Agreed. I dropped my usage down to zero when I moved into a small unit, and didn't have room for the large and rather old set I had, so it went to my sister. It's been almost 10 years without TV now.
What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know watching the pure shit on television. Whether it's re-runs of the stuff I used to watch or new stuff, it's all really poor.
I too couldn't see how bad it was until going a few years without a tele.
It's much like the slashdot crowd's uproar against the media each time they misuse the term "hacker" to mean "someone who writes viruses and breaks into computers and sells stolen data on the black market". No, it doesn't mean they're explicitly equating people who enjoy coding all night long, or making something do a useful thing it wasn't meant to... They're writing out of ignorance, and it's messed up as eventually that link is reenforced by virtue of the same term being used.
For any of you reading this who complain about "hacker" being used as a negative term by the press, but are happy to keep using "gay" as a term of abuse against something negative, ask yourself why you're upset at one but not the other. Is it your inbuilt biases? is it just because it only affects you and you don't give a shit about other groups in the same situation? Do you just not like short words?:)
I don't know why, but staring at a page with this much pink is surprisingly comforting. Any chance we could have an all-pink look as a selectable theme?
I really *really* do like it.
(except on pages where it's half pink half grey, but that's just details to fix up)
Go by what you feel
on
Preventing RSI?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Go by what you feel when you're using a computer. If you feel something hurting, stop. right away. Then look at what you're doing and what could cause it, and try something different.
12 years ago I worked in a department that insisted on bucketloads of ergonomic tricks to make things easier for people. If we were just using mouse and plain keyboard, we were pushed to try trackballs, wristrests for mouse & keyboard, split keyboards, ergo chairs etc. That made for a culture of workers feeling free to say "this isn't working for me, let me try something different" and most people found their niche setup, using components they didn't know were available to them, or didn't know were an option in the workplace.
As it turns out I tried trackballs and found them cripplingly painful, and ergo chairs were comfy while I sat on them but locked my knees painfully into place. I'm most comfortable with plain old keyboard and mouse, and have been RSI free with that setup for 22 years. It's the best solution for me, and if that works for you too, don't be in too much hurry to change.
> This really surprises anyone? I thought terms like "ideal for a DYIer!" have always meant "about to collapse" ?
It surprises many people. There are plenty of people who, when faced by something that looks like a bargain, or looks like they're getting a good deal & ripping off the buyer will jump at a business chance without thinking things through, because the scammer has successfully planted an image in the buyer/victim's own mind. Imaginations are a powerful thing, and work against the victim.
A relative of mine (no relation apart from by marriage) came across his first nigerian scammer email a couple of years ago. He spent days thinking over the options and planning how to rip nigerianscammerguy off of all his money, instead of just getting 10% of the $50million promised.
I gave the guy a handy hint, advised him it's a scam and these guys will just try to take money from him and keep promising but never delivering. That's when he said he knew it must be a scam, and unveiled some 'foolproof' plan to get the money from the nigerianscammerguy but not reveal who he was or send them much money at all.
Eventually, he ended up losing about $2500 to the scammers getting played right into their game. Why? While he knew it was a scam, he made the stupid mistake of believing the $50 million actually existed. It clouded his vision, and all he could see was a mental image of his bank statement with 7 digits in the black. Same with real estate, the buyers make an image in their mind of what they're buying, and don't lose it - even buyers of property who get to inspect it will see what they want to, unless there are major differences between description and reality.
Sadly, I don't think the summary was a troll or a joke, rather an expression of how poor many people are at truly reading news articles for meaning, as opposed to the habit of skimming over them in 30 seconds and getting a few key words to highlight mentally.
I've written articles for a few sites in the past, not as anything professional, but come across the same problem. Enough of the feedback in site comments or email comes from people who betray their lack of comprehension by their comments. I'll write about how to install an apache module for example, and specifically state three steps to be taken in order to get everything working; the responses indicate people have jumped in and tried only step three, done all steps in a random order, or in some cases completely misread the point of the article. "Hi B, I'm writing about your article on how to get eaccelerator working, and I'm getting errors decompressing the archive according to Step 2"... so I reply "Hello user, I have never written an eaccelerator article, step 2 is how to decompress the archive for installing mod_gzip". Any & every permutation comes back at me. It's possibly a reflection of bad writing skills, but honestly I don't think my writing is THAT poor.
So it goes on, and I blame half-hearted attempts in school to introduce speed reading, where anybody can be taught in minutes to skim over two paragraphs and get words like "hype" "apple" "mac mini" and "intel" then make up their own story in-mind, without getting any real context or meaning from what's read.
Back in the early 90s, I worked nightshifts in a petfood plant. Dry food only, thankfully. I'd spend 12 hours a night sitting on a line where the pellets rolled off a conveyor belt watching for large clumps that could damage the automated sorting systems. It would handle most of them, but sometimes something bad happened only a human could react to. I was paid $24 an hour in 1991 for that job, due to the time & conditions.
Fast forward to one my tech jobs 12 years later. In house support for education systems, a job that required the experience I'd gained in 10 years of previous tech & support work, and I was paid $19 an hour.
Looks like WoW doesn't have it wrong in all cases.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this only affect the system at the user level? Unless the person is browsing the web as root.... I'm sure some clever person could do some damage with this exploit but to affect the system as a whole, you would still get a dialog box to make system changes.
You're right and wrong, depending on what you view as "part of the system". A default OSX user for macs out of the box and after an install of OSX is put into group "admin". Admin isn't root of course, however many parts beyond the user's home are modifyable by admin freely without getting the password verification popup. This is why the previous leap.a virus did not require a password to be entered to infect the files it infects in/Applications.
Deeper parts of the OS are protected, but for a good example do "ls -l/Applications | grep admin | grep ^.rwxrwx" and see how many apps in group admin also have full rwx privs. Every one of those apps is wide open to modification by code running as a default OSX user. Then do "ls -l/Library | grep admin | grep ^.rwxrwx". Look at that, lots of/Library is open to writing by admin, freely and without the requirement of a password popup. If you wanted to add a little prefpane waiting for someone to innocently click on later, you could just dump it in there. Again, freely without requiring an admin password popup for default priv OSX users.
Not ALL of the system, but much of it. Enough anyway.
If I remember correctly, Ebola was this virus a few years ago that "spread from apes to humans" and thus would spread and kill us all. Wait, isn't that what Avian Flu is going to do to us? It's all a lot of hype.
It's a lot of valid potentiality that gets drummed up as hype by doomsayers, the media, and anyone else who has something to gain by promoting a state of fear, interest or worry in people.
Total worldwide ebola deaths since 1976 are 1,500. If you catch it, there's an 80% chance you'll die.
But then there have been 1.2million people in the US alone killed in fatal car accidents in the same time period. If you're caught in a fatal car accident, there's a pretty big chance you'll die too.
Avian flu is known to have killed under 100 people worldwide, since 1996. Worldwide deaths from normal influenza currently reach 500,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR worldwide. FIVE MILLION PEOPLE since 1996.
Read the above and you see how the panic effect of statistics is all in how the info is presented. Don't rely on alarmist messages of any type (this one included) to base your fears on, go & read up as much background info as you can. It makes the only sense.
Your job sounds almost like a scam a friend of mine was involved in, and it sucked the life out of him. Basically, he answered an advert in the local newspaper looking for proofreaders and transcribers with guaranteed work. Indeed, when he phoned them they gave him a job on the spot.
Except the job involved bidding money for work, and if you bid the most money for a particular job, you got the work and were paid for it. You were paid good money for it which is why it looked so appealing, I think he was on $45 per hour for transcribing from news broadcasts. The only problem was with such a large pool of "employees" it wasn't unusual to find they were bidding $40 for a job that only involved an hour's transcribing. Do the math and you can see how it works.
That was a scam though, your job sounds like it ended up the same without management quite realising how bad it was.
But their stock performance was very, very mediocre, and I wondered why so many smart people could do things that don't shine in terms of corporate results.
In the late 1980s I saw the same thing happen with a Hyundai. Motoring magazines reported on a really nice sporty little car they'd prototyped. It was really cute two door, a unique looking convertible that would have sold like hotcakes. Then as it got closer & closer to release it gained full rear seats instead of being a 2+2 layout. Then it got a bigger trunk for more luggage, a fatter roofline for more rear-seat passenger room. The "radical" front styling was softened, then it was given another two doors. In the end it was just another small four door hyundai, and when released was received so poorly it never made it out of Asia.
A press statement from Hyundai stated something along the lines of "market anticipation failed to convert to sales" when it was canned. That's because the beancounters, the conservative marketers massages the product into something virtually the antithesis of the original product the market built up its anticipation about.
Seems a common theme in the big companies, where something good is created but because of a lack of forceful "no. don't touch" from smart management everyone gets to poke their fingers in and change things, making Yet Another Lowest Common Denominator Product.
Much the same thing happened to a friend of the family. When I was 20, she was 12 and 5'8". By 13 she was 5'11", had filled out and had the hips, breasts and walk of any awesome college 20 year old. Her peers weren't as much trouble as the constant attention from older guys, anywhere from 20 to 40 or more and in every kind of social situation. This is a kid who wasn't even a teenager a year before, and was propositioned daily. She looked older and more mature than me, yet still acted every bit the young kid because that's exactly what she was. What quiet 12/13 year old kid knows how to fend off a persistent 30 year old guy in a park who wants her phone number, and can't see or understand this is a kid he's talking to?
Socially, it's pretty screwed up just because her body advertised signals that didn't match the person.
Before 1994, the 68k ruled the roost - then in March 1994 the first PPC Macs arrived in the form of 6100/7100/8100 macs running PPC601 CPUs.
That was MacOS 7.1.x era, and it wasn't until 8.5 that the system went all-PPC, leaving 68ks to use 8.1 and earlier operating systems. 8.5 was released October 1998, which gives a good 4 and a half years worth of 68k support after the first PPC macs came in. if we get the same or similar from Apple today, we should see PPC operating systems until at least 2010.
Either these pics are a PS job, or somebody leaked pictures from older test mules. There is no way in hell that Apple is going to sell something that looks so messy.
They look almost identical inside to the previous generation G5 iMac. 90% of it's the same machine, the only difference is the layout of components on the motherboard, with the case, frame, fans, drives and power boards all in exactly the same place in the 17" and 20" Intel iMacs as in the previous generation g5 iMac. EXACTLY.
RAM is still upgradable. Look down the bottom of the 4 rightmost images, and you can see latches/pull catches that unfold so the RAM slots are accessible from the outside, through a small hole in the case.
Doesn't explain the non-user upgradeable disk - though non-user upgradeable only means "officially".
People seem to have the impression that these Intel machines have been designed haphazardly, and the lack of aesthetics inside have made for many comments online that the insides must have been designed by Intel themselves to look so different to the G5s. A friend of mine has put together a picture of various models to show that they are almost identical inside to the previous model G5 iMacs. It's those G5 iMacs with iSights that introduced the messier interior, not the Intel ones.
Others have brought up good comments - that sometimes the counterfeits can be dangerous, not work the same as the real thing, not comply with local laws, be interference-prone electronics etc.
Another problem is when a device made in the same factory as the real deal (let's say a Toshiba laptop) is sold in the US as a real toshiba. To many people hey, it's a real toshiba, and it's half the price!
But part of the price of the REAL toshiba is the Quality Control that occurs along the line. Perhaps only 85% of all laptops made in that factory actually end up being accepted by toshiba as inventory, and the rest is set to be dismantled, scrapped or refurbished as something went wrong on the assembly line. So what do you get when you buy the fake toshiba?
You get one of the *already rejected* "toshibas" that was never meant to be released to the public. Not only was it never given a serial number that matches a toshiba-sold product so all warranty is out the window, it's already been rejected and defined as having problems. Made in the same factory, yes, but not the same quality as the final for-sale object.
Maybe you'll get lucky and get a solid machine that only has some case defects. Maybe you'll get a lemon that doesn't stay powered on for more than 15 minutes, has no warranty, and you still paid $400 for.
What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes. Has it improved recently?
This topic arose when people started using flash memory as a hard drive in old Powerbook 1400s. While they're a nice very expandable old powerbook, they have a RAM ceiling of 64MB. a G3/400 CPU expansion in them is one thing, but being limited to 64MB is a pain in the butt.
So popping a flash ram card in and using it as the virtual memory drive let PB1400 owners use 128, 256MB of virtual memory, running off the flash ram which was far quicker than the internal HD for swapping. Many people have also used these cards as the main boot drive so the whole OS boots from RAM, swaps to that same RAM, and gives mostly silent operation and saves on battery life. Critics of doing this noted the drives would last a month or two until suffering write death.
Systems running these cards have been seen working just fine for 3-4 years now. Write limits in the range of tens to low hundreds of thousands may not seem much, but in reality it's working quite well. Apparently part of this is that most newer flash ram drives are set up to attempt evenly distributed writes over cells, and not concentrate hundreds of writes one after another on the same cell
The house mice -- believed to have made their way to Gough decades ago on sealing and whaling ships -- have evolved to about three times their normal size.
I have raised a couple of generations of house mice from a captured pair at my parent's place, and while that original pair were the same size as any other house mouse, about an inch and a half from nose to the base of their tail, their offspring raised in my tank and fed well (ok, overfed:) were every bit as big as fancy mice, four inches or more long from nose to tail base. Going by volume they were well over three times the size of their parents, probably closer to 5. All it took was a regular diet of pet mouse grains, crickets and burger mince.
They were certainly fatter, but also MUCH larger at a base level.
Even if you are right, durability is not the work of the designer, but of the engineers, who have to chose the right materials for the right usage
That would be true for an average designer but an industrial designer is as much engineer as they are designer. They're hands on throughout the whole process, working with their team experienced in ergonomics, acoustics, heating, cooling and materials. Jonathan Ive would have as much responsibility for the scratchiness or non scratchiness of anything he'd designed as he does for its shape.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I dropped my usage down to zero when I moved into a small unit, and didn't have room for the large and rather old set I had, so it went to my sister. It's been almost 10 years without TV now.
What I find constantly amazing is seeing otherwise intelligent people I know watching the pure shit on television. Whether it's re-runs of the stuff I used to watch or new stuff, it's all really poor.
I too couldn't see how bad it was until going a few years without a tele.
It's much like the slashdot crowd's uproar against the media each time they misuse the term "hacker" to mean "someone who writes viruses and breaks into computers and sells stolen data on the black market". No, it doesn't mean they're explicitly equating people who enjoy coding all night long, or making something do a useful thing it wasn't meant to... They're writing out of ignorance, and it's messed up as eventually that link is reenforced by virtue of the same term being used.
:)
For any of you reading this who complain about "hacker" being used as a negative term by the press, but are happy to keep using "gay" as a term of abuse against something negative, ask yourself why you're upset at one but not the other. Is it your inbuilt biases? is it just because it only affects you and you don't give a shit about other groups in the same situation? Do you just not like short words?
I don't know why, but staring at a page with this much pink is surprisingly comforting. Any chance we could have an all-pink look as a selectable theme?
I really *really* do like it.
(except on pages where it's half pink half grey, but that's just details to fix up)
Go by what you feel when you're using a computer. If you feel something hurting, stop. right away. Then look at what you're doing and what could cause it, and try something different.
12 years ago I worked in a department that insisted on bucketloads of ergonomic tricks to make things easier for people. If we were just using mouse and plain keyboard, we were pushed to try trackballs, wristrests for mouse & keyboard, split keyboards, ergo chairs etc. That made for a culture of workers feeling free to say "this isn't working for me, let me try something different" and most people found their niche setup, using components they didn't know were available to them, or didn't know were an option in the workplace.
As it turns out I tried trackballs and found them cripplingly painful, and ergo chairs were comfy while I sat on them but locked my knees painfully into place. I'm most comfortable with plain old keyboard and mouse, and have been RSI free with that setup for 22 years. It's the best solution for me, and if that works for you too, don't be in too much hurry to change.
> This really surprises anyone? I thought terms like "ideal for a DYIer!" have always meant "about to collapse" ?
It surprises many people. There are plenty of people who, when faced by something that looks like a bargain, or looks like they're getting a good deal & ripping off the buyer will jump at a business chance without thinking things through, because the scammer has successfully planted an image in the buyer/victim's own mind. Imaginations are a powerful thing, and work against the victim.
A relative of mine (no relation apart from by marriage) came across his first nigerian scammer email a couple of years ago. He spent days thinking over the options and planning how to rip nigerianscammerguy off of all his money, instead of just getting 10% of the $50million promised.
I gave the guy a handy hint, advised him it's a scam and these guys will just try to take money from him and keep promising but never delivering. That's when he said he knew it must be a scam, and unveiled some 'foolproof' plan to get the money from the nigerianscammerguy but not reveal who he was or send them much money at all.
Eventually, he ended up losing about $2500 to the scammers getting played right into their game. Why? While he knew it was a scam, he made the stupid mistake of believing the $50 million actually existed. It clouded his vision, and all he could see was a mental image of his bank statement with 7 digits in the black. Same with real estate, the buyers make an image in their mind of what they're buying, and don't lose it - even buyers of property who get to inspect it will see what they want to, unless there are major differences between description and reality.
Sadly, I don't think the summary was a troll or a joke, rather an expression of how poor many people are at truly reading news articles for meaning, as opposed to the habit of skimming over them in 30 seconds and getting a few key words to highlight mentally.
I've written articles for a few sites in the past, not as anything professional, but come across the same problem. Enough of the feedback in site comments or email comes from people who betray their lack of comprehension by their comments. I'll write about how to install an apache module for example, and specifically state three steps to be taken in order to get everything working; the responses indicate people have jumped in and tried only step three, done all steps in a random order, or in some cases completely misread the point of the article. "Hi B, I'm writing about your article on how to get eaccelerator working, and I'm getting errors decompressing the archive according to Step 2"... so I reply "Hello user, I have never written an eaccelerator article, step 2 is how to decompress the archive for installing mod_gzip". Any & every permutation comes back at me. It's possibly a reflection of bad writing skills, but honestly I don't think my writing is THAT poor.
So it goes on, and I blame half-hearted attempts in school to introduce speed reading, where anybody can be taught in minutes to skim over two paragraphs and get words like "hype" "apple" "mac mini" and "intel" then make up their own story in-mind, without getting any real context or meaning from what's read.
Back in the early 90s, I worked nightshifts in a petfood plant. Dry food only, thankfully. I'd spend 12 hours a night sitting on a line where the pellets rolled off a conveyor belt watching for large clumps that could damage the automated sorting systems. It would handle most of them, but sometimes something bad happened only a human could react to. I was paid $24 an hour in 1991 for that job, due to the time & conditions.
Fast forward to one my tech jobs 12 years later. In house support for education systems, a job that required the experience I'd gained in 10 years of previous tech & support work, and I was paid $19 an hour.
Looks like WoW doesn't have it wrong in all cases.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this only affect the system at the user level? Unless the person is browsing the web as root.... I'm sure some clever person could do some damage with this exploit but to affect the system as a whole, you would still get a dialog box to make system changes.
/Applications.
/Applications | grep admin | grep ^.rwxrwx" and see how many apps in group admin also have full rwx privs. Every one of those apps is wide open to modification by code running as a default OSX user. Then do "ls -l /Library | grep admin | grep ^.rwxrwx". Look at that, lots of /Library is open to writing by admin, freely and without the requirement of a password popup. If you wanted to add a little prefpane waiting for someone to innocently click on later, you could just dump it in there. Again, freely without requiring an admin password popup for default priv OSX users.
You're right and wrong, depending on what you view as "part of the system". A default OSX user for macs out of the box and after an install of OSX is put into group "admin". Admin isn't root of course, however many parts beyond the user's home are modifyable by admin freely without getting the password verification popup. This is why the previous leap.a virus did not require a password to be entered to infect the files it infects in
Deeper parts of the OS are protected, but for a good example do "ls -l
Not ALL of the system, but much of it. Enough anyway.
It's OK, I knew what you meant anyway :)
If I remember correctly, Ebola was this virus a few years ago that "spread from apes to humans" and thus would spread and kill us all. Wait, isn't that what Avian Flu is going to do to us? It's all a lot of hype.
It's a lot of valid potentiality that gets drummed up as hype by doomsayers, the media, and anyone else who has something to gain by promoting a state of fear, interest or worry in people.
Total worldwide ebola deaths since 1976 are 1,500. If you catch it, there's an 80% chance you'll die.
But then there have been 1.2million people in the US alone killed in fatal car accidents in the same time period. If you're caught in a fatal car accident, there's a pretty big chance you'll die too.
Avian flu is known to have killed under 100 people worldwide, since 1996. Worldwide deaths from normal influenza currently reach 500,000 EVERY SINGLE YEAR worldwide. FIVE MILLION PEOPLE since 1996.
Read the above and you see how the panic effect of statistics is all in how the info is presented. Don't rely on alarmist messages of any type (this one included) to base your fears on, go & read up as much background info as you can. It makes the only sense.
Your job sounds almost like a scam a friend of mine was involved in, and it sucked the life out of him. Basically, he answered an advert in the local newspaper looking for proofreaders and transcribers with guaranteed work. Indeed, when he phoned them they gave him a job on the spot.
Except the job involved bidding money for work, and if you bid the most money for a particular job, you got the work and were paid for it. You were paid good money for it which is why it looked so appealing, I think he was on $45 per hour for transcribing from news broadcasts. The only problem was with such a large pool of "employees" it wasn't unusual to find they were bidding $40 for a job that only involved an hour's transcribing. Do the math and you can see how it works.
That was a scam though, your job sounds like it ended up the same without management quite realising how bad it was.
But their stock performance was very, very mediocre, and I wondered why so many smart people could do things that don't shine in terms of corporate results.
In the late 1980s I saw the same thing happen with a Hyundai. Motoring magazines reported on a really nice sporty little car they'd prototyped. It was really cute two door, a unique looking convertible that would have sold like hotcakes. Then as it got closer & closer to release it gained full rear seats instead of being a 2+2 layout. Then it got a bigger trunk for more luggage, a fatter roofline for more rear-seat passenger room. The "radical" front styling was softened, then it was given another two doors. In the end it was just another small four door hyundai, and when released was received so poorly it never made it out of Asia.
A press statement from Hyundai stated something along the lines of "market anticipation failed to convert to sales" when it was canned. That's because the beancounters, the conservative marketers massages the product into something virtually the antithesis of the original product the market built up its anticipation about.
Seems a common theme in the big companies, where something good is created but because of a lack of forceful "no. don't touch" from smart management everyone gets to poke their fingers in and change things, making Yet Another Lowest Common Denominator Product.
Much the same thing happened to a friend of the family. When I was 20, she was 12 and 5'8". By 13 she was 5'11", had filled out and had the hips, breasts and walk of any awesome college 20 year old. Her peers weren't as much trouble as the constant attention from older guys, anywhere from 20 to 40 or more and in every kind of social situation. This is a kid who wasn't even a teenager a year before, and was propositioned daily. She looked older and more mature than me, yet still acted every bit the young kid because that's exactly what she was. What quiet 12/13 year old kid knows how to fend off a persistent 30 year old guy in a park who wants her phone number, and can't see or understand this is a kid he's talking to?
Socially, it's pretty screwed up just because her body advertised signals that didn't match the person.
Small, safe and convenient nuclear laptop batteries, right here right now. :)
Most offsite backups are encrypted anyway. They can't get the data back without the right keys, which are backed up elsewhere.
Right?
They *DID* encrypt their offsite backups, didn't they?
Convince Adobe to bring Photoshop to Linux and I know dozens of people who'll switch in an eyeblink.
Before 1994, the 68k ruled the roost - then in March 1994 the first PPC Macs arrived in the form of 6100/7100/8100 macs running PPC601 CPUs.
That was MacOS 7.1.x era, and it wasn't until 8.5 that the system went all-PPC, leaving 68ks to use 8.1 and earlier operating systems. 8.5 was released October 1998, which gives a good 4 and a half years worth of 68k support after the first PPC macs came in. if we get the same or similar from Apple today, we should see PPC operating systems until at least 2010.
Either these pics are a PS job, or somebody leaked pictures from older test mules. There is no way in hell that Apple is going to sell something that looks so messy.
They look almost identical inside to the previous generation G5 iMac. 90% of it's the same machine, the only difference is the layout of components on the motherboard, with the case, frame, fans, drives and power boards all in exactly the same place in the 17" and 20" Intel iMacs as in the previous generation g5 iMac. EXACTLY.
RAM is still upgradable. Look down the bottom of the 4 rightmost images, and you can see latches/pull catches that unfold so the RAM slots are accessible from the outside, through a small hole in the case.
Doesn't explain the non-user upgradeable disk - though non-user upgradeable only means "officially".
People seem to have the impression that these Intel machines have been designed haphazardly, and the lack of aesthetics inside have made for many comments online that the insides must have been designed by Intel themselves to look so different to the G5s. A friend of mine has put together a picture of various models to show that they are almost identical inside to the previous model G5 iMacs. It's those G5 iMacs with iSights that introduced the messier interior, not the Intel ones.
Just so people know.
Others have brought up good comments - that sometimes the counterfeits can be dangerous, not work the same as the real thing, not comply with local laws, be interference-prone electronics etc.
Another problem is when a device made in the same factory as the real deal (let's say a Toshiba laptop) is sold in the US as a real toshiba. To many people hey, it's a real toshiba, and it's half the price!
But part of the price of the REAL toshiba is the Quality Control that occurs along the line. Perhaps only 85% of all laptops made in that factory actually end up being accepted by toshiba as inventory, and the rest is set to be dismantled, scrapped or refurbished as something went wrong on the assembly line. So what do you get when you buy the fake toshiba?
You get one of the *already rejected* "toshibas" that was never meant to be released to the public. Not only was it never given a serial number that matches a toshiba-sold product so all warranty is out the window, it's already been rejected and defined as having problems. Made in the same factory, yes, but not the same quality as the final for-sale object.
Maybe you'll get lucky and get a solid machine that only has some case defects. Maybe you'll get a lemon that doesn't stay powered on for more than 15 minutes, has no warranty, and you still paid $400 for.
What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes.
Has it improved recently?
This topic arose when people started using flash memory as a hard drive in old Powerbook 1400s. While they're a nice very expandable old powerbook, they have a RAM ceiling of 64MB. a G3/400 CPU expansion in them is one thing, but being limited to 64MB is a pain in the butt.
So popping a flash ram card in and using it as the virtual memory drive let PB1400 owners use 128, 256MB of virtual memory, running off the flash ram which was far quicker than the internal HD for swapping. Many people have also used these cards as the main boot drive so the whole OS boots from RAM, swaps to that same RAM, and gives mostly silent operation and saves on battery life. Critics of doing this noted the drives would last a month or two until suffering write death.
Systems running these cards have been seen working just fine for 3-4 years now. Write limits in the range of tens to low hundreds of thousands may not seem much, but in reality it's working quite well. Apparently part of this is that most newer flash ram drives are set up to attempt evenly distributed writes over cells, and not concentrate hundreds of writes one after another on the same cell
One point in the article seems incorrect to me.
:) were every bit as big as fancy mice, four inches or more long from nose to tail base. Going by volume they were well over three times the size of their parents, probably closer to 5. All it took was a regular diet of pet mouse grains, crickets and burger mince.
The house mice -- believed to have made their way to Gough decades ago on sealing and whaling ships -- have evolved to about three times their normal size.
I have raised a couple of generations of house mice from a captured pair at my parent's place, and while that original pair were the same size as any other house mouse, about an inch and a half from nose to the base of their tail, their offspring raised in my tank and fed well (ok, overfed
They were certainly fatter, but also MUCH larger at a base level.
Even if you are right, durability is not the work of the designer, but of the engineers, who have to chose the right materials for the right usage
That would be true for an average designer but an industrial designer is as much engineer as they are designer. They're hands on throughout the whole process, working with their team experienced in ergonomics, acoustics, heating, cooling and materials. Jonathan Ive would have as much responsibility for the scratchiness or non scratchiness of anything he'd designed as he does for its shape.
> they cater to gamers who tend to smoke heavily. The bad air and
> light can increase the danger of sudden death, experts warn.
And this is different to the den of the average console gamer how?