And exactly why the fuck are we OK with that in the US? I mean really, Americans are such spineless little cunts about that sort of thing. We talk a great game about how we're the land of the free and home of the brave but then get down on our knees and suck cock for big corporations at the drop of a hat.
Thank you. Has any of you fucking RedHat fanbois ever tried to get support for an Oracle problem on a Dell server running RedHat? Good luck with that. You'll end up in a goddamned finger pointing contest between Dell, RedHat and Oracle. If you're running Solaris on a Sparc on the other hand Sun owns the problem from start to finish. If you have a Sun support contract and open a ticket for an OS or hardware problem and it turns out to be a problem with the application that the system is running Sun will own the ticket from end to end, they will work with the application vendor until your problem is resolved. RedHat claims to do this, but they suck at it.
I ended up going with Linux on my new database servers due to Oracle's stupid core multiplier licensing bullshit, but I'm not running RedHat, I'm running Oracle Enterprise Linux, because that way I have one less throat to choke.
My backup environment runs NetBackup on Solaris servers, if you have mission critical applications then Sun's support beats RedHat like a red-headed stepchild on a rented mule. As far as RedHat being innovative please show me one thing that RedHat has done that's as innovative as DTrace, ZFS or containers.
With your mad wiping skillz you could get a job in the US. During the 1990s I worked for a university research lab that had classified contracts that were covered under the DISCO (Defense Investigative Security Clearance Office, surely the most contrived acronym ever) regulations for classified computing environments. The procedure for wiping the drives used in classified computers was to have a machinist cut the drive into four pieces with a bandsaw and then take the platters out and heat them beyond the Curie point with a blowtorch. We had a project back in the 90s that had been cancelled after about six months and it just about killed me to have the machinist destroy 24 beautiful 2Gb Seagate SCSI drives this way.
You're right. I, for one, will resist any temptation to rebut your mindless scream.
Yes, because you're a punk-ass bitch who can't refute his take down of your bullshit wanking pedantry. Please, reduce your carbon footprint to zero by hanging yourself with a hemp rope. Or you can go out in the woods somewhere and die of exposure, that way your corpse will provide nourishment for the forest biome.
As usual, the nuclear debate brings up BS. (And yes, I do mean on both sides.) Running a nuclear power plant is not carbon neutral. You have to build the plant, dig up the ore, process the fissionables, operate plant, dispose of the waste. All these things have a carbon footprint. Not nearly as much as burning coal, but not zero either.
By this ridiculous standard nothing is carbon neutral. Not windmills, which require steel, carbon, copper, aluminum and advanced composites, none of which grow on trees to produce and certainly not solar cells, which require large amounts of silicon and other chemicals that are produced via energy intensive processes.
Please, reduce your carbon footprint to zero by killing yourself, the planet doesn't need any more stupidly pedantic fuckheads such as yourself.
It would be better if you rode the bus to the library. But that would be inconvenient. It says a lot about the issue that everybody (except all the kneejerk "skeptics" that will soon post on this story) cares about curbing greenhouse gases, but nobody is willing to make the troublesome lifestyle changes necessary to make a real difference. Instead, we nibble around the edges of the problem, with marginal changes like "shrinking our carbon footprint" (hence this story and the strong market for hybrid cars) and spending money on "offsets".
I personally boil my tea and coffee water in the microwave. I do this because it's fast, because it gets the water to exactly the right temperature (if you have one of those boiling water sensors in your oven) and because the calcium accumulation in a teakettle is gross. But it does reduce my carbon footprint, though I have no idea how much.
You are so full of shit as to boggle the mind. Yeah, you're such a huge environmentalist, you microwave your water for tea in the microwave to save energy to reduce your carbon footprint. Fuck you. Oh, and riding the bus to the library is hardly that efficient, you're still dumping a bunch of carbon dioxide into the air. If you're so concerned about your carbon footprint you should sell all of your possessions and move to sub-Saharan Africa, either that or you could kill yourself, which would reduce your carbon footprint to zero.
by killing all of the environmentalists. How much carbon is generated by bloviating environmentalists spewing FUD by publishing badly flawed studies such as this one? It has to be in the megatons. By reducing the carbon footprints of all environmentalists to zero we could reduce energy consumption, carbon-dioxide production and we'd have fewer annoying fucks to deal with.
I was drooling over the new 17" until I got to the non-removable battery part. On long trips I've always loved the ability to swap through multiple batteries. 8 hours (which surely means 6 real world hours) is very good, but it still falls short of two or three swaps. Probably not something most people care about, so perhaps a good business decision... but I'll be holding on to my old 17" until it croaks, I guess.
If Apple is smart they'll open up the MagSafe licensing to third party vendors. This would allow them to create external battery packs that could be connected to a MacBook with a MagSafe connector. If well designed carrying such a battery pack would be no more inconvenient than carrying an extra battery for your laptop is now.
The case for Jobs' value is almost uniquely strong, since he left Apple for a while and it tanked, then he came back and it recovered.
That said, the opposite happens too; HP's stock shot up by billions the day Fiorina departed. So when my dad said, "Jobs proves CEOs are worth their pay," I had to disagree. You can't generalize like that.
Actually Steve got fired back in the 80s because he was running Apple into the ground. Apple then went on to do quite well in the late 80s and early 90s. Steve went on to found NeXT, which had really cool hardware, and really cool software but which, since their systems were really expensive and incredibly slow compared to Sun workstations, never took off the way that Steve told everyone it would.
Apple fucked up in the 90s because they underestimated Microsoft and they kept their prices ridiculously high. I worked in a research lab and was purchasing computer systems and by 1992 Apple's systems were almost twice the price of a PC and offered about half the performance. Apple's whole philosophy back then seemed to be "We'll make one computer, and sell it for 80 gajillion dollars and then everyone gets to go home for the rest of the year." As the performance of Intel's chips improved relative to the Motorola 68k series and as Windows got progressively less painful to use a lot of people decided that they would be willing to have a machine that ran twice as fast as a Mac and was half the cost even if the OS was ugly.
By the time Windows 95 came out Apple was really hurting and Windows 95, which was more stable than MacOS, almost put the final nail in their coffin.
Bear in mind that much of Apple's recent success is due to mistakes and missteps on the part of Microsoft just as much of Microsoft's success in the 80s and 90s was due to mistakes and missteps by their competitors.
Case in point -- they dropped Firewire from the MacBook. That means you can't use your family's DV or HDV camcorder anymore with a MacBook to use the new iMovie to edit your videos...
No, it means you use almost any newer camcorder which all use USB to attach to the computer. That's why Apple dropped it from the lineup, because it was not needed for even that remaining consumer reason.
They left it in the upper end models because it works better for storage, and also more advanced camcorders may continue to make use of Firewire.
God that was a fucking stupid decision. Rather than make the MacBook a few millimeters longer they dropped one of the most useful ports on the system. Ever used FireWire target disk mode? It's absolutely incredible. Oh, and anyone who thinks that USB2 is equal in performance to FireWire 400 anywhere other than a spec sheet is a fucking retard.
Unfortunately Steve Jobs is not an engineer and his whole "make things shiny, then make them functional" mindset has permeated through the Apple ranks. I like Macs, I own two and am considering a third, but I really wish that Steve, the man who gave us the one button mouse, the incredibly fucking unusable mouse that came with the original iMac, the original Mac keyboard without cursor keys and who spent $100k having the logo for NeXT designed before he had any hardware or software for the company, would pull his head out of his ass about the whole "form following function" thing.
Lots of laptop manufacturers do (or did) produce docks - including Apple - but they never seem to have taken the world by storm. They add to the build cost of the laptop (custom connectors) and tend to be expensive (and, lets face it, you really need one for home and one for work).
They never took the world by storm. Hmmmm, let's see, number of IBM/Lenovo laptops with docking stations I've seen in my last two jobs, too numerous to count. Number of Macintoshes I've seen in my last two jobs, less than 20. Yeah, those Lenovo guys, they're hardly selling any hardware at all.
You probably were not aware of this, but USB can be funneled through the DisplayPort. You attach one cable, and the monitor/mouse/keyboard/etxernal storage are connected.
What more do you want?
Well let's see, how about FireWire since USB2 performance sucks shit, oh, and I'd like a wired network connection because switched gigabit with jumbo frames kicks the shit out of any wireless out there when you're moving large files around.
I can't believe any Apple user would buy and use that thing in daylight without wearing a mask and/or holding their nose..
That's probably because you're borderline retarded as a result of being fed a diet of trans-fats, high-fructose corn syrup and lead paint chips as a child, which makes you a perfect Apple Fanboi. I'll bet you're one of the stupid bastards who actually believes Steve Jobs when he says that you don't need more than one button on a mouse or that USB2 and FireWire are equivalent in performance. I've used the BookEndz docks and they work quite well. Perhaps the BookEndz dock offends your aesthetic sensibilities but some us are actually doing work on our MacBooks and actually use those ports, we're not just plugging our new MacBooks into our shiny new Apple monitor with Apple's shiny new mini-display port connector and then masturbating ourselves into a self-congratulatory frenzy over how incredibly 1337 we are.
I've used the MacBook dock and the MacBook Pro dock and they're indispensable. Once I had decent docking solution I was able to get rid of my G5 tower and replace it with a MacBook Pro.
I love how assholes are always making stupid statements with no basis in fact and then qualifying them by saying "IIRC". Did you ever think that perhaps, before posting your bullshit that you should confirm it? Come on, it's not that hard, the intarweb has all kinds of cool tubes to get information. As an example you could have spent perhaps five minutes reading the Wikipedia article on Chernobyl. Then you could spend another 15 or 20 minutes reading some of the design documents for the AP600 and AP1000 reactors to see that their design is not at all similar to that of the RBMK.
But no, you couldn't do that, you had to jump in there and get that first post karma. Then, when someone called you on your bullshit you shuck and jive and change the subject to the fact that the reactor operators at Chernobyl dug themselves an incident pit in an attempt to shift attention from the fact that your initial claim, to wit that the AP1000 and AP600 reactors have similar containment structures to the RBMK series, is total bullshit.
In short you're ignorant and full of shit and you got called on it and rather than stand up and admit that you were full of shit you instead attempt to change the subject.
In his novel Night Walk. In it a government agent of a repressive theocracy uses it to torture one of his victims, asking him to recall happy moments from his life and then erasing them as they're recalled. After each erasure the victim knows that he's lost something precious and valuable but doesn't know what it was. It's an absolutely frightening scene and I for one hope that this technology doesn't work on any mammal more complex than a mouse.
is the shuttle then the space program deserves to die and I'd be happy to take it out behind the barn and put a bullet through its head. The shuttle has accomplished absolutely nothing of value that couldn't have been done by unmanned boosters. ISS is a fucking joke, it's smaller than Skylab, a space station that we launched in an afternoon over 30 years ago. Let's face it, the manned space program is a bad joke that should have been shut down years ago. NASA should have gone to Congress and said "if you want us to have a significant and real manned space program then this is what it will cost" and if Congress didn't approve the money then NASA should have said, "OK, forget it, we'll do unmanned stuff.". Instead of doing that NASA has spent the last 35 years running a manned space program that has accomplished nothing except to thoroughly explore low earth orbit, kill astronauts in avoidable accidents because of the incompetence of NASA management, provide pork for various congressional districts and pad the bottom lines of bloated, stupid, corrupt and inefficient aerospace contractors such as Lockheed and Boeing. Fuck NASA's manned space program. Scuttle the shuttle and for good measure de-orbit ISS and let the US Navy use it for target practice when it re-enters.
You're a fucking moron. I know you think that you're real smart because you wrote "...think about the square miles needed to permanenty store the nuclear waste" and "Uranium doesn't grow on trees, but you're a fucking moron. Let me explain to you why you're so fucking stupid.
1) "...think about the square miles needed to permanently store the nuclear waste".
Sorry, thank you for playing but the square miles needed to store all of that nuclear waste still pale in comparison to the square miles needed to produce solar photo-voltaic electricity. It doesn't matter how efficient your solar cells are you can only get about 1 kilowatt per square meter of power from the sun. This isn't bad, it's nothing to sneer at, but if you want a lot of power you'd better plan on covering a lot of square meters with solar cells. Now, from that 1kW per square meter take into account the fact that the cells used for these projects are between 10 and 20 percent efficiency, that your power source isn't available for 12 hours a day and that there are these things called clouds that can reduce the power you get from your power source and you see a dramatic increase in the amount of square meters you need to cover with silicon to generate meaningful amounts of power.
Let's consider the plant in question. 12.5 square miles producing 800 megawatts. It sounds like a lot, but in terms of energy density it sucks. 12.5 square miles is 32.4 square kilometers, with an 800 megawatt capacity that works out to about 25 megawatts per square kilometer or about 25 watts per square meter.
Now according to the article, which you probably didn't read, that power production figure is in the middle of a sunny day. Since it's not sunny all day long it kind of sucks when the sun goes down because when it does there goes your electricity.
Now, let's compare this plant to the Palos Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Palos Verde sits on 16 square kilometers of land and generates, on average, 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, four times as much as the plant mentioned in the article, and it generates that electricity day and night. Oh, and the 16 kilometers that Palos Verde site aren't all covered with solar cells, so in terms of not covering up the land with lots of solar cells nuclear wins on power generation and humps solar like the over-rated, underperforming, overhyped by stupid people bitch that it is.
"But the waste" you ignorantly squee. "What about the waste?" What about it? Find an unused chunk of desert, dig a large hole in it, encase the waste in suitable containers and bury it. Even without reprocessing this doesn't require a lot of land. In 2007 the US had about 50,000 tons of spent waste from nuclear reactors (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power). 50,000 metric tons of nuclear waste. 50,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is, at an assumed average density of say, 10 tons per cubic meter that works out to 5000 cubic meters. That's not a lot, a cube 18 meters on a side. If we assume that we want to dilute the waste at a ratio of 100:1 that would give us a 500,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste, which is a cube 80 meters on a side.
Reprocessing the waste, either by using standard reprocessing technologies such as PUREX or newer methods such as the DUPIC cycle would reduce this volume even more.
Now, this doesn't include the low level waste from nuclear operations. But while taking that into account we should also take into account the waste from producing solar cells. See, producing solar cells produces a lot of nasty waste as well. It's not radioactive, but it is quite toxic, and that's just the silicon production. Don't believe me? Then read about the Chinese who are finding out what life around a poly-silicon plant is like
years. I know that this has been said before and that I'm not the first person to say it but I think that Microsoft is going to be in for rough times because of Vista and because of the speed of the PC hardware that has been released over the last six years.
Five years ago I built my parents new PCs based upon AMD CPUs and ASUS motherboards and running Windows XP. Since then I have upgraded the RAM on their systems out to the max of 1.5Gb and they still run just fine, my Dad has a few newer games that are a bit slow, but applications such as Office, IE, FireFox, Adobe, TurboCAD, etc run just fine under XP. My laptop at work is almost four years old, I've had more memory installed and a larger hard drive but again, it works just fine with Office, etc under Windows XP. Newer hardware offers more bells and whistles but unless you're doing video work, or playing games a decent system put together in 2003 or 2004 will run XP just fine.
No one I know on the Windows side of the IT world is looking forward to upgrading to Vista because in order to do so we'd have to junk a bunch of perfectly good systems to install an OS that brings no benefit in a business environment. Business users don't need Aero glass, they don't need Vista's multimedia features (because businesses feel that if you want to do cool multimedia stuff you should do it at home and not be fucking off and doing it at work), they don't need Vista's "improved" security because any business that has an IT department that's worth it's salary are already behind firewalls, scan all incoming e-mails for viruses, automatically install security upgrades on user desktops and laptops and otherwise check their networks for infected systems and because the help desk guys really don't want to spend their entire day answering questions inspired by Vista's UAC spamming end users with largely spurious security notifications.
The only reason why anyone is buying Vista is because they have to. Dell just informed us today that as of tomorrow XP is no longer available as an OEM installed OS. You can still get it from Dell, but you're actually buying Vista with a "Downgrade Rights" license that allows you to install XP but with a Vista license. The "Downgrade Rights" program will be available until December 31st, 2010, so Microsoft will be able to say that they're selling lots and lots of copies of Vista when in reality many of these copies of Vista will actually be copies of XP sold under the "Downgrade Rights" program.
Pause and think for a moment upon how fucked up this is. Microsoft came out with a new operating system that no one wants; they tried to force adoption of the new OS by end of lifing the old one, but there was so much push back that they first had to extend the end of life date and then had to compromise and come out with the "Downgrade Rights" program which basically says that they're selling XP until New Year's Eve, 2010. Microsoft is fucked because they couldn't just keep selling XP, if they did it would be an implicit admission on their part that Vista is a failure. Microsoft also can't just say to customers "Fuck you, we're not selling XP any more, if you need an OS it's Vista or the highway" because if they did business customers in search of new systems might just say "Fuck it. I'll try the highway then. I'll keep my XP systems running as long as I can (which given the current economic climate isn't a bad idea anyways) and when I hit the wall where they don't run any more look at buying Macs or running Linux on the desktop."
Thank you for posting that. I've been an amputee for five years now (today is the fifth anniversary of the motorcycle accident that cost me my left leg below the knee). I have a kick ass foot now, the third one that I've had and I joke that this is the second best leg I've ever had, but it's nowhere near as good as the best one I've ever had, which is to say the one that I was born with.
Oscar Pistorius does not have an unfair advantage because of his prosthetics, that's sheer bullshit, he doesn't have any muscles below his knees to help him run and regardless of how good the technology is it does not make up for the fact that the best that his prosthetics can do is passively return energy. Any ignorant two-legged fuckers out there who need an example of this? OK, stand on your toes. You have enough muscle below your knees (unless you're some disgusting fat bastard) to support your entire body weight and lift it up over and over and over again throughout the day as you walk or if you run. Oscar Pistorius doesn't have those muscles. Need another example? Walk up a flight of stairs without flexing your feet. Keep the soles of your feet flat and use nothing but your knees and hip muscles to lift your legs up. Notice how quickly you get tired? Yeah, those calf muscles are pretty fucking sweet aren't they, so's an ankle. Despite what/. reading morons and the tards at the IOC might think these are not bionics. Using them takes a lot of energy and a lot of will power and while progress has been made they're nowhere near as good as the real thing, if they were then making the decision to have your leg cut off would be a lot fucking easier than it is.
Companies simply can't invest millions to prevent "What Ifs" like that.
Funny, my company is spending a significant chunk of change on a disaster recovery site in case so we can get back online in case something bad happens at our corporate headquarters. Guess we should just forget about DR, it's just a silly "what if".
middle east we could buy 50 or 60 million of these and spread them out in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Oh, and send a few million to Cuba and Venezuela too.
Nonsense. I was working for Amazon when this was developed. Here's the problem that this is supposed to solve. You have multiple fulfillment centers, you want goods to stay in those FCs for a minimum amount of time, you also have supply chains that allow you to take some shipments and have them drop shipped to the customer. How do you optimize this? Before Amazon put this code in place the process was fairly straightforward. If you lived close to FC X you got your product shipped from FC X. That's great, but what if you have a ton of product A in fulfillment center Y, or if you've optimized fulfillment center Z to handle certain products. When is it more efficient to fulfill a customer order by shipping it out of distribution center Y? How can you do this in such a way that minimizes shipping costs while maximizing product turnover and keeping the customers satisfied. And what do you do if you want to open mini fulfillment centers in large cities to quickly ship certain items that are in high demand (new bestselling novels or blockbuster movies on DVD). Then if you want to make this seriously fun and interesting throw in a program like Amazon Prime where you are guaranteed your shipment in two days. Optimizing for these factors alone is a seriously NP incomplete problem, I'm not surprised that Amazon is patenting it, they put a lot of money into figuring out this system and I know some of the programmers involved, they're smart guys. If you don't like the patent system then rail against that, but don't rail against Amazon for using the system to protect their investment, and investment is the right word, this is not a trivial problem, despite what the average/. 1337 hax0r d00d thinks.
As far as Amazon purportedly treating some customers better than others based upon the expectation of future business why not? There's a local restaurant I frequent, the food is good and I tip generously. When I go there the host will single me out and make sure that I get a table very quickly. Why do they do this? Because I spend a lot of money there and they want to keep me spending my money there.
I'd also like to know how Amazon is a monopoly. Really, I would. NewEgg kicks their asses on electronic items, if you want to buy anything from Apple you can go straight to the Apple store. If you don't like Amazon's prices for books there's always Barnes and Noble. eBay is a great place to find used DVDs and CDs.
There's not a conspiracy here. I know that this post is about Amazon and patents, but there's no evil conspiracy here. Move along. Nothing to see.
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And exactly why the fuck are we OK with that in the US? I mean really, Americans are such spineless little cunts about that sort of thing. We talk a great game about how we're the land of the free and home of the brave but then get down on our knees and suck cock for big corporations at the drop of a hat.
I ended up going with Linux on my new database servers due to Oracle's stupid core multiplier licensing bullshit, but I'm not running RedHat, I'm running Oracle Enterprise Linux, because that way I have one less throat to choke.
My backup environment runs NetBackup on Solaris servers, if you have mission critical applications then Sun's support beats RedHat like a red-headed stepchild on a rented mule. As far as RedHat being innovative please show me one thing that RedHat has done that's as innovative as DTrace, ZFS or containers.
With your mad wiping skillz you could get a job in the US. During the 1990s I worked for a university research lab that had classified contracts that were covered under the DISCO (Defense Investigative Security Clearance Office, surely the most contrived acronym ever) regulations for classified computing environments. The procedure for wiping the drives used in classified computers was to have a machinist cut the drive into four pieces with a bandsaw and then take the platters out and heat them beyond the Curie point with a blowtorch. We had a project back in the 90s that had been cancelled after about six months and it just about killed me to have the machinist destroy 24 beautiful 2Gb Seagate SCSI drives this way.
Yes, because you're a punk-ass bitch who can't refute his take down of your bullshit wanking pedantry. Please, reduce your carbon footprint to zero by hanging yourself with a hemp rope. Or you can go out in the woods somewhere and die of exposure, that way your corpse will provide nourishment for the forest biome.
By this ridiculous standard nothing is carbon neutral. Not windmills, which require steel, carbon, copper, aluminum and advanced composites, none of which grow on trees to produce and certainly not solar cells, which require large amounts of silicon and other chemicals that are produced via energy intensive processes. Please, reduce your carbon footprint to zero by killing yourself, the planet doesn't need any more stupidly pedantic fuckheads such as yourself.
You are so full of shit as to boggle the mind. Yeah, you're such a huge environmentalist, you microwave your water for tea in the microwave to save energy to reduce your carbon footprint. Fuck you. Oh, and riding the bus to the library is hardly that efficient, you're still dumping a bunch of carbon dioxide into the air. If you're so concerned about your carbon footprint you should sell all of your possessions and move to sub-Saharan Africa, either that or you could kill yourself, which would reduce your carbon footprint to zero.
by killing all of the environmentalists. How much carbon is generated by bloviating environmentalists spewing FUD by publishing badly flawed studies such as this one? It has to be in the megatons. By reducing the carbon footprints of all environmentalists to zero we could reduce energy consumption, carbon-dioxide production and we'd have fewer annoying fucks to deal with.
I was drooling over the new 17" until I got to the non-removable battery part. On long trips I've always loved the ability to swap through multiple batteries. 8 hours (which surely means 6 real world hours) is very good, but it still falls short of two or three swaps. Probably not something most people care about, so perhaps a good business decision... but I'll be holding on to my old 17" until it croaks, I guess.
If Apple is smart they'll open up the MagSafe licensing to third party vendors. This would allow them to create external battery packs that could be connected to a MacBook with a MagSafe connector. If well designed carrying such a battery pack would be no more inconvenient than carrying an extra battery for your laptop is now.
The case for Jobs' value is almost uniquely strong, since he left Apple for a while and it tanked, then he came back and it recovered.
That said, the opposite happens too; HP's stock shot up by billions the day Fiorina departed. So when my dad said, "Jobs proves CEOs are worth their pay," I had to disagree. You can't generalize like that.
Actually Steve got fired back in the 80s because he was running Apple into the ground. Apple then went on to do quite well in the late 80s and early 90s. Steve went on to found NeXT, which had really cool hardware, and really cool software but which, since their systems were really expensive and incredibly slow compared to Sun workstations, never took off the way that Steve told everyone it would.
Apple fucked up in the 90s because they underestimated Microsoft and they kept their prices ridiculously high. I worked in a research lab and was purchasing computer systems and by 1992 Apple's systems were almost twice the price of a PC and offered about half the performance. Apple's whole philosophy back then seemed to be "We'll make one computer, and sell it for 80 gajillion dollars and then everyone gets to go home for the rest of the year." As the performance of Intel's chips improved relative to the Motorola 68k series and as Windows got progressively less painful to use a lot of people decided that they would be willing to have a machine that ran twice as fast as a Mac and was half the cost even if the OS was ugly.
By the time Windows 95 came out Apple was really hurting and Windows 95, which was more stable than MacOS, almost put the final nail in their coffin.
Bear in mind that much of Apple's recent success is due to mistakes and missteps on the part of Microsoft just as much of Microsoft's success in the 80s and 90s was due to mistakes and missteps by their competitors.
Case in point -- they dropped Firewire from the MacBook. That means you can't use your family's DV or HDV camcorder anymore with a MacBook to use the new iMovie to edit your videos...
No, it means you use almost any newer camcorder which all use USB to attach to the computer. That's why Apple dropped it from the lineup, because it was not needed for even that remaining consumer reason.
They left it in the upper end models because it works better for storage, and also more advanced camcorders may continue to make use of Firewire.
God that was a fucking stupid decision. Rather than make the MacBook a few millimeters longer they dropped one of the most useful ports on the system. Ever used FireWire target disk mode? It's absolutely incredible. Oh, and anyone who thinks that USB2 is equal in performance to FireWire 400 anywhere other than a spec sheet is a fucking retard.
Unfortunately Steve Jobs is not an engineer and his whole "make things shiny, then make them functional" mindset has permeated through the Apple ranks. I like Macs, I own two and am considering a third, but I really wish that Steve, the man who gave us the one button mouse, the incredibly fucking unusable mouse that came with the original iMac, the original Mac keyboard without cursor keys and who spent $100k having the logo for NeXT designed before he had any hardware or software for the company, would pull his head out of his ass about the whole "form following function" thing.
Lots of laptop manufacturers do (or did) produce docks - including Apple - but they never seem to have taken the world by storm. They add to the build cost of the laptop (custom connectors) and tend to be expensive (and, lets face it, you really need one for home and one for work).
They never took the world by storm. Hmmmm, let's see, number of IBM/Lenovo laptops with docking stations I've seen in my last two jobs, too numerous to count. Number of Macintoshes I've seen in my last two jobs, less than 20. Yeah, those Lenovo guys, they're hardly selling any hardware at all.
You probably were not aware of this, but USB can be funneled through the DisplayPort. You attach one cable, and the monitor/mouse/keyboard/etxernal storage are connected.
What more do you want?
Well let's see, how about FireWire since USB2 performance sucks shit, oh, and I'd like a wired network connection because switched gigabit with jumbo frames kicks the shit out of any wireless out there when you're moving large files around.
What a hideous kludge!
I can't believe any Apple user would buy and use that thing in daylight without wearing a mask and/or holding their nose..
That's probably because you're borderline retarded as a result of being fed a diet of trans-fats, high-fructose corn syrup and lead paint chips as a child, which makes you a perfect Apple Fanboi. I'll bet you're one of the stupid bastards who actually believes Steve Jobs when he says that you don't need more than one button on a mouse or that USB2 and FireWire are equivalent in performance. I've used the BookEndz docks and they work quite well. Perhaps the BookEndz dock offends your aesthetic sensibilities but some us are actually doing work on our MacBooks and actually use those ports, we're not just plugging our new MacBooks into our shiny new Apple monitor with Apple's shiny new mini-display port connector and then masturbating ourselves into a self-congratulatory frenzy over how incredibly 1337 we are.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/BookEndz/BEMBP15F/
or if you have the 17" MacBook.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/BookEndz/BEMBP17/
They also make one for the old style 13" MacBook
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/BookEndz/BEMB13B/
I've used the MacBook dock and the MacBook Pro dock and they're indispensable. Once I had decent docking solution I was able to get rid of my G5 tower and replace it with a MacBook Pro.
But no, you couldn't do that, you had to jump in there and get that first post karma. Then, when someone called you on your bullshit you shuck and jive and change the subject to the fact that the reactor operators at Chernobyl dug themselves an incident pit in an attempt to shift attention from the fact that your initial claim, to wit that the AP1000 and AP600 reactors have similar containment structures to the RBMK series, is total bullshit.
In short you're ignorant and full of shit and you got called on it and rather than stand up and admit that you were full of shit you instead attempt to change the subject.
In his novel Night Walk. In it a government agent of a repressive theocracy uses it to torture one of his victims, asking him to recall happy moments from his life and then erasing them as they're recalled. After each erasure the victim knows that he's lost something precious and valuable but doesn't know what it was. It's an absolutely frightening scene and I for one hope that this technology doesn't work on any mammal more complex than a mouse.
is the shuttle then the space program deserves to die and I'd be happy to take it out behind the barn and put a bullet through its head. The shuttle has accomplished absolutely nothing of value that couldn't have been done by unmanned boosters. ISS is a fucking joke, it's smaller than Skylab, a space station that we launched in an afternoon over 30 years ago. Let's face it, the manned space program is a bad joke that should have been shut down years ago. NASA should have gone to Congress and said "if you want us to have a significant and real manned space program then this is what it will cost" and if Congress didn't approve the money then NASA should have said, "OK, forget it, we'll do unmanned stuff.". Instead of doing that NASA has spent the last 35 years running a manned space program that has accomplished nothing except to thoroughly explore low earth orbit, kill astronauts in avoidable accidents because of the incompetence of NASA management, provide pork for various congressional districts and pad the bottom lines of bloated, stupid, corrupt and inefficient aerospace contractors such as Lockheed and Boeing. Fuck NASA's manned space program. Scuttle the shuttle and for good measure de-orbit ISS and let the US Navy use it for target practice when it re-enters.
You're a fucking moron. I know you think that you're real smart because you wrote "...think about the square miles needed to permanenty store the nuclear waste" and "Uranium doesn't grow on trees, but you're a fucking moron. Let me explain to you why you're so fucking stupid.
1) "...think about the square miles needed to permanently store the nuclear waste".
Sorry, thank you for playing but the square miles needed to store all of that nuclear waste still pale in comparison to the square miles needed to produce solar photo-voltaic electricity. It doesn't matter how efficient your solar cells are you can only get about 1 kilowatt per square meter of power from the sun. This isn't bad, it's nothing to sneer at, but if you want a lot of power you'd better plan on covering a lot of square meters with solar cells. Now, from that 1kW per square meter take into account the fact that the cells used for these projects are between 10 and 20 percent efficiency, that your power source isn't available for 12 hours a day and that there are these things called clouds that can reduce the power you get from your power source and you see a dramatic increase in the amount of square meters you need to cover with silicon to generate meaningful amounts of power.
Let's consider the plant in question. 12.5 square miles producing 800 megawatts. It sounds like a lot, but in terms of energy density it sucks. 12.5 square miles is 32.4 square kilometers, with an 800 megawatt capacity that works out to about 25 megawatts per square kilometer or about 25 watts per square meter.
Now according to the article, which you probably didn't read, that power production figure is in the middle of a sunny day. Since it's not sunny all day long it kind of sucks when the sun goes down because when it does there goes your electricity.
Now, let's compare this plant to the Palos Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Palos Verde sits on 16 square kilometers of land and generates, on average, 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, four times as much as the plant mentioned in the article, and it generates that electricity day and night. Oh, and the 16 kilometers that Palos Verde site aren't all covered with solar cells, so in terms of not covering up the land with lots of solar cells nuclear wins on power generation and humps solar like the over-rated, underperforming, overhyped by stupid people bitch that it is.
"But the waste" you ignorantly squee. "What about the waste?" What about it? Find an unused chunk of desert, dig a large hole in it, encase the waste in suitable containers and bury it. Even without reprocessing this doesn't require a lot of land. In 2007 the US had about 50,000 tons of spent waste from nuclear reactors (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power). 50,000 metric tons of nuclear waste. 50,000 metric tons of nuclear waste is, at an assumed average density of say, 10 tons per cubic meter that works out to 5000 cubic meters. That's not a lot, a cube 18 meters on a side. If we assume that we want to dilute the waste at a ratio of 100:1 that would give us a 500,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste, which is a cube 80 meters on a side.
Reprocessing the waste, either by using standard reprocessing technologies such as PUREX or newer methods such as the DUPIC cycle would reduce this volume even more.
Now, this doesn't include the low level waste from nuclear operations. But while taking that into account we should also take into account the waste from producing solar cells. See, producing solar cells produces a lot of nasty waste as well. It's not radioactive, but it is quite toxic, and that's just the silicon production. Don't believe me? Then read about the Chinese who are finding out what life around a poly-silicon plant is like
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html
What wa
years. I know that this has been said before and that I'm not the first person to say it but I think that Microsoft is going to be in for rough times because of Vista and because of the speed of the PC hardware that has been released over the last six years.
Five years ago I built my parents new PCs based upon AMD CPUs and ASUS motherboards and running Windows XP. Since then I have upgraded the RAM on their systems out to the max of 1.5Gb and they still run just fine, my Dad has a few newer games that are a bit slow, but applications such as Office, IE, FireFox, Adobe, TurboCAD, etc run just fine under XP. My laptop at work is almost four years old, I've had more memory installed and a larger hard drive but again, it works just fine with Office, etc under Windows XP. Newer hardware offers more bells and whistles but unless you're doing video work, or playing games a decent system put together in 2003 or 2004 will run XP just fine. No one I know on the Windows side of the IT world is looking forward to upgrading to Vista because in order to do so we'd have to junk a bunch of perfectly good systems to install an OS that brings no benefit in a business environment. Business users don't need Aero glass, they don't need Vista's multimedia features (because businesses feel that if you want to do cool multimedia stuff you should do it at home and not be fucking off and doing it at work), they don't need Vista's "improved" security because any business that has an IT department that's worth it's salary are already behind firewalls, scan all incoming e-mails for viruses, automatically install security upgrades on user desktops and laptops and otherwise check their networks for infected systems and because the help desk guys really don't want to spend their entire day answering questions inspired by Vista's UAC spamming end users with largely spurious security notifications.
The only reason why anyone is buying Vista is because they have to. Dell just informed us today that as of tomorrow XP is no longer available as an OEM installed OS. You can still get it from Dell, but you're actually buying Vista with a "Downgrade Rights" license that allows you to install XP but with a Vista license. The "Downgrade Rights" program will be available until December 31st, 2010, so Microsoft will be able to say that they're selling lots and lots of copies of Vista when in reality many of these copies of Vista will actually be copies of XP sold under the "Downgrade Rights" program.
Pause and think for a moment upon how fucked up this is. Microsoft came out with a new operating system that no one wants; they tried to force adoption of the new OS by end of lifing the old one, but there was so much push back that they first had to extend the end of life date and then had to compromise and come out with the "Downgrade Rights" program which basically says that they're selling XP until New Year's Eve, 2010. Microsoft is fucked because they couldn't just keep selling XP, if they did it would be an implicit admission on their part that Vista is a failure. Microsoft also can't just say to customers "Fuck you, we're not selling XP any more, if you need an OS it's Vista or the highway" because if they did business customers in search of new systems might just say "Fuck it. I'll try the highway then. I'll keep my XP systems running as long as I can (which given the current economic climate isn't a bad idea anyways) and when I hit the wall where they don't run any more look at buying Macs or running Linux on the desktop."
You'll hate the compiler, but you'll love the whip and jackboots.
Thank you for posting that. I've been an amputee for five years now (today is the fifth anniversary of the motorcycle accident that cost me my left leg below the knee). I have a kick ass foot now, the third one that I've had and I joke that this is the second best leg I've ever had, but it's nowhere near as good as the best one I've ever had, which is to say the one that I was born with.
Oscar Pistorius does not have an unfair advantage because of his prosthetics, that's sheer bullshit, he doesn't have any muscles below his knees to help him run and regardless of how good the technology is it does not make up for the fact that the best that his prosthetics can do is passively return energy. Any ignorant two-legged fuckers out there who need an example of this? OK, stand on your toes. You have enough muscle below your knees (unless you're some disgusting fat bastard) to support your entire body weight and lift it up over and over and over again throughout the day as you walk or if you run. Oscar Pistorius doesn't have those muscles. Need another example? Walk up a flight of stairs without flexing your feet. Keep the soles of your feet flat and use nothing but your knees and hip muscles to lift your legs up. Notice how quickly you get tired? Yeah, those calf muscles are pretty fucking sweet aren't they, so's an ankle. Despite what /. reading morons and the tards at the IOC might think these are not bionics. Using them takes a lot of energy and a lot of will power and while progress has been made they're nowhere near as good as the real thing, if they were then making the decision to have your leg cut off would be a lot fucking easier than it is.
Funny, my company is spending a significant chunk of change on a disaster recovery site in case so we can get back online in case something bad happens at our corporate headquarters. Guess we should just forget about DR, it's just a silly "what if".
their Magic Mormon Underwear out of it thus giving them even higher levels of protection against that which is unholy!
middle east we could buy 50 or 60 million of these and spread them out in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Oh, and send a few million to Cuba and Venezuela too.
As far as Amazon purportedly treating some customers better than others based upon the expectation of future business why not? There's a local restaurant I frequent, the food is good and I tip generously. When I go there the host will single me out and make sure that I get a table very quickly. Why do they do this? Because I spend a lot of money there and they want to keep me spending my money there.
I'd also like to know how Amazon is a monopoly. Really, I would. NewEgg kicks their asses on electronic items, if you want to buy anything from Apple you can go straight to the Apple store. If you don't like Amazon's prices for books there's always Barnes and Noble. eBay is a great place to find used DVDs and CDs.
There's not a conspiracy here. I know that this post is about Amazon and patents, but there's no evil conspiracy here. Move along. Nothing to see.