Actually, quite a few USB sticks come with a partition set up as a auto-run CD image. I was *very* surprised the other day to plug one such stick into an XP PC at work and have it auto-run a bunch of system tray code for managing the USB stick.
I believe the stick is a SanDisk Cruiser.
Note that this is after I'd at least attempted to repartition and format the stick on my powerbook. Maybe I got it wrong but I didn't manage to kill the CD partition.
Yeah, I cart a Precision M60 and a 12" PBG4 all over the states. The M60 is so huge that my GF always breaks into hysterics when I open it up on the sofa. It's *hilariously* big, but it packs a punch, it's pretty solid, and the screen goes up to 1900x1200 which kick most other laptops into a cocked hat.
The PBG4 runs a lot cooler, a lot longer and gets most of the after hours and airplane use, unless I need the pixels.
That is *exactly* why I own two Shuffles, and my mini goes unloved and unused sitting on the shelf. I'd much rather have a mouse wheel style click wheel on the side, rather than the horrible touch sensitive pad.
I like my music listening to be spontaneous, and not interrupted by having to look at a tiny screen.
If I'm somewhere social, then I'll boot up iTunes on my PowerBook and hook up to an amp to talk music with people.
I think this could be quite useful, especially in conjunction with encryption as email starts to get less and less useful.
Here's an example, I worked on a bunch of documents flying home on Continental yesterday. I could have copied those up to my cell phone web-site from my mac as soon as we landed, which could have then auto-synched onto the company web-server for example, as I was driving home.
Obviously a cell phone web-site would mainly be useful for local content such as recently snapped pictures, notes, directions, and act as a locally accessible online presence for a real person. In this case, it doesn't replace a full web-site, but possibly acts as a locally discoverable 'business-card' for people in nearby physical proximity, similar to what we could do with beaming between palms.
Or in the form of a concrete example... The little spectrum analysers in iTunes are a good example of taking some time domain data, analysing it, and displaying the low through high frequencies.
As an example of how far we've come, I implemented the Cooley-Tukey FFT in assembler on an Amiga, and it was just barely out of real-time. You had to capture some audio data, then wait while it was analysed. Nowadays, you can write the same thing in Objective-C on a G4, using the standard audio capture library, and have the FFT's computed between redraw events.
1997 $45,000 converts to UK Pounds approx 31,250 (pretty damn good for 1997).0069 % for a gallon of gas.893 % for a PS/2
2006 $70,000 converts to UK Pounds approx 37,000.010 % for a gallon of gas 1.15 % for a PS/3
I'm assuming that we take the US 'worth' of a salary and translate to pounds, and it looks a *lot* worse for people in the UK, which would be borne out by my experience of living there all my life, until 1997 as it happens.
Looks like life has probably got a lot worse in the UK. Can anyone post average salary figures ?
I think it's due to the aerodynamics of the hard drive heads... which fly above the platter.
From the link... "The system relies on air pressure inside the drive to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk is in motion. A hard disk drive requires a certain range of air pressures in order to operate properly. The connection to the external environment and pressure occur through a small orifice in the enclosure, usually featuring also a carbon filter on the inside (the breather filter, see below). If the air pressure is too low, there will not be enough lift for the flying head, the head will not be at the proper height, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss. Specially manufactured sealed and pressurized drives are needed for reliable high-altitude operation, above about 10,000 feet. This does not apply to pressurized enclosures, like an airplane pressurized cabin. Modern drives include temperature sensors and adjust their operation to the operating environment."
Yeah, damn it !! I think it's probably time to go get that XBox 360, I believe it's called. The PS/3 looks like it's going to be late, expensive and probably the XBox 360 has won this round at the high-end. I predict a mid-year boost for MS with all the bad news coming from Sony. Points in favor of MS include XBox Live, the mini-games and some great franchises.
Interestingly, the medium and low end should be mopped up by the Nintendo, supported by the mainstream non-hardcore, and parents buying a game machine for their kids. At only a couple of hundred bucks, and with an innovative controller, I guess many of the hard-core will pick one up.
The PS/3 is going to be the Dreamcast of this generation.
But according to several posts above, $799 for the Core Duo Mini is rip-off.
I don't think so. I have one also, and it just kicks ass. It's very very fast. Very expandable. Lacie 250 GB Firewire drive under it. Hooked up to a scanner / printer. SCSI adapter for for slide scanner. Hooked up to a tube amp and Athena speakers for soundz. 2 Gigs of RAM. GigE for great connectivity. Pimpin'.
For me the perfect new Mac laptop would be the Core Duo Mini specs with a 1280x960 screen. Plenty of USB ports, at least one FW400 port, and keeping about the same size and shape as my 12" AlBook, which is near perfect in everything except screen, and has a great keyboard.
Apple is doing a better job with screens these days, and I really hope they deliver something better than the somewhat anaemic 1024x768 on the PB.
$1200 or $1300 would be perfectly acceptable seeing as a machine with these specs would be replacing the previous $1500 12" PowerBook. Lets hope we see a basic model at $1000, and the hotter model a few hundred above it.
Integrated graphics are fine. The Intel stuff has been pretty decent for years, and the GMA950 is their best yet.
One question to ask is 'Who *should* fix these bugs ?".
I have Ubuntu installed on a IBM Thinkpad, and the most noticeable bug is:
- eth0 gets renamed as eth1 somehow during card init, necessitating that I duplicate the wireless configuration between eth0 and eth1. Mostly it works, but about once a day, it will get confused and continually reboot the card. Ethernet then slows down to about 140 bytes/sec. Sometimes the kernel locks up, but ejecting the card will unlock so the mouse works, but then the keyboard is dead. Reboot time.
In this situation, who should fix it? Is it a distro problem? Is it a kernel problem? The boards are full of people with this kind of stupid problem.
Maybe the solution is to test and configure with standard hardware and a standard driver package. In a sense, this is what Apple does already with OS X. Maybe Dell should do this with Linux, but if they ended up with something like the problem above, then it might end up hurting them more, though I doubt it, since this kind of thing happens under Windows too, though it seems less common.
Let's hope that it's not as lame as the awful Netzero free service, where even redirects were dumped off to a NetZero advertising page.
Hey, I'm using NetZero already, don't advertise to me. It felt like spyware, terminating my account didn't, and removing all traces of it from my PC was a registry nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we have reverted to the Windows 95 technique where we shut all processes down, and display a screen that says:
"Please Turn Off Your Computer (Aaaarrrrgghhh Matey)"
Actually, quite a few USB sticks come with a partition set up as a auto-run CD image. I was *very* surprised the other day to plug one such stick into an XP PC at work and have it auto-run a bunch of system tray code for managing the USB stick.
I believe the stick is a SanDisk Cruiser.
Note that this is after I'd at least attempted to repartition and format the stick on my powerbook. Maybe I got it wrong but I didn't manage to kill the CD partition.
Dude, check the link and scroll down ...
a rd
http://www.spodesabode.com/content/article/cardbo
I think this guy has prior art.
Yeah, I cart a Precision M60 and a 12" PBG4 all over the states. The M60 is so huge that my GF always breaks into hysterics when I open it up on the sofa. It's *hilariously* big, but it packs a punch, it's pretty solid, and the screen goes up to 1900x1200 which kick most other laptops into a cocked hat.
The PBG4 runs a lot cooler, a lot longer and gets most of the after hours and airplane use, unless I need the pixels.
That is *exactly* why I own two Shuffles, and my mini goes unloved and unused sitting on the shelf. I'd much rather have a mouse wheel style click wheel on the side, rather than the horrible touch sensitive pad.
I like my music listening to be spontaneous, and not interrupted by having to look at a tiny screen.
If I'm somewhere social, then I'll boot up iTunes on my PowerBook and hook up to an amp to talk music with people.
I think this could be quite useful, especially in conjunction with encryption as email starts to get less and less useful.
Here's an example, I worked on a bunch of documents flying home on Continental yesterday. I could have copied those up to my cell phone web-site from my mac as soon as we landed, which could have then auto-synched onto the company web-server for example, as I was driving home.
Obviously a cell phone web-site would mainly be useful for local content such as recently snapped pictures, notes, directions, and act as a locally accessible online presence for a real person. In this case, it doesn't replace a full web-site, but possibly acts as a locally discoverable 'business-card' for people in nearby physical proximity, similar to what we could do with beaming between palms.
"You mean I have to weld it !!!"
"Oh-oh spaghetti-o-s"
My Dell M60 shutsdown when I close the lid, or push the power button.
More importantly, it pops back up like a champ when I re-open the lid. It's awesome. Who cares about boot times when you almost never reboot? sweeeet.
Or in the form of a concrete example ... The little spectrum analysers in iTunes are a good example of taking some time domain data, analysing it, and displaying the low through high frequencies.
As an example of how far we've come, I implemented the Cooley-Tukey FFT in assembler on an Amiga, and it was just barely out of real-time. You had to capture some audio data, then wait while it was analysed. Nowadays, you can write the same thing in Objective-C on a G4, using the standard audio capture library, and have the FFT's computed between redraw events.
Exxxxcelllenttttt !!!
You didn't convert the salaries:
.0069 % for a gallon of gas .893 % for a PS/2
.010 % for a gallon of gas
1997
$45,000 converts to UK Pounds approx 31,250 (pretty damn good for 1997)
2006
$70,000 converts to UK Pounds approx 37,000
1.15 % for a PS/3
I'm assuming that we take the US 'worth' of a salary and translate to pounds, and it looks a *lot* worse for people in the UK, which would be borne out by my experience of living there all my life, until 1997 as it happens.
Looks like life has probably got a lot worse in the UK. Can anyone post average salary figures ?
Sweet! I never put a return address on anything. In your face NSA !!
I think it's due to the aerodynamics of the hard drive heads ... which fly above the platter.
... "The system relies on air pressure inside the drive to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk is in motion. A hard disk drive requires a certain range of air pressures in order to operate properly. The connection to the external environment and pressure occur through a small orifice in the enclosure, usually featuring also a carbon filter on the inside (the breather filter, see below). If the air pressure is too low, there will not be enough lift for the flying head, the head will not be at the proper height, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss. Specially manufactured sealed and pressurized drives are needed for reliable high-altitude operation, above about 10,000 feet. This does not apply to pressurized enclosures, like an airplane pressurized cabin. Modern drives include temperature sensors and adjust their operation to the operating environment."
From the link
Ladies and Gentleworms, I give you the new MacBook Black ...
MacBook Black
What's it going to do? Cook him to death?!?!?
Yeah, damn it !! I think it's probably time to go get that XBox 360, I believe it's called. The PS/3 looks like it's going to be late, expensive and probably the XBox 360 has won this round at the high-end. I predict a mid-year boost for MS with all the bad news coming from Sony. Points in favor of MS include XBox Live, the mini-games and some great franchises.
Interestingly, the medium and low end should be mopped up by the Nintendo, supported by the mainstream non-hardcore, and parents buying a game machine for their kids. At only a couple of hundred bucks, and with an innovative controller, I guess many of the hard-core will pick one up.
The PS/3 is going to be the Dreamcast of this generation.
"Aaarrrggghhh, these sunglasses do nothing !"
But according to several posts above, $799 for the Core Duo Mini is rip-off.
I don't think so. I have one also, and it just kicks ass. It's very very fast. Very expandable. Lacie 250 GB Firewire drive under it. Hooked up to a scanner / printer. SCSI adapter for for slide scanner. Hooked up to a tube amp and Athena speakers for soundz. 2 Gigs of RAM. GigE for great connectivity. Pimpin'.
For me the perfect new Mac laptop would be the Core Duo Mini specs with a 1280x960 screen. Plenty of USB ports, at least one FW400 port, and keeping about the same size and shape as my 12" AlBook, which is near perfect in everything except screen, and has a great keyboard.
Apple is doing a better job with screens these days, and I really hope they deliver something better than the somewhat anaemic 1024x768 on the PB.
$1200 or $1300 would be perfectly acceptable seeing as a machine with these specs would be replacing the previous $1500 12" PowerBook. Lets hope we see a basic model at $1000, and the hotter model a few hundred above it.
Integrated graphics are fine. The Intel stuff has been pretty decent for years, and the GMA950 is their best yet.
One question to ask is 'Who *should* fix these bugs ?".
I have Ubuntu installed on a IBM Thinkpad, and the most noticeable bug is:
- eth0 gets renamed as eth1 somehow during card init, necessitating that I duplicate the wireless configuration between eth0 and eth1. Mostly it works, but about once a day, it will get confused and continually reboot the card. Ethernet then slows down to about 140 bytes/sec. Sometimes the kernel locks up, but ejecting the card will unlock so the mouse works, but then the keyboard is dead. Reboot time.
In this situation, who should fix it? Is it a distro problem? Is it a kernel problem? The boards are full of people with this kind of stupid problem.
Maybe the solution is to test and configure with standard hardware and a standard driver package. In a sense, this is what Apple does already with OS X. Maybe Dell should do this with Linux, but if they ended up with something like the problem above, then it might end up hurting them more, though I doubt it, since this kind of thing happens under Windows too, though it seems less common.
Let's hope that it's not as lame as the awful Netzero free service, where even redirects were dumped off to a NetZero advertising page.
Hey, I'm using NetZero already, don't advertise to me. It felt like spyware, terminating my account didn't, and removing all traces of it from my PC was a registry nightmare.
Sew it yourself clothes are really nothing new.
This linkie shows ClothKits, a 70's UK phenom. The very word strikes fear into me, bringing back memories of scarily ornate padded waistcoats.
I suspect kids today would throw themselves off tall buildings rather than wear that stuff.
Woo Hoo !!!! $8.88 Hard Drives !!!
Sweet!
Can't believe I waited 5 minutes for that to load.
...
Then it *slowly* dawned
Jack: Sorry Chloe, that IP address was 163.56.1.276 Chloe: Trying it now Jack, thanks