136/206 = 0.66019
137/206 = 0.66505
138/206 = 0.66990
2/3 = 0.66667
Clearly the measure does not pass with 2/3 of the vote. Even if you round off to 2 digits you would get 136/206 = 0.66, and 2/3 = 0.67, so it still doesn't pass.
I have a graduate degree and several years experience in my field and, like many others, am having difficulty finding work. I've had numerous people, including one or two professionals involved in hiring, tell me that that as a last resort in this economy I should offer companies my labor for free. Simply as a way to get my foot in the door, and if nothing else as a way to gain some more experience. Considering the amount of time, money and effort I've put into my education and work over the years I found this suggestion somewhat insulting, and after reading this article I would have to presume any company engaging in it would be breaking the law.
If I do a GIS for "Laura Bush" on the very first page is a photoshopped picture of her naked. If I do a GIS for "George Bush" on the very first page is a picture of him eating a kitten, three pictures of him giving the finger, one picture making him look like a monkey, one picture making him look like some kind of ogre and one picture of a bush impersonator being spanked on his bare bottom.
I think some are being overly sensitive here. Michelle Obama is an intelligent and successful woman, I think she can handle a corny picture on the internet.
that flash memory was so expensive it was only viable for applications where you only needed a little bit of storage, like storing your contacts list in a cellphone. Then it got to the point where it took over as the standard storage media for digital cameras and mp3 players, remember the microdrive? it's gone now, and hard drive based mp3 players are the exception not the rule these days. Now flash is beginning to move into the consumer pc space. This was first seen in cheap netbooks with 4-16gb ssds, but increasingly they are popping up as a high end option as well. It's pretty clear that rotating media is on the way out. I don't doubt that it will maintain it's cost/gigabyte advantage but it will likely be relegated to a role as low speed, infrequently accessed storage while ssds take over as the primary drive in laptops first and then desktops. It's possible a tipping point could be reached both as the performance delta between rotating and solid state media increases and as software companies beginning writing programs to take advantage of ssds until eventually the performance of rotating media is so abysmal they are no longer used and software companied forget about them entirely.
It's important to note too that while rotating media has a cost/gigabyte advantage it cannot go below a certain price floor due to the inherent and unchanging costs involved in manufacturing a precision mechanical device. For example the cheapest you can get a new 2.5" hdd these days is about 50 bucks, however even if a manufacturer were to make, say an 8 mb hdd it probably still wouldn't be much cheaper than that just due to the costs in making a magnetic disk, precision enclosure, bearings, etc. However ssds can easily go below this price. What this means is that ssds could potentially take over the low end of the pc market by offering cheap low capacity drives that hdd manufacturers are simply incapable of matching in price.
To better illustrate this lets look at the 64 Gb ssd, which is retailing for as little $150. As a quick back of the envelope calculation let's say that the cost/gigabyte of flash memory drops by half every 18 months, and working from that number lets say the cost of our ssd drops by 40% every 18 months. In 3 years then a 64 Gb ssd will be selling for around $50, the same price as the cheapest hdd available. In 3 years of course that low end hdd could very well be 500 gigabytes. But there are plenty of users who would likely take the ssd for its performance advantage, and once the cost goes below $50 it will suddenly be the cheapest option available. Keep in mind too that a 64 Gb ssd is perfectly capable of running Windows 7 with plenty of programs installed and some usable storage left over as well. It's perfectly viable for a lot of users and would provide much better performance than any other option.
Not sure where you're looking up prices but you're at least an order of magnitude off. Newegg is selling 250 GB OCZ SSDs for $699. Still a lot more than your average magnetic drive but the benefits make it an attractive option, once prices drop just a little I see them taking off in the mainstream.
She wouldn't have to wear them to use them, she could have simply used them to urinate in without making a mess. She herself stated that this is exactly what she did, at least according to the police report. And this would still fit perfectly well with her lawyers statements; all he said was that it was a lie that she drove to orlando wearing a diaper, he never said she didn't use them to collect urine. So the basic gist of the story is likely still accurate (could you drive 950 miles without peeing SOMEWHERE?). Yes some late night comedians exaggerated events for comedic effect, but what do you expect from them?
The parents point is still valid; an intelligent person with foresight can probably travel far distances in the US without leaving any sort of paper trail.
Let's say I throw a large rock in the water; some water is splashed up 30 feet in the air, but the waves that travel outward are only about a foot high. Does that splash count as a 30 foot high wave? I think most people would say no, a splash is different from a wave. This is the same thing that happened at Lituya bay, only on a much, much larger scale.
The government can pour money into any high tech enterprise with the side effect of producing new technology for the masses, that's not news. How much new technology was a result of military projects? The internet, GPS, nuclear power and jet engines to name just a very few.
It's nice to say that NASA projects led to all these developments but that money could have just as easily been spent on other projects (military for one possibility), that would have resulted in the same developments, or other, different developments that could have had a substantial impact on society.
The issue then is not that we have to spend this money on NASA to produce new developments it's what area of spending and research would best serve the overall interests of the United States. As others have stated, sending some remote controlled scooters to cruise around other planets, while cool, will have no immediate impact for the vast majority of citizens. While it may produce some cool tech there are plenty of sound arguments that that money could be better spent elsewhere. Perhaps on projects that would have a more immediate beneficial impact on US citizens while also producing some cool stuff. And if your short list of the best products of the space program includes tang and velcro you're sitting on shakey ground.
I haven't had problems finding computers at cafes that have usb ports. That's all you need to backup your pictures to a flash drive or another memory card. You can then mail one or the other home if you aren't able to upload the pictures. A notebook is actually fairly easy to "backup". Like I said you can just photocopy it and mail the copy home. Another option which actually works very well is to simply use your digital camera to photograph the pages. Trust me, it's completely legible.
Everything you're mentioning about backing things up still applies to a laptop. If you're using a laptop to backup your pictures what happens when it gets lost, stolen or damaged? This is a very common occurence when traveling. If you're already mailing memory cards or dvds home with all your stuff anyway then I don't really see the need for a computer to begin with. Like I said, if you're a professional photographer/journalist or someone else who really does require a computer every day to get your stuff done then by all means go for it. For 99% of the people out there that is just not the case and the hassle of dealing with one is not worth it.
I have many friends that have done extensive traveling in third world countries and have done some myself and neither I, nor no one that I know, has taken a laptop with them. It sounds great in theory but the reality is that it's simply more trouble than it's worth. I realize that this is slashdot and it's a unique demographic so if you HAVE to take one I would look for a very rugged ultraportable or umpc. Also a solid state drive would be a requirement for the high altitudes at everest.
But again, take some time to see if you can really justify the need for a laptop. If you are going to be sending daily blog updates maybe then you need one, if you are going to be taking LOTS of pictures, then maybe you could justify it. But for probably 99% of travelers, even slashdoters, you don't need one. You just have to get over that first hump of accepting life without a computer at your fingertips 24/7.
Take a notebook to write in, they're better than computers anyway. You don't need any power, plus you you can draw pictures and diagrams. When you can get to an internet cafe transcribe it. If you're worried about losing it make photocopies when you can and mail them home. 4 gb memory cards are going for 17 bucks on newegg. Assuming 2 mb per picture 2 of those cards could hold 4000 pictures, which would come out to an average of 22 pictures a day. Buy some storage space on picasa and upload pictures from there when you have a chance. If there are any documents you need access too just carry a memory stick, or email them to yourself so you can get to them from any internet cafe, or upload them to google web apps.
If you're carrying a laptop you're going to have to constantly baby it, especially if you're living out of a backpack. What happens when you drop your pack? What happens when your pack gets wet. What happens when you're on a bus with a bunch of locals, are you going to want to pull it out and risk it getting stolen? My advice is to simply cut the cord. When you're traveling like that it's much better to enjoy the experience than to be hunched over a keyboard half the day every day.
If you have a disk with a 5ms seek time, you're limited to 20 I/Os per second.
5 ms is 5 thousandths of a second, you could achieve 200 I/Os per second. Also that assumes that seek times are constant for each I/O, which is not the case.
It's not 1.5 G's it's a 1.5 factor of safety, big difference. Let's say the 787 is rated for 2 G's at maximum payload during normal operation, and let's say that at that maximum operating condition the wing loading is 10 psi (I'm making up numbers here purely for example). So to test the wing at with a 1.5 factor of safety what you might do is load the wing to 15 psi. And that wing loading would probably be the equivalent of around 3 Gs (at max payload). So yea, FOS and G force are completely different things.
Since this was clearly a biased study that only focused on negative aspects of file sharing perhaps we should list a few positive aspects.
1)The music industry does not lose a dime when people download music they wouldn't have purchased anyway.
The music industry likes to make claims that if someone has say 1000 mp3's on their computer that they have "stolen" the store bought value of that music from them. Not true at all, since that person likely would never have purchased that much music otherwise. Additionally, since all they are taking is intellectual property, there is no loss of the money spent to manufacture and distribute the cd's. 1000 mp3's could be the equivalent of 500 albums, at 20 bucks a pop that's 10,000 bucks. I know of very few people that have ever spent that much on music, even before file sharing, but I do know of a lot of people that have thousands of songs on their computers.
2)Downloading music exposes artists to a much wider audience then they would have previously been available to.
This kind of goes in hand with the previous statement. Little joey may not have nearly enough money to purchase lots of cd's, but he can download music. Maybe he'll download a song that looks kind of interesting, enjoy it and end up going to a show. Or maybe he'll play it for his friends and they'll buy the album, or go to a show.
I can understand the desire to get low cost computers into the hands of the underprivileged, really I do, it's an awesome goal. But I always have these nagging doubts if neutering the technology to get it to a cost they deem reasonable defeats the whole purpose. Remember when they tried to make those cheap internet appliances that grandma could use to check her email and surf the web? They had a dumbed down OS and scaled back hardware to make them cheap and simple to use, they also bombed horribly because they couldn't run any of the standard apps that a full on pc could. Same deal with webtv. So while this computer is cool how will it's usefullness fare long term when people discover they can't do all the stuff people are doing with their normal computers in the developed world?
Best Buy is currently selling a laptop, retail!, for $399. $399 laptop
And the specs on it are actually not half bad, not as bad as you might think:
15.4" screen
1.5 ghz Via C7-M
512 ram
128 meg shared video
DVD +/- DL burner
60 GB HDD
802.11 b/g
10/100 ethernet
v.92 modem
Vista Basic
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks, scale down the screen size and maybe eliminate a few usb ports and some other stuff, mass produce it and you could have a full on pc capable of running even windows vista for probably under 300 bucks. I have to think that something like that would be much more useful, even if you bought half as many it would still be better in the long run with it's upgradeability and standards compliance. Thoughts?
Maybe you didn't do that but there were certainly people that did. Gamers for one found that XP was usually a few percent slower than 98 for most games and often reverted to the older OS to get the maximum possible performance.
"Edgeline technology is said to be so ink-efficient that if HP were to sell these printers, they would never match the money they make from consumables (cartridges etc) now."
Got a link for this? I fail to see how an ink-efficient printer would affect their current business model. If anything it would improve their margins. Let's say the edgeline uses 50% less ink than other printers, simply put 50% less ink in the edgeline cartridges and charge the same price for them, problem solved.
I think we're all aware that current pricing structures for printer cartridges is a joke, it has little or no basis in what the cartridges actually cost to manufacture, so it's not like an edgeline printer would be some disruptive force in the marketplace.
This was a well done article. The one area I thought they didn't thoroughly test was the self destruct feature. They state at the end that there doesn't seem to be any hardware on the stick that would be capable of actually destroying the memory chip. Well, if you're so sure why not test that out? Exceed the maximum number of password attempts and see if you can still recover data from the drive, that would really be the final nail in the coffin.
I find it hard to believe that senior staff members were not aware their emails were being deleted for years. I am just a lowly grad student and I routinely have to wade through old emails, some months or possibly even years old. You're telling me Rove never once needed an email from a few months ago? I don't believe it, not for a second.
Secondly; as long as Rove for example was sending and replying to Officials who are using the standard Whitehouse domain then there should still be copies, it might be a little more difficult to track things down but most stuff should still be there.
Third; this is enough. Records and archiving of official communications should no longer be the responsibility of Whitehouse staff, who can be made to delete incriminating information. IT should be managed by an independent body. Government officials should be unable to communicate for official business using anything other than official communication channels. Failure to comply should result in punishment similar to perjury. I say this in reference to government but really it should be true for the private sector as well. Too many people are getting off easy for "lost" emails.
It is called the Live File System. It's similar to some of the cd burning programs of the past that would allow you to use a cd like a floppy disk where you could simply drag and drop files to it. And yes the problem is it's not fully compatible with earlier versions of windows, other os's and set top type devices. It's also the default format which i don't think is good, but you can change it.
Same deal at Colorado State. I couldn't access the campus wireless network with my new laptop until I managed to track down the Vista compatible Cisco VPN beta.
I like how some people seem to think they are morally superior to others simply because of the car they drive, when that is really only part of the picture.
Take for example someone who drives a Prius but commutes 50 miles every day and lives in a huge mansion, then compare that to someone that drives an suv but only commutes 10 miles every day and lives in a little rancher whose utilities are 1/3 that of the big mansion. Now the Prius owner may feel some moral superiority to the suv driver but who is really damaging the environment more?
Seriously, forget about storing all this data, what exactly are we going to do with it?? How are we going to process and manage zettabytes worth of data? What tools are we going to use to sift through that much data and get what we need? Should we even be keeping it?? Hell %90 of it may well be porn. The more data we produce the more urgent it will become to ask these sorts of questions, and find the answers to them.
The thing is with Apple you only have one supplier, Apple, and one price, what they say is what you pay, you can't shop around at all. With PC's you have dozens of supplier to choose from. So finding a PC maker that is selling a system at a similar price to a similar Apple system is not difficult. However it is also not difficult to find PC makers selling systems at a lower price than Apple, it's called shopping around, something you are unable to do when buying from Apple.
So yes, you can show me plenty of examples of expensive PC's and say Apple is on par with pricing. But I can reply right back; I just bought an Acer Aspire 5102: dual-core AMD processor, 1 gig of ram, 120 gig harddrive, 15.4" screen, dvd-burner, built in webcam and ati graphics. All of it for 675 bucks, delivered to my door, for just an hour or two shopping around on the internet. Show me an Apple laptop even close to that configuration for that price and I'll eat my hat.
"I'm not positive, but this seems very similar to me to "bait and switch," which is illegal. In that scheme, the store would advertise an exceptionally low price on an object...but only had 3 in stock. Then, when you come to the store as the 100th person looking for that item, they say, "sorry we ran out... but since you came, we can offer you a "good deal" on this other similar item for only a slightly higher [and much more profitable] price!"
Funny you mention that; there have been several reports from current/former BB employees who said they would advertise a sale item then move most of the stock to the storeroom or otherwise hide it so there would only be a couple of the items available for purchase. They are notorious for dirty tricks like that, but of course you probably already knew that.
Slashdot Mirror
136/206 = 0.66019 137/206 = 0.66505 138/206 = 0.66990 2/3 = 0.66667 Clearly the measure does not pass with 2/3 of the vote. Even if you round off to 2 digits you would get 136/206 = 0.66, and 2/3 = 0.67, so it still doesn't pass.
I have a graduate degree and several years experience in my field and, like many others, am having difficulty finding work. I've had numerous people, including one or two professionals involved in hiring, tell me that that as a last resort in this economy I should offer companies my labor for free. Simply as a way to get my foot in the door, and if nothing else as a way to gain some more experience. Considering the amount of time, money and effort I've put into my education and work over the years I found this suggestion somewhat insulting, and after reading this article I would have to presume any company engaging in it would be breaking the law.
If I do a GIS for "Laura Bush" on the very first page is a photoshopped picture of her naked. If I do a GIS for "George Bush" on the very first page is a picture of him eating a kitten, three pictures of him giving the finger, one picture making him look like a monkey, one picture making him look like some kind of ogre and one picture of a bush impersonator being spanked on his bare bottom. I think some are being overly sensitive here. Michelle Obama is an intelligent and successful woman, I think she can handle a corny picture on the internet.
that flash memory was so expensive it was only viable for applications where you only needed a little bit of storage, like storing your contacts list in a cellphone. Then it got to the point where it took over as the standard storage media for digital cameras and mp3 players, remember the microdrive? it's gone now, and hard drive based mp3 players are the exception not the rule these days. Now flash is beginning to move into the consumer pc space. This was first seen in cheap netbooks with 4-16gb ssds, but increasingly they are popping up as a high end option as well. It's pretty clear that rotating media is on the way out. I don't doubt that it will maintain it's cost/gigabyte advantage but it will likely be relegated to a role as low speed, infrequently accessed storage while ssds take over as the primary drive in laptops first and then desktops. It's possible a tipping point could be reached both as the performance delta between rotating and solid state media increases and as software companies beginning writing programs to take advantage of ssds until eventually the performance of rotating media is so abysmal they are no longer used and software companied forget about them entirely. It's important to note too that while rotating media has a cost/gigabyte advantage it cannot go below a certain price floor due to the inherent and unchanging costs involved in manufacturing a precision mechanical device. For example the cheapest you can get a new 2.5" hdd these days is about 50 bucks, however even if a manufacturer were to make, say an 8 mb hdd it probably still wouldn't be much cheaper than that just due to the costs in making a magnetic disk, precision enclosure, bearings, etc. However ssds can easily go below this price. What this means is that ssds could potentially take over the low end of the pc market by offering cheap low capacity drives that hdd manufacturers are simply incapable of matching in price. To better illustrate this lets look at the 64 Gb ssd, which is retailing for as little $150. As a quick back of the envelope calculation let's say that the cost/gigabyte of flash memory drops by half every 18 months, and working from that number lets say the cost of our ssd drops by 40% every 18 months. In 3 years then a 64 Gb ssd will be selling for around $50, the same price as the cheapest hdd available. In 3 years of course that low end hdd could very well be 500 gigabytes. But there are plenty of users who would likely take the ssd for its performance advantage, and once the cost goes below $50 it will suddenly be the cheapest option available. Keep in mind too that a 64 Gb ssd is perfectly capable of running Windows 7 with plenty of programs installed and some usable storage left over as well. It's perfectly viable for a lot of users and would provide much better performance than any other option.
Not sure where you're looking up prices but you're at least an order of magnitude off. Newegg is selling 250 GB OCZ SSDs for $699. Still a lot more than your average magnetic drive but the benefits make it an attractive option, once prices drop just a little I see them taking off in the mainstream.
She wouldn't have to wear them to use them, she could have simply used them to urinate in without making a mess. She herself stated that this is exactly what she did, at least according to the police report. And this would still fit perfectly well with her lawyers statements; all he said was that it was a lie that she drove to orlando wearing a diaper, he never said she didn't use them to collect urine. So the basic gist of the story is likely still accurate (could you drive 950 miles without peeing SOMEWHERE?). Yes some late night comedians exaggerated events for comedic effect, but what do you expect from them?
The parents point is still valid; an intelligent person with foresight can probably travel far distances in the US without leaving any sort of paper trail.
What does a standing wave have to do with a splash? They're two completely different things.
Let's say I throw a large rock in the water; some water is splashed up 30 feet in the air, but the waves that travel outward are only about a foot high. Does that splash count as a 30 foot high wave? I think most people would say no, a splash is different from a wave. This is the same thing that happened at Lituya bay, only on a much, much larger scale.
The government can pour money into any high tech enterprise with the side effect of producing new technology for the masses, that's not news. How much new technology was a result of military projects? The internet, GPS, nuclear power and jet engines to name just a very few.
It's nice to say that NASA projects led to all these developments but that money could have just as easily been spent on other projects (military for one possibility), that would have resulted in the same developments, or other, different developments that could have had a substantial impact on society.
The issue then is not that we have to spend this money on NASA to produce new developments it's what area of spending and research would best serve the overall interests of the United States. As others have stated, sending some remote controlled scooters to cruise around other planets, while cool, will have no immediate impact for the vast majority of citizens. While it may produce some cool tech there are plenty of sound arguments that that money could be better spent elsewhere. Perhaps on projects that would have a more immediate beneficial impact on US citizens while also producing some cool stuff. And if your short list of the best products of the space program includes tang and velcro you're sitting on shakey ground.
I haven't had problems finding computers at cafes that have usb ports. That's all you need to backup your pictures to a flash drive or another memory card. You can then mail one or the other home if you aren't able to upload the pictures. A notebook is actually fairly easy to "backup". Like I said you can just photocopy it and mail the copy home. Another option which actually works very well is to simply use your digital camera to photograph the pages. Trust me, it's completely legible.
Everything you're mentioning about backing things up still applies to a laptop. If you're using a laptop to backup your pictures what happens when it gets lost, stolen or damaged? This is a very common occurence when traveling. If you're already mailing memory cards or dvds home with all your stuff anyway then I don't really see the need for a computer to begin with. Like I said, if you're a professional photographer/journalist or someone else who really does require a computer every day to get your stuff done then by all means go for it. For 99% of the people out there that is just not the case and the hassle of dealing with one is not worth it.
I have many friends that have done extensive traveling in third world countries and have done some myself and neither I, nor no one that I know, has taken a laptop with them. It sounds great in theory but the reality is that it's simply more trouble than it's worth. I realize that this is slashdot and it's a unique demographic so if you HAVE to take one I would look for a very rugged ultraportable or umpc. Also a solid state drive would be a requirement for the high altitudes at everest.
But again, take some time to see if you can really justify the need for a laptop. If you are going to be sending daily blog updates maybe then you need one, if you are going to be taking LOTS of pictures, then maybe you could justify it. But for probably 99% of travelers, even slashdoters, you don't need one. You just have to get over that first hump of accepting life without a computer at your fingertips 24/7.
Take a notebook to write in, they're better than computers anyway. You don't need any power, plus you you can draw pictures and diagrams. When you can get to an internet cafe transcribe it. If you're worried about losing it make photocopies when you can and mail them home. 4 gb memory cards are going for 17 bucks on newegg. Assuming 2 mb per picture 2 of those cards could hold 4000 pictures, which would come out to an average of 22 pictures a day. Buy some storage space on picasa and upload pictures from there when you have a chance. If there are any documents you need access too just carry a memory stick, or email them to yourself so you can get to them from any internet cafe, or upload them to google web apps.
If you're carrying a laptop you're going to have to constantly baby it, especially if you're living out of a backpack. What happens when you drop your pack? What happens when your pack gets wet. What happens when you're on a bus with a bunch of locals, are you going to want to pull it out and risk it getting stolen? My advice is to simply cut the cord. When you're traveling like that it's much better to enjoy the experience than to be hunched over a keyboard half the day every day.
If you have a disk with a 5ms seek time, you're limited to 20 I/Os per second.
5 ms is 5 thousandths of a second, you could achieve 200 I/Os per second. Also that assumes that seek times are constant for each I/O, which is not the case.
It's not 1.5 G's it's a 1.5 factor of safety, big difference. Let's say the 787 is rated for 2 G's at maximum payload during normal operation, and let's say that at that maximum operating condition the wing loading is 10 psi (I'm making up numbers here purely for example). So to test the wing at with a 1.5 factor of safety what you might do is load the wing to 15 psi. And that wing loading would probably be the equivalent of around 3 Gs (at max payload). So yea, FOS and G force are completely different things.
Since this was clearly a biased study that only focused on negative aspects of file sharing perhaps we should list a few positive aspects.
1)The music industry does not lose a dime when people download music they wouldn't have purchased anyway.
The music industry likes to make claims that if someone has say 1000 mp3's on their computer that they have "stolen" the store bought value of that music from them. Not true at all, since that person likely would never have purchased that much music otherwise. Additionally, since all they are taking is intellectual property, there is no loss of the money spent to manufacture and distribute the cd's. 1000 mp3's could be the equivalent of 500 albums, at 20 bucks a pop that's 10,000 bucks. I know of very few people that have ever spent that much on music, even before file sharing, but I do know of a lot of people that have thousands of songs on their computers.
2)Downloading music exposes artists to a much wider audience then they would have previously been available to.
This kind of goes in hand with the previous statement. Little joey may not have nearly enough money to purchase lots of cd's, but he can download music. Maybe he'll download a song that looks kind of interesting, enjoy it and end up going to a show. Or maybe he'll play it for his friends and they'll buy the album, or go to a show.
I can understand the desire to get low cost computers into the hands of the underprivileged, really I do, it's an awesome goal. But I always have these nagging doubts if neutering the technology to get it to a cost they deem reasonable defeats the whole purpose. Remember when they tried to make those cheap internet appliances that grandma could use to check her email and surf the web? They had a dumbed down OS and scaled back hardware to make them cheap and simple to use, they also bombed horribly because they couldn't run any of the standard apps that a full on pc could. Same deal with webtv. So while this computer is cool how will it's usefullness fare long term when people discover they can't do all the stuff people are doing with their normal computers in the developed world?
Best Buy is currently selling a laptop, retail!, for $399. $399 laptop
And the specs on it are actually not half bad, not as bad as you might think:
15.4" screen
1.5 ghz Via C7-M
512 ram
128 meg shared video
DVD +/- DL burner
60 GB HDD
802.11 b/g
10/100 ethernet
v.92 modem
Vista Basic
Drop Vista and install Linux and you can save a few bucks, scale down the screen size and maybe eliminate a few usb ports and some other stuff, mass produce it and you could have a full on pc capable of running even windows vista for probably under 300 bucks. I have to think that something like that would be much more useful, even if you bought half as many it would still be better in the long run with it's upgradeability and standards compliance. Thoughts?
Maybe you didn't do that but there were certainly people that did. Gamers for one found that XP was usually a few percent slower than 98 for most games and often reverted to the older OS to get the maximum possible performance.
"Edgeline technology is said to be so ink-efficient that if HP were to sell these printers, they would never match the money they make from consumables (cartridges etc) now."
Got a link for this? I fail to see how an ink-efficient printer would affect their current business model. If anything it would improve their margins. Let's say the edgeline uses 50% less ink than other printers, simply put 50% less ink in the edgeline cartridges and charge the same price for them, problem solved.
I think we're all aware that current pricing structures for printer cartridges is a joke, it has little or no basis in what the cartridges actually cost to manufacture, so it's not like an edgeline printer would be some disruptive force in the marketplace.
This was a well done article. The one area I thought they didn't thoroughly test was the self destruct feature. They state at the end that there doesn't seem to be any hardware on the stick that would be capable of actually destroying the memory chip. Well, if you're so sure why not test that out? Exceed the maximum number of password attempts and see if you can still recover data from the drive, that would really be the final nail in the coffin.
I find it hard to believe that senior staff members were not aware their emails were being deleted for years. I am just a lowly grad student and I routinely have to wade through old emails, some months or possibly even years old. You're telling me Rove never once needed an email from a few months ago? I don't believe it, not for a second.
Secondly; as long as Rove for example was sending and replying to Officials who are using the standard Whitehouse domain then there should still be copies, it might be a little more difficult to track things down but most stuff should still be there.
Third; this is enough. Records and archiving of official communications should no longer be the responsibility of Whitehouse staff, who can be made to delete incriminating information. IT should be managed by an independent body. Government officials should be unable to communicate for official business using anything other than official communication channels. Failure to comply should result in punishment similar to perjury. I say this in reference to government but really it should be true for the private sector as well. Too many people are getting off easy for "lost" emails.
It is called the Live File System. It's similar to some of the cd burning programs of the past that would allow you to use a cd like a floppy disk where you could simply drag and drop files to it. And yes the problem is it's not fully compatible with earlier versions of windows, other os's and set top type devices. It's also the default format which i don't think is good, but you can change it.
Same deal at Colorado State. I couldn't access the campus wireless network with my new laptop until I managed to track down the Vista compatible Cisco VPN beta.
I like how some people seem to think they are morally superior to others simply because of the car they drive, when that is really only part of the picture.
Take for example someone who drives a Prius but commutes 50 miles every day and lives in a huge mansion, then compare that to someone that drives an suv but only commutes 10 miles every day and lives in a little rancher whose utilities are 1/3 that of the big mansion. Now the Prius owner may feel some moral superiority to the suv driver but who is really damaging the environment more?
Seriously, forget about storing all this data, what exactly are we going to do with it?? How are we going to process and manage zettabytes worth of data? What tools are we going to use to sift through that much data and get what we need? Should we even be keeping it?? Hell %90 of it may well be porn. The more data we produce the more urgent it will become to ask these sorts of questions, and find the answers to them.
The thing is with Apple you only have one supplier, Apple, and one price, what they say is what you pay, you can't shop around at all. With PC's you have dozens of supplier to choose from. So finding a PC maker that is selling a system at a similar price to a similar Apple system is not difficult. However it is also not difficult to find PC makers selling systems at a lower price than Apple, it's called shopping around, something you are unable to do when buying from Apple.
So yes, you can show me plenty of examples of expensive PC's and say Apple is on par with pricing. But I can reply right back; I just bought an Acer Aspire 5102: dual-core AMD processor, 1 gig of ram, 120 gig harddrive, 15.4" screen, dvd-burner, built in webcam and ati graphics. All of it for 675 bucks, delivered to my door, for just an hour or two shopping around on the internet. Show me an Apple laptop even close to that configuration for that price and I'll eat my hat.
"I'm not positive, but this seems very similar to me to "bait and switch," which is illegal. In that scheme, the store would advertise an exceptionally low price on an object...but only had 3 in stock. Then, when you come to the store as the 100th person looking for that item, they say, "sorry we ran out... but since you came, we can offer you a "good deal" on this other similar item for only a slightly higher [and much more profitable] price!"
Funny you mention that; there have been several reports from current/former BB employees who said they would advertise a sale item then move most of the stock to the storeroom or otherwise hide it so there would only be a couple of the items available for purchase. They are notorious for dirty tricks like that, but of course you probably already knew that.