SAVE $750 on Select Inspiron(TM) notebooks $1999 or more (before tax, restocking fees, shipping & handling)! Not available on XPS notebooks or Spotlight Savings offers. This offer is not combinable with other dollars off, percentage off or mail-in rebate offers. Only one coupon may be applied per cart at checkout. Coupon code expires after first 4000 uses, or when the limited time offer expires, whichever is earlier. Offers subject to change. View details in My Cart. Enter coupon code at checkout to receive this offer in Dell home Enter Dell Computer Coupon Code: 1CS4WZBB5$LVSS
They are also offering a $100 rebate and free shipping.
I just ordered nearly the same laptop as you speced out from Dell on Monday. Total cost after tax, discounts and rebates: $1202.77. I have the invoice to prove it. Yes I know the Dells are overpriced to begin with so to say you're "saving" money is not quite correct.
Listen, I'm not excusing it if MS used shoddy power supplies to cut costs but power is usually the biggest problem to face consumer electronics, regardless of manufacturer. Are some companies better? Sure, but that doesn't mean they're immune to these problems (ala Sony and the PS2 power problem).
Of *course* these things are going to take a lot of power and dissipate a lot of heat. There is very little you can do about it besides make sure there is adequate ventilation. Efficiency gets you only so far annd adding fans/heatsinks won't make a lick of difference if there is no where for the air to go. If people are going to stuff it on shelves and suffocate the box, how on earth do you "design it for that use"?
You're forgetting some basic economics: 6.5M pounds doesn't just disappear. It goes to paying the workers who installed the system, the engineers who designed the system, the truck drivers that delivered the system, the factory workers who made the cameras, etc.
Its not just that the 6.5M pounds went down the tube. It would make more sense to look at this system's cost/benefit in relation to *other* similar systems, not just by itself.
As a University of Michigan student, I always read these articles with a bit of skepticism. The Daily isn't exactly a reputable journal of opinion. After all, they still believe that academic integrity is a problem.
A big problem with CAPTCHAs is that they can be "broken" with some vigilance and know-how, although not 100% of the time. Yahoo!'s has been broken by a UC Berkeley group, they claim a 92% success rate. The UCB algorithm looks at the image then searches through a dictionary to find the most probably matches and spits them out (you can actually see on the site how it chooses and how close it gets when it misses, mistaking 'grip' for 'slip' and so on).
What is really needed for a *good* CAPTCHA is not pure image obscurity, but rather something that combines hard-to-read images with aspect about language that humans know intuitively, while at the same time being very difficult for computers to sort out. Take word associations, for example. You probably learned how words are associated with each other in 1st grade, so for humans it is a very simple task to pick out words that have a common theme. Computers are a different story. Have a CAPTCHA randomly spit out 10 words to the screen and have the user pick the 3 that are associated with one another, say for example HOUSE, LOG, FRONT, CAT, BROWN, DOG, CART, RUNNING, HOUR, MOUSE.
Even if the algorithm was to correctly identify all 10 words, it would still have to figure out what the association is and then correctly identify the words that fit the association. Assuming that it did correctly identify all of the words, at that point random guessing would yeild a success rate of 0.83%, less if it misidentifies even just one of the words. Combine something like this with a slightly smarter word obfuscator and I think it'd be something that would be very hard to beat...unless you're human, of course:)
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even bother looking up any of the "coupons" that Dell offers all of the time?
From http://www.allonlinecoupons.com/st/dell/
SAVE $750 on Select Inspiron(TM) notebooks $1999 or more (before tax, restocking fees, shipping & handling)! Not available on XPS notebooks or Spotlight Savings offers. This offer is not combinable with other dollars off, percentage off or mail-in rebate offers. Only one coupon may be applied per cart at checkout. Coupon code expires after first 4000 uses, or when the limited time offer expires, whichever is earlier. Offers subject to change. View details in My Cart. Enter coupon code at checkout to receive this offer in Dell home
Enter Dell Computer Coupon Code: 1CS4WZBB5$LVSS
They are also offering a $100 rebate and free shipping.
I just ordered nearly the same laptop as you speced out from Dell on Monday. Total cost after tax, discounts and rebates: $1202.77. I have the invoice to prove it. Yes I know the Dells are overpriced to begin with so to say you're "saving" money is not quite correct.
Since when does Apple give you a deal like that?
MS clearly doesn't get it because game systems made by major consumer electronics companies never have power issues. /sarcasm
Listen, I'm not excusing it if MS used shoddy power supplies to cut costs but power is usually the biggest problem to face consumer electronics, regardless of manufacturer. Are some companies better? Sure, but that doesn't mean they're immune to these problems (ala Sony and the PS2 power problem).
Of *course* these things are going to take a lot of power and dissipate a lot of heat. There is very little you can do about it besides make sure there is adequate ventilation. Efficiency gets you only so far annd adding fans/heatsinks won't make a lick of difference if there is no where for the air to go. If people are going to stuff it on shelves and suffocate the box, how on earth do you "design it for that use"?
You're forgetting some basic economics: 6.5M pounds doesn't just disappear. It goes to paying the workers who installed the system, the engineers who designed the system, the truck drivers that delivered the system, the factory workers who made the cameras, etc.
Its not just that the 6.5M pounds went down the tube. It would make more sense to look at this system's cost/benefit in relation to *other* similar systems, not just by itself.
Who is laughing now? :)
http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/hurricane.asp
Its sad that people believe and post this BS without any skeptcism whatsoever...*sigh*
As a University of Michigan student, I always read these articles with a bit of skepticism. The Daily isn't exactly a reputable journal of opinion. After all, they still believe that academic integrity is a problem.
A big problem with CAPTCHAs is that they can be "broken" with some vigilance and know-how, although not 100% of the time. Yahoo!'s has been broken by a UC Berkeley group, they claim a 92% success rate. The UCB algorithm looks at the image then searches through a dictionary to find the most probably matches and spits them out (you can actually see on the site how it chooses and how close it gets when it misses, mistaking 'grip' for 'slip' and so on).
:)
What is really needed for a *good* CAPTCHA is not pure image obscurity, but rather something that combines hard-to-read images with aspect about language that humans know intuitively, while at the same time being very difficult for computers to sort out. Take word associations, for example. You probably learned how words are associated with each other in 1st grade, so for humans it is a very simple task to pick out words that have a common theme. Computers are a different story. Have a CAPTCHA randomly spit out 10 words to the screen and have the user pick the 3 that are associated with one another, say for example HOUSE, LOG, FRONT, CAT, BROWN, DOG, CART, RUNNING, HOUR, MOUSE.
Even if the algorithm was to correctly identify all 10 words, it would still have to figure out what the association is and then correctly identify the words that fit the association. Assuming that it did correctly identify all of the words, at that point random guessing would yeild a success rate of 0.83%, less if it misidentifies even just one of the words. Combine something like this with a slightly smarter word obfuscator and I think it'd be something that would be very hard to beat...unless you're human, of course