Comment Re:News at 11 (Score 1) 75
Walmart had a pretty sweet deal -- Xbox + Kinect + $50 gift card for $200. http://bfads.net/Walmart-Black-Friday-Xbox-360-4gb-Console-w-50-Walmart-GC
Comment Re:Amzon isnt dodging anything (Score 1) 639
If I am in california and buy something from a company with a presence in California and my purchased items ship from California to me I should pay California sales taxes.
But they don't have a presence in California, your orders placed with Amazon are fulfilled by a [legally] different company!
They are essentially drop shipping everything you order.
Comment Re:Enough of this (Score 1) 811
I feel it's important to point out that Amazon actually has a presence in Texas, and therefore when they sell product to Texans they actually do need to be collecting sales tax and remitting it to the State of Texas.
Are you sure the company that sold you the product has a presence?
I work for a company (not in Washington) that drop ships for Amazon. In other words, Amazon.com, LLC buys the product from us and we ship it to whatever address they want. In this case, it seems the "brick and mortar" argument is easily arguable to not apply because we have no ties with Amazon.
Now, what if Amazon warehouses were considered to be owned by a different company legally? I'll pick a name, say "Amazon.com KYDC, LLC".
Amazon.com, LLC does the same thing where they buy from this secondary company and have them ship it to the customer. Does Amazon.com, LLC still have a presence?
Comment Re:Boom. (Score 1) 325
Yep, the new Chevy Volt will be lithium, but the Prius and other hybrids are all NiMH. You said the exact reason why -- they were (still are?) the most proven battery technology at the time the cars were engineered. (That's also the "big deal" about the Volt -- GM is having to do a bunch of research to develop a car worthy lithium battery in a very short time.)
Comment Re:TI-99/4A (Score 1) 622
Yes! I have fond memories of programming simple programs in BASIC and storing my hangman dictionary on cassette. The keyboard was a little difficult -- I believe the colon, brackets, other normal punctuation were a special key + normal alphabet key. a picture
Comment Re:Memtest not perfect. (Score 1) 724
Agreed. I have an ASUS Intel board and I bought 4 x 2GB sticks. Pick any three and it was rock solid -- add in that fourth and the machine would blue screen or processes would mysteriously crash after some time.
Turns out it's a very common problem for boards to have trouble reliably powering all 4 DIMMs, and upping the voltage by
New Type of Particle May Have Been Found 281
An anonymous reader writes "The LHC is out of commission, but the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is still chugging along, and may have just discovered a new type of particle that would signal new physics. New Scientist reports that the Tevatron's CDF detector has found muons that seem to have been created outside of the beam pipe that confines the protons and anti-protons being smashed together. The standard model can't explain the muons, and some speculate that 'an unknown particle with a lifetime of about 20 picoseconds was produced in the collision, traveled about 1 centimeter, through the side of the beam pipe, and then decayed into muons.' The hypothetical particle even seems to have the right mass to account for one theory of dark matter."
Comment Re:Cost (Score 1) 518
And they offer financing at 5% APR!!! I can't even get that low of a rate from the government to bail out my bank.
AJAX Version of Mathematica Coming 75
stoolpigeon writes "The O'Reilly School of Technology is teaming up with Wolfram Research to provide on-line math courses using an AJAX version of Mathematica. O'Reilly has posted an and interview with Scott Gray, the director of OST, that has more details on the program (named Hilbert after David Hilbert) itself as well as the classes they will be offering."
PHP In Action: Objects, Design, Agility 232
Michael J. Ross writes "Despite being perhaps the most popular Web language in use, PHP has for much of its history been criticized for not offering the full capabilities of object-oriented programming (OOP). But with the release of version 5, PHP introduced a robust object model, and made it easier for its proponents to create well-architected Web sites and applications. In turn, the new OOP capabilities have facilitated additional best practices, such as design patterns, test-driven development, continual refactoring, and HTML templates. These topics and more are explored in the book PHP in Action: Objects, Design, Agility."
Perl 5.10, 20 Year Anniversary 304
alfcateat writes "Perl 1 was released to the public by Larry Wall 20 years ago yesterday. To celebrate, Perl5Porters have released Perl5.10, the latest stable version of Perl 5. Happy Birthday Perl!
Perl 5.10 isn't just a bug fix version: it's full of new features that I'm eager to use: named captures in regular expressions, state variables for subroutines, the defined-or operator, a switch statement (called given-when, though), a faster regex engine, and more. You can read more about the changes in perldelta."
Student and Professor Build Budget Supercomputer 387
Luke writes "This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own."
