Aren't there a lot of children with more urgent needs?
I haven't seen a lot of this in the tech journals but I understand that almost all of the laptop's components are edible - so not only will giving every child a laptop improve social networking it'll also keep third world kids from starving to death.
Need food? Don't have any of that but here's a laptop.
Last September the hard drive my mother-in-law's 300MHz Thinkpad died for a second time. Since replacing the hard drive entails removing the keyboard, the fact that the machine ran Windows 98SE and the idea that I just didn't feel like screwing with it any more we went to the Apple store and she bought a 17" iMac.
Once I configured it she had no problem doing email or web and I threw a copy of OpenOffice on it so she could read any Word stuff she received.
I've had zero complaints and zero calls for support from her after about the first week she had the iMac. I'd recommend one to anybody who needs a computer and doesn't wanna be a geek.
What they should do is allow machine power settings to be controllable from an Active Directory policy object. Network admins would then have fine control of the power usage of their desktops.
Vista allows power management settings to be managed by policy object.
I don't see where Microsoft commented one way or the other. What we have is a blogger with an idea to inflict power saving modes on people. MS is *way* smarter than that.
It's one of the down sides to free speech on the internet - even people who have dumb things to say can be instantly (and globally) published.;-)
As others have pointed out, this concept has a tremendous number of issues that would have to be overcome for it to be worthwhile. First off, these units would be incredibly vulnerable to long-distance fire from heavy-caliber anti-material rifles. It's practically the most ideal target imaginable for a.50 BMG shooter: large, immobile, limited lethal range, and no human suffering upon destruction. Anyone else notice that those prototypes look to have M249 SAWs in them? You can see the tail end of a belt feeding in during part of the video, and it's the most likely possibility for a small 5.56 belt-fed. Except there doesn't seem to be any provisions for decent ammo storage. That tiny box that the weapon sits in isn't nearly large enough to hold more than a hundred rounds or so at most, and it doesn't really look like the weapon is designed to be fed from the base (ammo exposed to the elements; feeding issues; turret rotation and elevation interfering with feeding). Overall, it looks pretty well useless.
I checked out the video a second time after reading this. Could be a SAW - the thing feeds from the left side, not the bottom, though - and the ammo path appears to be fairly well protected from the elements. The ammo box moves with the weapon so feeding doesn't appear to be a problem.
As far as shooting one up with a.50 caliber machine gun this is an antipersonnel weapon - and although I was an infantryman for a fair number of years I've never seen a heavy machine gun used by an assault force that wasn't mounted on a vehicle. This thing isn't designed to take out vehicles, only dismounted personnel. I personally think you'd play hell taking one out with a.50 cal - the gadget is roughly man-sized, poses no threat to an armored vehicle and it'd be a pretty huge waste of fairly expensive ammunition trying to take one out before you got within the gadget's effective range. If I was in a tank or an APC I'd just ignore the thing and just run over it when I got close enough;-)
Thermal imaging devices would be ineffective against the gadget unless it had been fired in the previous couple hours, so in the dark or early morning when an assault is most likely the thing would be damn near invisible. Of course you could map the things out and neutralize them with artillery, but during a large-scale assault I imagine they'd be largely ignored as it does look like they only hold a couple hundred rounds and once they run out of bullets unless they can convince the lowest-ranking man to go reload the thing it'd be pretty much useless.
Then there's that pesky minefield thing again.
I see it as pretty effective against dismounted recon forces and not much else.
My guess is Bush threw Rumsfeld to the wolves to appease Nancy Pelosi, but I could be wrong.
I spent more than nine years in the military, most of it infantry - I was a professional bullet stopper. During the first Gulf War we walked across the border with 410,000 troops and are now operating with a bit more than a third of that. The only way to win a war is to win it - otherwise let's get the hell out and quit sacrificing our young men and women in an unwinnable conflict.
I supported the war based on the information that was provided - and that information turned out to be a bit less than accurate. Right now we either need to win the war or get the hell out and quit sacrificing troops when there aren't enough to effect any real change in Iraq.
Right or wrong, we're neck-deep in it now. Let's either win this damn thing or get the hell out of it. We can impeach Bush later if it seems appropriate.
Spent a couple weeks in Cancun in the winter a few times. Would love to live on the Mexican Riviera except for the hurricanes, so I'm looking at Mexico's left coast instead.
When I was a kid I spent three months in Mazatlan with two other guys - rented an apartment, had a maid and a cook and spent long, lazy days fishing, laying out on the beach and abusing the local substances. I spent a total of $600 on that trip not counting airfare but that was 30 years ago.
Looking at Mazatlan now the town is big enough to have its own Wal-Mart, has a fairly large community of American expatriates and you can still get a three bedroom house within a couple blocks of the beach for less than $100k. Average temperature doesn't vary by more than ten degrees year round - with an average high of 80 to 82 in January and 90 to 92 in June.
I wonder if you'd change your tune if it was your wife or mother or daughter that was killed.
I'd like to think I had the moral courage to stand by my convictions even in this situation. There's no way to know for sure, though.
And no, people with normal value systems do not believe that it makes the state or them "just as bad".
After you've finished defining 'normal value systems' for our studio audience I'd like to hear exactly how you know what these people do or do not believe.
Uhhh... so, let's see.... $200/PC/Year * 5 Years = $1000, yes?
No.
Let's take a chunk of time from 2000 to 2006 - we upgraded from Windows 98 through Win2k to WinXP and from Office 2k through Office XP to Office 2003. That's two OS and two office automation upgrades in six years.
Perhaps they are, but if we're on a fixed four-year replacement cycle (we are) the only people who get new machines every year are application developers and people who have enough corporate horsepower to get a new PC whenever they want;-)
Can't stop someone from turning on Aero (well, I could but I won't) - but if they deviate from the Standard Non-Shiny Corporate User Interface and complain about performance then I guess they've got a choice to make. This is, after all, a business PC.
I'll be the first to admit that some user customization is a good thing - generally speaking a happy user is a productive user, but I don't have to give a user the full Aero/Glass experience in order for them to be able to do their job.
The decision point is where user customization interferes with productivity - so if the user turns on all the bells and whistles and then calls the helpdesk because his PC is slow we either turn the bells and whistles off or get the user a new PC, depending on his position in the food chain, I guess;-)
Aero is not required on corporate PCs so scratch the video upgrade. We deployed Windows XP with the dummied-down Windows 2000 interface and expect to do the same with Vista. We do allow users to change to the Fisher-Price UI if they like, though.
Corporate customers don't pay between $750 and $1k for Office - our enterprise licensing for Microsoft products (which includes the OS, Office Professional and Server and Exchange CALs) runs about $200 per PC per year.
It's not always so simple. About a year ago we found that our then 12 year old son was using his Mum's account on her study computer to admire all kinds of porn...
This happened in our house when my youngest was a bit older than 12. I was using a cache browser to find some website I'd seen a week or so before and stumbled upon all kinds of porn. Unfortunately I had a Typical Parental Response®.
When I got done grouching at the kid and he'd left the room his stepmother asked me if I had a Playboy collection when I was a teenager. Curses! Foiled again.
I went and apologized to the kid and a pretty good talk ensued. Found out that the kid thought women acted in those videos because they liked to and it had never crossed his mind that maybe financial need/pimps/lowlife boyfriends/childhood abuse/drug habits/whatever might have contributed to the woman's decision to get into the biz.
Did we cure him from viewing pr0n on the internet? Of course not. I didn't throw away my stack of Playboys when my mom caught me with one either;-)
I'd prefer my hair not stand on end when I refueled (or got into) my car.
As stated many times in this thread, the infrastructure required to deliver that kind of power to an automotive ultracapacitor would be scary as fuck, with the magnetic field ripping pacemakers out of people's chests and stuff like that.
Want 500 mile capacity? Trickle charge. Folks don't need to drive more than 500 miles a day anyway;-)
Tradewars, probably...?
I'm pretty sure there are Internet versions of it out now... you might do some websearches...
Not really - there are clones, though. I had two versions of Legend of the Red Dragon running on my vBulletin board, though. The port to php is called Legend of the Green Dragon and unfortunately my users lost interest after about two months. It was fun while it lasted, though;-)
I used to run a two-node PCBoard BBS back in the day. I miss those days sometimes.
Classified laptops never leave the high-security vault. They're stored in a safe in that vault when they're not in use. Unclassified laptops can go anywhere.
In the olden days (early 1990s) people had to remove the hard drive and place it in the safe when they left the office. We did not have the convience of putting the whole thing in the safe.
Been there, did that. Laptops are a whole bunch easier - shut it down, sign it in, lock it up.
I'm old enough to remember classified typewriter ribbons;-)
Come again? What's the point of a laptop that's tied to a specific location? Buying a laptop when a desktop machine would suffice is a complete waste of money.
It has to do with physical security - you can store a laptop in a high-security safe when you're not using it. It costs more than a desktop PC but less than hardening the building;-)
Nobody said the three lost laptops contained classified data and nobody said they were in a secured facility - classified laptops don't leave the security vault where they're stored. *All* the users issued laptops work at least one day a week from home - they transport their laptops all the time. The users fly on airplanes and stay in hotel rooms.
Uniquely challenging set of circumstances? How much training to you have to have to learn to not leave a laptop unsecured?
5% shrinkage per year is considered doing a good job when it comes to managing laptop losses.
Considered a good job by whom? I work for an agency under Department of Defense, supporting about 3,000 users. We've lost three laptops in the last five years, two of them by the same contract employee. That employee no longer works here.
I can't speak for Commerce but DoD requires FIPS 140-2 encryption of data at rest on mobile devices. We redirect mobile user's My Documents folder to a network share, turn on data synchronization and encrypt both the local and remote directories. All users are briefed on the requirement to store data in that encrypted location.
There are real issues with encrypting an entire drive and how the hell you recover the data if the user dies/quits/forgets his password. At least the way we do it selected domain admins can decrypt the data on the network share if required.
But - IM frequently less than HO losing almost 4% of an agency's mobile computing resources is completely unacceptable. Somebody needs to get spanked over this one.
Assuming that the turbine produces 10 watts of power (got this from TFA) and is 30% efficient (not an unreasonable assumption) this would mean that the turbine produced 10 watts of work and a little more than 20 watts would be dissipated as heat - far less than a modern PC microprocessor.
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Need food? Don't have any of that but here's a laptop.
Last September the hard drive my mother-in-law's 300MHz Thinkpad died for a second time. Since replacing the hard drive entails removing the keyboard, the fact that the machine ran Windows 98SE and the idea that I just didn't feel like screwing with it any more we went to the Apple store and she bought a 17" iMac.
;-)
Once I configured it she had no problem doing email or web and I threw a copy of OpenOffice on it so she could read any Word stuff she received.
I've had zero complaints and zero calls for support from her after about the first week she had the iMac. I'd recommend one to anybody who needs a computer and doesn't wanna be a geek.
But - I still run Windows and Linux at home
Apparently unlike some I actually read TFA.
;-)
I don't see where Microsoft commented one way or the other. What we have is a blogger with an idea to inflict power saving modes on people. MS is *way* smarter than that.
It's one of the down sides to free speech on the internet - even people who have dumb things to say can be instantly (and globally) published.
I checked out the video a second time after reading this. Could be a SAW - the thing feeds from the left side, not the bottom, though - and the ammo path appears to be fairly well protected from the elements. The ammo box moves with the weapon so feeding doesn't appear to be a problem.
As far as shooting one up with a .50 caliber machine gun this is an antipersonnel weapon - and although I was an infantryman for a fair number of years I've never seen a heavy machine gun used by an assault force that wasn't mounted on a vehicle. This thing isn't designed to take out vehicles, only dismounted personnel. I personally think you'd play hell taking one out with a .50 cal - the gadget is roughly man-sized, poses no threat to an armored vehicle and it'd be a pretty huge waste of fairly expensive ammunition trying to take one out before you got within the gadget's effective range. If I was in a tank or an APC I'd just ignore the thing and just run over it when I got close enough ;-)
Thermal imaging devices would be ineffective against the gadget unless it had been fired in the previous couple hours, so in the dark or early morning when an assault is most likely the thing would be damn near invisible. Of course you could map the things out and neutralize them with artillery, but during a large-scale assault I imagine they'd be largely ignored as it does look like they only hold a couple hundred rounds and once they run out of bullets unless they can convince the lowest-ranking man to go reload the thing it'd be pretty much useless.
Then there's that pesky minefield thing again.
I see it as pretty effective against dismounted recon forces and not much else.
My guess is Bush threw Rumsfeld to the wolves to appease Nancy Pelosi, but I could be wrong.
I spent more than nine years in the military, most of it infantry - I was a professional bullet stopper. During the first Gulf War we walked across the border with 410,000 troops and are now operating with a bit more than a third of that. The only way to win a war is to win it - otherwise let's get the hell out and quit sacrificing our young men and women in an unwinnable conflict.
I supported the war based on the information that was provided - and that information turned out to be a bit less than accurate. Right now we either need to win the war or get the hell out and quit sacrificing troops when there aren't enough to effect any real change in Iraq.
Right or wrong, we're neck-deep in it now. Let's either win this damn thing or get the hell out of it. We can impeach Bush later if it seems appropriate.
And it seems appropriate.
Spent a couple weeks in Cancun in the winter a few times. Would love to live on the Mexican Riviera except for the hurricanes, so I'm looking at Mexico's left coast instead.
When I was a kid I spent three months in Mazatlan with two other guys - rented an apartment, had a maid and a cook and spent long, lazy days fishing, laying out on the beach and abusing the local substances. I spent a total of $600 on that trip not counting airfare but that was 30 years ago.
Looking at Mazatlan now the town is big enough to have its own Wal-Mart, has a fairly large community of American expatriates and you can still get a three bedroom house within a couple blocks of the beach for less than $100k. Average temperature doesn't vary by more than ten degrees year round - with an average high of 80 to 82 in January and 90 to 92 in June.
An excellent post. Thank you.
This oughtta be good ;-)
No.
Let's take a chunk of time from 2000 to 2006 - we upgraded from Windows 98 through Win2k to WinXP and from Office 2k through Office XP to Office 2003. That's two OS and two office automation upgrades in six years.
Perhaps they are, but if we're on a fixed four-year replacement cycle (we are) the only people who get new machines every year are application developers and people who have enough corporate horsepower to get a new PC whenever they want ;-)
;-)
Can't stop someone from turning on Aero (well, I could but I won't) - but if they deviate from the Standard Non-Shiny Corporate User Interface and complain about performance then I guess they've got a choice to make. This is, after all, a business PC.
I'll be the first to admit that some user customization is a good thing - generally speaking a happy user is a productive user, but I don't have to give a user the full Aero/Glass experience in order for them to be able to do their job.
The decision point is where user customization interferes with productivity - so if the user turns on all the bells and whistles and then calls the helpdesk because his PC is slow we either turn the bells and whistles off or get the user a new PC, depending on his position in the food chain, I guess
Aero is not required on corporate PCs so scratch the video upgrade. We deployed Windows XP with the dummied-down Windows 2000 interface and expect to do the same with Vista. We do allow users to change to the Fisher-Price UI if they like, though.
Corporate customers don't pay between $750 and $1k for Office - our enterprise licensing for Microsoft products (which includes the OS, Office Professional and Server and Exchange CALs) runs about $200 per PC per year.
Works for me - Mom and I will just retire to the bedroom and bump uglies instead. Now turn off that TV and get to work.
This happened in our house when my youngest was a bit older than 12. I was using a cache browser to find some website I'd seen a week or so before and stumbled upon all kinds of porn. Unfortunately I had a Typical Parental Response®.
When I got done grouching at the kid and he'd left the room his stepmother asked me if I had a Playboy collection when I was a teenager. Curses! Foiled again.
I went and apologized to the kid and a pretty good talk ensued. Found out that the kid thought women acted in those videos because they liked to and it had never crossed his mind that maybe financial need/pimps/lowlife boyfriends/childhood abuse/drug habits/whatever might have contributed to the woman's decision to get into the biz.
Did we cure him from viewing pr0n on the internet? Of course not. I didn't throw away my stack of Playboys when my mom caught me with one either ;-)
I'd prefer my hair not stand on end when I refueled (or got into) my car.
;-)
As stated many times in this thread, the infrastructure required to deliver that kind of power to an automotive ultracapacitor would be scary as fuck, with the magnetic field ripping pacemakers out of people's chests and stuff like that.
Want 500 mile capacity? Trickle charge. Folks don't need to drive more than 500 miles a day anyway
Not really - there are clones, though. I had two versions of Legend of the Red Dragon running on my vBulletin board, though. The port to php is called Legend of the Green Dragon and unfortunately my users lost interest after about two months. It was fun while it lasted, though ;-)
I used to run a two-node PCBoard BBS back in the day. I miss those days sometimes.
Classified laptops never leave the high-security vault. They're stored in a safe in that vault when they're not in use. Unclassified laptops can go anywhere.
Been there, did that. Laptops are a whole bunch easier - shut it down, sign it in, lock it up.
I'm old enough to remember classified typewriter ribbons ;-)
Touché ;-)
That's still a lot of missing laptops, though.
It has to do with physical security - you can store a laptop in a high-security safe when you're not using it. It costs more than a desktop PC but less than hardening the building ;-)
Nobody said the three lost laptops contained classified data and nobody said they were in a secured facility - classified laptops don't leave the security vault where they're stored. *All* the users issued laptops work at least one day a week from home - they transport their laptops all the time. The users fly on airplanes and stay in hotel rooms.
Uniquely challenging set of circumstances? How much training to you have to have to learn to not leave a laptop unsecured?
Considered a good job by whom? I work for an agency under Department of Defense, supporting about 3,000 users. We've lost three laptops in the last five years, two of them by the same contract employee. That employee no longer works here.
I can't speak for Commerce but DoD requires FIPS 140-2 encryption of data at rest on mobile devices. We redirect mobile user's My Documents folder to a network share, turn on data synchronization and encrypt both the local and remote directories. All users are briefed on the requirement to store data in that encrypted location.
There are real issues with encrypting an entire drive and how the hell you recover the data if the user dies/quits/forgets his password. At least the way we do it selected domain admins can decrypt the data on the network share if required.
But - IM frequently less than HO losing almost 4% of an agency's mobile computing resources is completely unacceptable. Somebody needs to get spanked over this one.
Assuming that the turbine produces 10 watts of power (got this from TFA) and is 30% efficient (not an unreasonable assumption) this would mean that the turbine produced 10 watts of work and a little more than 20 watts would be dissipated as heat - far less than a modern PC microprocessor.
Except that /.banned my home IP address for running a tor server. We got it resolved, though ;-)