This lets you rip your DVDs and CDs for easy access.
Think a bit before you rip the CDs and DVDs-- CDs are fine, they don't soak a whole lot of storage. But DVDs, those burn through a hard disk in a hurry.
Say, ferinstance, you're a science fiction geek, and you bought Babylon 5 on DVD. That's 5 boxed sets of 6 DVDs each, at around 8 GB per DVD, or on the order of 250 GB of data right there (a little less with those numbers, but those five boxed sets don't include the box o' movies or Crusade...)
Now, you can do some crunching to save some space, but I've not run into any software yet that will let you keep your DVD menus and special features intact when you crunch the video using xvid or similar). So we'd prefer not to do that, but it takes a whole 250 GB hard disk to keep just Babylon 5 online. I'd guess most relatively small DVD collections are notably larger than the disk space one is willing to throw at the problem, unless they're willing to give up DVD special features.
If we didn't lease them, I'd still be using the three year old underpowered Dell that was slowly falling apart, because you _know_ they wouldn't be willing to buy me something to replace it with...
Since we lease, the Dell's lease has expired, so we had to send it back and get something else, and you can no longer get three year old underpowered Dells...
The sick thing is: If you watch four or five cable channels, you'd probably wind up paying more a-la-carte.
The cable company doesn't bundle channels to get you to buy ones you don't want. They bundle channels to get a package to a price where they actually make money on the deal after all the infrastructure costs on just feeding you a fairly basic service.
If channels were pick-and-choose, for one, everyone now has to have a cable box (well, with digital, that may happen anyhow...), so zing, $5/mo/tv more, plus they have to make a certain amount of money off you, so the channels cost more-- think in terms of what the "premium" channels cost; the HBOs or Skinemaxes. Pretty much all channels would have to cost that much.
It's not so simple as "I get fifty channels for fifty bucks a month, so obviously each channel costs a buck!"
With DSL bundling, it works out similarly. There's an infrastructure cost in all the copper, and the intent was to sell it all as phone lines. I buy a phone line from Bellsloth, but I'm buying DSL from SpeedFactory. Now, if I could get unbundled DSL, then SpeedFactory would probably have to pay more to Bellsloth for the line (since Bellsloth has to recoup that cost somehow) and that comes back to me. But here's the real problem: Giving you voice communication service costs Bellsloth approximately _zero_. So if Bellsloth is going to recoup the investment on the lines they've run, they're going to have to charge Speedfactory just as much for the naked DSL line as they charge me for voice communications. And, as we know from economics, Speedfactory is going to pass that charge along to me, plus probably a small amount-- so I'm betting naked DSL would cost me _more_ than the setup I currently have.
And this way if the house burns down I can call 911...
Not for any reason like "keeping up with studies" or anything like that-- if it's important to you, you'll go to school even if you take some time off now.
See, the trick is you're just getting out of high school. And as such, you have absolutely _no idea_ who you are.
(Yes, I know, you're eighteen and omniscient and I am full of shit.)
(And no, I don't know who you are, either.)
High School is a very sterile place. You get exposed to a very limited set of views and ideas from which you attempt to assimilate what you consider the best of into Who You Are.
The Real World is a pretty sterile place, too. It's unprofessional to show anything other than a slightly different but still very limited set of views and ideas.
College, though, is a firehose of views and ideas. College is where we go to figure out who we are. College is where we figure out what we want to do, so don't be afraid of not knowing that walking in.
That said, you mentioned work and travel-- work, yeah, gotta pay the bills, but remember: Going to school now does _not_ imply you're not going to travel. You owe it to yourself to go backpack around Europe or see China or whatever else. Don't decide not to travel; decide you're taking a raincheck.
Well, I tried, but it turned out Cha was my dump stat...
-JDF
Re:Not a problem (yet)
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1
And even more importantly, can you make:
SHA1(data1) == SHA2(data2) where data1!=data2
where data2 == something that does the evil nasty thing you want it to do?
It's a hash. By definition, two things may reduce to the same hash; that's not "breaking" a hash. The trick is making something do your evil bidding while still hashing to the right value.
However, beware of the 486DX50 vs the 486DX250. The 486DX 50 was a true 50Mhz part whereas the DX2 were only 50Mhz internal to the chip with the bus running at 25Mhz.
Of course, then there's the other side of this issue, which was VLB: Vesa Local Bus (which is what we used for fast access to graphics cards [and sometimes IDE disk] before PCI/AGP) was only spec'd to run at 33MHz tops, and many VLB cards wouldn't run at 50 MHz. So you often had a choice: buy the 50 MHZ 486 DX to get the full 50MHz bus speed, but use an ISA graphics card, or buy the DX2/50 and use a VLB graphics card a 25MHz. The usual answer (once it came out) was the 486 DX2/66, which was a 66 MHz processor on a 33 MHz bus, topping out the local bus clock. Some things still ran faster on the 486DX/50, but games usually ran better on the DX2/66 due to the higher graphics card throughput.
Of course, the highest end graphics cards (Diamond's Viper, ferinstance) could generally handle a 50MHz clock. But most of us didn't have that kind of scratch lying around at the time.
Unless you are a pro (or a VERY serious photo geek) and can afford a pro quality photo printer,do not print digital photos at home.
I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Images from either my Canon Digital Rebel (3072x2048) or Powershot G1 (2048x1536) printed on my pretty low-end Epson C84 look very good. I don't have quite the same kind of gloss you'd get from a professional lab (Actually, they're much like a professional grade "matte finish"), but the image looks excellent. Plus, I get to control the details; I decide how bright the image is, ferinstance, I decide how/where to crop the image if necessary to change aspect ratio for the finished size.
Now, yes, it probably costs me twice as much to run off an 8x10 than it would to have a lab do it. But I get good output [0], I get it my way, and I don't have to leave the house. (And I'm not doing it in bulk, so I'm not worried about the cost difference.)
Just two years ago, I would have agreed with you; nowadays, as I was very surprised to find out, even low-end printers are pretty darned good.
-JDF
[0] Now, my little brother has Epson's high-end photo printer, and it generates output that's better than I've generally seen from labs, beautiful glossy output. It's not cheap, though; $400ish for the printer and six ink cartridges to try to keep up with get expensive after a while. But it's beautiful output.
For the record I paid the Amazon prices for my B5 collection (about 160GBP in total) and it was well worth it. If you like a series then you should at least pay the asking price to watch it.
Sure. If they're willing to sell it and one wants it, by all means, one should pay for it.
On the other hand, if they're willing to broadcast it over the air (or on cable) for free, but then not sell it, I have a hard time thinking it's somehow eeeeevil to go download a "pirated" copy. It seems so simple to me: If you want to make money from it, sell it. If you don't sell it, you sure as heck shouldn't be surprised when the people who want it get it from somebody other than you...
How's about going and taking a look at the Dell Poweredge SC. Dell will happily sell you a Poweredge SC for $399. They consider it to be a server class machine! [0]
What's the cheapest Windows Server OS they'll bundle with it? $349.
The hardware's cheap-- and gets cheaper every day.
[0]: There seems to be a "hierarchy of Dumb" when it comes to email attachments. The Dumb Rules of Thumb:
If the information comes in the body of an email, chances are it's least Dumb.
If it's HTML encoded into the email, it's usually a bit more Dumb.
If it comes as a word.DOC, it's more Dumb.
If it comes as a.XLS, it's probably even more useless and Dumb.
If it comes as a.PPT, chances are it's insanely Dumb.
Next time you're at the office going through your email, think about it. The most insanely stupid stuff you get is probably powerpoint slides (and chances are, could have been done just as well in plain-text email and gotten the point across...) and the few useful pieces of email you get are probably unhindered by any sort of encoding...
blocking Linux on the desktop in the workplace is internal web sites.
I dunno about your company, but where I work, and a number of other places I know of (friends work there, ex-employment, etc...) there's a lot of stuff on the web-- time cards, change management systems, computer-based training, employee locaterators... and it all requires MSIE. It's either ActiveX, or uses proprietary MSIE broken HTML, or what-have-you, because the webmonkeys that created it know everyone has a Windows box on their desk so they could do it the easy way instead of the right way.
And so, sure, I could use Linux on the desktop. I could use OpenOffice to handle.xls and.doc and boy I wish it couldn't handle.ppt[0], and I bet there's even a Linux email program that interfaces with all the stuff that handles Outlook-style calendaring and that rot-- since it's going to be impossible to change out the desktop OS if you've got to roll out new infrastructure at the same time. But the problem is, I won't be able to fill out my timecard, or access the trouble ticketing system, or a half dozen other things my job requires.
I suspect many companies are in this boat-- the apps they run on the desktop can easily be replaced, it's the broken web stuff they're stuck with.
This is technically how it happens, yes. For a given image size, it's effectively zoom (because if your 35mm camera has n megapixels, and my 24mm camera has n megapixels, I get more detail than you do because the pixels are denser)
Given that even my old 3.3 megapixel camera captures more detail than my ex-grilfiend's film SLR using ASA 400 film (I never did break her of that habit... nasty 400 speed film, we hates it, yes we does), and my 6 megapixel Digital Rebel is even better, to me, it's effectively zoom; I can get a better picture at a longer distance using the very same lens she used.
On the other hand, my camera's only six megapixels, where this new Canon monster is 17.2, so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison... However, the finished product resembles "higher zoom", since if we're both printing a full image at 8x10, mine will _look_ closer where yours will have more detail (and could be cropped down and blown up to look just like mine-- probably still with more detail since this camera's a year newer and $4000 or so more than mine.:) )
It doesn't "reproduce the image quality of 35 mm film." It makes it so that the CMOS goes in the same place, relative to the lens, as it does in a 35 mm camera. This means if you shoot something with a given lens, you'll get the same effect, digital or film.
Now, 11 megapixels, that's what allows the camera to "reproduce the image quality of 35mm film.
Now, what the 35mm image sensor does is it allows you to get the same lens effects. If you put a fisheye lens on my Canon Digital Rebel, ferinstance, you don't get nearly as wide-angle an image-- but if you're looking for zoom telephoto, my camera gets about 1.6x the "zoom" compared to a 35mm SLR with the same lens.
The idea for this spec is not to replace JPEG or PNG. Higher-end digital cameras have a mechanism by which to save images in a lossless format. It used to be this was generally TIFF, but when you're looking at six megapixel images, TIFF nets you pretty monstrous file sizes.
Most digital camera manufacturers came up with their own lossless compression. And, of course, they're all incompatible.
Now, why Adobe? If you're shooting high-end digital photography where you care about it being lossless, and you're doing post-production on your images, what are you using? Adobe Photoshop. So instead of having to have input routines for Photoshop for seventeen different specs, Adobe would much rather the manufacturers have one standard-- can't say as I blame them. Standards are good.
Now, most of us will still keep our cameras set to shoot JPEG, but the folks who do this stuff for a living, this will benefit them. This isn't a case of trying to create a new standard to replace one that already exists to try to get market dominance, a-la Microsoft (or, heck, Acrobat/pdf for the most part...), this is a new standard to make up for the fact that there simply isn't one in this segment and there desperately needs to be.
Now, this doesn't mean Adobe won't leverage the spec and make piles of cash off of it, but at least in this case they're actually inventing something that people need instead of trying to push something on them that they don't.
Ars Technica does a system guide that has multiple levels of computer. Just slap a number on each one, and poof.
The problem is that time changes these things. My computer six months ago was a "Hot Rod", but now it's an "Ultimate Budget Box." In the future, I'll buy a Level 7, but in a couple of months it'll become a Level 5. How do I know what level my computer currently is so I know whether or not it'll run that great new game that requires a Level 6 PC?
...and how many experience points does my PC need to get to level 8?
I have a "blueberry" cellphone that can browse the web on my belt. On the other side, I've got a RIM pager. Also on the belt is a Nite-Ize pouch with a Leatherman Wave and a mini-Maglite. On my wrist is a watch that not only tells time, it's got a compass an altimeter built in. My class ring says "Georgia Institute of Technology." I've got a SecurID token, a military surplus can opener, and the platter separator from an ST-225 hard disk on my keyring-- which itself was vendor swag from HP....and you're trying to tell me I need a USB flash widget so people can tell I'm a geek?
Slashdot Mirror
This lets you rip your DVDs and CDs for easy access.
Think a bit before you rip the CDs and DVDs-- CDs are fine, they don't soak a whole lot of storage. But DVDs, those burn through a hard disk in a hurry.
Say, ferinstance, you're a science fiction geek, and you bought Babylon 5 on DVD. That's 5 boxed sets of 6 DVDs each, at around 8 GB per DVD, or on the order of 250 GB of data right there (a little less with those numbers, but those five boxed sets don't include the box o' movies or Crusade...)
Now, you can do some crunching to save some space, but I've not run into any software yet that will let you keep your DVD menus and special features intact when you crunch the video using xvid or similar). So we'd prefer not to do that, but it takes a whole 250 GB hard disk to keep just Babylon 5 online. I'd guess most relatively small DVD collections are notably larger than the disk space one is willing to throw at the problem, unless they're willing to give up DVD special features.
-JDF
Sounds like The Sega Channel ...and even that wasn't a particularly new idea:
:)
Playcable dates back to '81. News for nerds, stuff that was a neat idea 20+ years ago.
-JDF
Why is it I thought that mecha was called an Excalibur?
My company leases notebook computers.
If we didn't lease them, I'd still be using the three year old underpowered Dell that was slowly falling apart, because you _know_ they wouldn't be willing to buy me something to replace it with...
Since we lease, the Dell's lease has expired, so we had to send it back and get something else, and you can no longer get three year old underpowered Dells...
-JDF
The sick thing is: If you watch four or five cable channels, you'd probably wind up paying more a-la-carte.
The cable company doesn't bundle channels to get you to buy ones you don't want. They bundle channels to get a package to a price where they actually make money on the deal after all the infrastructure costs on just feeding you a fairly basic service.
If channels were pick-and-choose, for one, everyone now has to have a cable box (well, with digital, that may happen anyhow...), so zing, $5/mo/tv more, plus they have to make a certain amount of money off you, so the channels cost more-- think in terms of what the "premium" channels cost; the HBOs or Skinemaxes. Pretty much all channels would have to cost that much.
It's not so simple as "I get fifty channels for fifty bucks a month, so obviously each channel costs a buck!"
With DSL bundling, it works out similarly. There's an infrastructure cost in all the copper, and the intent was to sell it all as phone lines. I buy a phone line from Bellsloth, but I'm buying DSL from SpeedFactory. Now, if I could get unbundled DSL, then SpeedFactory would probably have to pay more to Bellsloth for the line (since Bellsloth has to recoup that cost somehow) and that comes back to me. But here's the real problem: Giving you voice communication service costs Bellsloth approximately _zero_. So if Bellsloth is going to recoup the investment on the lines they've run, they're going to have to charge Speedfactory just as much for the naked DSL line as they charge me for voice communications. And, as we know from economics, Speedfactory is going to pass that charge along to me, plus probably a small amount-- so I'm betting naked DSL would cost me _more_ than the setup I currently have.
And this way if the house burns down I can call 911...
-JDF
Rockstar would be nuts not to hire these guys.
Or, given the current US corporate attitude,
"Rockstar would be nuts not to sue these guys."
Not for any reason like "keeping up with studies" or anything like that-- if it's important to you, you'll go to school even if you take some time off now.
See, the trick is you're just getting out of high school. And as such, you have absolutely _no idea_ who you are.
(Yes, I know, you're eighteen and omniscient and I am full of shit.)
(And no, I don't know who you are, either.)
High School is a very sterile place. You get exposed to a very limited set of views and ideas from which you attempt to assimilate what you consider the best of into Who You Are.
The Real World is a pretty sterile place, too. It's unprofessional to show anything other than a slightly different but still very limited set of views and ideas.
College, though, is a firehose of views and ideas. College is where we go to figure out who we are. College is where we figure out what we want to do, so don't be afraid of not knowing that walking in.
That said, you mentioned work and travel-- work, yeah, gotta pay the bills, but remember: Going to school now does _not_ imply you're not going to travel. You owe it to yourself to go backpack around Europe or see China or whatever else. Don't decide not to travel; decide you're taking a raincheck.
-JDF
Well, I tried, but it turned out Cha was my dump stat...
-JDF
And even more importantly, can you make:
SHA1(data1) == SHA2(data2) where data1!=data2
where data2 == something that does the evil nasty thing you want it to do?
It's a hash. By definition, two things may reduce to the same hash; that's not "breaking" a hash. The trick is making something do your evil bidding while still hashing to the right value.
-JDF
"nanoceramic material extracted from a natural stone"? How stupid do you have to be to believe this kind of thing?
Sounds to me like the answer to this poll actually is CowboyNeal.
-JDF
I dunno, I prefer my movies to have explosions and car chases to sex.
See, I can go get laid. I can't go tearing around city streets and blowing stuff up. So I have to get my boom quota out of movies.
Okay, well, yes, I'm a slashdotter, but in theory I can go get laid. It's not like it's illegal, just unlikely.
-JDF
How ever did I survive without this for so many years?
However, beware of the 486DX50 vs the 486DX250. The 486DX 50 was a true 50Mhz part whereas the DX2 were only 50Mhz internal to the chip with the bus running at 25Mhz.
Of course, then there's the other side of this issue, which was VLB: Vesa Local Bus (which is what we used for fast access to graphics cards [and sometimes IDE disk] before PCI/AGP) was only spec'd to run at 33MHz tops, and many VLB cards wouldn't run at 50 MHz. So you often had a choice: buy the 50 MHZ 486 DX to get the full 50MHz bus speed, but use an ISA graphics card, or buy the DX2/50 and use a VLB graphics card a 25MHz. The usual answer (once it came out) was the 486 DX2/66, which was a 66 MHz processor on a 33 MHz bus, topping out the local bus clock. Some things still ran faster on the 486DX/50, but games usually ran better on the DX2/66 due to the higher graphics card throughput.
Of course, the highest end graphics cards (Diamond's Viper, ferinstance) could generally handle a 50MHz clock. But most of us didn't have that kind of scratch lying around at the time.
-JDF
Unless you are a pro (or a VERY serious photo geek) and can afford a pro quality photo printer,do not print digital photos at home.
I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Images from either my Canon Digital Rebel (3072x2048) or Powershot G1 (2048x1536) printed on my pretty low-end Epson C84 look very good. I don't have quite the same kind of gloss you'd get from a professional lab (Actually, they're much like a professional grade "matte finish"), but the image looks excellent. Plus, I get to control the details; I decide how bright the image is, ferinstance, I decide how/where to crop the image if necessary to change aspect ratio for the finished size.
Now, yes, it probably costs me twice as much to run off an 8x10 than it would to have a lab do it. But I get good output [0], I get it my way, and I don't have to leave the house. (And I'm not doing it in bulk, so I'm not worried about the cost difference.)
Just two years ago, I would have agreed with you; nowadays, as I was very surprised to find out, even low-end printers are pretty darned good.
-JDF
[0] Now, my little brother has Epson's high-end photo printer, and it generates output that's better than I've generally seen from labs, beautiful glossy output. It's not cheap, though; $400ish for the printer and six ink cartridges to try to keep up with get expensive after a while. But it's beautiful output.
So they're gonna send up Intelsat 8?
No respect. Did they even consider sending up AMDsat 1?
-JDF
For the record I paid the Amazon prices for my B5 collection (about 160GBP in total) and it was well worth it. If you like a series then you should at least pay the asking price to watch it.
Sure. If they're willing to sell it and one wants it, by all means, one should pay for it.
On the other hand, if they're willing to broadcast it over the air (or on cable) for free, but then not sell it, I have a hard time thinking it's somehow eeeeevil to go download a "pirated" copy. It seems so simple to me: If you want to make money from it, sell it. If you don't sell it, you sure as heck shouldn't be surprised when the people who want it get it from somebody other than you...
-JDF
How's about going and taking a look at the Dell Poweredge SC. Dell will happily sell you a Poweredge SC for $399. They consider it to be a server class machine! [0]
What's the cheapest Windows Server OS they'll bundle with it? $349.
The hardware's cheap-- and gets cheaper every day.
-JDF
[0] For very limited values of server...
[0]: There seems to be a "hierarchy of Dumb" when it comes to email attachments. The Dumb Rules of Thumb:
.DOC, it's more Dumb.
.XLS, it's probably even more useless and Dumb.
.PPT, chances are it's insanely Dumb.
If the information comes in the body of an email, chances are it's least Dumb.
If it's HTML encoded into the email, it's usually a bit more Dumb.
If it comes as a word
If it comes as a
If it comes as a
Next time you're at the office going through your email, think about it. The most insanely stupid stuff you get is probably powerpoint slides (and chances are, could have been done just as well in plain-text email and gotten the point across...) and the few useful pieces of email you get are probably unhindered by any sort of encoding...
-JDF
blocking Linux on the desktop in the workplace is internal web sites.
.xls and .doc and boy I wish it couldn't handle .ppt[0], and I bet there's even a Linux email program that interfaces with all the stuff that handles Outlook-style calendaring and that rot-- since it's going to be impossible to change out the desktop OS if you've got to roll out new infrastructure at the same time. But the problem is, I won't be able to fill out my timecard, or access the trouble ticketing system, or a half dozen other things my job requires.
I dunno about your company, but where I work, and a number of other places I know of (friends work there, ex-employment, etc...) there's a lot of stuff on the web-- time cards, change management systems, computer-based training, employee locaterators... and it all requires MSIE. It's either ActiveX, or uses proprietary MSIE broken HTML, or what-have-you, because the webmonkeys that created it know everyone has a Windows box on their desk so they could do it the easy way instead of the right way.
And so, sure, I could use Linux on the desktop. I could use OpenOffice to handle
I suspect many companies are in this boat-- the apps they run on the desktop can easily be replaced, it's the broken web stuff they're stuck with.
This is technically how it happens, yes. For a given image size, it's effectively zoom (because if your 35mm camera has n megapixels, and my 24mm camera has n megapixels, I get more detail than you do because the pixels are denser)
:) )
Given that even my old 3.3 megapixel camera captures more detail than my ex-grilfiend's film SLR using ASA 400 film (I never did break her of that habit... nasty 400 speed film, we hates it, yes we does), and my 6 megapixel Digital Rebel is even better, to me, it's effectively zoom; I can get a better picture at a longer distance using the very same lens she used.
On the other hand, my camera's only six megapixels, where this new Canon monster is 17.2, so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison... However, the finished product resembles "higher zoom", since if we're both printing a full image at 8x10, mine will _look_ closer where yours will have more detail (and could be cropped down and blown up to look just like mine-- probably still with more detail since this camera's a year newer and $4000 or so more than mine.
-JDF
It doesn't "reproduce the image quality of 35 mm film." It makes it so that the CMOS goes in the same place, relative to the lens, as it does in a 35 mm camera. This means if you shoot something with a given lens, you'll get the same effect, digital or film.
Now, 11 megapixels, that's what allows the camera to "reproduce the image quality of 35mm film.
Now, what the 35mm image sensor does is it allows you to get the same lens effects. If you put a fisheye lens on my Canon Digital Rebel, ferinstance, you don't get nearly as wide-angle an image-- but if you're looking for zoom telephoto, my camera gets about 1.6x the "zoom" compared to a 35mm SLR with the same lens.
-JDF
The idea for this spec is not to replace JPEG or PNG. Higher-end digital cameras have a mechanism by which to save images in a lossless format. It used to be this was generally TIFF, but when you're looking at six megapixel images, TIFF nets you pretty monstrous file sizes.
Most digital camera manufacturers came up with their own lossless compression. And, of course, they're all incompatible.
Now, why Adobe? If you're shooting high-end digital photography where you care about it being lossless, and you're doing post-production on your images, what are you using? Adobe Photoshop. So instead of having to have input routines for Photoshop for seventeen different specs, Adobe would much rather the manufacturers have one standard-- can't say as I blame them. Standards are good.
Now, most of us will still keep our cameras set to shoot JPEG, but the folks who do this stuff for a living, this will benefit them. This isn't a case of trying to create a new standard to replace one that already exists to try to get market dominance, a-la Microsoft (or, heck, Acrobat/pdf for the most part...), this is a new standard to make up for the fact that there simply isn't one in this segment and there desperately needs to be.
Now, this doesn't mean Adobe won't leverage the spec and make piles of cash off of it, but at least in this case they're actually inventing something that people need instead of trying to push something on them that they don't.
I don't have to upgrade my PC if I want to play Doom III in 640x480.
...which is higher resolution than my TV can support when I plug a console into it...
-JDF
...in the geek world, at least.
...and how many experience points does my PC need to get to level 8?
Ars Technica does a system guide that has multiple levels of computer. Just slap a number on each one, and poof.
The problem is that time changes these things. My computer six months ago was a "Hot Rod", but now it's an "Ultimate Budget Box." In the future, I'll buy a Level 7, but in a couple of months it'll become a Level 5. How do I know what level my computer currently is so I know whether or not it'll run that great new game that requires a Level 6 PC?
I have a "blueberry" cellphone that can browse the web on my belt. On the other side, I've got a RIM pager. Also on the belt is a Nite-Ize pouch with a Leatherman Wave and a mini-Maglite. On my wrist is a watch that not only tells time, it's got a compass an altimeter built in. My class ring says "Georgia Institute of Technology." I've got a SecurID token, a military surplus can opener, and the platter separator from an ST-225 hard disk on my keyring-- which itself was vendor swag from HP. ...and you're trying to tell me I need a USB flash widget so people can tell I'm a geek?