You haven't seen the study where they tried to destroy flash chips. They failed, even after nailing them to a tree though the chip. These things are durable. Plus, since they are usb flash drives, they will probably be less expensive than the electronic keys many cars use now. My only worry is someone will find a bit for bit copy utility that can dulplicate keys. Plus, USB ports don't seem durable enough to me to be plugged and unplugged 5 times a day for ten years.
But you can't upgrade to that speed. The slashdot article misquotes. Current IrDA devices can be upgraded to support the PROTOCOL of the new faster IR, but not the faster transfer speeds. So an upgrade will allow the two to communicate, but only at 4.0 Mbps.
I have a solution, download "Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe" from www.mozilla.org and install it. Then launch the default browser from the start menu, and voila, IE looks and acts just like firefox, with all the features and even the bugs!
Bush, acting without the approval of his cabinet or advisors, pledged 100,000 GE air condititioners to recool the region.
Go ahead, mod me -1. I dare you!
Isn't it heartwarming that MoDaCo employees were willing to spend DAYs of time and $1000s in lost productivity to track down a $200 phone and a kleptomaniac.
I have pentiums made 2 years before the iMac came out that have built in USB ports. Computers with color monitors were out A DECADE before the mac, although not so cheap.
Apple put an Appletalk serial networking port on every mac, now... no, well... Apple put a 256 greyscale display option on every mac in 1997, now we... crap... Apple put a Firewire port on every Mac, now... well, maybe... Apple put an ADC connector on every Mac... um, you know what, I give freaken up!
True, laptop harddrives are exposed to a lot more drops than their larger counterparts, but there are other reasons for failure. Just like regular drives, they have a average mechanical wear failure rate. In fact, laptop drives are usually rated for less hours of spin time than 3.5" drives. Add to this that laptop drives get no cooling, and you have to think twice before blaming clumsy people for all lot data.
There is a real difference between a nice 350 and a cheap 350. The nice ones are actually rated to have a constant load of 350 or a little higher, wheras the cheap 350s are rated to peak at 350, and the 12v rails are very low power, which is the killer.
Thats because they are the same. Using new 1000W power supplies, they are able to beam all matter and light entering the community in every town to the actual Woodcrest, which is located in Siberia.
I have a Pentium D 8200, 2 GB of DDR2, Dual HDs (one SATA one IDE) and dual DVD burners, and a Radeon X800. Also, add a couple of firewire and USB devices. All of this runs off of a good 350W power supply with room to spare. If a 6800 (which uses more power than the 7800) uses about 135W, SLI would use 270W. That means you really only need a 500W supply. I think the idea above is right. By having an obsenely overkill flagship model, you not only make a couple of bucks off rich, poorly endowed kids who want a 1000W supply, but you get to brag that your company makes the most powerful power supply comercially available.
As if the chaos resulting from the 12,000 person stampede for 1,000 laptops was not enough, 48,000 lawyers swarmed over the riotgrounds trying to get in on class action lawsuits against the school system, the company responsible for the sale, Apple, and the company that built the card tables the laptops were displayed on.
I said Mac hardware. Not all hardware. The iPod is not a Mac. It does not run "Mac OS". It is an iPod. They sell tons more of those than of their Mac line. The much greater quantities of people buying iPods makes up for their lower profit per unit. Since the iPod has been released, Apple has seen profit growth in excess of 200%, whereas sales of Mac computers has only risen slightly.
iTunes and the iPod can be seen as one product, since the other is pretty much forced on a user of the other (iPods work with iTunes to sync, iTunes music will only play on iPods).
The reason Apple locks the OS in the first place is stability. Apple makes almost no money off of their Mac hardware compaired to iPods and iTunes. They would love to be able to sell their OS to the very large market of people who already have x86 PCs. The problem is, in order to keep with Apple's legendary "it just works" tradition, every part of the OS needs to be highly tested and troubleshot, especially drivers. In the past, that has not been a problem, because there are only about 15 different computer models that can run OS X. That means Apple has to make sure only 15 different systems will run stably. If they released for all x86 machines, they would have no way of testing every machine. Therefore, there would certainly be bugs that were found after release with certain hardware, making the OS no more stable than Windows, if not less so. Also, Apple does not have the clout to get drivers written for its OS by all hardware vendors, and they certainly don't have a large enough staff to write the drivers themselves. It is therefore obvious that Apple's decision to make OS X run only on their special x86 hardware was a move to insure that the stability and quality of use of the OS is consistant, not a cold hearted move to exclude the x86 masses (even though it fits with some of the terrible decissions that Apple made in the past).
Thats not what it costs to fix a machine. I run a small repair buisness for PCs. Wiping a machine and reinstalling windows only takes an hour or two, but that is not usually an option. People have documents and programs that need to be backed up, or are unreplacable. Sometimes, fixing a P3 with tons of spyware does not make as much sense at the new $299 eMachines.
"The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?"
Is that a bad thing?
Already been answered a million times in other threads. OS X for x86 will only run on Mac hardware. They will use a checker that checks on install and boot, to make sure. It is unclear as of yet how different the Mac x86 will be from a standard PC. For all we know, the Mac may have some sort of special Apple chipset. Developement machines run XP just fine, though. The motherboard seems to be pretty standard ATX, althought I doutbt that will last.
What have the poor and quite excellent (you know how hard it is to get a job there) programmers at Microsoft been up to for the last three years? Rewriting longhorn once a month as the focus groups and board of directors decides longhorn needs a new direction. The longhorn currently set to be released has very few new features, compaired to what it once was. This is not the fault of the programmers, but the fault of the management who have never really had any vision for longhorn other than it would be "better" than Windows XP.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it has WAY too much character developement for a starwars movie.
You haven't seen the study where they tried to destroy flash chips. They failed, even after nailing them to a tree though the chip. These things are durable. Plus, since they are usb flash drives, they will probably be less expensive than the electronic keys many cars use now. My only worry is someone will find a bit for bit copy utility that can dulplicate keys. Plus, USB ports don't seem durable enough to me to be plugged and unplugged 5 times a day for ten years.
But you can't upgrade to that speed. The slashdot article misquotes. Current IrDA devices can be upgraded to support the PROTOCOL of the new faster IR, but not the faster transfer speeds. So an upgrade will allow the two to communicate, but only at 4.0 Mbps.
I have a solution, download "Firefox Setup 1.0.6.exe" from www.mozilla.org and install it. Then launch the default browser from the start menu, and voila, IE looks and acts just like firefox, with all the features and even the bugs!
Mod me -1, I dare you!
Or even, maybe, transmit data via electric pulses via some sort of insulated, narrow, flexable conductor. I wonder if anyone has ever though of it.
Mod me -1, I dare you!
Never EVER having a hurricane, plus that little kid with his finger in the dike.
Bush, acting without the approval of his cabinet or advisors, pledged 100,000 GE air condititioners to recool the region. Go ahead, mod me -1. I dare you!
Isn't it heartwarming that MoDaCo employees were willing to spend DAYs of time and $1000s in lost productivity to track down a $200 phone and a kleptomaniac.
I have pentiums made 2 years before the iMac came out that have built in USB ports. Computers with color monitors were out A DECADE before the mac, although not so cheap.
Apple put an Appletalk serial networking port on every mac, now... no, well... Apple put a 256 greyscale display option on every mac in 1997, now we... crap... Apple put a Firewire port on every Mac, now... well, maybe... Apple put an ADC connector on every Mac... um, you know what, I give freaken up!
True, laptop harddrives are exposed to a lot more drops than their larger counterparts, but there are other reasons for failure. Just like regular drives, they have a average mechanical wear failure rate. In fact, laptop drives are usually rated for less hours of spin time than 3.5" drives. Add to this that laptop drives get no cooling, and you have to think twice before blaming clumsy people for all lot data.
There is a real difference between a nice 350 and a cheap 350. The nice ones are actually rated to have a constant load of 350 or a little higher, wheras the cheap 350s are rated to peak at 350, and the 12v rails are very low power, which is the killer.
Thats because they are the same. Using new 1000W power supplies, they are able to beam all matter and light entering the community in every town to the actual Woodcrest, which is located in Siberia.
I have a Pentium D 8200, 2 GB of DDR2, Dual HDs (one SATA one IDE) and dual DVD burners, and a Radeon X800. Also, add a couple of firewire and USB devices. All of this runs off of a good 350W power supply with room to spare. If a 6800 (which uses more power than the 7800) uses about 135W, SLI would use 270W. That means you really only need a 500W supply. I think the idea above is right. By having an obsenely overkill flagship model, you not only make a couple of bucks off rich, poorly endowed kids who want a 1000W supply, but you get to brag that your company makes the most powerful power supply comercially available.
As if the chaos resulting from the 12,000 person stampede for 1,000 laptops was not enough, 48,000 lawyers swarmed over the riotgrounds trying to get in on class action lawsuits against the school system, the company responsible for the sale, Apple, and the company that built the card tables the laptops were displayed on.
I said Mac hardware. Not all hardware. The iPod is not a Mac. It does not run "Mac OS". It is an iPod. They sell tons more of those than of their Mac line. The much greater quantities of people buying iPods makes up for their lower profit per unit. Since the iPod has been released, Apple has seen profit growth in excess of 200%, whereas sales of Mac computers has only risen slightly. iTunes and the iPod can be seen as one product, since the other is pretty much forced on a user of the other (iPods work with iTunes to sync, iTunes music will only play on iPods).
The reason Apple locks the OS in the first place is stability. Apple makes almost no money off of their Mac hardware compaired to iPods and iTunes. They would love to be able to sell their OS to the very large market of people who already have x86 PCs. The problem is, in order to keep with Apple's legendary "it just works" tradition, every part of the OS needs to be highly tested and troubleshot, especially drivers. In the past, that has not been a problem, because there are only about 15 different computer models that can run OS X. That means Apple has to make sure only 15 different systems will run stably. If they released for all x86 machines, they would have no way of testing every machine. Therefore, there would certainly be bugs that were found after release with certain hardware, making the OS no more stable than Windows, if not less so. Also, Apple does not have the clout to get drivers written for its OS by all hardware vendors, and they certainly don't have a large enough staff to write the drivers themselves. It is therefore obvious that Apple's decision to make OS X run only on their special x86 hardware was a move to insure that the stability and quality of use of the OS is consistant, not a cold hearted move to exclude the x86 masses (even though it fits with some of the terrible decissions that Apple made in the past).
Thats not what it costs to fix a machine. I run a small repair buisness for PCs. Wiping a machine and reinstalling windows only takes an hour or two, but that is not usually an option. People have documents and programs that need to be backed up, or are unreplacable. Sometimes, fixing a P3 with tons of spyware does not make as much sense at the new $299 eMachines.
"The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?" Is that a bad thing?
Already been answered a million times in other threads. OS X for x86 will only run on Mac hardware. They will use a checker that checks on install and boot, to make sure. It is unclear as of yet how different the Mac x86 will be from a standard PC. For all we know, the Mac may have some sort of special Apple chipset. Developement machines run XP just fine, though. The motherboard seems to be pretty standard ATX, althought I doutbt that will last.
Maybe you should try running Itanium code on the Itanium. Most OSes for the Itanium include very slow x86 emulation.
What have the poor and quite excellent (you know how hard it is to get a job there) programmers at Microsoft been up to for the last three years? Rewriting longhorn once a month as the focus groups and board of directors decides longhorn needs a new direction. The longhorn currently set to be released has very few new features, compaired to what it once was. This is not the fault of the programmers, but the fault of the management who have never really had any vision for longhorn other than it would be "better" than Windows XP.
Great, now the London underground will be free from suicide bomber, people with travelers wallet, and people wearing undergarments!
Whats this? A post on the slashdot-iola-tomaton? Smithers, reply quickly!
<Nelson> Ha HA! </Nelson>