Re:how about this...
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I can't believe I'm feeding the trolls today, but this one really got my goat. Macs are great. Macs are expensive. Just accept that both are true, and quit arguing over it. PCs are also great. PCs are cheaper. PCs are less stylish and poorly integrated.
I'm not sure where you pulled your PC price numbers, but the box I'm using cost less than $900 last year, and has an XP2000+, Radeon 9500 Pro, 512MB RAM, 5.1 sound, 2x80GB RAID, 8 USB, 3 Firewire, 40X CD-RW, 3COM LAN, and a DVD-ROM. Adding the DVD burner would add $180. IF the software is truly $500, we're still WAAAAAAY ahead. Windows XP Pro is far cheaper if purchased OEM, and I paid a whopping $50 for it via a MS promotion. Even $300 machines come with windows, though, so unless it's a homebuild, you get it "free". $400 *PCI* (!?) video cards and $200 sound cards are not the norm. A 9500 Pro runs about $180, and an Audigy 2 can be had for $80.
That was me building from parts. If you want to look at what's available today, Dell has a P4 2.2GHz desktop w/17" monitor, DVD writer, XP, and all your basic other stuff for a whopping $480 shipped free. Add whatever you want to that, and I guarantee it beats any mac price.
Now, that said, the mac is prettier, comes all in one box ready-to-go, and has very well-integrated software. And you pay for it. Whether it's worth it is up to each person, and does not need to be the subject of massive back-and-forth flame-o-ramas.
So, to reiterate: Macs are nice for some people, PCs are nice for some people, and despite the poster's noble cross-platform efforts, he paid too much for his PC parts.
George Goble is the man you're referring to. I remember his posted graphs of web traffic after the Letterman show back in '95-- not sure how long they had been up on his site. The liquid oxygen grill-lighting was truly impressive-- several of the lesser grills he tried actually evaporated in the intense heat.
It's a sad, sad day that ECN has requested Goble remove his web page. That guy is a Purdue institution.
And when I get home, I shall look at it on my 'scope.:) It seems to be fairly powerful, though-- the signal will induce enough power into unpowered speakers to make audible sound.
I think what I'm hearing is GPRS traffic, rather than regular GSM-- the sidekick I've got is an always-connected handheld.
Not sure if it's all GSM phones, but my T-Mobile phone makes beeps and buzzes (the pattern is always the same-- it's recognizeable, like a modem handshake) in my car stereo, home stereo, PC speakers, laptop headphones, TV, and practically anything with sound output that I put it near. I wonder if there's something common about amplifier design that gives them a resonant frequency near american GSM?
I'm as paranoid as the next slashdotter, but not for the same reasons. I'm only worried about my privacy when there is an imbalance, as there seems to be now. I'll submit to complete surveillance when the whole world does likewise-- and that means you too, Mr. President. Privacy is only an issue when the "other side" still has theirs. If we could all keep tabs on the government, why should we care if they keep tabs on us? Until TIA is really "total," and I can watch them as easily as they watch me, I'll continue to argue for privacy rights.
I agree completely. They are truly split-personality about their design choices. They flog outdated stuff that costs more to use than anyone expected (witness the $5million per flight the shuttle costs), while simultaneously targetting only pie-in-the-sky replacement designs like scramjets and all-composite SSTO lifters that invariably end up aborted in the design stage vastly overbudget.
If I could personally beat one thing into NASA, it would be TAKE SMALLER STEPS. Build something that's 30% better than the shuttle. Don't try for 1000% better right out of the gate-- they've proven time and time again that they can't hit their targets on massively complicated designs.
Here's just one small-step suggestion: take the successfully built and tested Linear Aerospike engine from the cancelled Venturestar program, and weld it to the ass-end of the shuttle. That right there is a 30% efficiency gain, if I remember the numbers right. That should result in your choice of: smaller SRBs, smaller main fuel tank, or larger payload. Or any moderate combination of all three.
Orrrr.... stick with Big Dumb Boosters until you can FINISH a new design. Russia lobs Soyuz capsules up for somewhere between 1/15 and 1/30 the cost of a shuttle launch. Send heavy stuff with Proton, and people with a Soyuz. Now that we have the half-finished ISS, we don't really need to fly our whole space laboratory back and forth just for some zero-G experiments do we?
I want to see as much in space as we can possibly afford. If old-style rockets are cheaper, use them. The Shuttle is a hideous investment at $500mil a pop. It's reusable, but not in any practical sense. Mir's yearly operating budget was ~$250mil, and the WHOLE MIR PROGRAM (construction and support missions included) cost less than $5bil, less than 10 shuttle missions. There is very little science being done with the shuttle that can't be done on a station, with crew and experiments launched on comparatively cheap russion lifters. Using the shuttle to launch comsats is like using a school bus to pick up some milk at the store.
Anyway, here's to hoping that a couple of successful private launches spur NASA into a more practical (but advancing, rather than stagnating) program.
And just for the record, the TurboNet mod for a series 1 Tivo costs $70, and is available here. It's no harder to install than a PCI card-- you open the case, plug it in, and drill a hole (or just cram it through one of the vents like i did) for the cable to stick out. As the parent poster mentioned, the current version of the Tivo software already contains the drivers needed to support it, so you no longer have to do any monkeying with the config files or removing the hard drive.
The series 2's just take a little $20 USB ethernet adapter, and away you go!
The more the merrier. NASA is busy launching (or lately, not launching) shuttles that cost roughly 30X the cost of launching a Soyuz, and has cancelled the latest of its "shuttle replacement" programs (the X-33/Venturestar). The sooner somebody else gets their foot in the door, the sooner we can get on with the exciting stuff in space. Cheaper. Some of these nuts will blow themselves up. Some will fail less catastrophically. A few will make it, and it will be a damn good thing to have somebody besides NASA pushing out for a change.
I heartily welcome and cheer for anybody willing to try. Build it and go, you crazy rich bastards!!
Is people who don't realize that not everyone has the same preferences as them. No matter how silly it may seem to you, some people like to send text messages and play video games from their phones.
This is like shouting "tastes great" at someone who thinks the beer is "less filling."
Or for geeks, shouting "vi" at an emacs user.
By your logic, we need a new name for "computers" because all anybody uses them for is Word Processing and Solitaire. I propose we call them "Soliputer WP."
That's a good start, but it should also fit in your pocket, be water and shockproof, run for a month on a single battery charge (and it should charge in less than a minute from a tiny solar panel while it's in your pocket) with enough juice to jump-start a semi, have a built-in fold-out 20" HD screen, and a pop-up projector lens for larger display. It should do GPS, FRS, GMRS, GSM, GPRS, 1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, 802.11a/b/g, 802.16a, bluetooth, IR, ethernet, firewire, and USB 1/2. It should take perfect audio, video, or still media, automatically compensating for my lack of training as a photographer. It should be able to warm my car up in the winter or cool it off in the summer when I am miles away from it. It should control my house, and seamlessly/wirelessly dock with any other gear I have. Little arms should pop out so it can reconfigure itself into new hardware anytime someone thinks of an improvement. It should run software from any hardware/OS combination ever in existence perfectly, and it should give me 4,000fps at 6400x4800x128 64xAA 32xAF in BF1942 with 3ms ping times to anywhere in the universe, speed-of-light be damned.
It should cost no more than $49.99 with a lifetime unlimited symmetric 2 Gbps connection, and come pre-loaded with all media ever created and a 100-year subscription to all media to be created.
Good graphics do not make a game. But that does NOT mean that all games with good graphics are bad. For every Asteroids, Tempest, Scorched Earth, or Lemmings there is a NOLF 2, Half-Life, or Mario 64 that proves great games CAN have great graphics. Too often, though-- artworks seems to take precedence over gameplay.
In fact, most of a game's characteristics in this respect are irrelevant to whether it's actually fun. If it's fun, I don't care if the music is annoying and repetitive. I don't care if everything in the game is a big block of pixels.
Fun is fun. Graphics are graphics. Music is music. If they're all there, super. But mostly I just want the fun.
I have no idea if it's all fake or real, except for this one. Frogs and goldfish living together? Hardly. And it's obvious that since there's no specular highlight on the back of the goldfish, that it was from a different picture with different lighting conditions. Just look at the white glare off the top of the frog's head! Also, I think the goldfish has been enlarged to be more menacing. And some of the water molecules are duplicates.
Back in high-school physics, we tried taking one of those 4' fluorescent tubes that everybody uses to light schools and offices out to the high-tension wires near my house. The induced potential difference if the tube was held vertically under the wire (at ground level under one of those massive steel-girder towers) was enough to light it dimly. But we're not dead. So you should be fine.
Are writers novelists? Is everyone who draws a draftsman? Are all painters artists?
Some programmers are engineers. Some programmers are programmers. Software engineers are a subset of all the programmers. Writing static HTML does not make a programmer an engineer. Writing embedded control software for a factory robot or a massive 3D graphics driver probably does. There's a lot of grey area in the middle. Unless you live in a state with licensing, like Indiana, where nobody's an engineer until they pass the PE exam.
I see lots of comments pointing out that for specific technology skills, you would be better off at a trade school, and that general concepts based on tried-and-true, simple example technologies are what you should expect at Universities.
Isn't a balance possible? I have been well-served by the general concepts I picked up while working through my engineering degree, but a more practical class or two would certainly have been welcome. I fully expect to be learning new technologies regularly during my career-- but a kickstart for students coming into the industry seems like a good idea.
So why not? Is there such an anti-tech-school feeling in universities that their students can't benefit from some specific training in addition to their more general classes?
I *did* miss the point, and I apologize. Two wage earners makes things different. So, let's take that number I dug up, and chop it in half. $27K/year. For that much, you can buy a $13K car (not bad-- pick up a nice Honda Civic) for 1/2 of it, and an $80K house for less than triple. I'd say we're still in the ballpark of your 1970s numbers. The car is a hair more, but I picked a decent one. You could easily pick up a Kia or something for less than that. An $80K house down the street from me here is a small two-bedroom with garage.
I think this gap is overrated. For starters, it almost doesn't exist if you live somewhere between the coasts. On top of that, today's new houses and new cars aren't exactly comparable with their counterparts from the 1970s. You can't buy a house much smaller than 1200sq. ft. new out here-- but most of the 1970s homes were much smaller.
Median family income for FY2002 in the US was $54,400. A whopping $4K less than the national average I quoted. I don't think there are quite as many robber barons as you believe.
Dude, you need to move out of brooklyn. Or the valley. Or wherever it is you're living that costs are that high. And stop looking at BMWs.
A nice, new Honda Accord is less than 1/4 the national average household income. A house in a less inflated real-estate market should work well for you also. $120K for 4 bedrooms here in Indiana, and interest rates are rock-bottom.
For the record, the average household income in 2002 for the whole US was $58K. Your numbers for the value of stuff in the 70s are still true today. 1/3 of $58K is a little over $19K. Plenty for a new car. Houses start at only a little more than 1x that here! Lots of small houses in the $85-$90K range. Huge houses (by valley/nyc standards) are available for $150K.
I think Dell support is just awful all-around. My last run-in with their tech support required talking to 12 different people and almost 20 phone calls. More than half sounded like American english speakers, and some of the helpful ones did not. I don't think the outsourcing is hurting them-- I think a lack of commitment to quality, training, and infrastructure is hurting them.
These things jumped out at me:
1. Their order tracking system is so unreliable that they are willing to assume (with no data in their system) that you placed an order for something, and it's just magically lost data. 2. Their pricing system does not allow them to see the sale prices offered on the web site. 3. They were unable to re-place a botched order at the price it was ordered at, and had to resort to issuing a credit to my card attached to an old order to make up the price difference! 4. There is no consistency in the abilities the reps have. Some could change prices. Some could place orders. Some could change past orders. Most couldn't do any, and nobody could do it all.
In short, I don't think it's any sort of "American tech support is better than Indian" argument. It's just that Dell sucks.
The reason "this free trade thing ain't working out" is that we don't have free trade. If things were truly open, do you really think labor in other countries would be so much cheaper? Things will even out in time. Our grandkids may even have a realistic world economy, where the value of labor doesn't fluctuate by factors of 100 based on where you live. But I'm not holding my breath-- this stuff moves slowly. Really slowly. This kind of outsourcing is better for the world in the long run, even if it sucks for our job market short-term.
"Six Degrees of Terrorism" would be an outstanding thing. In fact, if you don't get around to it, let me know, so that I can steal your idea (with credit to you, of course) and throw together some sort of cheesy little web DB app to handle it.
Actually, it would be super easy if we could connect Kevin Bacon to terrorism, and then just use 5 degrees to him. With all the ground-breaking research being done on how things connect to Kevin, I'm sure we've got our maximum hops down to 5 for most traffic by now.
I have never understood why there are so many "technology is intruding my life" or "email steals my work time" or "cell phones let my boss interrupt my free time" complaints. Or why people feel like they have to completely leave these devices behind.
It's like they are magically compelled to immediately answer any phone call or respond to any email/page/SMS/IM that they receive. You do not have to answer. You have voicemail. Your email will not vanish. Your phone can be set to silent, or turned off, and still be kept with you in case *you* need to use it.
These devices are not intrusive. What is intrusive is this built-in reflex people have that they MUST answer any communication RIGHT NOW.
Busy? Don't pick up. It's that simple. Why doesn't anybody else get it?
Except the Dells, where 802.11a/b/g is an option
on
Centrino Laptops Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's not technically a "Centrino" laptop anymore, if you pick that option, just a "Pentium M." But it's the same damn laptop with a Dell 802.11a/b/g card in it instead of the Intel card.
I noticed that you were limited to GeForce2 MX cards for your second two video cards because you need PCI-- there are GeForce4 MX PCI cards available. Here is a quick link to one of them-- I'm sure there are other variations available. $50 after rebate if you get it by the end of March.
That, my friend, is because the only things that are still around from 30 years ago are the ones that were durable. In another 30 years, people will say the same thing about today's things, because the crap will already be broken and disposed of. Sure, there will be millions of Huffy bicycles in the trash. But people will have forgotten them, and will marvel at the amazing durability of the high-end Treks and whatnot that survive.
And the space program differences are all about cost. The Pathfinder mission (which landed on mars) was part of the Discovery series of missions, capped at $150 million. Cassini, the last of the Voyager/Pioneer-type "heavy engineering" designs cost $3.4 BILLION. Pioneer 10 cost $350 million, in 1970. Voyager 1 and 2 cost $875 million together, in 1977. (those obviously need some inflation adjustment to be fair to a 1996 mission, but even Pioneer is more than double the cost without adjustment!) Of course there's going to be a performance difference when you pay many times as much. Even so, Galileo (another old-school nasa design) cost $1.6 billion, and its main antenna never opened. Would you rather have 10 cheap missions where 8 fail, or one expensive mission that fails?
Sure, we've lost lots of recent mars missions. But all added together, they barely cost as much as some of those single probes.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe I'm feeding the trolls today, but this one really got my goat. Macs are great. Macs are expensive. Just accept that both are true, and quit arguing over it. PCs are also great. PCs are cheaper. PCs are less stylish and poorly integrated.
I'm not sure where you pulled your PC price numbers, but the box I'm using cost less than $900 last year, and has an XP2000+, Radeon 9500 Pro, 512MB RAM, 5.1 sound, 2x80GB RAID, 8 USB, 3 Firewire, 40X CD-RW, 3COM LAN, and a DVD-ROM. Adding the DVD burner would add $180. IF the software is truly $500, we're still WAAAAAAY ahead. Windows XP Pro is far cheaper if purchased OEM, and I paid a whopping $50 for it via a MS promotion. Even $300 machines come with windows, though, so unless it's a homebuild, you get it "free". $400 *PCI* (!?) video cards and $200 sound cards are not the norm. A 9500 Pro runs about $180, and an Audigy 2 can be had for $80.
That was me building from parts. If you want to look at what's available today, Dell has a P4 2.2GHz desktop w/17" monitor, DVD writer, XP, and all your basic other stuff for a whopping $480 shipped free. Add whatever you want to that, and I guarantee it beats any mac price.
Now, that said, the mac is prettier, comes all in one box ready-to-go, and has very well-integrated software. And you pay for it. Whether it's worth it is up to each person, and does not need to be the subject of massive back-and-forth flame-o-ramas.
So, to reiterate: Macs are nice for some people, PCs are nice for some people, and despite the poster's noble cross-platform efforts, he paid too much for his PC parts.
http://www.eldtrain.com.au/members/humour/humour24 .htm
I'm sure there are other people mirroring bits and pieces of the original videos here and there. Post 'em if you find 'em!
George Goble is the man you're referring to. I remember his posted graphs of web traffic after the Letterman show back in '95-- not sure how long they had been up on his site. The liquid oxygen grill-lighting was truly impressive-- several of the lesser grills he tried actually evaporated in the intense heat.
It's a sad, sad day that ECN has requested Goble remove his web page. That guy is a Purdue institution.
And when I get home, I shall look at it on my 'scope. :) It seems to be fairly powerful, though-- the signal will induce enough power into unpowered speakers to make audible sound.
I think what I'm hearing is GPRS traffic, rather than regular GSM-- the sidekick I've got is an always-connected handheld.
Not sure if it's all GSM phones, but my T-Mobile phone makes beeps and buzzes (the pattern is always the same-- it's recognizeable, like a modem handshake) in my car stereo, home stereo, PC speakers, laptop headphones, TV, and practically anything with sound output that I put it near. I wonder if there's something common about amplifier design that gives them a resonant frequency near american GSM?
I'm as paranoid as the next slashdotter, but not for the same reasons. I'm only worried about my privacy when there is an imbalance, as there seems to be now. I'll submit to complete surveillance when the whole world does likewise-- and that means you too, Mr. President. Privacy is only an issue when the "other side" still has theirs. If we could all keep tabs on the government, why should we care if they keep tabs on us? Until TIA is really "total," and I can watch them as easily as they watch me, I'll continue to argue for privacy rights.
I agree completely. They are truly split-personality about their design choices. They flog outdated stuff that costs more to use than anyone expected (witness the $5million per flight the shuttle costs), while simultaneously targetting only pie-in-the-sky replacement designs like scramjets and all-composite SSTO lifters that invariably end up aborted in the design stage vastly overbudget.
If I could personally beat one thing into NASA, it would be TAKE SMALLER STEPS. Build something that's 30% better than the shuttle. Don't try for 1000% better right out of the gate-- they've proven time and time again that they can't hit their targets on massively complicated designs.
Here's just one small-step suggestion: take the successfully built and tested Linear Aerospike engine from the cancelled Venturestar program, and weld it to the ass-end of the shuttle. That right there is a 30% efficiency gain, if I remember the numbers right. That should result in your choice of: smaller SRBs, smaller main fuel tank, or larger payload. Or any moderate combination of all three.
Orrrr.... stick with Big Dumb Boosters until you can FINISH a new design. Russia lobs Soyuz capsules up for somewhere between 1/15 and 1/30 the cost of a shuttle launch. Send heavy stuff with Proton, and people with a Soyuz. Now that we have the half-finished ISS, we don't really need to fly our whole space laboratory back and forth just for some zero-G experiments do we?
I want to see as much in space as we can possibly afford. If old-style rockets are cheaper, use them. The Shuttle is a hideous investment at $500mil a pop. It's reusable, but not in any practical sense. Mir's yearly operating budget was ~$250mil, and the WHOLE MIR PROGRAM (construction and support missions included) cost less than $5bil, less than 10 shuttle missions. There is very little science being done with the shuttle that can't be done on a station, with crew and experiments launched on comparatively cheap russion lifters. Using the shuttle to launch comsats is like using a school bus to pick up some milk at the store.
Anyway, here's to hoping that a couple of successful private launches spur NASA into a more practical (but advancing, rather than stagnating) program.
And just for the record, the TurboNet mod for a series 1 Tivo costs $70, and is available here. It's no harder to install than a PCI card-- you open the case, plug it in, and drill a hole (or just cram it through one of the vents like i did) for the cable to stick out. As the parent poster mentioned, the current version of the Tivo software already contains the drivers needed to support it, so you no longer have to do any monkeying with the config files or removing the hard drive.
The series 2's just take a little $20 USB ethernet adapter, and away you go!
The more the merrier. NASA is busy launching (or lately, not launching) shuttles that cost roughly 30X the cost of launching a Soyuz, and has cancelled the latest of its "shuttle replacement" programs (the X-33/Venturestar). The sooner somebody else gets their foot in the door, the sooner we can get on with the exciting stuff in space. Cheaper. Some of these nuts will blow themselves up. Some will fail less catastrophically. A few will make it, and it will be a damn good thing to have somebody besides NASA pushing out for a change.
I heartily welcome and cheer for anybody willing to try. Build it and go, you crazy rich bastards!!
Is people who don't realize that not everyone has the same preferences as them. No matter how silly it may seem to you, some people like to send text messages and play video games from their phones.
This is like shouting "tastes great" at someone who thinks the beer is "less filling."
Or for geeks, shouting "vi" at an emacs user.
By your logic, we need a new name for "computers" because all anybody uses them for is Word Processing and Solitaire. I propose we call them "Soliputer WP."
That's a good start, but it should also fit in your pocket, be water and shockproof, run for a month on a single battery charge (and it should charge in less than a minute from a tiny solar panel while it's in your pocket) with enough juice to jump-start a semi, have a built-in fold-out 20" HD screen, and a pop-up projector lens for larger display. It should do GPS, FRS, GMRS, GSM, GPRS, 1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, 802.11a/b/g, 802.16a, bluetooth, IR, ethernet, firewire, and USB 1/2. It should take perfect audio, video, or still media, automatically compensating for my lack of training as a photographer. It should be able to warm my car up in the winter or cool it off in the summer when I am miles away from it. It should control my house, and seamlessly/wirelessly dock with any other gear I have. Little arms should pop out so it can reconfigure itself into new hardware anytime someone thinks of an improvement. It should run software from any hardware/OS combination ever in existence perfectly, and it should give me 4,000fps at 6400x4800x128 64xAA 32xAF in BF1942 with 3ms ping times to anywhere in the universe, speed-of-light be damned.
It should cost no more than $49.99 with a lifetime unlimited symmetric 2 Gbps connection, and come pre-loaded with all media ever created and a 100-year subscription to all media to be created.
Good graphics do not make a game. But that does NOT mean that all games with good graphics are bad. For every Asteroids, Tempest, Scorched Earth, or Lemmings there is a NOLF 2, Half-Life, or Mario 64 that proves great games CAN have great graphics. Too often, though-- artworks seems to take precedence over gameplay.
In fact, most of a game's characteristics in this respect are irrelevant to whether it's actually fun. If it's fun, I don't care if the music is annoying and repetitive. I don't care if everything in the game is a big block of pixels.
Fun is fun. Graphics are graphics. Music is music. If they're all there, super. But mostly I just want the fun.
I have no idea if it's all fake or real, except for this one. Frogs and goldfish living together? Hardly. And it's obvious that since there's no specular highlight on the back of the goldfish, that it was from a different picture with different lighting conditions. Just look at the white glare off the top of the frog's head! Also, I think the goldfish has been enlarged to be more menacing. And some of the water molecules are duplicates.
Back in high-school physics, we tried taking one of those 4' fluorescent tubes that everybody uses to light schools and offices out to the high-tension wires near my house. The induced potential difference if the tube was held vertically under the wire (at ground level under one of those massive steel-girder towers) was enough to light it dimly. But we're not dead. So you should be fine.
Are writers novelists?
Is everyone who draws a draftsman?
Are all painters artists?
Some programmers are engineers. Some programmers are programmers. Software engineers are a subset of all the programmers. Writing static HTML does not make a programmer an engineer. Writing embedded control software for a factory robot or a massive 3D graphics driver probably does. There's a lot of grey area in the middle. Unless you live in a state with licensing, like Indiana, where nobody's an engineer until they pass the PE exam.
I see lots of comments pointing out that for specific technology skills, you would be better off at a trade school, and that general concepts based on tried-and-true, simple example technologies are what you should expect at Universities.
Isn't a balance possible? I have been well-served by the general concepts I picked up while working through my engineering degree, but a more practical class or two would certainly have been welcome. I fully expect to be learning new technologies regularly during my career-- but a kickstart for students coming into the industry seems like a good idea.
So why not? Is there such an anti-tech-school feeling in universities that their students can't benefit from some specific training in addition to their more general classes?
I *did* miss the point, and I apologize. Two wage earners makes things different. So, let's take that number I dug up, and chop it in half. $27K/year. For that much, you can buy a $13K car (not bad-- pick up a nice Honda Civic) for 1/2 of it, and an $80K house for less than triple. I'd say we're still in the ballpark of your 1970s numbers. The car is a hair more, but I picked a decent one. You could easily pick up a Kia or something for less than that. An $80K house down the street from me here is a small two-bedroom with garage.
I think this gap is overrated. For starters, it almost doesn't exist if you live somewhere between the coasts. On top of that, today's new houses and new cars aren't exactly comparable with their counterparts from the 1970s. You can't buy a house much smaller than 1200sq. ft. new out here-- but most of the 1970s homes were much smaller.
Median family income for FY2002 in the US was $54,400. A whopping $4K less than the national average I quoted. I don't think there are quite as many robber barons as you believe.
p df
See here:
http://www.huduser.org/datasets/il/fmr02/tran236.
or here for google's HTML-ified version.
Dude, you need to move out of brooklyn. Or the valley. Or wherever it is you're living that costs are that high. And stop looking at BMWs.
A nice, new Honda Accord is less than 1/4 the national average household income. A house in a less inflated real-estate market should work well for you also. $120K for 4 bedrooms here in Indiana, and interest rates are rock-bottom.
For the record, the average household income in 2002 for the whole US was $58K. Your numbers for the value of stuff in the 70s are still true today. 1/3 of $58K is a little over $19K. Plenty for a new car. Houses start at only a little more than 1x that here! Lots of small houses in the $85-$90K range. Huge houses (by valley/nyc standards) are available for $150K.
I think Dell support is just awful all-around. My last run-in with their tech support required talking to 12 different people and almost 20 phone calls. More than half sounded like American english speakers, and some of the helpful ones did not. I don't think the outsourcing is hurting them-- I think a lack of commitment to quality, training, and infrastructure is hurting them.
These things jumped out at me:
1. Their order tracking system is so unreliable that they are willing to assume (with no data in their system) that you placed an order for something, and it's just magically lost data.
2. Their pricing system does not allow them to see the sale prices offered on the web site.
3. They were unable to re-place a botched order at the price it was ordered at, and had to resort to issuing a credit to my card attached to an old order to make up the price difference!
4. There is no consistency in the abilities the reps have. Some could change prices. Some could place orders. Some could change past orders. Most couldn't do any, and nobody could do it all.
In short, I don't think it's any sort of "American tech support is better than Indian" argument. It's just that Dell sucks.
The reason "this free trade thing ain't working out" is that we don't have free trade. If things were truly open, do you really think labor in other countries would be so much cheaper? Things will even out in time. Our grandkids may even have a realistic world economy, where the value of labor doesn't fluctuate by factors of 100 based on where you live. But I'm not holding my breath-- this stuff moves slowly. Really slowly. This kind of outsourcing is better for the world in the long run, even if it sucks for our job market short-term.
"Six Degrees of Terrorism" would be an outstanding thing. In fact, if you don't get around to it, let me know, so that I can steal your idea (with credit to you, of course) and throw together some sort of cheesy little web DB app to handle it.
Actually, it would be super easy if we could connect Kevin Bacon to terrorism, and then just use 5 degrees to him. With all the ground-breaking research being done on how things connect to Kevin, I'm sure we've got our maximum hops down to 5 for most traffic by now.
I have never understood why there are so many "technology is intruding my life" or "email steals my work time" or "cell phones let my boss interrupt my free time" complaints. Or why people feel like they have to completely leave these devices behind.
It's like they are magically compelled to immediately answer any phone call or respond to any email/page/SMS/IM that they receive. You do not have to answer. You have voicemail. Your email will not vanish. Your phone can be set to silent, or turned off, and still be kept with you in case *you* need to use it.
These devices are not intrusive. What is intrusive is this built-in reflex people have that they MUST answer any communication RIGHT NOW.
Busy? Don't pick up. It's that simple. Why doesn't anybody else get it?
http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-1027-405-2090 6166-2.html?tag=rating
It's not technically a "Centrino" laptop anymore, if you pick that option, just a "Pentium M." But it's the same damn laptop with a Dell 802.11a/b/g card in it instead of the Intel card.
I noticed that you were limited to GeForce2 MX cards for your second two video cards because you need PCI-- there are GeForce4 MX PCI cards available. Here is a quick link to one of them-- I'm sure there are other variations available. $50 after rebate if you get it by the end of March.
l s/item-details.asp?sku=E145-1034
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtoo
That, my friend, is because the only things that are still around from 30 years ago are the ones that were durable. In another 30 years, people will say the same thing about today's things, because the crap will already be broken and disposed of. Sure, there will be millions of Huffy bicycles in the trash. But people will have forgotten them, and will marvel at the amazing durability of the high-end Treks and whatnot that survive.
And the space program differences are all about cost. The Pathfinder mission (which landed on mars) was part of the Discovery series of missions, capped at $150 million. Cassini, the last of the Voyager/Pioneer-type "heavy engineering" designs cost $3.4 BILLION. Pioneer 10 cost $350 million, in 1970. Voyager 1 and 2 cost $875 million together, in 1977. (those obviously need some inflation adjustment to be fair to a 1996 mission, but even Pioneer is more than double the cost without adjustment!) Of course there's going to be a performance difference when you pay many times as much. Even so, Galileo (another old-school nasa design) cost $1.6 billion, and its main antenna never opened. Would you rather have 10 cheap missions where 8 fail, or one expensive mission that fails?
Sure, we've lost lots of recent mars missions. But all added together, they barely cost as much as some of those single probes.
Links:
pioneer cost
cassini cost
voyager cost
pathfinder cost