I think you're overstating or fabricating an issue that doesn't exist. For instance, on my (ancient) Aluminum PowerBook G4 (remember that the G4 chip was notorious for its heat issues), I have vents along the backside of the computer and along both sides (all of which are hidden from view in normal use). In regular practice I can easily max out the CPU for extended periods of time (heck, running Azureus and watching a movie will do that these days), yet it never gets hot enough to warrant concern, due to the proper venting. So while the thermal properties of other metals may be more favorable, it's not an issue if the heat is properly vented, which it is (otherwise, we could make the argument that every computer should use liquids for cooling since they have better thermal properties than air, which would entirely miss the fact that liquid cooling is simply unnecessary in many cases). And last I checked, the current laptop lines from Apple do not have vents in the region that would be directed at the groin.
Have you used a newer Macbook/Macbook Pro? The vents are pretty much gone, and they get hot. Since aluminum is a great conductor of heat, that means the bottom of the laptop gets pretty hot. As in so hot, it's uncomfortable to actually use it in your lap. That's what he means by saying it heats up your groin area. In comparison, most PC laptops use a hard plastic of some sort on the bottom. Plastic is a poor heat conductor, and in the case of the Thinkpads I have used, they at most only get warm. The aluminum may be pretty, but overall I think it's a pretty poor choice for a case material for a laptop.
So, it's not like there aren't PCs like that too. It's just that if you give the PC buyer the choice between something that looks a little messier, but uses standard off-the-shelf components, and saves them several hundred dollars versus something like the PowerMac, the PC user will choose the former almost every time. However, with the Mac you simply don't have a choice.
That's the whole point. For example, at the movies if a fountain drink was $2.00, I'd probably buy one and they would probably make something like $1.75 on the deal. However, since they want to try and extract $7.50 from me for something that costs them about 25 cents, I don't buy one and they make nothing. I'm guessing there are a lot of people like me, which suggests an elastic demand curve. Given that their food costs have to be pretty cheap, I really don't get why movie theatres price their food the way they do.
Slashdot is more anti-corporate more than anything else, mostly because people around here feel that corporations are unfairly taking from us. We don't like it when corporations pervert the copyright system to the point where nothing falls into the public domain anymore, essentially taking from us what should be ours to do with as we please. So a lot of people here don't feel bad about violating a corporation's copyrights, especially for things that should be in the public domain from now. Likewise, when it comes to GPL violations, people around here will side against the corporation, because people feel that corporations are once again taking something that they should not if they don't plan on reciprocating by sharing their modified code.
I think that if the copyright terms were rolled back to what they were originally, I think people around here would tend to respect copyrights more, and likewise I don't think most free software advocates would mind much when 28 year-old GPL code falls into the public domain.
It's more like an auction environment, where a third party knows the maximum the buyer is willing to pay and the minimum the seller willing to accept, and if the former is greater than the latter, they can very quickly step in and buy from the seller at their minimum and turn around and sell to the buyer at their maximum, keeping the difference to themselves. Free markets only really work when everyone has perfect information, and this is not the case here.
By simple math, 68.1 per 100k plus 12.9 per 100k would be 81.0 per 200k, which is 40.5 per 100k. This is close to the number above, but not exactly. The reason is that by adding the numbers together like that, that's assuming a population with exactly the same number of females as male. However, this is not the case, with most countries having more females than males, so that's why the number is a bit lower than you would otherwise expect. If you're clever, you can back out the male:female ratio from the data above.
Well, this seems like the perfect use of the smart appliances. As the electric company changes its rates around based upon how the demand changes, the appliance could automatically modify its behavior so that it will still be operating when the rates are the cheapest.
I wouldn't count on it, really. In the past, it was fairly unusual to write something down - you didn't have a cheap medium to do it on, and most people were illiterate anyway. So what remains of what little was recorded is valuable today, because it is rare. More common objects aren't nearly as valuable - you might be surprised at just how cheap you can buy ancient Roman coins for - they may be thousands of years old but they were made by the millions and plenty of examples survive. I see things like CDs and DVDs to be similar - even if only a very small fraction of a percentage survive, the fact there are literally billions of them around today means that in a 1000 years they aren't going to be uncommon. Furthermore, if they have computers that are direct descendants of the ones we're using now, they'll probably already have perfect digital copies of anything mass-produced, so they'll have little interest in trying to read the majority of them.
If a firefox plugin and retreive the torrent then so can any image hosting site. all reputable ones will decline to host those images. the torrents might be legal ones, but the image hosting sites will not see it valuable to their bussiness model to offer a service which might be hosting links to tainted goods.
Why not? Any image hosting site that accepts any image that someone uploads to it is already full of copyright violations as it stands now.
Buying laptops for everyone would be even more retarded. They cost more, break more, are harder to repair, run slower, are more easily stolen, have shorter lifetimes, have batteries that wear out, and have poor ergonomics (unless you spend even more and buy extra keyboards/mice/monitors). It really only makes sense to buy a laptop for those that actually need one for their job, and unless they are almost always traveling they'll probably want a desktop too.
That's why he said "nearly everyone". Pretty much only difference nowadays between a Xeon and the desktop processor it's based off of is that it's multi-CPU capable and supports ECC ram (well, and price). Well, the base Mac Pro only has one CPU socket, so multi-CPU is out. So you're paying $1600 for ECC ram. For $1600, I think I can live without it, especially considering the base Mac Pro is crippled and can only accept a total of 8GB of ram, where as those Dells can accept more.
And you can hardly cry fowl when people compare a $900 Dell to a $2750 Apple when the $2750 Apple is the only thing in Apple's line up that's even remotely similar.
Why not use a parallel port zip drive instead? It may also require a bi-directional parallel port, but those are easy to come by in 8-bit ISA. Parallel port zip drives are common, so it shouldn't be too hard to get a hold of one (plus a more modern type for your other computer), and even the 100MB version is a massive amount of storage for a computer that old.
Why, I'm right handed and don't use the numberpad often (it's been a while since I played nethack I confess). I want to rest my right hand on the mouse. Right now that means having my right arm at an unergonomic angle.
There's really no reason that the mouse has to be to the side of the keyboard. I find it comfortable to push the keyboard back a bit and use the mouse in front of the keyboard. This seems to be more ergonomic - though usually this means you're using it at an angle relative to the screen so you may have to get used to that. The only problem I find is sometimes the mouse gets in the way when I want to type.
What's so great about a poorly thought out mouse that's effectively single-button, and probably the worst non-laptop keyboard made in the past 20 years?
Which would be exactly zero? There are no 1400x1050 17" LCDs that I'm aware of.
Though the Newegg power search is useful because you can search by pixel pitch, which shows that 1680x1050 @ 19" is probably the closest to what he wants (at 0.243mm).
They were down to about $300 or so for a TN-based 1600x1200 at 20" before all the cheap and high volume stuff all switched to short-height monitors. You may be able to find some new - a few places still seem to have the Samsung Syncmaster 204B in stock. It's funny though how 4:3 still seems to do okay at the high-end though.
I think what he's looking more for is 'high dpi lcd monitor'. If you type that into Google you'll end up with a bunch of pages where everyone is wondering the pretty much the same thing.
Besides the Viewsonic, there is also an Acer and and Asus 19" monitor at 1680x1050 resolution. I'm not sure, but I think they all use the same panel, which sadly is a TN panel (though fairly decent as TN's go). This is about the best you can get in terms of DPI in the desktop LCD world right now.
The OS does take care of that stuff. All the application developer has to do is split the application up into more than one thread, and they're done. From there, the OS decides how to best assign the threads to the different cores available in the system. The problem is that there are still lots of single threaded applications out there, or at least applications where only one thread is responsible for all the heavy lifting.
You might want to hold onto that equipment, because as far as I can tell, no one makes CRTs for the high-end anymore, and on the low-end side of things I expect they won't last too much longer as whatever price advantage they once had must be gone by now with LCDs dropping in price so fast.
On the upside though, it's not hard to get was an expensive high-end Sony, Mitsubishi, etc. CRT for free now.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you used a newer Macbook/Macbook Pro? The vents are pretty much gone, and they get hot. Since aluminum is a great conductor of heat, that means the bottom of the laptop gets pretty hot. As in so hot, it's uncomfortable to actually use it in your lap. That's what he means by saying it heats up your groin area. In comparison, most PC laptops use a hard plastic of some sort on the bottom. Plastic is a poor heat conductor, and in the case of the Thinkpads I have used, they at most only get warm. The aluminum may be pretty, but overall I think it's a pretty poor choice for a case material for a laptop.
So, it's not like there aren't PCs like that too. It's just that if you give the PC buyer the choice between something that looks a little messier, but uses standard off-the-shelf components, and saves them several hundred dollars versus something like the PowerMac, the PC user will choose the former almost every time. However, with the Mac you simply don't have a choice.
That's the whole point. For example, at the movies if a fountain drink was $2.00, I'd probably buy one and they would probably make something like $1.75 on the deal. However, since they want to try and extract $7.50 from me for something that costs them about 25 cents, I don't buy one and they make nothing. I'm guessing there are a lot of people like me, which suggests an elastic demand curve. Given that their food costs have to be pretty cheap, I really don't get why movie theatres price their food the way they do.
Slashdot is more anti-corporate more than anything else, mostly because people around here feel that corporations are unfairly taking from us. We don't like it when corporations pervert the copyright system to the point where nothing falls into the public domain anymore, essentially taking from us what should be ours to do with as we please. So a lot of people here don't feel bad about violating a corporation's copyrights, especially for things that should be in the public domain from now. Likewise, when it comes to GPL violations, people around here will side against the corporation, because people feel that corporations are once again taking something that they should not if they don't plan on reciprocating by sharing their modified code.
I think that if the copyright terms were rolled back to what they were originally, I think people around here would tend to respect copyrights more, and likewise I don't think most free software advocates would mind much when 28 year-old GPL code falls into the public domain.
It's more like an auction environment, where a third party knows the maximum the buyer is willing to pay and the minimum the seller willing to accept, and if the former is greater than the latter, they can very quickly step in and buy from the seller at their minimum and turn around and sell to the buyer at their maximum, keeping the difference to themselves. Free markets only really work when everyone has perfect information, and this is not the case here.
It's pretty easy to do with old hardware, mostly early P2 stuff and older, before things like those notches became standard equipment.
I thought the article explained it pretty well myself.
How would you drive 2009 Celicas at the same time?
By simple math, 68.1 per 100k plus 12.9 per 100k would be 81.0 per 200k, which is 40.5 per 100k. This is close to the number above, but not exactly. The reason is that by adding the numbers together like that, that's assuming a population with exactly the same number of females as male. However, this is not the case, with most countries having more females than males, so that's why the number is a bit lower than you would otherwise expect. If you're clever, you can back out the male:female ratio from the data above.
Well, this seems like the perfect use of the smart appliances. As the electric company changes its rates around based upon how the demand changes, the appliance could automatically modify its behavior so that it will still be operating when the rates are the cheapest.
I wouldn't count on it, really. In the past, it was fairly unusual to write something down - you didn't have a cheap medium to do it on, and most people were illiterate anyway. So what remains of what little was recorded is valuable today, because it is rare. More common objects aren't nearly as valuable - you might be surprised at just how cheap you can buy ancient Roman coins for - they may be thousands of years old but they were made by the millions and plenty of examples survive. I see things like CDs and DVDs to be similar - even if only a very small fraction of a percentage survive, the fact there are literally billions of them around today means that in a 1000 years they aren't going to be uncommon. Furthermore, if they have computers that are direct descendants of the ones we're using now, they'll probably already have perfect digital copies of anything mass-produced, so they'll have little interest in trying to read the majority of them.
Why not? Any image hosting site that accepts any image that someone uploads to it is already full of copyright violations as it stands now.
Agreed. The extra $100-300 for something like a Thinkpad is well spent.
Buying laptops for everyone would be even more retarded. They cost more, break more, are harder to repair, run slower, are more easily stolen, have shorter lifetimes, have batteries that wear out, and have poor ergonomics (unless you spend even more and buy extra keyboards/mice/monitors). It really only makes sense to buy a laptop for those that actually need one for their job, and unless they are almost always traveling they'll probably want a desktop too.
That's why he said "nearly everyone". Pretty much only difference nowadays between a Xeon and the desktop processor it's based off of is that it's multi-CPU capable and supports ECC ram (well, and price). Well, the base Mac Pro only has one CPU socket, so multi-CPU is out. So you're paying $1600 for ECC ram. For $1600, I think I can live without it, especially considering the base Mac Pro is crippled and can only accept a total of 8GB of ram, where as those Dells can accept more.
And you can hardly cry fowl when people compare a $900 Dell to a $2750 Apple when the $2750 Apple is the only thing in Apple's line up that's even remotely similar.
Why not use a parallel port zip drive instead? It may also require a bi-directional parallel port, but those are easy to come by in 8-bit ISA. Parallel port zip drives are common, so it shouldn't be too hard to get a hold of one (plus a more modern type for your other computer), and even the 100MB version is a massive amount of storage for a computer that old.
There's really no reason that the mouse has to be to the side of the keyboard. I find it comfortable to push the keyboard back a bit and use the mouse in front of the keyboard. This seems to be more ergonomic - though usually this means you're using it at an angle relative to the screen so you may have to get used to that. The only problem I find is sometimes the mouse gets in the way when I want to type.
What's so great about a poorly thought out mouse that's effectively single-button, and probably the worst non-laptop keyboard made in the past 20 years?
That's a 1280x720 resolution LCD that can accept a 1400x1050 signal and scale it down. Not the same thing at all.
Which would be exactly zero? There are no 1400x1050 17" LCDs that I'm aware of.
Though the Newegg power search is useful because you can search by pixel pitch, which shows that 1680x1050 @ 19" is probably the closest to what he wants (at 0.243mm).
They were down to about $300 or so for a TN-based 1600x1200 at 20" before all the cheap and high volume stuff all switched to short-height monitors. You may be able to find some new - a few places still seem to have the Samsung Syncmaster 204B in stock. It's funny though how 4:3 still seems to do okay at the high-end though.
I think what he's looking more for is 'high dpi lcd monitor'. If you type that into Google you'll end up with a bunch of pages where everyone is wondering the pretty much the same thing.
Besides the Viewsonic, there is also an Acer and and Asus 19" monitor at 1680x1050 resolution. I'm not sure, but I think they all use the same panel, which sadly is a TN panel (though fairly decent as TN's go). This is about the best you can get in terms of DPI in the desktop LCD world right now.
The OS does take care of that stuff. All the application developer has to do is split the application up into more than one thread, and they're done. From there, the OS decides how to best assign the threads to the different cores available in the system. The problem is that there are still lots of single threaded applications out there, or at least applications where only one thread is responsible for all the heavy lifting.
You might want to hold onto that equipment, because as far as I can tell, no one makes CRTs for the high-end anymore, and on the low-end side of things I expect they won't last too much longer as whatever price advantage they once had must be gone by now with LCDs dropping in price so fast.
On the upside though, it's not hard to get was an expensive high-end Sony, Mitsubishi, etc. CRT for free now.