I don't know if anyone will go for it, though, except in the case of super-compact motherboards. Since losing enough flash cells means losing the entire integrated "hard drive", and therefore the full function of the motherboard.
Although I think that's where the market is headed. My mother had a perfectly good, roughly 8 year old, 3ghz pentium 4 that had performed reliably and is still powerful enough for what she needs to do. But the headache of removing 6 years worth of viruses, spyware and god knows what else just wasn't worth it. Between upgrading to 2gb of ram, wireless networking, a second video card (for dual monitors), a copy of windows 7 and replacing the buzzing fans and grinding hard drive, it was about the same cost to just replace it with a $300 nettop that bolts right to the back of her monitor that's arguably less powerful than her old computer, but I can lock it down and comes with free MS anti-virus software, and I don't have to worry about legacy support for XP in 2-3 years.
My point is, at this point, most people can replace the entire computer when the old hard drive fails for less than the cost to buy a new hard drive and pay for Geek Squad to install it for them. Computers bigger than a shoebox will cease to exist outside of the gaming community and some professions in another 2-3 years. Hell, we might even see some shoebox sized computers with horizontal risers with 2x pci-e slots for gamers, too. A dual core atom computer can play most computer games today, it's just the video card that's holding it back.
I'm reasonably sure quick format wasn't an option back in Windows 3.1 waaay back in 1993, but I will go ahead and forward that to my past self... Does the pop3 standard handle temporal shifts ok? Maybe I should send it pop2 just in case the servers from back then don't understand pop3:)
Oh, I was just talking about something that mounted in the PCI slot and was held in with a single screw like an old school sound card. There'd be no pin connectors interfacing directly with the motherboard; it'd still have a SATA jack to wire it to the motherboard.
Hell, there's no reason why they couldn't just integrate a 20 or 40gb SSD right into the motherboard. Talk about a microcomputer! Lenovo has some pretty tiny nettops nowadays, I imagine the physical dimensions of the hard drive more or less doubles the thickness of the unit. With a different form factor they could probably reduce the size of the packaging even further.
Back in middle school me and my buddy wanted to try out linux but didn't want to wait to format* the drive so we stuck the magnet out of the base of a magnet-mount shop lamp (10 lb "capacity", about 5" in diameter). To our surprise, not only did we corrupt the drive data, but the computer wouldn't recognize the drive, either.
*I am aware now that there's more involved to formatting a drive
I'd love to see the next version of windows released on a USB thumb drive. I own one external usb DVD player for OS installs and that's it. It feels very 1995 to still be installing my OS from optical media.
As Netflix expands their streaming movie selection and increases the video quality of their streamed movies, I think Blu Ray is going to die, or at least wither quite a bit in first world countries. Sure the audio/videophiles and people who like to collect things (like movies) will still buy their favorite titles and Blu Ray will continue to live on, but most people are content to skip the physical disc if they can get streaming videos ala carte at a flat rate. In third world countries VCD and DVD rental places are quite popular where broadband exists, but it still very slow, so I can see Blu Ray flourishing there once the rates for duplication and players comes down by at least 70%. I don't think we live in a world where silicon memory chips and their controllers will ever be cheaper than $10 or so, which is significantly higher than the cost of a piece of plastic with some foil embedded in it.
I wonder how long it will be before SSDs lose the traditional 3.5" form factor. There's no reason why you couldn't say, drop the guts into a PCI form factor. That cast aluminum enclosure is probably $3-5 of a product that probably costs $45 to make. With less heat and mass requirements it's likely we'll start seeing naked chips on a breadboard to save 8-9% of the manufacturing cost.
Hell, just last week (last Friday!) a flash ad on TechCrunch (linked to from Google News, no less!) opened a new tab in Google Chrome and downloaded a PDF to my desktop under XP SP3. That was an eye opening experience....
Or even as simple as: You get 200k/year based on the % of votes you were there for. Show up for 5 votes out of 100, you get 10k.
But the point is, we shouldn't have to pay senators anything. The money should be a symbol of gratitude for their service. There's no way they should be making almost 10 times an infantry level soldier in Iraq does (I'm guestimating 20k a year for a first year soldier). If they aren't showing up for work they need to be fired and replaced with someone willing to put in the work that 200K/year requires of them. As the law stands currently, you can't even recall a lazy senator.
If we're going to pay my senator $174,000 a year for 4 year term, plus lifetime pension and health benefits, plus other expenses*, I damn well expect them to be there every day. They already get plenty of days off, in addition to federal holidays. Maybe you make more than $174,000 a year, but I promise you, I don't. Considering it's an honor to serve your country, maybe they should rethink their payscale.
*Senators have free access to military jets, which cost anywhere from $500 to $5000 an hour depending on who you ask, among the many other perks
And what were the other 7 senators doing that day? Biden (the VP) is technically part of the senate, but I'll give him a pass on this. I'll be checking to see if my senator(s) were busy sleeping in that day.
Most schools are setup so you end up with about 1.5 extra semesters worth of credits by the time you graduate, in case you screw anything up. By your junior year a lot of kids at my old high school were taking teacher assistant and study period 0-credit classes, usually scheduled for the first two periods of school, with a sign in/attendance sheet that had to be turned in to the office by the end of the day on friday of each week - i.e. was not policed closely unless you started robbing gas stations during school hours. This generally meant you could skip the first two hours of the day and arrive at school to get in one or two classes before lunch, and then cruise through the rest of the afternoon.
On the flip side we also had "zero hour" which started an hour before 1st period, allowing those genetic freaks who woke up early to get their school day done with by 1:30. I wish I had known more about these programs going through school.
Amazon has them as well, for $5 less and with free shipping. I'm pretty sure they do free shipping as well. I've been using one of those, hooked up to one of these for about two years now. Flawless.
What's the margin of error on their data? How much does it fluctuate from month to month? Did any governments do any major new deployments, or change their firewall settings to mask what kind of browser their users were connecting with? Until several agencies start reporting consistent numbers I will remain skeptical of anything over 0.5%
As I understand it, the Brits realized that people simply slow down near a speed camera, so they started photographing your licence plate between two points, and calculating your speed based on the difference in the two time stamps and a known distance. Apparently this is common in other countries as well, for example, Belgium.
Well if you'd googled it before and already knew the answer, why didn't you contribute to the conversation rather than write a redundant -1 [citation needed] comment?:)
I was rather amused when my Belgian couchsurfer confided in me that they might be ticketed before they return home because they "may have exceeded the speed limit at some point". They calmed down when I explained we don't have speed cameras on our highways here in the US, but still didn't completely believe me.
Hell, FreeDos is still an active project. XP is infinitely more useful and flexible in comparison. "Sunset" support until 2014? They'll probably extend that "another six months" every 6 months until 2016 or so. I can't imagine XP fading into "win98" obscurity until 2020. Many of the computers at my office run win2k, possibly due to the happy coincidence that win2k and XP share essentially the same codebase.
I'd hope by 2012 people still running XP will have migrated to some webkit or mozilla based browser by then, though.
But before you go on about how 'quaint' CDs are, keep in mind how nice it is to own something physical.
On the flip side, there are some of us who think large collections of useless, shiny baubles are gaudy and take up too much space. Don't get me wrong, my buddy has two DVD-bookshelves *full* of DVDs he's never even opened, but he's ok with that because it's his "collection" and they're *his*. On the flip side, some of us just want to be able to turn on their music player and hear something good.
Hunh, I guess F1 uses a more points = win system rather than less points, thanks for "point"ing that out:) Are you talking about DNFs not being as bad for drivers series or manufacturer's series? How many throwout races do they have in a series?
I suppose in a black and white world you're right. In competitive races that are part of a series, I'm happy to be in the top third. Very rarely does someone "win" all the races of a series. In these sorts of situations you have a "winner" and someone who comes in "last"; it might sound like little leauge talk, but until the series is over, there aren't really any losers. It's like saying the Yankees "won" the 7th inning, and so the Red Sox "lose" that inning, even though the Red Sox are ahead by 2 points overall (one can dream) and might still win the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I think that's where the market is headed. My mother had a perfectly good, roughly 8 year old, 3ghz pentium 4 that had performed reliably and is still powerful enough for what she needs to do. But the headache of removing 6 years worth of viruses, spyware and god knows what else just wasn't worth it. Between upgrading to 2gb of ram, wireless networking, a second video card (for dual monitors), a copy of windows 7 and replacing the buzzing fans and grinding hard drive, it was about the same cost to just replace it with a $300 nettop that bolts right to the back of her monitor that's arguably less powerful than her old computer, but I can lock it down and comes with free MS anti-virus software, and I don't have to worry about legacy support for XP in 2-3 years.
My point is, at this point, most people can replace the entire computer when the old hard drive fails for less than the cost to buy a new hard drive and pay for Geek Squad to install it for them. Computers bigger than a shoebox will cease to exist outside of the gaming community and some professions in another 2-3 years. Hell, we might even see some shoebox sized computers with horizontal risers with 2x pci-e slots for gamers, too. A dual core atom computer can play most computer games today, it's just the video card that's holding it back.
I'm reasonably sure quick format wasn't an option back in Windows 3.1 waaay back in 1993, but I will go ahead and forward that to my past self... Does the pop3 standard handle temporal shifts ok? Maybe I should send it pop2 just in case the servers from back then don't understand pop3 :)
Oh, I was just talking about something that mounted in the PCI slot and was held in with a single screw like an old school sound card. There'd be no pin connectors interfacing directly with the motherboard; it'd still have a SATA jack to wire it to the motherboard.
Hell, there's no reason why they couldn't just integrate a 20 or 40gb SSD right into the motherboard. Talk about a microcomputer! Lenovo has some pretty tiny nettops nowadays, I imagine the physical dimensions of the hard drive more or less doubles the thickness of the unit. With a different form factor they could probably reduce the size of the packaging even further.
Back in middle school me and my buddy wanted to try out linux but didn't want to wait to format* the drive so we stuck the magnet out of the base of a magnet-mount shop lamp (10 lb "capacity", about 5" in diameter). To our surprise, not only did we corrupt the drive data, but the computer wouldn't recognize the drive, either.
*I am aware now that there's more involved to formatting a drive
I'd love to see the next version of windows released on a USB thumb drive. I own one external usb DVD player for OS installs and that's it. It feels very 1995 to still be installing my OS from optical media.
As Netflix expands their streaming movie selection and increases the video quality of their streamed movies, I think Blu Ray is going to die, or at least wither quite a bit in first world countries. Sure the audio/videophiles and people who like to collect things (like movies) will still buy their favorite titles and Blu Ray will continue to live on, but most people are content to skip the physical disc if they can get streaming videos ala carte at a flat rate. In third world countries VCD and DVD rental places are quite popular where broadband exists, but it still very slow, so I can see Blu Ray flourishing there once the rates for duplication and players comes down by at least 70%. I don't think we live in a world where silicon memory chips and their controllers will ever be cheaper than $10 or so, which is significantly higher than the cost of a piece of plastic with some foil embedded in it.
I wonder how long it will be before SSDs lose the traditional 3.5" form factor. There's no reason why you couldn't say, drop the guts into a PCI form factor. That cast aluminum enclosure is probably $3-5 of a product that probably costs $45 to make. With less heat and mass requirements it's likely we'll start seeing naked chips on a breadboard to save 8-9% of the manufacturing cost.
Hell, just last week (last Friday!) a flash ad on TechCrunch (linked to from Google News, no less!) opened a new tab in Google Chrome and downloaded a PDF to my desktop under XP SP3. That was an eye opening experience....
But the point is, we shouldn't have to pay senators anything. The money should be a symbol of gratitude for their service. There's no way they should be making almost 10 times an infantry level soldier in Iraq does (I'm guestimating 20k a year for a first year soldier). If they aren't showing up for work they need to be fired and replaced with someone willing to put in the work that 200K/year requires of them. As the law stands currently, you can't even recall a lazy senator.
If we're going to pay my senator $174,000 a year for 4 year term, plus lifetime pension and health benefits, plus other expenses*, I damn well expect them to be there every day. They already get plenty of days off, in addition to federal holidays. Maybe you make more than $174,000 a year, but I promise you, I don't. Considering it's an honor to serve your country, maybe they should rethink their payscale.
*Senators have free access to military jets, which cost anywhere from $500 to $5000 an hour depending on who you ask, among the many other perks
And what were the other 7 senators doing that day? Biden (the VP) is technically part of the senate, but I'll give him a pass on this. I'll be checking to see if my senator(s) were busy sleeping in that day.
Most schools are setup so you end up with about 1.5 extra semesters worth of credits by the time you graduate, in case you screw anything up. By your junior year a lot of kids at my old high school were taking teacher assistant and study period 0-credit classes, usually scheduled for the first two periods of school, with a sign in/attendance sheet that had to be turned in to the office by the end of the day on friday of each week - i.e. was not policed closely unless you started robbing gas stations during school hours. This generally meant you could skip the first two hours of the day and arrive at school to get in one or two classes before lunch, and then cruise through the rest of the afternoon.
On the flip side we also had "zero hour" which started an hour before 1st period, allowing those genetic freaks who woke up early to get their school day done with by 1:30. I wish I had known more about these programs going through school.
Amazon has them as well, for $5 less and with free shipping. I'm pretty sure they do free shipping as well. I've been using one of those, hooked up to one of these for about two years now. Flawless.
You sir, win the conversation. Sadly I already replied to another comment upstream so I can nolonger upmod this.
What's the margin of error on their data? How much does it fluctuate from month to month? Did any governments do any major new deployments, or change their firewall settings to mask what kind of browser their users were connecting with? Until several agencies start reporting consistent numbers I will remain skeptical of anything over 0.5%
As I understand it, the Brits realized that people simply slow down near a speed camera, so they started photographing your licence plate between two points, and calculating your speed based on the difference in the two time stamps and a known distance. Apparently this is common in other countries as well, for example, Belgium.
Do they measure your average speed between the two cars over long distances, and then mail you a ticket?
Well if you'd googled it before and already knew the answer, why didn't you contribute to the conversation rather than write a redundant -1 [citation needed] comment? :)
Alternately, he could just email the tax office, wait for a response, and then act on that.
I was rather amused when my Belgian couchsurfer confided in me that they might be ticketed before they return home because they "may have exceeded the speed limit at some point". They calmed down when I explained we don't have speed cameras on our highways here in the US, but still didn't completely believe me.
Really? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=low+income+support+britain
Hell, FreeDos is still an active project. XP is infinitely more useful and flexible in comparison. "Sunset" support until 2014? They'll probably extend that "another six months" every 6 months until 2016 or so. I can't imagine XP fading into "win98" obscurity until 2020. Many of the computers at my office run win2k, possibly due to the happy coincidence that win2k and XP share essentially the same codebase.
I'd hope by 2012 people still running XP will have migrated to some webkit or mozilla based browser by then, though.
On the flip side, there are some of us who think large collections of useless, shiny baubles are gaudy and take up too much space. Don't get me wrong, my buddy has two DVD-bookshelves *full* of DVDs he's never even opened, but he's ok with that because it's his "collection" and they're *his*. On the flip side, some of us just want to be able to turn on their music player and hear something good.
I thought google didn't issue any voting stock to the public?
Hunh, I guess F1 uses a more points = win system rather than less points, thanks for "point"ing that out :) Are you talking about DNFs not being as bad for drivers series or manufacturer's series? How many throwout races do they have in a series?
I suppose in a black and white world you're right. In competitive races that are part of a series, I'm happy to be in the top third. Very rarely does someone "win" all the races of a series. In these sorts of situations you have a "winner" and someone who comes in "last"; it might sound like little leauge talk, but until the series is over, there aren't really any losers. It's like saying the Yankees "won" the 7th inning, and so the Red Sox "lose" that inning, even though the Red Sox are ahead by 2 points overall (one can dream) and might still win the game.