60,000 units of anything lacking a national advertising budget is pretty impressive. Just because it's not sold at walmart doesn't mean it has to sell a million units in it's first year. If you hand build 3,000 gaming PCs at your house one year under "PCOLAMAN GAMERZ PCS" brand and make $20,000 in profit after you salary and parts costs, is that successful to you? Or did you fail and should you give up.
Corporate customers found a 60% power consumption decrease after they found that most users are happy with scaling their computer back to 333mhz once microsoft office is fully loaded. Customers reported that most power consumption occurred during employee recreational time at work, when Youtube and Flash games take up the majority of the user's cycles.
What? No, as in, I searched for homemade sailboats and a page about the history of sailing canoes in southern england from 1920-1939 pops up with all sorts of images of hand drawn illustrations from out of print books. Two years later I do the same search to find the page again and share it with my friend and no amount of either variations of the original search nor searches specified about sailing canoes from that era and/or region will bring up the result because it hasn't been linked to in at least 60 days nor mentioned in a news article. There's a trove of interesting, one-off data but google is so focused on items relating to the top 100 searches its damn near impossible to get accurate results for non-standard searches unless you only google about that particular topic on a regular basis. My point is google used to be awesome, but now its so accurate its no longer of any use. Its like reading the AP newswire vs opening an actual paper - you're going to find more interesting, tangennially related news items in the paper.
Has anyone else noticed google's search results are a little too focused, or personalized? I am finding that useful search results that I had clicked on that were only tangenially related no longer come up when I search under the identical terms a second time. While this is good in most cases, I'd like a way to switch off this "focused laser" approach and open up my results more broadly without having to dig past the first 10 pages of results. I feel like google is so specific that I either find my result in the first three results or not at all these days. I feel like I am missing out on the wonders of finding cool stuff that you didn't know existed, since the results are too good and almost never off topic.
I'd have to look at the wiki page to confirm but the atom processor is avalable with x64 extensions just like the core2s are. So the sky's the limit. 2GB caps are likely a chipset limitation rather than processor arch limitation. Future atom processors with x64 extensions should have no problem handling a terrabyte of ram in theory. In theory.
TF2 will run on a toaster if you can attach a decent video card to the bus. If you can run TF2 on a first gen macbook (not pro) with laptop graphics (integrated) then an atom with 8800 doing the heavy lifting should be no problem.
Can you use a PCI-e video card with this chipset though? I thought that was a major licensing restriction Intel had put on the Atom architecture. Yes the atom could interface with the PCI-e card, but they've restricted manufacturers from doing just that to cannibalize their desktop chip sales. Hopefully someone responds and puts me in my place, I'd love to play TF2 on an Atom/8800GTS combo with 4 gb of ram.
Well in theory there should be an update, bugfix, patch or something improved over the 14 month old RC by that point. So you're definitely getting some sort of update.
I don't have an optical drive in my computer thanks to steam. Everything I need for gaming comes through that pleasant olive green box. Once you're hooked in with a community of gamers you know it's easy and fun to jump in a game or invite people to your server. I know it sounds like a cheesy commercial but steam is the perfect gaming service. People always talked about bringing the online console community experience to the PC, not only has Steam surpassed it, but I think online console communities have a lot to learn about steam. As long as Steam stays healthy I have no reason to ever buy games elsewhere - all the good games are released on steam eventually, and I never have to worry about losing the physical CD.
In Texas, books are purchased for districts at the state level to save money. Texas being the 9th largest economy in the world (after California, the 8th) we have our own editions written and printed for the state, which is why there was such a huge controversy (here in Texas at least) over whether or not we would "teach" creationism. We came this close >. to electing a creationist majority to the Texas school board who would have done just that.
I don't really see the need for including intonation of voice in text. In 99% of cases a voicemail is either asking you a question (what size windshield wipers should I pick up from walmart?), telling you to do something (meet me at lunch at 2pm) or notification (I have to work through lunch and can't make it to lunch today). Most of those types of communication only have 2 or 3 key pieces of information, bookended with personalized greetings. Chances are if your mom/girlfriend/wife calls (the only people who intonation and lack of clear message matter) you're likely to pick up anyways.
I remember phone numbers via the visual pattern they create on the dialpad. It turns out most of the phone numbers I know follow one of four patterns, with slight variations from the pattern making up the individual phone numbers. At work I follow the same method for dialing speed dials and plugging through phone tree prompts and extensions.
I finally turned my voicemail off even though my VM message said something along the lines of "You have reached Hadlock, please hang up now and send a text message or email and I will call you back". My personal phone doesn't get a lot of calls from unknown numbers so that system worked well for me. If they know me they already have my email and phone number to SMS me, and if they're a telemarketer they have neither.
BUT people still left me voicemails. So I finally just turned it off. Checking voicemail is such a PITA and I'm glad I haven't had to do it for over 2 years now. I'm never going back.
Thanks for posting this. I came in here to say the same thing. I wish they had mod points for "close thread, this is the correct answer", I would give you all my mod points.
You read about people alluding to companies that do this, but I've actually seen a custom built laptop in person. Back in 2002 they were available. Buddy's friend needed some sort of wacky combination optical drive plus extended battery and custom built was the only way to go at the time. Looked just like a 2002 vintage Dell. Intel and all the major manufacturers make "reference design" boards which are then sold to 3rd party manufacturers to copy and produce their own designs/tweaks from. It's not terribly hard to get ahold of a reference board and case and connect the other stuff together cobbled from newegg, it's just a pain in the ass to do it for a one-off model at home.
Alienware was cool, when I was 16, in 1998. I wasn't even aware they still existed except for their influence on the "gilled front" look case design. I was convinced they'd dissapeared. Alienware is the cool shiny manufacturer for 16 year-olds whose parents have no problem paying for a "premium" laptop. And then this "article" comes along.
That's what I'd sell out for. A million bucks (take home money, after taxes yadda yadda) plus stock options and some sort of executive position for $180,000 a year plus bonuses and health benefits (WITH dental). You can sell out now for that, or you can build the company to that state in 10 years. If you can't sell the company for what I outlined above, it's not worth your trouble.
What kind of accounting software did you test. Our accounting software runs on FoxPro9, and prior to last year it was running in compatibility mode of FoxPro4 or 5 (I forget). Lots of small buisnesses run wonky custom accounting software that's been hacked to run sequentially newer operating systems since DOS. I think we started running our accounting software in win3.1 of FoxPro 3 or 4 back in 1998.
Refresh times would be measured in seconds, not ms. I actually was looking for a B&W passive LCD display a couple of years ago. Passive meaning the same LCD technology used in an old gameboy or digital watch. You get the same readability but with older tech and slightly more fragility. Plus you get acceptable refresh times but you're limited to well lit areas.
30% of $120.00 (that's about average these days right? I paid about 85 for most basic books in 2004) is still $36.00. Actually my local bookstore said they were bound by their rent (being on school property) to not sell at more than a 25%profit margin. That's still $30, leaving 5% for the author is $6, transportation costs let's say is $4 (hey this stuff is cheap to move when you're doing it by the truckload), giving the publisher about $80 to print the book. Everything else (probably $65) is profit. Let's break this down another way. Saw we give the retailer $30, the author $6, transportation costs are still $4, and printing costs are $15, and the publisher keeps $15 just for being the publisher. That comes out to about $70, or almost 50% less than what students are paying right now.
Interesting. I only glanced at the site after seeing the price, but I thought they'd dropped that with the Kindle 2. That's pretty cool, and if I didn't have internet at home (like a grandparent perhaps) this might be more worthwhile at that price. I'm guessing Amazon in that case is paying half price for data, at the cost of being a low priority connection/device on the network. It's probably in the buisness model to run the kindle internet access at a loss for the first five years or so to build marketshare. At that point they'll probably be able to offer a data rate that you could bridge to your laptop for $20 a month or so, ala T-Mobile and their blackberries.
This is true, but in most cases people are using it in a manner not conceived by the creator simply because there's a better tool for the job, but they just can't afford it right now. I would imagine the Kindle is pretty well locked down, and if you're buying the Kindle for something other than it's intended purpose (at $500!) you're wasting a lot of money. Those who absolutely need more storage space will figure out how to attach a USB thumb drive to the device, or tear their Kindle open to access the unused SD card reader or IDE interface inside.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, the guys who started Alienware in their garage were total failures.
60,000 units of anything lacking a national advertising budget is pretty impressive. Just because it's not sold at walmart doesn't mean it has to sell a million units in it's first year. If you hand build 3,000 gaming PCs at your house one year under "PCOLAMAN GAMERZ PCS" brand and make $20,000 in profit after you salary and parts costs, is that successful to you? Or did you fail and should you give up.
Corporate customers found a 60% power consumption decrease after they found that most users are happy with scaling their computer back to 333mhz once microsoft office is fully loaded. Customers reported that most power consumption occurred during employee recreational time at work, when Youtube and Flash games take up the majority of the user's cycles.
What? No, as in, I searched for homemade sailboats and a page about the history of sailing canoes in southern england from 1920-1939 pops up with all sorts of images of hand drawn illustrations from out of print books. Two years later I do the same search to find the page again and share it with my friend and no amount of either variations of the original search nor searches specified about sailing canoes from that era and/or region will bring up the result because it hasn't been linked to in at least 60 days nor mentioned in a news article. There's a trove of interesting, one-off data but google is so focused on items relating to the top 100 searches its damn near impossible to get accurate results for non-standard searches unless you only google about that particular topic on a regular basis. My point is google used to be awesome, but now its so accurate its no longer of any use. Its like reading the AP newswire vs opening an actual paper - you're going to find more interesting, tangennially related news items in the paper.
Has anyone else noticed google's search results are a little too focused, or personalized? I am finding that useful search results that I had clicked on that were only tangenially related no longer come up when I search under the identical terms a second time. While this is good in most cases, I'd like a way to switch off this "focused laser" approach and open up my results more broadly without having to dig past the first 10 pages of results. I feel like google is so specific that I either find my result in the first three results or not at all these days. I feel like I am missing out on the wonders of finding cool stuff that you didn't know existed, since the results are too good and almost never off topic.
I'd have to look at the wiki page to confirm but the atom processor is avalable with x64 extensions just like the core2s are. So the sky's the limit. 2GB caps are likely a chipset limitation rather than processor arch limitation. Future atom processors with x64 extensions should have no problem handling a terrabyte of ram in theory. In theory.
TF2 will run on a toaster if you can attach a decent video card to the bus. If you can run TF2 on a first gen macbook (not pro) with laptop graphics (integrated) then an atom with 8800 doing the heavy lifting should be no problem.
Can you use a PCI-e video card with this chipset though? I thought that was a major licensing restriction Intel had put on the Atom architecture. Yes the atom could interface with the PCI-e card, but they've restricted manufacturers from doing just that to cannibalize their desktop chip sales. Hopefully someone responds and puts me in my place, I'd love to play TF2 on an Atom/8800GTS combo with 4 gb of ram.
Well in theory there should be an update, bugfix, patch or something improved over the 14 month old RC by that point. So you're definitely getting some sort of update.
I don't have an optical drive in my computer thanks to steam. Everything I need for gaming comes through that pleasant olive green box. Once you're hooked in with a community of gamers you know it's easy and fun to jump in a game or invite people to your server. I know it sounds like a cheesy commercial but steam is the perfect gaming service. People always talked about bringing the online console community experience to the PC, not only has Steam surpassed it, but I think online console communities have a lot to learn about steam. As long as Steam stays healthy I have no reason to ever buy games elsewhere - all the good games are released on steam eventually, and I never have to worry about losing the physical CD.
In Texas, books are purchased for districts at the state level to save money. Texas being the 9th largest economy in the world (after California, the 8th) we have our own editions written and printed for the state, which is why there was such a huge controversy (here in Texas at least) over whether or not we would "teach" creationism. We came this close >. to electing a creationist majority to the Texas school board who would have done just that.
I don't really see the need for including intonation of voice in text. In 99% of cases a voicemail is either asking you a question (what size windshield wipers should I pick up from walmart?), telling you to do something (meet me at lunch at 2pm) or notification (I have to work through lunch and can't make it to lunch today). Most of those types of communication only have 2 or 3 key pieces of information, bookended with personalized greetings. Chances are if your mom/girlfriend/wife calls (the only people who intonation and lack of clear message matter) you're likely to pick up anyways.
I remember phone numbers via the visual pattern they create on the dialpad. It turns out most of the phone numbers I know follow one of four patterns, with slight variations from the pattern making up the individual phone numbers. At work I follow the same method for dialing speed dials and plugging through phone tree prompts and extensions.
I finally turned my voicemail off even though my VM message said something along the lines of "You have reached Hadlock, please hang up now and send a text message or email and I will call you back". My personal phone doesn't get a lot of calls from unknown numbers so that system worked well for me. If they know me they already have my email and phone number to SMS me, and if they're a telemarketer they have neither.
BUT people still left me voicemails. So I finally just turned it off. Checking voicemail is such a PITA and I'm glad I haven't had to do it for over 2 years now. I'm never going back.
Thanks for posting this. I came in here to say the same thing. I wish they had mod points for "close thread, this is the correct answer", I would give you all my mod points.
You read about people alluding to companies that do this, but I've actually seen a custom built laptop in person. Back in 2002 they were available. Buddy's friend needed some sort of wacky combination optical drive plus extended battery and custom built was the only way to go at the time. Looked just like a 2002 vintage Dell. Intel and all the major manufacturers make "reference design" boards which are then sold to 3rd party manufacturers to copy and produce their own designs/tweaks from. It's not terribly hard to get ahold of a reference board and case and connect the other stuff together cobbled from newegg, it's just a pain in the ass to do it for a one-off model at home.
Alienware was cool, when I was 16, in 1998. I wasn't even aware they still existed except for their influence on the "gilled front" look case design. I was convinced they'd dissapeared. Alienware is the cool shiny manufacturer for 16 year-olds whose parents have no problem paying for a "premium" laptop. And then this "article" comes along.
That's what I'd sell out for. A million bucks (take home money, after taxes yadda yadda) plus stock options and some sort of executive position for $180,000 a year plus bonuses and health benefits (WITH dental). You can sell out now for that, or you can build the company to that state in 10 years. If you can't sell the company for what I outlined above, it's not worth your trouble.
Their webserver was built using MS-DEBUG
What kind of accounting software did you test. Our accounting software runs on FoxPro9, and prior to last year it was running in compatibility mode of FoxPro4 or 5 (I forget). Lots of small buisnesses run wonky custom accounting software that's been hacked to run sequentially newer operating systems since DOS. I think we started running our accounting software in win3.1 of FoxPro 3 or 4 back in 1998.
E-ink displays use a proprietary control unit
Refresh times would be measured in seconds, not ms. I actually was looking for a B&W passive LCD display a couple of years ago. Passive meaning the same LCD technology used in an old gameboy or digital watch. You get the same readability but with older tech and slightly more fragility. Plus you get acceptable refresh times but you're limited to well lit areas.
30% of $120.00 (that's about average these days right? I paid about 85 for most basic books in 2004) is still $36.00. Actually my local bookstore said they were bound by their rent (being on school property) to not sell at more than a 25%profit margin. That's still $30, leaving 5% for the author is $6, transportation costs let's say is $4 (hey this stuff is cheap to move when you're doing it by the truckload), giving the publisher about $80 to print the book. Everything else (probably $65) is profit. Let's break this down another way. Saw we give the retailer $30, the author $6, transportation costs are still $4, and printing costs are $15, and the publisher keeps $15 just for being the publisher. That comes out to about $70, or almost 50% less than what students are paying right now.
Interesting. I only glanced at the site after seeing the price, but I thought they'd dropped that with the Kindle 2. That's pretty cool, and if I didn't have internet at home (like a grandparent perhaps) this might be more worthwhile at that price. I'm guessing Amazon in that case is paying half price for data, at the cost of being a low priority connection/device on the network. It's probably in the buisness model to run the kindle internet access at a loss for the first five years or so to build marketshare. At that point they'll probably be able to offer a data rate that you could bridge to your laptop for $20 a month or so, ala T-Mobile and their blackberries.
This is true, but in most cases people are using it in a manner not conceived by the creator simply because there's a better tool for the job, but they just can't afford it right now. I would imagine the Kindle is pretty well locked down, and if you're buying the Kindle for something other than it's intended purpose (at $500!) you're wasting a lot of money. Those who absolutely need more storage space will figure out how to attach a USB thumb drive to the device, or tear their Kindle open to access the unused SD card reader or IDE interface inside.