Of course standard hard drives will fail, but two shock-mounted laptop drives (found in the Empeg) last quite some time. Three years and going so far. Bumps have never been a problem for me.
True, but mini-itx PCs in car stereo form are not designed with audio in mind. The Empeg was designed for high-quality audio output, as well as being built on an open platform. This is why there is a 3rd party GPS application available for the Empeg. No video yet, though.
This has been suggested many times before. If we take such a drastic measure as to change SMTP to enable us to charge a penny per message, why not send that penny to the recipient? Then, the recipient can choose to refund the penny if he wanted the e-mail, and keep it if he didn't want the e-mail.
The only part that bothers me is having to have a bank account or micropayment system to send e-mail. It kinda takes away from the whole "freedom of the internet" thing.
Let's face it, hollywood has it's own way with everything. I'm an avid climber, and there hasn't been one accurate climbing movie since the Eiger Sanction with Clint Eastwood, and that wasn't 100% accurate. Lately with Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit (both FALLING movies, not climbing) I sat in the theater and laughed. People get the impression that if you climb, you will fall and DIE! The problem is, real climbing is methodical and boring for an observer, while falling creates excitement for the short attention span MTV crowd.
I toured NCR's retail manufacturing plant, and one of the demos was taking a barcode on paper, ripping it into sixteen pieces, throwing it on a scanner (like your supermarket scanner) and the scanner correctly identifying the product.
Another cool thing about those scanners is they can program things like discounts, sales, rebates, most everything by scanning barcodes in a book, like a codebook kinda.
Wal-Mart's Teradata data warehouse is one if the biggest (if not the biggest) data warehouses in the world. You can read about it at NCR's website. In the article, they say it is 7.5 terabytes, but from what I have heard, they now have two warehouses that total 110 terabytes.
It runs on NCR's 5200 system, which is based on Intel architecture. It scales up to 512 nodes, with 1-4 Intel processors per node.
The operating system is NCR's MP-RAS (a flavor of UNIX that runs on Intel architecture). I'm not sure if it runs Linux;-)
*disclaimer* I _do_ work for NCR, but I just thought this was some neat information. I don't work in our data warehousing department. The system above would cost many millions of dollars, so it's out of the range of the average/. reader, and if you are going to spend that money on a data warehouse, chances are you are talking with NCR anyway.
I only saw the ABC piece, but they could have been a little more accurate in their statements about what was broken into. ABC News made it sound like the Whitehouse and FBI critical systems had been cracked, when it was only the webservers that were attacked. They also made it sound like the attack disrupted Whitehouse communications with other nations (probably referring to a media news page).
Another overblown story to make people fear the internet and computers.
I work for NCR and I think that I can shed some light on the thought process behind the lawsuit and NCR's position in all of this.
Before I begin, let me say that I am not speaking for my employer in any way. These comments are merely those of one who is familiar with the company and it's goals.
NCR is a 100+ year old company, and started out making cash registers (National Cash Register). NCR moved into making electronic cash registers, then ATM's and point of sale equipment, with NCR servers providing back end support. NCR realized that services and software were the most profitable sections of the company, and is now positioning themselves to be a solutions company, with Data Warehousing being emphasized above everything else. NCR currently outsources most hardware manufacturing to other companies.
NCR is counting on their Teradata product line to move the company ahead into the year 2000. Databases and solutions to make those databases work with other systems (ATM's, point of sale equipment, etc) are now the focus of the business. The patent infringement was probably with a Netscape server product that accesses some sort of back end database. NCR could care less about the browser. Since NCR's database products are the key to the business, NCR is trying to protect them as much as possible.
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> How long will those hard drives last?
Of course standard hard drives will fail, but two shock-mounted laptop drives (found in the Empeg) last quite some time. Three years and going so far. Bumps have never been a problem for me.
True, but mini-itx PCs in car stereo form are not designed with audio in mind. The Empeg was designed for high-quality audio output, as well as being built on an open platform. This is why there is a 3rd party GPS application available for the Empeg. No video yet, though.
The device works left-handed. The display even can be re-oriented to better suit lefies.
I think it'd be a bit hard to fit this thing under your tounge. Let's not go to the other place you can take your temperature.
This has been suggested many times before. If we take such a drastic measure as to change SMTP to enable us to charge a penny per message, why not send that penny to the recipient? Then, the recipient can choose to refund the penny if he wanted the e-mail, and keep it if he didn't want the e-mail.
The only part that bothers me is having to have a bank account or micropayment system to send e-mail. It kinda takes away from the whole "freedom of the internet" thing.
Let's face it, hollywood has it's own way with everything. I'm an avid climber, and there hasn't been one accurate climbing movie since the Eiger Sanction with Clint Eastwood, and that wasn't 100% accurate. Lately with Cliffhanger and Vertical Limit (both FALLING movies, not climbing) I sat in the theater and laughed. People get the impression that if you climb, you will fall and DIE! The problem is, real climbing is methodical and boring for an observer, while falling creates excitement for the short attention span MTV crowd.
I toured NCR's retail manufacturing plant, and one of the demos was taking a barcode on paper, ripping it into sixteen pieces, throwing it on a scanner (like your supermarket scanner) and the scanner correctly identifying the product.
Another cool thing about those scanners is they can program things like discounts, sales, rebates, most everything by scanning barcodes in a book, like a codebook kinda.
-Mark
It runs on NCR's 5200 system, which is based on Intel architecture. It scales up to 512 nodes, with 1-4 Intel processors per node.
The operating system is NCR's MP-RAS (a flavor of UNIX that runs on Intel architecture). I'm not sure if it runs Linux ;-)
*disclaimer* /. reader, and if you are going to spend that money on a data warehouse, chances are you are talking with NCR anyway.
I _do_ work for NCR, but I just thought this was some neat information. I don't work in our data warehousing department. The system above would cost many millions of dollars, so it's out of the range of the average
Another overblown story to make people fear the internet and computers.
-M
I work for NCR and I think that I can shed some light on the thought process behind the lawsuit and NCR's position in all of this.
Before I begin, let me say that I am not speaking for my employer in any way. These comments are merely those of one who is familiar with the company and it's goals.
NCR is a 100+ year old company, and started out making cash registers (National Cash Register). NCR moved into making electronic cash registers, then ATM's and point of sale equipment, with NCR servers providing back end support. NCR realized that services and software were the most profitable sections of the company, and is now positioning themselves to be a solutions company, with Data Warehousing being emphasized above everything else. NCR currently outsources most hardware manufacturing to other companies.
NCR is counting on their Teradata product line to move the company ahead into the year 2000. Databases and solutions to make those databases work with other systems (ATM's, point of sale equipment, etc) are now the focus of the business. The patent infringement was probably with a Netscape server product that accesses some sort of back end database. NCR could care less about the browser. Since NCR's database products are the key to the business, NCR is trying to protect them as much as possible.