They should kick the people off who are jerks, to smell, too. Those are even more offensive
I agree with you on the smelly people. I was on a flight from Chicago to London and I sat next to a smelly Indian guy who hadn't bathed in months and had curry sweating out of his pores. It was a completely full flight and they couldn't move me. I could barely breathe the whole 9 hours and each breath made me want to puke from the smell. To make things worse, the flight ventilation system wasn't working properly so I couldn't get fresh air. I was leaning over to the other side so much (to get a couple inches further away from his stinkiness) that I actually bruised my side and ribs against the arm rest on the opposite side.
Why can't we just have education books just present multiple popular theories along with the pros and cons of each?
There is a big difference between "theory" and "Scientific Theory". The word "theory" can apply to anything anybody made up at any time without proof. Like the idea your kids were told about a stork delivering babies could be called the "stork procreation theory" and this is without a doubt a "theory". But if we try to make it into a "Scientific Theory" we have to perform scientific research like acquiring data (which may disprove the theory), and see if we can make predictable and testable (including rejectable tests) that conform with both our theory and data. We will find data opposed to our "stork procreation theory" by noting that nearly all babies currently around have actually come out of a vagina and they seem to get "put there" during sex (which seems to already rule out the whole "virgin birth theory" or something like that as well).
There are multiple popular theories out there that we should not just present in schools because they are not "Scientific Theories". For example: 1) the US Gov't is responsible for 911, 2) Alien UFO's crashed in Area 51, 3) The world was created by an all-powerful deity in 6 days only a couple thousand years ago. However, none of these has stood up to the rigors a standing "Scientific Theory" has so they should not be taught as Science or Fact in our schools.
Schools should limit their teaching of Science to only Scientific Theories. Any other "theory" taught simply isn't Science.
Most customer service centres seem to be manned by people that would fail the Turing test.
That's because they actually are not trained to act as an intelligent being. Rather they are given a script and flowchart. They have been reduced to nothing more than a speech recognition device for the customer-response program. Even their replies if you get angry or upset are scripted.
Example:
Customer Service: (spoken with a heavy foreign dialect): "Our products are very reliable and only a few people experience problems with them. Did you try unplugging the cable and waiting 30 seconds before replugging the cable in".
Angry Customer: "Listen, I told you the thing exploded and caused a fire"
Customer Service: "Did you try unplugging the cable and waiting 30 seconds before replugging the cable in"
Angry Customer: "That's what they told me to do last time when I called and told them it froze up and I thought it was overheating. It worked for ten minutes before it nuked itself and burned down my house!"
Customer Service: "I am very sorry that you continue to have a problem with our product. But I see you have called before and used up all your free support. In order to help you with your product I will have to refer you to another number which will charge a small fee to help you with your incident."
Skype/VOIP etc is going to be enabled over 3G as well as WIFI. A simple front-mounted camera for video chat support would have been nice.
I need multi-tasking.
Most people are not going to do serious multitasking on a tablet - but they will occasionally switch from one app to check something else out and then switch back. If you can suspend your app *AND* return to your previous state in it easily, that should be good enough. It's the lack of consistent "return to previous state" for iPhone apps that make the multi-tasking seem like it would be necessary. We don't need true "multitasking" of running processes in the background for the most part (push msgs where you can return to previous state should work fine for most people) and Apple can enable the background processing for apps that need it.
I want an SD or USB port
I agree both of those should be build in. You can get them but they're ugly dongles that attach to the iPod Dock connector.
Apple keeps it simple: Here's what this does. It's elegant and does what it does very well. We don't want you screwing that up by messing around with it without our approval. If you want open and free, go somewhere else and take your chances.
The iPad is being marketed as a consumer playback device. Read books, watch movies, play games. Similar to any content oriented device like a Sony PSP or Nintendo GameBoy. Unfortunately all consumer playback devices are pretty much locked down. Even web surfing is basically content consumption 99% of the time.
It's quite possible at the price point they are selling the device that they are not making as high a margin on it as their other devices (it starts cheaper than an unlocked iPhone). Therefore, they plan on making at least some of the money with selling content and that requires locking down the delivery path just like Sony does with PS3, Microsoft does with XBOX360, and Amazon is doing with the Kindle.
There are a few apps like the Word Processor / Spreadsheet / Presentation to make it appeal a bit more to business users or to seem more practical but in the end, it's not going to be a toned down PC or netbook but rather an eBook (i.e. Kindle competitor) on steroids.
And as an eBook competitor, I think it's gonna kill the Kindle DX. It's only $10 more and brings color (for full color magazines), music, movies, games, and internet.
However, once you do this, you won't be able to run 16-bit DOS-based software, so if you really need that you may have to wait for a patch. Or build a dedicated DOS machine, where at least you'll have no illusions of security. (Cynics would say this is true of any MS operating system, but I leave that debate to others.)
Or use VirtualBox / VMWare / VirtualPC to create a VM to run your DOS programs.
The fade-in is nice. Not so much because it's a fade-in (which is just visually more pleasant than an instant-display), but because you can visit www.google.com and get a very clean page (google logo, search field, and currently a Haiti relief notice), and just type away (as focus is set to the search field) and be done with it
I don't really think a small menu of text links hurts. But it sucks to make google your home page for a new tab and then have to wait 5 seconds after opening a tab before gmail or news links are clickable.
Sure, some people loved the show-menu-delay in windows too but I'd rather be able to click instantly on the next menu item rather than wait a couple seconds for it to fade in.
The problem is that my phone cost $300, the Apple Care costs $70 (and you need it because the battery is sealed into the phone, and won't last 2 years)
The battery on iPods and iPhones are surprisingly easy to replace if you have to do it and the third party batteries are cheap. I had a buddy take his iPod to the Apple store and they told him it would be $150 to check it out and replace battery if necessary. I got the parts online including the disassembly tools for under $20 including shipping and replaced the battery in under 10 min. They have batteries for the iPhone 3G as well for $13.90 and it comes with the tool to open it. The 3GS third party battery isn't out yet but it will be in a year when people start needing them.
Think about it like this: the $599 for an iPhone or a Droid is arbitrary. It was a price point generated by market research that takes irrational agents into account (because as much as economics majors want to pretend we're all rational, we're most definitely not). Now when you see you can get a Droid or iPhone for $199 it feels like a good deal.
You only get the IPhone / Droid for $199 by agreeing to a contract where you pay roughly $2,000 over two years where AT&T or Verizon subsidize the cost of the phone. The $599 price is the "unlocked" price (if it's available unlocked). Furthermore, it's far from arbitrary - the actual component cost of these phones is in the $300 range so selling them at $199 is selling at a loss (and again has to be subsidized by carriers and reimbursed by subscriber payments). Aside from component costs, assembly, shipping, testing, software development, etc. plus costs of distribution, store fronts, warrantee service, et al - the actual cost to manufacturers for these phones are around $450-$500 so $599 is a reasonable price point for them for unlocked MSRP if they want to sell without actually taking a loss.
With a DVD... it may only be $0.25 (or less) to press a DVD but there are costs involved with the actors, writers, the marketing, etc. So yes with the DVD, you're mainly paying for the content cost.
This is not true for the phones -- there you're paying for the hardware. The content and services are an additional fees and may subsidize your hardware costs but one way or another, you end up paying for the hardware as well.
Is this even a question? Blizzard is the greater evil for bowing down to law enforcement unnecessarily. This guy isn't a robber or murderer. I suppose that defending a drug dealer's privacy wouldn't be good PR but I don't think there is much question that the "War on Drugs" has ruined far more lives than Blizzard and the drug dealer combined.
Ummm, I'm pretty sure Blizzard was acting in their own self-interest. All it would take is a couple press releases saying Blizzard is sheltering drug dealers on WoW to have a ton of parents pulling their kids accounts.
That we do, two out of the top five molecular gastronomy restaurants in the world -- Alinea and Moto plus new entries like Province. One of the worlds largest single location seafood restaurants. Famous namesakes like Charlie Trotters. Tons of great steak houses, pizza, and hot dogs that Anthony Bourdain believes you should try before you can die happily at Hot Doug's.
There are more good restaurants in Chicago from high-end to casual to down-right "dive with tasty food" than there are days in the year.
10.5% is the normal rate I pay in the NW burbs of Chicago on taxable items : i.e. a book, a video game, a TV or electronic purchase. The rate is the same in the City of Chicago proper.
However, even though the rate is the same, it needs to be sent to three or four different entities (IL State, Cook County, Palatine Township and Rolling Meadows City). Although the number of special cases (to be totally compliant) is huge - I'm sure they would be happy if Amazon just started charging the base rates and sending them cash though.
When I visited New York last year, my iPhone was acting really weird. Heating up, battery dying quickly, not being able to see signal, calls dropping and very slow data rate. I thought my phone was screwed up because it was fairly new. As soon as I got back to IL, it went back to normal though. Then I saw the same problem with lack of signal / batter dying quickly when I went to big street fairs or events in Chicago that had tens or hundreds of thousands of people. At a couple events with maybe on 40K people), I couldn't even send Text Messages because the AT&T network was bonked. My solution was to turn off 3G and all of a sudden, my phone would behave normally again in these high crowd situations. I think that when 3G is saturated, the iPhone wastes a lot of battery trying to connect back to the Cell towers.
In the Chicago area, we have the highest as well as one of the most complicated sales tax in the nation. I live in the NW Suburbs we pay a state tax, a cook county tax, and a local (city) sales tax. The total in most places in Chicago and surrounding suburbs is 10.5%. There is also a dine-in sales tax of 1-2% depending on city and a "loop" sales tax so you pay around 13% tax to eat out in a restaurant. We have different sales tax rates for General Merchandies (9%) , Qualifying Food and Drugs (yep food taxed at 2.25%), Vehicles (7.25 or Chicago Home Rule Tax of 8.5%). We have a "use tax" which may be charged instead of "sales tax" on certain occasions for General Merchandis (6.25% - note not equal to 9% sales tax) or Qualifying Food and Drugs (1% - again not equal to sales tax). We have different local rates for taxing over 2,000 special items (cigarettes, liquor, and other "sin" sales tax varying rates per community make up many of these) in IL depending on municipality including taxes on bottled water (per bottle) and a proposed additional tax on soda pop.
I could be paying 12-13% sales tax for an item while someone 50 miles west of me in Rockford, IL (same state - 45 min drive on highway @65 MPH) pays only 6.5%.
To be honest, if I drive the 3 miles from one town's shopping center to another here in IL, I never have any idea what the exact rate I'll be paying other than it'll be too much.
Yeah but the free pizza the Garbage man gets is already rotting in garbage. We get the pizza delivered hot to our job for those extra (unpaid) crunch hours.
The main reason I was using VMWare over VBox was the crappy linear snapshots with destructive reverts. I guess it's time to try it again and see if the branched snapshots work half as well as the VMWare snapshot tree. Does VBox now allow you to do non-destructive revert to any position on the snapshot tree like VMWare ?
I understand profit, that's why we're in business, to make money. But charging more for something just because the consumer is willing to pay more for it... I guess that crosses the ethical line for me.
That's not supply and demand.
Actually, technically that is the Econ 101 definition of Supply and Demand. If the supply is limited (i.e. you are the only manufacturer for the battery) and the consumer has a demand for them, then you can charge more for the item. If you charge more than a consumer is willing to pay, demand (and profit) will drop. There's a curve where you maximize profit by increasing price until the drop in consumer demand actually negatively affects your profits and Capitalistic Principles dictate that one should price items at this profit maximizing point.
If the supply is not limited (i.e. more than one supplier), then the point at which you can maximize your profits becomes much lower than with a monopoly since your competitor can price an item slightly lower than yours and reduce the demand significantly for you. The key with a truly competitive supply side is to find a price point that generates a reasonable profit for you that is still competitive with other suppliers -- this is by no means the lowest point that will generate a profit -- for example, it is common (though often illegal) for competitors to engage in price fixingso so they may both follow through on the profit gauging.
So Capitalism really only works out for consumers when there is genuine competition among suppliers (without monopolies, price fixing, cartels, corruptions, etc). And since the natural response of a corporation is to maximize profit, not to maximize competition and consumer benefit, that is why regulation of Capitalism is required for it to work in any reasonable fashion.
Two things... 1) as the parent noted, the Mini9 is no longer being produced (replaced by Mini10). 2) The Mini 9 had by default a very small SSD (4/8/16GB) that would barely support a windows install and was designed for Linux. Saying that 33% of a netbook designed for Linux was sold with Linux means that people actually chose to run Windows on 67% of them even though it wasn't designed for Windows.
That is, fish farming uses more fish than it creates, thereby exacerbating the chronic overfishing problems that plague the seas.
Not to mention that fish farming can cause outbreaks of parasites or disease that spread to the wild and therefore do more harm than good when it comes to conserving the wild population. A good example of this is salmon lice from farmed fish killing wild salmon.
FWIW, you can get near linear scaling on many MB RAID controllers with SSD drives up to 3 drives. You may get a boost on the 4th drive as well, but it's not as much (some MB RAIDs top out at around 666MB/s and 3 Intel SSD drives will push this limit). As a matter of fact, with less than 4 drives, the difference in speed between built-in MB RAID and dedicated HW RAID is almost indistinguishable.
There are plenty of benchmarks on the net if you look for them that show both a large speedup in transfer rates and in IOPS with MB-based RAID and SSD's.
BTW, your USB drive copying example is flawed... by that logic, you should never buy a drive that does more than about 30MB/s because that's currently where USB tops out. Transfer rate is important for other things such as processing large video files, multimedia creation, loading large datasets (video game levels), etc.
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They should kick the people off who are jerks, to smell, too. Those are even more offensive
I agree with you on the smelly people. I was on a flight from Chicago to London and I sat next to a smelly Indian guy who hadn't bathed in months and had curry sweating out of his pores. It was a completely full flight and they couldn't move me. I could barely breathe the whole 9 hours and each breath made me want to puke from the smell. To make things worse, the flight ventilation system wasn't working properly so I couldn't get fresh air. I was leaning over to the other side so much (to get a couple inches further away from his stinkiness) that I actually bruised my side and ribs against the arm rest on the opposite side.
Why can't we just have education books just present multiple popular theories along with the pros and cons of each?
There is a big difference between "theory" and "Scientific Theory". The word "theory" can apply to anything anybody made up at any time without proof. Like the idea your kids were told about a stork delivering babies could be called the "stork procreation theory" and this is without a doubt a "theory". But if we try to make it into a "Scientific Theory" we have to perform scientific research like acquiring data (which may disprove the theory), and see if we can make predictable and testable (including rejectable tests) that conform with both our theory and data. We will find data opposed to our "stork procreation theory" by noting that nearly all babies currently around have actually come out of a vagina and they seem to get "put there" during sex (which seems to already rule out the whole "virgin birth theory" or something like that as well).
There are multiple popular theories out there that we should not just present in schools because they are not "Scientific Theories". For example: 1) the US Gov't is responsible for 911, 2) Alien UFO's crashed in Area 51, 3) The world was created by an all-powerful deity in 6 days only a couple thousand years ago. However, none of these has stood up to the rigors a standing "Scientific Theory" has so they should not be taught as Science or Fact in our schools.
Schools should limit their teaching of Science to only Scientific Theories. Any other "theory" taught simply isn't Science.
Most customer service centres seem to be manned by people that would fail the Turing test.
That's because they actually are not trained to act as an intelligent being. Rather they are given a script and flowchart. They have been reduced to nothing more than a speech recognition device for the customer-response program. Even their replies if you get angry or upset are scripted.
Example:
Customer Service: (spoken with a heavy foreign dialect): "Our products are very reliable and only a few people experience problems with them. Did you try unplugging the cable and waiting 30 seconds before replugging the cable in".
Angry Customer: "Listen, I told you the thing exploded and caused a fire"
Customer Service: "Did you try unplugging the cable and waiting 30 seconds before replugging the cable in"
Angry Customer: "That's what they told me to do last time when I called and told them it froze up and I thought it was overheating. It worked for ten minutes before it nuked itself and burned down my house!"
Customer Service: "I am very sorry that you continue to have a problem with our product. But I see you have called before and used up all your free support. In order to help you with your product I will have to refer you to another number which will charge a small fee to help you with your incident."
I don't need a camera.
Skype/VOIP etc is going to be enabled over 3G as well as WIFI. A simple front-mounted camera for video chat support would have been nice.
I need multi-tasking.
Most people are not going to do serious multitasking on a tablet - but they will occasionally switch from one app to check something else out and then switch back. If you can suspend your app *AND* return to your previous state in it easily, that should be good enough. It's the lack of consistent "return to previous state" for iPhone apps that make the multi-tasking seem like it would be necessary. We don't need true "multitasking" of running processes in the background for the most part (push msgs where you can return to previous state should work fine for most people) and Apple can enable the background processing for apps that need it.
I want an SD or USB port
I agree both of those should be build in. You can get them but they're ugly dongles that attach to the iPod Dock connector.
Making fun of it involves telling people about it.
The number of people who wouldn't buy one because of the name is vanishingly small.
Naw, that didn't work for the Wii at all :-)
Ipad as a name is about as bad as it can get for apple, due to all the jokes and the SNL skit. Is itablet also trademarked?
It's actually a MAD TV Skit
Apple keeps it simple: Here's what this does. It's elegant and does what it does very well. We don't want you screwing that up by messing around with it without our approval. If you want open and free, go somewhere else and take your chances.
The iPad is being marketed as a consumer playback device. Read books, watch movies, play games. Similar to any content oriented device like a Sony PSP or Nintendo GameBoy. Unfortunately all consumer playback devices are pretty much locked down. Even web surfing is basically content consumption 99% of the time.
It's quite possible at the price point they are selling the device that they are not making as high a margin on it as their other devices (it starts cheaper than an unlocked iPhone). Therefore, they plan on making at least some of the money with selling content and that requires locking down the delivery path just like Sony does with PS3, Microsoft does with XBOX360, and Amazon is doing with the Kindle.
There are a few apps like the Word Processor / Spreadsheet / Presentation to make it appeal a bit more to business users or to seem more practical but in the end, it's not going to be a toned down PC or netbook but rather an eBook (i.e. Kindle competitor) on steroids.
And as an eBook competitor, I think it's gonna kill the Kindle DX. It's only $10 more and brings color (for full color magazines), music, movies, games, and internet.
Another plus about the low winter temps... you can literally claim you have the "Coolest Job in the World".
However, once you do this, you won't be able to run 16-bit DOS-based software, so if you really need that you may have to wait for a patch. Or build a dedicated DOS machine, where at least you'll have no illusions of security. (Cynics would say this is true of any MS operating system, but I leave that debate to others.)
Or use VirtualBox / VMWare / VirtualPC to create a VM to run your DOS programs.
The fade-in is nice. Not so much because it's a fade-in (which is just visually more pleasant than an instant-display), but because you can visit www.google.com and get a very clean page (google logo, search field, and currently a Haiti relief notice), and just type away (as focus is set to the search field) and be done with it
I don't really think a small menu of text links hurts. But it sucks to make google your home page for a new tab and then have to wait 5 seconds after opening a tab before gmail or news links are clickable.
Sure, some people loved the show-menu-delay in windows too but I'd rather be able to click instantly on the next menu item rather than wait a couple seconds for it to fade in.
Or, at least, I'd like to be able to metabolize my food and store excess energy as electric charge, easily transferred to whatever devices are handy.
Hook an excercise bike up to a generator which is connected to a battery. Satisfies your requirements other than the "easy" part.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
You have the right equations but you are misinterpreting the variables.
Money == the Amount of Money it costs to get work done
Knowledge == the Amount of Knowledge the workers have for the job
In other words, we can rename the variables as such:
Cost_Of_Project == Amount_Of_Work / Knowledge_Of_Workers
Therefore the cost of a project approaches infinity as your workers become more stupid.
The problem is that my phone cost $300, the Apple Care costs $70 (and you need it because the battery is sealed into the phone, and won't last 2 years)
The battery on iPods and iPhones are surprisingly easy to replace if you have to do it and the third party batteries are cheap. I had a buddy take his iPod to the Apple store and they told him it would be $150 to check it out and replace battery if necessary. I got the parts online including the disassembly tools for under $20 including shipping and replaced the battery in under 10 min. They have batteries for the iPhone 3G as well for $13.90 and it comes with the tool to open it. The 3GS third party battery isn't out yet but it will be in a year when people start needing them.
Think about it like this: the $599 for an iPhone or a Droid is arbitrary. It was a price point generated by market research that takes irrational agents into account (because as much as economics majors want to pretend we're all rational, we're most definitely not). Now when you see you can get a Droid or iPhone for $199 it feels like a good deal.
You only get the IPhone / Droid for $199 by agreeing to a contract where you pay roughly $2,000 over two years where AT&T or Verizon subsidize the cost of the phone. The $599 price is the "unlocked" price (if it's available unlocked). Furthermore, it's far from arbitrary - the actual component cost of these phones is in the $300 range so selling them at $199 is selling at a loss (and again has to be subsidized by carriers and reimbursed by subscriber payments). Aside from component costs, assembly, shipping, testing, software development, etc. plus costs of distribution, store fronts, warrantee service, et al - the actual cost to manufacturers for these phones are around $450-$500 so $599 is a reasonable price point for them for unlocked MSRP if they want to sell without actually taking a loss.
With a DVD... it may only be $0.25 (or less) to press a DVD but there are costs involved with the actors, writers, the marketing, etc. So yes with the DVD, you're mainly paying for the content cost.
This is not true for the phones -- there you're paying for the hardware. The content and services are an additional fees and may subsidize your hardware costs but one way or another, you end up paying for the hardware as well.
Is this even a question? Blizzard is the greater evil for bowing down to law enforcement unnecessarily. This guy isn't a robber or murderer. I suppose that defending a drug dealer's privacy wouldn't be good PR but I don't think there is much question that the "War on Drugs" has ruined far more lives than Blizzard and the drug dealer combined.
Ummm, I'm pretty sure Blizzard was acting in their own self-interest. All it would take is a couple press releases saying Blizzard is sheltering drug dealers on WoW to have a ton of parents pulling their kids accounts.
Well, you do have great food
That we do, two out of the top five molecular gastronomy restaurants in the world -- Alinea and Moto plus new entries like Province. One of the worlds largest single location seafood restaurants. Famous namesakes like Charlie Trotters. Tons of great steak houses, pizza, and hot dogs that Anthony Bourdain believes you should try before you can die happily at Hot Doug's.
There are more good restaurants in Chicago from high-end to casual to down-right "dive with tasty food" than there are days in the year.
10.5% is the normal rate I pay in the NW burbs of Chicago on taxable items : i.e. a book, a video game, a TV or electronic purchase. The rate is the same in the City of Chicago proper.
However, even though the rate is the same, it needs to be sent to three or four different entities (IL State, Cook County, Palatine Township and Rolling Meadows City). Although the number of special cases (to be totally compliant) is huge - I'm sure they would be happy if Amazon just started charging the base rates and sending them cash though.
When I visited New York last year, my iPhone was acting really weird. Heating up, battery dying quickly, not being able to see signal, calls dropping and very slow data rate. I thought my phone was screwed up because it was fairly new. As soon as I got back to IL, it went back to normal though. Then I saw the same problem with lack of signal / batter dying quickly when I went to big street fairs or events in Chicago that had tens or hundreds of thousands of people. At a couple events with maybe on 40K people), I couldn't even send Text Messages because the AT&T network was bonked. My solution was to turn off 3G and all of a sudden, my phone would behave normally again in these high crowd situations. I think that when 3G is saturated, the iPhone wastes a lot of battery trying to connect back to the Cell towers.
In the Chicago area, we have the highest as well as one of the most complicated sales tax in the nation. I live in the NW Suburbs we pay a state tax, a cook county tax, and a local (city) sales tax. The total in most places in Chicago and surrounding suburbs is 10.5%. There is also a dine-in sales tax of 1-2% depending on city and a "loop" sales tax so you pay around 13% tax to eat out in a restaurant. We have different sales tax rates for General Merchandies (9%) , Qualifying Food and Drugs (yep food taxed at 2.25%), Vehicles (7.25 or Chicago Home Rule Tax of 8.5%). We have a "use tax" which may be charged instead of "sales tax" on certain occasions for General Merchandis (6.25% - note not equal to 9% sales tax) or Qualifying Food and Drugs (1% - again not equal to sales tax). We have different local rates for taxing over 2,000 special items (cigarettes, liquor, and other "sin" sales tax varying rates per community make up many of these) in IL depending on municipality including taxes on bottled water (per bottle) and a proposed additional tax on soda pop.
I could be paying 12-13% sales tax for an item while someone 50 miles west of me in Rockford, IL (same state - 45 min drive on highway @65 MPH) pays only 6.5%.
To be honest, if I drive the 3 miles from one town's shopping center to another here in IL, I never have any idea what the exact rate I'll be paying other than it'll be too much.
Yeah but the free pizza the Garbage man gets is already rotting in garbage. We get the pizza delivered hot to our job for those extra (unpaid) crunch hours.
VirtualBox ... introduction of branched snapshots
The main reason I was using VMWare over VBox was the crappy linear snapshots with destructive reverts. I guess it's time to try it again and see if the branched snapshots work half as well as the VMWare snapshot tree. Does VBox now allow you to do non-destructive revert to any position on the snapshot tree like VMWare ?
I understand profit, that's why we're in business, to make money. But charging more for something just because the consumer is willing to pay more for it... I guess that crosses the ethical line for me. That's not supply and demand.
Actually, technically that is the Econ 101 definition of Supply and Demand. If the supply is limited (i.e. you are the only manufacturer for the battery) and the consumer has a demand for them, then you can charge more for the item. If you charge more than a consumer is willing to pay, demand (and profit) will drop. There's a curve where you maximize profit by increasing price until the drop in consumer demand actually negatively affects your profits and Capitalistic Principles dictate that one should price items at this profit maximizing point.
If the supply is not limited (i.e. more than one supplier), then the point at which you can maximize your profits becomes much lower than with a monopoly since your competitor can price an item slightly lower than yours and reduce the demand significantly for you. The key with a truly competitive supply side is to find a price point that generates a reasonable profit for you that is still competitive with other suppliers -- this is by no means the lowest point that will generate a profit -- for example, it is common (though often illegal) for competitors to engage in price fixingso so they may both follow through on the profit gauging.
So Capitalism really only works out for consumers when there is genuine competition among suppliers (without monopolies, price fixing, cartels, corruptions, etc). And since the natural response of a corporation is to maximize profit, not to maximize competition and consumer benefit, that is why regulation of Capitalism is required for it to work in any reasonable fashion.
Two things... 1) as the parent noted, the Mini9 is no longer being produced (replaced by Mini10). 2) The Mini 9 had by default a very small SSD (4/8/16GB) that would barely support a windows install and was designed for Linux. Saying that 33% of a netbook designed for Linux was sold with Linux means that people actually chose to run Windows on 67% of them even though it wasn't designed for Windows.
That is, fish farming uses more fish than it creates, thereby exacerbating the chronic overfishing problems that plague the seas.
Not to mention that fish farming can cause outbreaks of parasites or disease that spread to the wild and therefore do more harm than good when it comes to conserving the wild population. A good example of this is salmon lice from farmed fish killing wild salmon.
FWIW, you can get near linear scaling on many MB RAID controllers with SSD drives up to 3 drives. You may get a boost on the 4th drive as well, but it's not as much (some MB RAIDs top out at around 666MB/s and 3 Intel SSD drives will push this limit). As a matter of fact, with less than 4 drives, the difference in speed between built-in MB RAID and dedicated HW RAID is almost indistinguishable.
There are plenty of benchmarks on the net if you look for them that show both a large speedup in transfer rates and in IOPS with MB-based RAID and SSD's.
BTW, your USB drive copying example is flawed... by that logic, you should never buy a drive that does more than about 30MB/s because that's currently where USB tops out. Transfer rate is important for other things such as processing large video files, multimedia creation, loading large datasets (video game levels), etc.