I don't think the interest of this story is that googlers have it so bad; rather, that the recession is touching everybody, even at the most high-flying companies. It's one of those formulaic "how is hot topic X affecting notable party Y" stories.
Judging by all the grilles, lights, and windows, it certainly looks the part of a dedicated gaming rig to my eyes. At least, no business user would let it near their office.
As a satisfied VMWare Workstation user, I'm curious how it went? Can VirtualBox assign USB devices to the guest? What snags have you noticed?
Actually my only gripe with Workstation lately is they update the format too much. I use it to allow team members to run apps with complex installation and configuration requirements - but it really blows a hole in everything when VMWare says "this virtual machine was created with a later version of VMWare... please upgrade" (or something like that). Installing VMWare workstation on gentoo always seems to take a few hours to get it working.
Yeah, energy isn't just for cars. A small version of this could be great for power tools. I currently avoid rechargeable tools since the batteries lose the ability to hold a charge after a few years, and you're up a creek if they go dead in the middle of a job (and you don't have extras).
If the capacitor is cheap enough, you could have a second one at home, either on trickle ready to quickly charge the first, or remove the dead one and put in the other.
IMHO the Tesla already has an excessive range of 250 miles. Most days 50 miles would be ample for me. Since the battery pack / capacitor is fairly expensive, large and heavy, it would be nice if it were broken into 50 lb modules so I could buy just buy however many I need.
In real world gasoline will burn yes but rarely explode as it need pretty exact amount of gasoline and oxygen to explode.
Perhaps the overriding point is that car fires are deadly, even without an explosion. (Granted, the huge inferno in my link was also fueled by cargo and tires, as well as gasoline and diesel).
Many iTunes tracks can only be played with Apple hardware... is that really such a difficult thing to understand? I would never invest in a music collection locked to a single brand of player.
But on the other hand, I wouldn't hesitate to get an Apple player, or even non-DRM tracks from iTunes. (Granted I never actually have, but that's because I like devices with more features, and don't care all that much about the UI so long as it's passable).
While we're at it let's fix that other great flaw of the octopus: they taste like shoe rubber.
Re:I heard this 10 years ago - the death of the fr
on
Are Newspapers Doomed?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Also, since many newspapers are little more than repackaged AP and Reuters news, looking at the NY Times for guidance - I don't know what their value proposition is supposed to be.
This ignores the point of the article - that the bedrock, actual "sources" of news such as the NYT are also in dire financial straits. Once they are gone (and by that I don't mean "cease to exist," merely that the quality nosedives because there are fewer investigative journalist slots) then all the secondary news sources you decry - and their readers - will be high and dry. The blogs and forums are just cud-chewers. Somebody still has to do the interviews and take the photos for them to ruminate over.
My experience watching people use laptops around the workplace is that, outside of airplanes, they usually don't run on batteries. Mostly it's people moving their laptop to work in somebody else's office for a few hours, or giving a presentation, or taking notes at a meeting, and generally they are plugged in.
I also have a good number of co-workers who choose 17" laptops. They are relatively big, but when it gets right down to it, it doesn't take them any longer to put those in a laptop bag and go somewhere than it does anybody with a smaller computer.
People in that part of the world have put up with "inhuman abuse" for thousands of years - it's a different mindset from "the west."
Is it? The Old Testament is pretty clear that the Jews didn't much care for servitude. The history of constant unrest in that part of the world for the last N-thousand years says a lot too. And before you attribute all that to purely theological differences rather than materialism, remember that one of the principal hopes in the great messiah was to free the chosen people from bondage. (Only later did Christians retrospectively interpret that as freeing them from spiritial bondage, i.e. the kind you can be "freed" from and still live under the thumb of a tyrannical king).
When a bunch of poor people lose hope in becoming Horatio Alger stories and start seeing themselves as a persecuted minority, that is a recipe for unrest. Especially when the better-off people take the attitude that, "hey, they should be grateful for having it as well of as they do, considering they're (whatever)."
But there is something to his point. As a parent of 4 children, I've been very surprised the degree to which they each turn out differently and the results of parenting technique are not deterministic. Thus taking on an infant (whether your own or somebody else's) is a roll of the dice. One of my children has serious emotional problems and it is a heavy burden for the whole family, almost every hour of every day, and I grieve that his future will not be what anybody would hope for. But whether it would have been better to discard him as an embryo and let "him" live in the next body, as a somewhat different person, is one of those funny questions that will never have a good answer.
Noise is one of my problems with fans, but reliability is the other. My HTPC serves many purposes and runs 24x7 - even our phone (VOIP) won't work without it - and I live in the southwest where swamp coolers (rather than A/C) are prevalent so it is rather dusty. Fans are the #1 cause of downtime for the computer. Over the last 5 years it has lost the northbridge fan, the video card fan, the CPU fan, and a case fan. It's a joke.
I am definitely getting an SSD drive for my HTPC. Yes, quiet matters. When I'm listening to music, or dialogue in movies, or just sitting in the room reading (as the HTPC may be recording or downloading a show), noise is annoying. My current HTPC hard drive is only 160 GB and is sufficient, so size is no longer an issue with SSD. But I am still waiting for the prices to come down. My goal is a system with no moving (noisy) parts, but CPU cooling is still a problem.
Yup, the initial $42 million is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the shuttle:
"the average cost per flight has been about $1.3 billion over the life of the program and about $750 million over its most recent five years of operations." (cite). I don't know whether that $1.3 billion is inflation adjusted - a very real consideration when a fair amount of the cost was up front in the late 1970s.
The number of PS3's sold will never be enough to hurt Sony's bottom line, but will boost the image of the console. Having credible scientists call your product a "supercomputer" is worth something. Does Ferrari's Forumla 1 racing team pay for itself? Nah, it's an investment to promote an image.
You don't have that option with a government monopoly which, even if you choose not to participate, keeps sucking money out of your wallet via taxation.
Governments can levy service-based fees instead of taxes. So far as I know, there's no law preventing me from shutting off running water to my house, and it's metered.
Good riddence to java 32 and 64bit, Sun freed it about a decade too late for most people to give a crap
I still think the failure of Java on the desktop is a tragedy and hope it will rise again (though I'm not holding my breath). What has replaced it for rich applications on the web? I see steaming, muddled heaps of web-specific "standards" and scripting languages which, individually, are too weak to do much. Give me a real language, for pete's sake. Yet, my experience with Java in the browser was as bad as everybody else's - they hardly ever worked. Either my JVM wasn't new enough, or it froze up.
But what I see missing from this discussion so far is a reminder that, at the height of their power, Microsoft killed Java on the desktop very intentionally - they put a polluted "MS-Java" with embrace-and-extend hooks into Windows. So Sun sued them and in retaliation, Microsoft made sure Java on the desktop was a pain in the butt for everybody. It was still possible, but too much trouble to bother. This history is important because it means Java still might succeed if it were given a fair shake. And now that Microsoft is less dominant (and RAM is cheap:) maybe - just maybe - the phoenix can rise again?
I am remiss in not sourcing my previous assertions about foreign car companies not putting many engineer jobs in the US:
The key difference in how the Big Three and foreign brands support jobs in the U.S. comes outside the factories, according to a 2006 study by the Level Field Institute, a group formed by Big Three retirees in Washington.
"What's driving the difference in jobs... is investment in research, design, engineering and management," Level Field President Jim Doyle said in a statement on the 2006 study.
The Center for Automotive Research said the Big Three had 24,000 engineers on U.S. payrolls in 2007. The Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association said its member companies had 3,500 U.S. research and development employees in 2007.
The rest of that article is full of information pertinent to this discussion as well.
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I don't think the interest of this story is that googlers have it so bad; rather, that the recession is touching everybody, even at the most high-flying companies. It's one of those formulaic "how is hot topic X affecting notable party Y" stories.
Judging by all the grilles, lights, and windows, it certainly looks the part of a dedicated gaming rig to my eyes. At least, no business user would let it near their office.
Actually my only gripe with Workstation lately is they update the format too much. I use it to allow team members to run apps with complex installation and configuration requirements - but it really blows a hole in everything when VMWare says "this virtual machine was created with a later version of VMWare... please upgrade" (or something like that). Installing VMWare workstation on gentoo always seems to take a few hours to get it working.
Fair enough. I wouldn't settle for re-encoding or bother with burning a CD, but it does bear mention.
Yeah, energy isn't just for cars. A small version of this could be great for power tools. I currently avoid rechargeable tools since the batteries lose the ability to hold a charge after a few years, and you're up a creek if they go dead in the middle of a job (and you don't have extras).
If the capacitor is cheap enough, you could have a second one at home, either on trickle ready to quickly charge the first, or remove the dead one and put in the other.
Being able to "refuel" at home (albeit at a slower rate) would also be a valuable convenience.
IMHO the Tesla already has an excessive range of 250 miles. Most days 50 miles would be ample for me. Since the battery pack / capacitor is fairly expensive, large and heavy, it would be nice if it were broken into 50 lb modules so I could buy just buy however many I need.
Perhaps the overriding point is that car fires are deadly, even without an explosion. (Granted, the huge inferno in my link was also fueled by cargo and tires, as well as gasoline and diesel).
But on the other hand, I wouldn't hesitate to get an Apple player, or even non-DRM tracks from iTunes. (Granted I never actually have, but that's because I like devices with more features, and don't care all that much about the UI so long as it's passable).
While we're at it let's fix that other great flaw of the octopus: they taste like shoe rubber.
This ignores the point of the article - that the bedrock, actual "sources" of news such as the NYT are also in dire financial straits. Once they are gone (and by that I don't mean "cease to exist," merely that the quality nosedives because there are fewer investigative journalist slots) then all the secondary news sources you decry - and their readers - will be high and dry. The blogs and forums are just cud-chewers. Somebody still has to do the interviews and take the photos for them to ruminate over.
Sorry dude the casting is done.
Good point. People don't like being slaves. Having slaves on the other hand is another matter.
I also have a good number of co-workers who choose 17" laptops. They are relatively big, but when it gets right down to it, it doesn't take them any longer to put those in a laptop bag and go somewhere than it does anybody with a smaller computer.
Is it? The Old Testament is pretty clear that the Jews didn't much care for servitude. The history of constant unrest in that part of the world for the last N-thousand years says a lot too. And before you attribute all that to purely theological differences rather than materialism, remember that one of the principal hopes in the great messiah was to free the chosen people from bondage. (Only later did Christians retrospectively interpret that as freeing them from spiritial bondage, i.e. the kind you can be "freed" from and still live under the thumb of a tyrannical king).
When a bunch of poor people lose hope in becoming Horatio Alger stories and start seeing themselves as a persecuted minority, that is a recipe for unrest. Especially when the better-off people take the attitude that, "hey, they should be grateful for having it as well of as they do, considering they're (whatever)."
But there is something to his point. As a parent of 4 children, I've been very surprised the degree to which they each turn out differently and the results of parenting technique are not deterministic. Thus taking on an infant (whether your own or somebody else's) is a roll of the dice. One of my children has serious emotional problems and it is a heavy burden for the whole family, almost every hour of every day, and I grieve that his future will not be what anybody would hope for. But whether it would have been better to discard him as an embryo and let "him" live in the next body, as a somewhat different person, is one of those funny questions that will never have a good answer.
Noise is one of my problems with fans, but reliability is the other. My HTPC serves many purposes and runs 24x7 - even our phone (VOIP) won't work without it - and I live in the southwest where swamp coolers (rather than A/C) are prevalent so it is rather dusty. Fans are the #1 cause of downtime for the computer. Over the last 5 years it has lost the northbridge fan, the video card fan, the CPU fan, and a case fan. It's a joke.
I am definitely getting an SSD drive for my HTPC. Yes, quiet matters. When I'm listening to music, or dialogue in movies, or just sitting in the room reading (as the HTPC may be recording or downloading a show), noise is annoying. My current HTPC hard drive is only 160 GB and is sufficient, so size is no longer an issue with SSD. But I am still waiting for the prices to come down. My goal is a system with no moving (noisy) parts, but CPU cooling is still a problem.
Yup, the initial $42 million is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the shuttle: "the average cost per flight has been about $1.3 billion over the life of the program and about $750 million over its most recent five years of operations." (cite). I don't know whether that $1.3 billion is inflation adjusted - a very real consideration when a fair amount of the cost was up front in the late 1970s.
The number of PS3's sold will never be enough to hurt Sony's bottom line, but will boost the image of the console. Having credible scientists call your product a "supercomputer" is worth something. Does Ferrari's Forumla 1 racing team pay for itself? Nah, it's an investment to promote an image.
Governments can levy service-based fees instead of taxes. So far as I know, there's no law preventing me from shutting off running water to my house, and it's metered.
A competitive market is better than a government monopoly. But a government monopoly is better than a private monopoly. At least you get a vote.
I still think the failure of Java on the desktop is a tragedy and hope it will rise again (though I'm not holding my breath). What has replaced it for rich applications on the web? I see steaming, muddled heaps of web-specific "standards" and scripting languages which, individually, are too weak to do much. Give me a real language, for pete's sake. Yet, my experience with Java in the browser was as bad as everybody else's - they hardly ever worked. Either my JVM wasn't new enough, or it froze up.
But what I see missing from this discussion so far is a reminder that, at the height of their power, Microsoft killed Java on the desktop very intentionally - they put a polluted "MS-Java" with embrace-and-extend hooks into Windows. So Sun sued them and in retaliation, Microsoft made sure Java on the desktop was a pain in the butt for everybody. It was still possible, but too much trouble to bother. This history is important because it means Java still might succeed if it were given a fair shake. And now that Microsoft is less dominant (and RAM is cheap :) maybe - just maybe - the phoenix can rise again?
The rest of that article is full of information pertinent to this discussion as well.