For a project of mine, I need a small data collection PC to be used in the field. I use thin client machines based on the same chip. I pay under $500 for a machine finished nicely with reasonable video, sound, usb, network ports, mini-pci for wifi, and a big heat sink on top. There is no fan in the unit, and it uses flash ram instead of a hard disk. Mine come with 512megs of ram, windows XPe, and 1gb of flash drive for storage. With no moving parts they last a long time, and the use about 20 watts of power rather than about 220 for a typical desktop pc.
They are also available (cheaper) with linux embedded, but in my case the app they run is written for XP and until I have time to re-write it, that's what I need.
When willing pay for it as a business contract, the same cable company with the same cable modem was able to give my full 2mbs upload and download and offered 4 as well.
They don't want you running servers because they're in the media business.
I have found Intuit to be one of the most bottom line focused, difficult, and ruthless companies I've ever dealt with. A shame, they have good products.
I recall recently waiting for my wife to come out of having surgery on her shoulder, and the surgeon came out to tell me how it went. The conversation was like this:
Me: How is she? Surgeon: I did fantastic work, it will be terrific. Me: So she came through it ok then? Surgeon: Oh yes, of course. Me: So the repair should hold this time? Surgeon: Certainly. It's much stronger now than it ever was, I really just had to finish up what wasn't done by [the previous surgeon] and it's now perfect.
...not that I would compare the skill and training of paramedics to surgeons, but the attitude can sometimes come from the same place. The training and pressure under which they must do their work means it has to attract people with confidence in abundance and the ability to make snap decisions.
I've also heard them referred to as "paragods".;-)
I'm not an EMT, just a firefighter (well, a fire officer). If they're stuck somewhere, I'll get them out. If they're on fire, I will put water on them. After that, they're someone else's problem.
As a fire fighter, I work with PD frequently. Despite what you see on TV, most of the FF/PD back and forth is overall friendly or at worst good natured sparing.
I know many officers. Some are good, some are not good. Most are somewhere in the middle. The youngest, smallest ones have in my experience been the ones closer to the stereotype. I refer to these as "25 year olds with their first mirrored shades and a gun" and are dangerous to themselves as much as the public they insult. Most though, grow up and become good natured and humble just like we all try to.
Cops are people, and suffer the same foibles as the rest of us. For them, like all others, power is a drug to be taken in small doses.
When you give a little man a little power, you create a big problem.
I'm a Lieutenant on a small department, and have been part of many "simulator" drills using not so artificial intelligence. We use an overhead project, software that allows drag and drop visual and audio changes to simulate the progression of a fire against a background image, and the real intelligence of a senior officer running the drill. The purpose of the drill is to give experience to the firefighters and officers making decision on how to attack the fire and when to take certain actions.
It is NOT about the individual firefighter on the line doing his job -- he's not meant to be focused on the big picture. He's got to focus on his local task as assigned -- search, vent, attack, etc.
The important thing, is that the person running the drill has a situation in his head about what caused the fire and how it will progress through the building, and can adjust the progression as a result of the decisions made by the officer making decisions. Once done, a great benefit of the experience is the discussion. Another huge benefit is the practice at simply making best use of radio traffic and keeping the situation in mind all at once.
The only advantage I see to this software they're showing is that it requires less people so you could have more people being in charge of the scenario and learning. They lose the experience coordinating the radio traffic, and the discussion at the end of how their tactics impacted the results would not benefit as many people.
It's intermediate between beginning and advanced! These in particular must be present often enough to be said to be in attendance with some frequency, but clearly perfect attendance would put them in the advanced placement and that won't do at all. They should start with band members.
As a Christian in the United States, you are NOT a minority. You are not oppressed. Your opinions are not quashed. Your life, liberty, and livelihood are not at risk. Your morals are not being impugned. You are not forced to live a life which is against any of your teachings. Nobody is asking you to live in any way against your beliefs. You are not forced to renounce or even hide your beliefs.
GET THE FLOCK OVER IT.
On the other hand, you and your ilk -- by which I do not mean all Christians, but rather the ranting lunatic fringe of which I consider you -- are in fact constantly doing all these things.
You threaten members of minority religions (or non-religions) You attempt to quash the opinions of others. You attempt to force others (through 'blue laws' to live by your beliefs. You harass people who believe differently. You try to suppress education on subjects where science appears to contradict you.
Once again -- you are the OPPRESSOR not the OPPRESSED!
Apple's biggest failures in turning adoption of their platform higher in years past have come from a constant falling back to their heart as a hardware company. Their recent success has been hand in hand with their use of ever increasingly standardized hardware. The original 'iMac' all-in-ones that used PCI video cards and EIDE drives with USB keyboards enabled them to cut the hardware costs dramatically and start competing on functionality and feel rather than internal stuff that for the most part nobody cares about.
Sure, AMD has some kick ass Intel compatible processors right now -- but the best way for apple to continue to ensure processors stay cheap and compatible is as a customer not an owner. If Apple bought AMD, then now you have a single company with processors, graphics cards, and pc's to sell and every temptation to "differentiate" (aka break the standard). That takes us back to the days when you couldn't upgrade your Mac without parts built specifically for that machine. Those days sucked.
The whole point to the.NET framework is lock-in. It's the classic trade off Microsoft has always made. Back in the early 90's you could write Windows 3.x apps with standard C++ language tools, but if you used their framework you got to market 6 months quicker because you didn't have to create your own windowing code. So, you could hit 90% of the market six months faster and you did, but then you gave up cross platform C++ by relying on their windows only libraries, and thus your software didn't work on Mac. That was the play then, and it is the play now.
By developing for the.NET framework, you get a lot of things. You get easy install kits, a 'contemporary professional' look and feel, you get drag and drop design, and you get cross platform use from the standpoint of different windows desktop, server, and mobile platforms.
If you're willing to limit your app to Microsoft platforms,.NET saves you time and money on development. It really does. I prefer to write in Java, but when I'm doing something within the.NET scope, it makes sense to use it.
The whole point of this play is to tie users to Windows platforms. They're in business to make money, and this is one way to continue doing that.
Java was created specifically to provide an alternative to Microsoft based development as a way to thwart Microsoft. That was a (not the, but a) primary goal of its development and licensing structure from the world go. It wasn't created to make money and while its goals are laudable, they aren't always realistic. It has been an abject failure at the desktop and even as browser based applets. A huge amount of effort went into making it useful for web servers (j2ee) but even those are barely cross platform and are themselves rife with vendor lock in. It's not like you're ever going to host IBM's portal product on someone else's J2EE server instead of Websphere after all.
So we can get things to market faster knowing we can fix the bugs in the chips later -- after the user fails to get the promised benefit.
UGH. I'm so sick this attitude that it is beyond description. ASUS makes some great gear, for example, and the worst software for that gear I've ever seen. Netgear is the same way. The crap both companies turn out is low quality and it's clear that their focus is so hardware centric that they see the software as a necessary evil that the users need in order to use the fabulous new hardware they're buying. This attitude of "Fix the software after we ship" means you can almost never rely on the software that ships with products from these companies. Unfortunately, sometimes the patches are worse. Asus in particular makes me ill with this. My P58-N-SLI motherboard is amazingly fast, but the update software is junk and the most recent bios patch was so bad I almost couldn't back down from it.
Sounds to me like this kind of chip would be a red flag for me to dump the product back on the shelf at the store.
At about 430 terahertz with direct line of sight over a distance of over a mile in some cases. Much longer if you're transmitting through a vacuum.
It can be very fast, but you can build your own slower version simply.
1. Take a red flashlight. 2. Stand on a hill. 3. Have a neighbor stand on another hill. 4. shine light at neighbor. 5. Cover the light with your hand, which produces a bitwise "0" 6. Uncover the light, which produces a bitwise "1" 7. Repeat, encoding your signal in binary at whatever rate your friend can accurately clock.
You may want to consider a "return to zero" phase or a "return to zero inverted" phase (NRZ/NRZI) to help you clock the signal for repeated bits at less accurate clock rates.:-)
Admittedly not about noise -- notebook drives aren't too loud -- but they are slow, and they do use a lot of power. A 25% power increase and a very big speed gain would work wonders for me. Yep, I'd pay it.
Sure, there are differences but we're talking about nanoseconds, not milliseconds with respect to ram. At worst it will be orders of magnitude better than a spindle and head.
What would you spend if you could be a 2.5" version that was interface compatible with your laptop sata connector that was say, 100gb with comparable power and performance?
Personally, to pull the SATA drive out of my laptop and replace it with a 100gb version of this that used so much less power and was so much faster would be a no-brainer even at something like 700 or 800 dollars (US). Battery life would be radically better, noise and heat would be much lower, performance better and general usability should be outstanding.
What are the downsides? How is the duty cycle on these things? Will they last as long or develop hotspots that can't store data as well?
Slashdot Mirror
I use them. They're big in "THIN CLIENTS".
For a project of mine, I need a small data collection PC to be used in the field. I use thin client machines based on the same chip. I pay under $500 for a machine finished nicely with reasonable video, sound, usb, network ports, mini-pci for wifi, and a big heat sink on top. There is no fan in the unit, and it uses flash ram instead of a hard disk. Mine come with 512megs of ram, windows XPe, and 1gb of flash drive for storage. With no moving parts they last a long time, and the use about 20 watts of power rather than about 220 for a typical desktop pc.
They are also available (cheaper) with linux embedded, but in my case the app they run is written for XP and until I have time to re-write it, that's what I need.
When willing pay for it as a business contract, the same cable company with the same cable modem was able to give my full 2mbs upload and download and offered 4 as well.
They don't want you running servers because they're in the media business.
He wouldn't have made them out of meat so they could be so tasty as part of a marinara sauce.
Just remember....recursive code is great code, because its recursive, so its great.
Surely we can teach these things to recognize other things! Slow drivers! Stupid people! Luddites! Conservatives!
I have found Intuit to be one of the most bottom line focused, difficult, and ruthless companies I've ever dealt with. A shame, they have good products.
.....I can't possibly be the only alpha geek out there who immediately associates a perfect silicon sphere with this:
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~hwloidl/htg-all.html
(see #48)
I recall recently waiting for my wife to come out of having surgery on her shoulder, and the surgeon came out to tell me how it went. The conversation was like this:
Me: How is she?
Surgeon: I did fantastic work, it will be terrific.
Me: So she came through it ok then?
Surgeon: Oh yes, of course.
Me: So the repair should hold this time?
Surgeon: Certainly. It's much stronger now than it ever was, I really just had to finish up what wasn't done by [the previous surgeon] and it's now perfect.
Are you seeing the trend here?
...not that I would compare the skill and training of paramedics to surgeons, but the attitude can sometimes come from the same place. The training and pressure under which they must do their work means it has to attract people with confidence in abundance and the ability to make snap decisions.
;-)
I've also heard them referred to as "paragods".
I'm not an EMT, just a firefighter (well, a fire officer). If they're stuck somewhere, I'll get them out. If they're on fire, I will put water on them. After that, they're someone else's problem.
"When you give a little man a little power, you get a big problem"
Little refers to the character of the man, not the stature. Clearly it also refers to your ability to understand metaphor.
As a fire fighter, I work with PD frequently. Despite what you see on TV, most of the FF/PD back and forth is overall friendly or at worst good natured sparing.
I know many officers. Some are good, some are not good. Most are somewhere in the middle. The youngest, smallest ones have in my experience been the ones closer to the stereotype. I refer to these as "25 year olds with their first mirrored shades and a gun" and are dangerous to themselves as much as the public they insult. Most though, grow up and become good natured and humble just like we all try to.
Cops are people, and suffer the same foibles as the rest of us. For them, like all others, power is a drug to be taken in small doses.
When you give a little man a little power, you create a big problem.
I'm a Lieutenant on a small department, and have been part of many "simulator" drills using not so artificial intelligence. We use an overhead project, software that allows drag and drop visual and audio changes to simulate the progression of a fire against a background image, and the real intelligence of a senior officer running the drill. The purpose of the drill is to give experience to the firefighters and officers making decision on how to attack the fire and when to take certain actions.
It is NOT about the individual firefighter on the line doing his job -- he's not meant to be focused on the big picture. He's got to focus on his local task as assigned -- search, vent, attack, etc.
The important thing, is that the person running the drill has a situation in his head about what caused the fire and how it will progress through the building, and can adjust the progression as a result of the decisions made by the officer making decisions. Once done, a great benefit of the experience is the discussion. Another huge benefit is the practice at simply making best use of radio traffic and keeping the situation in mind all at once.
The only advantage I see to this software they're showing is that it requires less people so you could have more people being in charge of the scenario and learning. They lose the experience coordinating the radio traffic, and the discussion at the end of how their tactics impacted the results would not benefit as many people.
Tell him we've already got one. It's very nice.
For me its the staples. I'm all about the staple marks.
It's intermediate between beginning and advanced! These in particular must be present often enough to be said to be in attendance with some frequency, but clearly perfect attendance would put them in the advanced placement and that won't do at all. They should start with band members.
Damn. Sorry all. I was responding with a flame to a stupid flame bait post and tripped on my own zipper.
As a Christian in the United States, you are NOT a minority.
You are not oppressed.
Your opinions are not quashed.
Your life, liberty, and livelihood are not at risk.
Your morals are not being impugned.
You are not forced to live a life which is against any of your teachings.
Nobody is asking you to live in any way against your beliefs.
You are not forced to renounce or even hide your beliefs.
GET THE FLOCK OVER IT.
On the other hand, you and your ilk -- by which I do not mean all Christians, but rather the ranting lunatic fringe of which I consider you -- are in fact constantly doing all these things.
You threaten members of minority religions (or non-religions)
You attempt to quash the opinions of others.
You attempt to force others (through 'blue laws' to live by your beliefs.
You harass people who believe differently.
You try to suppress education on subjects where science appears to contradict you.
Once again -- you are the OPPRESSOR not the OPPRESSED!
Apple's biggest failures in turning adoption of their platform higher in years past have come from a constant falling back to their heart as a hardware company. Their recent success has been hand in hand with their use of ever increasingly standardized hardware. The original 'iMac' all-in-ones that used PCI video cards and EIDE drives with USB keyboards enabled them to cut the hardware costs dramatically and start competing on functionality and feel rather than internal stuff that for the most part nobody cares about.
Sure, AMD has some kick ass Intel compatible processors right now -- but the best way for apple to continue to ensure processors stay cheap and compatible is as a customer not an owner. If Apple bought AMD, then now you have a single company with processors, graphics cards, and pc's to sell and every temptation to "differentiate" (aka break the standard). That takes us back to the days when you couldn't upgrade your Mac without parts built specifically for that machine. Those days sucked.
The whole point to the .NET framework is lock-in. It's the classic trade off Microsoft has always made. Back in the early 90's you could write Windows 3.x apps with standard C++ language tools, but if you used their framework you got to market 6 months quicker because you didn't have to create your own windowing code. So, you could hit 90% of the market six months faster and you did, but then you gave up cross platform C++ by relying on their windows only libraries, and thus your software didn't work on Mac. That was the play then, and it is the play now.
.NET framework, you get a lot of things. You get easy install kits, a 'contemporary professional' look and feel, you get drag and drop design, and you get cross platform use from the standpoint of different windows desktop, server, and mobile platforms.
.NET saves you time and money on development. It really does. I prefer to write in Java, but when I'm doing something within the .NET scope, it makes sense to use it.
By developing for the
If you're willing to limit your app to Microsoft platforms,
The whole point of this play is to tie users to Windows platforms. They're in business to make money, and this is one way to continue doing that.
Java was created specifically to provide an alternative to Microsoft based development as a way to thwart Microsoft. That was a (not the, but a) primary goal of its development and licensing structure from the world go. It wasn't created to make money and while its goals are laudable, they aren't always realistic. It has been an abject failure at the desktop and even as browser based applets. A huge amount of effort went into making it useful for web servers (j2ee) but even those are barely cross platform and are themselves rife with vendor lock in. It's not like you're ever going to host IBM's portal product on someone else's J2EE server instead of Websphere after all.
So we can get things to market faster knowing we can fix the bugs in the chips later -- after the user fails to get the promised benefit.
UGH. I'm so sick this attitude that it is beyond description. ASUS makes some great gear, for example, and the worst software for that gear I've ever seen. Netgear is the same way. The crap both companies turn out is low quality and it's clear that their focus is so hardware centric that they see the software as a necessary evil that the users need in order to use the fabulous new hardware they're buying. This attitude of "Fix the software after we ship" means you can almost never rely on the software that ships with products from these companies. Unfortunately, sometimes the patches are worse. Asus in particular makes me ill with this. My P58-N-SLI motherboard is amazingly fast, but the update software is junk and the most recent bios patch was so bad I almost couldn't back down from it.
Sounds to me like this kind of chip would be a red flag for me to dump the product back on the shelf at the store.
At about 430 terahertz with direct line of sight over a distance of over a mile in some cases. Much longer if you're transmitting through a vacuum.
:-)
It can be very fast, but you can build your own slower version simply.
1. Take a red flashlight.
2. Stand on a hill.
3. Have a neighbor stand on another hill.
4. shine light at neighbor.
5. Cover the light with your hand, which produces a bitwise "0"
6. Uncover the light, which produces a bitwise "1"
7. Repeat, encoding your signal in binary at whatever rate your friend can accurately clock.
You may want to consider a "return to zero" phase or a "return to zero inverted" phase (NRZ/NRZI) to help you clock the signal for repeated bits at less accurate clock rates.
Admittedly not about noise -- notebook drives aren't too loud -- but they are slow, and they do use a lot of power. A 25% power increase and a very big speed gain would work wonders for me. Yep, I'd pay it.
Sure, there are differences but we're talking about nanoseconds, not milliseconds with respect to ram. At worst it will be orders of magnitude better than a spindle and head.
What would you spend if you could be a 2.5" version that was interface compatible with your laptop sata connector that was say, 100gb with comparable power and performance?
Personally, to pull the SATA drive out of my laptop and replace it with a 100gb version of this that used so much less power and was so much faster would be a no-brainer even at something like 700 or 800 dollars (US). Battery life would be radically better, noise and heat would be much lower, performance better and general usability should be outstanding.
What are the downsides? How is the duty cycle on these things? Will they last as long or develop hotspots that can't store data as well?
There should be no seek time, it's solid state. There is no read write head to move, and there is no platter to spin.