Thankfully for AT&T, my phone gets utterly crap reception at work. I'll be lucky to have enough bandwidth to sent out a few text messages, let alone cause bandwidth problems for them.
A coworker and I were discussing this at work the other day actually. If I have trade secrets on my laptop, would I be running afoul of Safe Harbor and possibly shareholder interests if I give them my encryption key?
It may be that the SEC is the best avenue to challenge this. We just didn't think that starting a shareholder lawsuit against our company would be helpful to our employment status...
Somewhere along the way I heard a story of a bar that installed a breathalizer in the bar, so that patrons could check their BAC to make sure they were safe to drive.
They took it out not too long later because people started having contests to see who could blow the highest.
A fellow engineering student and I were laughing about this, and think we may have a way to derive some enjoyment from the bobble-head gift.
Say that the bobble head doll is six inches tall, and your CEO is six feet tall. This is just an approximation, as I don't have the fortune of either owning any bobble head dolls, or knowing your CEO. This gives us a 1:12 scale.
At this scale, a.22 caliber rifle is conservatively similar to a 25 mm anti-aircraft round. Any idea where I'm going with this?
Sure, the idea of shooting the thing has occurred to many others already, but it would be more interesting to make an engineering report out of it. Figure out what scaled distance you're shooting from, discuss material differences, apply these to difficulties which may be encountered in a more "real-life" setting, and you've got the makings of a great arrest and restraining order story. Videos could be used to further explicate the point, and different ammunition sizes experimented with to really explore the problem fully.
As a fictitious company I was part of this semester said, "We don't look for problems, we look for solutions".
I think this has been mentioned in passing, but I'd like to reinforce it.
I am a student in Construction Engineering, and one thing we've gone over is bidding strategies. The basic premise is that when bidding on jobs, you have an estimate of how much that job will cost you to build. You then look back at history, for similar jobs with similar competitors, and look at your probability of getting the job based upon various prices, such as 10% under cost, 10% above, and so forth. So we now have an idea of what the job will cost to do, as well as our likelihood of getting the work at various price points. Then we multiply the probablity of getting a job at a price point and how much percentage profit we'll make at that point, and find the price point which maximizes our profit.
Now this isn't a that aims to win every job, but over the long term will maximize profits. I see Amazon as attempting to do this type of research. Unlike a bid on a construction project, where bids are usually public knowledge, Amazon doesn't know where people who didn't buy a certain book went, or if they bought it at all. Therefore they're able to vary the price of a book, based upon the amount of profit they're making on it, and see what percentage of viewers of that item bought it. So we're back to probability times percentage profit. In my mind, it's market research, and they have been willing to at least give people the best deal available at that time.
In the future, I would not expect much in the way of fluctuating prices for products sold at Amazon, but more of a price that will maximize their profit (or minimize their losses, whatever the case might be).
Probably not the most powerful of effects, but in my mind the best bet would be to kill the signal to noise ratio for these people. Call them up, and tell them about the most well adjusted person in your school. Make them go through the hassle of checking it out.
Even better, arrange some people who are in class together, and actively mess with these people. Get some people to say this kind of thing about one person, and then that person shows them that it's all not true. I guess it'd kind of be discrediting their source of information. I mean, I was in high school a couple years ago, we would have had GREAT fun with something like this.;-)
True, the ATI chipset is hot, and I can't speak much to the CPU utilization of the OS, but I'm not sure what you're referring to on the Powerbooks. One problem recently has been G3 series Powerbooks (Wallstreet, not the new Lombards so much) being warm under operation. That I'll concede to you. But if you're talking about the 5300 series powerbooks that reportedly burst into flames, that wasn't so much a heat dissipation problem as faulty electronics in some of the early Lithium Ion batteries they used (If I recall correctly Apple was some of of the first to use them).
I think that the most important consideration is how clear users keep the computer, ie, do they drape something over it in an extreme example? Keeping the vent holes open is important. Convection works great, but if you change the route air uses to travel through the computer it's going to get pretty dicey.
Anyways, that's what I think, and although I wouldn't buy one, I think the new iMacs are quite a great value for what you get.
THat's what I forgot to say. The downside is that seek times are probably fairly wretched. Maybe the software could have a cache big enough to store a couple songs, and if your mp3 player was set for random, it would choose the next one early enough for the drive to retrieve it. But I agree, having to go from one end of the tape to the other probably would take a while.
Sounds like a pretty neat drive. It looks like the data transfer rates would be good enough for an mp3 type application. 2 MB per second should easily handle mp3, shouldn't it? It also looks like it's much easier to use than a regular tape drive, although how reliable is company hype? The only problem I see is that there don't seem to be any drivers or programs to interface it for linux (or Mac in my case) Let's hope they see those two as profitable investments. This makes me rethink an Orb drive. It may not be quite as fast, but at least it sounds like they're available to buy. 30Gig for $40 isn't too bad either.
I've got to agree. The 89 is very nice. As a freshman engineering student this year, I thought about buying a 92. Then someone showed me a TI89. It does everything a TI92 does, and nearly all a 92Plus does. It's also smaller, and about $30 cheaper than a TI92. Very good calculator. Oh, it's running a 68000 chip.
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Thankfully for AT&T, my phone gets utterly crap reception at work. I'll be lucky to have enough bandwidth to sent out a few text messages, let alone cause bandwidth problems for them.
A coworker and I were discussing this at work the other day actually. If I have trade secrets on my laptop, would I be running afoul of Safe Harbor and possibly shareholder interests if I give them my encryption key?
It may be that the SEC is the best avenue to challenge this. We just didn't think that starting a shareholder lawsuit against our company would be helpful to our employment status...
You may want to try an iGo http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2104318, I bought one at Radioshack a year ago. It has a unit you can power through AC or DC power, then it has interchangeable tips that power different devices.
It's still a little bulky, but if you're carrying around a bunch of devices, you can definitely cut back on how many chargers you lug around.
Somewhere along the way I heard a story of a bar that installed a breathalizer in the bar, so that patrons could check their BAC to make sure they were safe to drive.
They took it out not too long later because people started having contests to see who could blow the highest.
A fellow engineering student and I were laughing about this, and think we may have a way to derive some enjoyment from the bobble-head gift.
.22 caliber rifle is conservatively similar to a 25 mm anti-aircraft round. Any idea where I'm going with this?
Say that the bobble head doll is six inches tall, and your CEO is six feet tall. This is just an approximation, as I don't have the fortune of either owning any bobble head dolls, or knowing your CEO. This gives us a 1:12 scale.
At this scale, a
Sure, the idea of shooting the thing has occurred to many others already, but it would be more interesting to make an engineering report out of it. Figure out what scaled distance you're shooting from, discuss material differences, apply these to difficulties which may be encountered in a more "real-life" setting, and you've got the makings of a great arrest and restraining order story. Videos could be used to further explicate the point, and different ammunition sizes experimented with to really explore the problem fully.
As a fictitious company I was part of this semester said, "We don't look for problems, we look for solutions".
Erik
I think this has been mentioned in passing, but I'd like to reinforce it.
I am a student in Construction Engineering, and one thing we've gone over is bidding strategies. The basic premise is that when bidding on jobs, you have an estimate of how much that job will cost you to build. You then look back at history, for similar jobs with similar competitors, and look at your probability of getting the job based upon various prices, such as 10% under cost, 10% above, and so forth. So we now have an idea of what the job will cost to do, as well as our likelihood of getting the work at various price points. Then we multiply the probablity of getting a job at a price point and how much percentage profit we'll make at that point, and find the price point which maximizes our profit.
Now this isn't a that aims to win every job, but over the long term will maximize profits. I see Amazon as attempting to do this type of research. Unlike a bid on a construction project, where bids are usually public knowledge, Amazon doesn't know where people who didn't buy a certain book went, or if they bought it at all. Therefore they're able to vary the price of a book, based upon the amount of profit they're making on it, and see what percentage of viewers of that item bought it. So we're back to probability times percentage profit. In my mind, it's market research, and they have been willing to at least give people the best deal available at that time.
In the future, I would not expect much in the way of fluctuating prices for products sold at Amazon, but more of a price that will maximize their profit (or minimize their losses, whatever the case might be).
Probably not the most powerful of effects, but in my mind the best bet would be to kill the signal to noise ratio for these people. Call them up, and tell them about the most well adjusted person in your school. Make them go through the hassle of checking it out.
;-)
Even better, arrange some people who are in class together, and actively mess with these people. Get some people to say this kind of thing about one person, and then that person shows them that it's all not true. I guess it'd kind of be discrediting their source of information. I mean, I was in high school a couple years ago, we would have had GREAT fun with something like this.
Erik
True, the ATI chipset is hot, and I can't speak much to the CPU utilization of the OS, but I'm not sure what you're referring to on the Powerbooks. One problem recently has been G3 series Powerbooks (Wallstreet, not the new Lombards so much) being warm under operation. That I'll concede to you. But if you're talking about the 5300 series powerbooks that reportedly burst into flames, that wasn't so much a heat dissipation problem as faulty electronics in some of the early Lithium Ion batteries they used (If I recall correctly Apple was some of of the first to use them).
I think that the most important consideration is how clear users keep the computer, ie, do they drape something over it in an extreme example? Keeping the vent holes open is important. Convection works great, but if you change the route air uses to travel through the computer it's going to get pretty dicey.
Anyways, that's what I think, and although I wouldn't buy one, I think the new iMacs are quite a great value for what you get.
Erik
THat's what I forgot to say. The downside is that seek times are probably fairly wretched. Maybe the software could have a cache big enough to store a couple songs, and if your mp3 player was set for random, it would choose the next one early enough for the drive to retrieve it. But I agree, having to go from one end of the tape to the other probably would take a while.
Sounds like a pretty neat drive. It looks like the data transfer rates would be good enough for an mp3 type application. 2 MB per second should easily handle mp3, shouldn't it? It also looks like it's much easier to use than a regular tape drive, although how reliable is company hype? The only problem I see is that there don't seem to be any drivers or programs to interface it for linux (or Mac in my case) Let's hope they see those two as profitable investments. This makes me rethink an Orb drive. It may not be quite as fast, but at least it sounds like they're available to buy. 30Gig for $40 isn't too bad either.
Erik
I've got to agree. The 89 is very nice. As a freshman engineering student this year, I thought about buying a 92. Then someone showed me a TI89. It does everything a TI92 does, and nearly all a 92Plus does. It's also smaller, and about $30 cheaper than a TI92. Very good calculator. Oh, it's running a 68000 chip.