That's just nonsense. Seriously. Maybe you're too young to remember the NES, SNES or Genesis (or older consoles still), but I'm sure many slashdotters are not: who can forget throwing
I'm 27 and I've got a 5-year-old son who is still playing my NES. My brother and I played the hell out of it when we were kids - everything from ripped cables to over-mashed buttons on the controllers. But the console and the controllers still work (with a little electrical tape and cartridge fiddling). I've never heard of an NES failing. I had mine crash once or twice while being left on overnight so we could continue in the morning (no 'save' feature in game), but that's about it!
Now, I can somewhat understand if the failures are due to optical or hard drive failures. Sorta. But 54%? I can see 20% in the first year, sure. But 54% is absurd, especially when you consider that the other game systems (Wii, PS2) have the same device types - and the Wii is likely played by the more abusive "child" player set. (Were they audited in this survey?)
Traditional POTS have battery backups at the PX to avoid the power-outage scenario. Likewise, I've seen a number of cell towers lately with solar cells and, I'd guess, battery backup inside the buildings. I know my cell has worked during wide power outages in the area, thus the reason for my suspicion.
Locally, phone service is offered over bridged VoIP now that they've got fiber to most exchanges - as near as I can tell. You use a normal analog handset, but the switching box that goes to the telco sends it as VoIP. Internet and phone service will go out while Cable TV stays up. I suspect as people 'consolidate' service under a single provider, and providers start offering "communication packages" (phone/internet/TV) universally, we'll see more of this; it cuts a lot of the cost of having to support analog.
Honestly, with the large communications racing each others' stock prices to the top (er...), it's only natural that there'd be no redundancy or communication device fallbacks in the case of an emergency. Batteries and the like to maintain any such thing are expensive to maintain, and if it's one relatively small cost they can cut out, it's one more cent they can offer their stock purchasers. For consumer and most commercial communications, it doesn't make a whole hell of lot of difference anyway.
Then at the top are lines like "Members of the class of 2013 won't be surprised when they can charge a latte on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen.".... nor should anyone who has recently left the cave. Hell, the first guy I knew that got an eReader was in his 60s. You're not excused from observing your surroundings just because you've made it to (or past) middle-aged.
I think it emphasizes the speed of societal and technological change which has been going on of late (say, the last two decades). I recall hearing in the early '00s how we are now undergoing a greater increase in knowledge as a society in a single day than occurred during the whole of WW2 - or something to that effect. That much change, that quickly, can have a drastic impact on a society, whether intentional or not.
Consider: kids today have, in all likelihood, always had cell phones and SMS. I'm 28 and I remember having friends whos' parents did not yet have a house phone. I do not SMS regularly; yet kids today are glued to it. My wife is a handful of years younger than I, and she is more inclined to text than I am. But it goes beyond that.
Is a person more inclined to pick up a book and read it, or search it out, if all they're familiar with (or primarily familiar with) are computers and web pages? There are kids out there who were born after Internet Explorer 3 came out who are fully 'plugged in' and have little to no interaction with 'dead media'.
Ignoring the possibility that they will potentially remain mostly illiterate throughout their lives, this is a huge, HUGE jump in world perception from what even my generation experienced: I'm 28, for crying out loud! I am NOT old, yet I see what the "youth" are doing and have access to, and what they haven't experienced, and I'm blown away by the changes.
Case in point: computers in schools. They were just starting to be a big thing when I was a kid, with the Apple IIe, III and similar monochrome display, 5.25" floppy, CLI driven machines. When computerized card catalogs came along, they were CLI based up through college. Most of the current generation equates 'typing commands' with something vaguely "programming" or "hacking" and use (in terms of functionality, from what I've seen) horrible web based catalogs. They interface through a GUI, with their mouse, and mostly don't have a comprehension of "data" (or data/file types) so much as "files" and "folders".
Anyway, I'm getting way off here. The point I'm trying to make is: things are changing a lot, and whereas it used to be that Grandma couldn't relate to Johny and his evil music with a beat that wasn't about baby Jesus in the 1920s, we're now seeing a "cultural gap" occur every 5 or so years - often with clear punctuation points as new fads come into the forefront (emo, rap, Xbox, etc.). Those things all shape and form culture pretty quickly to be something completely alien to those who were in the same "spot" not long ago.
Did you know that tight polyester dickies (slacks, whatever you want to call them) in horrible colors have come and gone twice again since the 1970s, both in the last several years? THAT is what I'm talking about.
The general rule is "keep it simple". Of course, that depends on a lot of things:
a) how many users you have b) what your purchase cycles are like c) what kind of user/system pairing you've got (ie 1 system for 5 users, or 5 systems for 1 user) d) how many 'departments' or work-units are we involving? e) possibly most importantly, how much of a pain in the ass are your users? IE, are they going to bitch and moan if they don't have "johns-computer" at login (like they're used to due to prior poor management)?
Personally, I try to make workstation names as short and memorable as possible for management purposes while still retaining a degree of clarity telling me where they are on the network. Again, it all depends on the specific environment to a large degree, and seems to get more the most complex and frustrating around 20-100 machines (due to organizational momentum and poor planning).
I like to put each 'working group' within its own domain, and depending on the size of the work group, name the computers after a person's position and role. For instance, manager.hr, clerical1.accounting, and so on. It eases application and GPO deployment through AD.
In places where I've come upon many small purchases (eg. 200ish machines, but all purchased 10 at a time) I'll put the batch number in the name: eg. b11manager.hr, with the b## being a number that increases with each new batch. This helps make the environment somewhat self-documenting, and is useful for when nobody updates documentation.
At least for me, when it comes to pizza, it's not the 'fat' that makes me a sluggard. It's the damn carbs/sugar: the white bread and the sugar in the sauce.
I am primarily a carnivorous omnivorous. I eat a lot of meat, a fair amount of fruits/veggies, and maybe a serving or two of (whole) grains a day. I experience the same brain-sapping characteristics whenever I eat white bread or a fair amount of sugar, but I am otherwise just fine when eating something like a bacon cheeseburger (homemade) or homemade pizza.
Would not something as low-level format of the drive do the trick? And they do not even do this?
I find that somewhat difficult to believe. I know the medical industry has strict requirements that such things be done; when I worked in health care, we destroyed all drives physically - it was good stress relief to take a stack out back and pound the piss out of them with a sledge from maintenance, too.
I can't believe that, at least, financial companies do not have similar legal requirements. Please, someone tell me it is not true, and that such companies do, in fact, properly 'delete' all disks before recycling.
He calls a P4 2ghz lowly, but a P4 2ghz is my main computer. Upgraded a couple months ago from a P3 1ghz.
Wait, I'm confused. That was an upgrade?
Clock for clock, the P3 was by far better than the P4. AMD CPUs of that era were superior by quite a bit as well. Really, anything in that 'era' was primarily constrained by RAM. I've got Windows 7 running on a Thinkpad X30 right now (512M, 1.2GHz P3M) which runs better than XP did, but there were plenty of 1-3GHz machines sold then which were barely even able to run what they shipped with (256M) due to all the crap/bloatware installed by the vendors.
And compared to a 3GHz+ multicore system, 2GHz is indeed poky. (Slashdot is most certainly a pain in the ass on such systems.)
I do, however, have a 500MHz Celeron laptop w/ 256Mb which works just fine for basic web browsing, terminals, and the like. It is also quite slow, admittedly, but no slower than when it was new.
Things have been "slowing down" for a while, now. Back in '96 or so, tech mags were saying we were 5 years from crystal based, non-volatile storage. I remember a number of articles about it. Granted, they're always saying that, but consider how many storage advancements have actually been made since then: not many. We had SCSI and IDE, and we've refined our processes and improved the specs in a linear fashion, yes. But there's been no substantial storage advancement; it's all been linear.
As far as processors, I'd say the landscape is changing from a MHz war to one of multiple cores (and it's time for the OSes and software to catch up). We'll see such things being better utilized once that is the case.
Have you actually disposed of any of your old electronics "properly"? Unless you're in a substantial urban environment, it's often difficult to find the correct channels to recycle through even in the US - and then you've got to pay to have it done.
Locally, there are a dozen or so places to recycle computers. Not one of them will accept bin electronics for recycling (I've tried) - because they are not actually recycling, but stripping the good parts for reuse and resale. The best bet is to pay $10 for a (small) box from Office Depot which has just barely enough space for a single tower.
Actually, what makes it feasible for them is not so much the manpower costs, it's the part costs.
For you to replace the components in a 3-year-old computer, it's going to cost anywhere from $30-80 or so, per part, provided you do not upgrade, then another $3-8 or so in shipping.
For a company, it's just not worth it at all. They've got their deployment, which they have cycled out; or they bought another corporation's 3-year-old computers to use, and are then ready to dispose of them.
Yes, the foreign man hour is "worth" less. But everything in these countries is "worth" less, making the value - and price - of something like modern electronics significantly higher, relatively speaking.
Likewise, it probably doesn't make all that much sense for someone over there to repair (what is to them) a 3-year-old computer - which in reality might be 6-9 years since its production. Why? Part availability. The older stuff isn't readily available at an equitable market price.
However, when it comes to something like this "pay to import junk computers" it makes sense, because the market value of the scrap, relative to the cost of a computer of the same vintage, is low. It would cost a lot more to get a known-good product, so the per-working-part cost is significantly lower.
Consider: the Dell gx270 and 280. They came out in 2002 or 2003 or so, right about when pretty much every manufacturer had the "bad caps" problems in their boards and PSUs. Those models had both those problems, as well as a high running temperature: the result was a LOT of failures. You can, in fact, get them for $89 still: link. I imagine they had to go through 2-3 "systems" before they found enough components to piece together a "good" system, and they've got to still make a profit from that $89. A bin of 20 mostly-working gx270s couldn't have cost much more than $200-300.
It makes a hell of a lot of sense, and not just for 3rd worlders. It's a good deal for anyone of limited funds/financing (and does not really take all that much time, relative to (say) unpacking a new system and getting the proper image on it).
Let's see... hammer, saw, nail, knife, fork, anvil, gun... any of those will fit in the "tool" role, bucko. It is a tool - for killing or maiming, as you put it. But, likewise, a hammer and nails are just tools for ruining wood with holes, right? Wrong. There is a larger purpose to using tools: you build something with nails, and you protect yourself with a gun.
Regardless of your (or my, or anyone else's) dogmatic opinion on what a "tool" should be defined as, a gun most certainly is a tool, by any common definition.
tool â â/tul/ â"noun 1. an implement, esp. one held in the hand, as a hammer, saw, or file, for performing or facilitating mechanical operations. 2. any instrument of manual operation. 3. the cutting or machining part of a lathe, planer, drill, or similar machine. 4. the machine itself; a machine tool. 5. anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose: Education is a tool for success.
You, sir, make yourself look like a tool through your ignorant ideological "guns are not tools" statement.
Finally, to the topic at hand, if you take crimes committed by illegals, the US crime rate drops precipitously. Look at crime demographics as they relate to illegal alien population: there is a very strong, direct correlation between illegal alien population density and increased violent crime rates.
There are several 'nice things' about being able to use common (lithium) AA cells that you can't get with a battery pack.
* You can swap out batteries indefinitely, provided you've got the cells. Yes, you can do this with battery packs, but... * Battery packs are not universally available, whereas AA cells are. Pick them up anywhere. And you can substitute alkaline cells in a pinch. * With an ARM, just power it down and replace the batteries, and you're back up and going in 5s. Might not even have to 'power down' at all if you've got a 'backup battery'. * With AA cells, you are not bound by a "MAD" type situation, where if the battery pack dies/runs out (out of device warranty/support) you're SOL and stuck buying an expensive pack (look at the Asus Eee 701 battery options, if you doubt). Likewise, if the device dies, you don't end up with an otherwise-unusable battery pack: you've just got AA cells you can use elsewhere.
As much as I'd like to believe that, this coincides too closely with W7 coming out for that to be a realistic assessment, I think.
Hardware integration isn't really a problem: for the most part, they could pick one of the many ARM dev kits available and rebuilt Ubuntu (or whatever) for it - ARM has been around the block a couple of times, and is arguably more stable as an architecture than x86.
For a mass-consumer device, there are just too many things missing on the ARM architecture for wide adoption. The problem is software, not hardware. A suitable, supported Flash implementation would be the first thing on that list. Getting all of the main, useful Firefox extensions to work on ARM would likely be a big requirement as well. The inability to run any common Windows software, even with WINE (or Mono), is also likely to be a problem.
I'd argue that it's much more diverse than "Eastern" and "Western". You can see the differences of emotional perception and demonstration/manifestation even between the (say) East Coast and Midwest of the US.
He meant the data in the files, as it pertains contextually - NOT actual data integrity. Any "computer technician" of nominal value will care about data integrity, assuring that his or her customers can do their work.
If anything, we should be teaching electricians, sysadmins, secretaries, and the like management skills, and going without managers. Costs would be lower, proficiency would be higher, and people would want to come to work on Monday!
I hate to say it, but as someone who just bought a Phenom II x3 710 and someone who has exclusively bought AMD processors (for non-laptop use) for personal use since the K6, AMD may have just lost a customer for future purchases.
AMD: you need to stop focusing on the 'performance' side of things: people who look at performance tend to look at benchmarks and relative value. You need to put heavy focus on making your dies smaller and power envelope lower, while trying to regain memory support and bus superiority again. That was what I looked for when I bought, and those are the things that the common consumer look for (albeit usually in terms of "power use", "cost", and "snappy response").
^ This is what you get when you've lost or abandoned all cultural and historical knowledge and wisdom in the quest for a completely morally-relativistic, culturally-ambiguous Oneness.
You misunderstand what the government's goals are. Government there is not to fulfill its mandate any longer; it's become a vehicle for making its own goals manifest. It's goal is control, and it gets that control through different vehicles: the military, government spending programs, taxes, government healthcare, social security, civil service, and so on. By controlling our money, they control us. By taking our money, they make us weaker.
So yes, this really is in line with what your tax dollars are for: expanded government control. (The question you should be asking is: which government does this benefit, exactly?)
Too bad this can only be modded to +5. It needs to be made 'sticky' to the top of the thread (and every goddamn Google programmer's forehead, ever).
Seriously: can we PLEASE have the ability to accurately filter things via syntax include/exclude and grouping again? I know it still 'works' but it doesn't work half a damn. Every once in a while I'll google for an error or some such and i'll have to prune it down to a handful of terms to even get results (and I know there should be more than just a handful for these kinds of things, because it's not uncommon.) Google is becoming almost useless for technical searches.
I don't know about anyone else, but I used to get much more search-contextual information on fringe information from Google, even when compared to a highly-tailored search. I don't know if Google does its indexing differently now, or if it's indexing/crawling different subsets of data, but the results are not only different, but often less useful in an academic/info-junkie sense.
For instance, searing for "hammurabi" now results in Wikipedia being the first link. This is true for most searches where there's a wiki page, and for many where the search phrase is simply mentioned in the wp page (yet there is no individual wp page for the topic). A lot of the sites I've got bookmarked when researching superstitions and myth surrounding his code (giants, atlantis, etc.) which are still present do not show up in the search results today - but did around 2003.
Likewise, search for anything which might have current cultural significance ('bush war crimes') and then compare it to something that had cultural significance just a couple years ago ('saddam war crimes'). The results are drastically different and (in the case of the former) cater to lazy people; they also make actually finding a -site- (as opposed to just a 'current event' article) on the topic somewhat more frustrating. (This is just an example, though there are plenty of other similar situations - forgive my 3am brain.)
Now, it might be that Google has actually gotten a lot better at returning pertinent results: so good that those little things I see and go "ohhh interesting! *click*" don't occur nearly as often, and as an info junkie, I view google as having degraded.
Who knows. Still head over heels better than Bing or anything else out there, as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad more progress on 'searching better' is being made. I just wish they'd not clog the works making -cultural- assumptions about what I'm after and stick to the semantics of my search phrases.
Slashdot Mirror
it couldn't make that much of a difference.
also, consider that the 'owner' of a Wii played primarily by kids will be the parents. That'll skewer statistics.
That's just nonsense. Seriously. Maybe you're too young to remember the NES, SNES or Genesis (or older consoles still), but I'm sure many slashdotters are not: who can forget throwing
I'm 27 and I've got a 5-year-old son who is still playing my NES. My brother and I played the hell out of it when we were kids - everything from ripped cables to over-mashed buttons on the controllers. But the console and the controllers still work (with a little electrical tape and cartridge fiddling). I've never heard of an NES failing. I had mine crash once or twice while being left on overnight so we could continue in the morning (no 'save' feature in game), but that's about it!
Now, I can somewhat understand if the failures are due to optical or hard drive failures. Sorta. But 54%? I can see 20% in the first year, sure. But 54% is absurd, especially when you consider that the other game systems (Wii, PS2) have the same device types - and the Wii is likely played by the more abusive "child" player set. (Were they audited in this survey?)
Traditional POTS have battery backups at the PX to avoid the power-outage scenario. Likewise, I've seen a number of cell towers lately with solar cells and, I'd guess, battery backup inside the buildings. I know my cell has worked during wide power outages in the area, thus the reason for my suspicion.
Locally, phone service is offered over bridged VoIP now that they've got fiber to most exchanges - as near as I can tell. You use a normal analog handset, but the switching box that goes to the telco sends it as VoIP. Internet and phone service will go out while Cable TV stays up. I suspect as people 'consolidate' service under a single provider, and providers start offering "communication packages" (phone/internet/TV) universally, we'll see more of this; it cuts a lot of the cost of having to support analog.
Honestly, with the large communications racing each others' stock prices to the top (er...), it's only natural that there'd be no redundancy or communication device fallbacks in the case of an emergency. Batteries and the like to maintain any such thing are expensive to maintain, and if it's one relatively small cost they can cut out, it's one more cent they can offer their stock purchasers. For consumer and most commercial communications, it doesn't make a whole hell of lot of difference anyway.
Then at the top are lines like "Members of the class of 2013 won't be surprised when they can charge a latte on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen.".... nor should anyone who has recently left the cave. Hell, the first guy I knew that got an eReader was in his 60s. You're not excused from observing your surroundings just because you've made it to (or past) middle-aged.
I think it emphasizes the speed of societal and technological change which has been going on of late (say, the last two decades). I recall hearing in the early '00s how we are now undergoing a greater increase in knowledge as a society in a single day than occurred during the whole of WW2 - or something to that effect. That much change, that quickly, can have a drastic impact on a society, whether intentional or not.
Consider: kids today have, in all likelihood, always had cell phones and SMS. I'm 28 and I remember having friends whos' parents did not yet have a house phone. I do not SMS regularly; yet kids today are glued to it. My wife is a handful of years younger than I, and she is more inclined to text than I am. But it goes beyond that.
Is a person more inclined to pick up a book and read it, or search it out, if all they're familiar with (or primarily familiar with) are computers and web pages? There are kids out there who were born after Internet Explorer 3 came out who are fully 'plugged in' and have little to no interaction with 'dead media'.
Ignoring the possibility that they will potentially remain mostly illiterate throughout their lives, this is a huge, HUGE jump in world perception from what even my generation experienced: I'm 28, for crying out loud! I am NOT old, yet I see what the "youth" are doing and have access to, and what they haven't experienced, and I'm blown away by the changes.
Case in point: computers in schools. They were just starting to be a big thing when I was a kid, with the Apple IIe, III and similar monochrome display, 5.25" floppy, CLI driven machines. When computerized card catalogs came along, they were CLI based up through college. Most of the current generation equates 'typing commands' with something vaguely "programming" or "hacking" and use (in terms of functionality, from what I've seen) horrible web based catalogs. They interface through a GUI, with their mouse, and mostly don't have a comprehension of "data" (or data/file types) so much as "files" and "folders".
Anyway, I'm getting way off here. The point I'm trying to make is: things are changing a lot, and whereas it used to be that Grandma couldn't relate to Johny and his evil music with a beat that wasn't about baby Jesus in the 1920s, we're now seeing a "cultural gap" occur every 5 or so years - often with clear punctuation points as new fads come into the forefront (emo, rap, Xbox, etc.). Those things all shape and form culture pretty quickly to be something completely alien to those who were in the same "spot" not long ago.
Did you know that tight polyester dickies (slacks, whatever you want to call them) in horrible colors have come and gone twice again since the 1970s, both in the last several years? THAT is what I'm talking about.
What's wrong with python?
The general rule is "keep it simple". Of course, that depends on a lot of things:
a) how many users you have
b) what your purchase cycles are like
c) what kind of user/system pairing you've got (ie 1 system for 5 users, or 5 systems for 1 user)
d) how many 'departments' or work-units are we involving?
e) possibly most importantly, how much of a pain in the ass are your users? IE, are they going to bitch and moan if they don't have "johns-computer" at login (like they're used to due to prior poor management)?
Personally, I try to make workstation names as short and memorable as possible for management purposes while still retaining a degree of clarity telling me where they are on the network. Again, it all depends on the specific environment to a large degree, and seems to get more the most complex and frustrating around 20-100 machines (due to organizational momentum and poor planning).
I like to put each 'working group' within its own domain, and depending on the size of the work group, name the computers after a person's position and role. For instance, manager.hr, clerical1.accounting, and so on. It eases application and GPO deployment through AD.
In places where I've come upon many small purchases (eg. 200ish machines, but all purchased 10 at a time) I'll put the batch number in the name: eg. b11manager.hr, with the b## being a number that increases with each new batch. This helps make the environment somewhat self-documenting, and is useful for when nobody updates documentation.
At least for me, when it comes to pizza, it's not the 'fat' that makes me a sluggard. It's the damn carbs/sugar: the white bread and the sugar in the sauce.
I am primarily a carnivorous omnivorous. I eat a lot of meat, a fair amount of fruits/veggies, and maybe a serving or two of (whole) grains a day. I experience the same brain-sapping characteristics whenever I eat white bread or a fair amount of sugar, but I am otherwise just fine when eating something like a bacon cheeseburger (homemade) or homemade pizza.
Would not something as low-level format of the drive do the trick? And they do not even do this?
I find that somewhat difficult to believe. I know the medical industry has strict requirements that such things be done; when I worked in health care, we destroyed all drives physically - it was good stress relief to take a stack out back and pound the piss out of them with a sledge from maintenance, too.
I can't believe that, at least, financial companies do not have similar legal requirements. Please, someone tell me it is not true, and that such companies do, in fact, properly 'delete' all disks before recycling.
He calls a P4 2ghz lowly, but a P4 2ghz is my main computer. Upgraded a couple months ago from a P3 1ghz.
Wait, I'm confused. That was an upgrade?
Clock for clock, the P3 was by far better than the P4. AMD CPUs of that era were superior by quite a bit as well. Really, anything in that 'era' was primarily constrained by RAM. I've got Windows 7 running on a Thinkpad X30 right now (512M, 1.2GHz P3M) which runs better than XP did, but there were plenty of 1-3GHz machines sold then which were barely even able to run what they shipped with (256M) due to all the crap/bloatware installed by the vendors.
And compared to a 3GHz+ multicore system, 2GHz is indeed poky. (Slashdot is most certainly a pain in the ass on such systems.)
I do, however, have a 500MHz Celeron laptop w/ 256Mb which works just fine for basic web browsing, terminals, and the like. It is also quite slow, admittedly, but no slower than when it was new.
Things have been "slowing down" for a while, now. Back in '96 or so, tech mags were saying we were 5 years from crystal based, non-volatile storage. I remember a number of articles about it. Granted, they're always saying that, but consider how many storage advancements have actually been made since then: not many. We had SCSI and IDE, and we've refined our processes and improved the specs in a linear fashion, yes. But there's been no substantial storage advancement; it's all been linear.
As far as processors, I'd say the landscape is changing from a MHz war to one of multiple cores (and it's time for the OSes and software to catch up). We'll see such things being better utilized once that is the case.
Have you actually disposed of any of your old electronics "properly"? Unless you're in a substantial urban environment, it's often difficult to find the correct channels to recycle through even in the US - and then you've got to pay to have it done.
Locally, there are a dozen or so places to recycle computers. Not one of them will accept bin electronics for recycling (I've tried) - because they are not actually recycling, but stripping the good parts for reuse and resale. The best bet is to pay $10 for a (small) box from Office Depot which has just barely enough space for a single tower.
Actually, what makes it feasible for them is not so much the manpower costs, it's the part costs.
For you to replace the components in a 3-year-old computer, it's going to cost anywhere from $30-80 or so, per part, provided you do not upgrade, then another $3-8 or so in shipping.
For a company, it's just not worth it at all. They've got their deployment, which they have cycled out; or they bought another corporation's 3-year-old computers to use, and are then ready to dispose of them.
Yes, the foreign man hour is "worth" less. But everything in these countries is "worth" less, making the value - and price - of something like modern electronics significantly higher, relatively speaking.
Likewise, it probably doesn't make all that much sense for someone over there to repair (what is to them) a 3-year-old computer - which in reality might be 6-9 years since its production. Why? Part availability. The older stuff isn't readily available at an equitable market price.
However, when it comes to something like this "pay to import junk computers" it makes sense, because the market value of the scrap, relative to the cost of a computer of the same vintage, is low. It would cost a lot more to get a known-good product, so the per-working-part cost is significantly lower.
Consider: the Dell gx270 and 280. They came out in 2002 or 2003 or so, right about when pretty much every manufacturer had the "bad caps" problems in their boards and PSUs. Those models had both those problems, as well as a high running temperature: the result was a LOT of failures. You can, in fact, get them for $89 still: link. I imagine they had to go through 2-3 "systems" before they found enough components to piece together a "good" system, and they've got to still make a profit from that $89. A bin of 20 mostly-working gx270s couldn't have cost much more than $200-300.
It makes a hell of a lot of sense, and not just for 3rd worlders. It's a good deal for anyone of limited funds/financing (and does not really take all that much time, relative to (say) unpacking a new system and getting the proper image on it).
What I am curious about is why a Spaniard is allowed to do so in Mexico. That's more curious than dubious restrictions on import.
a *tool* is purely designed to *task*
Let's see... hammer, saw, nail, knife, fork, anvil, gun... any of those will fit in the "tool" role, bucko. It is a tool - for killing or maiming, as you put it. But, likewise, a hammer and nails are just tools for ruining wood with holes, right? Wrong. There is a larger purpose to using tools: you build something with nails, and you protect yourself with a gun.
Regardless of your (or my, or anyone else's) dogmatic opinion on what a "tool" should be defined as, a gun most certainly is a tool, by any common definition.
tool
â
â/tul/
â"noun
1. an implement, esp. one held in the hand, as a hammer, saw, or file, for performing or facilitating mechanical operations.
2. any instrument of manual operation.
3. the cutting or machining part of a lathe, planer, drill, or similar machine.
4. the machine itself; a machine tool.
5. anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose: Education is a tool for success.
You, sir, make yourself look like a tool through your ignorant ideological "guns are not tools" statement.
Finally, to the topic at hand, if you take crimes committed by illegals, the US crime rate drops precipitously. Look at crime demographics as they relate to illegal alien population: there is a very strong, direct correlation between illegal alien population density and increased violent crime rates.
There are several 'nice things' about being able to use common (lithium) AA cells that you can't get with a battery pack.
* You can swap out batteries indefinitely, provided you've got the cells. Yes, you can do this with battery packs, but...
* Battery packs are not universally available, whereas AA cells are. Pick them up anywhere. And you can substitute alkaline cells in a pinch.
* With an ARM, just power it down and replace the batteries, and you're back up and going in 5s. Might not even have to 'power down' at all if you've got a 'backup battery'.
* With AA cells, you are not bound by a "MAD" type situation, where if the battery pack dies/runs out (out of device warranty/support) you're SOL and stuck buying an expensive pack (look at the Asus Eee 701 battery options, if you doubt). Likewise, if the device dies, you don't end up with an otherwise-unusable battery pack: you've just got AA cells you can use elsewhere.
As much as I'd like to believe that, this coincides too closely with W7 coming out for that to be a realistic assessment, I think.
Hardware integration isn't really a problem: for the most part, they could pick one of the many ARM dev kits available and rebuilt Ubuntu (or whatever) for it - ARM has been around the block a couple of times, and is arguably more stable as an architecture than x86.
For a mass-consumer device, there are just too many things missing on the ARM architecture for wide adoption. The problem is software, not hardware. A suitable, supported Flash implementation would be the first thing on that list. Getting all of the main, useful Firefox extensions to work on ARM would likely be a big requirement as well. The inability to run any common Windows software, even with WINE (or Mono), is also likely to be a problem.
It could be a recent mutation which has not had the opportunity to propagate substantially. (How many hours a day do primates sleep?)
I imagine something like this would, like most mutations, be regressive, and therefore take a fairly long time to reach critical/substantial momentum.
Yep.
I'd argue that it's much more diverse than "Eastern" and "Western". You can see the differences of emotional perception and demonstration/manifestation even between the (say) East Coast and Midwest of the US.
He meant the data in the files, as it pertains contextually - NOT actual data integrity. Any "computer technician" of nominal value will care about data integrity, assuring that his or her customers can do their work.
Exactly!
If anything, we should be teaching electricians, sysadmins, secretaries, and the like management skills, and going without managers. Costs would be lower, proficiency would be higher, and people would want to come to work on Monday!
I hate to say it, but as someone who just bought a Phenom II x3 710 and someone who has exclusively bought AMD processors (for non-laptop use) for personal use since the K6, AMD may have just lost a customer for future purchases.
AMD: you need to stop focusing on the 'performance' side of things: people who look at performance tend to look at benchmarks and relative value. You need to put heavy focus on making your dies smaller and power envelope lower, while trying to regain memory support and bus superiority again. That was what I looked for when I bought, and those are the things that the common consumer look for (albeit usually in terms of "power use", "cost", and "snappy response").
^ This is what you get when you've lost or abandoned all cultural and historical knowledge and wisdom in the quest for a completely morally-relativistic, culturally-ambiguous Oneness.
You misunderstand what the government's goals are. Government there is not to fulfill its mandate any longer; it's become a vehicle for making its own goals manifest. It's goal is control, and it gets that control through different vehicles: the military, government spending programs, taxes, government healthcare, social security, civil service, and so on. By controlling our money, they control us. By taking our money, they make us weaker.
So yes, this really is in line with what your tax dollars are for: expanded government control. (The question you should be asking is: which government does this benefit, exactly?)
Too bad this can only be modded to +5. It needs to be made 'sticky' to the top of the thread (and every goddamn Google programmer's forehead, ever).
Seriously: can we PLEASE have the ability to accurately filter things via syntax include/exclude and grouping again? I know it still 'works' but it doesn't work half a damn. Every once in a while I'll google for an error or some such and i'll have to prune it down to a handful of terms to even get results (and I know there should be more than just a handful for these kinds of things, because it's not uncommon.) Google is becoming almost useless for technical searches.
I don't know about anyone else, but I used to get much more search-contextual information on fringe information from Google, even when compared to a highly-tailored search. I don't know if Google does its indexing differently now, or if it's indexing/crawling different subsets of data, but the results are not only different, but often less useful in an academic/info-junkie sense.
For instance, searing for "hammurabi" now results in Wikipedia being the first link. This is true for most searches where there's a wiki page, and for many where the search phrase is simply mentioned in the wp page (yet there is no individual wp page for the topic). A lot of the sites I've got bookmarked when researching superstitions and myth surrounding his code (giants, atlantis, etc.) which are still present do not show up in the search results today - but did around 2003.
Likewise, search for anything which might have current cultural significance ('bush war crimes') and then compare it to something that had cultural significance just a couple years ago ('saddam war crimes'). The results are drastically different and (in the case of the former) cater to lazy people; they also make actually finding a -site- (as opposed to just a 'current event' article) on the topic somewhat more frustrating. (This is just an example, though there are plenty of other similar situations - forgive my 3am brain.)
Now, it might be that Google has actually gotten a lot better at returning pertinent results: so good that those little things I see and go "ohhh interesting! *click*" don't occur nearly as often, and as an info junkie, I view google as having degraded.
Who knows. Still head over heels better than Bing or anything else out there, as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad more progress on 'searching better' is being made. I just wish they'd not clog the works making -cultural- assumptions about what I'm after and stick to the semantics of my search phrases.