Put your car up on a jack, throw a bunch of steel washers at the bottom of the car, Where they stick, is probably where a magnet (i.e. possible GPS device). Presumably it reports "home" via cell phone signal, so you could setup an antenna to listen for cell phone signals coming from your car.
Can you sell the GPS tracker on Ebay if you find one stuck to the underside of your car? What's the going rate for a GPS tracker that hasn't been detuned for civilian use? Is it even legal to own/sell? How would that ebay page read? "Uh, found this tracker stuck to the bottom of my car with a magnet. Buyer assumes all risk that US Government may track you down and request it back. Seller assumes no responsibility if you become an assailant in the US Federal court case against me".
OR!!!! You could just swap out the motherboard and hard drives on existing computers, saving on even more materials, cost of shipping (cases are bulky, bulky = expensive), and minimize the number of parts disposed of. In most business computers (i.e. lacking a modern PCI-E video card) , it's unlikely the new motherboard/processor's power requirements will outstrip the current power supply's ability to power them.
The i5 uses the x86 instruction set, and will happily run windows using x86 and x86-64 drivers. Drivers for windows ARM are going to be new and extremely buggy, if windows ARM ever surfaces.
Nope, I haven't done this. I buy my laptops used (or Ubuntu Netbooks), and build my desktops from scratch. Note I'm not the whiny guy bitching about the MS "tax". IANAL, but I don't doubt the credit card company would do this, especially if you pay your bills on time.
The short and sweet solution is to buy it on a credit card, print out the EULA, highlight the pertinent part, mail it to your CC company, and then have them charge back the OEM cost of Windows. You'll have to prove you contacted customer service, but that's typically not hard, and just notify them you're going to do a chargeback for the cost of the OEM windows install. I doubt they'll balk much about it; there's not much they can do once the laptop has delivered.
Dunno why the other comment got modded as a troll; most companies will happily refund you the cost of Windows; it's been documented many times. Dell sells a bunch of Linux laptops now, and you can find no-MS laptops from smaller vendors too. Perhaps you aren't trying very hard.
Great! You go ahead and be an early adopter, suffer through first gen/beta headaches, buggy drivers, random system crashes. Call me and let me know when it's stable enough for "mom". I don't know about you, but I've grown used to stable hardware, and I'm not about to go back to pre-XP SP1 crashyness for an extra hour of battery life, maybe even two. 5 hrs is plenty enough for me.
The off brand (wired - USB port included at no additional cost!) 360 controller at any big box store is only $15-20. A bluetooth!! rumble PS3 controller is $45. I'd rather (and do!) recycle my controllers from game consoles. Most everyone already has one (even if you don't already have a next-gen console), if only to take to a friend's house/dorm room so everyone can play. The chances you'll lose/break an iphone before you do the same to a real console controller is pretty high.
I'm not the AC, but I haven't had any problems installing steam (you know those are all on Steam, right?) and installing any game via steam. Everything runs just fine on my circa 2005 dell laptop running ubuntu 8.04 (LTS).... just at a very slow framerate! Counter Strike Source runs about netbook speed ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6habpF7W340 ) on my ancient 1.5ghz celeron/centrino/whatever intel calls it and a gig of ram. Shouldn't be a problem on a modern desktop. TF2 is platinum rated for Wine, although in two years I've never heard of anyone playing it "full time" under Wine, and I would have heard about it by now.
Yeah, I was going to say, we measured our own pulse rate in "gym" or PE as early as 3rd grade (1992?) measure the beats for 6 seconds, multiply by 10. Learning about resting and active heart rates is healthy. Dunno why you need an expensive heart rate monitor to do that.
Essentially. This, for perhaps a $2500 tax over the life of the car, requiring perhaps billions of dollars of new infrastructure? How about this: Figure out the expected life (in miles) of the car, and tax it at a flat rate of $0.35 per "gallon". Assume 180,000 miles per car, 25mpg, that's an additional $2520 tax on a new car. Boom. Done. No GPS, no stupid getting around the law, no new licences, stickers, tracking or enforcement.
The G11 isn't really quite as good as the price would lead you to believe. Go take a look at Four Thirds cameras that are just now coming on the market. A new, low end Nikon DSLR costs $450 at Target WITH lens (I saw one there yesterday) and blows the G11 out of the water.
Right, but what software are they installing on there? I'm curious what you're seeing installed on there that someone bought in a store and went through the trouble of connecting an external optical drive and then installed off a CD/DVD, rather than downloading. I haven't been down the software aisle of a computer store in ages, so I'm looking to you for expertise on the subject.
Downloaded software, or commercially bought (legal) software that was installed from an external drive? Most people don't buy Photoshop CSx for $700 and install it via CD/DVD to casually touch up facebook photos on the subway. What kind of CD-only software are you seeing installed? I'm honestly curious, I don't buy much software anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/how_big.htm
So roughly 20 million Library of Congresses (20mm LoC)
Put your car up on a jack, throw a bunch of steel washers at the bottom of the car, Where they stick, is probably where a magnet (i.e. possible GPS device). Presumably it reports "home" via cell phone signal, so you could setup an antenna to listen for cell phone signals coming from your car.
Can you sell the GPS tracker on Ebay if you find one stuck to the underside of your car? What's the going rate for a GPS tracker that hasn't been detuned for civilian use? Is it even legal to own/sell? How would that ebay page read? "Uh, found this tracker stuck to the bottom of my car with a magnet. Buyer assumes all risk that US Government may track you down and request it back. Seller assumes no responsibility if you become an assailant in the US Federal court case against me".
OR!!!! You could just swap out the motherboard and hard drives on existing computers, saving on even more materials, cost of shipping (cases are bulky, bulky = expensive), and minimize the number of parts disposed of. In most business computers (i.e. lacking a modern PCI-E video card) , it's unlikely the new motherboard/processor's power requirements will outstrip the current power supply's ability to power them.
Not to mention the lack of Faraday cage-like effect a traditional metal case provides.
The i5 uses the x86 instruction set, and will happily run windows using x86 and x86-64 drivers. Drivers for windows ARM are going to be new and extremely buggy, if windows ARM ever surfaces.
Nope, I haven't done this. I buy my laptops used (or Ubuntu Netbooks), and build my desktops from scratch. Note I'm not the whiny guy bitching about the MS "tax". IANAL, but I don't doubt the credit card company would do this, especially if you pay your bills on time.
SP1 was the first "non-crashy" consumer OS. SP3 is pretty solid as a consumer OS - I can understand why Microsoft is trying to move away from it!
The short and sweet solution is to buy it on a credit card, print out the EULA, highlight the pertinent part, mail it to your CC company, and then have them charge back the OEM cost of Windows. You'll have to prove you contacted customer service, but that's typically not hard, and just notify them you're going to do a chargeback for the cost of the OEM windows install. I doubt they'll balk much about it; there's not much they can do once the laptop has delivered.
Who wrote the guide (i.e. who paid for it to be written), and who owns the copyright?
Dunno why the other comment got modded as a troll; most companies will happily refund you the cost of Windows; it's been documented many times. Dell sells a bunch of Linux laptops now, and you can find no-MS laptops from smaller vendors too. Perhaps you aren't trying very hard.
Great! You go ahead and be an early adopter, suffer through first gen/beta headaches, buggy drivers, random system crashes. Call me and let me know when it's stable enough for "mom". I don't know about you, but I've grown used to stable hardware, and I'm not about to go back to pre-XP SP1 crashyness for an extra hour of battery life, maybe even two. 5 hrs is plenty enough for me.
The off brand (wired - USB port included at no additional cost!) 360 controller at any big box store is only $15-20. A bluetooth!! rumble PS3 controller is $45. I'd rather (and do!) recycle my controllers from game consoles. Most everyone already has one (even if you don't already have a next-gen console), if only to take to a friend's house/dorm room so everyone can play. The chances you'll lose/break an iphone before you do the same to a real console controller is pretty high.
Broken, first gen/beta ARM drivers for all my hardware!
I'm not the AC, but I haven't had any problems installing steam (you know those are all on Steam, right?) and installing any game via steam. Everything runs just fine on my circa 2005 dell laptop running ubuntu 8.04 (LTS).... just at a very slow framerate! Counter Strike Source runs about netbook speed ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6habpF7W340 ) on my ancient 1.5ghz celeron/centrino/whatever intel calls it and a gig of ram. Shouldn't be a problem on a modern desktop. TF2 is platinum rated for Wine, although in two years I've never heard of anyone playing it "full time" under Wine, and I would have heard about it by now.
Don't worry, your space heater is still 99% efficient!
Even ceramic heaters aren't 100% efficient, there is some radiation produced in the visible spectrum, the red "heat" of the coils (right above IR)
Just tested it from home, link works for me as well.
Right, but the longest we ever ran in all 12 years of grade school was a full mile. Mostly it was a health awareness type thing.
Yeah, I was going to say, we measured our own pulse rate in "gym" or PE as early as 3rd grade (1992?) measure the beats for 6 seconds, multiply by 10. Learning about resting and active heart rates is healthy. Dunno why you need an expensive heart rate monitor to do that.
Essentially. This, for perhaps a $2500 tax over the life of the car, requiring perhaps billions of dollars of new infrastructure? How about this: Figure out the expected life (in miles) of the car, and tax it at a flat rate of $0.35 per "gallon". Assume 180,000 miles per car, 25mpg, that's an additional $2520 tax on a new car. Boom. Done. No GPS, no stupid getting around the law, no new licences, stickers, tracking or enforcement.
Just do a site search on dell's site for "vostro a90" it should be the first search result.
The G11 isn't really quite as good as the price would lead you to believe. Go take a look at Four Thirds cameras that are just now coming on the market. A new, low end Nikon DSLR costs $450 at Target WITH lens (I saw one there yesterday) and blows the G11 out of the water.
Right, but what software are they installing on there? I'm curious what you're seeing installed on there that someone bought in a store and went through the trouble of connecting an external optical drive and then installed off a CD/DVD, rather than downloading. I haven't been down the software aisle of a computer store in ages, so I'm looking to you for expertise on the subject.
Dell still sells them. They've been moved over to the small business website, and rebranded the Dell Vostro A90
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-vostro-a90
$239 for an Ubuntu model.
Downloaded software, or commercially bought (legal) software that was installed from an external drive? Most people don't buy Photoshop CSx for $700 and install it via CD/DVD to casually touch up facebook photos on the subway. What kind of CD-only software are you seeing installed? I'm honestly curious, I don't buy much software anymore.