its rotation, while slow, is sufficient to generate a field of some intensity.
So why no magnetic field? No convection. Why no convection? Two possibilities. 1) The lack of tidal stresses from a comparatively large moon permitted its mantle to largely solidify already, as happened on Mars. 2) On the other hand, the LACK of tectonics may have deprived the core of a way to vent excess heat. Convection happens on Earth because the top of the mantle is cooler than the bottom, and the top is cooler BECAUSE it can let off heat through tectonics. It's a self perpetuating process. With Venus, the lack of tectonics deprived the mantle of any heat release sources other than volcanism. This would permit the Venusian mantle to get much hotter than the mantle on our own planet. The increased heat without outlet would lead to a mantle far more uniform in temperature...and a mantle that is uniformly hot will have no convection.
So it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Something fractured the early crust of our planet, permitting subduction. Subduction and tectonics in general introduced temperature irregularities into our mantle, which kicked off convection. Convection then drove tectonic activities by itself.
A protoplanet under bombardment would have a fairly consistent mantle temperature once bombardment began to ease. Energy imparted from impacts would spread throughout the body, and cooling would occur uniformly at the outer edges of the planet where the molten material came into contact with space. The planet would then begin cooling from the outside in, resulting in a relatively uniform crust. Again, you merely need to look at all of the other terrestrial bodies in our own solar system to confirm the model.
It appears that something "else" is required to kickstart plate tectonics. The only really major thing we can identify, that fits the models, is our moon. The giant impactor which blasted lunar material away from the Earth disrupted the mantles temperature and blasted away a signifigant portion of the lighter material which should have formed our crust. The glancing blow which the models suggest would have been required for the Giant Impactor theory would have also left the side of the planet opposite the impact relatively unscathed (aside from the many millenia of debris impacts which certainly followed). As an added bonus, the newly formed moon around the planet, comparatively large and in a tight orbit, would have induced tidal forces which helped (and still help today) to keep the mantle moving.
No impact = No giant moon, no disruption of the even cooling of the surface, no disruption of the mantle, no convection, and no tectonics. Geologically, the Earth would be Venus, only covered in 1-2 kilometers of water and with a more temperate atmospheric blanket (it would probably be a far colder planet than it is today). Aside from a volcanic island or two, the planet would be a big orbiting ball of water.
Interestingly, any truly "Earthlike" planets we find ARE more likely to be covered in water. We have oceans here on Earth only because we also have continents. While the exact origins of the continents are still debated, the one common theory is that they're remnants of the same impact that formed the moon e.g. the impact blew off much of the surface of the original Earth, and that our "continents" were formed from the portion of the original crust that wasn't destroyed. Since the new crust was formed from denser materials deeper in the planets core, the lighter original crust rode higher on the mantle than the rest of it. That original crust cracked apart, became the foundations (cratons) for the continents we have today...or at least kicked off a cycle of crustal formation that lead to the continents we have today. Comparable planets in our Solar System that did not experience similar impacts (Mars and Venus) have relatively flat surfaces and nothing resembling continents.
What if that impact had never occurred? The Earths surface would be level, like the other terrestrial planets, and instead of the water settling into the lower basins (the oceans), it would cover the entire surface of the planet to a depth of several kilometers. Only a few of today's highest peaks would extend above that water level. Those peaks, in all likelihood, wouldn't exist either. Not only would the tectonics needed for their formation be absent, but a world without continents would have monster surface waves and erosion would scrub them below the waterline in a few million years. If there were ANY life here, it would be no more advanced than the fish which exist today.
Unfortunately, if we DO ever get out into space and find "Earth-like" planets of comparable mass and temperature, they will probably be water-bound just as the Earth would have been.