These are some pretty interesting nostalgic videos! Thanks for the links. You should have logged in to post though so you aren't stuck in 0 point A/C hell. I'm not that far up on my history, but the videos proved interesting none-the-less.
I hope this vaccine is as effective as the smallpox and polio vaccines have been. The world would do well to be rid of this particularly crafty and deadly virus. It is also a whole lot easier to introduce vaccination programs into third world countries (which counts as medicinal treatment) which would otherwise have severe religious problems with contraceptives like condoms (which counts as interfering with "God's work").
You and I are in agreement. The poster I was replying to was indicating that we should not modify our theories until we get more data, I was countering that we definitely SHOULD be modifying our theories as we go, since we now have more than just the data on our own system. And when starting with just our own system, the next couple of systems discovered increases our available data by a phenomenal amount. Let the updating begin!
When you have a sample set of 1; then adding 2 data points is a fantastic expansion in scope even if we are quite positive that we do not have all of the potential information (soon to be discovered). At this early stage, finding a handful of other planetary systems has effectively multiplied what we know about planetary systems a thousandfold or more, even if we consider ourselves to be mostly blind still.
* Just to be clear, I see no reason to believe that any gods exist. And if we did have a being show up and proclaim it's self as god I would first assume an alien trying to pull one over on us to be honest...
I think they would be the absolute first to request an interview (at least I would be). Most atheists I know of are seekers of truth and knowledge just the same as the religious people, it's just that we want truth that is valid and provable by anyone, to anyone, and for everyone, and not just personally for ourselves. Everyone should be capable of knowing and understanding the truth of course (Christians agree). Unfortunately, none of the religious texts have provided us with any sort of testable ideas or theories so far which work that way. A true god* appearing one day and finally making its self known to the people would constitute it's self readily as proof, observation, and fact. If that happened, neither Atheists nor Christians would need to be "believers" or "deniers" any more and faith would be supplanted by loyalty. We would either be accepting or rejecting the god and his ways and nothing would be fundamentally different about the story really.
Personally, my loyalty may or may not lie with such a god (assuming one exists) since there are a raft of good and plain reasons to reject his behavior as being foolish, childish, savage, and plain ridiculous. Once I were to know the true back story straight from god is when I would consider my options. Until then, I will make up my own mind and will rest comfortably knowing I might be wrong.
All I can say, in finishing, is that the god(s) that all of the worlds major religions observe have earned 0 loyalty from me based on their behaviors and decisions so far. And you can't tell me that your god wouldn't care one way or the other about me, my reasoning, or my decision. Though with that whole "Garden of Eden" thing, I guess I can see why Christians fear being punished for decisions they might make while being totally ignorant about the circumstances ahead of time... I'll take that chance...
In my experience if you spend real money on computers through Dell (enough to actually have a sales person contact you, send you quotes, and setup a purchasing contract) your support would have been great and at least used to be to an American call center every timed you had to call in for support (24x7). This support was typically awesome and fast.
Their consumer support where you buy a pre-built boxed set or just a small handful of consumer class machines was almost always a call center in India (except for 8x5 or so) and was terrible in a legendary way.
Similar experience with HP, Compaq, and IBM really. Spend real money, get real support. Buy $400.00 desktop computer and if you run into problems... you get to use the forums and talk to "Jim" who has a thick Urdu accent, a weird 1/4 second pause in the phone call, and a penchant for getting you off the line as fast as possible.
Companies like Packard Bell had legendary bad support all of the time, and crap products too... so there is that too.
Unfortunately the bean counters and board of directors realized that it was a "cost center" and simply switched business support to the same service levels as the consumer support for all except their most valuable players.
So yes, Dell's business support at least used to be excellent (even the standard business support helpdesk was decent).
Please thank your boss for having this attitude, and recommend he/she try to encourage the people at their business meetings (luncheons, associations, etc.) to share this opinion. Our (IT) field is filled with many managers / companies who expect 60+ hours in the office, 24 hours attention (on-call), and holiday / weekends as a minimum for remaining employed, all while being expected to make-work some of the most underfunded projects in the company.
Cable tends to be 1/5 of the download bandwidth allocated for upload. Check your bandwidth with a speed test and then multiply the upload result by 0.90, then cap it to that. The extra 10% wiggle room is for DNS lookups and other traffic. Just be sure to check for the bits/bytes problem between different tools.
More or less, FreeBSD is not commonly supported by the same hardware vendors which do provide Linux support and drivers. RedHat / Fedora / CentOS is most commonly supported by the hardware vendors. Debian/Ubuntu is a close second. If I want full support of the features in my new Core-i7, NVidia graphics card, SSD hard disk, InkJet printers, or WIFI cards I am much more likely to get traction in the Linux space (and even that has been a long and hard road and is still sketchy coverage at best).
And for the server space, when you start getting into various RAID controllers, out of band management drivers (and SNMP MIBS), 10Gb networking, and fiber channel cards; the picture looks pretty much the same as in the desktop space.
So yeah, if all I want is a web, FTP, ssh, or similar server on standard (commodity) hardware then FreeBSD and variants are a perfectly valid option... until I want to start using SAN, 10Gb networking, fiber channel or centralized lights-out administration technologies (hardware out of band monitoring) where Linux support is common, but BSD support is not so much.
I work in an industry which requires extremely low latency (quasi-realtime server response times) which FreeBSD would be OK for, however the hardware we must use to achieve those results is NOT supported on FreeBSD by the vendors which make the drivers, nor are the 3rd-party libraries we use for communication with other data vendors.
Switching the OS to something more well supported is MUCH easier than trying to get all of the rest of the applications, drivers, and vendors to switch without some sort of tangible reason for it.
There is also such a thing as unreasonable punishments which our legal system is (supposedly) designed to protect against as well. Just imagine I can fuck your life up permanently just by slipping a joint into your coat pocket and calling the police. Matter of fact I would be tempted to do this to anyone passing such a law if it ever happened.
A policy change would certainly be a good thing, namely removing marijuana from your list of offending substances (make it legal, but only if grown in the states and with moderate taxes paid on it similar to tobacco and alcohol). With that one change alone it would completely rework the landscape in terms of cartels and drug money funds. We would still have problems with some of the harder substances like cocaine traffickers but it would pretty much eliminate a HUGE part of the Mexico cartel problem overnight. *~poof~* goes the profits and the industry. The best thing we could do to help both Mexico and the US is to make it legal to produce marijuana domestically and control it the same way we do for other substances like Tobacco, Alcohol, etc. Then, instead of your kids friends going down to the local gangster for some weed (of questionable origins or quality) they would just have to steal it from their parents. Unless of course you advocate for something like the electric chair for kids who get too curious.
Not that I disagree with you about him putting on a show (this is politics of course), or that it isn't just a feel-good stunt, but I don't really think it's belated nor as necessary for a successful re-election as you make it out to be.
1.) We still have more than a year left before the 2012 presidential elections. Personally, I would rather he NOT campaign but rather manage the country in the mean time. 2.) While the field of candidates is currently thinning, he has the incumbent advantage and no clear competitor on the field to run against him yet. 3.) While not great, he has better approval ratings than congress and indeed many other political offices. 4.) The Republicans are busy stabbing anything with a moderate stance in the face in order to win over the ultra-conservatives in the tea party and other supporting religious groups. This is especially true of the candidates themselves which get dumped wholesale if they aren't right wing enough. Obama can't appeal to those groups anyways so it would be useless to enter that fray. 5.) These initiatives, like the Jobs bill or the online petition thing, aren't even major events really. They do not represent a lot of spent effort or political capital for his administration. However, they can be capitalized by Obama very well later on as long as he isn't too foolish about it. Just consider that it is still appearing to many people as more work spent on the taxpayer's interests than the republicans have appeared to spend during that same time frame.
As the field thins out; the republican vs. republican infighting will be replaced with republican vs. incumbent president debates. But that will require knocking a few more republicans out of the race first. As of this exact moment however; none of the republicans represent a threat to Obama's second term at all (yet). If anything they can't duke it out yet without the fear of another one of their party members deciding to stab them in the back along the way just to prove who is more "conservative".
Just for full disclosure, I consider myself to be a moderate independent voter and I enjoy some good friction and disagreements for sure (it's healthy) but I absolutely loathe the polarization between moderate republicans and the complete wingnuts on the extreme end (tea party, ultra-conservative religious organizations, etc) because they don't just try to revolutionize the government to fit their minority world-view, they actively try to incapacitate it completely for just about anything other than only that (i.e. forcing budget negotiations during debt-ceiling procedures instead of during budget discussions which causes credit rating downgrades and poorly written legislation to be passed under emergency conditions).
Well, I've rambled enough since we effectively can agree on the fact that these actions are mostly fluff from the Obama administration even if we disagree on how important it is. I guess not expecting anything other than fluff in the first place makes it easier to not care one way or another about it now. - Toast
Yeah, the toll booths we have what is called "open road tolling". We still have a handful of cash / iPass lanes on the side of the freeway (typically near on-off ramps) but then we get 3-4 lanes for straight through iPass traffic where you don't have to slow down at all from whatever normal freeway speeds you are driving at (most do slow down a little to avoid the occasional state patrol lurking near the ramps though).
To top that off, the iPass cuts the cost of the tolls in half over the stated prices for cash users at each toll. So a $1.10 toll is then $0.55 for an iPass user. Transponders are $10 and come pre-charged with a minimum of $40 worth of tolls on them. You can link them to your checking account to automatically refill once you run out too.
All in all they do save a very substantial amount of time and money for even casual drivers in IL. To top it off the amount on the pass does not expire either. I've bought a couple for my family (who lives out of state) so when they do come down here they don't need to get a ton of change from the bank before leaving or spend an extra 45-60 minutes in the toll lanes or accelerating / decelerating during peak driving times. Even if you only drive through the Chicago area two or three times a year it's worth it IMO.
Performance desktop user here... Let me know when they start beating out the i5-2500K or i7-2600K CPU performance wise (even if the chip is more expensive!). I've got my i7-2600K running at 4.4Ghz stable without playing with the voltages or running turbine aircraft engine coolers (matter of fact the PC is almost silent). I can't think of any features I am missing on my P67 rev2 board which would make me trade in the performance of the CPU I have either. I love this chip!
I used to like AMD quite a lot (P4 era), but then they started lagging behind big time once Intel ditched Netburst. They have been either a lot HOTTER or a lot SLOWER (or both) than Intel for what seems like years now without really being able to recover. The Sandy Bridge based chips from Intel just kinda bend them over the barrel at the end of the day too with the reduced price point Intel is using for them. The only thing AMD would possibly give me would be a higher core count for my dollars, but not necessarily a more efficient (HT on SB is really nice) or cooler running chip; sadly this is something they used to excel at doing.
Since I'm not interested in their integrated graphics this is most likely the exact reason why there is minimal to no attraction for me to these product offerings.
Liquid helium is impossible to get to go up in flames as it is inert and non-flammable. You are thinking of liquid hydrogen. OTOH, your point about Texas going up in flames still stands.
We can only hope that their bodies had to spend more energy on supportive body mass and fibers than brain power. But if they are landing here then they made at least some of the qualifying grade for brains which is indeed scary. But think of the inverse!
I just can't imagine being the person to investigate the surface of a super earth if we could land on them (hypothetical of course). I just can't help but think there would be a risk of breaking a leg just by falling while walking or jumping. Never mind the blackout risk trying to do anything useful like climb a hill on a body with 4-5 times earth gravity. Humans do OK for a while with less gravity before our bodies have problems, but we are really pretty bad in an environment with more of it.
This is the same thing as regenerative braking in cars. It isn't generating energy from nothing, it's recapturing and reusing energy already spent.
This component replaces one of the components already in charge of wasting photons generated by your LCD screen (polarizing filter). Not in addition to it.
This isn't perpetual motion, it's energy reclamation.
My only concern is that the batteries and phones do not like to be left in sunlight (a proposed alternate use of this component). How many users will seek a quick charge by placing the phone in direct sunlight; only then to overheat the lithium battery in the device? Most things electronic do not like the heat generated by solar charging. I know I wouldn't want to stick a phone which has been sitting in sunlight for a while against my head because of the risk of burning my ears and cheeks.
Now that I'm on an Ubuntu (10.04) installation at home... and I have never run a Java applet through Firefox; I decided to test this out and see how bad it really is. I browsed over to http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp (Java test page) and I got the pop up for missing plug-ins. I clicked on the wizard's next button and it requested to install the necessary package and prompted for the administrative password. I entered it and then it installed and reloaded the page just fine. So, someone must have filed a bug report... funny how that works.
And as a matter of fact I WAS comparing the Windows diagnostic wizard with the Firefox plug-in wizard. You don't seem to have much technical experience if you both think the only thing the wizard in Windows does is renew the IP address and you think that the 3 packages you had to install were somehow random. The windows wizard does more than that (or tries to) and the 3 packages you had to install were all part of the plug-in you wanted to use.
And lastly, I didn't reassign the blame from anything to anything else. I said it was probably a broken wizard in Firefox you should submit a bug report on. Though at this stage I can see how you get into frustrating encounters with computers at the slightest hint of misbehavior. And I question if you have been keeping your install even half up-to-date since my experience was so vastly different than yours and I'm not even on the latest and greatest versions of anything.
Hey, at least you no longer have to dig around and link.so files into different hidden mozilla plugins directories AFTER installing the java packages.
Maybe file a bug report with Ubuntu or Oracle, or Mozilla? Seems that it's an intended feature which is not working... just a thought.
The other thought is... maybe the media plugin wizards have absolutely dick to do with the quality of the operating system? Ya know, since the plugin was indeed provided by the operating system packagers... maybe the failure is with the plugin maker for not packaging it directly on their site, or maybe it was with the browser maker for not finding it correctly?
On the plus side, you now know how to get the java plugin for firefox working in one simple step, namely installing the package which gives you the plugin. I have no idea what package it was you tried to install through the software manager, but it wasn't the right one. You can thank sun / oracle for not making the right package to install available from their website and instead leaving it for you to find though. On that note, it's a good thing that the Ubuntu development team compiled it all for you and stuck it into the repository too. All you had to do was find and install it since the automated firefox wizard didn't know where to find it.
I just hope you and your parents don't have to rely on the "Fix Network Problems" or "Fix Device Problems" wizard that Microsoft gives you with Windows, boy will that leave you feeling slighted after you paid all that money for it.
I think that knowing how to do basic things like locating missing media plugins, or resetting an IP address of a network connection is reasonable knowledge for a computer user to have. Requiring linking libraries or unloading and reloading kernel modules / drivers is where it goes too far into systems administration territory. Fortunately you didn't have to do any of that. You can run into both problems on all of the operating systems after all... only on one of them it's entirely voluntary and does not require purchasing the OS it's self.
Just note that SIMM and DIMM are two distinct form factors for memory. SIMM packaging having largely been abandoned post 1990. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMM vs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIMM
And they do make 8Gb and even 16Gb DIMMS: http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-ValueRAM-240-pin-PC3-8500-registered/dp/B003C015ZY
But you will likely find that many (if not most) motherboard chipsets do not support them. This is a chipset and bios coding issue more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
These are some pretty interesting nostalgic videos! Thanks for the links. You should have logged in to post though so you aren't stuck in 0 point A/C hell. I'm not that far up on my history, but the videos proved interesting none-the-less.
- Toast
I hope this vaccine is as effective as the smallpox and polio vaccines have been. The world would do well to be rid of this particularly crafty and deadly virus. It is also a whole lot easier to introduce vaccination programs into third world countries (which counts as medicinal treatment) which would otherwise have severe religious problems with contraceptives like condoms (which counts as interfering with "God's work").
- Toast
You and I are in agreement. The poster I was replying to was indicating that we should not modify our theories until we get more data, I was countering that we definitely SHOULD be modifying our theories as we go, since we now have more than just the data on our own system. And when starting with just our own system, the next couple of systems discovered increases our available data by a phenomenal amount. Let the updating begin!
- Toast
When you have a sample set of 1; then adding 2 data points is a fantastic expansion in scope even if we are quite positive that we do not have all of the potential information (soon to be discovered). At this early stage, finding a handful of other planetary systems has effectively multiplied what we know about planetary systems a thousandfold or more, even if we consider ourselves to be mostly blind still.
- Toast
They are working on it. Just give them more time...
Do you buy your houses based on the wall color or wall paper? I'm quite sorry for you if you do.
- Toast
* Just to be clear, I see no reason to believe that any gods exist. And if we did have a being show up and proclaim it's self as god I would first assume an alien trying to pull one over on us to be honest...
- Toast
I think they would be the absolute first to request an interview (at least I would be). Most atheists I know of are seekers of truth and knowledge just the same as the religious people, it's just that we want truth that is valid and provable by anyone, to anyone, and for everyone, and not just personally for ourselves. Everyone should be capable of knowing and understanding the truth of course (Christians agree). Unfortunately, none of the religious texts have provided us with any sort of testable ideas or theories so far which work that way. A true god* appearing one day and finally making its self known to the people would constitute it's self readily as proof, observation, and fact. If that happened, neither Atheists nor Christians would need to be "believers" or "deniers" any more and faith would be supplanted by loyalty. We would either be accepting or rejecting the god and his ways and nothing would be fundamentally different about the story really.
Personally, my loyalty may or may not lie with such a god (assuming one exists) since there are a raft of good and plain reasons to reject his behavior as being foolish, childish, savage, and plain ridiculous. Once I were to know the true back story straight from god is when I would consider my options. Until then, I will make up my own mind and will rest comfortably knowing I might be wrong.
All I can say, in finishing, is that the god(s) that all of the worlds major religions observe have earned 0 loyalty from me based on their behaviors and decisions so far. And you can't tell me that your god wouldn't care one way or the other about me, my reasoning, or my decision. Though with that whole "Garden of Eden" thing, I guess I can see why Christians fear being punished for decisions they might make while being totally ignorant about the circumstances ahead of time... I'll take that chance...
- Toast
Or you can just turn the plane into the skid and only have the plane as the moving part. I.E. maglev sort of thing.
That would more-or-less qualify as having "no moving parts" considering the only moving part is the one you wish to move in the first place.
- Toast
In my experience if you spend real money on computers through Dell (enough to actually have a sales person contact you, send you quotes, and setup a purchasing contract) your support would have been great and at least used to be to an American call center every timed you had to call in for support (24x7). This support was typically awesome and fast.
Their consumer support where you buy a pre-built boxed set or just a small handful of consumer class machines was almost always a call center in India (except for 8x5 or so) and was terrible in a legendary way.
Similar experience with HP, Compaq, and IBM really. Spend real money, get real support. Buy $400.00 desktop computer and if you run into problems... you get to use the forums and talk to "Jim" who has a thick Urdu accent, a weird 1/4 second pause in the phone call, and a penchant for getting you off the line as fast as possible.
Companies like Packard Bell had legendary bad support all of the time, and crap products too... so there is that too.
Unfortunately the bean counters and board of directors realized that it was a "cost center" and simply switched business support to the same service levels as the consumer support for all except their most valuable players.
So yes, Dell's business support at least used to be excellent (even the standard business support helpdesk was decent).
- Toast
Please thank your boss for having this attitude, and recommend he/she try to encourage the people at their business meetings (luncheons, associations, etc.) to share this opinion. Our (IT) field is filled with many managers / companies who expect 60+ hours in the office, 24 hours attention (on-call), and holiday / weekends as a minimum for remaining employed, all while being expected to make-work some of the most underfunded projects in the company.
Cable tends to be 1/5 of the download bandwidth allocated for upload. Check your bandwidth with a speed test and then multiply the upload result by 0.90, then cap it to that. The extra 10% wiggle room is for DNS lookups and other traffic. Just be sure to check for the bits/bytes problem between different tools.
- Toast
More or less, FreeBSD is not commonly supported by the same hardware vendors which do provide Linux support and drivers. RedHat / Fedora / CentOS is most commonly supported by the hardware vendors. Debian/Ubuntu is a close second. If I want full support of the features in my new Core-i7, NVidia graphics card, SSD hard disk, InkJet printers, or WIFI cards I am much more likely to get traction in the Linux space (and even that has been a long and hard road and is still sketchy coverage at best).
And for the server space, when you start getting into various RAID controllers, out of band management drivers (and SNMP MIBS), 10Gb networking, and fiber channel cards; the picture looks pretty much the same as in the desktop space.
So yeah, if all I want is a web, FTP, ssh, or similar server on standard (commodity) hardware then FreeBSD and variants are a perfectly valid option... until I want to start using SAN, 10Gb networking, fiber channel or centralized lights-out administration technologies (hardware out of band monitoring) where Linux support is common, but BSD support is not so much.
I work in an industry which requires extremely low latency (quasi-realtime server response times) which FreeBSD would be OK for, however the hardware we must use to achieve those results is NOT supported on FreeBSD by the vendors which make the drivers, nor are the 3rd-party libraries we use for communication with other data vendors.
Switching the OS to something more well supported is MUCH easier than trying to get all of the rest of the applications, drivers, and vendors to switch without some sort of tangible reason for it.
- Toast
There is also such a thing as unreasonable punishments which our legal system is (supposedly) designed to protect against as well. Just imagine I can fuck your life up permanently just by slipping a joint into your coat pocket and calling the police. Matter of fact I would be tempted to do this to anyone passing such a law if it ever happened.
A policy change would certainly be a good thing, namely removing marijuana from your list of offending substances (make it legal, but only if grown in the states and with moderate taxes paid on it similar to tobacco and alcohol). With that one change alone it would completely rework the landscape in terms of cartels and drug money funds. We would still have problems with some of the harder substances like cocaine traffickers but it would pretty much eliminate a HUGE part of the Mexico cartel problem overnight. *~poof~* goes the profits and the industry. The best thing we could do to help both Mexico and the US is to make it legal to produce marijuana domestically and control it the same way we do for other substances like Tobacco, Alcohol, etc. Then, instead of your kids friends going down to the local gangster for some weed (of questionable origins or quality) they would just have to steal it from their parents. Unless of course you advocate for something like the electric chair for kids who get too curious.
- Toast
Not that I disagree with you about him putting on a show (this is politics of course), or that it isn't just a feel-good stunt, but I don't really think it's belated nor as necessary for a successful re-election as you make it out to be.
1.) We still have more than a year left before the 2012 presidential elections. Personally, I would rather he NOT campaign but rather manage the country in the mean time.
2.) While the field of candidates is currently thinning, he has the incumbent advantage and no clear competitor on the field to run against him yet.
3.) While not great, he has better approval ratings than congress and indeed many other political offices.
4.) The Republicans are busy stabbing anything with a moderate stance in the face in order to win over the ultra-conservatives in the tea party and other supporting religious groups. This is especially true of the candidates themselves which get dumped wholesale if they aren't right wing enough. Obama can't appeal to those groups anyways so it would be useless to enter that fray.
5.) These initiatives, like the Jobs bill or the online petition thing, aren't even major events really. They do not represent a lot of spent effort or political capital for his administration. However, they can be capitalized by Obama very well later on as long as he isn't too foolish about it. Just consider that it is still appearing to many people as more work spent on the taxpayer's interests than the republicans have appeared to spend during that same time frame.
As the field thins out; the republican vs. republican infighting will be replaced with republican vs. incumbent president debates. But that will require knocking a few more republicans out of the race first. As of this exact moment however; none of the republicans represent a threat to Obama's second term at all (yet). If anything they can't duke it out yet without the fear of another one of their party members deciding to stab them in the back along the way just to prove who is more "conservative".
Just for full disclosure, I consider myself to be a moderate independent voter and I enjoy some good friction and disagreements for sure (it's healthy) but I absolutely loathe the polarization between moderate republicans and the complete wingnuts on the extreme end (tea party, ultra-conservative religious organizations, etc) because they don't just try to revolutionize the government to fit their minority world-view, they actively try to incapacitate it completely for just about anything other than only that (i.e. forcing budget negotiations during debt-ceiling procedures instead of during budget discussions which causes credit rating downgrades and poorly written legislation to be passed under emergency conditions).
Well, I've rambled enough since we effectively can agree on the fact that these actions are mostly fluff from the Obama administration even if we disagree on how important it is. I guess not expecting anything other than fluff in the first place makes it easier to not care one way or another about it now.
- Toast
Salt + Oxygen + Iron Oxide (rust).
How long will this chemical combination remain stable? Is long-term oxidation a concern here?
Yeah, the toll booths we have what is called "open road tolling". We still have a handful of cash / iPass lanes on the side of the freeway (typically near on-off ramps) but then we get 3-4 lanes for straight through iPass traffic where you don't have to slow down at all from whatever normal freeway speeds you are driving at (most do slow down a little to avoid the occasional state patrol lurking near the ramps though).
To top that off, the iPass cuts the cost of the tolls in half over the stated prices for cash users at each toll. So a $1.10 toll is then $0.55 for an iPass user. Transponders are $10 and come pre-charged with a minimum of $40 worth of tolls on them. You can link them to your checking account to automatically refill once you run out too.
All in all they do save a very substantial amount of time and money for even casual drivers in IL. To top it off the amount on the pass does not expire either. I've bought a couple for my family (who lives out of state) so when they do come down here they don't need to get a ton of change from the bank before leaving or spend an extra 45-60 minutes in the toll lanes or accelerating / decelerating during peak driving times. Even if you only drive through the Chicago area two or three times a year it's worth it IMO.
Performance desktop user here... Let me know when they start beating out the i5-2500K or i7-2600K CPU performance wise (even if the chip is more expensive!). I've got my i7-2600K running at 4.4Ghz stable without playing with the voltages or running turbine aircraft engine coolers (matter of fact the PC is almost silent). I can't think of any features I am missing on my P67 rev2 board which would make me trade in the performance of the CPU I have either. I love this chip!
I used to like AMD quite a lot (P4 era), but then they started lagging behind big time once Intel ditched Netburst. They have been either a lot HOTTER or a lot SLOWER (or both) than Intel for what seems like years now without really being able to recover. The Sandy Bridge based chips from Intel just kinda bend them over the barrel at the end of the day too with the reduced price point Intel is using for them. The only thing AMD would possibly give me would be a higher core count for my dollars, but not necessarily a more efficient (HT on SB is really nice) or cooler running chip; sadly this is something they used to excel at doing.
Since I'm not interested in their integrated graphics this is most likely the exact reason why there is minimal to no attraction for me to these product offerings.
15 CDs = 14 CDs for Debian Sarge binaries, +1 CD for Knoppix?
That used to be my tool-box for a while when setting up servers and workstations on slow internet connections some time back.
Liquid helium is impossible to get to go up in flames as it is inert and non-flammable. You are thinking of liquid hydrogen. OTOH, your point about Texas going up in flames still stands.
We can only hope that their bodies had to spend more energy on supportive body mass and fibers than brain power. But if they are landing here then they made at least some of the qualifying grade for brains which is indeed scary. But think of the inverse!
I just can't imagine being the person to investigate the surface of a super earth if we could land on them (hypothetical of course). I just can't help but think there would be a risk of breaking a leg just by falling while walking or jumping. Never mind the blackout risk trying to do anything useful like climb a hill on a body with 4-5 times earth gravity. Humans do OK for a while with less gravity before our bodies have problems, but we are really pretty bad in an environment with more of it.
Ok people, as stated before...
This is the same thing as regenerative braking in cars. It isn't generating energy from nothing, it's recapturing and reusing energy already spent.
This component replaces one of the components already in charge of wasting photons generated by your LCD screen (polarizing filter). Not in addition to it.
This isn't perpetual motion, it's energy reclamation.
My only concern is that the batteries and phones do not like to be left in sunlight (a proposed alternate use of this component). How many users will seek a quick charge by placing the phone in direct sunlight; only then to overheat the lithium battery in the device? Most things electronic do not like the heat generated by solar charging. I know I wouldn't want to stick a phone which has been sitting in sunlight for a while against my head because of the risk of burning my ears and cheeks.
Now that I'm on an Ubuntu (10.04) installation at home... and I have never run a Java applet through Firefox; I decided to test this out and see how bad it really is. I browsed over to http://www.java.com/en/download/installed.jsp (Java test page) and I got the pop up for missing plug-ins. I clicked on the wizard's next button and it requested to install the necessary package and prompted for the administrative password. I entered it and then it installed and reloaded the page just fine. So, someone must have filed a bug report... funny how that works.
And as a matter of fact I WAS comparing the Windows diagnostic wizard with the Firefox plug-in wizard. You don't seem to have much technical experience if you both think the only thing the wizard in Windows does is renew the IP address and you think that the 3 packages you had to install were somehow random. The windows wizard does more than that (or tries to) and the 3 packages you had to install were all part of the plug-in you wanted to use.
And lastly, I didn't reassign the blame from anything to anything else. I said it was probably a broken wizard in Firefox you should submit a bug report on. Though at this stage I can see how you get into frustrating encounters with computers at the slightest hint of misbehavior. And I question if you have been keeping your install even half up-to-date since my experience was so vastly different than yours and I'm not even on the latest and greatest versions of anything.
Hey, at least you no longer have to dig around and link .so files into different hidden mozilla plugins directories AFTER installing the java packages.
Maybe file a bug report with Ubuntu or Oracle, or Mozilla? Seems that it's an intended feature which is not working... just a thought.
The other thought is... maybe the media plugin wizards have absolutely dick to do with the quality of the operating system? Ya know, since the plugin was indeed provided by the operating system packagers... maybe the failure is with the plugin maker for not packaging it directly on their site, or maybe it was with the browser maker for not finding it correctly?
On the plus side, you now know how to get the java plugin for firefox working in one simple step, namely installing the package which gives you the plugin. I have no idea what package it was you tried to install through the software manager, but it wasn't the right one. You can thank sun / oracle for not making the right package to install available from their website and instead leaving it for you to find though. On that note, it's a good thing that the Ubuntu development team compiled it all for you and stuck it into the repository too. All you had to do was find and install it since the automated firefox wizard didn't know where to find it.
I just hope you and your parents don't have to rely on the "Fix Network Problems" or "Fix Device Problems" wizard that Microsoft gives you with Windows, boy will that leave you feeling slighted after you paid all that money for it.
I think that knowing how to do basic things like locating missing media plugins, or resetting an IP address of a network connection is reasonable knowledge for a computer user to have. Requiring linking libraries or unloading and reloading kernel modules / drivers is where it goes too far into systems administration territory. Fortunately you didn't have to do any of that. You can run into both problems on all of the operating systems after all... only on one of them it's entirely voluntary and does not require purchasing the OS it's self.
Just note that SIMM and DIMM are two distinct form factors for memory. SIMM packaging having largely been abandoned post 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMM
vs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIMM
And they do make 8Gb and even 16Gb DIMMS:
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-ValueRAM-240-pin-PC3-8500-registered/dp/B003C015ZY
But you will likely find that many (if not most) motherboard chipsets do not support them. This is a chipset and bios coding issue more than anything else.