Broadbandreports.com does a much better job listing Internet access providers.
Here's what I get when I go to dslreports.com and click "Broadband prequalification process (what can I get?)"
Closed until further notice
Prequalification APIs from the major telcos are unavailable to third parties unless they are also allowed to spam or direct-market you merely for enquiring after availability. If you only check the majors, you are missing out on whether local ISPs may be offering equivalent or better service. If you are after broadband and trust your existing phone or cable TV provider, check availability with them directly. If you don't trust them, there may be a local ISP available in your area - use our search services to find out if that is the case.
Now that you mention it, a UPS is another separate thing you don't need if you use a laptop. It'll run for several hours with the lid closed and automatically suspend when the battery gets too low. Recently some goober at work blipped the power without warning anybody because he was installing some equipment, and everybody not on a laptop lost their work. (Granted they should have been using UPSs).
Again, some services listed there look interesting, but there is no way to tell what the service will end up costing or how fast they will be. The DSL services are all "up to XXX kbps," meaning I could end up with who knows what depending on the quality and length of wiring to my home. And the prices quoted don't include "taxes and governmental surcharges, if any." Well, are there any? Oh, and "ISP service required." So what are my options and the prices for that? You can't find out without putting in detailed personal information including SSN!
It's all a pack of lies! So I bend over for the only other option, cable.
I live in a city of over half a million people. Last night I spent about 40 minutes trying to find out what my broadband options are. Nobody is upfront; it was incredibly difficult to determine even how much each service will cost after the teaser rates expire, especially if you don't want bundled local telephone or cable TV. Next, try to determine what DSL speed you'll get at your house, or what the upstream bandwidth for cable is. You can't. Just lots of stupid marketing fluff and "congratulations! Satellite Internet is available in your area!" type garbage. In the end I gave up, it didn't look like I have any real option besides what I have now - Comcast (which is good but too expensive, especially since I don't really want cable TV any more). I am sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't.
Do you think individuals and companies are going to take a big look at the CPU Energy Use when deciding on buying CPUs? I personally don't think it will become a deciding factor
I'd say we've already turned that corner. Intel aborted the netburst architecture (P4) because there was no easy way to dissipate more than a couple hundred watts, in that way power became the limiting factor. I don't think we'll see desktops reverting to 10W processors, nor do I think a 10% difference in consumption between competing products will be a big deciding factor, but I do think the exponential growth in CPU power requirements seen for the 20 years leading up to 2005 or so are over, simply because heat dissipation becomes an annoying issue as you approach 1KW PSUs. So I think attention has turned to how to get increasing performance from basically a fixed amount of power.
Also, doesn't it take LOTS more energy to continually refresh RAM than it does to enable a processor?
Your best window into this issue is laptops, where every watt counts. The simple answer to that particular question is "no." I have a D630 Dell laptop with 4GB RAM. When suspended to RAM, it consumes about 1% of a 56 watt-hour battery, per hour. In contrast, with the processor and screen running the whole battery is emptied in 3 hours.
Here is the sort of chart you're looking for, although it's somewhat dated. And of course it varies by model. I have a T60p Tkinkpad laptop which, by virtue of its Core Duo processor, presumably has good battery life. But since it also has an ATI FireGL video card, the battery life is crappy and it's uncomfortable to use on your lap.
Paying as little as MSRP would probably be a huge discount over "financing" it through a calling plan, if you knew what you were paying.
Cellphones aren't all that precious anymore. My wife recently got a tracphone (which has no contract) and went for the $30 model - which I guess is splurging, since they have another one for $15. Her $30 phone certainly does look cheap (almost like the fake toy cellphones they make for little kids), but it works just fine.
All that buying cellphones upfront would do is hurt the sales of high-end models, since people would realize what they're paying for features they don't really want anyways.
Yes. Pay no attention to the URL or the fact that you can buy lotto tickets in Utah. Move along...
Are you so sure? utahlottery.com doesn't look to me like it has anything to do with the state of Utah. And the Utah gambling law seems extremely clear.
This is just confirmation that the WTO is a meaningless cabal of
mindless USA bashers with an axe to grind.
Oh brother. Like the UN, the WTO is not some bureaucracy from outer space invading our sovereignty. We, more than any other single nation, created it. 95% of the time we use these organizations to hit other nations over the head and goad them into enforcing the intellectual property laws we want, accepting our exports, etc. Then once in a blue moon the tables are turned and certain people such as yourself go berzerk.
My question is why they would commit to a single algorithm in the first place? Most of the work for a system like this is in the data gathering, manipulation, and (perhaps most of all) user interface. The recognition algorithm itself will probably constitute 0.001% of the code. It's hard to believe they wouldn't make it modular and experiment with some different algorithms.
Since people love comparing wikipedia to Britanica, how does the comparison hold up here? Is Britanica multiplying in size over and over again with every new edition? If not, why not? I'd guess it's because the parent posters are correct.
Regardless of the number of endings, the board only has a finite number of states. A "solution" to the game simply maps each of these states to the optimal action. In any of your infinitely long games, there would have to be cycles - i.e. the board re-enters states it already encountered - and the cycles don't affect the outcome. That said, it is possible there is no forced win in go, so two optimal players would simply agree to a draw before the first move (a good strategy in thermonuclear warfare, it is said).
I think the worst thing Bush has done for the economy may have been our response to 911. Yes, it was a terrible attack that demanded a response. But everything we have done since then amplifies its effects. We've hyped the notion that terrorism is now an overwhelming problem which will plague us at least for the next generation or two, and that perpetual warfare is the answer. All this, basically in response to an attack carried out by 19 guys with a modicum of training, who all died in the attack.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying there are terrorist networks in the world plotting attacks and they must be broken up. (Several plots have been broken up -- using basic police techniques, while others in the UK were carried out to little effect). Making 911 a generation-defining event was really our choice, and it hasn't helped us any. Of course it is nearly impossible to determine the economic impact of this.
I think OpenOffice is the only program I've ever considered abandoning ONLY because it runs so slowly. On a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo I can watch each individual icon redraw (not a good thing). It goes well beyond typical bloat, it must be something with the widget set or how they are using it. Maybe it makes heavy use of some instruction that's horribly slow on my particular video card, I don't know. But for me, the performance of OpenOffice leaves a big gap open for KOffice.
IIRC, Gandhi had himself defeated Britain in India precisely by adhering to nonviolence even when the British slaughtered some of his followers. The resulting outcry from around the world pressured Britain to grant sovereignty to India. Had an Indian military leader tried to win independence from Britain by force, the casualties would certainly have been much greater, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyways.
I've not had that experience yet, but then the only things I've bought on craigslist have been items that are hard to ship (a used TV and a used bicycle).
It sounds like Craigslist needs a requirement that all items advertised must be available for immediate pickup. Craigslist should definitely avoid becoming merely a redundant front-end for ebay.
So, what will be the next thing to take eBay's place?
Craigslist. They're already dominating want ads, which is similar enough to auctions that craigslist could stand a chance of solving the main problem - that ebay has all the users, and thus benefits from the network effect. In order to displace ebay, a challenger will have to be more than just a little better, they'll have to blow ebay away, and somehow bootstrap a big enough user base to be viable. Since craigslist actually runs its service to maximize value for users instead of shareholders (and it's not just talk - craigslist's behavior utterly confounds Forbes), and could bootstrap from their want ads business, they might be able to do it.
Regardless, it's a fallacy to say something must not exist simply because a hallucination can produce the same sensation. If I hallucinate snakes does that mean snakes don't exist?
This whole sensory stimulation issue really has nothing at all to do with God either way. Yet the mention of God in the blurb is distracting everybody away from an even broader issue - that this sort of thing may be the ultimate drug, that has no side effects and (if you're a hedonist), replaces the need for every other activity in life.
Just because some kid has an ipod and a cellphone doesn't mean they're a genius when it comes to technology.
I think you're missing the point. Using a web browser is easy. Consistently writing concise, persuasive comments (like this one) on slashdot is another matter. I've learned more about writing by practicing on usenet and slashdot than in any writing class. Here, you get unvarnished feedback from a vast audience. I never got that type of feedback in a formal setting until I started publishing papers -- and most students never reach that point.
For me the cost of new equipment is not the problem. It's all the time it takes to find a new piece of equipment that actually works, find my way around all its quirks, and set everything up just the way I had it before.
I once thought it strange that business and govt. stockpile obsolete computer equipment to keep operational systems going. Now I understand it completely. I don't buy 3 of everything, but if I can avoid a labor-intensive upgrade, I do it.
Welcome to the post-Dateline world, where every news agency now wants to set up stings to bust the bad guy. I'd like to set up a sting to expose shitty journalists.
Is this story somehow an example of bad journalism? I think it's good journalism. Computer repair (just like car repair and health care) are problems that free markets just don't solve very well. There's no way for consumers to make informed decisions since diagnosing the problem is the job. Most people not only can't diagnose these problems themselves, but don't make this type of purchase very often, and have little or no objective data to go by. It's a tough problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Very funny.
Now that you mention it, a UPS is another separate thing you don't need if you use a laptop. It'll run for several hours with the lid closed and automatically suspend when the battery gets too low. Recently some goober at work blipped the power without warning anybody because he was installing some equipment, and everybody not on a laptop lost their work. (Granted they should have been using UPSs).
It's all a pack of lies! So I bend over for the only other option, cable.
And if I just need to plug in my cable modem, I could save my $10 and use the USB connector.
I live in a city of over half a million people. Last night I spent about 40 minutes trying to find out what my broadband options are. Nobody is upfront; it was incredibly difficult to determine even how much each service will cost after the teaser rates expire, especially if you don't want bundled local telephone or cable TV. Next, try to determine what DSL speed you'll get at your house, or what the upstream bandwidth for cable is. You can't. Just lots of stupid marketing fluff and "congratulations! Satellite Internet is available in your area!" type garbage. In the end I gave up, it didn't look like I have any real option besides what I have now - Comcast (which is good but too expensive, especially since I don't really want cable TV any more). I am sick of everybody pretending the free market is at work so everything is great. It isn't.
Here is the sort of chart you're looking for, although it's somewhat dated. And of course it varies by model. I have a T60p Tkinkpad laptop which, by virtue of its Core Duo processor, presumably has good battery life. But since it also has an ATI FireGL video card, the battery life is crappy and it's uncomfortable to use on your lap.
Cellphones aren't all that precious anymore. My wife recently got a tracphone (which has no contract) and went for the $30 model - which I guess is splurging, since they have another one for $15. Her $30 phone certainly does look cheap (almost like the fake toy cellphones they make for little kids), but it works just fine.
All that buying cellphones upfront would do is hurt the sales of high-end models, since people would realize what they're paying for features they don't really want anyways.
My question is why they would commit to a single algorithm in the first place? Most of the work for a system like this is in the data gathering, manipulation, and (perhaps most of all) user interface. The recognition algorithm itself will probably constitute 0.001% of the code. It's hard to believe they wouldn't make it modular and experiment with some different algorithms.
Since people love comparing wikipedia to Britanica, how does the comparison hold up here? Is Britanica multiplying in size over and over again with every new edition? If not, why not? I'd guess it's because the parent posters are correct.
You're right, I didn't know the number of stones in the game was unbounded.
Regardless of the number of endings, the board only has a finite number of states. A "solution" to the game simply maps each of these states to the optimal action. In any of your infinitely long games, there would have to be cycles - i.e. the board re-enters states it already encountered - and the cycles don't affect the outcome. That said, it is possible there is no forced win in go, so two optimal players would simply agree to a draw before the first move (a good strategy in thermonuclear warfare, it is said).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying there are terrorist networks in the world plotting attacks and they must be broken up. (Several plots have been broken up -- using basic police techniques, while others in the UK were carried out to little effect). Making 911 a generation-defining event was really our choice, and it hasn't helped us any. Of course it is nearly impossible to determine the economic impact of this.
I think OpenOffice is the only program I've ever considered abandoning ONLY because it runs so slowly. On a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo I can watch each individual icon redraw (not a good thing). It goes well beyond typical bloat, it must be something with the widget set or how they are using it. Maybe it makes heavy use of some instruction that's horribly slow on my particular video card, I don't know. But for me, the performance of OpenOffice leaves a big gap open for KOffice.
IIRC, Gandhi had himself defeated Britain in India precisely by adhering to nonviolence even when the British slaughtered some of his followers. The resulting outcry from around the world pressured Britain to grant sovereignty to India. Had an Indian military leader tried to win independence from Britain by force, the casualties would certainly have been much greater, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyways.
I've not had that experience yet, but then the only things I've bought on craigslist have been items that are hard to ship (a used TV and a used bicycle). It sounds like Craigslist needs a requirement that all items advertised must be available for immediate pickup. Craigslist should definitely avoid becoming merely a redundant front-end for ebay.
This whole sensory stimulation issue really has nothing at all to do with God either way. Yet the mention of God in the blurb is distracting everybody away from an even broader issue - that this sort of thing may be the ultimate drug, that has no side effects and (if you're a hedonist), replaces the need for every other activity in life.
I once thought it strange that business and govt. stockpile obsolete computer equipment to keep operational systems going. Now I understand it completely. I don't buy 3 of everything, but if I can avoid a labor-intensive upgrade, I do it.