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Comment Re:This is one place Apple has it right (Score 1) 597

I don't know why none of the PC makers can do this

Because PC makers work with far lower margins. If one of the component-makers give you a $0.50 discount on their components if you put their sticker on every laptop, and if you know that all your competitors already do so and have a 50 cent advantage in their battle for the customer (or any step between you and the customer), you don't have any justification to not also add another useless sticker.

Apple has far higher margins. Part of the design-tax is the absence of stickers. Which costs them money.

Comment what were they thinking? (Score 1) 212

Why did they develop a solution that has to be installed on the part of the infrastructure they have the least control of and that has the biggest diversity?

How will they roll this out? Forced install? For every OS? Including the OS on my media box with its crappy bittorrent client? And since the software physically runs inside the homes of people, that could open up a ton of legal troubles. What's so hard about making a law that forces ISP's to install monitoring software?

Somehow I'm happy that this seems to be a typical govenment IT-f#ckup.

Comment Re:No, what US Health Care Needs (Score 1) 584

A big part of efficient health care is to keep people out of hospitals. Prevent, inform and make basic health care easy, accessible and inexpensive. If this patient you're talking about had the option of going to a local doctor for a basic diagnosis and medicine for free (or a couple of dollars), I guess he would have done it. If his only option was going to a hospital where the doctor would give him unnecessary treatments and squeeze every dollar out of him while losing his insurane for the rest of his life, a first sign of a disease would mean as much as a personal bankruptcy for him. It's no wonder people are going to try to live with easy-to-cure diseases until it's too late and expensive treatment is necessary. You say he's an idiot, but actually he just decided that getting rid of a small inconvenience wasn't worth a personal bankruptcy.

Besides, the whole financial incentives system is broken. If a 400lb patient comes to the cardiologist, what is the financial incentive to just assign the patient a lifestyle coach, which is the only long term cure for his/her problems?

Comment Re:expected behaviour (Score 2, Interesting) 67

Hybrid drives aren't made to be first choice. They're made to be an affordable choice. If you want to assemble an affordable but fast PC nowadays, you'll probably end up with a 40GB SSD for OS+Apps with a cheap, silent and big hard disk for storage. The problem with this approach is the barrier at 40GB. What if your SSD needs more space? What if it turns out that some frequently-used data is on the hard disk? Or that 60% of the OS files are hardly used? Hybrid drives try to decide for themselves which data should be optimized.

But I'm not really sure that they're optimizing at the right level. Maybe they should expose themselves to the operating system as two separate partitions and let the filesystem implement the optimization while showing up as one single volume to the end-user.

Comment expected behaviour (Score 3, Interesting) 67

poor sequential read throughput

That's the expected behaviour of this disk. Extremely fast for common tasks (booting and loading apps) and slower for less common and less performance-critical tasks. If you really need the SSD-like performance for all your tasks, buy a 500GB+ SSD, if you have the money for it.

In a number of tests, the XT is actually slower than Seagate's year-old Momentus 7200.4, a drive that costs $40 less.

That's because it's probably a $40 cheaper disk with an $80 SSD attached to it.

Comment Re:And... (Score 5, Insightful) 559

And what if I have nothing to hide for the current government but don't get the assurance that today's laws are tomorrow's laws?

With enough information in the hands of governments, it's very easy to change a law, criminalize something that was perfectly legal and find and eliminate most of the 'criminals' under those new laws.

I know I'm kind of invoking Godwin's law here, but in 1939 it was perfectly legal to be Jewish here in the Netherlands. In the 1930s the Dutch government made an almost perfect register of the whole population, so in 1940 it was very easy for the Nazis to eliminate almost all the Dutch Jews.

Privacy

"Breathtakingly Stupid" EU Cookie Law Passes 447

Reader whencanistop writes with some details on an upcoming EU law that slipped under the radar as it was part of the package containing the "three strikes" provision, which attracted all the attention and criticism. "A couple of weeks ago we discussed the EU cookie proposal, which has now been passed into law. While the original story broke on the Out-law blog from a law perspective ('so breathtakingly stupid that the normally law-abiding business may be tempted to bend the rules to breaking point'), there has now been followup from a couple of industry insiders. Aurelie Pols of the Web Analytics Association has blogged on how this will affect websites that want to monitor what people are looking at on their sites, while eConsultancy has blogged on how this will impact the affiliate industry. In all of this the general public is being ignored — the people who, if the law is actually implemented, will have to proceed through ridiculous screens of text every time they access a website. I know most of you guys hate cookies in general, but they are vital for websites to know how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user."

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