Oh well, I'll bite. Absolutely destroying? The last quarter was something like 2.4 mill vs. 2.2 mill. for PS3 and 360. That's absolutely destroying? Hmm.
The installed base for the 360 is still about 8 million more than the PS3. At that rate of thrashing, it will only take Sony around 10 years to catch up!
The 360 has 7 mill consoles in Europe, so not dead there. Only valid comment in your post is that it's dead in Japan.
We probably shouldn't mention the software attach rate for the 360 is twice that of the PS3. I think the 360 is doing fine.
Also, you can make a case for the 360 being the dominant US console, if you look at software attach rate, 3rd party games, etc. The Wii is certainly doing well, but the 360 is holding it's own.
The player runs a type of virtual machine, but the actual code is contained on the disc itself. This code executes on the VM running on the player and authenticates the player/environment before it will allow the disk to play.
I'm not completely familiar with the crack of BD+, but I think they didn't complete crack the algorithm, just found a work around. Apparently they were able to change the coding slightly such that it breaks the work-around while still running in players.
While I personally agree (I couldn't live without Foxmarks, Adblock, etc), I'm not sure that the internet horde cares that much about extensions. I mean, I work with a lot of smart people (physicians) who have no clue what an extension is and don't really care.
I'd be curious what percentage of Firefox users actually use extensions. I would not be surprised if a quick, simple browser that loads ALL your web pages correctly would appeal to the majority of users.
I'd like to suggest quite the opposite, that this is the way it should be. Do not trust the government to protect your interests in this regard. Time and time again they've been proven slow, incapable, and even corrupt.
Meanwhile, it is private groups, reporters, etc. that keep things in check. While this system is far from perfect, it's certainly better than the government as the sole "protector" of our interests.
It's not 25k for a maxed out cluster. I configured it to match the cluster i just had built, hardware-wise, and it was $60k. And that was for one fewer compute node and significantly less storage on the storage node (only 1 GB vs. 4GB on mine). I payed $45k for a similar setup, but with a full-size rack rather than the mini-rack in this.
That's a pretty steep markup.
So not cheap.
Yeah, Steam certainly does it's job of getting me to pay closer to full price for games. Usually I would wait a few months and order the games significantly cheaper online, usually waiting for the $20-$30. However, the "now" factor of Steam has suckered me into paying close to full price for several games.
I generally could care less about the packaging. The really nice thing about Steam is that i don't have to worry about losing the disk/package to reinstall it. I'm willing to pay a couple extra bucks for that.
Well, you've touched on the demand side, but the supply side should be just as important. There are several carriers offering essentially the same service. Shouldn't competition drive the cost to something reasonable? I can get an "unlimited data" plan and transfer orders of magnitude more data than possible with SMS for the same price as the unlimited SMS plan. Does that make sense? The current situation reeks of price fixing to me.
Yes, what you're describing is actually in clinical practice fairly routinely now. From what I can tell without actually reading the article, these are serving slightly different purposes.
The pill with the camera (what you saw) is for looking at the bowel. It will not spend any significant time in the esophagus. It takes pictures as it travels through your bowel. AFAIK, it requires a bowel prep (drinking a bunch of nasty clear fluid for several hours) or the pictures will be full of crap, just like a regular endoscopy.
It seems like this device is made to keep suspended in the esophagus to take picture without the need for traditional upper endoscopy. It's not so much for looking at the intestines, which the other camera pill will do. So between the two devices, you should be able to cover pretty much the whole GI tract.
I would argue that neither are. Security through obscurity is more an idea than a design principle. It's talking about ways to get around the security OTHER THAN the encryption key (password).
The encryption key can be strong or weak, but it's not usually considered security through obscurity. Having several backdoors and hoping that nobody finds out about them would be security through obscurity, the obscurity being the "secret" backdoors.
For shimmer, it would be whether there is some other way to guess/figure out the open port other than having the sequence algorithm. The idea itself isn't really security through obscurity.
I'll add REM, Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen, the Cure, The Clash, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, the Smiths, Sonic Youth, Bon Jovi, Black Flag, Rollins Band, Talking Heads, the Ramones, Suzanne Vega, 10000 Mainiacs, and Lyle Lovett off the top of my head.
It was the era of the emergence of indie rock and grunge, and the "mainstreaming" of punk rock.
I agree. You can find great popular music being made in any decade or century. The inability to do so likely suggests you're looking for a specific style that isn't represented by most musicians in that decade.
IMHO, early REM, U2, and Dire Straits hold up to anything from any decade from a popular music standpoint.
Well, that's not what they were talking about.
There have been reports trying to estimate how much fossil fuel is required to be burned in order to plant, harvest, process, and distribute the ethanol. They then compare that to how much energy you get out of the ethanol when you burn it and compare it to how much fossil fuel energy was burned to make that ethanol. Some have estimated that you actually use more energy (in fossil fuels) to make it than you get when you burn it.
In other words, you would have been better off just burning the fossil fuel to begin with.
I haven't actually seen the calculations, so I have no idea whether this is really true. I remember once trying to find the actual numbers but couldn't.
Yup. 5 Gig is a lot to transfer on a wireless plan. However, it's piddly on a wired connection. I often transfer twice that much in a day over a cable modem, so hopefully it doesn't apply to their FiOS plan.
Hmm, how carefully did you read that article. It says right there that the diagnosis was questionable since the strain was too similar to later strains. I guess this is implying that it may have been a contaminant?
At any rate, perhaps that makes the moon theory still viable.
As for the mod points comment, I don't undersand what you're asking. I don't strive for anything, expcept apparently for pissing you off?
The question was not whether to upgrade to Vista, the question was whether Vista was more unstable or "crappy" than ME. I would not recommend upgrading from XP to Vista, nor have I ever done so. My main box is still XP. However, I must say that I don't have significnatly more problems with Vista than XP at the moment.
Nobody with a sane mind will follow and upgrade to a costly system that "has problems but it is quite stable and performs reasonable on modern hardware [...], but nothing that can't be fixed in the next year, I suspect.", when a more reasonable system is available (XP). Would I recommend getting Vista on a new system? In some cases, I probably would. It depends on the user. For example, if you're building an HD HTPC, you're pretty much forced to go with Vista unless you're going to go strictly OTA. So I think I'm quite sane.
In regards to how I obtained Vista, I did neither. Well, I guess I payed for it with a bit of my time. I got Vista for free with this "Power Together" promotion they were running. I got Office 2007 Professional and Vista Business for playing some streamed videos about product development. I also am getting Vista on a Thinkpad laptop, but will likely downgrade that for now because my work will not support Vista yet.
My experience with ME was horrible. I had/used several machines with ME at home/work/friends' that I could just not keep running reliably. My experience with Vista so far has not been perfect, but not bad in my book. Maybe I'm giving it too much of a break, but I don't think so.
Your Vista also experienced some unexplainable power-downs. And you suspect the fault on your side. How nice ! I did not blame myself for the powerdowns, just stated that I have not bothered to investigate since they have been infrequent. They were not during use, but I would just come back after it had been left on and it was off. It could certainly be a Vista problem, or more likely some goofy power saver setting either in Vista or in the Bios.
Am I correct to suspect that you paid a tiny little bit for your 'modern hardware' as well ? I knew it. You are quite clever. Most people pay for new hardware. I'm really not sure of your point. I never upgrade the OS on old hardware - except my ME box I upgraded to XP because it was intolerable. So, yes, I bought new hardware, probably more than a "tiny litle bit", which I'm assuming was sarcasm. I recall that it was around $1800 for the complete box right after the Core 2 Duo was released, all parts from Newegg as usual. That might not have included the video card. I use it mainly for post-processing CFD computational simulations and it works fine for that. I am admittedly a hobbyist and probably upgrade and tinker more than I should or need to.
The GP is a troll as far as I'm concerned. The jury is not still out. ME was horrible. Vista is a good OS. It certainly has problems but it is quite stable and performs reasonable on modern hardware. It certainly has some annoyances and problems, but nothing that can't be fixed in the next year, I suspect.
When I had ME, my computer crashed literally every 15 minutes. I have only had to reboot my Vista machine once in the several months I've had it. It has mysteriously powered down a few times, which I suspect is either an issue with my UPS or with the power settings, but I haven't bothered to investigate. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with Vista. I'm not gaming on it yet, but have played CS:Source with no issues on it.
I agree with most of what you say. That is a good option for many people. My only comment would be that once you start working, it can be quite difficult to go back to finish school.
The bottom line is you should have some kind of realistic plan. The one you describe is certainly a viable one, but is fairly conservative. I suspect for many, in terms of lifetime earnings, a little debt up front may be the better course.
I think that's fair. However, in general, if you go to a top ranked school and work really hard, you're probably going to have more opportunities than going to a mediocre school even if you worked really hard there too.
This comes from many different reasons. One, I think the professors at the better schools are often better. Certainly that's not always true.
Second, being around a group of really smart people (peers, grad students, profs, etc.) often inspires you to learn more. You simply often have to work less hard to do well at a "lesser" school. If you're really self-motivated, I'm sure you can learn just as much. However, not that many people are that self-motivated. If you're acing the tests, you probably think you're working enough.
Finally, the school reputation itself is worth something on the interview trail.
My experience was opposite of yours. I went to a top undergrad school and while my parents payed a little more (got a 50% scholarship vs. a free ride at my state school), I was able to parlay that into having all my graduate school payed for with a stipend throughout school. My grad school was a well-respected state school, but certainly not of the reputation of my undergrad school. So I feel like my choice in undergrad payed off in the end.
My impression is similar, that you're most attractive in the field of patent law. I suppose you might also be more attractive as a corporate lawyer at a large engineering firm, but again I would guess that this is mostly patent law stuff.
This is mighty boring in my book, but lawyers certainly have higher ceilings of pay in general. If you enjoy engineering, I would think you'd be happier sticking with that. If not (which I suspect if you're considering other options), there are certainly opportunities for a lawyer with an engineering background, if you can live with being generally despised.
Are you serious? Not many make more than $50k without degrees. It's great that you did, and I would certainly agree that having a degree doesn't guarantee you a great salary. Despite everything, hard work and ambition still account for a lot these days. That is the way it should be. However, you're deluding yourself if you think that an employee is not at a significant advantage with a degree, all other things being equal.
Another thing to consider is that starting salary is not everything. People without degrees are often passed over for promotions into supervisory and management positions. So you need to look at what your ceiling is going to be in 10-20 years. I can tell you many senior electrical and chemical engineers easily get into six figures. I believe the percentage of people without a degree that make over $100k is small in comparison. This may have been less true 20 years ago, but it certainly is true now.
Now, that's not to say if you're smart and motivated that you won't make much more than that without a degree. Indeed, many of the very wealthy people I know do not have college degrees. These people have done well for themselves by starting their own businesses. That's a whole different subject, and certainly a much different risk/reward proposition that being a career employee.
If anything, I suspect that's much more of a comment on you than your Thinkpad. The Thinkpads of 6 years ago were far superior to the iBook. I think even most Mac fans would agree.
You can at least make an argument about MacBook Pros, but I still disagree. The MacBook is designed to be thin and stylish and excels in both categories. However, the Thinkpad is designed to be a workhorse. They're both nice. The ThinkPad has certainly cut some corners after Lenovo took over, but it's still a very solid machine and has multiple distinct advantages over the Mac.
From a productivity standpoint, it's just stupid to get a MacBook over a Thinkpad if you're primarily using Windows. You have to use an external mouse, since the single button thing just doesn't cut it. And the keyboard shortcuts don't map perfectly. Meanwhile the Thinkpad still has the best mobile pointing device ever invented. I challenge you to spend two months using the Trackpoint device and go back to using a touch pad. You won't be able to.
The Thinkpads offer much higher screen resolutions, allowing anyone doing serious graphical work (graphic designers, CAD, CFD, etc.) a huge advantage. I just don't get how anyone doing anything graphical would find the 15" Macbook Pro resolution acceptable. This always surprised me.
Perhaps the MacBook Pro is best for you, but I believe from a productivity standpoint most people primarily running Windows you be much better served with a Thinkpad.
I think they meant cachet. I suspect you don't know what it means, or you would have been able to deduce the intent. Look it up, just like you did cache. It's your word of the day. Keep it up for 2 years and you may almost be qualified for a Geico commercial.
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Oh well, I'll bite. Absolutely destroying? The last quarter was something like 2.4 mill vs. 2.2 mill. for PS3 and 360. That's absolutely destroying? Hmm.
The installed base for the 360 is still about 8 million more than the PS3. At that rate of thrashing, it will only take Sony around 10 years to catch up!
The 360 has 7 mill consoles in Europe, so not dead there. Only valid comment in your post is that it's dead in Japan.
We probably shouldn't mention the software attach rate for the 360 is twice that of the PS3. I think the 360 is doing fine.
Also, you can make a case for the 360 being the dominant US console, if you look at software attach rate, 3rd party games, etc. The Wii is certainly doing well, but the 360 is holding it's own.
The player runs a type of virtual machine, but the actual code is contained on the disc itself. This code executes on the VM running on the player and authenticates the player/environment before it will allow the disk to play.
I'm not completely familiar with the crack of BD+, but I think they didn't complete crack the algorithm, just found a work around. Apparently they were able to change the coding slightly such that it breaks the work-around while still running in players.
While I personally agree (I couldn't live without Foxmarks, Adblock, etc), I'm not sure that the internet horde cares that much about extensions. I mean, I work with a lot of smart people (physicians) who have no clue what an extension is and don't really care.
I'd be curious what percentage of Firefox users actually use extensions. I would not be surprised if a quick, simple browser that loads ALL your web pages correctly would appeal to the majority of users.
Be careful what you wish for.
I'd like to suggest quite the opposite, that this is the way it should be. Do not trust the government to protect your interests in this regard. Time and time again they've been proven slow, incapable, and even corrupt.
Meanwhile, it is private groups, reporters, etc. that keep things in check. While this system is far from perfect, it's certainly better than the government as the sole "protector" of our interests.
It's not 25k for a maxed out cluster. I configured it to match the cluster i just had built, hardware-wise, and it was $60k. And that was for one fewer compute node and significantly less storage on the storage node (only 1 GB vs. 4GB on mine). I payed $45k for a similar setup, but with a full-size rack rather than the mini-rack in this. That's a pretty steep markup. So not cheap.
Yeah, Steam certainly does it's job of getting me to pay closer to full price for games. Usually I would wait a few months and order the games significantly cheaper online, usually waiting for the $20-$30. However, the "now" factor of Steam has suckered me into paying close to full price for several games. I generally could care less about the packaging. The really nice thing about Steam is that i don't have to worry about losing the disk/package to reinstall it. I'm willing to pay a couple extra bucks for that.
Kidding of course. If you're wishing for two wives, you're clearly not married, or haven't been for long. Hard enough to keep one happy.
Be very careful what you wish for. (Still kidding...not really...yes I am).
Well, you've touched on the demand side, but the supply side should be just as important. There are several carriers offering essentially the same service. Shouldn't competition drive the cost to something reasonable? I can get an "unlimited data" plan and transfer orders of magnitude more data than possible with SMS for the same price as the unlimited SMS plan. Does that make sense? The current situation reeks of price fixing to me.
The pill with the camera (what you saw) is for looking at the bowel. It will not spend any significant time in the esophagus. It takes pictures as it travels through your bowel. AFAIK, it requires a bowel prep (drinking a bunch of nasty clear fluid for several hours) or the pictures will be full of crap, just like a regular endoscopy.
It seems like this device is made to keep suspended in the esophagus to take picture without the need for traditional upper endoscopy. It's not so much for looking at the intestines, which the other camera pill will do. So between the two devices, you should be able to cover pretty much the whole GI tract.
I would argue that neither are. Security through obscurity is more an idea than a design principle. It's talking about ways to get around the security OTHER THAN the encryption key (password). The encryption key can be strong or weak, but it's not usually considered security through obscurity. Having several backdoors and hoping that nobody finds out about them would be security through obscurity, the obscurity being the "secret" backdoors. For shimmer, it would be whether there is some other way to guess/figure out the open port other than having the sequence algorithm. The idea itself isn't really security through obscurity.
It was the era of the emergence of indie rock and grunge, and the "mainstreaming" of punk rock.
I agree. You can find great popular music being made in any decade or century. The inability to do so likely suggests you're looking for a specific style that isn't represented by most musicians in that decade. IMHO, early REM, U2, and Dire Straits hold up to anything from any decade from a popular music standpoint.
Well, that's not what they were talking about. There have been reports trying to estimate how much fossil fuel is required to be burned in order to plant, harvest, process, and distribute the ethanol. They then compare that to how much energy you get out of the ethanol when you burn it and compare it to how much fossil fuel energy was burned to make that ethanol. Some have estimated that you actually use more energy (in fossil fuels) to make it than you get when you burn it. In other words, you would have been better off just burning the fossil fuel to begin with. I haven't actually seen the calculations, so I have no idea whether this is really true. I remember once trying to find the actual numbers but couldn't.
You obviously don't know my wife.
Yup. 5 Gig is a lot to transfer on a wireless plan. However, it's piddly on a wired connection. I often transfer twice that much in a day over a cable modem, so hopefully it doesn't apply to their FiOS plan.
At any rate, perhaps that makes the moon theory still viable.
In regards to how I obtained Vista, I did neither. Well, I guess I payed for it with a bit of my time. I got Vista for free with this "Power Together" promotion they were running. I got Office 2007 Professional and Vista Business for playing some streamed videos about product development. I also am getting Vista on a Thinkpad laptop, but will likely downgrade that for now because my work will not support Vista yet. My experience with ME was horrible. I had/used several machines with ME at home/work/friends' that I could just not keep running reliably. My experience with Vista so far has not been perfect, but not bad in my book. Maybe I'm giving it too much of a break, but I don't think so.
Your Vista also experienced some unexplainable power-downs. And you suspect the fault on your side. How nice ! I did not blame myself for the powerdowns, just stated that I have not bothered to investigate since they have been infrequent. They were not during use, but I would just come back after it had been left on and it was off. It could certainly be a Vista problem, or more likely some goofy power saver setting either in Vista or in the Bios. Am I correct to suspect that you paid a tiny little bit for your 'modern hardware' as well ? I knew it. You are quite clever. Most people pay for new hardware. I'm really not sure of your point. I never upgrade the OS on old hardware - except my ME box I upgraded to XP because it was intolerable. So, yes, I bought new hardware, probably more than a "tiny litle bit", which I'm assuming was sarcasm. I recall that it was around $1800 for the complete box right after the Core 2 Duo was released, all parts from Newegg as usual. That might not have included the video card. I use it mainly for post-processing CFD computational simulations and it works fine for that. I am admittedly a hobbyist and probably upgrade and tinker more than I should or need to.When I had ME, my computer crashed literally every 15 minutes. I have only had to reboot my Vista machine once in the several months I've had it. It has mysteriously powered down a few times, which I suspect is either an issue with my UPS or with the power settings, but I haven't bothered to investigate. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with Vista. I'm not gaming on it yet, but have played CS:Source with no issues on it.
I agree with most of what you say. That is a good option for many people. My only comment would be that once you start working, it can be quite difficult to go back to finish school. The bottom line is you should have some kind of realistic plan. The one you describe is certainly a viable one, but is fairly conservative. I suspect for many, in terms of lifetime earnings, a little debt up front may be the better course.
This comes from many different reasons. One, I think the professors at the better schools are often better. Certainly that's not always true.
Second, being around a group of really smart people (peers, grad students, profs, etc.) often inspires you to learn more. You simply often have to work less hard to do well at a "lesser" school. If you're really self-motivated, I'm sure you can learn just as much. However, not that many people are that self-motivated. If you're acing the tests, you probably think you're working enough.
Finally, the school reputation itself is worth something on the interview trail.
My experience was opposite of yours. I went to a top undergrad school and while my parents payed a little more (got a 50% scholarship vs. a free ride at my state school), I was able to parlay that into having all my graduate school payed for with a stipend throughout school. My grad school was a well-respected state school, but certainly not of the reputation of my undergrad school. So I feel like my choice in undergrad payed off in the end.
This is mighty boring in my book, but lawyers certainly have higher ceilings of pay in general. If you enjoy engineering, I would think you'd be happier sticking with that. If not (which I suspect if you're considering other options), there are certainly opportunities for a lawyer with an engineering background, if you can live with being generally despised.
Just kidding.....sort of. Good luck.
Another thing to consider is that starting salary is not everything. People without degrees are often passed over for promotions into supervisory and management positions. So you need to look at what your ceiling is going to be in 10-20 years. I can tell you many senior electrical and chemical engineers easily get into six figures. I believe the percentage of people without a degree that make over $100k is small in comparison. This may have been less true 20 years ago, but it certainly is true now.
Now, that's not to say if you're smart and motivated that you won't make much more than that without a degree. Indeed, many of the very wealthy people I know do not have college degrees. These people have done well for themselves by starting their own businesses. That's a whole different subject, and certainly a much different risk/reward proposition that being a career employee.
You can at least make an argument about MacBook Pros, but I still disagree. The MacBook is designed to be thin and stylish and excels in both categories. However, the Thinkpad is designed to be a workhorse. They're both nice. The ThinkPad has certainly cut some corners after Lenovo took over, but it's still a very solid machine and has multiple distinct advantages over the Mac.
From a productivity standpoint, it's just stupid to get a MacBook over a Thinkpad if you're primarily using Windows. You have to use an external mouse, since the single button thing just doesn't cut it. And the keyboard shortcuts don't map perfectly. Meanwhile the Thinkpad still has the best mobile pointing device ever invented. I challenge you to spend two months using the Trackpoint device and go back to using a touch pad. You won't be able to.
The Thinkpads offer much higher screen resolutions, allowing anyone doing serious graphical work (graphic designers, CAD, CFD, etc.) a huge advantage. I just don't get how anyone doing anything graphical would find the 15" Macbook Pro resolution acceptable. This always surprised me.
Perhaps the MacBook Pro is best for you, but I believe from a productivity standpoint most people primarily running Windows you be much better served with a Thinkpad.
I think they meant cachet. I suspect you don't know what it means, or you would have been able to deduce the intent. Look it up, just like you did cache. It's your word of the day. Keep it up for 2 years and you may almost be qualified for a Geico commercial.
Thank you, Cary. We'll take your comments under consideration.
Another satisfied customer.