The newer Dells have a hard drive test built into the BIOS. It's not as fancy as Powermax or Drive Fitness Test, but it does the job. Give the error code to tech support and they'll replace the drive no problem. (business support, don't know about home support which I've heard is worse)
There are companies that do market research stats on p2p downloads, similar to Nielsen Soundscan for CD sales. BigChampagne is one of them. Pop music jumped the shark years ago, but if listeners are really getting bored and tuning out, that's one way to find out.
It's actually a form of communism in which the "government" is supplanted by a partnership between the government and the small number of large companies that run everything. I don't know what you'd call it,
It's called fascism, but don't say that or Bush might go spread some freedom at your house.
Thanks for running the numbers. Here's some more info I found. The battery pack in the Prius is warranteed for 8 years/100,000 mi. Right now, the battery pack costs $3500 retail from the Toyota dealer, and that price is expected to drop much lower in 8 years. I seriously doubt it costs "more than it's worth" to replace the battery.
Here's the problem with the study. Even if the battery pack wears out after 100,000 miles, the nickel from the old battery gets recycled, and the car itself is good for at least another 100,000 with a new battery pack. It's an expensive part, but major repairs on a Hummer (like a transmission) can be equally expensive, and I guarantee you the Hummer will need major repairs when it gets over 200,000 mi. You can't assume the useful life of a Prius is 100,000 miles, and then the whole car goes to the dump.
I haven't heard of VMware doing this. AFAIK, full system virtualization gives every virtual machine its own address space. Since every VM starts with nothing in RAM, then boots from its own virtual disk, the hypervisor would have to scan each VM's RAM after booting to find identical pages.
The way shared memory does work is with lighter-weight OS level virtualization like OpenVZ or Solaris Containers. In those, there's only one kernel image, and each virtual machine gets its own userspace.
Virtualbox is great, especially the speed, but I've run into a bit of bugginess, like choppy sound in the guest OS, and on Ubuntu 6.06 host, it fails when I launch it because my USB mouse has a space in the device description. That last bug was a strange one. Unplug the mouse, and it launches fine. It's supposed to be fixed in the next version.
Virtualbox doesn't do 3D, and no other VM software do 3D well either. VMWare has some beta quality Direct3D support, but that's about it.
It takes away the freedom to use somebody else's code in your proprietary, for profit, application. Unlike the BSD license, for example. That's the whole point. It's somebody else's code. Don't like it? Then write it yourself, or go back to the author and pay them for a commercial license. Some developers will do that.
Video game controllers have used thumbs since the NES in the mid 80's. A thumb keyboard isn't any worse than a gamepad. There's been no mass epidemic of thumb RSI, however one study did show that the thumb is becoming the most dexterous finger on the hand where it used to be the index finger.
Feinstein is a Democrat, but she's always been pro-business, which is popular with California voters because it implies low taxes. However, we see more of the bad side of pro-business, being a corporate shill.
Copyright just isn't one of those issues that fires up the people on either side, so we get corporate lobbyists flying in under the radar and writing our IP laws. Republicans love copyright because it's good business for studios. Democrats love copyright because it's good business for studios AND entertainment industry people are reliable big money donors. Since support doesn't fall on party lines, you also get bills like the fair use act co-sponsored by Rick Boucher and that right-wing nutjob John Doolittle.
In case you haven't figured out the strategy, they divide the people on social issues to make elections look competitive while Corporate America is well-represented in both parties. They're not really a good fit in the Democratic Party, but a solid bloc of Republican support plus a big minority of Democratic support gives them an unbeatable majority for now.
There's one huge reason why paper ballots are the best: You don't have to be computer-literate to understand paper ballots and the physical security needed to keep them safe. Transparency and trust in the voting systems are absolutely essential to our democracy.
The combination of CFs and new LED technology must give the tungsten twirlers a few restless nights. I wonder what the automobile industry could pull out of it's collective chocolate canal (other than it's own cranial cavity) if legislation against the internal combustion engine were to suddenly appear and become law?
Actually, your analogy between lighting and engines is very close to reality.
Fluorescent lights are a proven technology that's popular with commercial users. Cost and complexity are higher than incandescents, but they're much more efficient (about 3-4 times). CFLs make fluorescent lights convenient and affordable for home users with the same efficiency advantage.
Diesel engines are a proven technology that's popular with commercial users. Cost and complexity are higher than for gasoline engines, but they're much more efficient (almost 2 times). Diesel cars in the past had a reputation for being slow and noisy, but the new diesels coming out of Europe are powerful, quiet and just as efficient. Diesel (and hybrid) engines are really the low hanging fruit of transportation efficiency. Anything more has compromises, and there's no magic bullet that quadruples efficiency. You can get incremental improvements from lightweight materials, aerodynamics, and smaller vehicles. Battery electrics are more efficient even with transmission losses because stationary power plants run close to peak efficiency all the time, but range and recharge time are well known problems.
Those are problems, yes, but they're symptoms of the direction of the project. Redhat can't decide if they want Fedora to be an experimental testbed for RHEL or a useful community distro. Several versions of Fedora have been good distros, but the inconsistency points to a lack of commitment from Redhat about making Fedora a useful distro. The other symptoms of those include the sometimes difficult upgrades between Fedora versions and the neglect of Fedora Legacy.
Have you checked the opinion polls? A majority of Americans *do* want us out of Iraq. Something like 12% agree with Bush's plan of sending *more* troops.
You're correct that conspicuous consumption is bullshit. It's driven by advertising and marketing that makes you feel inadequate about what you have and that what they're selling makes your life better. The first step to financial security is not getting fooled by advertising.
However, there are limits to managing your money wisely. It's one thing to tell some upper middle class guy to buy less shit so he doesn't have to be a wage slave to service all that debt. Telling the working poor to manage their money wisely just sounds stupid. Say someone's working full time making $9/hr (decent pay for service industry work in a big city). What's the cheapest apartment rental in that city (either single or going in with roommates)? How much money is left after paying rent? Try figuring out a household budget for that scenario. Don't forget that car repairs or minor medical bills can easily wipe out your savings.
The myth of social mobility in the US is the relief valve that prevents violent revolution. We know rags to riches stories happen, but it's so rare that it very probably won't happen to you. Still, we see stories all the time, whether it's entertainers, athletes, lottery winners, or someone who got lucky with a small time business deal. As long as people think there's a chance for themselves, that the game isn't rigged, they won't turn against the system. I've seen my share of rags to riches stories since I went to some good schools growing up. There were a lot of smart kids from poor or ordinary families who got a chance from financial aid and merit scholarships to join the elites. There were even more smart kids from upper middle class and rich families who were already elite.
So next time someone points to a rags to riches story to show that hard work pays, get ready to call bullshit. If you're smart, talented and hard-working, you'll probably end up a little better than an average guy, but you won't get rich without a lot of luck. We may not have a rigid caste system or a formal system of hereditary nobles, but don't pretend that privilege doesn't exist.
I haven't seen cassettes for sale in the music store since the late-90's, but yeah, cassettes were always the same price point as LPs which were about 2/3 the price of CDs. The record companies got comfortable with the price point of CDs always higher than cassettes and justified it as a premium product. They have digital quality sound and don't wear out like cassettes and LPs, right?
The late-90's is also about the time that we started calling bullshit on CD prices. You used to be able to buy 45rpm or cassette singles for a pretty cheap price, and today you have 99 cent songs from the Itunes music store. In the time between, you were stuck buying the CD and barely getting change from a twenty.
An object in orbit has the potential energy of its altitude, say 130 mi for LEO, and the kinetic energy of its orbital velocity, about 18000 mph. On a ballistic suborbital flight, you have the potential energy of its 62 mi altitude and almost no kinetic energy (there's a small horizontal component of velocity). I'm too lazy to do the math, but it's a huge difference.
That's what I thought too. Sure, Yahoo would like you to to log in to Flickr with a Yahoo account that you use for everything else because then they could aggregate all your browsing into a marketing profile, but Yahoo accounts are free and you don't have to give them any real personal info. Make one just for Flickr and clear your cookies if you log into another Yahoo account.
So very many computer stores these days pull scams to make a profit
You can add another scam, selling fake processors. Years ago, my mom bought a Pentium 120 from a mom and pop shop. When it was a few years old, I took it apart to upgrade some things. What a POS. Every part was the cheapest possible one you could imagine. I tried overclocking the CPU figuring I'd get at least 133, but it wouldn't go over 120. I pulled the "warranty void if removed" sticker off the bottom of the CPU and found it was a Pentium 100 that they overclocked and sold as a 120.
The simple incentive is to subsidize CFLs to make them cheap. My electric utility subsidizes them so they cost only 50 cents each. They're pretty cheap Greenlite models, but they work fine. Even unsubsidized, they're not that expensive at IKEA, maybe $2.50 each.
The thing is, regular explosives don't make a big enough boom to take out a missile by getting close. We had working interceptor missiles in the 60's, but they had nuclear warheads which made guidance a much easier problem.
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You mean like a sailing ship? :P
Cue the right wing rants on those dirty hippie socialists and their inferior economic system...
The newer Dells have a hard drive test built into the BIOS. It's not as fancy as Powermax or Drive Fitness Test, but it does the job. Give the error code to tech support and they'll replace the drive no problem. (business support, don't know about home support which I've heard is worse)
There are companies that do market research stats on p2p downloads, similar to Nielsen Soundscan for CD sales. BigChampagne is one of them. Pop music jumped the shark years ago, but if listeners are really getting bored and tuning out, that's one way to find out.
It's called fascism, but don't say that or Bush might go spread some freedom at your house.
Thanks for running the numbers. Here's some more info I found. The battery pack in the Prius is warranteed for 8 years/100,000 mi. Right now, the battery pack costs $3500 retail from the Toyota dealer, and that price is expected to drop much lower in 8 years. I seriously doubt it costs "more than it's worth" to replace the battery.
d =19&article_id=1183&page_number=1
http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp?section_i
Here's the problem with the study. Even if the battery pack wears out after 100,000 miles, the nickel from the old battery gets recycled, and the car itself is good for at least another 100,000 with a new battery pack. It's an expensive part, but major repairs on a Hummer (like a transmission) can be equally expensive, and I guarantee you the Hummer will need major repairs when it gets over 200,000 mi. You can't assume the useful life of a Prius is 100,000 miles, and then the whole car goes to the dump.
I haven't heard of VMware doing this. AFAIK, full system virtualization gives every virtual machine its own address space. Since every VM starts with nothing in RAM, then boots from its own virtual disk, the hypervisor would have to scan each VM's RAM after booting to find identical pages.
The way shared memory does work is with lighter-weight OS level virtualization like OpenVZ or Solaris Containers. In those, there's only one kernel image, and each virtual machine gets its own userspace.
Virtualbox is great, especially the speed, but I've run into a bit of bugginess, like choppy sound in the guest OS, and on Ubuntu 6.06 host, it fails when I launch it because my USB mouse has a space in the device description. That last bug was a strange one. Unplug the mouse, and it launches fine. It's supposed to be fixed in the next version.
Virtualbox doesn't do 3D, and no other VM software do 3D well either. VMWare has some beta quality Direct3D support, but that's about it.
Video game controllers have used thumbs since the NES in the mid 80's. A thumb keyboard isn't any worse than a gamepad. There's been no mass epidemic of thumb RSI, however one study did show that the thumb is becoming the most dexterous finger on the hand where it used to be the index finger.
Feinstein is a Democrat, but she's always been pro-business, which is popular with California voters because it implies low taxes. However, we see more of the bad side of pro-business, being a corporate shill.
Copyright just isn't one of those issues that fires up the people on either side, so we get corporate lobbyists flying in under the radar and writing our IP laws. Republicans love copyright because it's good business for studios. Democrats love copyright because it's good business for studios AND entertainment industry people are reliable big money donors. Since support doesn't fall on party lines, you also get bills like the fair use act co-sponsored by Rick Boucher and that right-wing nutjob John Doolittle.
In case you haven't figured out the strategy, they divide the people on social issues to make elections look competitive while Corporate America is well-represented in both parties. They're not really a good fit in the Democratic Party, but a solid bloc of Republican support plus a big minority of Democratic support gives them an unbeatable majority for now.
There's one huge reason why paper ballots are the best: You don't have to be computer-literate to understand paper ballots and the physical security needed to keep them safe. Transparency and trust in the voting systems are absolutely essential to our democracy.
Actually, your analogy between lighting and engines is very close to reality.
Fluorescent lights are a proven technology that's popular with commercial users. Cost and complexity are higher than incandescents, but they're much more efficient (about 3-4 times). CFLs make fluorescent lights convenient and affordable for home users with the same efficiency advantage.
Diesel engines are a proven technology that's popular with commercial users. Cost and complexity are higher than for gasoline engines, but they're much more efficient (almost 2 times). Diesel cars in the past had a reputation for being slow and noisy, but the new diesels coming out of Europe are powerful, quiet and just as efficient. Diesel (and hybrid) engines are really the low hanging fruit of transportation efficiency. Anything more has compromises, and there's no magic bullet that quadruples efficiency. You can get incremental improvements from lightweight materials, aerodynamics, and smaller vehicles. Battery electrics are more efficient even with transmission losses because stationary power plants run close to peak efficiency all the time, but range and recharge time are well known problems.
Those are problems, yes, but they're symptoms of the direction of the project. Redhat can't decide if they want Fedora to be an experimental testbed for RHEL or a useful community distro. Several versions of Fedora have been good distros, but the inconsistency points to a lack of commitment from Redhat about making Fedora a useful distro. The other symptoms of those include the sometimes difficult upgrades between Fedora versions and the neglect of Fedora Legacy.
Have you checked the opinion polls? A majority of Americans *do* want us out of Iraq. Something like 12% agree with Bush's plan of sending *more* troops.
You're correct that conspicuous consumption is bullshit. It's driven by advertising and marketing that makes you feel inadequate about what you have and that what they're selling makes your life better. The first step to financial security is not getting fooled by advertising.
However, there are limits to managing your money wisely. It's one thing to tell some upper middle class guy to buy less shit so he doesn't have to be a wage slave to service all that debt. Telling the working poor to manage their money wisely just sounds stupid. Say someone's working full time making $9/hr (decent pay for service industry work in a big city). What's the cheapest apartment rental in that city (either single or going in with roommates)? How much money is left after paying rent? Try figuring out a household budget for that scenario. Don't forget that car repairs or minor medical bills can easily wipe out your savings.
The myth of social mobility in the US is the relief valve that prevents violent revolution. We know rags to riches stories happen, but it's so rare that it very probably won't happen to you. Still, we see stories all the time, whether it's entertainers, athletes, lottery winners, or someone who got lucky with a small time business deal. As long as people think there's a chance for themselves, that the game isn't rigged, they won't turn against the system. I've seen my share of rags to riches stories since I went to some good schools growing up. There were a lot of smart kids from poor or ordinary families who got a chance from financial aid and merit scholarships to join the elites. There were even more smart kids from upper middle class and rich families who were already elite.
So next time someone points to a rags to riches story to show that hard work pays, get ready to call bullshit. If you're smart, talented and hard-working, you'll probably end up a little better than an average guy, but you won't get rich without a lot of luck. We may not have a rigid caste system or a formal system of hereditary nobles, but don't pretend that privilege doesn't exist.
I haven't seen cassettes for sale in the music store since the late-90's, but yeah, cassettes were always the same price point as LPs which were about 2/3 the price of CDs. The record companies got comfortable with the price point of CDs always higher than cassettes and justified it as a premium product. They have digital quality sound and don't wear out like cassettes and LPs, right?
The late-90's is also about the time that we started calling bullshit on CD prices. You used to be able to buy 45rpm or cassette singles for a pretty cheap price, and today you have 99 cent songs from the Itunes music store. In the time between, you were stuck buying the CD and barely getting change from a twenty.
An object in orbit has the potential energy of its altitude, say 130 mi for LEO, and the kinetic energy of its orbital velocity, about 18000 mph. On a ballistic suborbital flight, you have the potential energy of its 62 mi altitude and almost no kinetic energy (there's a small horizontal component of velocity). I'm too lazy to do the math, but it's a huge difference.
No. Don't want to name names, but they're probably out of business by now. It sounds a common scam in the Pentium era.
That's what I thought too. Sure, Yahoo would like you to to log in to Flickr with a Yahoo account that you use for everything else because then they could aggregate all your browsing into a marketing profile, but Yahoo accounts are free and you don't have to give them any real personal info. Make one just for Flickr and clear your cookies if you log into another Yahoo account.
The simple incentive is to subsidize CFLs to make them cheap. My electric utility subsidizes them so they cost only 50 cents each. They're pretty cheap Greenlite models, but they work fine. Even unsubsidized, they're not that expensive at IKEA, maybe $2.50 each.
The thing is, regular explosives don't make a big enough boom to take out a missile by getting close. We had working interceptor missiles in the 60's, but they had nuclear warheads which made guidance a much easier problem.