I can't help but feel that if Apple had introduced the start screen concept, people would be hailing it as the most impressive invention in the history of computing.
They did invent it. On the iPod. 5 years ago. (well, they copied Sony, who copied Palm, who copied... the Apple Newton....)
That's the problem... it's a UI design concept that was originally developped for a touchscreen interface on a small screen device. It's debatable whether it can transition to a larger screen size in the first place, but giving it the benefit of the doubt on that point, it's still extremely inefficient in terms of movement required without a touchscreen input. This becomes problematic when proper ergonomic viewing distance for even a 22" screen is usually beyond arm's length.
I'm not saying the start button is the best (actually, I prefer e17 click-on-desktop to get the launcher menu), but at least it's designed for efficient use with a keyboard/mouse. While I have no doubt that there's people fantasizing about having LCARS for real or such, we have had touchscreens available on the desktop for decades and there's a reason they're pretty much uniquely confined to point-of-sale systems.
The real problem with that argument is that study that showed that 80% of drivers considered themselves an above average driver, or whatever the exact numbers were. Most people think they are much better drivers than they are.
*shrugs* depends on your definitions. I'm probably more lucky than I am a good driver, but the last time I had an "at fault" accident, I was 17, and the visibility was down to about 100 feet due to a heavy rainstorm... I hit somebody in front of me who was turning without signalling, but because I hit her, I was at fault in the eyes of the law. Even the cop writing the ticket told me, at the time, I should take it to court because I had a good argument that it wasn't actually at fault. I have had one other accident, where somebody hit a pothole on an icy road and spun out in front of me, but that's one of those completely unavoidable situations. Plenty of other avoidable situations that I managed to avoid, but that one I had no choice, the road was too slick and I had about 15 feet to come to a complete stop in order to avoid hitting him (and no, I wasn't speeding at the time, actually I was going 10 under the limit).
So going purely on accident record, yes, I'm a "good" driver. I have had a total of one ticket since I was 17 as well, and it was a parking ticket (stayed too long), so by that measure I'm a good driver too. But how do you define being a "good" driver, really? I don't pay any attention to the speed limit at all, and rely on cruise control for long distance hauls to keep me from speeding too much... I *have* run up against the electronic limiter in my car before, which kicks in at 185km/h. I never drive at a speed that's inappropriate for the conditions, but very often that has nothing to do with the posted speed limit, being either higher or lower than the sign says. Does completely ignoring one of the biggest rules of the road make me a good driver, or just lucky?
By the standards of large cities, 225,000 is a suburb. a small one, at that. A suburb of a city like that is not likely to score very high on the list of targets for broadband development.
It'll happen eventually, but probably not very quickly. I live in a suburb of a metropolitan area (22,000 in my town, the greater metropolitan area passed 1 million in the last census), and only last year did we get VDSL/DSL speeds over 5mbit. Cable was available with faster advertised speeds, but even that still caps out at 20mbit on a network that's horribly oversold, and where you'd actually see about 5mbit on average. They are rolling out a faster network, but slowly.
10/2 is probably FTTN, not FTTH. I'm on an FTTN connection (Alcatel 7330 DSLAM) at just shy of 1km right now, so I could probably get 25/10 if I wanted, but I'm currently only paying for 12/1 (grandfathered plan they no longer offer), because it's adequate for my needs.
Not that I'm doubting the possibility that you could be on FTTH, but the speed is incredibly low for FTTH... my provider goes all the way up to 175/175 right now for FTTH ($200/mo at that tier), and it's actually an OC-48 that they're installing for their FTTH customers, so plenty of room to increase that.
When I switched from them to Koodo (subsidiary of Telus, working on the Bell/Telus network), they charged me $400 because they'd gone and renewed my contract without telling me... they refused to refund it, so I cancelled my television/internet and homephone with them as well. They called me up and asked what it would take to get me back as a customer, I told them that their mobility department had screwed the pooch, and that I would get an Inmarsat connection before I ever got Rogers again. they were unamused.
I suggest you switch as soon as you can, though.... your contract is up in September, so the ETP will not be that much (probably $0 because you have to give 30 days notice), and you don't risk the fuckers renewing your contract without telling you like they did mine. Plus, you can take advantage of the back to school special offers they have... most of the major players are currently offering 6GB data/voice plans for about $60/mo.
Sadly, I think you're going to fall on a lot of deaf ears, and on bigots who see the world in black & white. (cue the racist troll).
If they're going to differentiate, they need to do it based on hormones, not genetics. There's a lot of variation on a hormonal level as well, but the general result is that testosterone levels are directly related to body development, because testosterone is a metabolism booster and stimulates the growth of muscle mass. (this is why men can usually lose weight more easily than women).
In that respect, somebody who's CAIS or transsexual is actually at a disadvantage competing against other women... the CAIS because their body is unable to react to the testosterone, and the MtF transsexual because testosterone is being artificially suppressed.
Nor can Americans. Fully automatic weapons are illegal for the average gun owner, unless you jump through some Federal hoops. It can be done, there are some states which allow it if the Federal process is done.
Semi-automatic weapons can be had in the US fairly easily, and most of them, it's a pretty simple modification to turn it into a fully automatic weapon. You can even do it by accident, if you don't know what you're doing when you put the weapon back together after cleaning/disassembling it.
I don't object to long gun ownership... they are pretty difficult to use for crime, and are a necessary tool on a farm. I do, however, object to people being able to purchase semi-automatic hand guns.
This begs the question then - why is there not more crime committed with crude, homemade firearms, especially in places like Europe where - based on what you said - it would be fairly trivial to arm yourself with such?
Because homemade firearms are dangerous, and people aren't that stupid? When you can pick up a saturday night special for about the same cost as the materials needed to make your own weapon, there's nothing to be gained from making your own weapon.
And despite what you may have heard, it's still fairly easy to get your hands on a weapon in a country where they're prohibited. What leads to less gun crime being committed there is that the criminals don't feel they need to carry one to protect themselves against citizens who have one, not any lack of availability of weapons. One statistic I heard was that there's actually more guns per capita in Canada than there are in the US, thanks to the proliferation of hunters, farmers, and collectors and a less urban population. (I'd google it to see if it's true and post a link, but I'm at work and that kind of thing gets filtered).
Caveat emptor. You bought the software, and you had the choice to read the EULA online before you bought the software. Whether you exercise that ability or not is your problem. No major software company denies the ability to read the EULA online prior to purchase, specifically because of the shrink wrap license lawsuits from a decade ago.
About 1% in northern Europeans, and it's not known to occur in other racial groups... they happened to be doing a story on the Berlin patient on CBC a few days ago, and I was listening to it.
And as you point out, whether a person is a good match for a bone marrow transplant is a big question... it's significantly harder to find a match for a bone marrow transplant. The video goes into detail on it.
Usually this is not a problem for most applications, but when the payload is a loaded handgun this is a disaster.
There's the problem.... what kind of idiot stores a gun in a loaded state? I'm not going to get into the whole gun control argument*, but in all seriousness... how stupid do you have to be to not make the weapon safe before you store it? And don't give me the "what if somebody breaks in!" argument, it takes very little time at all to load a weapon and chamber a round... so little, in fact, that if you don't have it in a break-in situation then you're as likely to get yourself killed just reaching for a weapon in the first place and shouldn't try.
I was in the military for 4 years (released because of a knee injury), and the first thing they taught us before we were given weapons on basic training was how to make it safe, and every night (when not in the field) when we locked weapons up in the armory we would clear the chamber and remove the bolt. Once I graduated from basic, it was the same thing... when weapons were stored, they were always made safe, and the ammunition was not stored in the same cabinet as the weapon. It's not that fucking hard. Even if you're not going to disassemble the weapon, it's still not that hard to remove the magazine, clear the chamber, and put the safety on when storing it. Use a trigger lock if you want to be prudent. If you're going to own a weapon, then use your brain.
* -- I don't believe weapons should be in the hands of people who don't train and recertify in their use on a regular basis, and I don't think that handguns should be in the hands of civilians at all, but it's not germane to the point I'm making, so let's simply accept the current situation and not get bogged down with what should or shouldn't be.
why would you rule out a piece of hardware that's included in virtually every high end system today? heck, it's included in a lot of midrange, and even some low end systems, too.
Besides, as others point out, mechanical drives are capable of write speeds that can keep up with a gigabit connection too, and with enough physical memory in your computer, it's moot because you can download into memory and commit to disk later.
I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)
Haven't benchmarked a system recently, have you? SATA 1 is capable of up to 1.5GBit/s, SATA 2 3GBit/s, and SATA 3 6GBit/s. There *are* drives out there which can sustain this.. some consumer class SATA3 SSD's can sustain 550 MB/s write speed.
Quite aside from that, modern computers are being built with signficantly more RAM than earlier systems, too. My desktop was under $1000 and it's got 16GB of memory. Who cares what speed the hard drive is when you can download a large file to memory and commit it to the disk later? While I'm sure that files downloaded off the Internet will continue to get larger, there's very little on the 'net right now which would tax a system with a decent amount of memory. (though I happen to have an ADATA S510, which is a fairly cheap SSD but still has no problem keeping up with a 125MB/s write speed).
This x1000000. If I hadn't already posted, I'd mod this up.
A single female in such a workplace is also not going to stay there for very long (at least, I wouldn't... fortunately it hasn't been an issue for me as yet), and if you get somebody who sticks up for herself, then the consequences can be very expensive. The last words you want to hear in an exit interview are "hostile workplace".
They may also find, upon introducing proper rules regarding it, that some of the men already working there aren't very comfortable with the current situation, either. Women aren't the only group of people that can be bothered by misogyny.
Indians will work for pennies on the dollar. Hell you can outsource to Canada for cheaper than the US and not get the entire culture/accent barrier. Trust me worked in a outsourced call center, twice. My jobs got sent to India and the Philippines.
Maybe in the past, but certainly not now. When the Canadian dollar was worth about $0.65 US it made economic sense. Now that the Canadian dollar is brushing against parity, some days worth more some days worth slightly less than the US dollar, it doesn't make economic sense for a US company to outsource to Canada at all. Canada has a higher minimum wage than the US, and requires more benefits be paid. The only thing that made it economical in the past was that our dollar was worth so much less than the US dollar. The only places in Canada where it's economical to outsource call center jobs are economically depressed areas where they can get away with paying minimum wage. Even then, it's pushing it... minimum wage, even in poor/economically depressed parts of Ontario or Manitoba is $10/hr, and the same work could be done in central Ohio for $7.85/hr. Here in Ottawa, where the unemployment rate is the lowest in the country and even a call center employee can reasonably expect $15/hr to start, it just doesn't make economic sense at all.
India is becoming less economical to outsource to as well... the wage has gone up significantly in India over the last few years, and they're right now at about 2/3 what gets paid in Canada or the US for the same work: working in a call center is an upper middle class job in India, and has been known to attract scientists and medical doctors away from their careers for better pay and better hours. With the drop in customer satisfaction that accompanies outsourcing, it's very quickly becoming uneconomical to outsource there. Right now, most of the new call centers are being opened in the Philippines and North Africa, with some in central and south America.
And they should have gone with The Clash, not AC/DC this time... while the song Rock the Casbah was actually about a situation in Afghanistan, the situation in Iran today is very similar to the circumstances in Afghanistan that led to that song being written in the first place.:)
Your laptop almost certainly doesn't draw 100W most of the time. That's the *peak* output.
I am now running an ultraportable which came with a 60W brick, but I used to have a gaming laptop (16"/1920x1080, core i7 quad/4GB with a radeon 4870m/1GB) which came with a 120W brick, and when that brick died, I was able to charge that laptop while it was on by plugging the 60W brick into the laptop. Gaming was out of the question, but the video card was rated at 20W peak, so there was still a fair amount of overhead in the 120W brick that came with the laptop. Fortunately, Dell standardized on laptop power adapters years ago... the voltage and connector has been the same on every laptop I've owned for years, from the 35W wart that came with my Mini 9 to the 60W bricks that came with my current laptop and my mother's laptop to the 90W and 120W bricks that came with my last two gaming systems.
It charges at the same speed from a wall wart as it does from a computer.... I usually don't need to charge my phone during the day, and can simply plug it into the wall at night. But if I'm tethering data from the cell phone with my laptop, I'll plug the phone into the laptop and let it draw power from there.
Other than that, though, my desktop at work has a USB port and I can plug into that directly. I plug into the wall wart at home. And if I'm on a road trip/using the GPS, I'll plug it into the USB port in my car. By and large I just don't need to charge it from the laptop.
On a side note, does anyone know how many thunderbolt devices are actually available for consumer purchase at this point? Are any of them reasonably priced?
Just about any monitor with a DisplayPort input is usable with Thunderbolt. They shouldn't need anything approaching the 10.2GBit that the port is supposedly capable of, though.
It's not profitable (or at least it is not immediately obvious why doing so would be profitable).
Well... not sure how they're advertising their product in the states, but here in Canada their current ad campaign is all about their history, and trying to set themselves up as a friend of the family. The publicity that a "fuck off and die" C&D letter could create has the potential destroy that ad campaign.
The good will and good publicity that this letter has created, on the other hand, almost certainly helps the image they're trying to foster for their product.
I didn't miss it, I just think it's an idiotic suggestion when an ultraportable laptop or tablet fit in just about any bag you could possibly be carrying around, let alone trunk or glove box space in a car.
We're talking about being on call for work here... there's no reason he can't leave the device in the car and fetch it if he needs access to it. When you're talking about carrying an extra device that's virtually unnoticeable in your bag, why would you want to force yourself to use a device that's the wrong tool for the job?
The person asking the question either didn't do any research at all (seriously, how can you not know that SSH and VNC clients exist for every smart phone platform out there without needing to root the device), or he's planning on doing something more complex than SSH'ing into a system and executing something that's already set up to go. Either way, he's going about it wrong. I mean, if he had some special requirement that's not generally available, like being able to use NX Client on his cell phone (last I checked, there's no NX client on Android because it relies on X, which Android doesn't have), maybe I could see the point in asking on Slashdot, but there's nothing in the question asked that requires any special voodoo at all. Just get a phone with a decent slider keyboard and a hi res screen and be done with it. (and even that's mitigated if you get one of the *many* after-market keyboards that're available in the app marketplace for your respective device).
*shrugs* there's always been malicious modding going on. Piss off the wrong person, and they'll stalk you next time they have modpoints and downmod everything in your history. How else can you explain month-old +5 posts suddenly getting a -1 troll mod literally the day after you call somebody out on their bullshit?
The system is completely broken, sadly. Unsurprisingly, but sadly.
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I can't help but feel that if Apple had introduced the start screen concept, people would be hailing it as the most impressive invention in the history of computing.
They did invent it. On the iPod. 5 years ago. (well, they copied Sony, who copied Palm, who copied... the Apple Newton....)
That's the problem... it's a UI design concept that was originally developped for a touchscreen interface on a small screen device. It's debatable whether it can transition to a larger screen size in the first place, but giving it the benefit of the doubt on that point, it's still extremely inefficient in terms of movement required without a touchscreen input. This becomes problematic when proper ergonomic viewing distance for even a 22" screen is usually beyond arm's length.
I'm not saying the start button is the best (actually, I prefer e17 click-on-desktop to get the launcher menu), but at least it's designed for efficient use with a keyboard/mouse. While I have no doubt that there's people fantasizing about having LCARS for real or such, we have had touchscreens available on the desktop for decades and there's a reason they're pretty much uniquely confined to point-of-sale systems.
The real problem with that argument is that study that showed that 80% of drivers considered themselves an above average driver, or whatever the exact numbers were. Most people think they are much better drivers than they are.
*shrugs* depends on your definitions. I'm probably more lucky than I am a good driver, but the last time I had an "at fault" accident, I was 17, and the visibility was down to about 100 feet due to a heavy rainstorm... I hit somebody in front of me who was turning without signalling, but because I hit her, I was at fault in the eyes of the law. Even the cop writing the ticket told me, at the time, I should take it to court because I had a good argument that it wasn't actually at fault. I have had one other accident, where somebody hit a pothole on an icy road and spun out in front of me, but that's one of those completely unavoidable situations. Plenty of other avoidable situations that I managed to avoid, but that one I had no choice, the road was too slick and I had about 15 feet to come to a complete stop in order to avoid hitting him (and no, I wasn't speeding at the time, actually I was going 10 under the limit).
So going purely on accident record, yes, I'm a "good" driver. I have had a total of one ticket since I was 17 as well, and it was a parking ticket (stayed too long), so by that measure I'm a good driver too. But how do you define being a "good" driver, really? I don't pay any attention to the speed limit at all, and rely on cruise control for long distance hauls to keep me from speeding too much... I *have* run up against the electronic limiter in my car before, which kicks in at 185km/h. I never drive at a speed that's inappropriate for the conditions, but very often that has nothing to do with the posted speed limit, being either higher or lower than the sign says. Does completely ignoring one of the biggest rules of the road make me a good driver, or just lucky?
By the standards of large cities, 225,000 is a suburb. a small one, at that. A suburb of a city like that is not likely to score very high on the list of targets for broadband development.
It'll happen eventually, but probably not very quickly. I live in a suburb of a metropolitan area (22,000 in my town, the greater metropolitan area passed 1 million in the last census), and only last year did we get VDSL/DSL speeds over 5mbit. Cable was available with faster advertised speeds, but even that still caps out at 20mbit on a network that's horribly oversold, and where you'd actually see about 5mbit on average. They are rolling out a faster network, but slowly.
10/2 is probably FTTN, not FTTH. I'm on an FTTN connection (Alcatel 7330 DSLAM) at just shy of 1km right now, so I could probably get 25/10 if I wanted, but I'm currently only paying for 12/1 (grandfathered plan they no longer offer), because it's adequate for my needs.
Not that I'm doubting the possibility that you could be on FTTH, but the speed is incredibly low for FTTH... my provider goes all the way up to 175/175 right now for FTTH ($200/mo at that tier), and it's actually an OC-48 that they're installing for their FTTH customers, so plenty of room to increase that.
When I switched from them to Koodo (subsidiary of Telus, working on the Bell/Telus network), they charged me $400 because they'd gone and renewed my contract without telling me... they refused to refund it, so I cancelled my television/internet and homephone with them as well. They called me up and asked what it would take to get me back as a customer, I told them that their mobility department had screwed the pooch, and that I would get an Inmarsat connection before I ever got Rogers again. they were unamused.
I suggest you switch as soon as you can, though.... your contract is up in September, so the ETP will not be that much (probably $0 because you have to give 30 days notice), and you don't risk the fuckers renewing your contract without telling you like they did mine. Plus, you can take advantage of the back to school special offers they have... most of the major players are currently offering 6GB data/voice plans for about $60/mo.
Sadly, I think you're going to fall on a lot of deaf ears, and on bigots who see the world in black & white. (cue the racist troll).
If they're going to differentiate, they need to do it based on hormones, not genetics. There's a lot of variation on a hormonal level as well, but the general result is that testosterone levels are directly related to body development, because testosterone is a metabolism booster and stimulates the growth of muscle mass. (this is why men can usually lose weight more easily than women).
In that respect, somebody who's CAIS or transsexual is actually at a disadvantage competing against other women... the CAIS because their body is unable to react to the testosterone, and the MtF transsexual because testosterone is being artificially suppressed.
Nor can Americans. Fully automatic weapons are illegal for the average gun owner, unless you jump through some Federal hoops. It can be done, there are some states which allow it if the Federal process is done.
Semi-automatic weapons can be had in the US fairly easily, and most of them, it's a pretty simple modification to turn it into a fully automatic weapon. You can even do it by accident, if you don't know what you're doing when you put the weapon back together after cleaning/disassembling it.
I don't object to long gun ownership... they are pretty difficult to use for crime, and are a necessary tool on a farm. I do, however, object to people being able to purchase semi-automatic hand guns.
This begs the question then - why is there not more crime committed with crude, homemade firearms, especially in places like Europe where - based on what you said - it would be fairly trivial to arm yourself with such?
Because homemade firearms are dangerous, and people aren't that stupid? When you can pick up a saturday night special for about the same cost as the materials needed to make your own weapon, there's nothing to be gained from making your own weapon.
And despite what you may have heard, it's still fairly easy to get your hands on a weapon in a country where they're prohibited. What leads to less gun crime being committed there is that the criminals don't feel they need to carry one to protect themselves against citizens who have one, not any lack of availability of weapons. One statistic I heard was that there's actually more guns per capita in Canada than there are in the US, thanks to the proliferation of hunters, farmers, and collectors and a less urban population. (I'd google it to see if it's true and post a link, but I'm at work and that kind of thing gets filtered).
Getting a patent for being 6 months ahead of the competition is a problem, getting one for being 15 years ahead is not.
Once you've gone to market, however, how do we know you were really 15 years ahead, and not only 6 months?
You mean the EULA they publish on their website?
Caveat emptor. You bought the software, and you had the choice to read the EULA online before you bought the software. Whether you exercise that ability or not is your problem. No major software company denies the ability to read the EULA online prior to purchase, specifically because of the shrink wrap license lawsuits from a decade ago.
About 1% in northern Europeans, and it's not known to occur in other racial groups... they happened to be doing a story on the Berlin patient on CBC a few days ago, and I was listening to it.
http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/ID/2260029968/
And as you point out, whether a person is a good match for a bone marrow transplant is a big question... it's significantly harder to find a match for a bone marrow transplant. The video goes into detail on it.
Usually this is not a problem for most applications, but when the payload is a loaded handgun this is a disaster.
There's the problem.... what kind of idiot stores a gun in a loaded state? I'm not going to get into the whole gun control argument*, but in all seriousness... how stupid do you have to be to not make the weapon safe before you store it? And don't give me the "what if somebody breaks in!" argument, it takes very little time at all to load a weapon and chamber a round... so little, in fact, that if you don't have it in a break-in situation then you're as likely to get yourself killed just reaching for a weapon in the first place and shouldn't try.
I was in the military for 4 years (released because of a knee injury), and the first thing they taught us before we were given weapons on basic training was how to make it safe, and every night (when not in the field) when we locked weapons up in the armory we would clear the chamber and remove the bolt. Once I graduated from basic, it was the same thing... when weapons were stored, they were always made safe, and the ammunition was not stored in the same cabinet as the weapon. It's not that fucking hard. Even if you're not going to disassemble the weapon, it's still not that hard to remove the magazine, clear the chamber, and put the safety on when storing it. Use a trigger lock if you want to be prudent. If you're going to own a weapon, then use your brain.
* -- I don't believe weapons should be in the hands of people who don't train and recertify in their use on a regular basis, and I don't think that handguns should be in the hands of civilians at all, but it's not germane to the point I'm making, so let's simply accept the current situation and not get bogged down with what should or shouldn't be.
why would you rule out a piece of hardware that's included in virtually every high end system today? heck, it's included in a lot of midrange, and even some low end systems, too.
Besides, as others point out, mechanical drives are capable of write speeds that can keep up with a gigabit connection too, and with enough physical memory in your computer, it's moot because you can download into memory and commit to disk later.
I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)
Haven't benchmarked a system recently, have you? SATA 1 is capable of up to 1.5GBit/s, SATA 2 3GBit/s, and SATA 3 6GBit/s. There *are* drives out there which can sustain this.. some consumer class SATA3 SSD's can sustain 550 MB/s write speed.
Quite aside from that, modern computers are being built with signficantly more RAM than earlier systems, too. My desktop was under $1000 and it's got 16GB of memory. Who cares what speed the hard drive is when you can download a large file to memory and commit it to the disk later? While I'm sure that files downloaded off the Internet will continue to get larger, there's very little on the 'net right now which would tax a system with a decent amount of memory. (though I happen to have an ADATA S510, which is a fairly cheap SSD but still has no problem keeping up with a 125MB/s write speed).
This x1000000. If I hadn't already posted, I'd mod this up.
A single female in such a workplace is also not going to stay there for very long (at least, I wouldn't... fortunately it hasn't been an issue for me as yet), and if you get somebody who sticks up for herself, then the consequences can be very expensive. The last words you want to hear in an exit interview are "hostile workplace".
They may also find, upon introducing proper rules regarding it, that some of the men already working there aren't very comfortable with the current situation, either. Women aren't the only group of people that can be bothered by misogyny.
You can easily build a Window/Linux machine for $900-$1500 tops that is pretty powerful.
In 1985? The GP was talking about comparable systems that were out at the same time as an Atari ST or C64....
Indians will work for pennies on the dollar. Hell you can outsource to Canada for cheaper than the US and not get the entire culture/accent barrier. Trust me worked in a outsourced call center, twice. My jobs got sent to India and the Philippines.
Maybe in the past, but certainly not now. When the Canadian dollar was worth about $0.65 US it made economic sense. Now that the Canadian dollar is brushing against parity, some days worth more some days worth slightly less than the US dollar, it doesn't make economic sense for a US company to outsource to Canada at all. Canada has a higher minimum wage than the US, and requires more benefits be paid. The only thing that made it economical in the past was that our dollar was worth so much less than the US dollar. The only places in Canada where it's economical to outsource call center jobs are economically depressed areas where they can get away with paying minimum wage. Even then, it's pushing it... minimum wage, even in poor/economically depressed parts of Ontario or Manitoba is $10/hr, and the same work could be done in central Ohio for $7.85/hr. Here in Ottawa, where the unemployment rate is the lowest in the country and even a call center employee can reasonably expect $15/hr to start, it just doesn't make economic sense at all.
India is becoming less economical to outsource to as well... the wage has gone up significantly in India over the last few years, and they're right now at about 2/3 what gets paid in Canada or the US for the same work: working in a call center is an upper middle class job in India, and has been known to attract scientists and medical doctors away from their careers for better pay and better hours. With the drop in customer satisfaction that accompanies outsourcing, it's very quickly becoming uneconomical to outsource there. Right now, most of the new call centers are being opened in the Philippines and North Africa, with some in central and south America.
The reactor wasn't the failing at Fukushima, the flood wall was.
Noriega was Panama, not AC/DC.
And they should have gone with The Clash, not AC/DC this time... while the song Rock the Casbah was actually about a situation in Afghanistan, the situation in Iran today is very similar to the circumstances in Afghanistan that led to that song being written in the first place. :)
Your laptop almost certainly doesn't draw 100W most of the time. That's the *peak* output.
I am now running an ultraportable which came with a 60W brick, but I used to have a gaming laptop (16"/1920x1080, core i7 quad/4GB with a radeon 4870m/1GB) which came with a 120W brick, and when that brick died, I was able to charge that laptop while it was on by plugging the 60W brick into the laptop. Gaming was out of the question, but the video card was rated at 20W peak, so there was still a fair amount of overhead in the 120W brick that came with the laptop. Fortunately, Dell standardized on laptop power adapters years ago... the voltage and connector has been the same on every laptop I've owned for years, from the 35W wart that came with my Mini 9 to the 60W bricks that came with my current laptop and my mother's laptop to the 90W and 120W bricks that came with my last two gaming systems.
It charges at the same speed from a wall wart as it does from a computer.... I usually don't need to charge my phone during the day, and can simply plug it into the wall at night. But if I'm tethering data from the cell phone with my laptop, I'll plug the phone into the laptop and let it draw power from there.
Other than that, though, my desktop at work has a USB port and I can plug into that directly. I plug into the wall wart at home. And if I'm on a road trip/using the GPS, I'll plug it into the USB port in my car. By and large I just don't need to charge it from the laptop.
On a side note, does anyone know how many thunderbolt devices are actually available for consumer purchase at this point? Are any of them reasonably priced?
Just about any monitor with a DisplayPort input is usable with Thunderbolt. They shouldn't need anything approaching the 10.2GBit that the port is supposedly capable of, though.
It's not profitable (or at least it is not immediately obvious why doing so would be profitable).
Well... not sure how they're advertising their product in the states, but here in Canada their current ad campaign is all about their history, and trying to set themselves up as a friend of the family. The publicity that a "fuck off and die" C&D letter could create has the potential destroy that ad campaign.
The good will and good publicity that this letter has created, on the other hand, almost certainly helps the image they're trying to foster for their product.
I didn't miss it, I just think it's an idiotic suggestion when an ultraportable laptop or tablet fit in just about any bag you could possibly be carrying around, let alone trunk or glove box space in a car.
We're talking about being on call for work here... there's no reason he can't leave the device in the car and fetch it if he needs access to it. When you're talking about carrying an extra device that's virtually unnoticeable in your bag, why would you want to force yourself to use a device that's the wrong tool for the job?
The person asking the question either didn't do any research at all (seriously, how can you not know that SSH and VNC clients exist for every smart phone platform out there without needing to root the device), or he's planning on doing something more complex than SSH'ing into a system and executing something that's already set up to go. Either way, he's going about it wrong. I mean, if he had some special requirement that's not generally available, like being able to use NX Client on his cell phone (last I checked, there's no NX client on Android because it relies on X, which Android doesn't have), maybe I could see the point in asking on Slashdot, but there's nothing in the question asked that requires any special voodoo at all. Just get a phone with a decent slider keyboard and a hi res screen and be done with it. (and even that's mitigated if you get one of the *many* after-market keyboards that're available in the app marketplace for your respective device).
*shrugs* there's always been malicious modding going on. Piss off the wrong person, and they'll stalk you next time they have modpoints and downmod everything in your history. How else can you explain month-old +5 posts suddenly getting a -1 troll mod literally the day after you call somebody out on their bullshit?
The system is completely broken, sadly. Unsurprisingly, but sadly.