Microsoft following on the dot bombs?
on
Xbox Sequel Rumors
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm let me see, sell a device cheaply then charge for the services? were have we heard this before... Can you say netpliance , can you say cue cat?
this concept, which had been tried many times before, is just not ready for prime time yet. Until the last mile equation is solved for the majority of households this kind of device is not going to work. If they aim it at a competitor to Tivo and have it play just game great, but if they expect to stream media to it and gather viewing data they are shooting themselves in the foot.
The fact is that joe six pack WILL NOT wait to download a movie to their TV set. With most broadband barely able to make it under current loads on their networks a device that is trying to get a 300K stream to it immediatly is just going to loose out. With poor quality of service this device will die quickly.
The sad thing is everyone knows this is the ultimate goal. For microsoft to control what we see and hear as part of our entertainemnt. Without real advances to correct some serious market defiencies that have been brought to light by recent events , such as @home tanking, microsoft is going to have another BOB on their hands.
The local police in Virginia Beach want to install this to monitor the ocean front area. They are so gung ho about it that they are willing to fight city hall on this issue. The mayor and the local city council have both said that they do not like the idea and the police chiefs reply was that they were going ahead with it anyways.
The reason that I point this out is that I have to wonder what is going on behind the scenes. We have a technology that is unproven at best and most likely unworkable. Yet we see police chiefs risking their jobs to get it installed. Is it the kick backs or something more sinister? Probably kick backs but I would really like to know for sure.
This kind of stunt has been used to show of the latest technology many different times. At one trade show novell used a fish tank to transfer token ring signals around on their network. Rusty barbed wire has been used many times. I personally know people who have used electric fences to transfer modem signals over a distance of miles to reach the barn.
This is all smoke and mirrors. What you do not realize is that the cross section of all of these materials is large. That is the real problem of data transfer when you break it down. It is the number of electrons that can be pushed over a data source without the cross section of the wire breaking down (over heating and glowing red is usually the indicator of this). What Cisco does not say in this article is if we can still use the phone lines for what they are intended for, phones, once we use this technology. this is not really an advantage if I have to rewire the building anyways so I can still make phone calls. Might as well have put in the regular cat 5 then making the advantage of this pointless.
The final last mile problem has a third part not adjusted by this technology. this is the ancient switches that this must travel through. The thing that has stopped the broadband revolution is the time and effort necesary to switch over all of the network to be able to use this tech. Phone companies are slow to roll these things out. When I worked for an ISP we once had to wait 6 months to install a dial-up location as the local telco had Lost their back hoe and did not want to rent one. How you loose a back hoe I will never know. SO don't hold your breath, this revolution is still born.
I hate it when people intentionally fudge facts on stuff.
"About 65 percent of executives polled by Goldman Sachs said they have no plans to use Linux at their company next year."
Well of course they don't, becuase 99% of them have no idea what is going on in the NOC. If you were to ask the CEO of my company if we were going to run linux, after spending three days explaining to him what it was, He would say no. The fact is that we ARE running linux in my NOC. No one has told the CEO because frankly he has no need to know. If he did know it would not change anything.
It just shows the danger of trusting a survey when you have no idea if it has been implimented correctly. What is Goldman Sachs next major revelation? That 99% of corporate CEO's do not think the change from a 85:1 to a 475:1 pay discrepency between CEO and line workers is anything to worry about?
You seem to think that OO is some end all be all of the programing language. It is more on how you structure the code. You can do a hello world program using OO is you wanted. Instead of acting on the logic of the problem you design from the idea that the data is what must be manipulated and therefore is an object to be handeled. All the problems you are listed are easily solved by defining the class that is associated with the data inputs and then perform actions on those objects. It is quite a bit different in thinking over how fortran is programmed.Having programmed in both OO is a much more powerful solution.
Here is an excerpt from www.whatis.com that may explain this better than I can.
" The first step in OOP is to identify all the objects you want to manipulate and how they relate to each other, an exercise often known as data modeling. Once you've identified an object, you generalize it as a class of objects (think of Plato's concept of the "ideal" chair that stands for all chairs) and define the kind of data it contains and any logic sequences that can manipulate it. Each distinct logic sequence is known as a method. A real instance of a class is called (no surprise here) an "object" or, in some environments, an "instance of a class." The object or class instance is what you run in the computer. Its methods provide computer instructions and the class object characteristics provide relevant data. You communicate with objects - and they communicate with each other - with well-defined interfaces called messages.
The concepts and rules used in object-oriented programming provide these important benefits:
The concept of a data class makes it possible to define subclasses of data objects that share some or all of the main class characteristics. Called inheritance, this property of OOP forces a more thorough data analysis, reduces development time, and ensures more accurate coding.
Since a class defines only the data it needs to be concerned with, when an instance of that class (an object) is run, the code will not be able to accidentally access other program data. This characteristic of data hiding provides greater system security and avoids unintended data corruption.
The definition of a class is reuseable not only by the program for which it is initially created but also by other object-oriented programs (and, for this reason, can be more easily distributed for use in networks).
The concept of data classes allows a programmer to create any new data type that is not already defined in the language itself.
One of the first object-oriented computer languages was called Smalltalk. C++ and Java are the most popular object-oriented languages today. The Java programming language is designed especially for use in distributed applications on corporate networks and the Internet."
Re:Why 2 wheels?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Because three wheels would increase the base of this devices. As it is the IT is only as wide as a person and the length is the same. It falls basically in the same dimensions that a person falls into. Add a third wheel and you must increase the base in order to get any sort of stability from the device, or you reduce the radius of the wheels to the point that powerring them becomes problematic.
I am sure that they did not want a size increase to limit the use of this device on sidewalks. if it was bulkier than a person then they may not hit their sidewalk use goal. Two wheels side by side gave them this base where two wheels front and back would not have. Two wheels front and back would have increased the length to achieve balance and increased the scooter comparison.
All atms have cameras on them to record the physical person who removed the cash. If they show a withdrawl at 1pm and their is no one standing in front of the machine at that time then I would think yuo have a case. And if they do use a physical card to do it with a physicall person pushing the buttons, it won't be you standing their taking the money out...
Ok granted they have hacked the hardware with a neato device that they built but.... Is it really practical as a hack, I was struck by the length of time it took to acomplish this hack in real time. Looks like three days total of the device attached to the machine. This is a VERY long time to try and hack something that is in a secure position. Also you have to get inside the bank undetected (either as an insider or as some sort of infiltrator) place the device out of sight (don't forget to hide the connections).
Frankly if you have gone that far why not just rob the vault? The money is right their. Ultimatly with this stealth run of encryption you have a bunch of PIN numbers.... Ok great but you don't have any of the cards or the card info that is needed even. Even if you some how extract the contents of the cards magnetic strip you still have to manufacture a card, then you have my pin number. Great now you can withdraw the total sum of my bank account which is... about $20 right now. That's a lot of work in a high risk way to garner a very small amount of reward.
This is really not all that different than me saying I can crack a PCs bios password if I can get access to the physical machine and have a screwdriver. the amount of effort that precedes the hack negates the hacks effectiveness.
I applaud their inginuity, and I hope IBM buys the idea off of them as a handy tool to recover lost data, but if I was IBM I would not be in any big hurry to change all of this hardware.
All I can figure is that the Slashdot coders have made some sort of change and want to see if the crap filter can take a huge load or not. Batten down the hatches! It's destructive testing time! The only explination I can find for this topic at least.
Why in the world would they need DNA. I am pretty sure that no where in the specs for DNS or IPv4 is it required that my genome sequence be part of the string being sent out.
So, who wants to take bets that the RIAA get's copyright violaters termed as hackers?
space is not going to be really conqurable until we can get skin tight style suits going. Even with the fact that in space weight becomes less of a problems (it is not gone, it returns as inertia force). Range of mobility in an enviroment that can kill you will be key. I would hope that they are spending more research in this area. Polarizing suits and cermic wire heaters would seem to be the way to go. The real trick is keeping what is on the inside from leaking to the ourside. Non-porus plastics are available, I would think you could layer those with light sensitice polarizing compunds, beef up the style of artic survival suits heaters and give it a go. If we can free ourselves from the bulkyness of the suits we have now anything in space will be possible.
This keeps florring me everytime I see it. 10lbs is not really that heavy, I have a pair of workboots that way more than that, and a leather jacket also. I think people may be a little to converned with "light weight" when it comes to notebooks. I'd lug an extra pound per hour of battery life easy. The orignal "darth vader lunch boxs" had an issue with wieght, but at 40 pounds each they had an issue definatly. Everyone got scared with these first portables and now obseses,like a high school prom queen, with weight.
To a lot of people 10 pounds is not that much. I wish they gave us the option when we bought them to add weight to add features, then I could custimize a laptop to do what I want and make sure the wieght was inside the limits I set for it, not some abitrary number set by a diminutive asain woman. (not a slam on asain women btw, more of an example of how much carrying capacity can change across the human race.)
Now let's see how many trolls I collect referring disgustingly to asain woman.
[speculation]
Might be the columbians at it, their was an advisory earlier this week warning that one of the mendelin cartel heads had been brought to the US for trial and that people should be carefull.
[/speculation]
the people that are buyign this stuff, at any price, are the same people that play Quake in god mode and look up all the cheat codes for a game before they even install it. It's sad but their will alwasy be an aspect of society that will want to cheat or get an advantage no matter what the cost. Look at the proliferation of scripts, pinging other players, etc. That occur in most games. People willing to pay for some advatantage, no matter how much it destroys the play ability of the game, are the script kiddies of the gaming world. 20 years ago they would have been using loaded dice to roll up their D&D characters.
At least this time it is costing them something in real money to get these kind of advantages. I tip my hat to blizzards work that they have locked their game down tight enough that people are going to extremes outside the game to get these kinds of advantages.
Unfortunatly the glut is in long haul fiber, not local fiber. The most exspensive part of any connetion is what is called the last mile. This is the connection between your house and the nearest switching station. The reason for this is simple, Age. In most places the copper in the ground has been their since the 1950's and in some cases longer. It is of different specs than are ideal and is corroding.
The problem with replacing it is that you have to get so many permits and studies just to replace one section of line that it is not feasable to do so. When congress de-regulated the phone industry they forced the local telco to give this last mile to the public domain. Any carrier can provide service over that mile of copper wire, be it DSL , POTS (Plain old telephone service), or long distance. This causes the eminent maintainer (the local telco) not to be interested at all in replacing any of it. Why replace it for other people? Monopolies are bad, but it does help to have someone who are directly responsible for maintaining a service.
Free peice of advice for the day BTW. If you have a 56K modem it really helps to reduce the number of analogue to digital conversion (56K can only stand one) If you are having signal problems call and have caller ID added to your list of services for a month. This forces the telco to move you from older equipment to the new digital equipment they are installing. This will provide better signal to you. After the month cancel the service, they won't bother to switch you back and you will keep the performance increase.
I thought XP was supposed to be when all the version merged together no more win9x/NT break. It still appears that we have seperate version, now they are just on the same release cycle. It used to be that it took 2 to 4 years for a new release to come out on each side of the calender, home and office alternating. Now it seems that microsoft has merged these cycles and I am betting that we will see OS release every year to 2 years.
A further note why are they releasing a home and an office (professional) version? How much difference can their possibly be? Were is the server vesion I have seen announced.
I think microsoft is going to be in real trouble over this release because of these factors. Installations of windows 2000 were slow due to the random releasing of server version and confussion over what to apply were. This is just going to compound the issue. I know they are trying to bolster OS sales (windows 2000 has never taken off) but this is not going to help at all.
Unfortunatly the idea of being re-active instead of pro-active permiates the whole IT industry currently. This is why we see software being shipped with little or no beta testing resulting in massive patches after release. Part of the problem stems from the fact that to often it is A.) Dangerous to report the problem to someone.
Example B.) Against the law to report it Example or C.) So common that it would take to much time to shift through it and report it to the apropraite people to have them take no action (I'd make an example of my firewal logs from just today but I suspect I would find out quickly what exactly the maximum size on a post could be as I overload it). I don't think we shoudl wait for the manufactures to solve this problem for us, I think we should handle this problem ourselves. If you get a badly tested product return it, no matter how much it may hurt. Maybe we can have something like Earth day where , instead of cleaning the beachs, all the system admins can spend a day collectively informing each other,without fear of prosecution, about their problems.
then again I may be just dreaming this all, at my job we cannot even get around to replacing the horribly flaky mail server yet because it has not gone tits up let alone arange a day for the internet community to pick up the litter on the side of the information super highway.
A final thought, aren't they advocating a DDOS circumvention tool? Isn't that agains the DMCA? Maybe the president of Mcafee needs a couple days in jail to think this one over next to Dmitry Sklyarov.
We REALLY need to frind a different term for measuring floating point operations. Anyone from the country, or has spent time their, can tell you that a cowflop, sometimes shortened to just flop, is the results after a cow is finished with the grass it ate. I see the term terraflop and frankly I reach for my boots figurring this is going to be a big one....
Unfortunatly the person who told the author that this happens all the time was extremly correct, and just not on internet sources.
A story to illistrate from what I know. When I worked for a local paper they used to run what was called a "readers choice" award. The idea being that people would vote on what places around town they liked the best. categories included best place to eat, best pizza etc. I had a friend who worked for a regional pizza chain. He told me that he had been directed by the boss, along with several other employees to fill out these forms to be sent in. I , of course, reported what I had heard to the editor of that section of the paper and she said that she would look into it.
When I spoke to her a week later she told me that yes that she had found massive evidence of ballet fraud. Random samplings of ballets with this store on them had turned up the people who had their name on the ballot had not filled them out. She said that she had personally seen over 100 ballots filled out with the same pen and handwriting. I felt vidicated. Then the awards were anounced. The number one spot was that pizza chain! I spoke to the editor and asked how this could be, she told me that it was a marketting decision from above. Basically they bought so much ad revenue they were given that spot.
This just illistrates the porblems that any news repoting agency faces. If you moderate you are going to slant the moderation to the bias of the viewer, what I consider a troll you may consider a witty comment. The first time you remove a post for any reason the news starts to slant, even if the post was trash pure and simple. It is a slippery slope that once started down cannot be stopped.
The same goes for advertising, you may think that they are the worst people in the world but you have to generate ad revenue and therefore accept their ads. Some ad revenue is turned away but once accepted it does flavor the news that it supports.. A final fact about this from my expereinces at the local paper. We where told that out of our 100 million dollar revenue from the previous year 11 million had come from news paper sales, the rest had come from advertising. In the four story building I worked in one third of one floor was for the news department, the rest of the building was for the advertising departments. Journalism has alwasy been subjugated to market forces. It's almost a good sign that online journalism has started to feel these effects themselves. It is a sign that online news is growing up.
I am looking for a very tiny linux based system with wireless internet so that I can hook it to that new camera in a pill and do live video confrencing from the inside of my large intestine. Let people know what I REALLY think of their ideas. The best part would be the puns that would naturally form from this system, I leave you to figure them out yourself...
"Better hurry up with your briefing, I had taco bell for lunch and the bottom of the toilet bowl gets poor recpetion..."
One of the core reasons that IP law is breaking down so much is the level that it has been subverted by corporations, the very thing it was invented to stop! The orignal idea was that invetors and creative people would be protected from theft from corporations. If you invented something you got to have the rights to it. you could sell the rights but they could not be stolen from you. This was desinged to protect people like the person who invented the paper clip. He desinged the paper clip to pay off a debt and was payed the total sum of $400 for the idea. It has made the people he solled it to millions of dollars since then. Because he did not patent the idea he gets nothing.
I think part of the problem would go away if we mandated that corporations cannot have patent and IP rights, they can only be assinged to real people. That way corporations will stop this nonsense of making you signe your IP rights away to them when you work for them. This would have a two fold effect:
1.) truly brilliant people who are inventive would be rewarded. These people would become like athletes as they became more desirable as the number of core patents they hold increases. If a company wanted to produce something they would have to hire the person that held the IP or the patent. This would cause a great demand for these intelligent people and give a large shot in the arm to pure research and people wanting to go to school, If it becomes as lucrative and glamorous to be a scientist as it is to be a basketball player.
2.) Companies would be a lot slower to patent trivial things that they use. The fear would exist that when the person leaves that holds your trivial patent it will become just as dangerous to you. Campanies might try to get around this by having their intellectual property assinged to people like the CEO but you would still face having to buy the rights back to transfer them to someone else in the company (pricy) or risk having the CEO leave and screw the company over. This would lead companies to conclude that frivolous patents where dangerous, and that having the necesary ones spread out in a corporation would benefit them.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm let me see, sell a device cheaply then charge for the services? were have we heard this before... Can you say netpliance , can you say cue cat?
this concept, which had been tried many times before, is just not ready for prime time yet. Until the last mile equation is solved for the majority of households this kind of device is not going to work. If they aim it at a competitor to Tivo and have it play just game great, but if they expect to stream media to it and gather viewing data they are shooting themselves in the foot.
The fact is that joe six pack WILL NOT wait to download a movie to their TV set. With most broadband barely able to make it under current loads on their networks a device that is trying to get a 300K stream to it immediatly is just going to loose out. With poor quality of service this device will die quickly.
The sad thing is everyone knows this is the ultimate goal. For microsoft to control what we see and hear as part of our entertainemnt. Without real advances to correct some serious market defiencies that have been brought to light by recent events , such as @home tanking, microsoft is going to have another BOB on their hands.
The local police in Virginia Beach want to install this to monitor the ocean front area. They are so gung ho about it that they are willing to fight city hall on this issue. The mayor and the local city council have both said that they do not like the idea and the police chiefs reply was that they were going ahead with it anyways.
The reason that I point this out is that I have to wonder what is going on behind the scenes. We have a technology that is unproven at best and most likely unworkable. Yet we see police chiefs risking their jobs to get it installed. Is it the kick backs or something more sinister? Probably kick backs but I would really like to know for sure.
It has now been discovered that the leading cause of cancer in labratory mice is.....
Scientists!
Please take note and live you life accordingly.
This kind of stunt has been used to show of the latest technology many different times. At one trade show novell used a fish tank to transfer token ring signals around on their network. Rusty barbed wire has been used many times. I personally know people who have used electric fences to transfer modem signals over a distance of miles to reach the barn.
This is all smoke and mirrors. What you do not realize is that the cross section of all of these materials is large. That is the real problem of data transfer when you break it down. It is the number of electrons that can be pushed over a data source without the cross section of the wire breaking down (over heating and glowing red is usually the indicator of this). What Cisco does not say in this article is if we can still use the phone lines for what they are intended for, phones, once we use this technology. this is not really an advantage if I have to rewire the building anyways so I can still make phone calls. Might as well have put in the regular cat 5 then making the advantage of this pointless.
The final last mile problem has a third part not adjusted by this technology. this is the ancient switches that this must travel through. The thing that has stopped the broadband revolution is the time and effort necesary to switch over all of the network to be able to use this tech. Phone companies are slow to roll these things out. When I worked for an ISP we once had to wait 6 months to install a dial-up location as the local telco had Lost their back hoe and did not want to rent one. How you loose a back hoe I will never know. SO don't hold your breath, this revolution is still born.
I hate it when people intentionally fudge facts on stuff.
"About 65 percent of executives polled by Goldman Sachs said they have no plans to use Linux at their company next year."
Well of course they don't, becuase 99% of them have no idea what is going on in the NOC. If you were to ask the CEO of my company if we were going to run linux, after spending three days explaining to him what it was, He would say no. The fact is that we ARE running linux in my NOC. No one has told the CEO because frankly he has no need to know. If he did know it would not change anything.
It just shows the danger of trusting a survey when you have no idea if it has been implimented correctly. What is Goldman Sachs next major revelation? That 99% of corporate CEO's do not think the change from a 85:1 to a 475:1 pay discrepency between CEO and line workers is anything to worry about?
You seem to think that OO is some end all be all of the programing language. It is more on how you structure the code. You can do a hello world program using OO is you wanted. Instead of acting on the logic of the problem you design from the idea that the data is what must be manipulated and therefore is an object to be handeled. All the problems you are listed are easily solved by defining the class that is associated with the data inputs and then perform actions on those objects. It is quite a bit different in thinking over how fortran is programmed.Having programmed in both OO is a much more powerful solution.
Here is an excerpt from www.whatis.com that may explain this better than I can.
" The first step in OOP is to identify all the objects you want to manipulate and how they relate to each other, an exercise often known as data modeling. Once you've identified an object, you generalize it as a class of objects (think of Plato's concept of the "ideal" chair that stands for all chairs) and define the kind of data it contains and any logic sequences that can manipulate it. Each distinct logic sequence is known as a method. A real instance of a class is called (no surprise here) an "object" or, in some environments, an "instance of a class." The object or class instance is what you run in the computer. Its methods provide computer instructions and the class object characteristics provide relevant data. You communicate with objects - and they communicate with each other - with well-defined interfaces called messages.
The concepts and rules used in object-oriented programming provide these important benefits:
The concept of a data class makes it possible to define subclasses of data objects that share some or all of the main class characteristics. Called inheritance, this property of OOP forces a more thorough data analysis, reduces development time, and ensures more accurate coding.
Since a class defines only the data it needs to be concerned with, when an instance of that class (an object) is run, the code will not be able to accidentally access other program data. This characteristic of data hiding provides greater system security and avoids unintended data corruption.
The definition of a class is reuseable not only by the program for which it is initially created but also by other object-oriented programs (and, for this reason, can be more easily distributed for use in networks).
The concept of data classes allows a programmer to create any new data type that is not already defined in the language itself.
One of the first object-oriented computer languages was called Smalltalk. C++ and Java are the most popular object-oriented languages today. The Java programming language is designed especially for use in distributed applications on corporate networks and the Internet."
Because three wheels would increase the base of this devices. As it is the IT is only as wide as a person and the length is the same. It falls basically in the same dimensions that a person falls into. Add a third wheel and you must increase the base in order to get any sort of stability from the device, or you reduce the radius of the wheels to the point that powerring them becomes problematic.
I am sure that they did not want a size increase to limit the use of this device on sidewalks. if it was bulkier than a person then they may not hit their sidewalk use goal. Two wheels side by side gave them this base where two wheels front and back would not have. Two wheels front and back would have increased the length to achieve balance and increased the scooter comparison.
All atms have cameras on them to record the physical person who removed the cash. If they show a withdrawl at 1pm and their is no one standing in front of the machine at that time then I would think yuo have a case. And if they do use a physical card to do it with a physicall person pushing the buttons, it won't be you standing their taking the money out...
Ok granted they have hacked the hardware with a neato device that they built but.... Is it really practical as a hack, I was struck by the length of time it took to acomplish this hack in real time. Looks like three days total of the device attached to the machine. This is a VERY long time to try and hack something that is in a secure position. Also you have to get inside the bank undetected (either as an insider or as some sort of infiltrator) place the device out of sight (don't forget to hide the connections).
... about $20 right now. That's a lot of work in a high risk way to garner a very small amount of reward.
Frankly if you have gone that far why not just rob the vault? The money is right their. Ultimatly with this stealth run of encryption you have a bunch of PIN numbers.... Ok great but you don't have any of the cards or the card info that is needed even. Even if you some how extract the contents of the cards magnetic strip you still have to manufacture a card, then you have my pin number. Great now you can withdraw the total sum of my bank account which is
This is really not all that different than me saying I can crack a PCs bios password if I can get access to the physical machine and have a screwdriver. the amount of effort that precedes the hack negates the hacks effectiveness.
I applaud their inginuity, and I hope IBM buys the idea off of them as a handy tool to recover lost data, but if I was IBM I would not be in any big hurry to change all of this hardware.
All I can figure is that the Slashdot coders have made some sort of change and want to see if the crap filter can take a huge load or not. Batten down the hatches! It's destructive testing time! The only explination I can find for this topic at least.
Why in the world would they need DNA. I am pretty sure that no where in the specs for DNS or IPv4 is it required that my genome sequence be part of the string being sent out.
So, who wants to take bets that the RIAA get's copyright violaters termed as hackers?
Well their goes another two weeks at least of my life... Dammit just as I was kicking my DiabloII addiction.
space is not going to be really conqurable until we can get skin tight style suits going. Even with the fact that in space weight becomes less of a problems (it is not gone, it returns as inertia force). Range of mobility in an enviroment that can kill you will be key. I would hope that they are spending more research in this area. Polarizing suits and cermic wire heaters would seem to be the way to go. The real trick is keeping what is on the inside from leaking to the ourside. Non-porus plastics are available, I would think you could layer those with light sensitice polarizing compunds, beef up the style of artic survival suits heaters and give it a go. If we can free ourselves from the bulkyness of the suits we have now anything in space will be possible.
This keeps florring me everytime I see it. 10lbs is not really that heavy, I have a pair of workboots that way more than that, and a leather jacket also. I think people may be a little to converned with "light weight" when it comes to notebooks. I'd lug an extra pound per hour of battery life easy. The orignal "darth vader lunch boxs" had an issue with wieght, but at 40 pounds each they had an issue definatly. Everyone got scared with these first portables and now obseses ,like a high school prom queen, with weight.
To a lot of people 10 pounds is not that much. I wish they gave us the option when we bought them to add weight to add features, then I could custimize a laptop to do what I want and make sure the wieght was inside the limits I set for it, not some abitrary number set by a diminutive asain woman. (not a slam on asain women btw, more of an example of how much carrying capacity can change across the human race.)
Now let's see how many trolls I collect referring disgustingly to asain woman.
[speculation]
Might be the columbians at it, their was an advisory earlier this week warning that one of the mendelin cartel heads had been brought to the US for trial and that people should be carefull.
[/speculation]
the people that are buyign this stuff, at any price, are the same people that play Quake in god mode and look up all the cheat codes for a game before they even install it. It's sad but their will alwasy be an aspect of society that will want to cheat or get an advantage no matter what the cost. Look at the proliferation of scripts, pinging other players, etc. That occur in most games. People willing to pay for some advatantage, no matter how much it destroys the play ability of the game, are the script kiddies of the gaming world. 20 years ago they would have been using loaded dice to roll up their D&D characters.
At least this time it is costing them something in real money to get these kind of advantages. I tip my hat to blizzards work that they have locked their game down tight enough that people are going to extremes outside the game to get these kinds of advantages.
Unfortunatly the glut is in long haul fiber, not local fiber. The most exspensive part of any connetion is what is called the last mile. This is the connection between your house and the nearest switching station. The reason for this is simple, Age. In most places the copper in the ground has been their since the 1950's and in some cases longer. It is of different specs than are ideal and is corroding.
The problem with replacing it is that you have to get so many permits and studies just to replace one section of line that it is not feasable to do so. When congress de-regulated the phone industry they forced the local telco to give this last mile to the public domain. Any carrier can provide service over that mile of copper wire, be it DSL , POTS (Plain old telephone service), or long distance. This causes the eminent maintainer (the local telco) not to be interested at all in replacing any of it. Why replace it for other people? Monopolies are bad, but it does help to have someone who are directly responsible for maintaining a service.
Free peice of advice for the day BTW. If you have a 56K modem it really helps to reduce the number of analogue to digital conversion (56K can only stand one) If you are having signal problems call and have caller ID added to your list of services for a month. This forces the telco to move you from older equipment to the new digital equipment they are installing. This will provide better signal to you. After the month cancel the service, they won't bother to switch you back and you will keep the performance increase.
Microsoft accused of unfair practices and deceptive techniques!?! I must say that I am shocked, schocked I tell you!
Unfortunatly I am uneligable for any such legal action against them as I think I gave them my soul in the last click thruogh agreement I did...
I thought XP was supposed to be when all the version merged together no more win9x/NT break. It still appears that we have seperate version, now they are just on the same release cycle. It used to be that it took 2 to 4 years for a new release to come out on each side of the calender, home and office alternating. Now it seems that microsoft has merged these cycles and I am betting that we will see OS release every year to 2 years.
A further note why are they releasing a home and an office (professional) version? How much difference can their possibly be? Were is the server vesion I have seen announced.
I think microsoft is going to be in real trouble over this release because of these factors. Installations of windows 2000 were slow due to the random releasing of server version and confussion over what to apply were. This is just going to compound the issue. I know they are trying to bolster OS sales (windows 2000 has never taken off) but this is not going to help at all.
Unfortunatly the idea of being re-active instead of pro-active permiates the whole IT industry currently. This is why we see software being shipped with little or no beta testing resulting in massive patches after release. ,without fear of prosecution, about their problems.
Part of the problem stems from the fact that to often it is A.) Dangerous to report the problem to someone.
Example B.) Against the law to report it Example or C.) So common that it would take to much time to shift through it and report it to the apropraite people to have them take no action (I'd make an example of my firewal logs from just today but I suspect I would find out quickly what exactly the maximum size on a post could be as I overload it).
I don't think we shoudl wait for the manufactures to solve this problem for us, I think we should handle this problem ourselves. If you get a badly tested product return it, no matter how much it may hurt. Maybe we can have something like Earth day where , instead of cleaning the beachs, all the system admins can spend a day collectively informing each other
then again I may be just dreaming this all, at my job we cannot even get around to replacing the horribly flaky mail server yet because it has not gone tits up let alone arange a day for the internet community to pick up the litter on the side of the information super highway.
A final thought, aren't they advocating a DDOS circumvention tool? Isn't that agains the DMCA? Maybe the president of Mcafee needs a couple days in jail to think this one over next to Dmitry Sklyarov.
If history is any judge in 10 years from now we will not be able to believe that we watched such crappy specs and liked them.
Gamer 1 " Good god this quake 3 is SUCH 24 bit color, how could they stand it?"
Gamer 2 "Totally!"
We REALLY need to frind a different term for measuring floating point operations. Anyone from the country, or has spent time their, can tell you that a cowflop, sometimes shortened to just flop, is the results after a cow is finished with the grass it ate. I see the term terraflop and frankly I reach for my boots figurring this is going to be a big one....
Unfortunatly the person who told the author that this happens all the time was extremly correct, and just not on internet sources.
A story to illistrate from what I know. When I worked for a local paper they used to run what was called a "readers choice" award. The idea being that people would vote on what places around town they liked the best. categories included best place to eat, best pizza etc. I had a friend who worked for a regional pizza chain. He told me that he had been directed by the boss, along with several other employees to fill out these forms to be sent in. I , of course, reported what I had heard to the editor of that section of the paper and she said that she would look into it.
When I spoke to her a week later she told me that yes that she had found massive evidence of ballet fraud. Random samplings of ballets with this store on them had turned up the people who had their name on the ballot had not filled them out. She said that she had personally seen over 100 ballots filled out with the same pen and handwriting. I felt vidicated. Then the awards were anounced. The number one spot was that pizza chain! I spoke to the editor and asked how this could be, she told me that it was a marketting decision from above. Basically they bought so much ad revenue they were given that spot.
This just illistrates the porblems that any news repoting agency faces. If you moderate you are going to slant the moderation to the bias of the viewer, what I consider a troll you may consider a witty comment. The first time you remove a post for any reason the news starts to slant, even if the post was trash pure and simple. It is a slippery slope that once started down cannot be stopped.
The same goes for advertising, you may think that they are the worst people in the world but you have to generate ad revenue and therefore accept their ads. Some ad revenue is turned away but once accepted it does flavor the news that it supports.. A final fact about this from my expereinces at the local paper. We where told that out of our 100 million dollar revenue from the previous year 11 million had come from news paper sales, the rest had come from advertising. In the four story building I worked in one third of one floor was for the news department, the rest of the building was for the advertising departments. Journalism has alwasy been subjugated to market forces. It's almost a good sign that online journalism has started to feel these effects themselves. It is a sign that online news is growing up.
I am looking for a very tiny linux based system with wireless internet so that I can hook it to that new camera in a pill and do live video confrencing from the inside of my large intestine. Let people know what I REALLY think of their ideas.
The best part would be the puns that would naturally form from this system, I leave you to figure them out yourself...
"Better hurry up with your briefing, I had taco bell for lunch and the bottom of the toilet bowl gets poor recpetion..."
One of the core reasons that IP law is breaking down so much is the level that it has been subverted by corporations, the very thing it was invented to stop! The orignal idea was that invetors and creative people would be protected from theft from corporations. If you invented something you got to have the rights to it. you could sell the rights but they could not be stolen from you. This was desinged to protect people like the person who invented the paper clip. He desinged the paper clip to pay off a debt and was payed the total sum of $400 for the idea. It has made the people he solled it to millions of dollars since then. Because he did not patent the idea he gets nothing.
I think part of the problem would go away if we mandated that corporations cannot have patent and IP rights, they can only be assinged to real people. That way corporations will stop this nonsense of making you signe your IP rights away to them when you work for them. This would have a two fold effect:
1.) truly brilliant people who are inventive would be rewarded. These people would become like athletes as they became more desirable as the number of core patents they hold increases. If a company wanted to produce something they would have to hire the person that held the IP or the patent. This would cause a great demand for these intelligent people and give a large shot in the arm to pure research and people wanting to go to school, If it becomes as lucrative and glamorous to be a scientist as it is to be a basketball player.
2.) Companies would be a lot slower to patent trivial things that they use. The fear would exist that when the person leaves that holds your trivial patent it will become just as dangerous to you. Campanies might try to get around this by having their intellectual property assinged to people like the CEO but you would still face having to buy the rights back to transfer them to someone else in the company (pricy) or risk having the CEO leave and screw the company over. This would lead companies to conclude that frivolous patents where dangerous, and that having the necesary ones spread out in a corporation would benefit them.
Just my two cents