As far as i know, the Thinkpad uses the Mini-PCI slot for both ethernet and wireless, and there's no combination card that has both, so you can have only the wired or wireless connection at the same time.
I have found that the Tecra 8200 has built-in ethernet and 802.11, but their battery life is poor and they're a bit heavy.
The Ibook is a subnotebook. You can't fit a 14" screen into a subnotebook. Furthermore, the Dell is noisier, has much worse battery life, and doesn't offer internal 802.11 antennas. A more appropriate comparison to the ibook is the Dell Inspiron 2100, their subnotebook, which starts around $1700.
Pricing is overrated. Unless you're an impoverished student, you should probably just get whatever computer you like the best.
Quality costs. I don't really find the cost of their computers to be a big issue for buying a computer personally. The value of a computer to me is on the order of several thousand dollars a year. With such a large value, it's very important to get something that fits my needs well and is reliable, and if it's going into my room, something quiet. The math goes something like this:
Some good PC- cost:$1500 value_to_me:$5000
Some good Mac-cost:$2000 value_to_me:$8000
Obviously, the Mac gives me a better profit, so I get that. People tend to undervalue additional quality. As you can see, since the amount that i'm actually willing to pay is so much higher, the difference in prices is not a big deal.
Where price does matter much more is when you're buying boxes en masse. But for your personal box, don't be afraid to spend and get what is right for you.
Interestingly, the powerbook and ibook are much more competitive than PC laptops, if you're looking at just raw speed and price. But there's far more speed and price...
with a small landfill contracted by a community in Michigan, that sufficient natural gas could be generated from a properly designed one to power a generator which provides the entire community with heat and light, with some excess they sell to the grid.
There are millions of ways to produce power, just like this one. The problem is *cost*. This would not be very cost efficient. The density of the natural gas here is low, and the landfill would need help to actually force a sufficient amount of decomposition (in most landfills, there's actually not much decomposition).
Your numbers are *way* off. You need to include costs such as transformers and storage, along with the space to store it all.
$10000 of PVs also won't be able to power your typical house unless you convert it all to very efficient devices (which is basically what most solar homes have, since to a great deal it's cheaper to conserve than to get more solar capacity)
You can generally expect about an overall $.50/kWh cost from a well-designed PV system in a sunny area (such as Arizona).
By the way, what the hell is a typical power bill in Californial like, anyway? We keep hearing about these "1500%" increases..
Those are referring to marginal peak rates for electricity, i.e. it's 110 degrees all over california, and you already bought your usual 20 GWh, how much is it going to cost to get 1 GWh more. The *average* cost of electricity in CA has done something on the order of doubling over the last couple years.
It seems to me to be far more likely that California has been spoiled by years and years of artificially low power costs, and are suddenly confronted with paying the actual cost of getting electricity for the first time, and are crying like babies over it.
It's not the people's fault; it's bad governance (which i guess is in part the people's fault). First there was Governor Pete Wilson, the legislature, and the California utilities (PG&E, SCE, etc) which created a "deregulation" bill which would have done well if not for the rapid rise in energy prices.
Then, there was Governor Davis, who refused to raise electricity prices and remove the price cap earlier than planned in the deregulation bill, causing the utilities to spiral towards bankruptcy, and causing power producers to not sell to CA (no one wants a soon-to-be-bankrupt company as a customer). Raising prices would have helped the utilities with their financial problems, and would have encouraged more conservation.
Instead, now that it's too late to do the *right* thing, Davis plans to pay for the financial problems by using tax dollars rather than raising the cap to its market level--conservation is thwarted again.
Whether it's local or imported from another state, Califonia is buying energy produced from oil. 700-1500% increases are PRECISELY because of supply and demand, because it's all relative to price.
The previous poster was referring to california's electricity, and california's electricity does *not* (< 1 percent) come from oil, imported or not.
As someone astutely pointed out on Slashdot a while back, we will never truely run out of oil, because as supply diminishes (the supply curve shifts to the right on the chart), the market price goes up accordingly to stabilize demand.
Nope. There's a cap to the price because of substitution effects. For example, you can create alternative petroleum products by conversion of organic material. Or, you can get power from other sources.
For what it's worth, there are plenty of people buying the (rather ugly) Prius as well
as Honda's Insight out here in the Bay Area. They're as easy to find out here as any conventional car. Furthermore, they're by no means underpowered; both have about the same performance as the car i drive (an old Civic EX).
These vehicles do not qualify for ZEV status; they burn gas just like a typical car. They just burn less of it.
They should also try the tech out in their big truck chassis, where the improved mileage would really pay off when those chassis are used to build cargo vans and Winnebagos.
The major truck sellers will have hybrid trucks and SUVs on the market for this very reason. Improving gas mileage from 15 mpg to 20 mpg saves much more gas/money than the same percentage improvement in more fuel efficient vehicles.
I like the sound of so-called "BioDiesel". This is a combustible fuel produced from a crop (for example oilseed rape).
This would seem to be the perfect fuel, since it would have energy density comparable (more/less - don't know) to existing gasoline/diesel but the big advantage of zero overall carbon emissions.
The main problem is cost. It is far more costly to grow the plants and convert them into fuel than it is to extract oil from the earth.
Any idea if they count the power station emissions and the environmental cost of replacing lead acid cells every couple of years for electric vehicles?
They're counted separately. Mobile sources and stationary sources are dealt with very differently in air quality modeling. Stationary sources can be controlled and can be located in sparsely populated areas. Mobile sources tend to be in highest concentration where there is the highest concentration of people (and where air quality is the most important).
Yes, Time Out is one of the best albums ever. However, no matter how good your equipment is, the album will always only be a reproduction of the music. There's a lot more to be gained by going out and listening to real music, which comes from people, rather than from machines. There's a huge difference in the complexity of real music which can't be simulated in recordings for any reasonable cost.
Re:I can see spending about 5k on a home theater
on
Insanely Audiophile
·
· Score: 1
You wrote: "Plus, I'm free to drink a malted barley beverage while I watch..."
If the prices WERE ridiculous then people wouldn't be buying CD's. Sure, I don't like paying $15 a CD, NO ONE does. But at the same time, If the record labels want to sell CD's at that price, and people buy them (and they do!) then I see no problem with this situation.
How would you feel if all the companies that made hard drives got together and decided to raise prices to $10/GB? I'd be upset at this bit of collusion, since i know that in a competitive market, they'd be selling it for less. However, I'd still buy hard drives, since their value to me is far greater than $10/GB.
Being economical for me to purchase the drive does not make the price at an optimum point for the economy.
The problem with monopoly-level pricing is that you reduce the amount of consumer surplus, reduce the amount of consumption, thus the economic benefits are reduced. The only one who gains is the monopolist, but these gains are smaller than the maximum consumer surplus. This is why collusion is illegal in countries with free markets.
Collusion is what the large record companies (with the help of their industry association, riaa) has done. Last year, they were fined heavily and forced to reduced CD prices because of this collusion.
Please people: Learn your basic economics, or you'll continually be duped by uneducated arguments from monopolies like microsoft and riaa.
It's all in what you're willing to pay, I suppose. For me, $20 for a movie I really like is a worthwhile investment.
Basic econ:
Monopoly-level pricing doesn't set prices at a level where goods are a bad investment for everyone; if you set pricing that high you'd make nothing. Monopoly-level pricing is higher though, and results in less consumption, more profit for the monopoly, and less consumer surplus--overall, less economic productivity.
We should not be happy with prices that are just "good enough"; prices should by competitive markets, not industry associations.
Our whole society is revolving into a subscription, Think about all the things that you pay for on a revolving subscription basis today, then ask did these things exist or require a subscription 20 years ago?
Sure somethings may improve your quality of life but the concept of owning physical products that you pay for once and use is going away.
This is a *very good* thing, in my opinion. One large flaw of our economic system is that people tend to buy cheap, crappy, low-quality merchandise which in the long run is more expensive than high-quality products. In a service model, the service's best interest will be in giving you high-quality products, because they'll be the ones paying for the cost if they fail. And if it doesn't provide the level of service it should, you can leave the service.
Furthermore, services can handle goods in bulk, repairs in bulk, and disposal, so the overall costs should go down.
Services also let you easily figure out how much something's going to cost. If you buy, and the product dies after the warranty's out, you're out a ton of money. The risk factor is much larger.
Take a look at Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute for some examples of services replacing traditional buy-once-hope-for-the-best purchase of goods.
I don't watch enough TV to actually need 6 hours of tape, so I don't even have to swap casettes during the week. All this takes 5-10 minutes.
For many of us, the 5-10 minutes saved each week are well worth $10/month. And that's not even counting the savings from automatic labelling, faster fast forwarding and other features that random access allows for.
Sounds like it would be a better idea to get hold of a GFX card with grabbar functions and write some good software for it.
You really want such a system to be off of your processor and off of your main disks. The TiVo is always playing and recording to the disk, so it's quite disk intensive. It's also always encoding and decoding, so you'd want dedicated mpeg chips as well if you wanted the system to be at all usable.
Besides, with digital TV/HDTV you really do want to get the original MPEG2 stream instead of decoding it once, and then encoded again when you record.
That's what the DirecTiVo and ultimateTV do. They use the mpeg2 stream directly and don't have mpeg2 encoders.
It's not hard to get 1.3 software (though i'm still not quite sure why someone would want to use a tivo without a subscription); you just need to find someone who has a backup of a 1.3 tivo drive, and restore that backup onto your current tivo disk.
The odd thing is that this happened, since a TiVo without a subscription won't get software upgrades.
One cost advantage of very high resolution LCDs is that they hide some flaws such as dead pixels. Hot pixels will still stand out, but they'll be tiny.
If that was the case then there would have to be a gradual increase in prices as the supply started getting shorter. That did not happen. The prices all of a sudden spiked up tenfold despite the fact that CA used seven percent less energy this year and then last year.
There were two major factors. In the beginning of "deregulation" in CA, many old inefficient power plants were closed. These were not economical to run; in fact, part of the reason for the price cap on electricity was to assure the utilities a profit so they could make payments on these plants and shut them down.
More recently, the price of natural gas has gone up significantly (throughout the US--NG is generally difficult to transport without pipelines, so most NG comes from domestic sources). This caused the price that power generators charged to rise, so the CA utilities started losing money on every W-h of electricity being sold; they could not increase prices because of the price cap of "deregulation". As they started to lose huge amounts of money, power generators charged even more for the power, because the utilities became bad credit risks--they were obviously going to go bankrupt, and no one makes money selling to a bankrupt company. The rapid rise in the costs was caused by this positive feedback. This is the short version, and there are many other important details i've left out, but there have been a huge number of papers written on the topic.
It's very far from a simple supply-demand problem.
The big corporations killed themselves with the policies they pushed through the state government. Go figure.
Finally, I'd just like to note that more drilling in Alaska will do nothing for electricity in CA, since CA does not use oil for electricity, and there are no plans to pipe NG from alaska.
Almost no one *really* cares. People think they care, but aren't willing to make efforts that really count--spending their own money on the problem.
Just look outside and see how many people have bought cars which are more expensive/bigger than they need, and bought houses that are bigger than they need. It is obvious that these people care more about themselves living in larger houses and bigger cars than feeding a bunch of anonymous starving kids. Hell, plenty of people think that putting neon lights in their PC cases is more important than feeding a few starving kids.
Slashdot Mirror
The Travelmate's battery lasts two hours; the iBook's lasts five. The Travelmate is 6.1 pounds, the iBook is 4.9. Next?
I have found that the Tecra 8200 has built-in ethernet and 802.11, but their battery life is poor and they're a bit heavy.
~5lb
internal DVD
5 hour battery life
built in firewire, ethernet, and 802.11 antenna
1024x768 or higher resolution
Pricing is overrated. Unless you're an impoverished student, you should probably just get whatever computer you like the best.
Some good PC- cost:$1500 value_to_me:$5000
Some good Mac-cost:$2000 value_to_me:$8000
Obviously, the Mac gives me a better profit, so I get that. People tend to undervalue additional quality. As you can see, since the amount that i'm actually willing to pay is so much higher, the difference in prices is not a big deal.
Where price does matter much more is when you're buying boxes en masse. But for your personal box, don't be afraid to spend and get what is right for you.
Interestingly, the powerbook and ibook are much more competitive than PC laptops, if you're looking at just raw speed and price. But there's far more speed and price...
There are millions of ways to produce power, just like this one. The problem is *cost*. This would not be very cost efficient. The density of the natural gas here is low, and the landfill would need help to actually force a sufficient amount of decomposition (in most landfills, there's actually not much decomposition).
You can generally expect about an overall $.50/kWh cost from a well-designed PV system in a sunny area (such as Arizona).
Those are referring to marginal peak rates for electricity, i.e. it's 110 degrees all over california, and you already bought your usual 20 GWh, how much is it going to cost to get 1 GWh more. The *average* cost of electricity in CA has done something on the order of doubling over the last couple years.
It seems to me to be far more likely that California has been spoiled by years and years of artificially low power costs, and are suddenly confronted with paying the actual cost of getting electricity for the first time, and are crying like babies over it.
It's not the people's fault; it's bad governance (which i guess is in part the people's fault). First there was Governor Pete Wilson, the legislature, and the California utilities (PG&E, SCE, etc) which created a "deregulation" bill which would have done well if not for the rapid rise in energy prices.
Then, there was Governor Davis, who refused to raise electricity prices and remove the price cap earlier than planned in the deregulation bill, causing the utilities to spiral towards bankruptcy, and causing power producers to not sell to CA (no one wants a soon-to-be-bankrupt company as a customer). Raising prices would have helped the utilities with their financial problems, and would have encouraged more conservation.
Instead, now that it's too late to do the *right* thing, Davis plans to pay for the financial problems by using tax dollars rather than raising the cap to its market level--conservation is thwarted again.
The previous poster was referring to california's electricity, and california's electricity does *not* (< 1 percent) come from oil, imported or not.
As someone astutely pointed out on Slashdot a while back, we will never truely run out of oil, because as supply diminishes (the supply curve shifts to the right on the chart), the market price goes up accordingly to stabilize demand.
Nope. There's a cap to the price because of substitution effects. For example, you can create alternative petroleum products by conversion of organic material. Or, you can get power from other sources.
These vehicles do not qualify for ZEV status; they burn gas just like a typical car. They just burn less of it.
The major truck sellers will have hybrid trucks and SUVs on the market for this very reason. Improving gas mileage from 15 mpg to 20 mpg saves much more gas/money than the same percentage improvement in more fuel efficient vehicles.
The main problem is cost. It is far more costly to grow the plants and convert them into fuel than it is to extract oil from the earth.
They're counted separately. Mobile sources and stationary sources are dealt with very differently in air quality modeling. Stationary sources can be controlled and can be located in sparsely populated areas. Mobile sources tend to be in highest concentration where there is the highest concentration of people (and where air quality is the most important).
Yes, Time Out is one of the best albums ever. However, no matter how good your equipment is, the album will always only be a reproduction of the music. There's a lot more to be gained by going out and listening to real music, which comes from people, rather than from machines. There's a huge difference in the complexity of real music which can't be simulated in recordings for any reasonable cost.
That's what a camelback is for :).
How would you feel if all the companies that made hard drives got together and decided to raise prices to $10/GB? I'd be upset at this bit of collusion, since i know that in a competitive market, they'd be selling it for less. However, I'd still buy hard drives, since their value to me is far greater than $10/GB.
Being economical for me to purchase the drive does not make the price at an optimum point for the economy. The problem with monopoly-level pricing is that you reduce the amount of consumer surplus, reduce the amount of consumption, thus the economic benefits are reduced. The only one who gains is the monopolist, but these gains are smaller than the maximum consumer surplus. This is why collusion is illegal in countries with free markets.
Collusion is what the large record companies (with the help of their industry association, riaa) has done. Last year, they were fined heavily and forced to reduced CD prices because of this collusion.
Please people: Learn your basic economics, or you'll continually be duped by uneducated arguments from monopolies like microsoft and riaa.
Basic econ:
Monopoly-level pricing doesn't set prices at a level where goods are a bad investment for everyone; if you set pricing that high you'd make nothing. Monopoly-level pricing is higher though, and results in less consumption, more profit for the monopoly, and less consumer surplus--overall, less economic productivity.
We should not be happy with prices that are just "good enough"; prices should by competitive markets, not industry associations.
This is a *very good* thing, in my opinion. One large flaw of our economic system is that people tend to buy cheap, crappy, low-quality merchandise which in the long run is more expensive than high-quality products. In a service model, the service's best interest will be in giving you high-quality products, because they'll be the ones paying for the cost if they fail. And if it doesn't provide the level of service it should, you can leave the service. Furthermore, services can handle goods in bulk, repairs in bulk, and disposal, so the overall costs should go down.
Services also let you easily figure out how much something's going to cost. If you buy, and the product dies after the warranty's out, you're out a ton of money. The risk factor is much larger.
Take a look at Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute for some examples of services replacing traditional buy-once-hope-for-the-best purchase of goods.
For many of us, the 5-10 minutes saved each week are well worth $10/month. And that's not even counting the savings from automatic labelling, faster fast forwarding and other features that random access allows for.
You really want such a system to be off of your processor and off of your main disks. The TiVo is always playing and recording to the disk, so it's quite disk intensive. It's also always encoding and decoding, so you'd want dedicated mpeg chips as well if you wanted the system to be at all usable.
Besides, with digital TV/HDTV you really do want to get the original MPEG2 stream instead of decoding it once, and then encoded again when you record.
That's what the DirecTiVo and ultimateTV do. They use the mpeg2 stream directly and don't have mpeg2 encoders.
The odd thing is that this happened, since a TiVo without a subscription won't get software upgrades.
One cost advantage of very high resolution LCDs is that they hide some flaws such as dead pixels. Hot pixels will still stand out, but they'll be tiny.
There were two major factors. In the beginning of "deregulation" in CA, many old inefficient power plants were closed. These were not economical to run; in fact, part of the reason for the price cap on electricity was to assure the utilities a profit so they could make payments on these plants and shut them down.
More recently, the price of natural gas has gone up significantly (throughout the US--NG is generally difficult to transport without pipelines, so most NG comes from domestic sources). This caused the price that power generators charged to rise, so the CA utilities started losing money on every W-h of electricity being sold; they could not increase prices because of the price cap of "deregulation". As they started to lose huge amounts of money, power generators charged even more for the power, because the utilities became bad credit risks--they were obviously going to go bankrupt, and no one makes money selling to a bankrupt company. The rapid rise in the costs was caused by this positive feedback. This is the short version, and there are many other important details i've left out, but there have been a huge number of papers written on the topic.
It's very far from a simple supply-demand problem. The big corporations killed themselves with the policies they pushed through the state government. Go figure.
Finally, I'd just like to note that more drilling in Alaska will do nothing for electricity in CA, since CA does not use oil for electricity, and there are no plans to pipe NG from alaska.
Just look outside and see how many people have bought cars which are more expensive/bigger than they need, and bought houses that are bigger than they need. It is obvious that these people care more about themselves living in larger houses and bigger cars than feeding a bunch of anonymous starving kids. Hell, plenty of people think that putting neon lights in their PC cases is more important than feeding a few starving kids.
Protests are nice, but money speaks the truth.