Now you're the one being naive. This stuff does more damage than 1%. A lot more. It reinforces other memes that some people want to believe and it is widespread. Remember the Heavensgate cult? That was the tip of the iceberg. To various degrees that nonsense has infected millions of minds.
If I'm supposed to be afraid that "nuke"s are going to create a 200' tall latex lizard-monster that stop-motions to fire a stream of natrual gas at me... serious indeed.
As an EE, I would expect that the electrical system is designed to be as well protected and fail-safe as possible, but...
As an intelligent human being, I'd expect a micro-car full of batteries to be likely to kill anyone stupid enough to ground on it after it has been mangled in a wreck. As someone having no overt desire to drive a giant battery, I have no reason to pretend otherwise. As a thoughtful individual, I won't be surprised when CNN points out how high pressure Hydrogen tanks are also an extreme hazard in accidents, and some other xE is astonished by the consequences of his eco-choice.
We have been refining automotive internal combustion systems for about a century. Everyone involved, from mechanics and insurance adjusters to rescue personnel, has an inherent understanding of the dangers. No great evolutionary change in our species has occurred during that time; we're still the same super-brained primates we were back then. So it stands to reason that we're going to have to learn the lessons in order to cope with these new machines, and that we'll do it the hard way; one nasty wreck after another...
If this doesn't rempresent the death of the megahertz as a processor-benchmark standard, I don't know what will...
Keep trying. This has zero relevance toward misguided attempts to debunk processor cycles as a performance measure.
Supposedly this device can reconfigure itself to support new instructions. Apply a faster clock and it will reconfigure, or execute the present configuration, that much faster.
Just because your pet CPU manufacturer doesn't have the capital or expertise to produce the fastest possible device doesn't mean they wouldn't if they could, or that you wouldn't be as happy as a clam if they did. The best course is to divorce yourself from the equation and stop playing favorites. These are electrical devices sold to a market of customers, nothing more. About the only real measure of value is to ratio of computational capacity over cost. The rest is silly fanboy noise.
Radio stations have been randomly shuffling music for a rather long time now. As a result, music is neatly compartmentalized into 2-4 minute chunks. Contemporary music is designed to be shuffled. The fact that you might enjoy your music as it was designed to be enjoyed is not a sign of brain damage. That some ivory tower mucky-muck professor of marketing seems to assign undo significance to "the sequence in which the artist decided to present it" means precisely squat. All the "hits" get re-released as "the best of"s in many cases with little or no production input from the original artists, it they're still alive, and customers promptly buy them. Artists and professors are over-rated.
Considering that even a worm brain can get its owner around, you'd think our capacity for juggling thoughts would be encyclopaedic.
It is. A worms locomotive requirements are relatively trivial; move toward moisture, dig, avoid sunlight, etc. That's the entire extent of a worms movement needs. No legs, so balance isn't an issue, either. We have somewhat more at stake with regard to our fate, also. It is a big deal if some bird swoops down and nabs us. Not so, the worm. Obviously we must consider a bit more when we move about. Simply standing upright is an enormous feat involving dozens of muscles and a hard, skeletal, jointed frame. Worms have no bones, they just sort of mush about from one spot to the next. Basically, that massive, overgrown nerve bundle on top of your neck is exactly what's needed to get you around.
Am I alone in thinking of hotmail or yahoo or google as the kind of e-mail you use when you have no better alternative?
No. But you are mistaken. It's an excellent option for almost all email purposes.
I can't imagine why anyone who can afford the price of an Internet account wouldn't prefer Pegasus, Eudora, or even Outlook.
I don't want to license, upgrade, debug, etc. someone's proprietary email clients and/or servers, maintain servers and storage including backups, expose my network providing SMTP or POP/IMAP holes in my firewall, etc. etc. There are many reasons one can easily imagine. Try harder.
Beyond that, I want my e-mail archives on my computer, not on some random server that I don't control.
Why? So it's isolated from you if you can't communicate with your computer? I can hit my Yahoo stuff from literally anything, including my cell phone. Besides, any worthy web mail system will allow you to pull the mail via POP or IMAP, should you feel the need.
I want to know that I'm the only person who is accessing my files,
Nix email then. You do know unencrypted email travels through the Internet unencrypted, right?
and I don't want to wake up some morning and find out that the message that I desperately need to review is lost because of a server failure or DDOS attack.
A Yahoo (and, eventually, Google) email account has vastly more storage redundancy than anything you can cook up. Costs less, too. Won't break when you upgrade whatever manages the storage, since you don't manage or upgrade it, either. Doesn't force me to provide SMTP so I can just not worry about whatever silly hole is found in whatever 20 year old code base provides it. Won't infect my machines should I preview the wrong message due to incessant client bugs...
Relying on a webmail system for your primary communications just seems foolish.
Puttering around with local attached storage and obsolete email systems seems foolish. These web mail systems provide excellent spam control, scalability, low cost and high reliability. Frankly email service is a commodity now; just a value-add for some other service. Google will get web mail right, finally, and I'm done nursing email servers. 3 years from now PHB's are going to be asking why the hell they're paying for Exchange licenses, and wasting time with their IT monkeys misconfiguring the servers.
It is clear that edge firewalls are not sufficient. A network with squishy insides is doomed the first time some "salesrep" wanders in from who-knows-where and plugs his broken, virus ridden, misconfigured, obsolete laptop into your switched network. Every cotton pick'n host connected to a network needs a basic stateful packet filter, and wouldn't it be nice if it was entirely OS independent?
There will be a firewall built into your chipset, your OS, your router...
Nothing wrong with that. Since when has choice been a problem? If it's responsible for passing packets it should have a means of filtering them. A simple principle, really.
A basic stateful packet filter (a.k.a firewall) is a fairly simple, well understood mechanism. Firmware is the ideal place to implement it. It will work regardless of which operating system is installed/upgrade/misconfigured. It will work before the OS boots! Many good commercial firewalls are based on only low-power embedded CPU's and flash memory, yet provide very comprehensive firewall functions, multiple interfaces with complex routing, VPN, SNMP, etc.
Not just that...
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not just the fact that they hide the "free" download version. Additional problems include;
Staggering bloat. That client is a mess of custom controls and bugs. At the moment, any attempt to use the menus causes a hard lockup of XP. Not just the client, the entire desktop.
An unwelcome background process that insists on reinstalling itself (on windows.) Amateur and petty. It makes me sick.
It's supposedly spyware. I don't know if this is the case, but there are rumors.
The only reason I still suffer with RealPlayer in any form is MIT's OpenCourseware. The RealPlayer client has always been a PITA and Real has always been it's own worst enemy. They had more than half a decade of opportunity. Microsoft's Media Player has done nothing exceptional; just suck a lot less.
for the love of god, stop misusing spreadsheets/excel as databases- They are for calculating numbers, not creating lists of things!!!!!!
The correct moderation of the parent is not overrated, but off-topic. The story is about the distortions created with spreadsheets by optimistic assumptions, not the banal matter of data maintenance.
The story discusses how "what-if" scenarios in spreadsheets are easily bent to produce the desired results. The story goes on to plug one of the authors favorite financial modeling tools as the "correct" alternative.
The argument is hogwash. If the input for a calculation (be it done in Excel, the calculator built into my cell phone, or a hoytee-toytee financial modeling tool) is bullshit then the result is bullshit. It's called lying. Which ever tool makes the lying easier and more credible will be what gets used. If, because it really is a powerful and credible financial modeling tool, the author's plugged favorite makes the lying more difficult, the liars will revert to Excel.
BTW, this is a non-problem. Lies built in spreadsheets are believed by fools only. Skeptical, intelligent people don't fall for it when they care enough to consider matters. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the amazing 150% ROI figure Oracle generates for you while selling you it's ERP or the promises of love and wealth provided by a 1-888-palmreader service. Fools get fooled and it's not the spreadsheet's fault.
Please establish a new Topic; Meaningless Academic Debates (MADS). In it, we shall place any discussion of CISC vs. RISC, DVD+R vs. DVD-R, big-endian vs. little-endian and, now, whether Sedna is or is not a planet. Thanks in advance!
Imagine if we had no knowledge of planets other than what we currently know about extra-solar planets. One day we built a Really Big Telescope and discover these small, "rocky" objects orbiting other stars. No doubt a debate would then ensue as to whether these objects are legitimate planets. Would it occur to anyone participating in this debate to make a distinction between Earth and Sedna?
The designation "planet" is entirely arbitrary and nearly obsolete. No matter what criteria you establish, some chunk of matter orbiting some star is going to screw up the charts. You may think it's possible, but sooner or later we'll find a big collection of iron ore sized slightly larger than Mars that was obviously built by someone and we'll have to decide whether something constructed is a "planet." As soon as we figure that out a giant ball of positrons with an atmosphere and a functioning ecology will appear. Space is really, really BIG and it doesn't confine itself to our ignorant, mostly sentimental, little classifications.
Can we please not entertain this nonsense any more than necessary? It is the academic equivalent of the World Wrestling Federation; plenty of self serving, dramatic heat and absolutely zero light. If not then classify it properly so I can weed it out.
Define death. If LCD compromises performance (refresh, etc.) but not price, odds are the market will go 99% LCD and CRT will be rarified to specialty niches at very, very high cost. So while it will still be possible to get a CRT, you won't be able to afford it.
LCD and plasma already attain sufficiant performance for the bulk of what the market wants. The only issue remaining is price. Those people who really need CRT (a small fraction of those that will think they do,) will just have to get funded.
Hopefully the name will get changed prior to getting this into the JSE platform. Does it bother anyone else to imagine having to talk about something called Groovy in a professional environment? The Groovy site is chock full of cuteness about making this or that more or less "groovy". I don't mind it personally but it's not helpful when you expect non-technical types to have faith in stuff.
Anyhow, the JSE platform could use an implicit scripting language. I can see the technical merit in this. A Groovy based shell (with exceptions, an abstract file system, all the JDBC goodness integrated, etc.) that works right everywhere would be a nice bit of progress.
Re:Paranoia Check...
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 4, Funny
christ do you people sit around all day _LOOKING_ for ways to complain and be outraged?
Why, yes. Yes we do.
Please avoid further mentions of Western religious figures.
Watched about 45 minutes of The History Channel last night. About 50% of the adds were pills. Allergy pills, vision pills, weight loss pills, energy pills...
Some of this stuff is borderline criminal. The "better ocular health" one was a good example. Some old guy, driving, almost pulls out in front of a semi-tractor trailer he failed to see. Presumably the eye pill resolves this little problem. He can now detect large, shiny, noisy, fast moving objects at range. Amazing. A new pill has caused someone that must have been as blind as a door knob to become capable of driving safely. Naturally I believe every word and I'm convinced he and the other millions of members of the target audience will be perfectly safe on the road. No doubt they'll all have a high degree of confidence in their super vision and refuse to believe they aren't 110% competent.
This sort of snake oil is precisely where 99% of that new "prescription drug benefit" will go. Bunch of repackaged vitimins and legal forms of speed.
"But at $79.99 a month, it's only a good deal to those who can write it off as a business expense."
Grrr. I'm paying $60 for a (highly rate limited due to the # of subscribers) 256Kbps 802.11 uplink, $99 for 128Kbps IDSL (yeah, I know it's just repackaged ISDN) because the former is too unreliable, and $15 for a decent dial-up to backup all the others because I can not afford not to have a connection! If I thought it would help I would kill someone to get 600Kbps for $80.
You can not function in the modern employment world above the level of "service" without solid, fast Internet connections. If you haven't figured this out yet you're grist for the unemployment line. It's a personal expense the same way a plumber pays for a toolbox full of tools. Get it?
there are protocols that are being used by the likes of cisco that make a 56k modem faster than broadband. Why is it not being implimented? The broadband companies need to make the money back from the investment in their infrastructure.
"Detroit" has a 100mpg carburetor that oil companies suppress to maintain price.
"Alternative" medicine is rejected by "Western" medicine to preserve medical monopolies.
Solar power if so cheap and efficient that it can easily provide for all our energy needs, but is prevented from being adopted to maintain "power company" profits.
Unions are the source of all progress but have been ruined by business.
NASA is an aerospace subsidy and ignores scientists to fund "big budget" projects like the Space Shuttle.
America hoards food that could eliminate starvation planet wide.
The media is controlled by any one of; corporate interests, right wing Christians or left wing socialists.
The Cold War was created to justify the "Military Industrial Complex."
Power lines, cell phones and chlorine are causing a cancer epidemic....and now Cisco has a "protocol" that makes a 56k modem faster than "broadband."
they can't say anything if it's launched from the moon
That's pretty darn naive. "They" do what's done as much for political reasons as any real concern for the environment. They will have zero difficulty inventing a plethora of reasons to oppose nuclear anything, anywhere. You will be told how incompetent, greedy American corporations are threatening the survival of the planet for nuclear profit. Bank on it.
ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?
Yes. However, some nights when I drive home from work I eye a bridge abutment thinking I'd like to bury my car in it at 140mph. So I'm not certain that whether I'd like to do something is a great way to evaluate it. What's your point?
BTW, is there a simple way to disable an airbag? Isn't there supposed to be a switch someplace? Thanks.
Will I need a license to build a campfire? I understand that burning stuff causes buckyballs and bits of nanotubes and whatnot to appear. Am I not, therefore, guilty of violating NEC's patents by "manufacturing" their product without a license?
Just wondering. I'd hate to violate the sanctity of this most worthy collection of patents...
These are my requirements; High performance that is not compromised when I'm not at the office. All software, storage and media devices available regardless of whether I'm at the office. Just enough portability to make it from the office to the car and back in short order. Enough battery life to survive 60 minutes in a meeting, assuming it never goes standby. Cost low enough that I can get it in the budget with adequate frequency.
Oh yea, and a Large flat panel and good size keyboard. I will spend 8, 10, 12+ hours working on the machine. I don't mean reading email. I mean working. Don't give me this "use a desktop" bullsh*t. I don't have time to monkey around with keeping multiple machines in order. I want a machine that is sufficiant all my needs.
1 GB RAM. Nothing special about that. Not for a desktop. For a portable it's still on the high end.
160 GB disk. So what? How many offices don't have a server to store everything on? Depending on file servers for large amounts of storage you need to use remotely is stupid...
DVD burner. Optional on some laptops and you can always use an external to a docking station. Docking stations are somewhat heavier than this machine...
These are my requirements; High performance that is not compromised when I'm not at the office. All software, storage and media devices available regardless of whether I'm at the office. Just enough portability to make it from the office to the car and back in short order. Enough battery life to survive 60 minutes in a meeting, assuming it never goes standby. Cost low enough that I can get it in the budget with adequate frequency.
Given that set of requirements this machine is a good setup. It has no appeal to the dainty, sandal wearing consultant types of the.com age, but most of them are using 3 year old laptops and thankful for it.
Slashdot Mirror
So do 99% of the population
Now you're the one being naive. This stuff does more damage than 1%. A lot more. It reinforces other memes that some people want to believe and it is widespread. Remember the Heavensgate cult? That was the tip of the iceberg. To various degrees that nonsense has infected millions of minds.
...serious anti-nuke picture...
If I'm supposed to be afraid that "nuke"s are going to create a 200' tall latex lizard-monster that stop-motions to fire a stream of natrual gas at me... serious indeed.
Why should yours?
As an EE, I would expect that the electrical system is designed to be as well protected and fail-safe as possible, but...
As an intelligent human being, I'd expect a micro-car full of batteries to be likely to kill anyone stupid enough to ground on it after it has been mangled in a wreck. As someone having no overt desire to drive a giant battery, I have no reason to pretend otherwise. As a thoughtful individual, I won't be surprised when CNN points out how high pressure Hydrogen tanks are also an extreme hazard in accidents, and some other xE is astonished by the consequences of his eco-choice.
We have been refining automotive internal combustion systems for about a century. Everyone involved, from mechanics and insurance adjusters to rescue personnel, has an inherent understanding of the dangers. No great evolutionary change in our species has occurred during that time; we're still the same super-brained primates we were back then. So it stands to reason that we're going to have to learn the lessons in order to cope with these new machines, and that we'll do it the hard way; one nasty wreck after another...
If this doesn't rempresent the death of the megahertz as a processor-benchmark standard, I don't know what will...
Keep trying. This has zero relevance toward misguided attempts to debunk processor cycles as a performance measure.
Supposedly this device can reconfigure itself to support new instructions. Apply a faster clock and it will reconfigure, or execute the present configuration, that much faster.
Just because your pet CPU manufacturer doesn't have the capital or expertise to produce the fastest possible device doesn't mean they wouldn't if they could, or that you wouldn't be as happy as a clam if they did. The best course is to divorce yourself from the equation and stop playing favorites. These are electrical devices sold to a market of customers, nothing more. About the only real measure of value is to ratio of computational capacity over cost. The rest is silly fanboy noise.
Radio stations have been randomly shuffling music for a rather long time now. As a result, music is neatly compartmentalized into 2-4 minute chunks. Contemporary music is designed to be shuffled. The fact that you might enjoy your music as it was designed to be enjoyed is not a sign of brain damage. That some ivory tower mucky-muck professor of marketing seems to assign undo significance to "the sequence in which the artist decided to present it" means precisely squat. All the "hits" get re-released as "the best of"s in many cases with little or no production input from the original artists, it they're still alive, and customers promptly buy them. Artists and professors are over-rated.
Considering that even a worm brain can get its owner around, you'd think our capacity for juggling thoughts would be encyclopaedic.
It is. A worms locomotive requirements are relatively trivial; move toward moisture, dig, avoid sunlight, etc. That's the entire extent of a worms movement needs. No legs, so balance isn't an issue, either. We have somewhat more at stake with regard to our fate, also. It is a big deal if some bird swoops down and nabs us. Not so, the worm. Obviously we must consider a bit more when we move about. Simply standing upright is an enormous feat involving dozens of muscles and a hard, skeletal, jointed frame. Worms have no bones, they just sort of mush about from one spot to the next. Basically, that massive, overgrown nerve bundle on top of your neck is exactly what's needed to get you around.
Why have you assumed that the poster uses plain text?
a.) because the poster mentioned no encryption, which is reasonable because...
b.) for every message that gets encrypted, 2.3E9 messages don't.
c.) encryption works with web mail too, so the point isn't even relevant.
I encrypt all my mail as a matter of course.
Whatever. Outside of your tiny circle of geeks you may not have the expectation that your habits will be tolerated. That's where the rest of us live.
Am I alone in thinking of hotmail or yahoo or google as the kind of e-mail you use when you have no better alternative?
No. But you are mistaken. It's an excellent option for almost all email purposes.
I can't imagine why anyone who can afford the price of an Internet account wouldn't prefer Pegasus, Eudora, or even Outlook.
I don't want to license, upgrade, debug, etc. someone's proprietary email clients and/or servers, maintain servers and storage including backups, expose my network providing SMTP or POP/IMAP holes in my firewall, etc. etc. There are many reasons one can easily imagine. Try harder.
Beyond that, I want my e-mail archives on my computer, not on some random server that I don't control.
Why? So it's isolated from you if you can't communicate with your computer? I can hit my Yahoo stuff from literally anything, including my cell phone. Besides, any worthy web mail system will allow you to pull the mail via POP or IMAP, should you feel the need.
I want to know that I'm the only person who is accessing my files,
Nix email then. You do know unencrypted email travels through the Internet unencrypted, right?
and I don't want to wake up some morning and find out that the message that I desperately need to review is lost because of a server failure or DDOS attack.
A Yahoo (and, eventually, Google) email account has vastly more storage redundancy than anything you can cook up. Costs less, too. Won't break when you upgrade whatever manages the storage, since you don't manage or upgrade it, either. Doesn't force me to provide SMTP so I can just not worry about whatever silly hole is found in whatever 20 year old code base provides it. Won't infect my machines should I preview the wrong message due to incessant client bugs...
Relying on a webmail system for your primary communications just seems foolish.
Puttering around with local attached storage and obsolete email systems seems foolish. These web mail systems provide excellent spam control, scalability, low cost and high reliability. Frankly email service is a commodity now; just a value-add for some other service. Google will get web mail right, finally, and I'm done nursing email servers. 3 years from now PHB's are going to be asking why the hell they're paying for Exchange licenses, and wasting time with their IT monkeys misconfiguring the servers.
Do more firewalls make a more secure machine?
Yes.
It is clear that edge firewalls are not sufficient. A network with squishy insides is doomed the first time some "salesrep" wanders in from who-knows-where and plugs his broken, virus ridden, misconfigured, obsolete laptop into your switched network. Every cotton pick'n host connected to a network needs a basic stateful packet filter, and wouldn't it be nice if it was entirely OS independent?
There will be a firewall built into your chipset, your OS, your router...
Nothing wrong with that. Since when has choice been a problem? If it's responsible for passing packets it should have a means of filtering them. A simple principle, really.
A basic stateful packet filter (a.k.a firewall) is a fairly simple, well understood mechanism. Firmware is the ideal place to implement it. It will work regardless of which operating system is installed/upgrade/misconfigured. It will work before the OS boots! Many good commercial firewalls are based on only low-power embedded CPU's and flash memory, yet provide very comprehensive firewall functions, multiple interfaces with complex routing, VPN, SNMP, etc.
The only reason I still suffer with RealPlayer in any form is MIT's OpenCourseware. The RealPlayer client has always been a PITA and Real has always been it's own worst enemy. They had more than half a decade of opportunity. Microsoft's Media Player has done nothing exceptional; just suck a lot less.
for the love of god, stop misusing spreadsheets/excel as databases- They are for calculating numbers, not creating lists of things!!!!!!
The correct moderation of the parent is not overrated, but off-topic. The story is about the distortions created with spreadsheets by optimistic assumptions, not the banal matter of data maintenance.
The story discusses how "what-if" scenarios in spreadsheets are easily bent to produce the desired results. The story goes on to plug one of the authors favorite financial modeling tools as the "correct" alternative.
The argument is hogwash. If the input for a calculation (be it done in Excel, the calculator built into my cell phone, or a hoytee-toytee financial modeling tool) is bullshit then the result is bullshit. It's called lying. Which ever tool makes the lying easier and more credible will be what gets used. If, because it really is a powerful and credible financial modeling tool, the author's plugged favorite makes the lying more difficult, the liars will revert to Excel.
BTW, this is a non-problem. Lies built in spreadsheets are believed by fools only. Skeptical, intelligent people don't fall for it when they care enough to consider matters. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the amazing 150% ROI figure Oracle generates for you while selling you it's ERP or the promises of love and wealth provided by a 1-888-palmreader service. Fools get fooled and it's not the spreadsheet's fault.
Please establish a new Topic; Meaningless Academic Debates (MADS). In it, we shall place any discussion of CISC vs. RISC, DVD+R vs. DVD-R, big-endian vs. little-endian and, now, whether Sedna is or is not a planet. Thanks in advance!
Imagine if we had no knowledge of planets other than what we currently know about extra-solar planets. One day we built a Really Big Telescope and discover these small, "rocky" objects orbiting other stars. No doubt a debate would then ensue as to whether these objects are legitimate planets. Would it occur to anyone participating in this debate to make a distinction between Earth and Sedna?
The designation "planet" is entirely arbitrary and nearly obsolete. No matter what criteria you establish, some chunk of matter orbiting some star is going to screw up the charts. You may think it's possible, but sooner or later we'll find a big collection of iron ore sized slightly larger than Mars that was obviously built by someone and we'll have to decide whether something constructed is a "planet." As soon as we figure that out a giant ball of positrons with an atmosphere and a functioning ecology will appear. Space is really, really BIG and it doesn't confine itself to our ignorant, mostly sentimental, little classifications.
Can we please not entertain this nonsense any more than necessary? It is the academic equivalent of the World Wrestling Federation; plenty of self serving, dramatic heat and absolutely zero light. If not then classify it properly so I can weed it out.
Outsourcing LCD production is a good thing, after all?
It always has been. Nearly all LCD devices are produced by a small number of Taiwanese manufacturers and repackaged by everyone else.
CRT won't die until...
Define death. If LCD compromises performance (refresh, etc.) but not price, odds are the market will go 99% LCD and CRT will be rarified to specialty niches at very, very high cost. So while it will still be possible to get a CRT, you won't be able to afford it.
LCD and plasma already attain sufficiant performance for the bulk of what the market wants. The only issue remaining is price. Those people who really need CRT (a small fraction of those that will think they do,) will just have to get funded.
Hopefully the name will get changed prior to getting this into the JSE platform. Does it bother anyone else to imagine having to talk about something called Groovy in a professional environment? The Groovy site is chock full of cuteness about making this or that more or less "groovy". I don't mind it personally but it's not helpful when you expect non-technical types to have faith in stuff.
Anyhow, the JSE platform could use an implicit scripting language. I can see the technical merit in this. A Groovy based shell (with exceptions, an abstract file system, all the JDBC goodness integrated, etc.) that works right everywhere would be a nice bit of progress.
christ do you people sit around all day _LOOKING_ for ways to complain and be outraged?
Why, yes. Yes we do.
Please avoid further mentions of Western religious figures.
Thanks!
100 bucks on vitamins?
Watched about 45 minutes of The History Channel last night. About 50% of the adds were pills. Allergy pills, vision pills, weight loss pills, energy pills...
Some of this stuff is borderline criminal. The "better ocular health" one was a good example. Some old guy, driving, almost pulls out in front of a semi-tractor trailer he failed to see. Presumably the eye pill resolves this little problem. He can now detect large, shiny, noisy, fast moving objects at range. Amazing. A new pill has caused someone that must have been as blind as a door knob to become capable of driving safely. Naturally I believe every word and I'm convinced he and the other millions of members of the target audience will be perfectly safe on the road. No doubt they'll all have a high degree of confidence in their super vision and refuse to believe they aren't 110% competent.
This sort of snake oil is precisely where 99% of that new "prescription drug benefit" will go. Bunch of repackaged vitimins and legal forms of speed.
"But at $79.99 a month, it's only a good deal to those who can write it off as a business expense."
Grrr. I'm paying $60 for a (highly rate limited due to the # of subscribers) 256Kbps 802.11 uplink, $99 for 128Kbps IDSL (yeah, I know it's just repackaged ISDN) because the former is too unreliable, and $15 for a decent dial-up to backup all the others because I can not afford not to have a connection! If I thought it would help I would kill someone to get 600Kbps for $80.
You can not function in the modern employment world above the level of "service" without solid, fast Internet connections. If you haven't figured this out yet you're grist for the unemployment line. It's a personal expense the same way a plumber pays for a toolbox full of tools. Get it?
there are protocols that are being used by the likes of cisco that make a 56k modem faster than broadband. Why is it not being implimented? The broadband companies need to make the money back from the investment in their infrastructure.
...and now Cisco has a "protocol" that makes a 56k modem faster than "broadband."
"Detroit" has a 100mpg carburetor that oil companies suppress to maintain price.
"Alternative" medicine is rejected by "Western" medicine to preserve medical monopolies.
Solar power if so cheap and efficient that it can easily provide for all our energy needs, but is prevented from being adopted to maintain "power company" profits.
Unions are the source of all progress but have been ruined by business.
NASA is an aerospace subsidy and ignores scientists to fund "big budget" projects like the Space Shuttle.
America hoards food that could eliminate starvation planet wide.
The media is controlled by any one of; corporate interests, right wing Christians or left wing socialists.
The Cold War was created to justify the "Military Industrial Complex."
Power lines, cell phones and chlorine are causing a cancer epidemic.
they can't say anything if it's launched from the moon
That's pretty darn naive. "They" do what's done as much for political reasons as any real concern for the environment. They will have zero difficulty inventing a plethora of reasons to oppose nuclear anything, anywhere. You will be told how incompetent, greedy American corporations are threatening the survival of the planet for nuclear profit. Bank on it.
ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?
Yes. However, some nights when I drive home from work I eye a bridge abutment thinking I'd like to bury my car in it at 140mph. So I'm not certain that whether I'd like to do something is a great way to evaluate it. What's your point?
BTW, is there a simple way to disable an airbag? Isn't there supposed to be a switch someplace? Thanks.
Will I need a license to build a campfire? I understand that burning stuff causes buckyballs and bits of nanotubes and whatnot to appear. Am I not, therefore, guilty of violating NEC's patents by "manufacturing" their product without a license?
Just wondering. I'd hate to violate the sanctity of this most worthy collection of patents...
These are my requirements; High performance that is not compromised when I'm not at the office. All software, storage and media devices available regardless of whether I'm at the office. Just enough portability to make it from the office to the car and back in short order. Enough battery life to survive 60 minutes in a meeting, assuming it never goes standby. Cost low enough that I can get it in the budget with adequate frequency.
Oh yea, and a Large flat panel and good size keyboard. I will spend 8, 10, 12+ hours working on the machine. I don't mean reading email. I mean working. Don't give me this "use a desktop" bullsh*t. I don't have time to monkey around with keeping multiple machines in order. I want a machine that is sufficiant all my needs.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
.com age, but most of them are using 3 year old laptops and thankful for it.
3 GHz P4. OK, that's pretty nice.
That's damn nice. Certainly not stupid...
1 GB RAM. Nothing special about that.
Not for a desktop. For a portable it's still on the high end.
160 GB disk. So what? How many offices don't have a server to store everything on?
Depending on file servers for large amounts of storage you need to use remotely is stupid...
DVD burner. Optional on some laptops and you can always use an external to a docking station.
Docking stations are somewhat heavier than this machine...
These are my requirements; High performance that is not compromised when I'm not at the office. All software, storage and media devices available regardless of whether I'm at the office. Just enough portability to make it from the office to the car and back in short order. Enough battery life to survive 60 minutes in a meeting, assuming it never goes standby. Cost low enough that I can get it in the budget with adequate frequency.
Given that set of requirements this machine is a good setup. It has no appeal to the dainty, sandal wearing consultant types of the