"Honestly.. do you think in 5-8 years that OpenOffice.org will not be just a tad more attractive to businesses?"
No, I don't, just like Linux won't be anymore attractive either.
the vast majority of Businesses use what everyone else is using, and that's Windows and Office. Scream, cry, kick all you want u can't fight reality. Kids should be learning what the business world is using, putting on your resume "Redhat and Open Office experience" doesn't look that great to the average business running Windoze & Office.
"Outsourcing is about saving money. The whole idea is probably a non-starter since running and maintaining a ship is expensive, even when at anchor. Now add the luxuries you are talking about and the expense grows even more. They can only do what their billing can afford."
I dunno about that, somehow real cruise ships manage to pay all their staff, keep the ship operational, AND make a huge profit while selling off cruises for $500 A WEEK!
Fire 90% of the entertainment staff, get rid of all the expensive food and other BS and see how much it'd cost. Plus, don't forget buildings have to pay property taxes every year, if the ship is registered in another country imagine the huge savings from that alone.
"They would never allow that. non-US citizens would take the boats and make a run for the US coast. Not just the low-pay programmers but especially the support crew, the cooks, the maids, the janitors, etc."
LOL what, you don't think real cruise ships use staff from other countries? Are they all jumping ship soon as it's within swimming distance of the US?
"What makes you think a controversial ship like this would be allowed in? Ships have been turned away. Not only for security and immigration reasons but for simple political reasons."
They don't have to bring the entire ship in, that'd be stupid. I'm sure they'll have a smaller yacht or two tethered for voyages to shore.
That gaming article is currently completely worthless to average PC builders, who wants to buy a system with CPU that costs more than the rest of the entire system anymore? Why couldn't they benchmark a less expensive Opteron processor on games, like the 242 or 244, both under $200 right now.
I'd also love to see how well these overclock, since I have a athlon64 3000 (1.8ghz) that does 2.5ghz, which would put it at about 4100 AMD's PR scale.
If a ~$150 1.6ghz 242 can do the same speeds as the ~$700 2.4ghz 250, a 50% overclock, then we might have another Celeron 300A on our hands:)
um... you do realize it's a freaking pleasure ship, pleasure being the primary word here. The entire boat was designed for people to have fun on, you make it sound like a jail.
everyone looks at this as a bad idea, i see it as a GOOD IDEA. Maybe it'll wake up some of those morons running our government and show them how big the whole off-shoring problem has become.
"Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi.
Screw that, can I tether my jet ski to the back? 600 jet ski's might sound like a lot, but we're talking about a freaking cruise ship here, thing's probably over 1000 feet long.
from lavoice.org "SeaCode would employ 600 developers - the bulk of them non-U.S. citizens "
um... if they're not US citizens how do they plan to visit the US? Are they all getting green cards or H1B's or whatever?
"at least at this point, its looking like its actually worse than normal magnetic drives"
Really? Well, do you have a CD-ROM or DVD drive? Guess what jack-ass, that's smaller than magnetic hard drives too.
if you bothered to rtfa... or hell just read the damn title, "disc" should have clued u in... you'd realize these are competing with DVD drives being WORM, NOT HARD DRIVES. You won't even be able to write to these making them worthless to 99% of/. readers.
excuse my stupidity, but if i pay for broadband then share it with my neighbors isn't that stealing broadband? How is this any different? You're letting hundreds of people that are not paying for a service use the service under one person's name.
If I ran a cable or phone line from my house to my neighbor's, isn't that stealing cable or phone service too? Or is somehow wifi exempt from these laws?
duh, google it... answer found on the first page: "Flamingos are not born pink. They are white at birth. However, a substance -- called carotenoids -- in the foods they eat produce the bright pink color.
Flamingos would lose their shading if they could not eat carotenoid-filled foods like plankton, shrimp, or -- as handlers at the Philadelphia Zoo have found -- carrots. "
what exactly is so complicated about PCs? It's not like he's programming them or anything, he's just installing software. Need a new power supply? Unscrew & unplug original, put new one in, wow that was hard. There's no soldering or replacing ICs anymore, you just replace bad components which, at most, requires removing a few tiny screws.
from article: "Computer software is very, very complex. Stick a load of it together on a computer - itself a pretty complex beast - and you've got yourself a system which is more complex than anything else you are ever likely to own."
so? that's not saying much, what's he comparing it to, the toaster oven? I'd say a car is a much more complicated beastie, you're getting poor mpg (equivalent to ur computer eating resources) and what do u do? Sorry no Task Manager to see what's eating resources, no MSCONFIG to disable startup processes. And most of us would be fine with your buddy down the street messing with car to see why it's not running right wouldn't you?
if it were Sept 1995 this is what you'd be reading:
"Sony's Playstation console has launched with great fanfare, and already there are plenty of places to get opinions and reviews. Shacknews has a nice hands on with the player itself, Gamespy has reviews of the launch titles, and Gamespot has coverage of just about everything on its PSP Launch Center page. From the Shacknews hands-on: "Technically speaking, the Playstation is a far superior machine to the Super Nintendo. It's a powerhouse device, capable of displaying modern graphics, playing robust sound, and can even replace a CD player. Nintendo has been doing it right for over a decade, why should we think the Playstation can just waltz onto the scene and take over? Can it even be done?"
"You are also mistaken regarding salvage titles -- vehicles with salvage titles can certainly be driven on US roads and insured. The process to go about this in Georgia, at least, is listed here:"
u should have read the site first: "Any one who rebuilds or repairs a salvage vehicle is required to apply for a rebuilt title, when a Georgia title is required, and an inspection of the vehicle at the same time once the vehicle has been restored but before the vehicle is painted.... A rebuilt vehicle must pass an inspection by this Department's Inspection Unit of Motor Vehicle Services (MVS) before a Georgia title (when a Georgia title is required) and/or license plate can be issued."
it's got to pass an inspection first. If the vehicle doesn't have brakes I don't think it'd pass inspection do you? And these dont use standard brakes either, they use a highly customized regenerative braking system that would be difficult to duplicate or at least cost prohibitive.
just make Blu-Ray HD-DVD DVD-+RW CDRW drives
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Think I'm gonna wait for my BluRay HD-DVD+-RW CDRW drive
"I can understand some of GMs thinking, especially the part about litigation, but it seems a waste to crush so many perfectly usable automobiles."
Not only that but they couldn't possibly get insurance on a vehicle who's brakes can not be replaced due to the part not being available.
They're right, they had to crush them, either that or give them salvage titles and unlicensable, which means uninsurable and not legal to be driven on the roads. They could still be used off-road and on private property, perhaps as a high-tech golf carts or for security guards of private property? Honestly I think if they ebay'd them they could have sold all the vehicles and not been held liable, but they took the safe road and I applaud them for that.
" Interesting....At any rate, this could prove quite interesting and make irrelevant many of the security concerns that the average consumer faces as well as consolidate and ease software distribution issues."
for those who didn't RTFA her basic idea was this: someday your desktop might just be a terminal running GoogleOS remotely, and you'll pay a monthly fee for everything.
It'll never happen, and here's reasons why:
--large companies can do that now but many don't because it's cheaper to have a desktop with no monthly dues
--no matter how cheap the monthly fee is people still hate to be locked into monthly fees. Look how many people still use antennas on their TVs. Look how many people get the cheapest, crappiest cable plan. Look at the hard time XM and Sirrus satellite radio is having breaking in, even with just a $9 a month charge theres still lots of people who don't want to bother.
--what happens if you don't pay a month or two, do you lose all your data and family photos? Good luck convincing people to sign up for that plan!
Articles like this remind me of all those futuristic movies where the govt or companies will control everything and the people just follow what they're told. We're a long way from that.
from the Daylighting article: "Most residential tubular skylights cost $300 to $500, not including installation. The least expensive we found were about $200 for 8" diameter (200 mm) models.... The best selling 10", 14" and 16" (250 mm, 360 mm, and 405 mm) Solatube units provide up to 3,760, 6,300 and 8,200 lumens, respectively, under ideal, full-sun conditions."
This is from 1999 so there's probably inflation, but assuming a 8" diameter skylight puts out as much light as a 100w bulb under average conditions (a 100w bulb puts out 1700 lumens), and given that a 100w bulb would cost 4.8 cents to operate for 6 hours at 8 cents kWh, and lets say the skylight provides 16 hrs of light a day on average, that same light would cost 12.8 cents with a 100w light bulb, or about $46 a year. That means it'd take over 4 years for the skylight to pay for itself, to pay back the $200, if you absolutely needed a light on for 16 hours a day during the day.
Let's not forget the cost of installation, or the fact that you'll still need a light at night, or that you can't turn it off if for whatever reason you wanted to "turn the lights off" like in summer when it's light out until after 10pm, or even the money lost in heating/cooling due to poor insulation since the more holes you punch in a roof the harder it is to insulate, or the fact that those are 1999 prices and in 6 years I'm sure it's more expensive now.
So it's not an cost effective replacement for incandescent lighting and certainly not fluorescent, however sunlight has been proven to be beneficial, from improving moods to influencing cancer, so it might help in that regard, but it's really not worth it for the money, least not in the short run, I'd bet it'd take at least 10 years to get your money back and then it's only 13 cents a day at current average electricity prices.
existed for many many years...
on
Sunlight in a Tube
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Environmental Building News, Volume 8, Number 10 - October 1999
Imagine a device that sits on the roof of a building and focuses sunlight into cables the size of electrical wire. These cables are run through walls and ceiling plenums into light fixtures that beam natural, full spectrum daylight deep into a building's interior."
it's called Hybrid Lighting or Daylighting. Been around for a looooooong time.
"It adds up. I just discovered (via a forum post) a "PowerSave" feature..."
yeah but we're not talking about a powersaving feature, we're talking about having 4ghz vs 0.5ghz. That's a huge difference. Now if you're just checking email with both the systems then your wasting, but if you're encoding DivX movies you need the extra mhz.
besides, someone had a good point: "your desktop power supply does not run at capacity all the time, it needs that to get it through surges in demand"
The only difference between a VIA system and a p4 system is the processor. The hd, video, etc are all sucking the same amount of power, and that p4 isn't going to be sucking maximum power 24/7, when you're just checking email you're not going to be at 90% utilization. Sure it'll use more wattage than a Via, but it's unlikely it'll be 200w vs 90w all the time like in my example, I'd bet the power consumption would be closer to about even given everything being the same except for a Via CPU vs a P4. Does anyone exactly how much more a P4 sucks down at idle vs a Via CPU? I'm betting it's not over 50w, probably not even that dramatic.
check this out: EPIA Power Simulator tells you the power consumption of EPIA boards with different accessories. At idle with a high-end video card, CDROM drive and 3.5" hd a EPIA 5000 got nearly 90w. They also have a p4 you can play with proving larger power consumption, but I found this interesting: over at Anandtech they did a review showing that a AMD64 3500+ 90nm core only sucks down 86w at idle. 86w! That's a full system too. The Tech Report did a similar test and got 113w from a similar cpu. That's still damn good.
So if what these sites are saying is correct these boards really don't save any power when the PCs are idle compared to 3+ ghz AMD64 90nm core processors, and very little compared to P4s. Good to know.
"For those of us who keep our systems on 24/7 in our bedrooms, low power/noise are a critical factor in deciding our computing platform."
Noise I agree with, but power? What do I care if the system in my bedroom corner is sucking down 200w or 90w? Not like that's $50 more a month, or even $10 for that matter. You're talking a couple bucks at most.
Check out the electricity calculator. Enter the watts and your kw/hr and it'll tell u you how you're spending.
At 8 cents a kWh this is what I got:
200w = 38 cents a day... $11.52/mo, $140/yr.
90w = 17 cents/day... $5.18/mo, 63.07/yr
Sorry, that $6 more per month is nothing to cry about, although after seeing that $80 yearly difference I think I will keep downloads going on the laptop from now on and only fire up the desktop when I have serious work to do, especially since my PSU is closer to double that rating so double that cost. Still, doesn't justify buying a laptop for downloading or paying extra for a power-saving system with no processing power.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't, just like Linux won't be anymore attractive either.
the vast majority of Businesses use what everyone else is using, and that's Windows and Office. Scream, cry, kick all you want u can't fight reality. Kids should be learning what the business world is using, putting on your resume "Redhat and Open Office experience" doesn't look that great to the average business running Windoze & Office.
that is pleasure ;)
Obviously you've never been deployed in the armed forces...
I dunno about that, somehow real cruise ships manage to pay all their staff, keep the ship operational, AND make a huge profit while selling off cruises for $500 A WEEK!
Fire 90% of the entertainment staff, get rid of all the expensive food and other BS and see how much it'd cost. Plus, don't forget buildings have to pay property taxes every year, if the ship is registered in another country imagine the huge savings from that alone.
"They would never allow that. non-US citizens would take the boats and make a run for the US coast. Not just the low-pay programmers but especially the support crew, the cooks, the maids, the janitors, etc."
LOL what, you don't think real cruise ships use staff from other countries? Are they all jumping ship soon as it's within swimming distance of the US?
"What makes you think a controversial ship like this would be allowed in? Ships have been turned away. Not only for security and immigration reasons but for simple political reasons."
They don't have to bring the entire ship in, that'd be stupid. I'm sure they'll have a smaller yacht or two tethered for voyages to shore.
I'd also love to see how well these overclock, since I have a athlon64 3000 (1.8ghz) that does 2.5ghz, which would put it at about 4100 AMD's PR scale.
If a ~$150 1.6ghz 242 can do the same speeds as the ~$700 2.4ghz 250, a 50% overclock, then we might have another Celeron 300A on our hands :)
um... you do realize it's a freaking pleasure ship, pleasure being the primary word here. The entire boat was designed for people to have fun on, you make it sound like a jail.
everyone looks at this as a bad idea, i see it as a GOOD IDEA. Maybe it'll wake up some of those morons running our government and show them how big the whole off-shoring problem has become.
Screw that, can I tether my jet ski to the back? 600 jet ski's might sound like a lot, but we're talking about a freaking cruise ship here, thing's probably over 1000 feet long.
from lavoice.org
"SeaCode would employ 600 developers - the bulk of them non-U.S. citizens "
um... if they're not US citizens how do they plan to visit the US? Are they all getting green cards or H1B's or whatever?
i hope they choose this as the ship ;)
Really? Well, do you have a CD-ROM or DVD drive? Guess what jack-ass, that's smaller than magnetic hard drives too.
if you bothered to rtfa... or hell just read the damn title, "disc" should have clued u in... you'd realize these are competing with DVD drives being WORM, NOT HARD DRIVES. You won't even be able to write to these making them worthless to 99% of /. readers.
you mean when it's asked to run windows? ;)
If I ran a cable or phone line from my house to my neighbor's, isn't that stealing cable or phone service too? Or is somehow wifi exempt from these laws?
"Flamingos are not born pink. They are white at birth. However, a substance -- called carotenoids -- in the foods they eat produce the bright pink color.
Flamingos would lose their shading if they could not eat carotenoid-filled foods like plankton, shrimp, or -- as handlers at the Philadelphia Zoo have found -- carrots. "
maybe you can, but I'm not fitting it anywhere and it doesn't matter how small it is!
from article:
"Computer software is very, very complex. Stick a load of it together on a computer - itself a pretty complex beast - and you've got yourself a system which is more complex than anything else you are ever likely to own."
so? that's not saying much, what's he comparing it to, the toaster oven? I'd say a car is a much more complicated beastie, you're getting poor mpg (equivalent to ur computer eating resources) and what do u do? Sorry no Task Manager to see what's eating resources, no MSCONFIG to disable startup processes. And most of us would be fine with your buddy down the street messing with car to see why it's not running right wouldn't you?
"Sony's Playstation console has launched with great fanfare, and already there are plenty of places to get opinions and reviews. Shacknews has a nice hands on with the player itself, Gamespy has reviews of the launch titles, and Gamespot has coverage of just about everything on its PSP Launch Center page. From the Shacknews hands-on: "Technically speaking, the Playstation is a far superior machine to the Super Nintendo. It's a powerhouse device, capable of displaying modern graphics, playing robust sound, and can even replace a CD player. Nintendo has been doing it right for over a decade, why should we think the Playstation can just waltz onto the scene and take over? Can it even be done?"
I think we know how history played out...
I dunno, we found a teenage girl that beat 3 robots at arm wrestling and a cute high school dropout self-taught chip designer so now I believe anything is possible on /.
Neighborhood? Your neighborhood is 30 miles wide? I'd call that a city, so if more than 10 people in the city get this it's over.
u should have read the site first:
"Any one who rebuilds or repairs a salvage vehicle is required to apply for a rebuilt title, when a Georgia title is required, and an inspection of the vehicle at the same time once the vehicle has been restored but before the vehicle is painted.... A rebuilt vehicle must pass an inspection by this Department's Inspection Unit of Motor Vehicle Services (MVS) before a Georgia title (when a Georgia title is required) and/or license plate can be issued."
it's got to pass an inspection first. If the vehicle doesn't have brakes I don't think it'd pass inspection do you? And these dont use standard brakes either, they use a highly customized regenerative braking system that would be difficult to duplicate or at least cost prohibitive.
Think I'm gonna wait for my BluRay HD-DVD+-RW CDRW drive
yeah but do you enjoy it? Having it is one thing, but enjoying it is quite another ;)
Not only that but they couldn't possibly get insurance on a vehicle who's brakes can not be replaced due to the part not being available.
They're right, they had to crush them, either that or give them salvage titles and unlicensable, which means uninsurable and not legal to be driven on the roads. They could still be used off-road and on private property, perhaps as a high-tech golf carts or for security guards of private property? Honestly I think if they ebay'd them they could have sold all the vehicles and not been held liable, but they took the safe road and I applaud them for that.
for those who didn't RTFA her basic idea was this: someday your desktop might just be a terminal running GoogleOS remotely, and you'll pay a monthly fee for everything.
It'll never happen, and here's reasons why:
--large companies can do that now but many don't because it's cheaper to have a desktop with no monthly dues
--no matter how cheap the monthly fee is people still hate to be locked into monthly fees. Look how many people still use antennas on their TVs. Look how many people get the cheapest, crappiest cable plan. Look at the hard time XM and Sirrus satellite radio is having breaking in, even with just a $9 a month charge theres still lots of people who don't want to bother.
--what happens if you don't pay a month or two, do you lose all your data and family photos? Good luck convincing people to sign up for that plan!
Articles like this remind me of all those futuristic movies where the govt or companies will control everything and the people just follow what they're told. We're a long way from that.
"Most residential tubular skylights cost $300 to $500, not including installation. The least expensive we found were about $200 for 8" diameter (200 mm) models.... The best selling 10", 14" and 16" (250 mm, 360 mm, and 405 mm) Solatube units provide up to 3,760, 6,300 and 8,200 lumens, respectively, under ideal, full-sun conditions."
This is from 1999 so there's probably inflation, but assuming a 8" diameter skylight puts out as much light as a 100w bulb under average conditions (a 100w bulb puts out 1700 lumens), and given that a 100w bulb would cost 4.8 cents to operate for 6 hours at 8 cents kWh, and lets say the skylight provides 16 hrs of light a day on average, that same light would cost 12.8 cents with a 100w light bulb, or about $46 a year. That means it'd take over 4 years for the skylight to pay for itself, to pay back the $200, if you absolutely needed a light on for 16 hours a day during the day.
Let's not forget the cost of installation, or the fact that you'll still need a light at night, or that you can't turn it off if for whatever reason you wanted to "turn the lights off" like in summer when it's light out until after 10pm, or even the money lost in heating/cooling due to poor insulation since the more holes you punch in a roof the harder it is to insulate, or the fact that those are 1999 prices and in 6 years I'm sure it's more expensive now.
So it's not an cost effective replacement for incandescent lighting and certainly not fluorescent, however sunlight has been proven to be beneficial, from improving moods to influencing cancer, so it might help in that regard, but it's really not worth it for the money, least not in the short run, I'd bet it'd take at least 10 years to get your money back and then it's only 13 cents a day at current average electricity prices.
Environmental Building News, Volume 8, Number 10 - October 1999
Imagine a device that sits on the roof of a building and focuses sunlight into cables the size of electrical wire. These cables are run through walls and ceiling plenums into light fixtures that beam natural, full spectrum daylight deep into a building's interior."
it's called Hybrid Lighting or Daylighting. Been around for a looooooong time.
yeah but we're not talking about a powersaving feature, we're talking about having 4ghz vs 0.5ghz. That's a huge difference. Now if you're just checking email with both the systems then your wasting, but if you're encoding DivX movies you need the extra mhz.
besides, someone had a good point:
"your desktop power supply does not run at capacity all the time, it needs that to get it through surges in demand"
The only difference between a VIA system and a p4 system is the processor. The hd, video, etc are all sucking the same amount of power, and that p4 isn't going to be sucking maximum power 24/7, when you're just checking email you're not going to be at 90% utilization. Sure it'll use more wattage than a Via, but it's unlikely it'll be 200w vs 90w all the time like in my example, I'd bet the power consumption would be closer to about even given everything being the same except for a Via CPU vs a P4. Does anyone exactly how much more a P4 sucks down at idle vs a Via CPU? I'm betting it's not over 50w, probably not even that dramatic.
check this out: EPIA Power Simulator tells you the power consumption of EPIA boards with different accessories. At idle with a high-end video card, CDROM drive and 3.5" hd a EPIA 5000 got nearly 90w. They also have a p4 you can play with proving larger power consumption, but I found this interesting: over at Anandtech they did a review showing that a AMD64 3500+ 90nm core only sucks down 86w at idle. 86w! That's a full system too. The Tech Report did a similar test and got 113w from a similar cpu. That's still damn good.
So if what these sites are saying is correct these boards really don't save any power when the PCs are idle compared to 3+ ghz AMD64 90nm core processors, and very little compared to P4s. Good to know.
read what I wrote:
"Noise I agree with, but power?"
Noise I agree with, but power? What do I care if the system in my bedroom corner is sucking down 200w or 90w? Not like that's $50 more a month, or even $10 for that matter. You're talking a couple bucks at most.
Check out the electricity calculator. Enter the watts and your kw/hr and it'll tell u you how you're spending.
At 8 cents a kWh this is what I got:
200w = 38 cents a day... $11.52/mo, $140/yr.
90w = 17 cents/day... $5.18/mo, 63.07/yr
Sorry, that $6 more per month is nothing to cry about, although after seeing that $80 yearly difference I think I will keep downloads going on the laptop from now on and only fire up the desktop when I have serious work to do, especially since my PSU is closer to double that rating so double that cost. Still, doesn't justify buying a laptop for downloading or paying extra for a power-saving system with no processing power.