Did you ever stop to consider that those people "sneaking across the boarder", as you so negatively put it, may simply not be able to read the large signs on the fences that clearly stated they were entering another country?
Who could blame them for not noticing the cultural difference, as there isn't much of one in many of the southern towns which have been overwhelmed by these apparent illiterates.
Nobody sane wants to make immigration more difficult for contributing members of society. The whole 'anchor baby' thing is an axillary response to what is happening; it's a symptom, not the cause, of immigration 'glut'.
What people want is for the enforcement of current immigration laws, or if not that, then at least keep the southern border secure or remove the incentive to immigrate illegally - the result of which is huge communities of non-assimilating, non-citizens.
That would kind of lead to the conclusion that "technology improvement does not equate with progress", would it not?
To "abuse" tech, you have to assume tech has some sort of higher calling. What might that be, exactly? To a communist, the Western world abuses said technology by allowing freedom of expression and communication. To a libertarian/libertine, the totalitarian parts of the world abuse it by putting restrictions on it.
Technology is a tool; it has and always will be. It can not be "abused". You can use it to abuse people, but it is like any other tool, whether those tools be guns, pencils, or laws. (Arguably, politicians are tools, too; albeit, just a slightly less useful type.)
That is what "X does not exists" means; we apply the same standard to everything else whose non-existence we take as given.
There was an odor in my house, once. I called the landlord and a guy came over to check for gas leaks. He didn't find any. He then sent over a guy to check for dead mice and the like. He didn't find any of those, either. This went on for some time, over a period of months. A couple neighbors reported it, and the police got involved to check for drug labs. None of those, either.
The odor was unpleasant, but not over-powering. Then, a couple weeks later, and the odor was gone almost immediately. We never tracked it down, but nobody contests that it
If you can't find something, maybe you're looking in the wrong place. We haven't determined (outside of crazy theories) the origin of everything, yet, either - that does not mean one way or the other that it was God or that it was some other sort of cosmic coincidence.
I suppose you could make an inductive argument: "We've seen what we've seen of the universe (or of any greater realities encompassing it, if they exist), and it holds true everywhere we've seen. Therefore, it holds true everywhere." The problem with that is that its strength relies on our perceiving a representative sample of reality, but we have little to back that assumption up.
It's interesting to me that the arguments used to explain away God by atheists are the same ball and game as those used by the Church when Copernicus and Galileo were doing their thing. "Look here, that's not possible! It's [not] written in this here codex, and therefore false/heresy!"
The only appreciable difference is that one was wrong due to interpretation/understanding of something which has not changed (and is supposedly of God); the other is wrong because he's basing his beliefs on the flawed and constantly changing ideas of other scientists.
Science is no place for dogma. Sure, have your beliefs, people - but don't base your world view on those beliefs. Base your beliefs on observation (and, ultimately, your world view). It's a difficult distinction which most people seem to get backwards.
That said, I'm going to keep using Google, the secular search engine.:)
Core i5/i7 are significantly faster than the previous generations, even without the built-in overclocking. They're on par with AMD again (at least in terms of performance), and they're got triple channel memory support - a big win. They've also replaced the vastly inferior FSB, allowing for more system throughput that rivals what AMD has, again.
If you're not seeing gains, then it is quite likely that you do not need the newer processors - that is, the ones with more than one or two cores. Very few common workloads actually need these newer CPUs, and most user workloads would be much better suited with only one or two fast cores (vs. 8 fast-but-not-3GHz cores). If you're dealing with servers, multiple cores is, simply, awesome.
It's also possible that the lack of gains you're seeing are due to your graphics processor. Are you a gamer? Maybe that's why you're not seeing an improvement - you've got a slow video card.
No, sir: your assessment is clearly wrong. Core i# stuff is easily 30% faster than the previous generation of Intel cards, never mind the generation before that. It's the first major architecture improvement Intel has made in about 8 years, for crying out loud.
Thought the '2' in Core2 referred to the second generation already...
With the Core i3/5/7 being the third these are more like the fourth generation.
Not really. Sandy Bridge seems to share more architectural similarities with Core/Core2 than with Core i# chips - they were obviously made by different, albeit likely related, internal development teams. SB doesn't support triple channel RAM, for starters.
Re stating 'I Know', Richard Dawkins has a great thought experiment on this.
-Statement: There is a perfect Victorian china tea set orbiting the sun in an orbit about half way between the sun and the earth.
My position: I'm willing to say that I know this statement is false.
So what you do to determine this is use inductive reasoning to determine the probability, yes?
The same applies to god. If you show me some evidence, then I'll change my mind. But from an examination of current evidence, I say that the existence of some involved creator is vanishingly unlikely.
On what core basis is it vanishingly unlikely that there is/was a creator involved?
Which is more probabilistic: 1) that things have evolved from the void of nothingness and there is is an underlying Theory of Everything which contradicts entropy and would explain a great many scientific inconsistencies
2) or that there is/was an outside controlling force which had its hand in setting things in motion?
It would seem odd to me that the primary field of science which has proponents that says "this all happened by chance" is also a broken theory within the context of entropy.
As far as I know, there has been no evidence brought to light - no discernible fact, no mathematic theorem, etc. - which even suggests at the lack of a creator at some point. (Most of those things don't overtly suggest a creator, either.) If you're writing a creator off on mere complexity, I'd suggest you examine the scope of your knowledge which might be, understandably, lacking compared to what would be needed to start "existence".
Would that car pass Western fuel economy testing, safety rating testing, etc.?
And even if it would, that would add 50%+ to the ticket price.
Personally, I'd pay $6k for a new vehicle... which I knew was rigorously designed, carefully assembled, and the like. I don't really care what it would be, as long as it'd be big enough to legally transport my family (which, due to living in the US, is a bit of a problem in most cars due to having to keep children under 7 or so in car large, bulky seats which do not fit 3-across in a sedan). I don't care if the car doesn't have all the "nice" things like AC and airbags, as long as it's not a deathtrap.
You sir, are absolutely correct. This little nugget was sitting in the back of my mind when I commented, but I wish I hadn't - because I didn't mention it, and now I wish to mod you up.
Relatively speaking, the Earth most certainly is the center of the universe; or, at least, our universe. Every point of context we have starts Here; if that is not a center, then I do not know what you might call it.
At least we Westerners don't believe the sun sets at the bottom of a well every day.
In defense of all religion, however, it's been the religious groups which have preserved and fostered knowledge/education through the ages in stark contrast to the pursuits of secular powers throughout history. It was the religious groups who stored, preserved, and advanced despite secular power interests. It was only through state-sponsored religion that we were able to advance society to a point where that knowledge could be utilized, allowing for the secular world to seek Enlightenment.
Hell, we're even finding today in physical sciences (including quantum physics) that many of the tenants of Eastern religions may have even had a basis in science, at one point - which is dire news indeed for contemporary soft-science standing theories, like Evolution (as the whole "this is the first time we've advanced to this level") would be unlikely, at best.
Maybe in terms of business and the like, but for the average user, the desktop has always been where it's at. The desktop enables:
1) Porn. Not going to get much porn on a server, regardless of whether you're on a video terminal or not. 2) Graphics and audio editing (video, photo, etc.) - you're going to need that desktop with the dedicated audio/video card. 3) Games. Unless we're talking about nethack, you're using your workstation.
In the world of computers, servers are the monks and workstations are the scribes and artists. It's been that way for about 20 years, more or less.
What is it about UNIX design/philosophy, particularly as it is usually imlemented, that prohibits a user from:
1) clicking on a link in an email 2) downloading a binary and/or script 3) running said script/binary (granted, they'd have to chmod +x first, so there's at least a modicum of technical competency required before this would work) 4) shitting more worms across the Internet as they spam everyone on their Thunderbird/Kmail/whatever address book via their upstream SMTP server
Seriously. Does the iPhone actually do anything that (say) could not be done with Windows 7? No, not really.
OK, you're right: I should not have said "bloated" and "big". I should have said "slow as fuck and bloated".
Leave your browser open for the better part of the day, and let me know how Firefox performs (vs. Chrome). Night and day difference.
I can't even watch 720p stuff on some of my computers with Firefox - not if I want to be doing anything else. (These are single core systems.) Chrome handles much better in the same (limited memory) environment.
That said, recent Chromium builds have had some pretty severe memory leaks.
I'd agree there, sometimes. I've run Chrome for weeks without a single hickup, as well.
Unlike Firefox crashing, which often requires a 'reboot' lasting up to a minute on a modern machine (if you're using session manager or the like), a single tab requires ctl-R to be hit, once - and it's instantly back (often/sometimes with session data). That's stock, mind you. Firefox, on the other hand, records no such thing, and even with Session Manager will often lose session data (whether it's opened tabs or things typed in the crashed windows).
I have 8 cores. I open 5 tabs, creating 5 processes. One tab crashes. One process crashes. The remaining 4 remain as they are; usually, it's quite simple to regain the crashed page by loading it.
With stock firefox, that usually means pulling each of those 5 pages out of history again, after restarting the whole browser.
As far as "hanging one core and not the whole processor" you do realize that in a modern operating system, processes are not inextricably linked to a core? If your whole system locks due to the browser hanging, that's poor system design (Windows, Mac) or failing hardware.
So, they introduce a faster Javascript engine. Good for them; they've got a working prototype/alpha of 1/4th of the necessary features to catch up with everyone else, at this point:
* multiprocess functionality * security mechanisms resulting from said multiprocess functionality * better thread/tab/etc. management
At this point, the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable: Chrome, for instance, seems to implement most of the extensions I used natively, and does it better than Firefox extensions did, to boot. (Most of which were only necessary to make up for FF shortcomings, like crashing.)
Honestly, the very first thing FF should be working on is multiprocess shit. It's big, bloated, and at this point, somewhat archaic in architecture - the code base is over 12 years old, isn't it?
Agreed. Rackspace can do as they please, and given the noise over this matter, it's no surprise that they acted as they did.
However, the bigger issue here is: how the hell does something like this not only make the news, but keep itself in the limelight for days? We're talking about the organized action of 50 people, performing a constitutionally protected act.
It has been bigger news than the rioting in LA and the lawlessness on the southern border (of which we have seen barely any news). Does Rackspace host any thing relating to La Raza? Why have those (hypothetical) sites not been taken down (or, at least, received any news)? The internal dissolution of one's country is somewhat bigger news than the isolated and non-violent religious actions of 50 nuts.
Furthermore, how the fuck is this something of international turmoil? Has anyone even actually read what the Quran says about (for instance) jihad? Here's a hint: it says not much at all about inner, spiritual trials and a bit about conquering and defeating the opponents of Islam in war ('opponents', in the Islamic sense, meaning "not Muslims"). Why is so little made of this, or the countless atrocities endorsed via Sharia law (and which are directly supported by the Quran)? We're talking about a religion which assassinates/kills people for drawing cartoons, stones women for showing a little ankle, and considers a women adulterous in the event of rape unless there are multiple male witnesses to back her up, and various other atrocities, for fuck sake. Go read their "holy" book!
Let's have a little discernment in our hatred of religions, for crying out loud. Considering not only what is written in the Quran, but what is considered to be the prevailing dogma throughout the Muslim world as it pertains to that Quran, it could be considered roughly on par with burning, say, Mein Kampf. Sure, burning books is an offensive act - one we're conditioned against socially and culturally in the West - but let's consider this with a little more pragmatism.
Would it be a bad thing if all books encouraging the extermination, subjugation, etc. of other races, genders, of beliefs were to disappear? Probably not. A symbolic burning to say "this is bad"?
Sadly, that's true - especially for technology related stuff.
* Anything with "-soft" in it? yeah, no. Not only are they all taken, but they suck. * Anything not really long? Already taken. * Two or three common words, or variations thereof? Taken. * Greek names, etc.? Mostly taken.
Unless you're naming the company after yourself, and you've got a long German name, good luck.
THe thing about netbooks is that they offer a limited subset of functionality - which is why people aren't willing to drop a lot of money on them. "I can't really use it for much" so it isn't worth much. It (like a tablet) is just too small. The difference between a tablet (iPad) buyer and a netbook buyer is that one buys for trendiness and the other does not.
(I'm not sure what the iPad users justify their purchases with. What functionality do they offer which you'd usually perform with a netbook? Watching movies? Is that even possible, outside of iTunes? And I'd have to hold it?)
I have no doubt that a convertible tablet/netbook would sell pretty damn well, if the hardware/software functionality was there and the price was right. A convertible Atom/ARM tablet? Yeah, I'd spring right on that, even if it cost (marginally) more. Why one of those, but neither a tablet or a netbook? Simple: I envision my use to be somewhat split 50/50 in tablet/mobile use and flat surface use for such a small, always-on device.
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Did you ever stop to consider that those people "sneaking across the boarder", as you so negatively put it, may simply not be able to read the large signs on the fences that clearly stated they were entering another country?
Who could blame them for not noticing the cultural difference, as there isn't much of one in many of the southern towns which have been overwhelmed by these apparent illiterates.
Nobody sane wants to make immigration more difficult for contributing members of society. The whole 'anchor baby' thing is an axillary response to what is happening; it's a symptom, not the cause, of immigration 'glut'.
What people want is for the enforcement of current immigration laws, or if not that, then at least keep the southern border secure or remove the incentive to immigrate illegally - the result of which is huge communities of non-assimilating, non-citizens.
That would kind of lead to the conclusion that "technology improvement does not equate with progress", would it not?
To "abuse" tech, you have to assume tech has some sort of higher calling. What might that be, exactly? To a communist, the Western world abuses said technology by allowing freedom of expression and communication. To a libertarian/libertine, the totalitarian parts of the world abuse it by putting restrictions on it.
Technology is a tool; it has and always will be. It can not be "abused". You can use it to abuse people, but it is like any other tool, whether those tools be guns, pencils, or laws. (Arguably, politicians are tools, too; albeit, just a slightly less useful type.)
That is what "X does not exists" means; we apply the same standard to everything else whose non-existence we take as given.
There was an odor in my house, once. I called the landlord and a guy came over to check for gas leaks. He didn't find any. He then sent over a guy to check for dead mice and the like. He didn't find any of those, either. This went on for some time, over a period of months. A couple neighbors reported it, and the police got involved to check for drug labs. None of those, either.
The odor was unpleasant, but not over-powering. Then, a couple weeks later, and the odor was gone almost immediately. We never tracked it down, but nobody contests that it
If you can't find something, maybe you're looking in the wrong place. We haven't determined (outside of crazy theories) the origin of everything, yet, either - that does not mean one way or the other that it was God or that it was some other sort of cosmic coincidence.
I suppose you could make an inductive argument: "We've seen what we've seen of the universe (or of any greater realities encompassing it, if they exist), and it holds true everywhere we've seen. Therefore, it holds true everywhere." The problem with that is that its strength relies on our perceiving a representative sample of reality, but we have little to back that assumption up.
It's interesting to me that the arguments used to explain away God by atheists are the same ball and game as those used by the Church when Copernicus and Galileo were doing their thing. "Look here, that's not possible! It's [not] written in this here codex, and therefore false/heresy!"
The only appreciable difference is that one was wrong due to interpretation/understanding of something which has not changed (and is supposedly of God); the other is wrong because he's basing his beliefs on the flawed and constantly changing ideas of other scientists.
Science is no place for dogma. Sure, have your beliefs, people - but don't base your world view on those beliefs. Base your beliefs on observation (and, ultimately, your world view). It's a difficult distinction which most people seem to get backwards.
That said, I'm going to keep using Google, the secular search engine. :)
Are you serious?
Core i5/i7 are significantly faster than the previous generations, even without the built-in overclocking. They're on par with AMD again (at least in terms of performance), and they're got triple channel memory support - a big win. They've also replaced the vastly inferior FSB, allowing for more system throughput that rivals what AMD has, again.
If you're not seeing gains, then it is quite likely that you do not need the newer processors - that is, the ones with more than one or two cores. Very few common workloads actually need these newer CPUs, and most user workloads would be much better suited with only one or two fast cores (vs. 8 fast-but-not-3GHz cores). If you're dealing with servers, multiple cores is, simply, awesome.
It's also possible that the lack of gains you're seeing are due to your graphics processor. Are you a gamer? Maybe that's why you're not seeing an improvement - you've got a slow video card.
No, sir: your assessment is clearly wrong. Core i# stuff is easily 30% faster than the previous generation of Intel cards, never mind the generation before that. It's the first major architecture improvement Intel has made in about 8 years, for crying out loud.
Thought the '2' in Core2 referred to the second generation already...
With the Core i3/5/7 being the third these are more like the fourth generation.
Not really. Sandy Bridge seems to share more architectural similarities with Core/Core2 than with Core i# chips - they were obviously made by different, albeit likely related, internal development teams. SB doesn't support triple channel RAM, for starters.
Re stating 'I Know', Richard Dawkins has a great thought experiment on this.
-Statement: There is a perfect Victorian china tea set orbiting the sun in an orbit about half way between the sun and the earth.
My position: I'm willing to say that I know this statement is false.
So what you do to determine this is use inductive reasoning to determine the probability, yes?
The same applies to god. If you show me some evidence, then I'll change my mind. But from an examination of current evidence, I say that the existence of some involved creator is vanishingly unlikely.
On what core basis is it vanishingly unlikely that there is/was a creator involved?
Which is more probabilistic:
1) that things have evolved from the void of nothingness and there is is an underlying Theory of Everything which contradicts entropy and would explain a great many scientific inconsistencies
2) or that there is/was an outside controlling force which had its hand in setting things in motion?
It would seem odd to me that the primary field of science which has proponents that says "this all happened by chance" is also a broken theory within the context of entropy.
As far as I know, there has been no evidence brought to light - no discernible fact, no mathematic theorem, etc. - which even suggests at the lack of a creator at some point. (Most of those things don't overtly suggest a creator, either.) If you're writing a creator off on mere complexity, I'd suggest you examine the scope of your knowledge which might be, understandably, lacking compared to what would be needed to start "existence".
How could that much be considered "the lowest bid"?
Give one guy 6 months and 500k (100k less than the apparent bid), and I'm sure he'd have it done and in budget. WTF.
Hell, it wasn't long ago that finding 2GB of flash for $35 was a bit difficult, too.
Would that car pass Western fuel economy testing, safety rating testing, etc.?
And even if it would, that would add 50%+ to the ticket price.
Personally, I'd pay $6k for a new vehicle... which I knew was rigorously designed, carefully assembled, and the like. I don't really care what it would be, as long as it'd be big enough to legally transport my family (which, due to living in the US, is a bit of a problem in most cars due to having to keep children under 7 or so in car large, bulky seats which do not fit 3-across in a sedan). I don't care if the car doesn't have all the "nice" things like AC and airbags, as long as it's not a deathtrap.
You sir, are absolutely correct. This little nugget was sitting in the back of my mind when I commented, but I wish I hadn't - because I didn't mention it, and now I wish to mod you up.
Relatively speaking, the Earth most certainly is the center of the universe; or, at least, our universe. Every point of context we have starts Here; if that is not a center, then I do not know what you might call it.
At least we Westerners don't believe the sun sets at the bottom of a well every day.
In defense of all religion, however, it's been the religious groups which have preserved and fostered knowledge/education through the ages in stark contrast to the pursuits of secular powers throughout history. It was the religious groups who stored, preserved, and advanced despite secular power interests. It was only through state-sponsored religion that we were able to advance society to a point where that knowledge could be utilized, allowing for the secular world to seek Enlightenment.
Hell, we're even finding today in physical sciences (including quantum physics) that many of the tenants of Eastern religions may have even had a basis in science, at one point - which is dire news indeed for contemporary soft-science standing theories, like Evolution (as the whole "this is the first time we've advanced to this level") would be unlikely, at best.
Maybe in terms of business and the like, but for the average user, the desktop has always been where it's at. The desktop enables:
1) Porn. Not going to get much porn on a server, regardless of whether you're on a video terminal or not.
2) Graphics and audio editing (video, photo, etc.) - you're going to need that desktop with the dedicated audio/video card.
3) Games. Unless we're talking about nethack, you're using your workstation.
In the world of computers, servers are the monks and workstations are the scribes and artists. It's been that way for about 20 years, more or less.
Kind of like how the Palm Pre can do that?
Very neat feature, that.
I'm not sure we're reading the same thing, here.
What is it about UNIX design/philosophy, particularly as it is usually imlemented, that prohibits a user from:
1) clicking on a link in an email
2) downloading a binary and/or script
3) running said script/binary (granted, they'd have to chmod +x first, so there's at least a modicum of technical competency required before this would work)
4) shitting more worms across the Internet as they spam everyone on their Thunderbird/Kmail/whatever address book via their upstream SMTP server
Seriously. Does the iPhone actually do anything that (say) could not be done with Windows 7? No, not really.
OK, you're right: I should not have said "bloated" and "big". I should have said "slow as fuck and bloated".
Leave your browser open for the better part of the day, and let me know how Firefox performs (vs. Chrome). Night and day difference.
I can't even watch 720p stuff on some of my computers with Firefox - not if I want to be doing anything else. (These are single core systems.) Chrome handles much better in the same (limited memory) environment.
That said, recent Chromium builds have had some pretty severe memory leaks.
I'd agree there, sometimes. I've run Chrome for weeks without a single hickup, as well.
Unlike Firefox crashing, which often requires a 'reboot' lasting up to a minute on a modern machine (if you're using session manager or the like), a single tab requires ctl-R to be hit, once - and it's instantly back (often/sometimes with session data). That's stock, mind you. Firefox, on the other hand, records no such thing, and even with Session Manager will often lose session data (whether it's opened tabs or things typed in the crashed windows).
Still "hidden" I am afraid - as far as i know. I heard rumor that there's a native-and-real adblock, but I've yet to bother to seek it out.
What?
I have 8 cores. I open 5 tabs, creating 5 processes. One tab crashes. One process crashes. The remaining 4 remain as they are; usually, it's quite simple to regain the crashed page by loading it.
With stock firefox, that usually means pulling each of those 5 pages out of history again, after restarting the whole browser.
As far as "hanging one core and not the whole processor" you do realize that in a modern operating system, processes are not inextricably linked to a core? If your whole system locks due to the browser hanging, that's poor system design (Windows, Mac) or failing hardware.
So, they introduce a faster Javascript engine. Good for them; they've got a working prototype/alpha of 1/4th of the necessary features to catch up with everyone else, at this point:
* multiprocess functionality
* security mechanisms resulting from said multiprocess functionality
* better thread/tab/etc. management
At this point, the only thing Firefox has going for it is adblock and the huge extension repository. Even then, its debatable: Chrome, for instance, seems to implement most of the extensions I used natively, and does it better than Firefox extensions did, to boot. (Most of which were only necessary to make up for FF shortcomings, like crashing.)
Honestly, the very first thing FF should be working on is multiprocess shit. It's big, bloated, and at this point, somewhat archaic in architecture - the code base is over 12 years old, isn't it?
Agreed. Rackspace can do as they please, and given the noise over this matter, it's no surprise that they acted as they did.
However, the bigger issue here is: how the hell does something like this not only make the news, but keep itself in the limelight for days? We're talking about the organized action of 50 people, performing a constitutionally protected act.
It has been bigger news than the rioting in LA and the lawlessness on the southern border (of which we have seen barely any news). Does Rackspace host any thing relating to La Raza? Why have those (hypothetical) sites not been taken down (or, at least, received any news)? The internal dissolution of one's country is somewhat bigger news than the isolated and non-violent religious actions of 50 nuts.
Furthermore, how the fuck is this something of international turmoil? Has anyone even actually read what the Quran says about (for instance) jihad? Here's a hint: it says not much at all about inner, spiritual trials and a bit about conquering and defeating the opponents of Islam in war ('opponents', in the Islamic sense, meaning "not Muslims"). Why is so little made of this, or the countless atrocities endorsed via Sharia law (and which are directly supported by the Quran)? We're talking about a religion which assassinates/kills people for drawing cartoons, stones women for showing a little ankle, and considers a women adulterous in the event of rape unless there are multiple male witnesses to back her up, and various other atrocities, for fuck sake. Go read their "holy" book!
Let's have a little discernment in our hatred of religions, for crying out loud. Considering not only what is written in the Quran, but what is considered to be the prevailing dogma throughout the Muslim world as it pertains to that Quran, it could be considered roughly on par with burning, say, Mein Kampf. Sure, burning books is an offensive act - one we're conditioned against socially and culturally in the West - but let's consider this with a little more pragmatism.
Would it be a bad thing if all books encouraging the extermination, subjugation, etc. of other races, genders, of beliefs were to disappear? Probably not. A symbolic burning to say "this is bad"?
Sadly, that's true - especially for technology related stuff.
* Anything with "-soft" in it? yeah, no. Not only are they all taken, but they suck.
* Anything not really long? Already taken.
* Two or three common words, or variations thereof? Taken.
* Greek names, etc.? Mostly taken.
Unless you're naming the company after yourself, and you've got a long German name, good luck.
Because AltaVista is such an easy turn of phrase, it rolls right off the tongue, right?
That was my preferred engine for quite some time. I could barely type it, just now, and have to verbalize to remember the proper spelling.
THe thing about netbooks is that they offer a limited subset of functionality - which is why people aren't willing to drop a lot of money on them. "I can't really use it for much" so it isn't worth much. It (like a tablet) is just too small. The difference between a tablet (iPad) buyer and a netbook buyer is that one buys for trendiness and the other does not.
(I'm not sure what the iPad users justify their purchases with. What functionality do they offer which you'd usually perform with a netbook? Watching movies? Is that even possible, outside of iTunes? And I'd have to hold it?)
I have no doubt that a convertible tablet/netbook would sell pretty damn well, if the hardware/software functionality was there and the price was right. A convertible Atom/ARM tablet? Yeah, I'd spring right on that, even if it cost (marginally) more. Why one of those, but neither a tablet or a netbook? Simple: I envision my use to be somewhat split 50/50 in tablet/mobile use and flat surface use for such a small, always-on device.