When I've had flash drives fail, it's almost always been catastrophic - I can't read anything off the flash at all. Furthermore, it's always been sudden - it simply stops working. My harddisk failures generally are not - the drive gives warnings (becomes loud, starts clicking, slow spin up) before it fails completely. For the flash, I think it's almost always been the controller chip that fails and not the actual flash memory, but unless you are a soldering wizard, it might as well be the same thing.
The Macbook Air is not really the same market. The Asus/Dell is going for cheap, small, and ubiquitous, whereas the Macbook Air is going for a high end niche market. If anything, Apple is competing in this market by eliminating the keyboard and foldup design, and going with a touchscreen/tablet interface with the iPhone/iPod touch.
It won't work on all of them, but 'Alt-Spacebar' then press 'm', then use the arrow keys to move the dialog box around. Basically what you're doing is 'Alt-space' brings up the menu you get when you click on the icon in the top left corner of the window, and 'm' selects "Move", which is the old pre-Windows 3.0 way to move stuff around with the keyboard.
There is no reason to have to abandon VGA equipment. Most DVI ports I see are DVI-I, which means that in addition to the digital pins, the full set of analog pins are also present in the connector to drive an analog device using a cheap adaptor to convert to a VGA pinout. You do have to watch out for DVI-D devices which lacks the analog pins (easiest way to tell is to look for the four pins next to the bar on the connector, those are some of the analog pins, and if they are missing it's a DVI-D plug). Devices that only output to DVI-D are kind of rare, but not unheard of.
Also, some/many of the more expensive "DVI only" monitors also feature DVI-I ports, which means they'll accept a VGA signal using the same adaptor. Cheaper monitors may only have DVI-D, so do pay attention.
The version of Windows is XP Home, and it will only be available for OEMs selling ultraportable computers that cannot run Windows Vista, or won't run it very well. As such, Microsoft will only license it if your computers don't exceed some maximum specifications as defined by Microsoft. Some more information here: http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/03/windows-xp-to-live-until-2010-on-the-eee/.
Yeah, I don't get it either. Do you really think your typical harddrive for your typical desktop is going to last for 100,000-1,000,000 writes? It'll be long dead before that. As far as I'm concerned, SSD's are ready for most applications, the only problem at the moment is cost.
Well, different keyboards for different needs. I have a "happy hacker" keyboard on my home PC, and I like the extra deskspace I get from chopping 7-8" from the keyboard, and I don't need to enter enough numbers to miss the keypad. At work though, I have a full sized keyboard and I wouldn't give it up for anything as I use the keypad all the time.
I disagree. The top menubar is mighty inconvienent on large monitors, and especially multiple monitor set ups where your menubar may be on an entirely different monitor. Yes, it only takes a second or two to move the mouse there, but it gets tiresome after a while. I could also use keyboard shortcuts, but quite frankly that's never been a strength of the Mac.
I don't what you mean by speeding recognition. The top menubar also changes with whatever application you have active, which means that I have to suddenly pay attention to what window is active before I can interact with the program (with more mouse moves as I have to select the right window), whereas on other OSes, I can just move the mouse to the menubar I want to interact with and use it.
Finally, while it's not really a fault of the top menubar concept, the way it is implemented by Apple means that a program is not closed when it looks closed (all the windows are gone). I don't know how many times I've run accross a Mac with lots of programs without windows open for this reason, with the user unaware of why their computer is sluggish.
Overall, it's a crappy UI design. It's not a fixed header as compared to a website, because it's always changing depending on what your doing (what application you're running, or lack thereof). A good UI has things stay the same no matter what you're doing. The Windows taskbar is like this, as it more or less always behaves the same no matter what (though XP broke this a little with things like grouping and auto-hiding taskbar icons). I can see why Apple did it originally though, as space was a premium on the original Macs with their small screens, and it was unlikely you would have multiple windows open where you could see them anyway, so it wasn't that confusing either. Hence the reason why I call it dated.
The menubar serves the foreground application. The windows taskbar was, and is to this day, a weird hack of functional confusion designed for a world of screen-filling maximized windows. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good.
And the menubar on the top of the screen is a incredibly dated concept that dates back to the days of small 9" monochrome screens, and is inconvienent and confusing in these days where large screens and multi-monitor setups are common. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good.
Windows 3.1 wasn't that bad. I remember it as the last version of Windows that wouldn't do crap behind your back (in other words, the harddrive light stays off when the computer is idle), and the last version of Windows that wasn't burdened down with the registry which constantly acquires bloat and liked to randomly corrupt itself (at least back in the '95 days). It was also configured by simple text files, and ran quite comfortably on a 386. It also behaved in a consistent manner, so once you trained someone how to do something in Windows 3.1, they could repeat the same steps and get the same result (similar to DOS in this aspect), whereas Windows 95 and later are prone to occasionally throwing up random errors or randomly breaking for no good reason just to confuse people.
My Delco (Chevy) radio has a blinking red light on it too. It means that if the radio is disconnected and reconnected, a 4-digit code is required to get the radio to work again. (If I deactivate this anti-theft feature, the light doesn't blink).
If someone were to steal the radio out of the car, it would become a brick. It also disables itself if I disconnect and reconnect the battery.
That's actually a good example of security theatre. No thief steals factory radios - they only work in a one or few models of cars, generally aren't of high quality anyway, and really would only be useful to someone who had a broken version of the same radio. It's much easier to fence an aftermarket stereo, and they'll generally get more money for them, so that's what they steal. The only purpose the codes serve is to annoy the owners of the cars that have them.
The National Journal, the szame rag that ranked John Kerry as the "most liberal" senator back around the previous presidental election? It seems pretty obvious to anyone who pokes around in their methodology that they only reason they publish these lists is to give the right some talking points. For example, there were only two votes they scored where Barack Obama took the "liberal" side, whereas Hilary Clinton took the "conservative" side, thus earning Obama two more "liberal" points than Hilary, On one of these votes, John McCain voted with Obama, so take that as you will. Here's a source: http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/02/what_the_national_journal_libe.html.
And here's the methodology: http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/votes.htm. Some of those are quite head scratchers, for example, voting for "94/SConRes21: Raise the tax rate on income over $1 million and use the revenue to increase funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. March 22. (38-58)" earns you conservative points. Who knew?
And what is so magic about age 65? That is fundamentally unfair - tax the seniors the same as everyone else. If the local municipality needs a certain amount of revenue to run their operations, everyone should share the pain (and complain about it, and vote for changes).
On the other hand, their Social Security benefits do not scale with inflation, so it would seem fair to me that their property tax burden also not scale as their home's price goes up from inflation. However, this is all moot anyway as the laws were changed.
It still defeats the purpose of the insurance. If you know because of genetics that you aren't going to get sick, then why bother with the insurance? And if you're one of the ones that knows that you're going to get sick, you're going to be better off setting the money aside yourself and investing it rather than being gouged by the insurance companies.
If you're running Windows XP, try going into Device Manager and expanding 'System Devices', and see if you see anything. On my Thinkpad, it's listed as 'Atmel TPM'. I think the same should apply for Vista.
The Office XP disc which came with my laptop a few years ago, would be incredibly loud compared to other discs, and the entire laptop would shake. (I don't understand why and I can't figure out how a particular disc would behave like that)
Most likely it has to do with the disk being slightly out of balance, and nothing to do with any DRM on the disk.
Just curious, if you're main problem is the hard drive speed, but your datasets are only ~2GB in size, why don't you just build a machine with a massive amount of ram? I figure you could easily have a computer with 16-32GB+ of DDR2 ram for a few grand. Seems like a cheaper and faster way of dealing with it instead of moving to flash disks.
Although Spirit and Opportunity are somewhat limited by their power source, they have indeed been overwhelmingly successful missions.
Actually, both Spirit and Opportunity contain small radioactive heaters to help keep themselves warm. I don't believe they use them for electricity at all, just for the warmth.
Part of the problem is that the interesting sites are also the most risky. If Pheonix landed on top of a boulder, or fell off a cliff, or slide down a steep hill, or ended up inside a hole (where the solar panels wouldn't work), the mission would be over. Therefore, the safest thing to do is to target a flat area where the chances of the terrain interfering with the mission is minimized.
There really isn't any difference between a color digital camera and what they are doing now, except that the color digital camera has the red, green, and blue color filters in front of the individual pixels and they can't be removed or changed. The only way to really solve the debate is to send a human up there and have them look around.
Alternatively, you could agree to meet at a certain place at a certain time, then split up and do as you will - a tried and true technique that contrary to popular belief, does not require a PDA or cell phone. Also, if someone collapses in a busy amusement park, the emergency services will be alerted so don't worry about. The policy is still stupid, but your reasons against it are nonsense.
I'm not sure it works that way, as how is the drive supposed to know what kind of file system you're using? The drive just sees a bunch of data in sectors, and doesn't know what is important, and what is unimportant (as in, marked as 'deleted' by the OS) as the file system keeps track of that kind of thing. I would assume then that the wear leveling algorithms won't trash anything, as it cannot know what it can trash, therefore I would guess that a SSD drive would be the same as a HDD in terms of recovery. That is, unless the wear leveling is moved from the hardware level to the software level - in other words let the OS do the wear leveling as it knows better what to keep so it should be able to do a better job.
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I have a 4MB Sony Memory stick. Still works, though pretty much useless.
When I've had flash drives fail, it's almost always been catastrophic - I can't read anything off the flash at all. Furthermore, it's always been sudden - it simply stops working. My harddisk failures generally are not - the drive gives warnings (becomes loud, starts clicking, slow spin up) before it fails completely. For the flash, I think it's almost always been the controller chip that fails and not the actual flash memory, but unless you are a soldering wizard, it might as well be the same thing.
The Macbook Air is not really the same market. The Asus/Dell is going for cheap, small, and ubiquitous, whereas the Macbook Air is going for a high end niche market. If anything, Apple is competing in this market by eliminating the keyboard and foldup design, and going with a touchscreen/tablet interface with the iPhone/iPod touch.
It won't work on all of them, but 'Alt-Spacebar' then press 'm', then use the arrow keys to move the dialog box around. Basically what you're doing is 'Alt-space' brings up the menu you get when you click on the icon in the top left corner of the window, and 'm' selects "Move", which is the old pre-Windows 3.0 way to move stuff around with the keyboard.
There is no reason to have to abandon VGA equipment. Most DVI ports I see are DVI-I, which means that in addition to the digital pins, the full set of analog pins are also present in the connector to drive an analog device using a cheap adaptor to convert to a VGA pinout. You do have to watch out for DVI-D devices which lacks the analog pins (easiest way to tell is to look for the four pins next to the bar on the connector, those are some of the analog pins, and if they are missing it's a DVI-D plug). Devices that only output to DVI-D are kind of rare, but not unheard of.
Also, some/many of the more expensive "DVI only" monitors also feature DVI-I ports, which means they'll accept a VGA signal using the same adaptor. Cheaper monitors may only have DVI-D, so do pay attention.
The version of Windows is XP Home, and it will only be available for OEMs selling ultraportable computers that cannot run Windows Vista, or won't run it very well. As such, Microsoft will only license it if your computers don't exceed some maximum specifications as defined by Microsoft. Some more information here: http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/03/windows-xp-to-live-until-2010-on-the-eee/.
Yeah, I don't get it either. Do you really think your typical harddrive for your typical desktop is going to last for 100,000-1,000,000 writes? It'll be long dead before that. As far as I'm concerned, SSD's are ready for most applications, the only problem at the moment is cost.
Well, different keyboards for different needs. I have a "happy hacker" keyboard on my home PC, and I like the extra deskspace I get from chopping 7-8" from the keyboard, and I don't need to enter enough numbers to miss the keypad. At work though, I have a full sized keyboard and I wouldn't give it up for anything as I use the keypad all the time.
I disagree. The top menubar is mighty inconvienent on large monitors, and especially multiple monitor set ups where your menubar may be on an entirely different monitor. Yes, it only takes a second or two to move the mouse there, but it gets tiresome after a while. I could also use keyboard shortcuts, but quite frankly that's never been a strength of the Mac.
I don't what you mean by speeding recognition. The top menubar also changes with whatever application you have active, which means that I have to suddenly pay attention to what window is active before I can interact with the program (with more mouse moves as I have to select the right window), whereas on other OSes, I can just move the mouse to the menubar I want to interact with and use it.
Finally, while it's not really a fault of the top menubar concept, the way it is implemented by Apple means that a program is not closed when it looks closed (all the windows are gone). I don't know how many times I've run accross a Mac with lots of programs without windows open for this reason, with the user unaware of why their computer is sluggish.
Overall, it's a crappy UI design. It's not a fixed header as compared to a website, because it's always changing depending on what your doing (what application you're running, or lack thereof). A good UI has things stay the same no matter what you're doing. The Windows taskbar is like this, as it more or less always behaves the same no matter what (though XP broke this a little with things like grouping and auto-hiding taskbar icons). I can see why Apple did it originally though, as space was a premium on the original Macs with their small screens, and it was unlikely you would have multiple windows open where you could see them anyway, so it wasn't that confusing either. Hence the reason why I call it dated.
The menubar serves the foreground application. The windows taskbar was, and is to this day, a weird hack of functional confusion designed for a world of screen-filling maximized windows. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good.
And the menubar on the top of the screen is a incredibly dated concept that dates back to the days of small 9" monochrome screens, and is inconvienent and confusing in these days where large screens and multi-monitor setups are common. Just because it's familiar doesn't mean it's good.
Windows 3.1 wasn't that bad. I remember it as the last version of Windows that wouldn't do crap behind your back (in other words, the harddrive light stays off when the computer is idle), and the last version of Windows that wasn't burdened down with the registry which constantly acquires bloat and liked to randomly corrupt itself (at least back in the '95 days). It was also configured by simple text files, and ran quite comfortably on a 386. It also behaved in a consistent manner, so once you trained someone how to do something in Windows 3.1, they could repeat the same steps and get the same result (similar to DOS in this aspect), whereas Windows 95 and later are prone to occasionally throwing up random errors or randomly breaking for no good reason just to confuse people.
My Delco (Chevy) radio has a blinking red light on it too. It means that if the radio is disconnected and reconnected, a 4-digit code is required to get the radio to work again. (If I deactivate this anti-theft feature, the light doesn't blink).
If someone were to steal the radio out of the car, it would become a brick. It also disables itself if I disconnect and reconnect the battery.
That's actually a good example of security theatre. No thief steals factory radios - they only work in a one or few models of cars, generally aren't of high quality anyway, and really would only be useful to someone who had a broken version of the same radio. It's much easier to fence an aftermarket stereo, and they'll generally get more money for them, so that's what they steal. The only purpose the codes serve is to annoy the owners of the cars that have them.
. Be warned though that it currently uses a crapload of CPU, and there can be a video lag while gnash loads things.
So in other words, it's just like Flash now?
The National Journal, the szame rag that ranked John Kerry as the "most liberal" senator back around the previous presidental election? It seems pretty obvious to anyone who pokes around in their methodology that they only reason they publish these lists is to give the right some talking points. For example, there were only two votes they scored where Barack Obama took the "liberal" side, whereas Hilary Clinton took the "conservative" side, thus earning Obama two more "liberal" points than Hilary, On one of these votes, John McCain voted with Obama, so take that as you will. Here's a source: http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/02/what_the_national_journal_libe.html.
And here's the methodology: http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/votes.htm. Some of those are quite head scratchers, for example, voting for "94/SConRes21: Raise the tax rate on income over $1 million and use the revenue to increase funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. March 22. (38-58)" earns you conservative points. Who knew?
That's not terrorism at all, just a regular invasion of one country by another.
And what is so magic about age 65? That is fundamentally unfair - tax the seniors the same as everyone else. If the local municipality needs a certain amount of revenue to run their operations, everyone should share the pain (and complain about it, and vote for changes).
On the other hand, their Social Security benefits do not scale with inflation, so it would seem fair to me that their property tax burden also not scale as their home's price goes up from inflation. However, this is all moot anyway as the laws were changed.
It still defeats the purpose of the insurance. If you know because of genetics that you aren't going to get sick, then why bother with the insurance? And if you're one of the ones that knows that you're going to get sick, you're going to be better off setting the money aside yourself and investing it rather than being gouged by the insurance companies.
If you're running Windows XP, try going into Device Manager and expanding 'System Devices', and see if you see anything. On my Thinkpad, it's listed as 'Atmel TPM'. I think the same should apply for Vista.
The Office XP disc which came with my laptop a few years ago, would be incredibly loud compared to other discs, and the entire laptop would shake. (I don't understand why and I can't figure out how a particular disc would behave like that)
Most likely it has to do with the disk being slightly out of balance, and nothing to do with any DRM on the disk.
Just curious, if you're main problem is the hard drive speed, but your datasets are only ~2GB in size, why don't you just build a machine with a massive amount of ram? I figure you could easily have a computer with 16-32GB+ of DDR2 ram for a few grand. Seems like a cheaper and faster way of dealing with it instead of moving to flash disks.
Although Spirit and Opportunity are somewhat limited by their power source, they have indeed been overwhelmingly successful missions.
Actually, both Spirit and Opportunity contain small radioactive heaters to help keep themselves warm. I don't believe they use them for electricity at all, just for the warmth.
Part of the problem is that the interesting sites are also the most risky. If Pheonix landed on top of a boulder, or fell off a cliff, or slide down a steep hill, or ended up inside a hole (where the solar panels wouldn't work), the mission would be over. Therefore, the safest thing to do is to target a flat area where the chances of the terrain interfering with the mission is minimized.
There really isn't any difference between a color digital camera and what they are doing now, except that the color digital camera has the red, green, and blue color filters in front of the individual pixels and they can't be removed or changed. The only way to really solve the debate is to send a human up there and have them look around.
Alternatively, you could agree to meet at a certain place at a certain time, then split up and do as you will - a tried and true technique that contrary to popular belief, does not require a PDA or cell phone. Also, if someone collapses in a busy amusement park, the emergency services will be alerted so don't worry about. The policy is still stupid, but your reasons against it are nonsense.
I'm not sure it works that way, as how is the drive supposed to know what kind of file system you're using? The drive just sees a bunch of data in sectors, and doesn't know what is important, and what is unimportant (as in, marked as 'deleted' by the OS) as the file system keeps track of that kind of thing. I would assume then that the wear leveling algorithms won't trash anything, as it cannot know what it can trash, therefore I would guess that a SSD drive would be the same as a HDD in terms of recovery. That is, unless the wear leveling is moved from the hardware level to the software level - in other words let the OS do the wear leveling as it knows better what to keep so it should be able to do a better job.