I'm sure you can't find the article because it probably doesn't exist. Artificial hearts (and the associated machinery) are quite noisy. As a matter of fact, artificial heart valves, which are quite common, are noisy enough that you can hear them from several feet away in a quiet room.
I have an artificial valve and it sometimes keeps me awake at night. It's like having an old school wind-up wrist watch parked next to your ear. But it certainly beats the alternative....death.
Cheers,
Sure, this is cool if you live in one of the major metropolitan areas covered. I live less than 20 miles from NYC and EVDO isn't available here. So if you're in an area covered and you don't have access to real broadband, this is a win. Otherwise, I'd personally stick with the tried and true cablemodem or (gasp) DSL link.
Also, EVDO!=3G. It's more like 2.75G.
It's easier for them to detect fraud in progress than it is to prevent it. When I say easier, I mean that it interferes less with their tertiary marketing of your personal data to make more money on top of interest payments and "membership fees."
These lenders have a cost of funds of under 5%. They're charging "good" customers as little as 9.9% and "bad" customers 20-30% interest. Even with high levels of fraud (as long as they can shut the fraudsters down relatively quickly upon discovery) and the money they're making selling your account/demographic information to advertisers, the banks are making money hand over fist. They have no fear of losing customers since our economy more or less forces you to have a credit card for many transactions. So there isn't any incentive for them to tidy up until the fraud begins to encroach on profits or the inconvenience of consumers causes pressure from lawmakers (who aren't inclined to buck the system since the banks donate heavily to political campaigns).
So what is a consumer to do? Boycott credit cards? You can't even do that. I was just declined for a consulting gig because my "credit score" was too low. I don't owe anyone any money and haven't owned a credit card in 10+ years. Having "no credit" seems to be worse than having "bad credit." There's no winning.
It's very easy to go back 60 years into the past and play armchair quarterback using your own "modern" moral compass.
The fact of the matter is that Japan was fully prepared to fight an invasion of Japan to the last man/woman/child. The people who decided to pull the trigger on the atomic bomb had just seen firsthand what that kind of scenario was like in Germany.
Do I like the fact that those bombs were dropped on cities? No. Do I think it saved millions of Allied soldiers' (and Japanese soldiers/civilians) lives? Absolutely.
I ordered their most expensive Athlon64 Presario Notebook about 6 months ago. I was very happy with it. Very fast and was perfect for my needs. After about 2 months, the video died. The unit would work just fine with an external monitor. So I called up support and got sent to some Indian call center. I described the problem and asked for a RMA number. The tech said he needed to go through a series of troubleshooting steps first. So I wasted about an hour with this guy (who's accent made it virtually impossible to understand him...and I've actually worked in Bangalore!). Finally, he agrees to RMA the unit.
About 10 days later, I get the notebook back and it's suffering from EXACTLY THE SAME problem. So I call up and describe the problem, explain that it's still broken with exactly the same symptoms, and am told I need to go through the same silly troubleshooting session...another hour of my time wasted. They RMA the unit. About 8 days later, it comes back and works fine. Two days later, the video fails with exactly the same symptoms (worked with external monitor). At this point, I called and said I wanted a new unit when they insisted I send it in for a third time. I escalated things several levels above the tech and they outright refused to give me a new computer. So I went to HP's website and filed a polite description of the issue and a complaint about the service to the "email Carly" link. The very next morning, an Indian women called and very apologetically offered to send me a new unit with an upgraded processor and a DVD burner (rather than CD/RW) to compensate me for my trouble.
And it's worked fine ever since. But I don't think I'd ever buy another HP/Compaq notebook. The call center experience was by far the most annoying and inefficient that I've ever experienced. When it came time for me to decide which notebooks to buy for my company (only about 100 units), I went with Sony Vaios even though they were quite a bit more expensive since I'd always had good experiences with their tech support.
With the exception of the resolution number, the specifications of this monitor duo are pretty lackluster. The brightness and contrast are sub par, as is the response time and the off axis viewing capability. You'd be MUCH better off springing for a pair of nice 19" or 20" displays that have better contrast/response/viewing angles/etc. The cost would be about the same, but you'd wind up with a substantially better viewing experience.
They're MUCH heavier, use more power, generate more heat, take up more space, and will probably be more expensive than LCDs as the market realigns itself around flat panels. However, I suspect there will always be companies out there willing to produce CRTs for special applications at some usurous price point.
My only real problem with tiny PC's is that you're stuck with integrated graphics solutions. That won't matter to someone who just needs a computer to work on Word documents or surf the net, but I occasionally like to play a game. If they could make a P4 or Athlon 64 SFF system that had enough room to stuff in an aftermarket AGP or PCI-X graphics card, I'd probably buy one to cut down on the desk clutter. It would be useful, even if it was double the thickness or length of the mini.
My ideal system would look something like this:
Athlon 64 3500+ or equivalent P4
512mb RAM
DVD+-RW
reasonable 3D graphics card
120-200gig hard drive
ethernet
wifi card
USB + Firewire ports
integrated sound card
I haven't been terribly enthused with the franchise under Berman's stewardship and I keep scratching my head wondering "how the heck did this person gain so much influence over things?"
I had a similar experience. I switched my folks (in their late 50's with little computer experience) from Windows 2000 to CentOS 4.0 (basically Redhat EL4). And I haven't heard a peep out of them since. They use firefox for the web, thunderbird for email, and openoffice when someone sends them a MS Office file.
The computer boots up faster, doesn't creak under the bloat load (It's a P3 1ghz machine with 384MB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 5200 card) and just plain works. The fact that they don't have to give a moment's thought to virus infection or spyware is "pennies from heaven"...a bonus.
Everyone's happy.
Cheers,
Um...you might want to get out more and lose the attitude.
99% of the folks out there don't want or need outbound port 25. If you do need it, you should be able to ask your upstream for it, but it shouldn't just be on automatically because of the potential for abuse.
I'm not sure what your UID has to do with anything...other than verify that you've been inside on your computer for a lot longer than I have. Maybe someday I can berate someone for being a newcomer too. Hope springs eternal....
It will block a huge amount of spam from being injected by broadband zombies and will inconvenience a vanishingly small number of hard core geeks (who probably know someone with a well connected server in a datacenter that they IMAP into from home anyway).
*sarcasm*
Let's see, I go to the campus bookstore and purchase a text that's required for a class. What?!?! $100 for a text on ordinary differential equations? Surely, the study of ODE hasn't changed much in say the last 30 years, but my professor insists that we use this specific edition and there aren't any in the USED bin. Oh wait, I see...my professor is a contributing author...
And even if the book is available in the used bin, it costs 75% of the new price. Some hapless student is going to pay that, open the book a few times over the course of a semester and then resell it back to the bookstore at 15% of what he/she paid for it...only to see it back for sale a few days later at 75% of the cover price again.
Rinse and repeat...until, of course, another edition of the book is published with a new forward and some extremely minor content changes and the cycle starts anew (without the availability of a USED alternative for one semester)....I think the publishers are getting upset with the wrong people. And students are just getting the shaft.
OK, so they denied taking something and it was proven (at least to my satisfaction) that they did. Now Maui is "coming clean" that they "borrowed" GPL code and want to play nice. I guess they figure it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. It makes me wonder if their other products have similar issues.
A slippery slope.
3G data transmission speeds are about 300kbit/sec. With mpeg-4 encoding and a relatively tiny number of pixels (we're only talking about 176x144 resolution on a 5cm screen) that's pretty decent quality and you can get 15-30 frames a second without any problems so long as the processor on the phone can deal with the stream.
However, you're still stuck with a vanishingly small screen and a tiny speaker that makes the audio sound awful, even if it's encoded at a decent bitrate. Would I watch a movie in that environment? Probably not. But I'd tune in to news or catch sports scores if I was sitting around in an airport or a riding on a train.
Don't forget that 3G radios suck batteries dry a LOT faster and having the phone's tiny processor running flat out to keep up with decoding a video stream will likely make battery life even worse...so don't throw away your cableTV box just yet. 8-)
I'm a bit confused about what problem this product is trying to solve. It's not really smaller, cheaper, or faster than a Mac mini or other currently available "mini pc".
It definitely gets points in the "neato" factor, but I can't picture many people buying one unless one or more of the points above changes.
Cheers,
The companies complaining about this "shortage" are the same ones that were cutting Comp Sci majors off at the knees when the companies overextended themselves during the "bubble" years. Those same companies then ran out and auctioned off their development to the lowest bidders in India/China/Eastern Europe...only to find out that the hourly wage wasn't a very good predictor of overall cost.
So now they want to come back "home" and wonder why there's a lack of trust in the future or salability of a Comp Sci degree.
Gee, what an ungrateful lot we are... 8-)
Cheers,
I haven't followed openBSD in quite some time and the answer wasn't apparent from the "features" link...but...
Did Theo get around to supporting SMP yet? Given the avalanche of "cheap" multicore processors coming down the pike, SMP support sure would be nice.
If somebody else fixes it (which probably won't be long), Linux still has to agree to make it part of the latest/greatest kernel.
I'm not really agreeing with his childish "dictator" accusation, but he does have a point. Linus can be dismissive of patches when it's not something of interest to him or is esoteric enough that he can't (or won't...or doesn't have time to) wrap his brain around it. Not a criticism, mind you...just an observation.
Cheers,
I'm looking forward to the day where I can use my $30/month wireless phone w/3G service to connect to a VOIP gateway over the data channel and chat with my buddies overseas for some rational fee. As things stand now, you either need to use a phone card or allow your carrier to drive a VW microbus up your nether regions to make international calls.
All funny/paranoia jokes aside, people that get in the way of DeBeers have a way of sudden financial ruin or disappearing. They actively and dilligently seek out and buy or destroy technologies to artificially create gem quality diamonds. Researchers in this field have every reason to be concerned about their security. Scary stuff. Wired did a great article on this very thing a few years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you can't find the article because it probably doesn't exist. Artificial hearts (and the associated machinery) are quite noisy. As a matter of fact, artificial heart valves, which are quite common, are noisy enough that you can hear them from several feet away in a quiet room. I have an artificial valve and it sometimes keeps me awake at night. It's like having an old school wind-up wrist watch parked next to your ear. But it certainly beats the alternative....death. Cheers,
Sure, this is cool if you live in one of the major metropolitan areas covered. I live less than 20 miles from NYC and EVDO isn't available here. So if you're in an area covered and you don't have access to real broadband, this is a win. Otherwise, I'd personally stick with the tried and true cablemodem or (gasp) DSL link. Also, EVDO!=3G. It's more like 2.75G.
It's easier for them to detect fraud in progress than it is to prevent it. When I say easier, I mean that it interferes less with their tertiary marketing of your personal data to make more money on top of interest payments and "membership fees."
These lenders have a cost of funds of under 5%. They're charging "good" customers as little as 9.9% and "bad" customers 20-30% interest. Even with high levels of fraud (as long as they can shut the fraudsters down relatively quickly upon discovery) and the money they're making selling your account/demographic information to advertisers, the banks are making money hand over fist. They have no fear of losing customers since our economy more or less forces you to have a credit card for many transactions. So there isn't any incentive for them to tidy up until the fraud begins to encroach on profits or the inconvenience of consumers causes pressure from lawmakers (who aren't inclined to buck the system since the banks donate heavily to political campaigns).
So what is a consumer to do? Boycott credit cards? You can't even do that. I was just declined for a consulting gig because my "credit score" was too low. I don't owe anyone any money and haven't owned a credit card in 10+ years. Having "no credit" seems to be worse than having "bad credit." There's no winning.
It's very easy to go back 60 years into the past and play armchair quarterback using your own "modern" moral compass.
The fact of the matter is that Japan was fully prepared to fight an invasion of Japan to the last man/woman/child. The people who decided to pull the trigger on the atomic bomb had just seen firsthand what that kind of scenario was like in Germany.
Do I like the fact that those bombs were dropped on cities? No. Do I think it saved millions of Allied soldiers' (and Japanese soldiers/civilians) lives? Absolutely.
Does the military censor news? Absolutely.
I ordered their most expensive Athlon64 Presario Notebook about 6 months ago. I was very happy with it. Very fast and was perfect for my needs. After about 2 months, the video died. The unit would work just fine with an external monitor. So I called up support and got sent to some Indian call center. I described the problem and asked for a RMA number. The tech said he needed to go through a series of troubleshooting steps first. So I wasted about an hour with this guy (who's accent made it virtually impossible to understand him...and I've actually worked in Bangalore!). Finally, he agrees to RMA the unit.
About 10 days later, I get the notebook back and it's suffering from EXACTLY THE SAME problem. So I call up and describe the problem, explain that it's still broken with exactly the same symptoms, and am told I need to go through the same silly troubleshooting session...another hour of my time wasted. They RMA the unit. About 8 days later, it comes back and works fine. Two days later, the video fails with exactly the same symptoms (worked with external monitor). At this point, I called and said I wanted a new unit when they insisted I send it in for a third time. I escalated things several levels above the tech and they outright refused to give me a new computer. So I went to HP's website and filed a polite description of the issue and a complaint about the service to the "email Carly" link. The very next morning, an Indian women called and very apologetically offered to send me a new unit with an upgraded processor and a DVD burner (rather than CD/RW) to compensate me for my trouble.
And it's worked fine ever since. But I don't think I'd ever buy another HP/Compaq notebook. The call center experience was by far the most annoying and inefficient that I've ever experienced. When it came time for me to decide which notebooks to buy for my company (only about 100 units), I went with Sony Vaios even though they were quite a bit more expensive since I'd always had good experiences with their tech support.
Cheers,
With the exception of the resolution number, the specifications of this monitor duo are pretty lackluster. The brightness and contrast are sub par, as is the response time and the off axis viewing capability. You'd be MUCH better off springing for a pair of nice 19" or 20" displays that have better contrast/response/viewing angles/etc. The cost would be about the same, but you'd wind up with a substantially better viewing experience.
They're MUCH heavier, use more power, generate more heat, take up more space, and will probably be more expensive than LCDs as the market realigns itself around flat panels. However, I suspect there will always be companies out there willing to produce CRTs for special applications at some usurous price point.
The asus system is a LOT bigger than a Mac mini.
My only real problem with tiny PC's is that you're stuck with integrated graphics solutions. That won't matter to someone who just needs a computer to work on Word documents or surf the net, but I occasionally like to play a game. If they could make a P4 or Athlon 64 SFF system that had enough room to stuff in an aftermarket AGP or PCI-X graphics card, I'd probably buy one to cut down on the desk clutter. It would be useful, even if it was double the thickness or length of the mini.
My ideal system would look something like this:
Athlon 64 3500+ or equivalent P4
512mb RAM
DVD+-RW
reasonable 3D graphics card
120-200gig hard drive
ethernet
wifi card
USB + Firewire ports
integrated sound card
Cheers,
I haven't been terribly enthused with the franchise under Berman's stewardship and I keep scratching my head wondering "how the heck did this person gain so much influence over things?"
Anyone know?
I had a similar experience. I switched my folks (in their late 50's with little computer experience) from Windows 2000 to CentOS 4.0 (basically Redhat EL4). And I haven't heard a peep out of them since. They use firefox for the web, thunderbird for email, and openoffice when someone sends them a MS Office file. The computer boots up faster, doesn't creak under the bloat load (It's a P3 1ghz machine with 384MB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 5200 card) and just plain works. The fact that they don't have to give a moment's thought to virus infection or spyware is "pennies from heaven"...a bonus. Everyone's happy. Cheers,
Um...you might want to get out more and lose the attitude. 99% of the folks out there don't want or need outbound port 25. If you do need it, you should be able to ask your upstream for it, but it shouldn't just be on automatically because of the potential for abuse. I'm not sure what your UID has to do with anything...other than verify that you've been inside on your computer for a lot longer than I have. Maybe someday I can berate someone for being a newcomer too. Hope springs eternal....
Most people don't NEED a server listening/sending on port 25 and can connect remotely to a server via POP/IMAP. That was my point. Cheers,
It will block a huge amount of spam from being injected by broadband zombies and will inconvenience a vanishingly small number of hard core geeks (who probably know someone with a well connected server in a datacenter that they IMAP into from home anyway).
*sarcasm* Let's see, I go to the campus bookstore and purchase a text that's required for a class. What?!?! $100 for a text on ordinary differential equations? Surely, the study of ODE hasn't changed much in say the last 30 years, but my professor insists that we use this specific edition and there aren't any in the USED bin. Oh wait, I see...my professor is a contributing author...
And even if the book is available in the used bin, it costs 75% of the new price. Some hapless student is going to pay that, open the book a few times over the course of a semester and then resell it back to the bookstore at 15% of what he/she paid for it...only to see it back for sale a few days later at 75% of the cover price again.
Rinse and repeat...until, of course, another edition of the book is published with a new forward and some extremely minor content changes and the cycle starts anew (without the availability of a USED alternative for one semester)....I think the publishers are getting upset with the wrong people. And students are just getting the shaft.
OK, so they denied taking something and it was proven (at least to my satisfaction) that they did. Now Maui is "coming clean" that they "borrowed" GPL code and want to play nice. I guess they figure it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. It makes me wonder if their other products have similar issues.
A slippery slope.
3G data transmission speeds are about 300kbit/sec. With mpeg-4 encoding and a relatively tiny number of pixels (we're only talking about 176x144 resolution on a 5cm screen) that's pretty decent quality and you can get 15-30 frames a second without any problems so long as the processor on the phone can deal with the stream. However, you're still stuck with a vanishingly small screen and a tiny speaker that makes the audio sound awful, even if it's encoded at a decent bitrate. Would I watch a movie in that environment? Probably not. But I'd tune in to news or catch sports scores if I was sitting around in an airport or a riding on a train. Don't forget that 3G radios suck batteries dry a LOT faster and having the phone's tiny processor running flat out to keep up with decoding a video stream will likely make battery life even worse...so don't throw away your cableTV box just yet. 8-)
I'm a bit confused about what problem this product is trying to solve. It's not really smaller, cheaper, or faster than a Mac mini or other currently available "mini pc". It definitely gets points in the "neato" factor, but I can't picture many people buying one unless one or more of the points above changes. Cheers,
As their OS and Office product "upgrade" cycles slow down, they can supplement their income by selling antivirus subscriptions.
When you can reduce my living costs to those of someone in Bangalore, perhaps then I can consider a more "competitive" salary/compensation package.
Until that time, I've got to pay my bills and feed my family. So I'll stick with my "high" Amercian salary and benefits package, thank you.
The companies complaining about this "shortage" are the same ones that were cutting Comp Sci majors off at the knees when the companies overextended themselves during the "bubble" years. Those same companies then ran out and auctioned off their development to the lowest bidders in India/China/Eastern Europe...only to find out that the hourly wage wasn't a very good predictor of overall cost. So now they want to come back "home" and wonder why there's a lack of trust in the future or salability of a Comp Sci degree. Gee, what an ungrateful lot we are... 8-) Cheers,
I haven't followed openBSD in quite some time and the answer wasn't apparent from the "features" link...but... Did Theo get around to supporting SMP yet? Given the avalanche of "cheap" multicore processors coming down the pike, SMP support sure would be nice.
If somebody else fixes it (which probably won't be long), Linux still has to agree to make it part of the latest/greatest kernel. I'm not really agreeing with his childish "dictator" accusation, but he does have a point. Linus can be dismissive of patches when it's not something of interest to him or is esoteric enough that he can't (or won't...or doesn't have time to) wrap his brain around it. Not a criticism, mind you...just an observation. Cheers,
I'm looking forward to the day where I can use my $30/month wireless phone w/3G service to connect to a VOIP gateway over the data channel and chat with my buddies overseas for some rational fee. As things stand now, you either need to use a phone card or allow your carrier to drive a VW microbus up your nether regions to make international calls.
All funny/paranoia jokes aside, people that get in the way of DeBeers have a way of sudden financial ruin or disappearing. They actively and dilligently seek out and buy or destroy technologies to artificially create gem quality diamonds. Researchers in this field have every reason to be concerned about their security. Scary stuff. Wired did a great article on this very thing a few years ago.