She, like other 'X czars', is in charge of coordinating X across various departments and whatnot. She'll be making sure that consistent security policies exist at all levels of the executive branch's computers, hopefully with some level of standardization. She probably will also be a direct point of contact for people with security concerns about said computers, for both people within and without the executive branch.
She's also a public face for this Administration's computer security policies. Aka, she's ready to be the scapegoat if things don't work. And going to Congress with legislation that is needed.
At least, that's from what I'm guessing based on what 'czars' do.
I think it's worth mentioning that failing to vet isn't really an ethics violation either.
The people with tax problems whose he's suggested have not ended up in those positions, which isn't a 'ethics failure' so much as, um, an 'ethics success'.
Meanwhile, I find this level of scrutiny amazing. Bush had incredibly dodgy people in positions of power and no one seemed to say anything about it.
I'm waiting for some sort of generic browser plugin which can only be run from a local webpage, and whose sole purpose is to launch other applications and embed their windows in the browser. Have it open a browser window with no menus or toolbars, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell it from the real thing.
It could even go and convert existing shortcuts to.html files that embed said application.
Well, it's a good thing that there's no competitor to Microsoft that is well known for 'applications' in web sites, and even has a web-based competitor to MS Office and MSN chat.
And it's a good thing such a competitor doesn't exist, because if people started using them for chat and office, those people would start using them for everything, including stuff that MS had web based products for itself, like email and search.
Yes, it sure is a good thing that a time traveler assassinated Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1993 (1), or Microsoft's behavior would look very deeply stupid.
1) He claimed it was because Google gained sentience on January 23, 2011, and became Skynet, although some people suspect it's just because he got banned from Google Groups for spamming and the Skynet thing was a coincidence.
Or be very clever and run it the other way around.
I, for one, would love a low cost version of Windows, but I would then use it to not have to buy a full Windows version to stick in VMWare for those one or two apps that won't work in Linux. I'm sure plenty of other Linux desktop people have games they'd like to run, and the nice thing about that is that people already only run one of those at a time.
This being purchased instead of full versions of Windows to go in emulators is probably not what MS had in mind.
Hey, for some reason I keep hearing the price point '10 dollars' thrown around. At that price, people might buy three or four copies of it and install them into different virtual machines, along with a single application, and simply keep them suspended with that app fullscreen. (I have, in fact, done this with Windows 98 and IE 6 so I can test webpages, but I already had half a dozen 98 licenses laying around.) It's still cheaper than a copy of XP.
And this way you can share virtual machines on a network easily. Well, you can do that already, but 'How many applications do we install in this virtual machine?' question just shifted. You just install one per machine, and buy a boatload of cheap Windows copies, instead of previously, where you had to weigh the cost of Windows licenses vs. the loss when you have four apps in one VM and two different people want to use different ones.
Anyone running a bot would find they can't open a browser or play music or something. People would have a good incentive to make sure their PC is only running what it should be running.
...although they'd then have no ability to fix the problem, as they would be unable to run spyware removal tools.
However, most of them would simply not know what's going. They'd start using the computer, it would first allow three apps. Then a month later, two apps. Then one app. And then no apps.
It's like the 'standard Windows slowdown' that users experience, but much much more destructive.
As an added bonus, on a computer with half a dozen malware apps, all of which try to start at startup (Although half of them fail because they're over the limit)...how, exactly, are you supposed to run spyware removal apps?
Um, except that the problems you'll be dealing with in this new system are the fact that they tried to view a PDF in IE, which installed Acrobat Reader and their 'fast loader' is now running in the background at all times, counting towards the limit.
And they installed AIM, and their computer OEM installed some idiotic background thing that counts towards the limit too.
And now they can't run anything. Inexplicably. Now anyone helping them has to learn what Microsoft means by 'Applications' and how to disable them.
The real fun will be when someone has hit the limit via three spyware programs, and thus you can't run Spybot to disable said spyware. Think on that for a while. How would you fix that computer? (Can't even run a crack to disable the limit...if the cracking program counts as an 'application'.)
A 'starter edition' of Windows wouldn't let things be installed at all.
a 100mA 4.5V wall-wart uses 0.45W at full-load and inefficiency load makes it use 0.9W. even on 1% load it still draws about 50% of its rating.
I believe you missed what I was saying. I know power supplies are wasteful with minor loads. That's why I said devices that regularly draw large amounts of power should have another power supply, roughly as powerful as a random wallwart, that runs the device in standby.
I'm failing to see how you didn't grasp this when you immediately went on and stated that's what Philips TVs have. It's illogical to say 'You don't know what you're talking about with separate power supplies being a good idea...oh, and people already do that.'?
As for your insistence that Philips TV currently have such a system: Good for them. I didn't implied they didn't. The 'Energy Star' initiative has been very good for TVs and, as I said, the problem with them in their standby mode (So you can use the remote) has mostly been fixed. Some with separate power supplies, some with capacitors and batteries.
That doesn't mean it's been fixed in, for example, microwaves. Or DVD players. Or refrigerators, which often suck power even when the compressor isn't running.
Those things often have one power supply still, and run it 24/7 at 1% of their load, drawing, as you said, 50% of their normal power.
Well, I'll grant you that. I personally wish more had been done to guarantee that money spent had been toward American countries.
But that's really beside the point. I was just saying that people complaining that the stimulus spends money on irrelevant things are entirely, well, stupid, as that's the damn point.
A case can be made, of course, that we should spend the money on slightly useful things, all of which those things are. A valid objection is that there's something that would be more useful and just as much help to the economy, and we should do that instead, but the objection 'We're spending money on random stuff' is just idiotic.
I'd like to see rebates for American fuel efficient cars, which would help both the economy as a whole and the car industry.
I can't even begin to list what is horrible wrong with your math, but here's a hint:
You realize that total US yearly revenue is 1.75 trillion right? Which, according to your logic, means a person making $109,000 a year currently pays about $90,000 in taxes. Seems like they would have caught on at some point that, after taxes, they're living below poverty level and eligible for government aid.
Or, you know, you've insanely taken a group that pays an average of 71% of taxes and extrapolated those taxes onto the minimum people fitting in that group.
That's not even getting into your completely incorrect assumption about joint filing. Joint filing does not work that way. If it just magically added up incomes and treated them as a single person, no one would ever do it, as it would always push people into higher tax brackets. Duh.
Incidentally, any web page that lists the 'percentage' of total taxes pay by income percentage is lying. Lying by statistics.
We don't tax people by head, we tax them by income. Comparing the number of people to taxes paid is inherently dishonest. The top 10% of the people may, indeed, be paying 71% of the income taxes, but they're making like 60% of the income, which is, of course, what the income tax is taxing.
Here's an actual view of the situation, although it's only by quintile. Once it got to 10% and 5% and 1% it the amount of taxes would, indeed, go up somewhat, but not to the amount you're imagining.
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
350 Million to buy back watershed lands?
Which will go into the pockets of people who have watershed land, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
1 Billion to the census dept for ???
Which will go to census workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
All those things are exactly the entire damn point of the bill. There are things in there that are not, and won't help stimulate anything, but you're apparently so ignorant you don't know the point of the stimulus bill, which is to spend money on crap so that the money enters the economy.
Republicans, OTOH, want to put it in the economy via 'tax cuts', which, ignoring the fact those are skewed towards those making more money, shows they at least get the concept of 'stimulus' somewhat better than you.
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
You're saying that the Republicans are objecting to creating temporary job funded by the government and instead says they should be permanent?
That is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
There's a valid objection to construction jobs in that they might not be created fast enough, but the fact they'd not be permanent is a good thing, at least for people worried, as the Republicans so often claim, about spending.
How does giving out condoms provide jobs?
Because condoms are, of course, created by pixies and distributed by the Condom Fairy. (Don't ask what you leave under your pillow to get one.)
How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
It doesn't 'create jobs', it 'creates cheap housing', something that is also needed during a recession, especially one accompanied by record levels of mortgage failures.
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
How big a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that the 'stimulus package' is just a way to refer to a general bill to attempt to help the economy, and hence not every item in it is an attempt to stimulate spending? Many things attempt to help in other ways.
How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs?
And how does naming the bill 'stimulus' create jobs? They should have created an unnamed bill and hired people to make the name! Or named it 'Make jobs or we'll beat you to death with shovels!'
Hey, how does the Republicans arguing to remove things from said bill create jobs?
Plus, you don't have to worry about lightning. (Assuming you don't care about a 7 dollar alarm clock.)
I was actually going to get one of those kill-a-watt measuring devices to see if it would be worthwhile to install power strips on my microwave and see how much various chargers were drawing when not hooked up, or when hooked up but the device is fully charged. I have a theory they're sucking power, and I could just leave the strip on for an hour a day when everything's plugged in.
But I discovered those things were like 100 dollars. I thought they'd be more along the lines of the cost of multimeters, which are like 10 bucks for cheap ones.
Hey, Obama, hear that? How about a rebate for those things for those of us trying to save energy? Or, I hear in a few places, you can apparently borrow them from the public library. How about federal grants for that?
What we need is a programmable 'IR relay' power strip like that.
They need to have an IR sensor, that you program for each plug by aiming the remote of the thing plugged into that outlet at it and pressing 'power'. So that when it senses that, it turns said device on...and five seconds later, it repeats the IR signal to actually turn the device on. (Might be nice to be able to program the delay.)
And then it waits and cuts power off when it gets the signal again.
Of course, there are ways around this. A lot of existing TVs actually turn back on if you unplugged them when they were on. Mine, on a power strip, does. Flip back on the strip and it's on. This combined with the fact I use other devices for tuning and sound, means I don't actually use the remote or power button for it at all. (Well, I turn it off if I'm just listening to music.) And unlike a lot of power features, you can probably test this in the store, although you should ask permission before unplugging display models.
I've also seen stereo amps that had a power-out on the back that came on when they were turned on, intended for TVs that automatically came back on.
You shouldn't be flipping a DVR on and off. Not only is that harmful, as DVRs are computers with filesystems and whatnot that can lose integrity, but it defeats the purpose of having a DVR. (And many of them can't be shut down correctly in any easy manner.)
It's your TV that really needs to be on a power switch, along with possibly your amp. (My damn stereo has a light to indicate it's off. Yeah, thanks for that.) And DVD players, many of which don't even have the concept of 'off'. And VCRs that aren't used for recording if you still have one of those around. And don't forget AV switches...don't need to switch around if nothing's turn on.
The real problem here is the single-wattage power converters.
So that every slight power trickle turns the thing on full. Which is a real hassle when the device has a remote control (Although that has mostly been fixed.) or a clock like a microware (The entire concept there just pisses me off. Microwaves do not need to know the time.)
Or, now, downloading information from the internet, or an internal timer to record TV shows.
If every device that wanted to do that simply came with the equivalent of a 100mA 4.5v wall wart in addition to the real power supply, (But built in, obviously, off the same power connection.) we'd save a lot of power. But it would cost a good three or four dollars more, so that's never going to happen.
Computers have actually done this for years, although they do it a little too much. (Powering random USB devices while off is a bit silly.) But their power supplies all have a mode where instead of supplying 450 watts at five or six voltages, they only supply a few watts at 5v, and it seems to be a microscopic power drain.
Whereas I always built my computers from scratch. And upgraded them as long as possible. (Still do, although it's a lot easier these days.)
Hence for the longest time I'd end up with cases without USB support (Frankly, I'd upgrade cases only when the power supply failed or needed changing.), and motherboards that had pins to hook USB headers to...and no actual USB plugs at all.
I used to see a lot of computers like that. The MB came with USB, the case didn't. In about half of them the builder didn't bother including the USB stub that went into the card slot (Presumably because they didn't want to bother figuring the pinout, or to save three dollars, or they'd never heard of USB.), and even in the ones where it was installed, half the time it didn't work, and even when it was installed and actually working, no one knew it was back there or what it was for.
Now, around early 99, as USB took off, they stopped making like that. But existing computers don' magically vanish, it took another two years for people to be somewhat secure in the assumption that computers would actually have USB ports. (Although they would still be totally unreachable in the back for another two years after that.)
The Dell and Packard Bell and whatnot machines were slightly ahead of their custom brethren in this regard, and probably only because their case and MB were designed at the same time. What happened there is a lot of the 95 and NT machines were shipped with physically installed and hooked up USB ports...that were disabled in the BIOS because there were no drivers for them in the included OS.
I've never heard of that for my phone, the A717, but I'm pretty sure I have no video-out ability.
Video out would be one of those things I wouldn't mind an extra cable for...hard to fit those plugs on a phone. OTOH, there's that weird A/V miniplug that camcorders use, which is at least a standard weird plug.
I don't actually care because I use a bluetooth headset, so if I actually wanted to make a call on headset while it was plugged in, I could. (The total lack of affordability for stereo bluetooth headphones compared to headsets is whole nother mystery entirely.)
Windows 98 is not hardware. USB is hardware. iMac is hardware.
The person you are responding to is exactly correct. The iMac came without traditional ports, and companies actually started making products for it.
Just because Windows 98 supported USB didn't mean that PCs actually came with USB ports at that time. Even after USB exploded, USB ports were still unlikely to be found on PC until 2000 or so. (Or they'd be on motherboards, but not actually hooked up to anything, or relegated to a slot in the back, etc.)
That is the story of USB. There was a period where no one had ever heard of USB, and then a period where products showed up all over the place that were supposedly supported by Mac and Windows 98, but no PC owner actually was able to use them because none of them actually had USB ports, or they didn't work right, or they were on NT or 95. Whereas iMac owners were forced to use them. (And the iMac was insanely popular, BTW.) And then, bang, suddenly PC owners were using USB too.
If you weren't there, don't comment. Those of us who were remember it fairly clearly. And everyone knew it at the time.
Of course, USB probably would have caught on anyway, eventually.
No kidding. I've got a Samsung with a weird plug too.
Granted, it also takes headphones, so it couldn't be 'just' USB, but there doesn't appear to have been any logical reason to not make it two separate plugs.
There's the 'computer connection plus charging' connection, which logically shares no pins with the analog 'headset' connection. Same plug, two entire different sets of used pins. Some I'm willing to bet is literally just USB power and data, and the other that is just a ground, two analog audio out, one analog audio in, and a 'mute' button that gets grounded when pressed. (Looking in there, it actually looks like more than nine pins. Maybe there's separate 'charge' pins also. It does promote for 'mode' on USB plug-in and not on charger. Which makes the whole thing even more absurd.)
It also means, strangely enough, that I can't talk on the headset while charging it or having it connected to my computer. It's a very strange limitation when you think about it...I can make calls when it's plugged in, after all. Just not use a wired headset.
Seriously, I'd like to see phone manufacturers stop playing games with us by selling use fancy USB cables, fancy charge cables, and fancy headphone cable, where the only difference between them and anything else is the connector.
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What makes this one so special?
She, like other 'X czars', is in charge of coordinating X across various departments and whatnot. She'll be making sure that consistent security policies exist at all levels of the executive branch's computers, hopefully with some level of standardization. She probably will also be a direct point of contact for people with security concerns about said computers, for both people within and without the executive branch.
She's also a public face for this Administration's computer security policies. Aka, she's ready to be the scapegoat if things don't work. And going to Congress with legislation that is needed.
At least, that's from what I'm guessing based on what 'czars' do.
I think it's worth mentioning that failing to vet isn't really an ethics violation either.
The people with tax problems whose he's suggested have not ended up in those positions, which isn't a 'ethics failure' so much as, um, an 'ethics success'.
Meanwhile, I find this level of scrutiny amazing. Bush had incredibly dodgy people in positions of power and no one seemed to say anything about it.
I'm waiting for some sort of generic browser plugin which can only be run from a local webpage, and whose sole purpose is to launch other applications and embed their windows in the browser. Have it open a browser window with no menus or toolbars, and you'd be hard-pressed to tell it from the real thing.
It could even go and convert existing shortcuts to .html files that embed said application.
Well, it's a good thing that there's no competitor to Microsoft that is well known for 'applications' in web sites, and even has a web-based competitor to MS Office and MSN chat.
And it's a good thing such a competitor doesn't exist, because if people started using them for chat and office, those people would start using them for everything, including stuff that MS had web based products for itself, like email and search.
Yes, it sure is a good thing that a time traveler assassinated Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1993 (1), or Microsoft's behavior would look very deeply stupid.
1) He claimed it was because Google gained sentience on January 23, 2011, and became Skynet, although some people suspect it's just because he got banned from Google Groups for spamming and the Skynet thing was a coincidence.
Or be very clever and run it the other way around.
I, for one, would love a low cost version of Windows, but I would then use it to not have to buy a full Windows version to stick in VMWare for those one or two apps that won't work in Linux. I'm sure plenty of other Linux desktop people have games they'd like to run, and the nice thing about that is that people already only run one of those at a time.
This being purchased instead of full versions of Windows to go in emulators is probably not what MS had in mind.
Hey, for some reason I keep hearing the price point '10 dollars' thrown around. At that price, people might buy three or four copies of it and install them into different virtual machines, along with a single application, and simply keep them suspended with that app fullscreen. (I have, in fact, done this with Windows 98 and IE 6 so I can test webpages, but I already had half a dozen 98 licenses laying around.) It's still cheaper than a copy of XP.
And this way you can share virtual machines on a network easily. Well, you can do that already, but 'How many applications do we install in this virtual machine?' question just shifted. You just install one per machine, and buy a boatload of cheap Windows copies, instead of previously, where you had to weigh the cost of Windows licenses vs. the loss when you have four apps in one VM and two different people want to use different ones.
Anyone running a bot would find they can't open a browser or play music or something. People would have a good incentive to make sure their PC is only running what it should be running.
However, most of them would simply not know what's going. They'd start using the computer, it would first allow three apps. Then a month later, two apps. Then one app. And then no apps.
It's like the 'standard Windows slowdown' that users experience, but much much more destructive.
That's exactly what I said above.
As an added bonus, on a computer with half a dozen malware apps, all of which try to start at startup (Although half of them fail because they're over the limit)...how, exactly, are you supposed to run spyware removal apps?
Um, except that the problems you'll be dealing with in this new system are the fact that they tried to view a PDF in IE, which installed Acrobat Reader and their 'fast loader' is now running in the background at all times, counting towards the limit.
And they installed AIM, and their computer OEM installed some idiotic background thing that counts towards the limit too.
And now they can't run anything. Inexplicably. Now anyone helping them has to learn what Microsoft means by 'Applications' and how to disable them.
The real fun will be when someone has hit the limit via three spyware programs, and thus you can't run Spybot to disable said spyware. Think on that for a while. How would you fix that computer? (Can't even run a crack to disable the limit...if the cracking program counts as an 'application'.)
A 'starter edition' of Windows wouldn't let things be installed at all.
a 100mA 4.5V wall-wart uses 0.45W at full-load and inefficiency load makes it use 0.9W. even on 1% load it still draws about 50% of its rating.
I believe you missed what I was saying. I know power supplies are wasteful with minor loads. That's why I said devices that regularly draw large amounts of power should have another power supply, roughly as powerful as a random wallwart, that runs the device in standby.
I'm failing to see how you didn't grasp this when you immediately went on and stated that's what Philips TVs have. It's illogical to say 'You don't know what you're talking about with separate power supplies being a good idea...oh, and people already do that.'?
As for your insistence that Philips TV currently have such a system: Good for them. I didn't implied they didn't. The 'Energy Star' initiative has been very good for TVs and, as I said, the problem with them in their standby mode (So you can use the remote) has mostly been fixed. Some with separate power supplies, some with capacitors and batteries.
That doesn't mean it's been fixed in, for example, microwaves. Or DVD players. Or refrigerators, which often suck power even when the compressor isn't running.
Those things often have one power supply still, and run it 24/7 at 1% of their load, drawing, as you said, 50% of their normal power.
Well, I'll grant you that. I personally wish more had been done to guarantee that money spent had been toward American countries.
But that's really beside the point. I was just saying that people complaining that the stimulus spends money on irrelevant things are entirely, well, stupid, as that's the damn point.
A case can be made, of course, that we should spend the money on slightly useful things, all of which those things are. A valid objection is that there's something that would be more useful and just as much help to the economy, and we should do that instead, but the objection 'We're spending money on random stuff' is just idiotic.
I'd like to see rebates for American fuel efficient cars, which would help both the economy as a whole and the car industry.
I was trying to buy them at Home Depot, which was the only place I could find them. This was about a year ago. I think they were $89.99.
I didn't realize they had insane markup there, thanks.
Um, you FAIL MATH FOREVER.
I can't even begin to list what is horrible wrong with your math, but here's a hint:
You realize that total US yearly revenue is 1.75 trillion right? Which, according to your logic, means a person making $109,000 a year currently pays about $90,000 in taxes. Seems like they would have caught on at some point that, after taxes, they're living below poverty level and eligible for government aid.
Or, you know, you've insanely taken a group that pays an average of 71% of taxes and extrapolated those taxes onto the minimum people fitting in that group.
That's not even getting into your completely incorrect assumption about joint filing. Joint filing does not work that way. If it just magically added up incomes and treated them as a single person, no one would ever do it, as it would always push people into higher tax brackets. Duh.
Incidentally, any web page that lists the 'percentage' of total taxes pay by income percentage is lying. Lying by statistics.
We don't tax people by head, we tax them by income. Comparing the number of people to taxes paid is inherently dishonest. The top 10% of the people may, indeed, be paying 71% of the income taxes, but they're making like 60% of the income, which is, of course, what the income tax is taxing.
Here's an actual view of the situation, although it's only by quintile. Once it got to 10% and 5% and 1% it the amount of taxes would, indeed, go up somewhat, but not to the amount you're imagining.
Do you even know what stimulus is?
650 Million for converter boxes?
Which will go to companies who make them and their workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
350 Million to buy back watershed lands?
Which will go into the pockets of people who have watershed land, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
1 Billion to the census dept for ???
Which will go to census workers, and hopefully get spent and enter the economy.
All those things are exactly the entire damn point of the bill. There are things in there that are not, and won't help stimulate anything, but you're apparently so ignorant you don't know the point of the stimulus bill, which is to spend money on crap so that the money enters the economy.
Republicans, OTOH, want to put it in the economy via 'tax cuts', which, ignoring the fact those are skewed towards those making more money, shows they at least get the concept of 'stimulus' somewhat better than you.
Oh my God you are so full of crap. No one is saying that building schools won't employ people. What is being said is, "what happens to those jobs when the schools built?" These are not permanent jobs.
You're saying that the Republicans are objecting to creating temporary job funded by the government and instead says they should be permanent?
That is possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
There's a valid objection to construction jobs in that they might not be created fast enough, but the fact they'd not be permanent is a good thing, at least for people worried, as the Republicans so often claim, about spending.
How does giving out condoms provide jobs?
Because condoms are, of course, created by pixies and distributed by the Condom Fairy. (Don't ask what you leave under your pillow to get one.)
How does allocating money so groups like ACORN can purchase houses and rent them out create jobs?
It doesn't 'create jobs', it 'creates cheap housing', something that is also needed during a recession, especially one accompanied by record levels of mortgage failures.
Now these may be great ideas, but they do NOT belong in the "stimulus" package if they do not stimulate. Seriously, how big of a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that?
How big a moron do you have to be to NOT understand that the 'stimulus package' is just a way to refer to a general bill to attempt to help the economy, and hence not every item in it is an attempt to stimulate spending? Many things attempt to help in other ways.
How does extending unemployment benefits create jobs?
And how does naming the bill 'stimulus' create jobs? They should have created an unnamed bill and hired people to make the name! Or named it 'Make jobs or we'll beat you to death with shovels!'
Hey, how does the Republicans arguing to remove things from said bill create jobs?
Plus, you don't have to worry about lightning. (Assuming you don't care about a 7 dollar alarm clock.)
I was actually going to get one of those kill-a-watt measuring devices to see if it would be worthwhile to install power strips on my microwave and see how much various chargers were drawing when not hooked up, or when hooked up but the device is fully charged. I have a theory they're sucking power, and I could just leave the strip on for an hour a day when everything's plugged in.
But I discovered those things were like 100 dollars. I thought they'd be more along the lines of the cost of multimeters, which are like 10 bucks for cheap ones.
Hey, Obama, hear that? How about a rebate for those things for those of us trying to save energy? Or, I hear in a few places, you can apparently borrow them from the public library. How about federal grants for that?
Erm, you should really use a power strip with an on/off switch instead of plugging and unplugging.
What we need is a programmable 'IR relay' power strip like that.
They need to have an IR sensor, that you program for each plug by aiming the remote of the thing plugged into that outlet at it and pressing 'power'. So that when it senses that, it turns said device on...and five seconds later, it repeats the IR signal to actually turn the device on. (Might be nice to be able to program the delay.)
And then it waits and cuts power off when it gets the signal again.
Of course, there are ways around this. A lot of existing TVs actually turn back on if you unplugged them when they were on. Mine, on a power strip, does. Flip back on the strip and it's on. This combined with the fact I use other devices for tuning and sound, means I don't actually use the remote or power button for it at all. (Well, I turn it off if I'm just listening to music.) And unlike a lot of power features, you can probably test this in the store, although you should ask permission before unplugging display models.
I've also seen stereo amps that had a power-out on the back that came on when they were turned on, intended for TVs that automatically came back on.
Or not detect it at all anyway, if the device has decided not to download it not hooked up to cable.
You shouldn't be flipping a DVR on and off. Not only is that harmful, as DVRs are computers with filesystems and whatnot that can lose integrity, but it defeats the purpose of having a DVR. (And many of them can't be shut down correctly in any easy manner.)
It's your TV that really needs to be on a power switch, along with possibly your amp. (My damn stereo has a light to indicate it's off. Yeah, thanks for that.) And DVD players, many of which don't even have the concept of 'off'. And VCRs that aren't used for recording if you still have one of those around. And don't forget AV switches...don't need to switch around if nothing's turn on.
The real problem here is the single-wattage power converters.
So that every slight power trickle turns the thing on full. Which is a real hassle when the device has a remote control (Although that has mostly been fixed.) or a clock like a microware (The entire concept there just pisses me off. Microwaves do not need to know the time.)
Or, now, downloading information from the internet, or an internal timer to record TV shows.
If every device that wanted to do that simply came with the equivalent of a 100mA 4.5v wall wart in addition to the real power supply, (But built in, obviously, off the same power connection.) we'd save a lot of power. But it would cost a good three or four dollars more, so that's never going to happen.
Computers have actually done this for years, although they do it a little too much. (Powering random USB devices while off is a bit silly.) But their power supplies all have a mode where instead of supplying 450 watts at five or six voltages, they only supply a few watts at 5v, and it seems to be a microscopic power drain.
Mine does.
I use a fucking power strip on it.
Whereas I always built my computers from scratch. And upgraded them as long as possible. (Still do, although it's a lot easier these days.)
Hence for the longest time I'd end up with cases without USB support (Frankly, I'd upgrade cases only when the power supply failed or needed changing.), and motherboards that had pins to hook USB headers to...and no actual USB plugs at all.
I used to see a lot of computers like that. The MB came with USB, the case didn't. In about half of them the builder didn't bother including the USB stub that went into the card slot (Presumably because they didn't want to bother figuring the pinout, or to save three dollars, or they'd never heard of USB.), and even in the ones where it was installed, half the time it didn't work, and even when it was installed and actually working, no one knew it was back there or what it was for.
Now, around early 99, as USB took off, they stopped making like that. But existing computers don' magically vanish, it took another two years for people to be somewhat secure in the assumption that computers would actually have USB ports. (Although they would still be totally unreachable in the back for another two years after that.)
The Dell and Packard Bell and whatnot machines were slightly ahead of their custom brethren in this regard, and probably only because their case and MB were designed at the same time. What happened there is a lot of the 95 and NT machines were shipped with physically installed and hooked up USB ports...that were disabled in the BIOS because there were no drivers for them in the included OS.
I've never heard of that for my phone, the A717, but I'm pretty sure I have no video-out ability.
Video out would be one of those things I wouldn't mind an extra cable for...hard to fit those plugs on a phone. OTOH, there's that weird A/V miniplug that camcorders use, which is at least a standard weird plug.
I don't actually care because I use a bluetooth headset, so if I actually wanted to make a call on headset while it was plugged in, I could. (The total lack of affordability for stereo bluetooth headphones compared to headsets is whole nother mystery entirely.)
Windows 98 is not hardware. USB is hardware. iMac is hardware.
The person you are responding to is exactly correct. The iMac came without traditional ports, and companies actually started making products for it.
Just because Windows 98 supported USB didn't mean that PCs actually came with USB ports at that time. Even after USB exploded, USB ports were still unlikely to be found on PC until 2000 or so. (Or they'd be on motherboards, but not actually hooked up to anything, or relegated to a slot in the back, etc.)
That is the story of USB. There was a period where no one had ever heard of USB, and then a period where products showed up all over the place that were supposedly supported by Mac and Windows 98, but no PC owner actually was able to use them because none of them actually had USB ports, or they didn't work right, or they were on NT or 95. Whereas iMac owners were forced to use them. (And the iMac was insanely popular, BTW.) And then, bang, suddenly PC owners were using USB too.
If you weren't there, don't comment. Those of us who were remember it fairly clearly. And everyone knew it at the time.
Of course, USB probably would have caught on anyway, eventually.
No kidding. I've got a Samsung with a weird plug too.
Granted, it also takes headphones, so it couldn't be 'just' USB, but there doesn't appear to have been any logical reason to not make it two separate plugs.
There's the 'computer connection plus charging' connection, which logically shares no pins with the analog 'headset' connection. Same plug, two entire different sets of used pins. Some I'm willing to bet is literally just USB power and data, and the other that is just a ground, two analog audio out, one analog audio in, and a 'mute' button that gets grounded when pressed. (Looking in there, it actually looks like more than nine pins. Maybe there's separate 'charge' pins also. It does promote for 'mode' on USB plug-in and not on charger. Which makes the whole thing even more absurd.)
It also means, strangely enough, that I can't talk on the headset while charging it or having it connected to my computer. It's a very strange limitation when you think about it...I can make calls when it's plugged in, after all. Just not use a wired headset.
Seriously, I'd like to see phone manufacturers stop playing games with us by selling use fancy USB cables, fancy charge cables, and fancy headphone cable, where the only difference between them and anything else is the connector.