OT Wrong advertised specifications

[Doug Miller]

Of course not -- but it *does* have bearing on the throughput ["speed"] of the device that's *processing* that signal.

[HeyBub]

Right. There's one in Albany. None in Brooklyn, Bronx, Buffalo, and One in Niagra Falls. One each in Cheektowaga, Hamburg, Amherst, Clarence, Lockport, Batavia, and Fredonia. Among others.

New York is lip-deep in Walmarts.

[HeyBub]

I'll put you down as undecided.

According to Walmart, the "save a few bucks" is much more. The company, again according to them, has saved lower-income Americans more money than all the welfare programs combined (Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, WIC, etc.).

As for mistreating employees, we did away with slavery in the Second War of Independence - employees are certainly permitted to find better places to work.

When a WalMart store opened in Jaunary of last year, across the street from Chicago, the store advertised for 325 positions. They got 25,000 applications, 90% from Chicago ZIP codes (Chicago itself doesn't allow Walmart stores). Must be a lot of masochists in the Chicago area if Walmart is as Draconian as some believe.

Disrespect for the environment? Walmart is committed to selling 100 million CFLs this year and has several other programs in the works (fuel efficiency for its trucks, recycling, re-use, etc.), including demonstration stores in McKinney, Texas, Lawrence, Kansas, and Oklahoma and California.

The store I visit (140,000 sq ft) has skylights and use almost no electric lighting during the day. Do you have any large retail stores in your area that do the same? Any?

The percentage of Walmart employees availing themselves of Walmart's health insurance plan is slightly better than retailing as a whole (48% vs 45%). Those employees that do use public health insurance (mainly Medicare) are part-timers who are wholly eligible.

I understand your complaint about moving manufacturing to China, but Adam Smith settled this complaint in the 18th Century with "The Wealth of Nations."

Some people just don't keep up.

[Peter A]

Perhaps you high-school physics "C" students will do us the great favor of taking your moronic twaddle off the cooking newsgroup.

[ransley]

Run full Vista, it takes 1GB ram.

[Doug Miller]

Gravity has an extensive kill-filter functionality...

[Peter A]

"According to WalMart." Gee, the font of truth. But I agree, WalMart has provided lower prices to many Americans. At the same time it has lowered wages and forced a lot of people into a situation where they have no choice but to scrounge for the very lowest prices. Often, because their jobs have vanished thanks to WalMart.

Except that those "better places to work" no longer exist because WalMart has driven them out of business or out of the country.

Not masochists, but desperate people who have nowhere else to work because WalMart has driven other retail stores out of business and has pushed manufacturing overseas.

WalMart has indeed done various things that are good for the environment. You miss my point, however. They do these things for one and only one reason - to reduce costs and increase profits. All well and good, but it's still a corporation motivated solely by greed and not by public good. When it helps the bottom line, the environment can go to hell. Of course, WalMart is hardly alone in this, but they seem particularly venal and insensitive.

Medicare is for old folks, perhaps you mean Medicaid.

Your stats may be true, but so what? No other company comes remotely close to WalMart in terms of the drain on the public treasury to provide health care for its employees. It's shameful that I and other taxpayers have to pay many millions to provide health care for workers who are helping WalMart to rake in billions in profits.

Look at the way Target treats its employees. Look at CostCo. Both are popular and profitable companies, not without their faults, but way ahead of WalMart in every way.

Frankly, you sound like a WalMart stooge. Perhaps you are just trying to justify your shopping there.

[HeyBub]

Possibly. 95% of Walmart employees shop at Walmart.

The more manufacturing we can push overseas, the better for all of us. As Adam Smith said (I mentioned him earlier), each country should do what it does best and when that happens each country prospers.

As for "increasing profits," every one of their demonstration stores runs at a loss for the enviornmental test. For example, they are attempting to heat the stores with reclaimed grease/oil/something. There is no way, according to them, they can recover the cost of installing the system. But it's a learning test.

By the way, greed is good. The poor cannot donate to charity.

Ah, you've not been to Walmart.

I agree that no other company comes close. Walmart is the largest employer in the country.

You recall that Target evicted the Salvation Army kettle people. Walmart not only welcomes them but often donates an employee to ring the bell if the Army is short-handed.

Frankly, you sound like a union goon. Perhaps you resent people working for an honest day's pay.

(See, I can insult with the best of them.)

[HeyBub]

I found a page listing state ranking.

New York has 37 WalMart SuperCenters, slightly behind Kansas and Iowa, each with 39. But way ahead of New Mexico (28). Texas has 259.

But Texas has more people who need bargains than does New York.

[krw]

On a motherboard, about eight inches (a foot in air). Not that that fact has anything to do with the maximum clock frequency achievable.

The difference does matter. The length of a PCI clock on a plug-in card, for instance, has to be within .1" (2.5" +/- .1", IIRC). The

*difference* in trace lengths is more important than length.

[krw]

No, there is no difference between formatted and unformatted disk size (unformatted disk drives don't exist in the wild). The issue is that disks are sold by the decimal megabyte (10^6 bytes) rather than binary "megabytes" (2^16 bytes) as memory is.

What "same thing"?

Celerons aren't horrible anymore, unlike the original.

Of course not. WallyWorld doesn't know any more about computers than the average reader of these groups. ;-)

[Bill]

There are plenty of Walmart's lots closer to NYC than Albany and the other cities you mentioned. There are several on Long Island and a couple in Westchester.

Also, there are Home Depot's and Costco's in NYC (including Manhattan), so the excuse of not having enough room to build one is bogus. They may not be willing to pay the price for the real estate but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

Bill

[Bill]

Right, for older machines 256mb was very common. But not for current desktops, which is what we are discussing here.

Bill

[Bill]

What makes you think it wasn't local?

Bill

[Mark Anderson]

There is one in Chicago now.

WalMart is selling out America allowing the Chinese to dump goods into this market crippling our manufacturing base. Once we can't manufacture anything we are dependent upon foreign nations, such as China, to build anything. One of America's greatest strengths post WWII came from its ability to build lots and lots of shit.

China refuses to float its currency thus making its goods cheaper than they really are. Dumping is technically illegal in this country in that it eliminates competition destroying a free market but somehow no one in Congress can do anything about China now -- thanks to WalMart. China plans decades and centuries ahead. Wall Street plans for the next quarter. By owning so much US Debt and US dollars China already can cripple this nation economically more than any terrorist or 1000 terrorists could do in any attack or coordinated attacks.

That hillbillies from Texas are fanboys of Walmart because they save a few dollars on whatever useless crap they're too stupid not to buy does not surprise me. Ironically WalMart started out selling only US made goods and marketed itself as the ultimate American company. Too many people probably think this is still true when in reality, WalMart's pursuit of profits by allowing itself to be a conduit for cheap Chinese goods could one day destroy our economy.

[SMS]

The UMA graphics is fine unless you're doing CAD/CAM or high-powered gaming. However it does mean that you're going to want to go to 1.5GB or

2GB even for Vista Home once you subtract the memory that the video card is using.

[Paul M. Cook]

11.8 inches I happen to have one of Grace Hoppers nanoseconds. It is a length of wire 11.8 inches long. I got it from her when I attended a speech she gave at the DODARPA office I worked at in 1985.

What you should not is that you do not understand what I am saying because you do not know what you are talking about. Did I mention I studied computer science in college? We learned all kinds of stuff.

You lost the argument. Your claim is patently incorrect. It is wrong. It sufferes from a dearth of correctnes. It is truth challenged. It is factually insufficient. It's BS. You made a statement that was just plain wrong.

11.8 inches

186,000 *2^(-32) That should get close enough.

Which manufacturer? AMD and Intel are not the only manufacturers, you know?

Doug, I'm done with your game. You made a claim that was wrong. Get over it.

Paul

[Dave Martindale]

Of course, this was done for illustration purposes. That length is correct for an electromagnetic signal travelling in a vacuum (or air, which is nearly identical) only. In real computers, signals are carried in microstrip transmission lines (signal trace on one face of a PC board with an internal ground plane, or ground on the other face), or twisted-pair transmission lines, or even coaxial cable transmission lines. In those, the velocity is somewhat lower, and a nanosecond takes you a shorter distance - about 60-80% of the distance in a vacuum.

Dave

[Dave Martindale]

Actually, he does have a point. Transmission delays through wires and other bits of hardware set a floor on latency - the time it takes for an unpredictable input to influence the output. But it doesn't limit throughput. In the same way that a CPU with a long execution pipeline may have many computations "in process" at a given time, communication links may have several signal states "in flight" within a single cable at a given time.

As clock rates and data rates climb, computer components look more and more like independently-clocked units networked together with high-bandwidth links, rather than classical "bus" communications where everyone is synchronized to a common clock and everyone has to see the same data.

Dave

[Edwin Pawlowski]

You may be right, but the American consumer is complicit in this. WalMart would not have any success unless the consumer bought the stuff. We used to have a choice but there is not much made in USA left.