First off lowering wages is a race to the bottom. Henry Ford paid good wages to his employees simply because he needed a middle class to buy cars. Our relentless gutting of high wage middle class manufacturing jobs is one good reason we are on the brink of a depression.
Second people will pay for good service, if it is actually GOOD service. I convinced my company to switch from Dell to a local PC shop with excellent service and PCs built from top quality components.
In the same manner (as much as it pains me to say it) Apple is able to charge a premium to support better build quality and knowledgeable staff.
Finally, a smart big box will figure out that equipping their sales people with wireless gadgets that allow them to direct difficult questions up to a smaller but well qualified cadre of experts makes sense.
Amen to that! My N810 internet tablet is a near perfect ebook reader w/ fbreader and evince installed. Also my EEE 900a is exquisite as well, once you set the page advance in fbreader to the space key and activate portrait mode the EEE has the same form factor and page size as a trade paperback. Public domain PDFs from Google books work beautifully w/ evince. I've even pressed an HP Journada 820 into a passable ebook reader.
Both the eee and the n810 have internet access and direct download capability for project Gutenberg and other sources.
Transitioned from matlab to numpy/scipy/pylab/PIL/VTK and I'm much happier, much cleaner and easier to use. I handle interaction w/ pygame. Presently (like at this moment) working on two major network controlled interferometer data collection and analysis systems in python.
No UAV is capable of fighting a mannned air craft and winning.
Yet. Have you noticed that no UAV has been designed for dogfighting yet? UCAV and it's on the way the manned aircraft can turn their head and see the planes over their shoulder
A data acquisition/display issue. A properly designed UCAV can look in all directions at once in visible, IR, and RADAR And no human can withstand as much turning acceleration as a UAV can.
Nor does a UAV need life support or an ejector and all that associated weight The main reason UCAVs aren't common yet is because fighter jocks tend to rise through the ranks and acquire fighters.
WRONG! Sir Charles Wheatstone (as in Wheatstone Bridge) invented the Wheatstone Stereoscope before Sir. David Brewster developed the lens system attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Of course as with the computer, GUI, MP3 player, and cell phone, the stereoscope was actually invented by Steve Jobs.
Have styling by the same Mecha designer as Patlabor easily worth the added $35,000 for your own Alphonse. On the other hand the Hyper Operating System is almost as bad as Vista.
...then you've got the beginnings of a military state on your hands.
Um, you've not been following the news much. We're in the degenerate luxury phases of a military state at this point. We've already hit the point of comfort women. Nothing surprises me now.
Taking away good American mirror grinding jobs and sending them to the moon (probably to be made by illegal aliens) while depriving FedEx of the shipping revenue! Somebody contact Lou Dobbs!
Actually I do remember installing slackware back in 1995. Given the state of Win 3.1 and Win95 it Linux was the only practical way of getting on the web using mosaic and then navigator. While linux was not terribly stable at that point it was more stable than Win95. Linux was good then but not ready for prime time. With the recent releases of Ubuntu I'd argure it is ready for prime time.
I modded my EEE with a touchscreen. It uses a DVD derived 800x480 display, so basically it's about what he's proposing. In the shade, it's fantastic, in the sun it sucks. Good, but pretty much trivial using relatively simple resources.
Luxeon Rebels and Vs? Yawn! I've been running those under PWM for over 2 years. Presently I'm rigging an RGB LEDEngin15W Light Engine w/ 1.5 A buck boosts running through a fiber bundle conduit to drive a DLP. Had to go out and get some arctic silver epoxy and P3 heatsinks to handle the heat. Maybe the current state of LED tech will make it to MIT in a couple of years.
Um, not quite. Admittedly, if you had a very high lift wing (or a big balloon) you could make it to the upper atmosphere that way, but once past the atmosphere at some point you would have to get to orbital velocity, well in excess of Mach 1 at ground level (past the atmosphere Mach numbers have no meaning). A rocket has a fixed delta v which it has to expend to get where it's going, the more of it that it expends to cancel gravitational acceleration the more fuel is wasted. Once in a reasonably high orbit, one could use a slow thrust method like a solar sail to get out of the gravity well. As for an unpowered slingshot assist, totally impossible. Slingshot assists operate by following a trajectory from outside the gravity well, into it, transferring a bit of the momentum of the planet to the spacecraft.
Slashdot Mirror
First off lowering wages is a race to the bottom. Henry Ford paid good wages to his employees simply because he needed a middle class to buy cars. Our relentless gutting of high wage middle class manufacturing jobs is one good reason we are on the brink of a depression.
Second people will pay for good service, if it is actually GOOD service. I convinced my company to switch from Dell to a local PC shop with excellent service and PCs built from top quality components.
In the same manner (as much as it pains me to say it) Apple is able to charge a premium to support better build quality and knowledgeable staff.
Finally, a smart big box will figure out that equipping their sales people with wireless gadgets that allow them to direct difficult questions up to a smaller but well qualified cadre of experts makes sense.
Damn straight, if Pluto wasn't a planet, how could there be a Sailor Pluto?
Amen to that! My N810 internet tablet is a near perfect ebook reader w/ fbreader and evince installed.
Also my EEE 900a is exquisite as well, once you set the page advance in fbreader to the space key and activate portrait mode the EEE has the same form factor and page size as a trade paperback. Public domain PDFs from Google books work beautifully w/ evince.
I've even pressed an HP Journada 820 into a passable ebook reader.
Both the eee and the n810 have internet access and direct download capability for project Gutenberg and other sources.
Transitioned from matlab to numpy/scipy/pylab/PIL/VTK and I'm much happier, much cleaner and easier to use. I handle interaction w/ pygame. Presently (like at this moment) working on two major network controlled interferometer data collection and analysis systems in python.
No UAV is capable of fighting a mannned air craft and winning.
Yet. Have you noticed that no UAV has been designed for dogfighting yet?
UCAV and it's on the way
the manned aircraft can turn their head and see the planes over their shoulder
A data acquisition/display issue.
A properly designed UCAV can look in all directions at once in visible, IR, and RADAR
And no human can withstand as much turning acceleration as a UAV can.
Nor does a UAV need life support or an ejector and all that associated weight
The main reason UCAVs aren't common yet is because fighter jocks tend to rise through the ranks and acquire fighters.
You work 14 hours a day for a week and then repeat it.
WRONG!
Sir Charles Wheatstone (as in Wheatstone Bridge) invented the Wheatstone Stereoscope before Sir. David Brewster developed the lens system attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Of course as with the computer, GUI, MP3 player, and cell phone, the stereoscope was actually invented by Steve Jobs.
So we have a 5x5 button grid, something casio has done w/ wrist calculators for 20+ years
And some Paprika to go with it.
Forget slayer, I wanna be Willow's girlfriend!!!
Have styling by the same Mecha designer as Patlabor easily worth the added $35,000 for your own Alphonse. On the other hand the Hyper Operating System is almost as bad as Vista.
...then you've got the beginnings of a military state on your hands.
Um, you've not been following the news much. We're in the degenerate luxury phases of a military state at this point. We've already hit the point of comfort women. Nothing surprises me now.
Had Palms since the original Visor.
Same here, the power button on my T|X failed after a few months, sync failed later, and other bits afterwards. No amount of hard resets will fix it.
My friend had the touchscreen fail twice.
Neither of will ever buy Palm again.
Went over to the Nokia n800, not as clean a solution, bulkier, but it works and has a true Debian distro.
We could then jack them into a "matrix" of batteries while feeding them a VR version of reality. That is until the NEO mouse evolves.
Taking away good American mirror grinding jobs and sending them to the moon (probably to be made by illegal aliens) while depriving FedEx of the shipping revenue!
Somebody contact Lou Dobbs!
Actually I do remember installing slackware back in 1995. Given the state of Win 3.1 and Win95 it Linux was the only practical way of getting on the web using mosaic and then navigator. While linux was not terribly stable at that point it was more stable than Win95. Linux was good then but not ready for prime time. With the recent releases of Ubuntu I'd argure it is ready for prime time.
I modded my EEE with a touchscreen. It uses a DVD derived 800x480 display, so basically it's about what he's proposing. In the shade, it's fantastic, in the sun it sucks. Good, but pretty much trivial using relatively simple resources.
Oh god, it's Saban Moon all over again!
They already did a live action version, it was called "The Matrix".
Frankly, going from the political surreal subtlety of Oshi to the Feelgood whack you over the head style of Spielberg is terrifying.
Back away from the property Steve, and get something better suited to your talents like La Blue Girl. (He could do wonders with a CGI Nin-Nin)
Already exists.
So why would we want Win7 w/o backward compatibility and with hardware support on par w/ Vista?
Actually the mouse was developed at SRI well before Xerox
Luxeon Rebels and Vs? Yawn! I've been running those under PWM for over 2 years. Presently I'm rigging an RGB LEDEngin 15W Light Engine w/ 1.5 A buck boosts running through a fiber bundle conduit to drive a DLP. Had to go out and get some arctic silver epoxy and P3 heatsinks to handle the heat.
Maybe the current state of LED tech will make it to MIT in a couple of years.
...Martian Packets
Um, not quite. Admittedly, if you had a very high lift wing (or a big balloon) you could make it to the upper atmosphere that way, but once past the atmosphere at some point you would have to get to orbital velocity, well in excess of Mach 1 at ground level (past the atmosphere Mach numbers have no meaning). A rocket has a fixed delta v which it has to expend to get where it's going, the more of it that it expends to cancel gravitational acceleration the more fuel is wasted. Once in a reasonably high orbit, one could use a slow thrust method like a solar sail to get out of the gravity well.
As for an unpowered slingshot assist, totally impossible. Slingshot assists operate by following a trajectory from outside the gravity well, into it, transferring a bit of the momentum of the planet to the spacecraft.
Of course, to maintain optimal maintainability and code reuse I use BrainF*ck.
...our new A1 mutant overlords.
Well they took power 7 years ago, but better late than never!