High quality of life drives jobs away. Until Americans are willing to work like Chinese factory workers must - think 80 hour weeks for very low wages that aren't sufficient to fund what most westerners would consider to be an acceptable life, it will be cheaper to manufacture in China. More likely, this will remain true until China has enough money and prosperity that its citizens push for a higher quality of life, and the factories move somewhere less developed. That's the way the global economy works.
For $139, I can buy a copy of XP. Why pay Dell $150?
People who are capable of installing an OS will either know that Vista's probably going to work out better for them or choose to go with Linux. XP specifically appeals to those who have been duped by the Mac ads.
Very, very few employees lose any productivity waiting the 45 seconds for their computers to boot. When they enter the office and start the computer, they then spend those 45 seconds doing other things like sitting down, taking off coats, noticing, doing real, non-computer work, etc. Anyone who actually works every second of the day and can only be productive with the computer booted can just suspend instead.
Note that national labs didn't have anything like the focus on renewable energy that Chu created at LBL until he did that a few years ago. This man is a very effective politician, a great scientist, and a real visionary.
Your mistake is assuming that a great scientist isn't a great administrator. Chu has been leading LBL with incredible success for four years, and under his leadership LBL has become the most focused national lab, and that focus is on alternative energy generation and storage. I've never met anyone who had a better understanding of both the science and practicality of alternative energy than Steven Chu. Picking Chu is Obama's best choice to date.
Jeez, when will people accept that the only thing the mac is good for is paying for things that other people get free?
Jeez, when will people accept that time is valuable and sometimes Mac's "just work" while other systems take more time to maintain.
Isn't this advantage almost exclusively for those entirely new to each respective OS? When I can do everything you can do better and faster than you can do it, and your only response is, "But if neither of us had any experience I could do it faster with my system," I think you need a new system.
I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.
Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.
On a 2.5 year old $600 box running Vista, Firefox loads along with my home page (a my yahoo page with a lot of stuff going on) within 2 seconds after a cold boot. You're really short on RAM, running a computer from the 90s, or you need to reinstall Firefox. The browser itself opens with no detectable lag (meaning no more than 150 ms or so) after I run it, and the content fully loads 1-1.5 seconds later.
You're using Windows 64 ultimate and it seems slow on 4GB?
Well of course. Its Microsoft.
You've got the lowest/. UID of any retarded person I've seen.
1) He didn't say it feels slow, nor did he imply it.
2) Vista with 4 gigs of RAM is snappy. It feels faster than a new Macbook Pro and similar to Ubuntu. This is, of course, assuming that the user knows how to turn off all animations that slow things down.
At my local BestBuy there are a half dozen 1 gig laptops running Vista, and they don't explode when you run a program on them. I wouldn't choose to buy one without the intention to upgrade to more memory, but they do work, and for very basic use you don't even feel the lack of memory.
There is a ton of supporting evidence that talking on your mobile while driving is dangerous. The legal situation has more to do with convention and historical artifacts than anything of substance.
In fact, not only is talking on your mobile more dangerous than talking to passengers, but talking on your mobile while driving can be as dangerous as driving intoxicated, at least according Mythbusters which did a cellphone vs drunk driving experiment on season 3 ("Killer Brace Position")
The two hosts arranged an obstacle course into four parts: accelerating to 30mph and then stopping at a stop sign, parallel parking, seeing how long it would take to do 15mph through the whole course, and while going 30mph, being told to switch left, right or center lane. Each part was graded by an instructor.
During a sober run of the course, both test drivers passed. However, during the cell phone run, Hyneman asked the drivers three questions in which they had to either think about the answer, repeat a sentence, figure out a verbal puzzle and list five things. Both drivers failed the obstacle course.
As usual, Mythbuster methodology fails. A similar show made by and for scientists would be nice. On said show, the drivers wouldn't know they were being tested, the phone conversation would be a typical conversation, and the driving would be normal driving. The Mythbusters are so obsessed with statistically insignificant, unrealistically contrived "experiments" that they seem to actively avoid the simple, meaningful method.
There are two problems I see with the usual theory that aging is related to "accumulation of damage", as the article seems to imply:
1) Humans live, barring accidents and disease, about 80-90 years, 120 at the outside. My dog lives 15-16 years, 22 on the outside. My dog gets all the normal signs of aging -- arthritis, gray hair, join and muscle pain, etc. But at an age that humans are not even entering their physical prime.
2) From a certain point of view, there is only one organism on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of the organism fall off now and then, but it constantly renews itself. Slightly different each, but going through a consistent cycle of "physical prime". How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
How ridiculous.
1) Tacos and burritos are both made of tortillas and both get eaten. How come my tacos crunch when I bite them?
2) From a certain point of view, all Mexican food is one giant dish. Why would it take longer to consume all the Mexican food in the world than to consume one refried bean?
Irrelevant anecdotes don't poke holes in a theory, dude. Shame on all of you who modded the parent up. The world isn't as simple as the summary of a/. story. Don't try to argue about something under the assumption that the summary is the extent of human knowledge on the subject.
While it's good to save a reasonable amount of money for retirement, it's often taken too far. A lot of people never think to enjoy life before old age because they were working hard and saving hard for retirement, only to find when they get there that they're both too old to do what they want and too set in their spartan ways to enjoy leisure anymore. While saving, don't forget that the best part of your life shouldn't be a brief and uncertain period at the end.
...the main character and story is the lamest of all the GTA by a huge margin. GTA IV is the type of crap you would expect to happen when a company farms out development to another small no name studio to save development expenses.
I found the story had more depth and was more engaging than the others.
It was heavily gimped to fit on the 7 gigabyte 360 DVD format and no standard harddrive and the graphics are shit thanks to being downgraded to run on the weak 360 graphics hardware.
Who said anything about the 360? I have the PS3 version - it's not my fault you bought a sucky console;)
1) I don't think it's the lamest GTA, but it is a C+ game that got A grades because of expectations and marketing. Oh wow, it's a big quasi-open world. When I realized it was actually almost entirely linear, had very few characters, and many fewer who were more than blunt caricatures, I was done.
2) The 360 and the PS3 version looked pretty much equivalent to me. I played 360 and I saw my friend play on the PS3. If it were a decent game I might have gone for the PC version, considering the improved controls and (still mediocre) graphics that massively outdid either console, but unfortunately it wasn't worth the effort.
3) I thought DRM was only aimed at preventing casual pirates, meaning people who would play a game and give the disk to a friend to play it too. Considering that applying a crack to the most draconian DRM on a torrented version of a game isn't as hard as downloading the torrent in the first place, it certainly has no practical effect on internet piracy. This whole effort is a hoax on the executives at major publishing houses.
The fact that the same video will play fine on a 2007 Mac but refuse to play on a 2008 Mac proves that the copy protection is not necessary -- if it was necessary it would be applied to all computers equally.
The great irony is that you can boot into Vista on your 2008 Macbook and play the same video.
Everyone who modded the parent up is...well I didn't intend to flame so I'll stop there.
Most console owners use more energy for consoles than for microwaves. And more for consoles than for ovens. Probably less than they use for air conditioning. If you're rational, at some point you'll realize that the important power is the sum of all of these. Jumping into every discussion of any individual power-saving technique and saying it's insignificant is pointless. More than half of my energy costs come from things other than gas, air conditioning, and heating. Your strategy is to take all the little things in this large, diverse miscellaneous column and ridicule efforts to reduce their energy use, even when doing so would have zero negative impact, as in the case discussed here with consoles. Instead, you presumably want to wave a magic wand and fix the big individual contributors, like my car. There's no logical reason to ignore massive energy costs just because they're spread out over a lot of small items. Saving $1B/year in the US, as in the article, through simple, totally unobtrusive power saving features is EXACTLY what needs to be done. Ignoring everything except prayers for a fusion powered car is a lot more pointless.
If we *really* want to cut energy usage, we need to look at the things people take for granted, not "make sure to unplug your playstation at night".
I read this article earlier today on ars and knew that it would end up here and evoke the "it's too insignificant to matter" response these discussions always get.
Yes, for an individual consumer, you won't save a lot of money/energy by shutting down your console. However, this report isn't directed at consumers. It's meant to guide the power-saving decisions that go into designing future consoles. They point out that just adding a "sleep after 6 hour of inactivity" feature turned on by default on all of these consoles, US energy consumption would go down by $1B/year. That's significant.
Inactivity-timer-induced-shutdown sounds good to me (they just want it to be turned on by default, too; if you have a burning need to keep your PS3 running constantly no matter what, go ahead and switch it back in the options menu). It would also be great to cut the standby power requirements, too. They should easily be able to run a system clock and a remote control sensor for far less than 1 W - I have other devices that do so in my home. That would shave 10-15 W off of a 360 of PS3.
Also, let's improve our efficiency for things like water heating, home heating, car driving, and anything else where efficiency improvements are possible.
Every time any sort of power saving discussion comes up on/., a few people say that it's not worth doing [Xn] because [Y] is the real problem. I think that the sum of Xn from n=0 to n=100 is significant. Solving our "energy problem" isn't a job for a magic bullet. We need to be creative and determined across a wide range of activities.
Also, I approve of your sleep-moding your Mac. I shut down, but I don't think choosing sleep instead of fully off is that big of a deal, especially compared to those who just leave unused systems on 24/7.
1) You missed the point again. He didn't defend MS. He criticized the Apple ads. They're not the same thing if you view them outside of an extremist, black and white, there can be only one pure and perfect OS mindset.
2) There are no "important facts" in the Apple ads, nor have there been.
3) I know a lot of people who are typical computer users. They're not buying Macs, but they are specifically avoiding Vista almost exclusively because of the Mac vs. PC ads. This amazes me. They're largely the same people who forwarded me emails saying that Obama is actually a Muslim terrorist a month ago, and who now obsess about Palin's wardrobe. They buy into advertising more than they should, they don't care about proof, and they're the most abundant consumers in the world.
Wow, what's not compatible with Vista 64? What's wrong with 100% working video drivers that install and function for nVidia and ATI devices exactly the same as the 32 bit drivers? I also suggest you try comparing Vista and XP boxes after a month of use. XP slows down, Vista gets faster. After even a day of use, Vista will be faster at loading some applications (at least Firefox, Word, Trillian for me). Vista will typically have lower average framerates by 0-5% as long as you run a DX9 version of whatever you're playing in Vista. If you use DX10, in most cases you'll suffer by 10-50%. App productivity benchmarks like running PS filters will probably show a very small XP advantage. Differences are negligible on most cases, but it's true that a few albatrosses are still out there, unaddressed.
is not 'of this world'. Science will take ages before they'll realise the basic truths described in countless religious and new-age texts that we've had for centuries..
In the annual hacking contest we talked about, oh, six months ago, in which competitors won laptops by being the first to gain root access to them, OSX was breached first, early on day 1. Vista and Linux, properly configured, weren't breached until the rules allowed direct access to the machine on a later day of the competition. This translates to: Macs are secure because they're not a common target, but when there's incentive to hack one (like there would be for a system that needs a security rating for deployment) it goes down easier than anything else.
Women are very common in hard science majors/grad schools now. In fact, when jumping from undergrad to grad school, the woman:man ratio actually goes up in all the schools I've seen recently. Maybe one day computer science will follow the path hard science has taken, but I agree with another poster that forcing women into areas for which they have aptitude but little interest isn't the right strategy. My wife's a better scientist than I (the phd scientist), but she chose to go into a humanity, due to slightly greater interest in that direction. As a bonus, between the two of us we span vastly different fields, which is very enriching for both of us.
Slashdot Mirror
High quality of life drives jobs away. Until Americans are willing to work like Chinese factory workers must - think 80 hour weeks for very low wages that aren't sufficient to fund what most westerners would consider to be an acceptable life, it will be cheaper to manufacture in China. More likely, this will remain true until China has enough money and prosperity that its citizens push for a higher quality of life, and the factories move somewhere less developed. That's the way the global economy works.
1. Mod parent up.
2. https://ssl.scroogle.org/ is even better.
3. There's no reason to ever use Google directly again.
For $139, I can buy a copy of XP. Why pay Dell $150?
People who are capable of installing an OS will either know that Vista's probably going to work out better for them or choose to go with Linux. XP specifically appeals to those who have been duped by the Mac ads.
Very, very few employees lose any productivity waiting the 45 seconds for their computers to boot. When they enter the office and start the computer, they then spend those 45 seconds doing other things like sitting down, taking off coats, noticing, doing real, non-computer work, etc. Anyone who actually works every second of the day and can only be productive with the computer booted can just suspend instead.
Note that national labs didn't have anything like the focus on renewable energy that Chu created at LBL until he did that a few years ago. This man is a very effective politician, a great scientist, and a real visionary.
Your mistake is assuming that a great scientist isn't a great administrator. Chu has been leading LBL with incredible success for four years, and under his leadership LBL has become the most focused national lab, and that focus is on alternative energy generation and storage. I've never met anyone who had a better understanding of both the science and practicality of alternative energy than Steven Chu. Picking Chu is Obama's best choice to date.
Jeez, when will people accept that the only thing the mac is good for is paying for things that other people get free?
Jeez, when will people accept that time is valuable and sometimes Mac's "just work" while other systems take more time to maintain.
Isn't this advantage almost exclusively for those entirely new to each respective OS? When I can do everything you can do better and faster than you can do it, and your only response is, "But if neither of us had any experience I could do it faster with my system," I think you need a new system.
The only job of student government in any university is to plan parties. Good for her for trying to do more.
I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.
Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.
On a 2.5 year old $600 box running Vista, Firefox loads along with my home page (a my yahoo page with a lot of stuff going on) within 2 seconds after a cold boot. You're really short on RAM, running a computer from the 90s, or you need to reinstall Firefox. The browser itself opens with no detectable lag (meaning no more than 150 ms or so) after I run it, and the content fully loads 1-1.5 seconds later.
You're using Windows 64 ultimate and it seems slow on 4GB?
Well of course. Its Microsoft.
You've got the lowest /. UID of any retarded person I've seen.
1) He didn't say it feels slow, nor did he imply it.
2) Vista with 4 gigs of RAM is snappy. It feels faster than a new Macbook Pro and similar to Ubuntu. This is, of course, assuming that the user knows how to turn off all animations that slow things down.
At my local BestBuy there are a half dozen 1 gig laptops running Vista, and they don't explode when you run a program on them. I wouldn't choose to buy one without the intention to upgrade to more memory, but they do work, and for very basic use you don't even feel the lack of memory.
There is a ton of supporting evidence that talking on your mobile while driving is dangerous. The legal situation has more to do with convention and historical artifacts than anything of substance.
In fact, not only is talking on your mobile more dangerous than talking to passengers, but talking on your mobile while driving can be as dangerous as driving intoxicated, at least according Mythbusters which did a cellphone vs drunk driving experiment on season 3 ("Killer Brace Position")
The two hosts arranged an obstacle course into four parts: accelerating to 30mph and then stopping at a stop sign, parallel parking, seeing how long it would take to do 15mph through the whole course, and while going 30mph, being told to switch left, right or center lane. Each part was graded by an instructor.
During a sober run of the course, both test drivers passed. However, during the cell phone run, Hyneman asked the drivers three questions in which they had to either think about the answer, repeat a sentence, figure out a verbal puzzle and list five things. Both drivers failed the obstacle course.
As usual, Mythbuster methodology fails. A similar show made by and for scientists would be nice. On said show, the drivers wouldn't know they were being tested, the phone conversation would be a typical conversation, and the driving would be normal driving. The Mythbusters are so obsessed with statistically insignificant, unrealistically contrived "experiments" that they seem to actively avoid the simple, meaningful method.
There are two problems I see with the usual theory that aging is related to "accumulation of damage", as the article seems to imply:
1) Humans live, barring accidents and disease, about 80-90 years, 120 at the outside. My dog lives 15-16 years, 22 on the outside. My dog gets all the normal signs of aging -- arthritis, gray hair, join and muscle pain, etc. But at an age that humans are not even entering their physical prime.
2) From a certain point of view, there is only one organism on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of the organism fall off now and then, but it constantly renews itself. Slightly different each, but going through a consistent cycle of "physical prime". How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
How ridiculous.
1) Tacos and burritos are both made of tortillas and both get eaten. How come my tacos crunch when I bite them?
2) From a certain point of view, all Mexican food is one giant dish. Why would it take longer to consume all the Mexican food in the world than to consume one refried bean?
Irrelevant anecdotes don't poke holes in a theory, dude. Shame on all of you who modded the parent up. The world isn't as simple as the summary of a /. story. Don't try to argue about something under the assumption that the summary is the extent of human knowledge on the subject.
While it's good to save a reasonable amount of money for retirement, it's often taken too far. A lot of people never think to enjoy life before old age because they were working hard and saving hard for retirement, only to find when they get there that they're both too old to do what they want and too set in their spartan ways to enjoy leisure anymore. While saving, don't forget that the best part of your life shouldn't be a brief and uncertain period at the end.
...the main character and story is the lamest of all the GTA by a huge margin. GTA IV is the type of crap you would expect to happen when a company farms out development to another small no name studio to save development expenses.
I found the story had more depth and was more engaging than the others.
It was heavily gimped to fit on the 7 gigabyte 360 DVD format and no standard harddrive and the graphics are shit thanks to being downgraded to run on the weak 360 graphics hardware.
Who said anything about the 360? I have the PS3 version - it's not my fault you bought a sucky console ;)
1) I don't think it's the lamest GTA, but it is a C+ game that got A grades because of expectations and marketing. Oh wow, it's a big quasi-open world. When I realized it was actually almost entirely linear, had very few characters, and many fewer who were more than blunt caricatures, I was done.
2) The 360 and the PS3 version looked pretty much equivalent to me. I played 360 and I saw my friend play on the PS3. If it were a decent game I might have gone for the PC version, considering the improved controls and (still mediocre) graphics that massively outdid either console, but unfortunately it wasn't worth the effort.
3) I thought DRM was only aimed at preventing casual pirates, meaning people who would play a game and give the disk to a friend to play it too. Considering that applying a crack to the most draconian DRM on a torrented version of a game isn't as hard as downloading the torrent in the first place, it certainly has no practical effect on internet piracy. This whole effort is a hoax on the executives at major publishing houses.
Good luck finding a computer without it.
A 2007 MacBook.
The fact that the same video will play fine on a 2007 Mac but refuse to play on a 2008 Mac proves that the copy protection is not necessary -- if it was necessary it would be applied to all computers equally.
The great irony is that you can boot into Vista on your 2008 Macbook and play the same video.
Everyone who modded the parent up is...well I didn't intend to flame so I'll stop there.
Most console owners use more energy for consoles than for microwaves. And more for consoles than for ovens. Probably less than they use for air conditioning. If you're rational, at some point you'll realize that the important power is the sum of all of these. Jumping into every discussion of any individual power-saving technique and saying it's insignificant is pointless. More than half of my energy costs come from things other than gas, air conditioning, and heating. Your strategy is to take all the little things in this large, diverse miscellaneous column and ridicule efforts to reduce their energy use, even when doing so would have zero negative impact, as in the case discussed here with consoles. Instead, you presumably want to wave a magic wand and fix the big individual contributors, like my car. There's no logical reason to ignore massive energy costs just because they're spread out over a lot of small items. Saving $1B/year in the US, as in the article, through simple, totally unobtrusive power saving features is EXACTLY what needs to be done. Ignoring everything except prayers for a fusion powered car is a lot more pointless.
If we *really* want to cut energy usage, we need to look at the things people take for granted, not "make sure to unplug your playstation at night".
I read this article earlier today on ars and knew that it would end up here and evoke the "it's too insignificant to matter" response these discussions always get.
Yes, for an individual consumer, you won't save a lot of money/energy by shutting down your console. However, this report isn't directed at consumers. It's meant to guide the power-saving decisions that go into designing future consoles. They point out that just adding a "sleep after 6 hour of inactivity" feature turned on by default on all of these consoles, US energy consumption would go down by $1B/year. That's significant.
Inactivity-timer-induced-shutdown sounds good to me (they just want it to be turned on by default, too; if you have a burning need to keep your PS3 running constantly no matter what, go ahead and switch it back in the options menu). It would also be great to cut the standby power requirements, too. They should easily be able to run a system clock and a remote control sensor for far less than 1 W - I have other devices that do so in my home. That would shave 10-15 W off of a 360 of PS3.
Also, let's improve our efficiency for things like water heating, home heating, car driving, and anything else where efficiency improvements are possible.
Every time any sort of power saving discussion comes up on /., a few people say that it's not worth doing [Xn] because [Y] is the real problem. I think that the sum of Xn from n=0 to n=100 is significant. Solving our "energy problem" isn't a job for a magic bullet. We need to be creative and determined across a wide range of activities.
The answer according to TFA is 15W for your PS3.
Also, I approve of your sleep-moding your Mac. I shut down, but I don't think choosing sleep instead of fully off is that big of a deal, especially compared to those who just leave unused systems on 24/7.
1) You missed the point again. He didn't defend MS. He criticized the Apple ads. They're not the same thing if you view them outside of an extremist, black and white, there can be only one pure and perfect OS mindset.
2) There are no "important facts" in the Apple ads, nor have there been.
3) I know a lot of people who are typical computer users. They're not buying Macs, but they are specifically avoiding Vista almost exclusively because of the Mac vs. PC ads. This amazes me. They're largely the same people who forwarded me emails saying that Obama is actually a Muslim terrorist a month ago, and who now obsess about Palin's wardrobe. They buy into advertising more than they should, they don't care about proof, and they're the most abundant consumers in the world.
Wow, what's not compatible with Vista 64? What's wrong with 100% working video drivers that install and function for nVidia and ATI devices exactly the same as the 32 bit drivers? I also suggest you try comparing Vista and XP boxes after a month of use. XP slows down, Vista gets faster. After even a day of use, Vista will be faster at loading some applications (at least Firefox, Word, Trillian for me). Vista will typically have lower average framerates by 0-5% as long as you run a DX9 version of whatever you're playing in Vista. If you use DX10, in most cases you'll suffer by 10-50%. App productivity benchmarks like running PS filters will probably show a very small XP advantage. Differences are negligible on most cases, but it's true that a few albatrosses are still out there, unaddressed.
is not 'of this world'. Science will take ages before they'll realise the basic truths described in countless religious and new-age texts that we've had for centuries..
Are centuries-old texts really "new-age?"
Soul: Immortal spiritual being
Like the highlander?
In the annual hacking contest we talked about, oh, six months ago, in which competitors won laptops by being the first to gain root access to them, OSX was breached first, early on day 1. Vista and Linux, properly configured, weren't breached until the rules allowed direct access to the machine on a later day of the competition. This translates to: Macs are secure because they're not a common target, but when there's incentive to hack one (like there would be for a system that needs a security rating for deployment) it goes down easier than anything else.
Women are very common in hard science majors/grad schools now. In fact, when jumping from undergrad to grad school, the woman:man ratio actually goes up in all the schools I've seen recently. Maybe one day computer science will follow the path hard science has taken, but I agree with another poster that forcing women into areas for which they have aptitude but little interest isn't the right strategy. My wife's a better scientist than I (the phd scientist), but she chose to go into a humanity, due to slightly greater interest in that direction. As a bonus, between the two of us we span vastly different fields, which is very enriching for both of us.