I've done a quite a few rebates in the past year or two and got virtually all of them. I think i'm missing a $4 one, but all the big ones came through fine (sometimes after the odd phone call).
making a large lcd without dead pixels is akin to making a large chip die without defects.
You have some rate of defects/cm^2 or defects/pixel and the more area or pixels you have, the greater the chances of a defect. It's what makes true 35mm CCDs for cameras prohibatively expensive.
Sony must be using some pretty low tolerances to have any significant number of dead pixels on such a small screen.
Furthermore the last time I used partition magic (which was many years back) the users guide still advised you to backup all your data before resizing.
Is that still true or does it come wiht some sort of garuntee now?
While people don't choose their children in the absolute sense, they do have a huge potential to shape them.
I'm a software developer, my father was a software developer. It's not like the old days when i took over the family business, i found myself interested in programming at an early age and pursued it.
Would i be a programmer if it weren't my father's profession - it's hard to say - but i'm sure the fact that that i've been exposed to computers my whole life had something to do with it.
Equally i expect that when I have children it's more likely that one of them one will be involved in something computer related.
Most business use of PCs (excluding embedded stuff) is for wordprocessing, spreadsheets, email and web. All of these tasks can be easily accomplished without the use of a serial port.
I use serial ports to sync with my older phone, download shit to my calculator, play around with X10, but i realize that very very few people do these things.
I think for most of that hardware the OS is the problem.
Even if you can connect your factory equipment to a mac (which you can through a usbserial) then you are still stuck with software that expects windows or even dos.
The lack of a serial port is not the sticking point for these industries, it's the lack of software support.
For typical office use, serial ports are a non-issue.
The other issue here is that most Point-of-Sale/Manufacturing/Gas Station software works perfectly well and doesn't need upgrading. Lots of places still use DOS because it met their needs in the 80s and continues to today. These people aren't going to be moving to WinXP or Apple, because they dont need the latest applications or internet technology or whatever.
I don't push paper but i'm in a decently big company.
I've been in smaller companies and really cant think of why you'd need serial or parallel ports.
- Printing is all either ethernet or usb. - Scanning is usually usb. - PIM synchronization is usually usb or bluetooth.
Nowadays i only see serial and parallel ports used for things like
- interfacing with lab/cam equipment - programming door security systems and standalone card-readers - interfacing with hardware products that are in the process of being developed
Excluding people who do this kind of technical work, who really needs parallel or serial ports?!
I work in "business" and the last time i used a serial or parallel port for something work related was when i needed to get into a unix box that didn't have a display and wasn't booting... serialled in and tweaked the prom settings.
Why would you need one... it's a serious question.
My system has usb mouse/keyboard and a built in smart card reader for my id badge. Everything else like printing is done over the network.
I have a squiggle like signature but i can sign it pretty consistently. My dad's gotten it to the point where he can sign two copies of his illegible squiggle that you set on a lightbox and they line up exactly.
The motion and speed that I sign are probably close enough that a decent algorithm could compare my signature.
I have US friends who have found themselves in the UK actually having to write SEE ID on their receipts so that it matches what's on the signature strip.
Others just get refused because you aren't supposed to put anything else in that box. My card agreement is pretty specific that i'm supposed to put my signature there and i dont want to violate that.
If you've ever used a sunray environment then you'll know how nice this can be.
My workspace follows me on my badge. I can go to a collegues office with a problem, and by putting my badge in their system i can show them my desktop exactly as i left it.
A few months ago the power died in my building one weekend, so i just walked across campus to another building and carried on where i left off.
When i go into a meeting i can start up staroffice with my presentation and have it ready to go before i walk into the conference room. When i get there I can insert my badge into the sunray and my slides appear on the projector.
Plus i get the benifit of having 12 or 16 cpus and as many gigs of ram at my disposal. I can run as many tasks as I can concieve of at one time without suffering a sluggish user interface. Oh and everything lives in a datacenter with regular backups.
Extending this to home users isn't so easy, but it's a very neat idea in the business space where you dont have so much need for full screen video or games.
Don't forget there are huge group of multinationals that use windows.
If windows were to become unavaible in the EU then they'd be forced to run some alternative on a significant portion of their desktops.
Once you've figured out how to deploy said alternative, and since the per seat cost of switching is comparatively low, and you may as well extend it to the entire enterprise.
The problem with visual basic is that it's produced for Microsoft's business purposes and if they dont align with your business purposes then you are SOL.
If you use something that's open then no one entity can kill it under the guise of it not fitting in their business model.
If sun discontinue java tommorrow then there are plenty more jdk's that will do the job, and as long as people want a functioning jdk then someone will make one.
Developing against a 'locked-in' environment always has this risk, and hopefully businesses will start to realize that it's not worth it.
Writing stuff in VB may be quick but leaving yourself open to microsoft pulling this sort of crap isn't worth the effort.
Open-source is not produced for your "business purposes" and despite it's shortcomings doesn't suffer from this problem.
Let's hope the businesses stung by this choose an open standard next time round.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes more sense to buy the show from the producer and cut out the middleman
To be fair the indian computer market in the 1960s was considerably less valuable than the european market now.
I've done a quite a few rebates in the past year or two and got virtually all of them. I think i'm missing a $4 one, but all the big ones came through fine (sometimes after the odd phone call).
making a large lcd without dead pixels is akin to making a large chip die without defects.
You have some rate of defects/cm^2 or defects/pixel and the more area or pixels you have, the greater the chances of a defect. It's what makes true 35mm CCDs for cameras prohibatively expensive.
Sony must be using some pretty low tolerances to have any significant number of dead pixels on such a small screen.
Seems like sqlite or hsqldb make more sense on the low end and as always there are better (though often more expensive) options on the high end.
It's great for prototyping things, but i just can't imagine running something critical on it.
The flipside is that you can make a name for yourself by making stuff that's simple, fast and "just works"
Furthermore the last time I used partition magic (which was many years back) the users guide still advised you to backup all your data before resizing.
Is that still true or does it come wiht some sort of garuntee now?
I somewhat disagree with you.
While people don't choose their children in the absolute sense, they do have a huge potential to shape them.
I'm a software developer, my father was a software developer. It's not like the old days when i took over the family business, i found myself interested in programming at an early age and pursued it.
Would i be a programmer if it weren't my father's profession - it's hard to say - but i'm sure the fact that that i've been exposed to computers my whole life had something to do with it.
Equally i expect that when I have children it's more likely that one of them one will be involved in something computer related.
I've had mobile internet since about 1998 and it's getting more and more useful with each new generation of cellphones.
Now that i've got full colour and html rendering (instead of wml) it's getting pretty useful.
Being able to get maps and driving directions from your phone is a big plus. Having access to email and ebay can also be useful.
But i do feel the pain of rendering some graphic heavy sites over my 43k connection.
You're probably not a typical business.
Most business use of PCs (excluding embedded stuff) is for wordprocessing, spreadsheets, email and web. All of these tasks can be easily accomplished without the use of a serial port.
I use serial ports to sync with my older phone, download shit to my calculator, play around with X10, but i realize that very very few people do these things.
I think for most of that hardware the OS is the problem.
Even if you can connect your factory equipment to a mac (which you can through a usbserial) then you are still stuck with software that expects windows or even dos.
The lack of a serial port is not the sticking point for these industries, it's the lack of software support.
For typical office use, serial ports are a non-issue.
The other issue here is that most Point-of-Sale/Manufacturing/Gas Station software works perfectly well and doesn't need upgrading. Lots of places still use DOS because it met their needs in the 80s and continues to today. These people aren't going to be moving to WinXP or Apple, because they dont need the latest applications or internet technology or whatever.
I don't push paper but i'm in a decently big company.
I've been in smaller companies and really cant think of why you'd need serial or parallel ports.
- Printing is all either ethernet or usb.
- Scanning is usually usb.
- PIM synchronization is usually usb or bluetooth.
Nowadays i only see serial and parallel ports used for things like
- interfacing with lab/cam equipment
- programming door security systems and standalone card-readers
- interfacing with hardware products that are in the process of being developed
Excluding people who do this kind of technical work, who really needs parallel or serial ports?!
I work in "business" and the last time i used a serial or parallel port for something work related was when i needed to get into a unix box that didn't have a display and wasn't booting... serialled in and tweaked the prom settings.
Why would you need one... it's a serious question.
My system has usb mouse/keyboard and a built in smart card reader for my id badge. Everything else like printing is done over the network.
I can't say I have high hopes for how this will be doing in a few months if it's dead already.
I have a squiggle like signature but i can sign it pretty consistently. My dad's gotten it to the point where he can sign two copies of his illegible squiggle that you set on a lightbox and they line up exactly.
The motion and speed that I sign are probably close enough that a decent algorithm could compare my signature.
I have US friends who have found themselves in the UK actually having to write SEE ID on their receipts so that it matches what's on the signature strip.
Others just get refused because you aren't supposed to put anything else in that box. My card agreement is pretty specific that i'm supposed to put my signature there and i dont want to violate that.
I suppose the machine could send it's identifier to the server, the server could apply drm and return the file.
If you've ever used a sunray environment then you'll know how nice this can be.
My workspace follows me on my badge. I can go to a collegues office with a problem, and by putting my badge in their system i can show them my desktop exactly as i left it.
A few months ago the power died in my building one weekend, so i just walked across campus to another building and carried on where i left off.
When i go into a meeting i can start up staroffice with my presentation and have it ready to go before i walk into the conference room. When i get there I can insert my badge into the sunray and my slides appear on the projector.
Plus i get the benifit of having 12 or 16 cpus and as many gigs of ram at my disposal. I can run as many tasks as I can concieve of at one time without suffering a sluggish user interface. Oh and everything lives in a datacenter with regular backups.
Extending this to home users isn't so easy, but it's a very neat idea in the business space where you dont have so much need for full screen video or games.
Don't forget there are huge group of multinationals that use windows.
If windows were to become unavaible in the EU then they'd be forced to run some alternative on a significant portion of their desktops.
Once you've figured out how to deploy said alternative, and since the per seat cost of switching is comparatively low, and you may as well extend it to the entire enterprise.
I didn't realize .net was standardized. I know that c# is and possible the 'virtual machine' equivilent.
.net framework are really quite impressive and are a huge technology leap for microsoft.
Personally i do prefer java. Although c# and the
There seems to be a wealth of compatible JRE's so it's hard to believe that the lack of an international standard has really hindered java.
The problem with visual basic is that it's produced for Microsoft's business purposes and if they dont align with your business purposes then you are SOL.
If you use something that's open then no one entity can kill it under the guise of it not fitting in their business model.
I think by harm they want to prevent it from being fragmented and risk losing a single standard.
Probably a reference to MS's attempt to create it's own 'enhanced' jvm
While i haven't done much research, a little casual testing suggests that opensource JREs run a lot more java software than mono runs .net software.
If sun discontinue java tommorrow then there are plenty more jdk's that will do the job, and as long as people want a functioning jdk then someone will make one.
Developing against a 'locked-in' environment always has this risk, and hopefully businesses will start to realize that it's not worth it.
Writing stuff in VB may be quick but leaving yourself open to microsoft pulling this sort of crap isn't worth the effort.
Open-source is not produced for your "business purposes" and despite it's shortcomings doesn't suffer from this problem.
Let's hope the businesses stung by this choose an open standard next time round.
Well i'm running at 700mhz and unfortuantely my ram is maxed at 256 :(
The CPU is holding up fine, it's the ram and paging that kills me when i have eclipse running.