Dual topologies can be pretty hard an very expensive. I have been to sites in lots of little "industrial" parks around various cities and almost all the fiber an copper is run down one single conduit all the way down the street. These places also usually don't back up to anything but more empty land for future expansion so there is no other direction to bring in connectivity from. Yes you get multiple providers and such but if that one conduit gets taken out they are both gone.
Wireless is getting better these days. Cisco makes some routers that take cardbus cellular air cards. This is a good option in those situations. The monthly cost if you don't use it is affordable and its enough bandwidth to keep 20 people or so doing e-mail, and maybe very slow web browsing, if you traffic shape things carefully. Its not bad as the failover route.
I don't want transparent security technology. I want security technology that I can see and touch and NEED to think about.
1.When its transparent it just gets abused and used against me for crap like DRM by people who haven't the right. 2.I want the confidence of knowing I have protection because I put it in place. 3.I want to be able to turn it off when need be to understand where a problem exists, the security layer or something else. 4.I don't trust my government to have my interests in mind much of the time, and as much as I distrust foreign governments and foreigners even more that dose not make me included to put the security of my information and communication in the hands of my own government which has proven its often inept and at times malicious. 5.Its my stuff nobody should be dictating to me how I protect it or don't as a matter of principle. Just as with my house its my right to leave the door unlocked if I want to and useless as that right might sound I am unprepared to give it up.
I actually agree with that sentiment but one has to consider the possibility that we only feel this way because we are experiencing the painful part right now. When we have the benefit of twenty years of history to look back across to the events of 2007-20011 we might indeed find that the middle-class worker has benefited from technology and global growth.
it would force states to actually *compete* for businesses to move there by having reasonable tax rates.
And you don't think your state legislators are smart enough to not start that race to the bottom ending when states basically could not tax business at all.
Ireland is on the verge of Bankruptcy for one reason only, the bank grantees. In orders to protect the banks there the PM foolishly backed the entire face value of bank securities there. They also guaranteed the entire deposit in not just savings accounts but investments like money markets. Ireland had a perfectly solid fiscal situation until they put themselves on the hook for an unknowable amount. Turns out the Irish real estate situation, and the situation around MBS and CDO obligation was pretty much the same as here in the States.
Now because the Irish use the Euro and its not the reserve currency they can't just use quantitative easing or play games where their central bank buys assets with funny money, no they have actually acquire revenue from taxation or bond sales when they dump free money into their commercial banks in the form of bailouts.
The problem now is the bond holders are getting nervous that the Irish government won't be able to repay the bonds and are not allowing the debt to be rolled over at affordable interest rates. The problem here is the irresponsible bank bailouts, not the tax and spending policy in general which appeared to be working. Had they come up with some temporary plan to offer people retirement security and took care of the citizens by standing behind only savings accounts, instead of rescuing the F'ing bankers; they could have solved the problem much more cheaply and allowed capitalism to work. The ill behaving banks would have folded and new banks run by responsible people could have pop up. The same is true in this country. The problem is the socialization of loss while allowing these robber barons to keep their private gains. I am all for free markets, but that means mister commercial when you screw up and bankrupt yourself people like me with savings get to the privilege of buying your assets cheaply at auction so you can pay off your bond holders. It also means the currency deflates and my savings grow in value. That is how it is supposed to work. These bailouts were sort of immoral behavior you would have expected from China or Soviet era Russia. Its not the sort of thing that is supposed to happen in the free world.
Given that IBM has pretty much exited the personal computer market I really don't understand what you are trying to say. You do realize they just market re-branded Lenovo stuff in that space right? I also think any executive issuing a PO for such equipment is not so clueless that they can't understand the differences between Microsoft, IBM, and Lenovo and I also doubt very much your thesis they don't care to understand.
You either have astonishingly poor communication skills or actually do work with a bunch of monkeys and PHBs. I am not suggesting most Officers don't have their PHB moments but if yours are still having that moment in Q4-2010 you might want to look for another job because your firm's days are probably few.
Now be fair they might be one of those people that thinks keeping in contact means with someone is constituted by reading their impersonal broadcast messages periodically, and broadcasting his or her own impersonal broadcast messages that the someone may more may not read.
I really think these social networks are pushing society apart far more than drawing it together.
Not really a solution. Unless the pictures are quite large ( and then you wasting time and bandwidth transferring them) I can easily generate rainbow tables of the hash of each image with each combination of one or two bits flipped. An indexed table will let me match those hashes pretty quickly even with a few million rows. Hell with home systems having 4gigs of ram memory in them it would be easy.
Goldman Sachs and others created a product, people were willing to buy a product at a certain price. There's a risk element just like there is with any other security. That's capitalism, what's wrong with that?
There is nothing wrong with that but those MBS and other derivatives were marketed as being less risky than lots of those guys knew they in fact were. There is nothing wrong with derivatives, the problem had to do with FRAUD up and down the line. People applying for loans gave fraudulent information to brokers, brokers fraudulently modified the applications farther or simply passed on the documents as vetted without doing it. Banks wrote the loans and then sold them to other banks fraudulently claiming their application processes were secure when they were knowingly doing nothing to verify what brokers will telling them. Those other banks lumped those loans into baskets of vary quality claiming that it was diversification and reduced risk. The trouble was because of all the FRAUD up and down the line many many more of the loans in those baskets of high quality mortgages were actually low quality. Knowing this they marketed the securities any way FRAUDULENTLY insisting they were safe. Then people bought insure on the investment which by this point many of these investors might not have know there were problems but many still did know and in those cases the FRAUDULENTLY characterized the risk the the insurer who went with it because they wanted to have the business to show their investors. The insurers probably knew what was going on as well but because of all the other FRAUD they were able to claim most of their exposure was only to high quality assets and push up their stock prices that way. Then because people had the insurance which was to affordable they used more leverage than they otherwise would buy more of the same FRAUD laden crap and repeated the process until it was unsustainable.
So the problem was not capitalism, but FRAUD and sadly none of the solutions actually involved prosecuting anyone from FRAUD.
Actually really big money men like Soros pay top dollar to have the fastest connections into the systems that run the exchanges. They also have computer systems running what ever algorithm they think will make a money that day sitting on their side of those connections waiting to pounce. Ever try to get in on a hot IPO as retail investor? You can't, ever try to unload something during a major sell off and wonder why it takes hours when the trade to buy it took seconds (sure some of that might be there are no buyers but..)? Most of this is because you at the back of the line when it comes to placing orders and people like Soros are up front.
With limited quantities (tickets, discounted items, etc) you have to put limits/rules in place or the only people buying them are those that want to profit off it.
No you don't need to put limits. Ticket scalping happens because the market is demonstrating that tickets are under priced. If someone buys all the tickets up as you say and than tries to sell them there is a maximum price at which he can expect to move the units. This is the price people are willing to pay to see the show. Lets say I purchase all the $15 dollar tickets to see my favorite band. They are not harmed, they sold their entire inventory of tickets at a price they were willing to offer the service of performing for; I might be able to sell those tickets at $20 each and make a tidy profit. If I try and sell them a $80 each most of them probably won't sell and I will lose my shirt because the self life of the inventory is right up until the show starts and after that its all worthless.
Now if they want to stop ticket scalping the band should simply charge more. If they raise the price to the maximum they can expect to move all the inventory at lets say its $20, than I while I can still buy them all I wont because I can't even resell them all for $21.
Really hot shows just need to up their prices. The performers would make more money and the ticket vendor sites would not get DDOSed, with 1000s of requests in the first moments of sale.
Well me and a number of other people would like a Constitutional Amendment requiring all future laws in the US code to have a sunset date. Congress would have to than re debate every law periodically to determine if it should be renewed. There are varying opinions about how far out the maximum sunset can be. I personally think 30 years makes sense, that is four senate terms plus one to cover the other thirds not up for election at the end of term 1. This way most of the original people who debate the law will be gone from the senate, and folks with a fresh perspective would be able to consider it on its merits. Also having to take an issue up once every thirty years should not be two burdensome. The vast majority of expiring codes probably won't be controversial at all and could get taken care of with a quick up or down direct to floor vote in the first days of each congressional session.
Exactly there is an Amendment process if the Constitution as the framers wrote it does not address a modern situation than there is a process for changing it. It can't just be ignored when its not convenient. That process was made especially onerous for a reason as well. Its to make damn sure and changes are carefully considered and to avoid any short circuiting of checks and balances to prevent the document form being hijacked!
Um that is pretty easy because the fourth amendment outlines what is a reasonable search
"no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Anything that does not meet that criteria is unreasonable.
I am not expert, and this is just from a brief conversation I had in an elective class many years ago with a neural science professor but I asked how it is the brain does things in an instant that would likely take a powerful micro computer most of a day, while simple multiplication is often quite difficult for me to do in my head.
The reason he gave is that the brain works usually in a in precise manor. You have lots of different groups of neurons that your relatively plastic brain has wired up to do things like recognize certain patterns. If enough of those go high other parts of your brain proceed as if there was certainty. That works well for evaluating how hard the sterling wheel is pushing back and deciding how much more to stimulate muscles to contract. When you doing something like math though there is only a very specific correct symbol. They parallelism of the voting system breaks down and your brain how to check that all or almost all of those networks agree.
Because the airline screens are Government and nolonger private, I thin there is a First Amendment argument here.
The pat downs obviously would violate the fourth Amendment there is no probably cause to suspect you of a crime just because you are in an airport and wish to board a plane. The procedure also takes in excess of 10min in some cases so even if there was cause it may exceed the bounds of a Terry stop; finally people have attempted to turn around and leave the airport rather than submit and been denied which makes everyone feel that we are not free to leave; which than becomes false imprisonment.
Now the knee jerk response is going to be "but you don't have to go to the airport and get on a plane" its not a right; and therefore you cannot evoke the fourth. What if I live in New York and want to assemble with others in California later that afternoon? I could do so but for the fact the government is not letting my on a privately owned aircraft, that I purchased a ticket to get onto from a private carrier. By demanding I submit to my fourth amendment rights being violated they are infringing on my first amendment rights.
Maybe they should just subject drivers to being pulled over and given an enhanced pat down and having their vehicle searched at random to make sure they don't have any potential distracting devices anywhere but locked in the boot.
I would have to agree, its really hard to imagine a "start up" can't make anything work on traditional SQL RDBMS(es). If you put the right hardware underneath it even SQL Server 2000 (64bit anyway) will scale just fine to terabyte size databases at thousands of transactions per second. That is not on impossible hardware for a successful start to buy either, we are talking a dedicated storage controller with gigabyte or so cache and few dozen SAS drives. I know I have worked on such projects.
You need the schema right, and if its more reads than writes you might even de-normalize a little and you will need to partition the data appropriately, but it can be done. This is why realDBAs still make the big bucks. There is a lot to know in that domain. You probably should hire someone who is an expert on whatever stuff you are using now to consult before you go down the path of NOSQL. All you told us is you are a growing start up with is not much to go on but without know what you are doing its hard for me to believe you are doing anything on a scale that can't be done well with a relational database; but maybe I am wrong and maybe you are doing something huge. Remember as soon as you go down the NOSQL path you are going to have to be doing a great deal of heavy lifting because the quantity of libraries and off the shelf stuff out there is not great.
When i saw the headline, i was hoping that this would be a device that allowed an SSD to be connected to a RAM slot and used as RAM, rather than an SSD that takes up a RAM slot.
Well I don't know why you would want to use slow flash as your primary storage rather than fast DRAM or SRAM. Now this is not what I think you had in mind but having primary storage that does not need refresh would permit you to have a machine that could be powered on and off and remain in a consistent state. Well there were a few more things you'd need to do like preserve the content of CPU registers but there are ways to solve those problems. Such a machine also could have only primary storage because large flash banks are so cheap. Now this machine would be very slow but for some applications it would be useful. Actually such machines are often employed in manufacturing and probably other places. A flash based memory module would have been a step toward alowing us geeks how just want to play with something like that a way to build it out of cheap hardware; but your typical gamer would have no interest.
If they were to do this for some of my classes they'd find a 100% cheating rate
That is an admission of cheating, I think you should have posted AC unless you are really really sure non of your profs know your Slashdot nick/id.
Which would not shock me if one or two does. I had a prof ask me if my nick was DarkOx based after he read some posts and recognized some of the idea's I had discussed with him in class. You might want to be more careful.
Most users need a word processor and a spread sheet and perhaps a Viso type utility. I guess lots of people probably want a presentation tool like Power Point as well but I never give those types of presentations I am white board man, so I can't help you there. Abiword, Gnumeric and Dia pretty much meet my needs. If I need to look at a Visio doc Microsofts viewer works pretty well under wine. Abiword and Gnumeric are probably not as feature rich as OO.org but both are easier to use IMHO and both handle most Microsoft Office documents of their respective types pretty well. Dia is a pretty good tool for putting together diagrams and getting ideas down fast. Depending on your needs you should check those projects out.
Slashdot Mirror
Dual topologies can be pretty hard an very expensive. I have been to sites in lots of little "industrial" parks around various cities and almost all the fiber an copper is run down one single conduit all the way down the street. These places also usually don't back up to anything but more empty land for future expansion so there is no other direction to bring in connectivity from. Yes you get multiple providers and such but if that one conduit gets taken out they are both gone.
Wireless is getting better these days. Cisco makes some routers that take cardbus cellular air cards. This is a good option in those situations. The monthly cost if you don't use it is affordable and its enough bandwidth to keep 20 people or so doing e-mail, and maybe very slow web browsing, if you traffic shape things carefully. Its not bad as the failover route.
I don't want transparent security technology. I want security technology that I can see and touch and NEED to think about.
1.When its transparent it just gets abused and used against me for crap like DRM by people who haven't the right.
2.I want the confidence of knowing I have protection because I put it in place.
3.I want to be able to turn it off when need be to understand where a problem exists, the security layer or something else.
4.I don't trust my government to have my interests in mind much of the time, and as much as I distrust foreign governments and foreigners even more that dose not make me included to put the security of my information and communication in the hands of my own government which has proven its often inept and at times malicious.
5.Its my stuff nobody should be dictating to me how I protect it or don't as a matter of principle. Just as with my house its my right to leave the door unlocked if I want to and useless as that right might sound I am unprepared to give it up.
class TSA_AGENT ... ...
{
public:
private:
friend class American_Citizen
}
And yet something feels different this time.
I actually agree with that sentiment but one has to consider the possibility that we only feel this way because we are experiencing the painful part right now. When we have the benefit of twenty years of history to look back across to the events of 2007-20011 we might indeed find that the middle-class worker has benefited from technology and global growth.
it would force states to actually *compete* for businesses to move there by having reasonable tax rates.
And you don't think your state legislators are smart enough to not start that race to the bottom ending when states basically could not tax business at all.
Ireland is on the verge of Bankruptcy for one reason only, the bank grantees. In orders to protect the banks there the PM foolishly backed the entire face value of bank securities there. They also guaranteed the entire deposit in not just savings accounts but investments like money markets. Ireland had a perfectly solid fiscal situation until they put themselves on the hook for an unknowable amount. Turns out the Irish real estate situation, and the situation around MBS and CDO obligation was pretty much the same as here in the States.
Now because the Irish use the Euro and its not the reserve currency they can't just use quantitative easing or play games where their central bank buys assets with funny money, no they have actually acquire revenue from taxation or bond sales when they dump free money into their commercial banks in the form of bailouts.
The problem now is the bond holders are getting nervous that the Irish government won't be able to repay the bonds and are not allowing the debt to be rolled over at affordable interest rates. The problem here is the irresponsible bank bailouts, not the tax and spending policy in general which appeared to be working. Had they come up with some temporary plan to offer people retirement security and took care of the citizens by standing behind only savings accounts, instead of rescuing the F'ing bankers; they could have solved the problem much more cheaply and allowed capitalism to work. The ill behaving banks would have folded and new banks run by responsible people could have pop up. The same is true in this country. The problem is the socialization of loss while allowing these robber barons to keep their private gains. I am all for free markets, but that means mister commercial when you screw up and bankrupt yourself people like me with savings get to the privilege of buying your assets cheaply at auction so you can pay off your bond holders. It also means the currency deflates and my savings grow in value. That is how it is supposed to work. These bailouts were sort of immoral behavior you would have expected from China or Soviet era Russia. Its not the sort of thing that is supposed to happen in the free world.
Given that IBM has pretty much exited the personal computer market I really don't understand what you are trying to say. You do realize they just market re-branded Lenovo stuff in that space right? I also think any executive issuing a PO for such equipment is not so clueless that they can't understand the differences between Microsoft, IBM, and Lenovo and I also doubt very much your thesis they don't care to understand.
You either have astonishingly poor communication skills or actually do work with a bunch of monkeys and PHBs. I am not suggesting most Officers don't have their PHB moments but if yours are still having that moment in Q4-2010 you might want to look for another job because your firm's days are probably few.
Lots of the current generation Netbooks can run at 9hours on their batteries.
pretty amazing for the company introduced its flagship product with this ad YouTube Apple 1984
Now be fair they might be one of those people that thinks keeping in contact means with someone is constituted by reading their impersonal broadcast messages periodically, and broadcasting his or her own impersonal broadcast messages that the someone may more may not read.
I really think these social networks are pushing society apart far more than drawing it together.
I agree, if TM they falsified there identities with TM than they broke the rules.
Not really a solution. Unless the pictures are quite large ( and then you wasting time and bandwidth transferring them) I can easily generate rainbow tables of the hash of each image with each combination of one or two bits flipped. An indexed table will let me match those hashes pretty quickly even with a few million rows. Hell with home systems having 4gigs of ram memory in them it would be easy.
Goldman Sachs and others created a product, people were willing to buy a product at a certain price. There's a risk element just like there is with any other security. That's capitalism, what's wrong with that?
There is nothing wrong with that but those MBS and other derivatives were marketed as being less risky than lots of those guys knew they in fact were. There is nothing wrong with derivatives, the problem had to do with FRAUD up and down the line. People applying for loans gave fraudulent information to brokers, brokers fraudulently modified the applications farther or simply passed on the documents as vetted without doing it. Banks wrote the loans and then sold them to other banks fraudulently claiming their application processes were secure when they were knowingly doing nothing to verify what brokers will telling them. Those other banks lumped those loans into baskets of vary quality claiming that it was diversification and reduced risk. The trouble was because of all the FRAUD up and down the line many many more of the loans in those baskets of high quality mortgages were actually low quality. Knowing this they marketed the securities any way FRAUDULENTLY insisting they were safe. Then people bought insure on the investment which by this point many of these investors might not have know there were problems but many still did know and in those cases the FRAUDULENTLY characterized the risk the the insurer who went with it because they wanted to have the business to show their investors. The insurers probably knew what was going on as well but because of all the other FRAUD they were able to claim most of their exposure was only to high quality assets and push up their stock prices that way. Then because people had the insurance which was to affordable they used more leverage than they otherwise would buy more of the same FRAUD laden crap and repeated the process until it was unsustainable.
So the problem was not capitalism, but FRAUD and sadly none of the solutions actually involved prosecuting anyone from FRAUD.
Actually really big money men like Soros pay top dollar to have the fastest connections into the systems that run the exchanges. They also have computer systems running what ever algorithm they think will make a money that day sitting on their side of those connections waiting to pounce. Ever try to get in on a hot IPO as retail investor? You can't, ever try to unload something during a major sell off and wonder why it takes hours when the trade to buy it took seconds (sure some of that might be there are no buyers but..)? Most of this is because you at the back of the line when it comes to placing orders and people like Soros are up front.
With limited quantities (tickets, discounted items, etc) you have to put limits/rules in place or the only people buying them are those that want to profit off it.
No you don't need to put limits. Ticket scalping happens because the market is demonstrating that tickets are under priced. If someone buys all the tickets up as you say and than tries to sell them there is a maximum price at which he can expect to move the units. This is the price people are willing to pay to see the show. Lets say I purchase all the $15 dollar tickets to see my favorite band. They are not harmed, they sold their entire inventory of tickets at a price they were willing to offer the service of performing for; I might be able to sell those tickets at $20 each and make a tidy profit. If I try and sell them a $80 each most of them probably won't sell and I will lose my shirt because the self life of the inventory is right up until the show starts and after that its all worthless.
Now if they want to stop ticket scalping the band should simply charge more. If they raise the price to the maximum they can expect to move all the inventory at lets say its $20, than I while I can still buy them all I wont because I can't even resell them all for $21.
Really hot shows just need to up their prices. The performers would make more money and the ticket vendor sites would not get DDOSed, with 1000s of requests in the first moments of sale.
Well me and a number of other people would like a Constitutional Amendment requiring all future laws in the US code to have a sunset date. Congress would have to than re debate every law periodically to determine if it should be renewed. There are varying opinions about how far out the maximum sunset can be. I personally think 30 years makes sense, that is four senate terms plus one to cover the other thirds not up for election at the end of term 1. This way most of the original people who debate the law will be gone from the senate, and folks with a fresh perspective would be able to consider it on its merits. Also having to take an issue up once every thirty years should not be two burdensome. The vast majority of expiring codes probably won't be controversial at all and could get taken care of with a quick up or down direct to floor vote in the first days of each congressional session.
Exactly there is an Amendment process if the Constitution as the framers wrote it does not address a modern situation than there is a process for changing it. It can't just be ignored when its not convenient. That process was made especially onerous for a reason as well. Its to make damn sure and changes are carefully considered and to avoid any short circuiting of checks and balances to prevent the document form being hijacked!
Um that is pretty easy because the fourth amendment outlines what is a reasonable search
"no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Anything that does not meet that criteria is unreasonable.
I am not expert, and this is just from a brief conversation I had in an elective class many years ago with a neural science professor but I asked how it is the brain does things in an instant that would likely take a powerful micro computer most of a day, while simple multiplication is often quite difficult for me to do in my head.
The reason he gave is that the brain works usually in a in precise manor. You have lots of different groups of neurons that your relatively plastic brain has wired up to do things like recognize certain patterns. If enough of those go high other parts of your brain proceed as if there was certainty. That works well for evaluating how hard the sterling wheel is pushing back and deciding how much more to stimulate muscles to contract. When you doing something like math though there is only a very specific correct symbol. They parallelism of the voting system breaks down and your brain how to check that all or almost all of those networks agree.
Because the airline screens are Government and nolonger private, I thin there is a First Amendment argument here.
The pat downs obviously would violate the fourth Amendment there is no probably cause to suspect you of a crime just because you are in an airport and wish to board a plane. The procedure also takes in excess of 10min in some cases so even if there was cause it may exceed the bounds of a Terry stop; finally people have attempted to turn around and leave the airport rather than submit and been denied which makes everyone feel that we are not free to leave; which than becomes false imprisonment.
Now the knee jerk response is going to be "but you don't have to go to the airport and get on a plane" its not a right; and therefore you cannot evoke the fourth. What if I live in New York and want to assemble with others in California later that afternoon? I could do so but for the fact the government is not letting my on a privately owned aircraft, that I purchased a ticket to get onto from a private carrier. By demanding I submit to my fourth amendment rights being violated they are infringing on my first amendment rights.
Maybe they should just subject drivers to being pulled over and given an enhanced pat down and having their vehicle searched at random to make sure they don't have any potential distracting devices anywhere but locked in the boot.
I would have to agree, its really hard to imagine a "start up" can't make anything work on traditional SQL RDBMS(es). If you put the right hardware underneath it even SQL Server 2000 (64bit anyway) will scale just fine to terabyte size databases at thousands of transactions per second. That is not on impossible hardware for a successful start to buy either, we are talking a dedicated storage controller with gigabyte or so cache and few dozen SAS drives. I know I have worked on such projects.
You need the schema right, and if its more reads than writes you might even de-normalize a little and you will need to partition the data appropriately, but it can be done. This is why realDBAs still make the big bucks. There is a lot to know in that domain. You probably should hire someone who is an expert on whatever stuff you are using now to consult before you go down the path of NOSQL. All you told us is you are a growing start up with is not much to go on but without know what you are doing its hard for me to believe you are doing anything on a scale that can't be done well with a relational database; but maybe I am wrong and maybe you are doing something huge. Remember as soon as you go down the NOSQL path you are going to have to be doing a great deal of heavy lifting because the quantity of libraries and off the shelf stuff out there is not great.
When i saw the headline, i was hoping that this would be a device that allowed an SSD to be connected to a RAM slot and used as RAM, rather than an SSD that takes up a RAM slot.
Well I don't know why you would want to use slow flash as your primary storage rather than fast DRAM or SRAM.
Now this is not what I think you had in mind but having primary storage that does not need refresh would permit you to have a machine that could be powered on and off and remain in a consistent state. Well there were a few more things you'd need to do like preserve the content of CPU registers but there are ways to solve those problems. Such a machine also could have only primary storage because large flash banks are so cheap. Now this machine would be very slow but for some applications it would be useful. Actually such machines are often employed in manufacturing and probably other places. A flash based memory module would have been a step toward alowing us geeks how just want to play with something like that a way to build it out of cheap hardware; but your typical gamer would have no interest.
If they were to do this for some of my classes they'd find a 100% cheating rate
That is an admission of cheating, I think you should have posted AC unless you are really really sure non of your profs know your Slashdot nick/id.
Which would not shock me if one or two does. I had a prof ask me if my nick was DarkOx based after he read some posts and recognized some of the idea's I had discussed with him in class. You might want to be more careful.
Most users need a word processor and a spread sheet and perhaps a Viso type utility. I guess lots of people probably want a presentation tool like Power Point as well but I never give those types of presentations I am white board man, so I can't help you there. Abiword, Gnumeric and Dia pretty much meet my needs. If I need to look at a Visio doc Microsofts viewer works pretty well under wine. Abiword and Gnumeric are probably not as feature rich as OO.org but both are easier to use IMHO and both handle most Microsoft Office documents of their respective types pretty well. Dia is a pretty good tool for putting together diagrams and getting ideas down fast. Depending on your needs you should check those projects out.