Rich people are going to care. The same people who can afford $10/gallon gas can also afford $100,000 cars with laser collision avoidance or whatever. And those same people care a lot about personal safety, because their hairy carcasses are a great deal more valuable than yours and mine.
If the day of the SUV is over, the question is what comes next - and nobody really knows the answer to that. The car companies would be smart to bet both ways. Make 100mpg sub-sub-compacts for the poor people, and make Batmobiles for the rich people. Either way you might get to sell some cars.
I just recently did this on an XPS M1330. All the drivers can be downloaded from Dell. I used nLite to make a Windows XP SP2 install CD with the Dell-provided Intel storage driver preintegrated. After booting this and installing XP, I then installed all the other drivers by double-clicking on them.
I didn't have a Blu-Ray drive to play with, but everything else on the box worked perfectly with the Dell-supplied drivers.
What items did you have trouble with on the M1530? Is it significantly different from the M1330?
No, he's right, it really was fantastically stable.
If you had a time machine, went back to 1992, bought a Compaq Deskpro 386 and Windows 3.1, configured it for Standard Mode, put it on a table with a reliable power outlet, opened File Manager and returned to the present day, you would find it all still running with File Manager open to wherever it was when you left.
Now, if you had opened *ANY* *APPLICATION* *WHATSOEVER* other than File Manager or Program Manager, or if you had configured it for 386 Extended Mode, then the machine would be crashed and dead by sundown on the day after you left it. But in that case, if you were to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del when you got back 16 years later, you could be back to File Manager in less than 15 seconds.
Win95 and subsequent DOS-based Windows flavors had two problems: First, they scrapped Standard Mode, and second, they came bundled with some applications. Win95 was more stable than Windows 3.1 386 Extended Mode ever was, but that's like saying you're more articulate than George W. Bush or more ethical than Dick Cheney.
Windows NT from Service Pack 3 forward was rock solid stable - again, if you don't run any applications. Somewhere in the late Windows 2000 / early Windows XP era, it became possible to run applications and still be stable. Of course, that doesn't mean you can run 2000 or XP on the radiation-hardened 286s you have inside the nuclear containment zone, or whatever other industrial problem you might be facing.
It is undoubtedly true that speaking fluent Japanese adds tremendous value to a US programmer. That being said, US-Japan trade is not nearly as large as many Americans believe. Americans often think Japan is their #1 or #2 trading partner. Here are top five US trading partners for 2007:
Canada - $562 billion (17% of all US foreign trade) China - $387 billion (12%) Mexico - $347 billion (11%) EU - $320 billion (10%) Japan - $208 billion (6%)
As you can see, Japan is the least of the five. US trade with China in 2008 will probably be double the trade with Japan.
So only learn Japanese if you are interested in Japanese culture. If you only want to improve your marketability, learn Chinese or Canadian.:-)
Nobody would call anything 'geomicroblogging' if they planned for it to be routinely used by millions of people. Can you imagine? "Hi, did you see my geomicroblog the other day? I posted some stuff about geomicroblogging. I'm sorry, the reception isn't very good on this cell phone - the address of restaurant we're going to is on my geomicroblog. No, I said geomicroblog. GEO MICRO BLOG! Oh never mind, it's Andy's Bar And Grill, which is the same number of syllables anyway."
If by some random chance this actually caught on, the word would immediately be shortened (see: "blog" from "web log" from "personal content management system").
was in assuming that ordering direct from Palm was better from their point of view. It isn't. Manufacturers don't specialize in logistics, distribution or warehousing, all of which are complex problem spaces that require significant skill to execute correctly. In fact, many manufacturers are so inefficient in these areas that it actually costs them more to sell you a unit than for you to buy it through distribution, margins and all. It also costs them far more to attempt to diagnose and support a problem than to accept a large batch of returns from a major distributor.
Just buy the thing locally from a retailer with a no-questions-asked return policy, and if there's anything wrong with it that you think might be a hardware defect, return it and try another one. This would have saved you $100 in phone calls (though why the hell are you paying over a dollar a minute for long distance?) and would have saved Palm several hundred dollars in support costs.
"Caution wake turbulence." Heard from ATC all the time at larger airports. It means the plane ahead of you has created standing vortexes that you probably don't want to fly through.
So take a C-130 and rig it out with a big, aimable vortex generator. Hopefully with a variable power control so you can adjust for a Cessna vs a 767. Whenever some errant airplane wanders into the Washington ADIZ, instead of firing missiles at him, PUFF! and Joe Pilot is getting an unexpected lesson in unusual attitude recovery. If he persists in heading the wrong way, PUFF PUFF and now we get to find out if he can deal with inverted flight. If he STILL doesn't react as desired, PUFF PUFF PUFF and maybe the wings come off.
It's not guaranteed to be non-lethal (though you always have plausible deniability), but under the old system we would have shot him down with a missile, so this is presumably better. If he hoped to survive the encounter, he should have read up on intercept procedures...
And how is it "irresponsible and dangerous" to allow someone else to have space superiority? Is it that only we are smart and moral enough to be trusted with it? What quality of ours is it that makes us smart and moral, and everyone else evil and dumb? How did this quality become absent at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc? If it is possible for us to lose this quality, is it also possible for someone else to gain it? If that happened, would it then become "irresponsible and dangerous" for that someone else to fail to maintain space superiority over us?
I agree that learning the most interesting programming languages changes the way you think about all programming languages. And certainly, C makes you think more about what's going on under the covers, which is undoubtedly a good thing.
But when writing C or C++, you really only have a sense of what a VAX or PDP-11 would have had to do to run the code. You don't have a very good sense of what a modern processor actually does - nothing in C or C++ gives you an intuitive understanding of pipelining, of the cost of cache misses, etc. If you look at the object code produced by a good modern optimizing compiler, you would probably be surprised how far it departs from what you thought you were doing.
So while C does give you some slight exposure to low-level concepts, in the modern age it really doesn't serve as a good substitute for actually hand-writing some assembly code. It's a bit like taking a walking tour of Paris using an audio guide narrated by Peter Ustinov in 1972. It's hard to separate the Paris part from the Ustinov and the 1972 parts.
Yes, you are precisely right. As things stand now, there's no good reason why tier one networks need to buy vast amounts of new routing infrastructure - what they already own works just fine. With this new plan, they will all have to buy ten times more hardware, which will return us all to the glory days of the dot com era. Or at least will return Lawrence Roberts to the glory days of the dot com era.
Why, did you think this plan had something to do with providing better service to end-users? When does that ever happen?
Are we assuming that the time required to write to backing store increases directly with the quantity of RAM? Or is it possible that with a TB of RAM, the "write to backing store" process might take longer than the available battery life?
Reverting to a low-performance mode and scheduling disk activity through the end of battery life might not be the smartest move, particularly if the user is sitting there with knowledge of a particularly important data item that they want to commit to disk in the 10 minutes they have.
Some of the judges think that the RIAA is the good guy, and approve of their tactics. If the RIAA has figured out a model that extends judicial power over distributed "anonymous" P2P networks, why would judges fight against it? It's their own power being expanded.
No, really, they aren't. If you just read block 2000 from flash media, a subsequent read of block 2001 and a subsequent read of block 546725 execute in exactly the same amount of time. Most modern flash devices randomize the actual locations to distribute wear evenly, so when you request logical block 2000 you might be getting physical block 71541, and then when you request logical block 2001 you might get physical block 391515. This makes a mockery of the very concept of defragmentation. You would be spending huge amounts of time and consuming the limited write lifespan of the flash device, only so to make sure that any file containing block 71541 stores its next piece of data on block 391515. It's meaningless.
The OP is quite correct that once flash-based SSDs become more commonplace, all the major filesystems are going to have to adapt to perform optimally in that environment. Anyone looking forward to ext4 and NTFS 3.2?
I agree it's a pain trying to get "Jack" from Mumbai to solve your problem with a Dimension or Inspiron. But all XPS support is US-based.
As to build quality or design, it's meaningless to generalize to "all Dell" or "all Lenovo." Both companies have their share of dogs, but build quality on the M1330 is excellent. Design is in the eye of the beholder, but I routinely have people walk up and ask me about the M1330 (usually having walked past rows of throbbing-Apple-logo Macs to do so).
1. You're talking about business class, not first class. First class is generally only offered on larger airplanes where you have a choice of turning left or right as you enter the cabin. In first class on those airplanes, you don't even see the economy passengers.
2. With a business class seat, you get on first to make sure you have first claim on the shared resources of the airplane, such as overhead bins and tiny little blankets. If you waited to get on until the economy people had all walked through, it's a sure bet they would have taken all that stuff before you ever saw it.
3. You also get off first, which means you get to the taxi stand / rental car place before the rest of the planeload, which means you get to the meeting first.
I'm typing this on a Dell XPS M1330. LED backlight? Check. Widescreen display? Got it. Lightweight form factor? Yep. 64Gb SSD available? Since December, although I took the 200Gb SATA. Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz and 4Gb of DDR2-5300? Yep, although I only chose to pay for 2.0Ghz and 3Gb. And I got the Geforce Go 8400M video card with 128Mb dedicated graphics memory - not stellar by hard-core gamer standards, but worlds beyond the integrated graphics on the X300. Plus, my M1330 was at least $500 cheaper than the X300 will be.
Can someone please explain to me what the big deal is?
1. Yahoo isn't the smartest kid on the block, but they aren't *that* dumb. Nobody with a vague clue offers "unlimited" bandwidth or storage. And Yahoo has a vague clue.
2. Isn't it funny that they did this right after the Microsoft takeover offer?
It's possible that this was already in the works and has nothing to do with MS. But it's just so self-evidently stupid that I wonder if senior executives were involved. What's the strategic angle? Do they now accept an MS takeover as inevitable, and want to discredit MS as much as possible post-takeover (because it will be MSHoo, not Yahoo, who gets sued over the "unlimited" claims)? Or are they hoping to attract so many unprofitable bandwidth leeches that their service becomes undesirable and MS loses interest? Or is there a more subtle angle to this?
You're right, Microsoft is still way behind. If only Sun was still making the SPARCstation 1, I would certainly have bought one and run X11 and SWM on it, rather than settling for my Dell XPS M1330 with Vista.
By the way, pass the crack pipe, I want some of what you're smoking.
How could TCAS avert a collision without the pilots knowledge? First of all, as far as I know TCAS just gives audible/visual indications, and it's up to the pilots to pull the stick in the recommended direction. Even if the TCAS system is capable of autonomously commanding a control input, the pilots would immediately be aware of the change in heading, altitude, attitude etc... unless you're prepared to believe that an airline pilot with thousands of hours experience would simply fail to notice when his airplane executed an uncommanded sharp turn.
"Less than a real human being" is an interesting concept. You say people who fail to accept personal responsibilities are not entitled to the full set of rights and freedoms that "real human beings" enjoy. Which rights exactly shall we deny them? Are LTARHBs still entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which the First Congress of the United States declared to be unalienable? Should LTARHBs be allowed to vote? Should they live in the same cities as real people? The same neighborhoods?
Also, if LTARHBs are to be denied certain rights, presumably the government has to be able to tell the difference (to allow/deny them access to a voting booth, or whatever). Can an LTARHB hide out among the regular population? Is there a test we can administer (other than staging a nearby mugging) to tell if someone is an LTARHB? Or can you tell by looking at them? What color is the skin of a typical LTARHB?
And I still want to know is when exactly "back then" was. if you were transported back to a time when people understood that individual rights and freedoms hinge on the acceptance of personal responsibilities, what would you see on the front page of a calendar? Was it the 1950s? Was it 1776? Was it the first century AD? When exactly are we talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, like Slashdot and SlashdotPrime? The really hard part is making sure the trolls never find out they're in a sandbox.
Rich people are going to care. The same people who can afford $10/gallon gas can also afford $100,000 cars with laser collision avoidance or whatever. And those same people care a lot about personal safety, because their hairy carcasses are a great deal more valuable than yours and mine.
If the day of the SUV is over, the question is what comes next - and nobody really knows the answer to that. The car companies would be smart to bet both ways. Make 100mpg sub-sub-compacts for the poor people, and make Batmobiles for the rich people. Either way you might get to sell some cars.
-Graham
I just recently did this on an XPS M1330. All the drivers can be downloaded from Dell. I used nLite to make a Windows XP SP2 install CD with the Dell-provided Intel storage driver preintegrated. After booting this and installing XP, I then installed all the other drivers by double-clicking on them.
I didn't have a Blu-Ray drive to play with, but everything else on the box worked perfectly with the Dell-supplied drivers.
What items did you have trouble with on the M1530? Is it significantly different from the M1330?
-Graham
No, he's right, it really was fantastically stable.
If you had a time machine, went back to 1992, bought a Compaq Deskpro 386 and Windows 3.1, configured it for Standard Mode, put it on a table with a reliable power outlet, opened File Manager and returned to the present day, you would find it all still running with File Manager open to wherever it was when you left.
Now, if you had opened *ANY* *APPLICATION* *WHATSOEVER* other than File Manager or Program Manager, or if you had configured it for 386 Extended Mode, then the machine would be crashed and dead by sundown on the day after you left it. But in that case, if you were to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del when you got back 16 years later, you could be back to File Manager in less than 15 seconds.
Win95 and subsequent DOS-based Windows flavors had two problems: First, they scrapped Standard Mode, and second, they came bundled with some applications. Win95 was more stable than Windows 3.1 386 Extended Mode ever was, but that's like saying you're more articulate than George W. Bush or more ethical than Dick Cheney.
Windows NT from Service Pack 3 forward was rock solid stable - again, if you don't run any applications. Somewhere in the late Windows 2000 / early Windows XP era, it became possible to run applications and still be stable. Of course, that doesn't mean you can run 2000 or XP on the radiation-hardened 286s you have inside the nuclear containment zone, or whatever other industrial problem you might be facing.
-Graham
It is undoubtedly true that speaking fluent Japanese adds tremendous value to a US programmer. That being said, US-Japan trade is not nearly as large as many Americans believe. Americans often think Japan is their #1 or #2 trading partner. Here are top five US trading partners for 2007:
Canada - $562 billion (17% of all US foreign trade)
China - $387 billion (12%)
Mexico - $347 billion (11%)
EU - $320 billion (10%)
Japan - $208 billion (6%)
As you can see, Japan is the least of the five. US trade with China in 2008 will probably be double the trade with Japan.
So only learn Japanese if you are interested in Japanese culture. If you only want to improve your marketability, learn Chinese or Canadian. :-)
-Graham
Nobody would call anything 'geomicroblogging' if they planned for it to be routinely used by millions of people. Can you imagine? "Hi, did you see my geomicroblog the other day? I posted some stuff about geomicroblogging. I'm sorry, the reception isn't very good on this cell phone - the address of restaurant we're going to is on my geomicroblog. No, I said geomicroblog. GEO MICRO BLOG! Oh never mind, it's Andy's Bar And Grill, which is the same number of syllables anyway."
If by some random chance this actually caught on, the word would immediately be shortened (see: "blog" from "web log" from "personal content management system").
I propose "gumble."
-Graham
was in assuming that ordering direct from Palm was better from their point of view. It isn't. Manufacturers don't specialize in logistics, distribution or warehousing, all of which are complex problem spaces that require significant skill to execute correctly. In fact, many manufacturers are so inefficient in these areas that it actually costs them more to sell you a unit than for you to buy it through distribution, margins and all. It also costs them far more to attempt to diagnose and support a problem than to accept a large batch of returns from a major distributor.
Just buy the thing locally from a retailer with a no-questions-asked return policy, and if there's anything wrong with it that you think might be a hardware defect, return it and try another one. This would have saved you $100 in phone calls (though why the hell are you paying over a dollar a minute for long distance?) and would have saved Palm several hundred dollars in support costs.
-Graham
"Caution wake turbulence." Heard from ATC all the time at larger airports. It means the plane ahead of you has created standing vortexes that you probably don't want to fly through.
So take a C-130 and rig it out with a big, aimable vortex generator. Hopefully with a variable power control so you can adjust for a Cessna vs a 767. Whenever some errant airplane wanders into the Washington ADIZ, instead of firing missiles at him, PUFF! and Joe Pilot is getting an unexpected lesson in unusual attitude recovery. If he persists in heading the wrong way, PUFF PUFF and now we get to find out if he can deal with inverted flight. If he STILL doesn't react as desired, PUFF PUFF PUFF and maybe the wings come off.
It's not guaranteed to be non-lethal (though you always have plausible deniability), but under the old system we would have shot him down with a missile, so this is presumably better. If he hoped to survive the encounter, he should have read up on intercept procedures...
-Graham
What are MWDs? Mega Weapons of Death?
And how is it "irresponsible and dangerous" to allow someone else to have space superiority? Is it that only we are smart and moral enough to be trusted with it? What quality of ours is it that makes us smart and moral, and everyone else evil and dumb? How did this quality become absent at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc? If it is possible for us to lose this quality, is it also possible for someone else to gain it? If that happened, would it then become "irresponsible and dangerous" for that someone else to fail to maintain space superiority over us?
Also, how do you "park" someting in LEO?
-Graham
I agree that learning the most interesting programming languages changes the way you think about all programming languages. And certainly, C makes you think more about what's going on under the covers, which is undoubtedly a good thing.
But when writing C or C++, you really only have a sense of what a VAX or PDP-11 would have had to do to run the code. You don't have a very good sense of what a modern processor actually does - nothing in C or C++ gives you an intuitive understanding of pipelining, of the cost of cache misses, etc. If you look at the object code produced by a good modern optimizing compiler, you would probably be surprised how far it departs from what you thought you were doing.
So while C does give you some slight exposure to low-level concepts, in the modern age it really doesn't serve as a good substitute for actually hand-writing some assembly code. It's a bit like taking a walking tour of Paris using an audio guide narrated by Peter Ustinov in 1972. It's hard to separate the Paris part from the Ustinov and the 1972 parts.
-Graham
Ok, so how do I go about applying for citizenship in Montkotchewan?
-Graham
Yes, you are precisely right. As things stand now, there's no good reason why tier one networks need to buy vast amounts of new routing infrastructure - what they already own works just fine. With this new plan, they will all have to buy ten times more hardware, which will return us all to the glory days of the dot com era. Or at least will return Lawrence Roberts to the glory days of the dot com era.
Why, did you think this plan had something to do with providing better service to end-users? When does that ever happen?
-Graham
Are we assuming that the time required to write to backing store increases directly with the quantity of RAM? Or is it possible that with a TB of RAM, the "write to backing store" process might take longer than the available battery life?
Reverting to a low-performance mode and scheduling disk activity through the end of battery life might not be the smartest move, particularly if the user is sitting there with knowledge of a particularly important data item that they want to commit to disk in the 10 minutes they have.
-Graham
Some of the judges think that the RIAA is the good guy, and approve of their tactics. If the RIAA has figured out a model that extends judicial power over distributed "anonymous" P2P networks, why would judges fight against it? It's their own power being expanded.
-Graham
No, really, they aren't. If you just read block 2000 from flash media, a subsequent read of block 2001 and a subsequent read of block 546725 execute in exactly the same amount of time. Most modern flash devices randomize the actual locations to distribute wear evenly, so when you request logical block 2000 you might be getting physical block 71541, and then when you request logical block 2001 you might get physical block 391515. This makes a mockery of the very concept of defragmentation. You would be spending huge amounts of time and consuming the limited write lifespan of the flash device, only so to make sure that any file containing block 71541 stores its next piece of data on block 391515. It's meaningless.
The OP is quite correct that once flash-based SSDs become more commonplace, all the major filesystems are going to have to adapt to perform optimally in that environment. Anyone looking forward to ext4 and NTFS 3.2?
-Graham
I agree it's a pain trying to get "Jack" from Mumbai to solve your problem with a Dimension or Inspiron. But all XPS support is US-based.
As to build quality or design, it's meaningless to generalize to "all Dell" or "all Lenovo." Both companies have their share of dogs, but build quality on the M1330 is excellent. Design is in the eye of the beholder, but I routinely have people walk up and ask me about the M1330 (usually having walked past rows of throbbing-Apple-logo Macs to do so).
-Graham
1. You're talking about business class, not first class. First class is generally only offered on larger airplanes where you have a choice of turning left or right as you enter the cabin. In first class on those airplanes, you don't even see the economy passengers.
2. With a business class seat, you get on first to make sure you have first claim on the shared resources of the airplane, such as overhead bins and tiny little blankets. If you waited to get on until the economy people had all walked through, it's a sure bet they would have taken all that stuff before you ever saw it.
3. You also get off first, which means you get to the taxi stand / rental car place before the rest of the planeload, which means you get to the meeting first.
-Graham
I'm typing this on a Dell XPS M1330. LED backlight? Check. Widescreen display? Got it. Lightweight form factor? Yep. 64Gb SSD available? Since December, although I took the 200Gb SATA. Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz and 4Gb of DDR2-5300? Yep, although I only chose to pay for 2.0Ghz and 3Gb. And I got the Geforce Go 8400M video card with 128Mb dedicated graphics memory - not stellar by hard-core gamer standards, but worlds beyond the integrated graphics on the X300. Plus, my M1330 was at least $500 cheaper than the X300 will be.
Can someone please explain to me what the big deal is?
-Graham
Pizza goes on shirt. Sunlight activates catalyst. Catalyst causes a chemical reaction that decomposes the pizza into ... what? Organic gases?
What does this smell like while operating?
-Graham
1. Yahoo isn't the smartest kid on the block, but they aren't *that* dumb. Nobody with a vague clue offers "unlimited" bandwidth or storage. And Yahoo has a vague clue.
2. Isn't it funny that they did this right after the Microsoft takeover offer?
It's possible that this was already in the works and has nothing to do with MS. But it's just so self-evidently stupid that I wonder if senior executives were involved. What's the strategic angle? Do they now accept an MS takeover as inevitable, and want to discredit MS as much as possible post-takeover (because it will be MSHoo, not Yahoo, who gets sued over the "unlimited" claims)? Or are they hoping to attract so many unprofitable bandwidth leeches that their service becomes undesirable and MS loses interest? Or is there a more subtle angle to this?
-Graham
You're right, Microsoft is still way behind. If only Sun was still making the SPARCstation 1, I would certainly have bought one and run X11 and SWM on it, rather than settling for my Dell XPS M1330 with Vista.
By the way, pass the crack pipe, I want some of what you're smoking.
-Graham
that's "making a GIFT for you"
I'm way too smart for you...
You were right - it's just that he doesn't have a low enough uid.
How could TCAS avert a collision without the pilots knowledge? First of all, as far as I know TCAS just gives audible/visual indications, and it's up to the pilots to pull the stick in the recommended direction. Even if the TCAS system is capable of autonomously commanding a control input, the pilots would immediately be aware of the change in heading, altitude, attitude etc ... unless you're prepared to believe that an airline pilot with thousands of hours experience would simply fail to notice when his airplane executed an uncommanded sharp turn.
-Graham
"Less than a real human being" is an interesting concept. You say people who fail to accept personal responsibilities are not entitled to the full set of rights and freedoms that "real human beings" enjoy. Which rights exactly shall we deny them? Are LTARHBs still entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which the First Congress of the United States declared to be unalienable? Should LTARHBs be allowed to vote? Should they live in the same cities as real people? The same neighborhoods?
Also, if LTARHBs are to be denied certain rights, presumably the government has to be able to tell the difference (to allow/deny them access to a voting booth, or whatever). Can an LTARHB hide out among the regular population? Is there a test we can administer (other than staging a nearby mugging) to tell if someone is an LTARHB? Or can you tell by looking at them? What color is the skin of a typical LTARHB?
And I still want to know is when exactly "back then" was. if you were transported back to a time when people understood that individual rights and freedoms hinge on the acceptance of personal responsibilities, what would you see on the front page of a calendar? Was it the 1950s? Was it 1776? Was it the first century AD? When exactly are we talking about?
-Graham