The race is on!
There's gold in them thar hills.
2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
Naturally Sony's former headquarters is incompatible with the surrounding infrastructure, traditional phone, power and water systems, and traditional office furniture. The IT infrastructure is locked down in such a way that the buyer can take possession but only Sony can truly control it. As such it will be marginably habitable but to get full advantage of their purchase the buyer will have to throw the building away and buy a new generic building from another vendor.
We got you dead to rights on these 13 felonies here, and they're doozies. Look at -'em! Computer hacking, cracking and mayhem no jury or judge is gonna understand. Heck, the judge in your case doesn't even use a computer: he dictates his email. These are fine fat felonies that retail as much as four years each in the big time federal pound me prison full of hepatitis and AIDS and stabbings and beatings and whatnot. Now we'll probably only ask for half that if you put us to the trouble of working you through the court. Your mother will cry every day until she dies. Your family will burn every asset they have on fruitless appeals and die poor. They will be disgraced before the community.
But I like you kid. You remind me a little of my nephew - he's a bright kid too. My docket is full and we could save some time here. Besides, I've got a quota to meet and I'm having a little bit of a dry spell, so you could help me get the ball rolling again. Tell ya what I'm gonna do. I'll let you have the whole baker's dozen 4-year bigtime felonies for the low, low price of only two weeks each. That's, what, total six months easy time in the jammies and slippers recreational jail for the slightly criminally inclined. What a steal! That's one cent on the dollar! You'll be out by summer. But you gotta act fast. I got a fence I'm talking with this afternoon I can probably get to turn state's evidence and then this is all off the table. So. Whaddya say? We in business?
If you go to HP's website and choose "advanced PCs" you will see a broad selection of PCs engineered for both Windows 8 and Windows 7, licensed for Windows 8 Pro but with Windows 7 Pro on. It's hard to even find the ones with W8 on now.
http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USSMBPublicStore-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse?CatalogCategoryID=2XAQ7EN5tHwAAAEuvqEV2RV3
This is no different from the Vista days when Microsoft bragged they sold millions of copies of Windows Vista for PCs that never ran it, nor ever could. Microsoft needs to declare victory even if they have to pre-sell W8 with downgrade rights to OEMs selling PCs pre-"downgraded" to W7, and deeply discount it to do so. They've sold "60 million licenses" - and now OEMs can put W7 on and Microsoft can sell it as a W8 license, and probably had to discount W8 licenses to get the sale. In the Vista days I pointed in a number of comments to the fact that HP workstations nominally came with Vista, but didn't even support the software - they came pre-downgraded to XP and Vista is not even supported on that hardware still today.
But even this isn't saving PC sales. We like our iPads and Android tablets. Yes, we do.
What I want most of my modern science and appliances is that whether I am there or not, they obey me. I bought them. I own them. It is my right. If I'm bringing home a notable personage I need to be able to tell my home to light the top lights, dim the bottom lights, light the driveway strobe and turn off the farking dishwasher so we can talk. APICs are the slaves or the modern era, and we need not feel guilt about imposing on their needs.
A few years hence when AIs are given sufferance and protection, that is a different question.
This is a key solution others (WP?) should have tried. Hackers are now pirating Android apps and selling them in the Blackberry App store. You should be able to side-load Android apps to kickstart the BB10 ecosystem, forcing the utility into the device even without the app-maker's intent or consent. Almost all of the myriad Android apps (but nothing with NDK).
Yes, it's not Kosher. It's not legit. It's cheating. RIM will have to put a stop to it eventually when somebody legally calls their attention to it. In the mean time though, it's enough of the fine end of a wedge to get a credible product launch.
Scrappy move, RIM. I had counted you out. While I can't morally approve of this maneuver I can respect that it's what you had to do, and therefore ethical. I award you five points and move your token from "doomed" to "at risk". I'd have preferred you just made RIM quality Android handsets in the first place, and got the Google Play store. Hubris being what it is though, I understand.
The component cost on the high def displays isn't that much more. And the quality difference for photography is amazing. Then there's the multiple-windows thing with a real OS.
1080p on a cellphone - that's ridiculous. 400+dpi? I would need an ocular upgrade. But this rez on a 14" tablet is not uncalled for.
This is a headless NAS. There are only two possible reasons why instead of browser-independent web management it requires a Windows / Mac client app to be installed.
Either: the developers are incompetent. They go the long way around because it's the only way they know.
Or: they've some motivation to induce in their customers a dependency on Windows / Mac they may not already have. I.E. the main thrust is not only to provide a great product.
No sale.
Besides the fact that a third of people imprisoned are so because of simple marijuana possession, there are the network effects of criminalization including violence that we acknowledged when we decriminalized alcohol in the US. If it isn't illegal you don't have to kill or hurt people over disclosing your involvement in it, nor policemen arresting you for it. If local grow is legal, importation issues like mules are completely gone. We really do get to let go of half of our court cases and jail populations, with a concurrent savings in cost. And the decrease in street violence is just a fringe benefit.
The cost is that more people will sit on their couch eating Hot Pockets and drinking Mountain Dew while they play XBox, torching a bowl now and then. I'm OK with that. I don't have to pay for that.
That was beautiful. It was also wrong. The plants bond the Carbon and _Hydrogen_ atoms together, having received the hydrogen from water and carbon from the air. Oxygen is thereby released, not bonded, as the H2O molecule discards the unnecessary oxygen. The plants make _hydrocarbons_.
But I give you nine points for art. Though it was wrong, it was nicely done.
Almost all energy received from the sun not immediately radiated away is metabolized in photosynthesis. As is heat radiated from the core of the Earth, which still has considerable contribution from infall friction. A temperature increase improves the habitat where algae grow, which is typically inhibited by cold. And so Algae will reverse this trend in time and sink all of the carbon that we produce.
It's neither a good nor a bad thing. Oil provides useful lubricants, and we should be mindful of that.
1. They finally fixed the font rendering exploit bug? That only took nine years. I suppose in a few years they'll start looking at their gradient rendering engine. Or NTFS.
2. Oops, the fix broke their competitors applications but their own applications were recently patched to not be harmed in advance? Who could have expected that to happen? That's odd. I am shocked.
Since Surface 2 will be around $900 and I can already get 10" Android tablets for $150, it just doesn't seem likely. Sure it's better hardware, but the software is lame. And the hardware is not 6x better to earn the 6x price. Almost all the value is in the software after all, and these Android tabs have access to over 600,000 apps.
We have finally found the road to that "impossible" $100 laptop.
Funny... that's where I got my two at the top of this thread. Did you try their website? You know they have site to store, and free shipping on items over $50 right? Though they had 88 under $100 options at the time, it seems they've now sold out of all except this one: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Hot-Holiday-Tablet-Bundle-with-Your-Choice-7-Tablet-and-Accessory-Kit-Value-Bundle/22254826
And that doesn't look so different from the ones I got. It seems that these are the hot thing for under the tree this year. Bump up to $150 like the fine article does, and you can have one up to 10" with similar characteristics. Not much time left before the holiday though. It looks like all of these are selling out fast.
Seriously I bought two of them. They are all over the place. There are a lot of models to choose from at that price, but I got the "SuperSonic Matrix SC-72MID". 7" capacitive touchscreen, dual cam, 1.4Ghz processor, Android 4.0 with Google Play. USB, USB OTG cable included, uSDHC. Flash Player. At 4GB the onboard storage is a little light - only 1.7GB to spare out of the box, though this version of Android lets you move most apps to a cheap SD card. 8 or 16GB really should be the minimum though. Touch could be more responsive. Viewing angles and color are ok but not great. Web browsing is fine. $89 each delivered. It could be a little snappier overall.
But for $89? Come on! That's ridiculous already. The cooler thing is that next year is going to be even better. The pace of progress in these mobile devices is simply astounding.
Well since it's old home week, here's IDC forecasting 30 million Windows Phone sales in 2011. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/update-idc-30-million-windows-phone-7-handsets-to-be-sold-by-end-2011/8451
This wasn't four years out. It was next year at the time.
I'm pretty sure they whiffed that one, but Microsoft used it to intimidate a lot of people to do things based on that fantasy - to their detriment.
Missing an "at least" or an "up to". A page like forbes.com articles would doubtless be halved. El Reg's simpler layout and such more like 15%.
Of course, that's in optimal cases. Nothing SPDY can do about latency introduced by must-load ad affiliate networks blocking page rendering, and not responding for ten seconds at a time.
Some of us are aware that an 800lb gorilla beating up everybody in our neighborhood for 30 years does affect us personally. We would like to be rid of that gorilla, and it's starting to look possible. Already he's more of a Baboon, and we'd like to see him shrunk to about a spider monkey at least.
That is a huge impact. And now the astroturfing campaign seems shifted to "Wait for RT PRO - A Full Wintel tablet is our only hope!" Without a thought to the whole "Santa thing" or the fact that Wintel tablets have not ever moved significant units after being available for fifteen years.
If they're counting on a Wintel tablet to save them - and at that launched into the January post-Christmas inventory blowouts, they may as well give up hope right now.
Meanwhile Apple and Samsung are singing "I'm in the money..." as their supply chains churn out hundreds of millions of units to eager customers the world over with ready cash. Android and iOS devices are flying off of shelves effortlessly.
Then they have the gall to suggest macro-economic issues, as if we aren't laying out technology budget bigger and faster than ever before - just not on their stuff. Nonsense!
The primary advantage of each new version of Microsoft Office is that it isn't compatible with anything. Not even older versions of Office. So people get it, make documents others can't read, and then demand that they buy it too. It helps us early adopters feel better about ourselves to know we can make others follow us in this way.