I've seen a total of three Thunderbolt products now. A four-drive storage enclosure, a monitor (Not just displayport - it also includes port expansion capabilities) and a high-definition capture box. The capture box is nice though - not just 1080p (Analog or digital inputs) but supporting 3D video as well (digital only).
It's hard to think of much that could need the sheer capacity even USB3 offers though. No hard drive could saturate it. Maybe future drives will. The only uses I can see are driving multible displays (Great for videowalls and such - daisy the displays, no need to have eight video cards in one PC) and esoteric things like scientific instruments, timelapse cameras or high-speed logic analysers.
And it isn't as if USB hasn't been through that before. The first USB tech was just USB. Then came high-speed USB. Then full-speed USB. Now superspeed USB. What comes next? Ludicrous speed?
We get that a lot. Our generic fix-everything solution is the profile reset - just wipes the users profile and replaces with default, which is usually much easier than diagnosing the specific problem. A side effect of this is that the recent documents listing is cleared, so we sometimes get recently-reset users calling in a panic because they think their documents have disappeared. Rather more commonly they call in a panic because they think software is no longer installed after it's icon vanishes from the start menu quick-list.
A GUI is a wonderful productivity tool, but when people fail to understand what those icons represent and just do things by ritualised procedures then they are unable to adapt to even the most trivial changes in interface.
Not that Ribbon was at all trivial. I still can't work out what the benefit is.
It's a bit of a mystery how much oil Saudi Arabia has - or any OPEC country. The system they use to allocate quotas rewards the countries with the largest reserves, so they all have a strong economic incentive to exagerate.
But have they ever shipped an actual two-button mouse? They did one button mice first, then two-virtual-button mice. I did use a magic mouse for a time, but it felt so strange in my hand (Like a bar of soap!) I ended up selling it and using a logitech wireless mouse instead. Much better, I think. five physical buttons and a wheel - what's the point of multitouch on a mouse anyway? The only gestures I could get to work were scroll, zoom, forward and back... but the logitech side buttons do forward and back, the wheel scrolls and the zoom isn't much use anyway.
I havn't, but I'll let you know in a week. My macbook pro arrives soon. I only chose it because I really want that UWXGA screen, and my first choice (Dell) no longer sells them. I did buy a Dell refurbished with one, but the graphics chip was faulty.
If I were an overstressed person going postal, grenades would be my weapon of choice if I could get them. My target would be a primary school. Partly because of the vulnerability of all those children packed into such a small space for the morning gathering, but mostly because of the sheer infamy. Kill random people on the street, you're a serial killer. Target children, and you're a legend.
I work in tech support. I've encountered a few users who didn't even realise the round thing in the corner of Office was a menu until I opened it for them.
I've had one user who was amazed by my techno-skills when I opened the documents folder. Turned out she had spent the last two years managing documents by opening Word, selecting Save As and using the save dialog as a file manager.
On the other hand, weapons now are not the same as weapons then. We've got weapons capable of blowing up a sizeable city now. You can get full-auto drum-fed shotguns light enough to duel wield (And yes, fpsrussia has done it). If the second amendment grants the right to own a pistol, what about a shutgun? Combat shotgun? Land mines? Loaded bomber plane? Heavy artillary? Missiles? How about a few nuclear weapons? Somewhere, a line has to be drawn between 'right to bear arms' and 'Right not to be killed by some crazy person having a very bad day and going postal with his grenade launcher.'
And the home-field advantage - the british were half a world away, their supply lines stretched to breaking.
Remember who they were fighting. The British empire. Lots of people talk about taking over the world, but we got 25% of the way there. The largest empire ever seen by geographic area, and second largest by population. We came, we saw, we slaughtered and oppressed and we RULED. You think we were some pushover, to be defeated by a bunch of farmers? No, they had help. A lot of help.
Technology is built on stealing ideas. That's how advancement is made. Someone has an idea, lots more people copy it and make their own changes. Some of those changes are bad and get forgotten, and some are good and get copied in turn.
Apple really should steal some mouse buttons though. They've gone the way of two-buttons in the OS now, even make their mice in such a way that it's easy to right-click with them, and yet somehow they refuse to actually make a seperate, physically distinct right mouse button. As if it's a point of historical pride for them now.
You just can't compete with the advantage of bundling. Remember that most users are not technologically literate. When they want to find something, they just type it into their address bar. They don't even know properly what an address is. That is why IE remains by a substantial margin the world's most popular browser - not because it's the best, but because it comes installed on every new computer, and most users don't see any reason to try another. In the same way, all those users who stick with IE because it's there are going to end up using Bing. Some of them might not even realise there are other search engines out there.
Because the much cheaper production costs in China still outweigh the IP-related losses. Also because it wouldn't actually stop the knock-off factories. They don't *need* access to blueprints and schematics. It helps, yes - but they can still reverse-engineer or immitate.
Half-empty words. I doubt MS will want the bad press of simply announcing that non-windows support will be cut, but it's quite possible that they will just reduce resource allocation to those devisions. Linux, OSX, Android et at will still be supported... but only on a nine-month feature delay and full of bugs.
They might just want the technology to improve XBox voice communication. Or perhaps they want such a popular application as Skype to be exclusive to Windows phones, and only the buggy-and-incomplete versions available to the Android and iPhone competitors.
I was thinking more the name that their political opponents will refer to it as. It's not unusual for a law to have one official name, but to be refered to by it's proponents as something more positive and by it's opponents as with a nickname more negative and often insulting. Take the Copyright Term Extension Act - commonly refered to by opponents as the Micky Mouse Protection Act, in reference to the extensive lobbying performed by Disney. Or, for a more topical example, the way that more conservative media and blogs will refer to various state acts forbidding discrimination against gender identity as 'bathroom bills' in order to focus on the creepyness of men potentially demanding to use the women's toilets.
A static field will have some effect on electronics by affecting the saturation point of inductors... but you'd need a ridiculously strong field for that to happen. Maybe if you were standing next to an MRI machine.
You might be surprised. A lot of these quacks have a craving to be legitimate, and so they will put in all the effort. Your typical newspaper horoscope writer doesn't, but if you go to a specialist they will consult tables, study star charge, compensate for calander drift, calculate the position of planets as they were down to the minute of your birth. The results are still just as worthless as if they generated a random number, but all the effort that went into generating the worthless numbers can be seen as giving them an apparent value.
From what I can work out, Seven/Vista's search is made to work with the index. No index, no useable search. XP didn't need the index, it just served to aid performance. In my quest for the avian porn, I was searching a network share... no index available, so Vista's search just failed dismally.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a total of three Thunderbolt products now. A four-drive storage enclosure, a monitor (Not just displayport - it also includes port expansion capabilities) and a high-definition capture box. The capture box is nice though - not just 1080p (Analog or digital inputs) but supporting 3D video as well (digital only).
It's hard to think of much that could need the sheer capacity even USB3 offers though. No hard drive could saturate it. Maybe future drives will. The only uses I can see are driving multible displays (Great for videowalls and such - daisy the displays, no need to have eight video cards in one PC) and esoteric things like scientific instruments, timelapse cameras or high-speed logic analysers.
And it isn't as if USB hasn't been through that before. The first USB tech was just USB. Then came high-speed USB. Then full-speed USB. Now superspeed USB. What comes next? Ludicrous speed?
Hi-speed vs full-speed caused a bit of confusion for a time.
We get that a lot. Our generic fix-everything solution is the profile reset - just wipes the users profile and replaces with default, which is usually much easier than diagnosing the specific problem. A side effect of this is that the recent documents listing is cleared, so we sometimes get recently-reset users calling in a panic because they think their documents have disappeared. Rather more commonly they call in a panic because they think software is no longer installed after it's icon vanishes from the start menu quick-list.
A GUI is a wonderful productivity tool, but when people fail to understand what those icons represent and just do things by ritualised procedures then they are unable to adapt to even the most trivial changes in interface.
Not that Ribbon was at all trivial. I still can't work out what the benefit is.
It's a bit of a mystery how much oil Saudi Arabia has - or any OPEC country. The system they use to allocate quotas rewards the countries with the largest reserves, so they all have a strong economic incentive to exagerate.
It's all a matter of how the problem is phased. If the option are 'Screw with the weather' or 'Give up your cars and air conditioning' then...
Actually, people would do neither, and to hell with the consequences.
But have they ever shipped an actual two-button mouse? They did one button mice first, then two-virtual-button mice. I did use a magic mouse for a time, but it felt so strange in my hand (Like a bar of soap!) I ended up selling it and using a logitech wireless mouse instead. Much better, I think. five physical buttons and a wheel - what's the point of multitouch on a mouse anyway? The only gestures I could get to work were scroll, zoom, forward and back... but the logitech side buttons do forward and back, the wheel scrolls and the zoom isn't much use anyway.
I havn't, but I'll let you know in a week. My macbook pro arrives soon. I only chose it because I really want that UWXGA screen, and my first choice (Dell) no longer sells them. I did buy a Dell refurbished with one, but the graphics chip was faulty.
If I were an overstressed person going postal, grenades would be my weapon of choice if I could get them. My target would be a primary school. Partly because of the vulnerability of all those children packed into such a small space for the morning gathering, but mostly because of the sheer infamy. Kill random people on the street, you're a serial killer. Target children, and you're a legend.
A reasonable interpretation. A law can have very strange consequences if applied to circumstances it's authors did not foresee.
I work in tech support. I've encountered a few users who didn't even realise the round thing in the corner of Office was a menu until I opened it for them.
I've had one user who was amazed by my techno-skills when I opened the documents folder. Turned out she had spent the last two years managing documents by opening Word, selecting Save As and using the save dialog as a file manager.
On the other hand, weapons now are not the same as weapons then. We've got weapons capable of blowing up a sizeable city now. You can get full-auto drum-fed shotguns light enough to duel wield (And yes, fpsrussia has done it). If the second amendment grants the right to own a pistol, what about a shutgun? Combat shotgun? Land mines? Loaded bomber plane? Heavy artillary? Missiles? How about a few nuclear weapons? Somewhere, a line has to be drawn between 'right to bear arms' and 'Right not to be killed by some crazy person having a very bad day and going postal with his grenade launcher.'
And the home-field advantage - the british were half a world away, their supply lines stretched to breaking.
Remember who they were fighting. The British empire. Lots of people talk about taking over the world, but we got 25% of the way there. The largest empire ever seen by geographic area, and second largest by population. We came, we saw, we slaughtered and oppressed and we RULED. You think we were some pushover, to be defeated by a bunch of farmers? No, they had help. A lot of help.
Technology is built on stealing ideas. That's how advancement is made. Someone has an idea, lots more people copy it and make their own changes. Some of those changes are bad and get forgotten, and some are good and get copied in turn.
Apple really should steal some mouse buttons though. They've gone the way of two-buttons in the OS now, even make their mice in such a way that it's easy to right-click with them, and yet somehow they refuse to actually make a seperate, physically distinct right mouse button. As if it's a point of historical pride for them now.
Bing will win.
You just can't compete with the advantage of bundling. Remember that most users are not technologically literate. When they want to find something, they just type it into their address bar. They don't even know properly what an address is. That is why IE remains by a substantial margin the world's most popular browser - not because it's the best, but because it comes installed on every new computer, and most users don't see any reason to try another. In the same way, all those users who stick with IE because it's there are going to end up using Bing. Some of them might not even realise there are other search engines out there.
Because the much cheaper production costs in China still outweigh the IP-related losses. Also because it wouldn't actually stop the knock-off factories. They don't *need* access to blueprints and schematics. It helps, yes - but they can still reverse-engineer or immitate.
Even the Android version doesn't support video yet.
Not on my tablet, anyway. Maybe it does on others.
Half-empty words. I doubt MS will want the bad press of simply announcing that non-windows support will be cut, but it's quite possible that they will just reduce resource allocation to those devisions. Linux, OSX, Android et at will still be supported... but only on a nine-month feature delay and full of bugs.
They might just want the technology to improve XBox voice communication. Or perhaps they want such a popular application as Skype to be exclusive to Windows phones, and only the buggy-and-incomplete versions available to the Android and iPhone competitors.
I was thinking more the name that their political opponents will refer to it as. It's not unusual for a law to have one official name, but to be refered to by it's proponents as something more positive and by it's opponents as with a nickname more negative and often insulting. Take the Copyright Term Extension Act - commonly refered to by opponents as the Micky Mouse Protection Act, in reference to the extensive lobbying performed by Disney. Or, for a more topical example, the way that more conservative media and blogs will refer to various state acts forbidding discrimination against gender identity as 'bathroom bills' in order to focus on the creepyness of men potentially demanding to use the women's toilets.
A static field will have some effect on electronics by affecting the saturation point of inductors... but you'd need a ridiculously strong field for that to happen. Maybe if you were standing next to an MRI machine.
True... but the sheet steel used to form the case of almost all PCs would provide very good magnetic shielding.
Sorry, I misinterpreted the comment as sarcasm.
You might be surprised. A lot of these quacks have a craving to be legitimate, and so they will put in all the effort. Your typical newspaper horoscope writer doesn't, but if you go to a specialist they will consult tables, study star charge, compensate for calander drift, calculate the position of planets as they were down to the minute of your birth. The results are still just as worthless as if they generated a random number, but all the effort that went into generating the worthless numbers can be seen as giving them an apparent value.
From what I can work out, Seven/Vista's search is made to work with the index. No index, no useable search. XP didn't need the index, it just served to aid performance. In my quest for the avian porn, I was searching a network share... no index available, so Vista's search just failed dismally.
Fossil fuels are not carbon neutral by definition, unless you work on a millions-of-years timescale.