Fedora core being the gigantic beast that it is, why isn't there a push towards network installation ? For those few that will install linux on a whole bunch of PC's the ISOs are ok, though a "Jigdo"-style custom ISO might be better, but for people like me who install once and use it for months without reinstalling, a small net-based launcher would be great as I could download only the bits I need. This is what I do for Debian and of course Gentoo and I think it's great, but for Fedora this is considered a hack and tends to break things.
Thing is, the NSA doesn't physically "tap" into anything anymore, they just get the telco to send them a copy of the audio stream. This way they can monitor as many people as they like, simultaneously. Heck, they could keep archives of every single call you make, automatically. Sure it requires massive storage, but what's money when you're the government ?:P
Dude, first of all your code isn't worth "millions of dollars". Seriously, 1998 was eight years ago. Code is cheap these days, and every family has a "programmer" somewhere.. I mean, they're BAD programmers but such is the way of the world. Second, the usual flavor when dealing with large corporate accounts is to give them whatever they want and adjust your price accordingly, so that whatever happens, you've made enough money that any adversity won't bother you much. They're probably not going to screw you in the way you're thinking, but the only way to be sure is to get a good lawyer and have it write up a solid contract that explicitly protects your interests.
Many successful companies are driven by one large client, the other thousand little guys are just advertising really, because one of those little guys might know a big guy and suddenly refer a million-dollar contract. The key to staying in business is keeping that large client happy and fat, so that they don't run to your competitor. If this means giving away your source code in exchange for lots of money, then that's what you do. If you don't, they will find someone who will, if that's what they really want, and you will be left with your thousand annoying little guys and no cash cow.
Funny, I remember throwing a TNT2 in my box and going "WTF" before returning 2 days later. My 2 year old Voodoo2 kicked the everloving shit out of that thing. Then a month later I blew a month's rent on a Geforce2 GTS and fragged my buddies at 120fps in 1024x768.. this was 2000 mind you. Nowadays I run everything in 1280x1024 without a hitch on a year-old card. I'm a little worried about SLI, mostly because of the compatibility issues, but it looks like that's the way to go for the future, just like our CPUs are going multicore.
The curious thing about dual and quad SLI is they raise concerns about motherboard design and power supplies. You need one crazy honkin' PS to feed a pair of dual Geforce 7900's. I'm surprised we don't see hardcore gamer cases with two power supplies. Even a trusty Antec TP-550 can get schooled by a pair of these behemoths on a highly overclocked AMD. Then you have the PCI-Express bus, and its inherent suckiness. It's not really the PCI-E standard that's bad, it's the chickenshit motherboard manufacturers who are too shy to put in more PCI-E slots in there. I don't need 5 legacy PCI slots when I have 7.1 sound, dual gbit lan and firewire onboard. Hell I'd be fine with just one PCI slot, the rest PCI-E x16 so I can crap more GPUs. Wouldn't you just love to set Carmack loose on a 4-way dual-7900 rig ?
Piracy was fine a decade ago when CD burners cost over a grand, and a few years ago the same was true for DVD burners. It was fine because Joe Random couldn't afford a burner, and even if he had the cash, he didn't have the brains to use it. Nowadays they're practically giving us the tools to pirate content. Let's be serious: does the average user buying an HP, Gateway or Dell really have a legitimate use for a DVD burner ?
Sure, for us techies it's nice to have cheap toys, but even when they cost a fortune I had no problems justifying the investment. I also had no problems duplicating discs and charging for the service.
There is no way to stop anything, especially when that anything is software piracy. An audio recording is software, a DVD is software. It's bits on a disc, and bits are damned easy to copy. The best the content producers can do is offer true value beyond ownership. Forget the distribution model, forget the physical medium.. give me something the kid next door can't download. When I buy an album, give me discounted tickets to a rock show. When I buy a DVD, give me half-price admission at my next movie. Reward the people who are buying your products, rather than trying to punish those who don't.
Exactly! The.ca TLD is such a pain in the ass, not even worth going for. Even if there are more available "good" names in the.ca TLD, what good is it if the.ca and.com are two different entities ? Most people will mix them up anyways, and end up visiting the.com instead, wondering where their beloved beaver-taming website went. I don't own a single.ca domain, don't feel like putting up with CIRA, primarily because anything in this country is buried deep in bureaucracy (thus light-handed corruption). I'll skip the lengthy, circle-jerk canadian registration process and get my instant $6.95 domains from Godaddy instead, as I have done for years.
Canada's a nice place to live, but fuck is our government ever near-sighted.
Sony has been the first to successfully market many of these things, but they didn't invent them. The "walkman" name was invented by Sony, but the first portable cassette player was the "Stereobelt", patented in 1972 by a German fellow named Andreas Pavel. Sony has been paying royalties to this inventor since the 80's.
You mention the transistor radio, that too was invented before Sony, in Indianapolis no less. You know those things people used to say about asian manufacturing, that they just copied our gadgets and built them for cheap ? It actually had some truth.
Trinitron, well.. yeah okay that was a good one they didn't steal. Now I'm not saying Sony's never done anything good, but like Microsoft they tend to lean on the side of evil. I'm still looking forward to a 60" Sony TV because on a floor with 30 other TV's, the Sony caught my eye.. but I am suspicious, just wondering what kinds of hell I will run into after I buy the beast. I just don't trust that company.
He's like the runner-up in democratic elections: his sole purpose is to rattle the cage. Like the idiots say, bad press is good press. RMS may be a babbling hippie, but he is drawing attention to topics of interest. Some people with greater minds just might spend a moment in profound thought.
I'm just sick of him claiming everything should be free, but not free fre, GNU/free. He reminds me of most rap artists, same beat, same profanity, different track name.
The reason developers are still working on PS2 titles is because Sony is turning the PS3 into a grand screwup. Nobody really knows how it's going to turn out, Sony is screwing developers left and right (nothing new), and to top it off we don't even know if we'll be able to afford the damned thing. $699 buys you a hell of a lot of handjobs!
If you were a gamer, you'd already have this "hefty hardware". If you were just a normal person rather than a troll, you'd have enough "normal hardware" to run Vista anyways. It's not like you're forced to run Aero Glass just to use your computer. You can run Vista with a plain-jane interface just like many users run XP with the classic grey interface. What's important is the underlying OS and its functionality. Even at this early stage, Vista does many things right like per-application and even per-request security controls and a saner audio/video API.
Back to the topic, Xbox is dead. Yes, it's dead. It's done its time. It's damned obvious that Microsoft will focus all its resources on the 360. It's been out for what, 6 months now ? That means the last batch of games have been released, or canned in favor of 360 substitutes. No one in their right mind would be producing a first-gen Xbox today, and anyone even thinking about starting a new project, should have done so five years ago; they missed the boat. There's very little homebrew activity on the Xbox, beyond XBMC, so there won't be any worthy indie games to keep the aging platform alive. I love my Xbox dearly, despite the average mediocrity of its titles, but it's no Dreamcast, that's for sure.
I think the sensor is integrated in the Nike shoes, you just buy the 29$ antenna and battery-powered transmitter. Since the battery is non-replaceable (and they don't bother recycling kinetic energy - philistines!), you end up buying another 29$ antenna every time the battery dies, I'm guessing at least once per season.
Then of course you're paying a premium for the "special" Nike shoes with the sensor. Hell, you're already paying a premium for ordinary Nike shoes, big whoop!
Absolutely! Why can't we have some sort of international board for these things ? Have one or more representatives from each participating nation and get them to all vote on issues. If the 2-3 US reps don't like.xxx, but a dozen european reps approve it,.xxx goes ahead and the repressive fucks in washington can bite my crank.
I apologize in advance for throwing gasoline on the flames, but rarely have I ever considered an audio company to know heads from tails about technology. Audio is audio, it has not seen any dramatic changes in decades, just incremental improvements here and there. They're far too busy playing numbers games and hyping nonsense jargon to sell the latest rehash of the same old product.
Sony is #1 when it comes to selling us worthless garbage. They will go to great lengths to make sure their product doesn't work with anything else in the world. When MP3 was booming, Sony went and created NetMD and their stupid ATRAC-3. Why ? God why can't they just embrace standards and cash in like all their competitors do ? Sony is not Microsoft. They don't control the audio industry, they can't lead the way if nobody's following.
So today it's Intel beating AMD, tomorrow some kid will "prove" that AMD still kicks Intel's ass. Right now I absolutely don't give a crap. I've got my AMD X2, which I dearly love. Until I get my hands on someone else's Intel Yonah and actually see a difference, if any, then I'll make my judgement.
Just like nobody buys a car without test-driving it.. well.. nobody sane anyways.. I won't buy a CPU before seeing what it can do for me. In my books, Intel has held a horrible track record for the last five years and they will have to pull some magnificent hacks in order to regain my favor.
Ok, I'll try to give you the condensed version. In Canada, when you're unemployed and receiving social assistance checks, you have to "prove" that you're unable to work. Some people are truly disadvantaged and have physical ailments that restrict the types of work they can do, and those same people often have learning disabilities that rule out office work so they're SOL, but that group is a very small chunk of the present welfare receipients.
For the rest, "work" usually involves complaining about (imaginary) back pain, and hounding doctors until they cough up a work exemption document. Some folks choose to abuse the school system instead, as the gov't will pay all costs associated with getting a high school diploma, career training or trade skill. They also get subsidized housing and probably many more freebies I don't know about. For every honest person who's down on their luck and needs short-term support, there's three or four who are just in it for a free ride and know how to play the system.
I have personally known a few of these types, since I was fortunate enough to live most of my youth in a sketchy part of town. For many of these people, welfare is a way of life, which boggles the mind! I'd pull up with my new car and big stereo, all the ghetto teens would stare in amazement wondering how I could possibly afford it all. "Is he selling dope?" "Does he have a rich girlfriend?" They just couldn't grasp the concept of how their childhood friend was suddenly a CS professional earning eight times more money than they ever will.
Anyways, to summarize I don't think the Canadian system is perfect. It goes too far in my opinion, giving too many freebies and taking too much from those who actually make this country work. It's not communism but it certainly engenders talent exile. I've known for years that I would be better off financially to move to the states, but there's a comfort factor here in Canada that I'm just not ready to give up. Health care is one of them. Cheap insurance, low crime rate, and far less traffic:)
The last time I used a tilt controller (on a bus), the person sitting across from me asked if I had a condition. I was playing some racing game, and the analog tilt was far superior to the "full left or right" of the keyboard.
Norms really don't "get" tilt sensors because they can't see them. Maybe if the tilt controller had a bubble level built into the side, it would be obvious to casual onlookers and maybe I wouldn't get asked if I'm retarded. Or maybe it's the hair.
Ick.. I get the funny feeling they're basing that $1/gb metric on "deduplicated" data. It's nice that the appliance does it transparently, but it's still just a numbers game.
FWIW, any techie can build a bigass file server for 50 cents a gb or less, using common SATA hard drives and software RAID. Just get a nice rackmount case with a buttload of hotswap bays, toss in a fast-ish CPU and a gig of ram, Linux Samba FTP and a quick'n'dirty web-based control panel. Have your buddy print up a nice logo sticker, get a commercial template for your web site, buy yourself a suit and welcome yourself to the overpriced world of network storage sales.
Hell, I'd do it myself if I had the capital to build the machines in the first place, but sadly I can barely afford my own file server.
I just started working at Dell here in Canada, and the #1 question on the first day when they told us about the Alienware merger was "Will Dell start selling AMD ?" Everyone wants to see them push out some serious gaming goodness for the XPS line. They have some wicked new designs coming out, I wouldn't be surprised to see an AMD-powered Dell desktop released around XMas.
And if they don't, I will accept brib^H^H^H^Hdonations to lobby management:D
Ahh friend we end up paying for health care, DEARLY! That's why I only see 2/3rds of my salary. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have our system than the free-for-all (aka fuck-em-all) system of the USA, where you have to pay up or die on the sidewalk. Now if only we could be a little more selective about WHO we treat for free; kick those welfare ass-kissers out! A lot of the lineups in clinics and hospitals are caused by people who don't even pay taxes to begin with! They're just waiting for someone to extend their disability insurance because "they're incapable of working", or maybe they just got beat up by the also-worthless neighbor for being too punk in drublic.
Yeah, the system has its flaws, but at least we have peace of mind. There are enough things to worry about in life, like work, kids, and americans:P
My immediate and knee-jerk solution to your problem is DON'T switch to Java. I forget who I stole the quote from, but: "Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
Maybe it's just my bias, but it seems like all Java developers are stuck in a rut, churning out applications that look like a ten year old HTML form, and feel like a Cobol terminal. I don't know if it's because of the libraries they use, or that they don't drink enough Pepsi, but something is just WRONG.
One thing I whole-heartedly recommend is to look into functional languages, if you can afford the performance hit. When it comes to large business-intelligence applications, functional will help you write safer, more concise code, keeping your attention focused on the actual program logic rather than the implementation details. Something like "Clean" or OCaml comes to mind. If you're really uptight, you could write the backend with functional code, then a thin interface in some conventional language, or even a RAD tool like VB.Net or Delphi. Just stay the hell away from Java, for everyone's sake.
Okay, this is neat, big resolution in a small package, though the image quality must suck as these small circuits are more susceptible to noise. I'm sure the engineers have done their best to minimize interference artifacts but it's still pushing the limits. What I'd REALLY like to see is this type of miniaturization applied to a big sensor, so that we could attain very high pixel counts. An 8.0 mpix mini camera is cute, but a 50 mpix SLR would make me drool at 8000x6000. We'd finally beat film quality and tap into a whole wealth of new photo-editing possibilities.
Things haven't changed all that much, except multiply all the requirements by 32. People are still buying machines with 128 or 256mb of ram, loading XP with a bunch of resident apps and praising how their 3.8ghz P4 is so much faster than the 2.66 celeron it replaced.
Then they come over to my place for the evening, poke around my 2.4ghz AMD with 4gb ram and then fail to understand how a 2.4ghz AMD can be faster than the latest and greatest Intel. If their P4 had 4gb of ram, hell even one gig would be comfy, they would probably give my X2-4800 a good run for the money.
There has been too much media emphasis on clock speeds and large hard-disk caches, and too little on achieving a balanced system. Who gives a crap that the latest hard drives sport 16mb of cache if all your PC ever does is swap ?:P
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Fedora core being the gigantic beast that it is, why isn't there a push towards network installation ? For those few that will install linux on a whole bunch of PC's the ISOs are ok, though a "Jigdo"-style custom ISO might be better, but for people like me who install once and use it for months without reinstalling, a small net-based launcher would be great as I could download only the bits I need. This is what I do for Debian and of course Gentoo and I think it's great, but for Fedora this is considered a hack and tends to break things.
Thing is, the NSA doesn't physically "tap" into anything anymore, they just get the telco to send them a copy of the audio stream. This way they can monitor as many people as they like, simultaneously. Heck, they could keep archives of every single call you make, automatically. Sure it requires massive storage, but what's money when you're the government ? :P
Dude, first of all your code isn't worth "millions of dollars". Seriously, 1998 was eight years ago. Code is cheap these days, and every family has a "programmer" somewhere.. I mean, they're BAD programmers but such is the way of the world. Second, the usual flavor when dealing with large corporate accounts is to give them whatever they want and adjust your price accordingly, so that whatever happens, you've made enough money that any adversity won't bother you much. They're probably not going to screw you in the way you're thinking, but the only way to be sure is to get a good lawyer and have it write up a solid contract that explicitly protects your interests.
Many successful companies are driven by one large client, the other thousand little guys are just advertising really, because one of those little guys might know a big guy and suddenly refer a million-dollar contract. The key to staying in business is keeping that large client happy and fat, so that they don't run to your competitor. If this means giving away your source code in exchange for lots of money, then that's what you do. If you don't, they will find someone who will, if that's what they really want, and you will be left with your thousand annoying little guys and no cash cow.
Funny, I remember throwing a TNT2 in my box and going "WTF" before returning 2 days later. My 2 year old Voodoo2 kicked the everloving shit out of that thing. Then a month later I blew a month's rent on a Geforce2 GTS and fragged my buddies at 120fps in 1024x768.. this was 2000 mind you. Nowadays I run everything in 1280x1024 without a hitch on a year-old card. I'm a little worried about SLI, mostly because of the compatibility issues, but it looks like that's the way to go for the future, just like our CPUs are going multicore.
The curious thing about dual and quad SLI is they raise concerns about motherboard design and power supplies. You need one crazy honkin' PS to feed a pair of dual Geforce 7900's. I'm surprised we don't see hardcore gamer cases with two power supplies. Even a trusty Antec TP-550 can get schooled by a pair of these behemoths on a highly overclocked AMD. Then you have the PCI-Express bus, and its inherent suckiness. It's not really the PCI-E standard that's bad, it's the chickenshit motherboard manufacturers who are too shy to put in more PCI-E slots in there. I don't need 5 legacy PCI slots when I have 7.1 sound, dual gbit lan and firewire onboard. Hell I'd be fine with just one PCI slot, the rest PCI-E x16 so I can crap more GPUs. Wouldn't you just love to set Carmack loose on a 4-way dual-7900 rig ?
Piracy was fine a decade ago when CD burners cost over a grand, and a few years ago the same was true for DVD burners. It was fine because Joe Random couldn't afford a burner, and even if he had the cash, he didn't have the brains to use it. Nowadays they're practically giving us the tools to pirate content. Let's be serious: does the average user buying an HP, Gateway or Dell really have a legitimate use for a DVD burner ?
Sure, for us techies it's nice to have cheap toys, but even when they cost a fortune I had no problems justifying the investment. I also had no problems duplicating discs and charging for the service.
There is no way to stop anything, especially when that anything is software piracy. An audio recording is software, a DVD is software. It's bits on a disc, and bits are damned easy to copy. The best the content producers can do is offer true value beyond ownership. Forget the distribution model, forget the physical medium.. give me something the kid next door can't download. When I buy an album, give me discounted tickets to a rock show. When I buy a DVD, give me half-price admission at my next movie. Reward the people who are buying your products, rather than trying to punish those who don't.
Exactly! The .ca TLD is such a pain in the ass, not even worth going for. Even if there are more available "good" names in the .ca TLD, what good is it if the .ca and .com are two different entities ? Most people will mix them up anyways, and end up visiting the .com instead, wondering where their beloved beaver-taming website went. I don't own a single .ca domain, don't feel like putting up with CIRA, primarily because anything in this country is buried deep in bureaucracy (thus light-handed corruption). I'll skip the lengthy, circle-jerk canadian registration process and get my instant $6.95 domains from Godaddy instead, as I have done for years.
Canada's a nice place to live, but fuck is our government ever near-sighted.
I am insensitive you Canadian clod!
But no, seriously I was thinking canadian dollars.. my bad!
Sony has been the first to successfully market many of these things, but they didn't invent them. The "walkman" name was invented by Sony, but the first portable cassette player was the "Stereobelt", patented in 1972 by a German fellow named Andreas Pavel. Sony has been paying royalties to this inventor since the 80's.
You mention the transistor radio, that too was invented before Sony, in Indianapolis no less. You know those things people used to say about asian manufacturing, that they just copied our gadgets and built them for cheap ? It actually had some truth.
Trinitron, well.. yeah okay that was a good one they didn't steal. Now I'm not saying Sony's never done anything good, but like Microsoft they tend to lean on the side of evil. I'm still looking forward to a 60" Sony TV because on a floor with 30 other TV's, the Sony caught my eye.. but I am suspicious, just wondering what kinds of hell I will run into after I buy the beast. I just don't trust that company.
He's like the runner-up in democratic elections: his sole purpose is to rattle the cage. Like the idiots say, bad press is good press. RMS may be a babbling hippie, but he is drawing attention to topics of interest. Some people with greater minds just might spend a moment in profound thought.
I'm just sick of him claiming everything should be free, but not free fre, GNU/free. He reminds me of most rap artists, same beat, same profanity, different track name.
The reason developers are still working on PS2 titles is because Sony is turning the PS3 into a grand screwup. Nobody really knows how it's going to turn out, Sony is screwing developers left and right (nothing new), and to top it off we don't even know if we'll be able to afford the damned thing. $699 buys you a hell of a lot of handjobs!
If you were a gamer, you'd already have this "hefty hardware". If you were just a normal person rather than a troll, you'd have enough "normal hardware" to run Vista anyways. It's not like you're forced to run Aero Glass just to use your computer. You can run Vista with a plain-jane interface just like many users run XP with the classic grey interface. What's important is the underlying OS and its functionality. Even at this early stage, Vista does many things right like per-application and even per-request security controls and a saner audio/video API.
Back to the topic, Xbox is dead. Yes, it's dead. It's done its time. It's damned obvious that Microsoft will focus all its resources on the 360. It's been out for what, 6 months now ? That means the last batch of games have been released, or canned in favor of 360 substitutes. No one in their right mind would be producing a first-gen Xbox today, and anyone even thinking about starting a new project, should have done so five years ago; they missed the boat. There's very little homebrew activity on the Xbox, beyond XBMC, so there won't be any worthy indie games to keep the aging platform alive. I love my Xbox dearly, despite the average mediocrity of its titles, but it's no Dreamcast, that's for sure.
I think the sensor is integrated in the Nike shoes, you just buy the 29$ antenna and battery-powered transmitter. Since the battery is non-replaceable (and they don't bother recycling kinetic energy - philistines!), you end up buying another 29$ antenna every time the battery dies, I'm guessing at least once per season.
Then of course you're paying a premium for the "special" Nike shoes with the sensor. Hell, you're already paying a premium for ordinary Nike shoes, big whoop!
Ask VMWare. They sold you the software in the first place, they should support it. Slashdot is not your I.T. department.
Absolutely! Why can't we have some sort of international board for these things ? Have one or more representatives from each participating nation and get them to all vote on issues. If the 2-3 US reps don't like .xxx, but a dozen european reps approve it, .xxx goes ahead and the repressive fucks in washington can bite my crank.
Ewwww.. now every time I hear that song about losing one's virginity, I'll have an image of Shatner's toupee in my mind.. ewwwwwwwww
make it go away!!!
I apologize in advance for throwing gasoline on the flames, but rarely have I ever considered an audio company to know heads from tails about technology. Audio is audio, it has not seen any dramatic changes in decades, just incremental improvements here and there. They're far too busy playing numbers games and hyping nonsense jargon to sell the latest rehash of the same old product.
Sony is #1 when it comes to selling us worthless garbage. They will go to great lengths to make sure their product doesn't work with anything else in the world. When MP3 was booming, Sony went and created NetMD and their stupid ATRAC-3. Why ? God why can't they just embrace standards and cash in like all their competitors do ? Sony is not Microsoft. They don't control the audio industry, they can't lead the way if nobody's following.
La la la I can't hear youuuuuu..
So today it's Intel beating AMD, tomorrow some kid will "prove" that AMD still kicks Intel's ass. Right now I absolutely don't give a crap. I've got my AMD X2, which I dearly love. Until I get my hands on someone else's Intel Yonah and actually see a difference, if any, then I'll make my judgement.
Just like nobody buys a car without test-driving it.. well.. nobody sane anyways.. I won't buy a CPU before seeing what it can do for me. In my books, Intel has held a horrible track record for the last five years and they will have to pull some magnificent hacks in order to regain my favor.
Ok, I'll try to give you the condensed version. In Canada, when you're unemployed and receiving social assistance checks, you have to "prove" that you're unable to work. Some people are truly disadvantaged and have physical ailments that restrict the types of work they can do, and those same people often have learning disabilities that rule out office work so they're SOL, but that group is a very small chunk of the present welfare receipients.
:)
For the rest, "work" usually involves complaining about (imaginary) back pain, and hounding doctors until they cough up a work exemption document. Some folks choose to abuse the school system instead, as the gov't will pay all costs associated with getting a high school diploma, career training or trade skill. They also get subsidized housing and probably many more freebies I don't know about. For every honest person who's down on their luck and needs short-term support, there's three or four who are just in it for a free ride and know how to play the system.
I have personally known a few of these types, since I was fortunate enough to live most of my youth in a sketchy part of town. For many of these people, welfare is a way of life, which boggles the mind! I'd pull up with my new car and big stereo, all the ghetto teens would stare in amazement wondering how I could possibly afford it all. "Is he selling dope?" "Does he have a rich girlfriend?" They just couldn't grasp the concept of how their childhood friend was suddenly a CS professional earning eight times more money than they ever will.
Anyways, to summarize I don't think the Canadian system is perfect. It goes too far in my opinion, giving too many freebies and taking too much from those who actually make this country work. It's not communism but it certainly engenders talent exile. I've known for years that I would be better off financially to move to the states, but there's a comfort factor here in Canada that I'm just not ready to give up. Health care is one of them. Cheap insurance, low crime rate, and far less traffic
The last time I used a tilt controller (on a bus), the person sitting across from me asked if I had a condition. I was playing some racing game, and the analog tilt was far superior to the "full left or right" of the keyboard.
Norms really don't "get" tilt sensors because they can't see them. Maybe if the tilt controller had a bubble level built into the side, it would be obvious to casual onlookers and maybe I wouldn't get asked if I'm retarded. Or maybe it's the hair.
Ick.. I get the funny feeling they're basing that $1/gb metric on "deduplicated" data. It's nice that the appliance does it transparently, but it's still just a numbers game.
FWIW, any techie can build a bigass file server for 50 cents a gb or less, using common SATA hard drives and software RAID. Just get a nice rackmount case with a buttload of hotswap bays, toss in a fast-ish CPU and a gig of ram, Linux Samba FTP and a quick'n'dirty web-based control panel. Have your buddy print up a nice logo sticker, get a commercial template for your web site, buy yourself a suit and welcome yourself to the overpriced world of network storage sales.
Hell, I'd do it myself if I had the capital to build the machines in the first place, but sadly I can barely afford my own file server.
I just started working at Dell here in Canada, and the #1 question on the first day when they told us about the Alienware merger was "Will Dell start selling AMD ?" Everyone wants to see them push out some serious gaming goodness for the XPS line. They have some wicked new designs coming out, I wouldn't be surprised to see an AMD-powered Dell desktop released around XMas.
:D
And if they don't, I will accept brib^H^H^H^Hdonations to lobby management
Ahh friend we end up paying for health care, DEARLY! That's why I only see 2/3rds of my salary. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have our system than the free-for-all (aka fuck-em-all) system of the USA, where you have to pay up or die on the sidewalk. Now if only we could be a little more selective about WHO we treat for free; kick those welfare ass-kissers out! A lot of the lineups in clinics and hospitals are caused by people who don't even pay taxes to begin with! They're just waiting for someone to extend their disability insurance because "they're incapable of working", or maybe they just got beat up by the also-worthless neighbor for being too punk in drublic.
:P
Yeah, the system has its flaws, but at least we have peace of mind. There are enough things to worry about in life, like work, kids, and americans
My immediate and knee-jerk solution to your problem is DON'T switch to Java. I forget who I stole the quote from, but:
"Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
Maybe it's just my bias, but it seems like all Java developers are stuck in a rut, churning out applications that look like a ten year old HTML form, and feel like a Cobol terminal. I don't know if it's because of the libraries they use, or that they don't drink enough Pepsi, but something is just WRONG.
One thing I whole-heartedly recommend is to look into functional languages, if you can afford the performance hit. When it comes to large business-intelligence applications, functional will help you write safer, more concise code, keeping your attention focused on the actual program logic rather than the implementation details. Something like "Clean" or OCaml comes to mind. If you're really uptight, you could write the backend with functional code, then a thin interface in some conventional language, or even a RAD tool like VB.Net or Delphi. Just stay the hell away from Java, for everyone's sake.
Okay, this is neat, big resolution in a small package, though the image quality must suck as these small circuits are more susceptible to noise. I'm sure the engineers have done their best to minimize interference artifacts but it's still pushing the limits. What I'd REALLY like to see is this type of miniaturization applied to a big sensor, so that we could attain very high pixel counts. An 8.0 mpix mini camera is cute, but a 50 mpix SLR would make me drool at 8000x6000. We'd finally beat film quality and tap into a whole wealth of new photo-editing possibilities.
Things haven't changed all that much, except multiply all the requirements by 32. People are still buying machines with 128 or 256mb of ram, loading XP with a bunch of resident apps and praising how their 3.8ghz P4 is so much faster than the 2.66 celeron it replaced.
:P
Then they come over to my place for the evening, poke around my 2.4ghz AMD with 4gb ram and then fail to understand how a 2.4ghz AMD can be faster than the latest and greatest Intel. If their P4 had 4gb of ram, hell even one gig would be comfy, they would probably give my X2-4800 a good run for the money.
There has been too much media emphasis on clock speeds and large hard-disk caches, and too little on achieving a balanced system. Who gives a crap that the latest hard drives sport 16mb of cache if all your PC ever does is swap ?