As of late, gaming notebooks were usually custom built by certain companies. They were tiny volume sellers and enormous profit making items. Everyone desired this type of portable, but it was too high priced. They the the most advanced technology and just the best laptops. Having said that the majority of us probably didn’t buy laptops of this variety because of the cost. Recently all that has seemed to have changed as the giant manufacturers have seen the opportunities in laptops for gaming.

Compared to the smaller retailers these manufacturers are aware that they can make even more markup. This can be a good opportunity to make tidy profits for them. In my opinion well known manufacturers can use leverage to convince prospects to buy laptops despite the price. This is an enormous threat to smaller boutique companies. I think once it becomes marketed to the masses it will lose some of the appeal. I think the uneducated automatically feel safe by buying from a brand they are familiar with.

The hype being created in regards to the latest branded gaming notebook computers is making potential customers see them as being the best laptops ever. This has the potential to be very positive for small manufacturers. I can see the option of getting to customize the notebook to be a cardinal buying factor. I think the people that buy laptops for gaming typically know what they are searching for. For particular customers specs and statistics are more meaningful than design.

This is all positive from the consumers position. Fresh technology will be accessible to everybody when prices are pushed lower. Although that’s my take on it, its just my point of view and most likely not what will happen.Prices will possibly remain relatively high because there are always new laptops being introduced. As the gaming laptop division becomes saturated with multinational manufacturers, most will apply a wait and see approach.

According to recent polls, more than 50 percent of Americans, and hundreds of millions of people elsewhere in the world believe that UFOs are authentic. For many it is a deeply held belief.

For decades there have been sightings of UFOs by countless people. It is a mystery that only scientific research can solve, and yet the phenomenon remains largely unexamined. Most of the reporting on this subject by the mainstream media holds those who claim to have seen UFOs up to embarrassing ridicule.

Today if you report a UFO to the U.S. government you will be informed that the United States Air Force conducted a 22-year investigation that ended in 1969 and concluded that UFOs are not a threat to national security and are of little or no scientific interest. But as one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists says in the program, “You simply cannot dismiss the possibility that some of these UFO sightings are actually sightings from some object created by … a civilization perhaps millions of years ahead of us in technology.”

For a long time now, people have been looking for a single site on the web that shows as much of the good UFO video footage that has been gathered throughout the years as possible. It is for this reason that www.ufos-to-go.org was made. No signups, no popups, and no spyware like the other sites. Just click and watch. This site was an absolute joy to explore. The videos housed at the site have had to pass tough scrutiny as to their authenticity. The site makes no claim to the existence of extraterrestrial visitors to our humble little planet, and offers up no opinions. The website leaves it up to you, the viewer, to draw your own conclusions and decide for yourself.

J B Thomas

The women I interviewed caused me to look at my clients in new ways. As Proust states, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” I discovered many aspects of enchantment in my clients as I began to look anew at them. I began to recognize, within my treatment room, extraordinary human beings. Yes, they often had difficult life situations, dysfunctional backgrounds, poorly functioning and damaging marriages, problem children and other disappointments, but they were still able to achieve many moments that worked well for them. Here were people who felt passion and excitement about many aspects of their lives.

What I saw led me to agree with those innovative professionals who have challenged the “disease” model, i.e.: the old way of looking at our clients or patients as primarily having problems, difficulties, dysfunctions, personality disorders or sickness. Classification numbers seem to be attached to them, labeling them as if they were items of clothing hanging from a department store rack. I began to perceive my clients differently, as if through a new lens–as people who have talents, who are survivors. They came equipped with a multitude of talents, capacities, hobbies, knowledge and passions. In the histories of their lives they experienced many enhances mental and/or physical states, even in far from ideal circumstances.

As children, my clients may have had special, peaceful ways of feeling when they went fishing alone by a pond, or when they were watching a sunset. This contented ego state of the ten-year-old was one way they experienced their ENCHANTED SELVES. Retrieved in adulthood, the positive state of being can serve as one Positive Fingerprint of the Mind and Positive Shadowprints are unique, as individual as one’s fingerprints, utilizing different positive capacities within them.

The women I interviewed made me aware of how we can forget what it felt like to be experiencing one’s ENCHANTED SELF. The way we were raised in our particular family may get in the way of recognition. This is particularly true if one’s family has dismissed something a child once loved to do, as being unimportant. For example, one might have enjoyed daydreaming while sitting on a swing. An irritated mother, calling from the back door, might have felt such an activity to be an unwise use of time. Someone else may have longed to be an artist or writer, but her family discouraged such “impractical” dreams. Another may have felt whole and pure while organizing a chaotic home life. Although not an ideal circumstance, the competencies one experienced and the sense of power may well have been another Positive Fingerprint of the Mind.

I began to realize that we, as therapists, need to understand, as well as help our clients to understand, that many of our earlier integrated moments, hours, days, weeks, our “optimizing opportunities” may have been long forgotten and discarded aided by family as well as societal values, opinions and options. Each of my clients may not have had the chance, in terms of personal growth and education, to recognize or validate his or her Positive Fingerprints. But still, enhanced times have happened. Inside of each client is an ENCHANTED SELF.

About the Author

Dr. Holstein is the originator of The Enchanted Self and a psychologist since 1981. She is the author of two books: The Enchanted Self, A Positive Therapy and Recipes for Enchantment, The Secret Ingredient is YOU!
Dr. Holstein speaks on radio, and appears on television in NY and NJ. She gives lectures, seminars, retreats and audio interviews on LadybugLive.com and is in private practice in Long Branch, NJ with her husband, Dr. Russell Holstein.

The August issue of Tooling & Production highlights, “Leaning ETO Project Management.” The term engineer-to-order (ETO) denotes a style of manufacturing rather than a specific industry segment. Other synonymous terms are “project-based” or “custom” manufacturers. ETO companies typically have distinct characteristics about the way they conduct business that differentiate them from discrete or repetitive manufacturers.

According to Thomas R. Cutler, spokesperson for the ETO Institute, “ETO companies build unique products designed to customer specifications. Each product requires a unique set of item numbers, bills of material, and routings. Estimates and quotations are required to win business. Products are complex with long lead times, typically months or even years. Unlike standard products, the customer is heavily involved throughout the entire design and manufacturing process. Engineering changes are a way of life. Material is purchased not for inventory but for a specific project. All actual costs are allocated to a project and tracked against the original estimate. Once complete, the product is typically installed at the customer’s site. In most cases, aftermarket services continue throughout the life of the product.”

The ETO Institute (www.etoinstitute.org) is an independent organization committed to helping North American engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturers compete more effectively in an increasingly competitive global environment. Our resources section provides a list of articles and white papers focused on manufacturing and, in particular, engineer-to-order. The bulletin board provides a forum for organizations to share ideas and information and to discuss challenges and business issues.

Thomas R. Cutler
e-mail protected from spam bots
www.etoinstitute.org
954-486-7562

# # #

About the Author

Professional Marketing Firm

Trade shows will naturally draw those with high end interest and
the technical knowledge that leads to that jargon spewed by
keynote speakers. Enterprise-speak vendors display their wares
and attendees at break-out sessions are full of techno-geeks
seeking the latest knowledge enhancement for their narrow
interest area. InternetWorld 2002 was no different.

But I’ve made a couple of interesting trade show discoveries. 1)
Privately funded companies who are themselves small businesses
are more likely to create applications for small business use,
NOT applications that may promise to make them millionaires in a
rapid initial public offering of vastly over-rated stock.

2) Privately funded small businesses are run by Apple Mac
owners! The start-ups often bloom from existing businesses as a
further development of existing privately held companies. Those
small business developers offer software that works on EVERY
operating system, not just one.

Windows, Linux, OS2 Warp, Sun Solaris, other Java platforms, Mac
OS9 (Classic) and Mac OS X! Did I hear you say, that would work
for anyone? So rule number one for small business use is
affordability and flexibility — those overpromised and
underdelivered qualities listed on every news release ever
written for software solutions.

This second discovery sort of slowly dawned on me while I’ve
wandered show floors over the course of the last year searching
for valuable tools for the little guy. I find a worthwhile small
business solution and there’s a Mac on the booth demo display! I
quickly learned to reverse that 2nd phenomenon in my favor to
make it easier to find valuable small business stuff on vast
convention center show floors.

I no doubt noticed those Macs because I own a couple of them
myself. I’d like to make the corollary that Mac users are
successful business operators who run reasonably profitable
businesses. The Mac test proved effective at InternetWorld when
all but a couple of the most valuable eBiz discoveries made were
being demonstrated on Macs. ALL of the Mac’s I discovered
prominently displayed were demonstrating worthwhile small
business tools, and each of those Mac users provided software
that would run on a Mac. I may have discovered a way to avoid
the frustration of finding unusable or overpriced tools at
internet trade shows!

The mainstream is missing here. That is clearly part of the odd
atmosphere at web conferences as vendors hawk their wares from
fancy show booths . . . and to whom? To the enterprise, stupid!

Individual sales for those companies offering small business
solutions means income of less than $100 monthly, or licensing
fees of between $500 and $2000 for those vendors and not
multimillion dollar deals that you read about in the Wall Street
Journal. This means that those vendors that do offer small
business solutions most often don’t attend trade shows because
they can’t reach their audience there. Unless they can also sell
their tools to enterprise level Dilbert-like drones, there is
little reason to hawk their wares at trade shows.

Are there any folks out there (other than Mac users) who just
have a middle level interest, run a small business online and
don’t sound like they are spelling everything when discussing
business applications? CRM, ROI, ERP, J2EE, XML and even SOAP
are on the tongues of corporate suits. Are the rest of us lost
and wandering aimlessly through InternetWorld, sponsored by AOL?
Even the MacWorld conference seems to be overflowing in stuff
only giant corporate Goliaths can possibly afford for their
business.

I hope that the adoption of the UNIX platform for OS X makes
Apple more successful, but I’d sure hate to see ENTERPRISE
software and business users make Apple move to that lucrative
market and forget what made them a success in the first place,
lack of jargon, intuitive commands and pleasing, even fun to use
computers. Maybe Apple could develop a GUI for corporate use
that reminds Dilbert-like drones that they are WORKING after
all! Don’t enjoy your time on the clock, by golly! The screen is
gray and lifeless and commands are full of jargon.

I’d like to propose to Steve Jobs that he attempt another launch
of NEXT, which is essentially his basis for OS X. That way, if
Big Business adopts NEXT with enthusiasm, we won’t lose the
entertaining sound effects, understandable language and
attractive graphics that make Apple delicious.

It was in the year between 1904 and 1905 that Albert Einstein
embarked upon three studies that would change the face of
physics. The first was the study of heat. He studied Brownian
Motion - the way in which particles in a colloid jiggle about.
This explained how energy is stored in material as warmth.
Ludwig Boltzmann had discovered the mechanical equivalent of
heat.

The second study took him into the realm of photoelectrics. Max
Planck had discovered that light consists of a kind of “atoms”.
The term “atomiki” (indivisibles) had been coined by Democrit of
Smyrna, who stated that only atoms and free space are real. The
term was picked up by Dalton and JJ Thomson as the smallest,
indivisible piece of material. So Planck, in his search for a
new word, introduced the concept of a “quantum” for the smallest
piece of energy. Planck’s constant, when multiplied by the
frequency of any particular colour of light, will tell you how
many watt-seconds are the least amount of light of that colour
that are possible.

The third study by Einstein went into the nucleus of the atom,
in the search for an explanation of the riddle of radium. How
can a piece of metal stay warm - seemingly forever? Where is the
energy coming from?

Einstein’s second work - on the photoelectric effect - was the
one that brought him the Nobel prize. It related to the puzzle
that light can travel at a huge, but fixed and finite, speed
through free space - and therefore must consist of nothing
solid. Nevertheless, when it collides with something it can
cause that thing to move.

Such calculations are traditionally based upon studies of
momentum - the product of mass and velocity. We know what the
mass is - it is nothing at all, because light is nothing at all.
We also know the speed of light. In a vacuum, it is known as c
(which is about 300 million metres persecond, or 186 thousand
miles per second).

So when we use the MKS system (metres, kilogrammes and seconds),
we multiply zero by three hundred million - and this gives us
the momentum of light. It must surely be nil.

However, when light hits an atom of metal it can throw out an
electron from the metal. This is the photoelectric effect.
Planck goes into some detail about the quantization of energy in
his Nobel prize lecture:

http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1918/planck-lecture.html

So we can say that one quantum of light delivers one single
electron.

The fact that the electron moves means that it has momentum.
That is the product of the mass of the electron and its speed.
So when we divide the momentum by the speed of light, we come up
with the mass of a quantum of light. This is a sensation. Energy
should be weightless, but here we find that it has mass.

Einstein then continued his studies of the movement of the
electron by likening that movement to its behaviour under the
influence of a voltage. It turns out that for each frequency of
light, there is an “electron-volt” rating which describes what
would happen if that light struck an electron. The electron-volt
value can be obtained from Planck’s result in Joules
(Watt-seconds) simply by multiplying by a special constant.

His researches showed that the electrons are held in place
inside the atoms by means of known voltages, the work functions.
When light sets them free, the energy of the light in
electron-volts is divided up two ways. The first part of the
voltage if that which is needed to overcome the work function.
The second part is the energy that is left over in the liberated
electron.

This work on the photoelectric effect was so important because
it tied together many loose ends of physics. The spectral lines
of light could now be defined as electron-voltages, and one
could tell exactly where the light originated in the atoms. The
atom was now looked upon as an electrical machine, and one could
predict how metals would behave when used as photocells, for
example. So the whole world of photoelectrics arrived - with
sound-stripe on film and invisible-ray burglar alarms. At the
same time, one could predict the properties of metals in an
electroplating bath (although the photoelectric work-function
was becoming supplemented with the electrochemical
work-function).

Einstein received the 1920 Nobel prize for physics - but it was
delayed for a year. He received the prize itself whilst on board
a ship visiting Japan. His lecture to the Nordic Assembly of
Naturalists was not his acceptance speech, therefore. Already he
is thinking of relativity:

http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1921/press.html

We have entered into a world where matter has mass (weight under
standard gravity), and so also has energy. But are the two kinds
of mass the same?

When we have a lump of material of mass M1, and place it at a
distance D from a second piece of material of mass M2, we get an
attraction between the two.

The law is simple. It is M1 times M2 divided by D and divided
again by D.

That calculation defines the acceleration, or pull, that one
piece of material will exert on the other.

But what of light?

Max Planck had said that the smallest quantum of light is h
times v. Here h is Planck’s constant and v is the frequency of
that light.

Einstein now delivered his famous cliché (that E=mc-squared). So
the mass m is E divided by the speed of light and again by the
speed of light.

>From this, we discover that the smallest “mass” of light is h
times v divided by c divided by c.

We have seen that c is an enormous number. When we divided h
times v by c we get a truly tiny quantity of mass. A further
such division makes it ridiculously small. Nevertheless, the
smallest quantum of light is not weightless - it is almost
weightless.

If we want to take a photograph without a lens, we can make a
pinhole camera. A bundle of light-rays will go through the
pinhole to the film, and the sharpest detail on the resulting
image will be only as sharp as the pinhole.

Now we make another camera, with a pinhole half as high and half
as wide. We need to expose the film for four times the time, but
it does indeed become twice as sharp.

Now we make another, with the pinhole four times smaller. At
some point, we get a serious disappointment. The exposures are
getting longer, but the images are not getting any sharper.

What is happening is that the quanta of light, as they pass
through the tiny pinhole, are forced so close together that
their masses interact. Rays of light are pulling rays of light.
This is known as diffraction.

So the rule M1 times M2 divided by D-squared seems to hold for
the mass of energy as well as for the mass of matter.

It was about this time that questions were being asked as to
what would happen in one of the masses - say M1 - was due to
matter, whilst the other - M2 - was due to energy.

Einstein’s answer was simple - try it.

As the mass of a quantum of light is so tiny, we need to
counterbalance it with some enormous object if we are to see
some visible effect. Einstein suggested the sun.

The sun is about a hundred-thousand times heavier than the
earth. So it is extremely heavy. If Einstein’s prediction were
to come true, a quantum of light of mass M2, skimming past the
sun with its huge mass M1, should be pulled off course.

This would not be gravity, because gravity is something exerted
by matter upon matter.

This would not be diffraction, because diffraction is something
exerted by energy upon energy.

This would be a half-way thing, neither one nor the other. It
would be graviffraction. It would be the gravity of the sun
causing the diffraction of the light.

One has to be careful, because a slight haze of gasses in the
vicinity of the sun may act as a lens - causing refraction
rather than diffraction.

When Einstein predicted the bending of light by the sun, in
1916, scientists waited three years for an eclipse.

Sure enough, as stars and planets on the opposite side of the
solar system tried to drift behind the edge of the sun, the sun
pulled the rays of light off course. The stars stayed visible
due to the curved light path. The prediction had been confirmed.

Charles Douglas Wehner