That's utterly untrue. You might mean that Apple devices won't include VP9 support out-of-the-box (unlike Android), but that's quite different, and won't necessarily hamper adoption. You might as well say: "And not a single Apple device will have Google Maps."
All that's needed is for a popular iOS multimedia app to include VP9, or perhaps even for someone to simply implement a VP9 decoder in javascript:
Besides, it's far more of an uphill battle for Apple these days than it was before. They're no longer seen as THE smart phone platform, nor do they have a monopoly on rich, young influential people. Plus Theora/VP3 was crap next to H.264 and VP8 didn't appear until the fight was long over. This time VP9 is around before H.265 has a foothold, and there isn't no gaping chasm of disparity as there was before. Not to mention the Opus audio codec is often considered better than anything else out there, including HE-AACv2 (or whatever the preferred branding).
As LED street lights are installed, some of them should be solar powered
You're talking about major maintenance and extra up-front costs, as workers have to drive around, non-stop, constantly replacing failing (SLA) batteries. They last only a few years, and spread across thousands of street lights, you'd be changing several every single day.
it is probably more cost effective to reduce the political nonsense and red tape instead of hiring someone to deal with it.
Have you ever held a job? A heck of a lot of the "nonsense" is PEOPLE. When everyone feels they can just walk down to IT and chew someone's ear off every time they forgot how to do something, or worse, their manager sends them begging to various departments in-lieu of training and such...
These are the biggest time-sinks I've seen in the corporate world, and having a manager around to referee is immensely beneficial. The alternative is requiring EVERYONE in IT to have those same skills and political savvy to stonewall some irritating department, without accidentally getting themselves fired in the process.
IMHO, non-technical managers can serve immensely useful purposes, just by virtue of being around for years, accumulating institutional knowledge, ranging from filling out necessary paperwork, to nagging other departments when they don't come through, to all of the things mentioned above, and more. You can throw-in some "project management" and other skills in the mix, too. If your manager has them covered (and isn't incredibly busy), you can concentrate on other things.
The amount of power used by the laptop is going to be pretty much a rounding error. You'd be better off making sure the tires are properly inflated.
Except more efficiently powering your laptop will not prevent you from fully inflating your tires, nor will it make doing so any less effective nor more time-consuming.
Similarly, fully inflating your tires will not prevent you from more efficiently powering your laptop, or eliminate the significant gains from doing so.
No matter how relatively significant the gains, there are gains, and they are cost effective and well worth the effort. And if you add up all the various "rounding error" type gains to be had in most vehicles, they cumulatively add up to a significant amount of savings.
I watched the first season of Game of Thrones on netflix, then gave up.
The discs are nearly empty, with two ~55 minute episodes per disc. The subtitles (vobsubs) are ugly as hell, compared to the beautiful subtitles included when broadcast, the copy protection is aggressive, wasting my time, there are no special features to speak of. etc, etc.
Without a doubt, the biggest tech failure of the year is slashdot's new mobile site, and the horendous beta desktop site. I can't imagine the motivation behind the flashy, slow, non-functional mess. If classic.slashdot.org ever goes away, so too will I.
I was considering a tablet instead of a netbook some time ago, but hit on a major stumbling block right away... Ethernet ports.
RJ45 gives me faster and more reliable network access when I need it. RJ45 allows me to connect to the network (and the internet) in places (or particular subnets) where there is no wifi. RJ45 allows me to configure my WiFi router/AP out of the box, or when the configuration gets erased. RJ45 lets me configure my WiFi PTZ camera to join them to my WiFi network in the first place. RJ45 allows me to use my netbook as a basic server or network analyser temporarily, or as an end-of-life job. RJ45 allows my netbook to act as a wireless bridge for other devices, and provide wifi and network access for your tablet, smartphone, ultrabook, etc.
Even if I could install a real OS like Linux on a piece of tablet hardware, the universal lack of RJ45 ports would be a continual problem. Carrying around a bunch of dongles is a nightmare. And netbooks are cheaper than decent tablets anyhow.
Now, if anyone can find me a nice cheap and small laptop that also has actual RS-232 ports built-in, I'll buy one in a second, since USB only provides 5V, and some serial devices strictly need the old +12V/-12V signaling to work... Not to mention issues with timing and similar...
Case in point: I'm using an inverter that I bought 6 years ago, rather than buying a new laptop with a longer-lasting battery right now (cellular data, too... in the back seat of a car that's travelling 100km/h through the countryside).
An inverter is a terribly wasteful way to power a laptop, and when that waste is powered by gasoline in an ICE, you might be quadrupling the expense.
My old EeePC is powered by 12V, so I can use an old $2 car cig-lighter cord, with no dual-conversion waste. If your laptop is not (most aren't) I strongly suggest a $12 investment, which you will get a return on in a matter of days:
By changing the amount of average monthly balance on the checking account I can select what kind of spam I get via USPS. Seriously. The running joke around here is that if you keep the average above $10K, you are bougie since all your firestarter paper comes by mail!
I get no such spam. Of course every time I sign-up for a bank account, I jump through hoops sending in cards or calling-up automated phone numbers to opt-out of ALL information sharing.
the old adage about possession being 9/10ths of the law does ring true here: it's much easier to keep what you have than to get back what you don't.
There's no truth in that at all. The fact that you have to write a check doesn't obviate any responsibility you have to pay your bill, nor does the bank's possession of your money obviate them of the responsibility to fully reimburse you for fraud very quickly. Legally, the two are entirely equivalent.
I remind you that this is a debate about the merits of debit cards versus credit cards. References to other payment methods would be more than just stupid.
Information about debit cards are NOT shared with anyone outside of the issuing bank. They are every bit as private as writing a check, doing a wire transfer, or similar. Credit cards are the polar opposite, with all your financial information being reported, and being easy for anyone on the planet to access.
There really is only one reason to ever use a debit card - your credit is so bad that you can't actually get a credit card. In all other ways credit cards are the superior tool.
Superior, how? Superior as in just about anybody is able to easily find out about all your credit cards, and plenty of purchase details? Is that the kinds of "superior" you were talking about?
People who have "important data" and fail to make a backup copy - no matter which type of media they are using - deserve to lose their data.
How often would you say people need to make backups? Servers aren't read-only devices that get updated in batches once a month... Losing a week's worth of work can be a nightmare. Even losing a day of work can hurt. Spending more money on reliable hard drives is well worth it. Even if we're talking about your transactional database, and you've got real-time streaming backups to a peer node, the downtime of one of them is going to be costly, and again worth buying more reliable equipment.
UPS are cheap and reliable, and give you time to shut down.
Cheap UPSes are horribly unreliable. What's more, they can be less reliable than grid power... APC's horrid SmartUPS devices had an awful tendency for a significant percentage to drop the load during a self-test, even when both battery and utility power were in perfect working order...
Even if you have dual power supplies, and connect to different UPSes, you're screwed. The SmartUPS all perform a self-test at exactly the same time, two weeks from the last power outage, we had hundreds, and they all self-tested almost to the second...
Big UPSes don't guarantee reliability, either. I've seen refrigerator-sized units that dropped the load during brownouts so short that servers NOT on the UPS didn't see the interruption.
Of course UPSes CAN be designed in completely fail-safe ways, failing-over to grid power bypass, but since I've seen even very expensive units failing, I expect nobody is willing to pay for that, and most instead architect a power system where individual UPSes failing still doesn't cause interruptions.
Datawind is always late to the party. They make big annoucements about incredibly inexpensive items years in the future to generate interest. Then by the time they're actually selling something, everyone else has passed them by. Even now, you can pickup a tablet with similar specs from walmart for $50. By the time we see any DW tablets on the shelves, several companies will be selling $40 tablets, or better.
None of that is the major problem... Declining channel quality is. In the past decade and a half, everyone has been following the model of making a good channel, keeping it that way until a lot of providers pick it up, then turning it into a piece of crap, and moving all the good content on it onto 3 other new cable channels your cable company has to start carrying.
Remember when the History Channel had shows about History? Remember when the Discovery Channel had shows with science and discovery? Remember when the Learning Channel taught viewers anything?
Proliferation of channels caused a steep decline in signal to noise ratio. Now, the lowest-common-denominator broadcast channels look very high quality in comparison, even as those morons keep chasing low-budget crap shows, and "reality" TV proliferates.
Take the money you spend on cable TV every month for a year, spend at most $150 of it on a top-of-the-line antenna system, and donate the rest to your local PBS station. You'll still get 100 channels, picture quality will be far better, and you'll quickly forget you've ever heard of Honey Boo Boo.
Sadly more and more people refuse to check any bags, leading to flights over boarding first, massive problems in the overhead bins, high stress, and delayed flights.
It's the airlines' fault for hidden charges for checked bags, and so it's only right that they reap the fallout.
Personally, I wish airlines would do away with their checked baggage fees. Besides the obvious, I'd also like to be able to take more than 10oz of hair gel, deodorant, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc., when I travel. Not to mention a pocket knife, nail clippers, etc, which TSA won't allow in the cabin but are fine if checked.
Southwest has gotten a lot of mileage out of their "bags fly free" advertising campaign, making fools of the other airlines. And so when I need to fly, I check their routes and rates first.
Other beliefs and opinions often have at least some rational basis and are subject to debate, religion does not.
That's utter nonsense. I'd say *most* politicians hold *numerous* beliefs that are not based on any evidence, and they are unwilling to debate or reconsider.
religion is directly responsible for much death and suffering throughout history, even into the present day. Other beliefs and opinions have nowhere near that death toll.
That's a pretty stupid thing to say. I'm pretty sure the combined death tolls of Stalin and Mao outweigh the sum total of all religious conflicts in modern history.
Regardless of whether votes ultimately fall along religious lines, we wouldn't even be wasting time on these issues if it weren't for religion.
That makes no sense at all. If religion is to blame, why can't you show a clear breakdown of votes by affiliation? How could it be otherwise?
And name ANY issue you want, that you wish to attribute to religion, and I'm sure I can point to a rather non-religious country somewhere on the planet that similarly has laws against it.
Even if you're British or Canadian where the religious right isn't nearly as rabid as they are in the U.S., they still influence legislation to the nation's detriment.
Thank you for calling the US "rabid" and "religious right". Now I will point out that homosexual marriage was legal in the US before almost any other nation on earth. Only the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada beat the US by a year or two. The undeniably secular and oh-so-enlightened England was a downright laggard on this issue. Why weren't they advancing LGBT rights a century before the knuckle-dragging US with their "rabid", "religious right" population?
consider that the religious people who represent you in government essentially believe in unicorns and faeries.
Any and every person on the planet holds one or more beliefs or opinions you will disagree with. Singling out religion as one harmful dark and sinister belief is absolutely baseless.
Would you prefer an atheist politician who has utterly opposite cultural, solical, economic, political, diplomatic and military views as you, over a Protestant who you otherwise agree with?
It's particularly hard to understand this view today, when religious views are hardly ever deciding factors in legislation. Votes on LGBT policies never fall on religious lines, nor do all Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, etc., universally vote for or against them. Ditto for abortion, civil rights, affirmative action, social programs, economic policies, etc.
Where is the great harm that all these damn religious politicians are causing?
Where are the horde of atheists that voted the separation of church and state into law? Where are the atheists that are fighting to keep the protestants from repealing it? Where are these atheists judges that continue to enforce it?
but long-lasting religions don't tend to have gods that can be easily disproven by experiment
The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim read like exhaustive historical texts. If you can't find something significant in there that is disprovable, you're not trying.
Complaining that religion is not "easily disproven by experiment" is like complaining that the history of Russia has no experimental basis, and therefore must be false.
Funny that you're disagreeing with the parent, touting how much faster software has gotten, and then complain that video playback doesn't work, when your problem is the steaming pile of crap that is Adobe Flash.
I guarantee that your old Dell can play back H.264 video just fine, using something like MPlayer instead of Flash for the decoding...
Slashdot Mirror
That's utterly untrue. You might mean that Apple devices won't include VP9 support out-of-the-box (unlike Android), but that's quite different, and won't necessarily hamper adoption. You might as well say: "And not a single Apple device will have Google Maps."
All that's needed is for a popular iOS multimedia app to include VP9, or perhaps even for someone to simply implement a VP9 decoder in javascript:
http://libwebpjs.hohenlimburg.org/vp8/webm-javascript-decoder/
Besides, it's far more of an uphill battle for Apple these days than it was before. They're no longer seen as THE smart phone platform, nor do they have a monopoly on rich, young influential people. Plus Theora/VP3 was crap next to H.264 and VP8 didn't appear until the fight was long over. This time VP9 is around before H.265 has a foothold, and there isn't no gaping chasm of disparity as there was before. Not to mention the Opus audio codec is often considered better than anything else out there, including HE-AACv2 (or whatever the preferred branding).
You're talking about major maintenance and extra up-front costs, as workers have to drive around, non-stop, constantly replacing failing (SLA) batteries. They last only a few years, and spread across thousands of street lights, you'd be changing several every single day.
Have you ever held a job? A heck of a lot of the "nonsense" is PEOPLE. When everyone feels they can just walk down to IT and chew someone's ear off every time they forgot how to do something, or worse, their manager sends them begging to various departments in-lieu of training and such...
These are the biggest time-sinks I've seen in the corporate world, and having a manager around to referee is immensely beneficial. The alternative is requiring EVERYONE in IT to have those same skills and political savvy to stonewall some irritating department, without accidentally getting themselves fired in the process.
IMHO, non-technical managers can serve immensely useful purposes, just by virtue of being around for years, accumulating institutional knowledge, ranging from filling out necessary paperwork, to nagging other departments when they don't come through, to all of the things mentioned above, and more. You can throw-in some "project management" and other skills in the mix, too. If your manager has them covered (and isn't incredibly busy), you can concentrate on other things.
Except more efficiently powering your laptop will not prevent you from fully inflating your tires, nor will it make doing so any less effective nor more time-consuming.
Similarly, fully inflating your tires will not prevent you from more efficiently powering your laptop, or eliminate the significant gains from doing so.
No matter how relatively significant the gains, there are gains, and they are cost effective and well worth the effort. And if you add up all the various "rounding error" type gains to be had in most vehicles, they cumulatively add up to a significant amount of savings.
I watched the first season of Game of Thrones on netflix, then gave up.
The discs are nearly empty, with two ~55 minute episodes per disc. The subtitles (vobsubs) are ugly as hell, compared to the beautiful subtitles included when broadcast, the copy protection is aggressive, wasting my time, there are no special features to speak of. etc, etc.
Except that's just a striped down front page. Managing the horde of comments is the challenging part, and they made no attempt to do so.
Without a doubt, the biggest tech failure of the year is slashdot's new mobile site, and the horendous beta desktop site. I can't imagine the motivation behind the flashy, slow, non-functional mess. If classic.slashdot.org ever goes away, so too will I.
I was considering a tablet instead of a netbook some time ago, but hit on a major stumbling block right away... Ethernet ports.
RJ45 gives me faster and more reliable network access when I need it. RJ45 allows me to connect to the network (and the internet) in places (or particular subnets) where there is no wifi. RJ45 allows me to configure my WiFi router/AP out of the box, or when the configuration gets erased. RJ45 lets me configure my WiFi PTZ camera to join them to my WiFi network in the first place. RJ45 allows me to use my netbook as a basic server or network analyser temporarily, or as an end-of-life job. RJ45 allows my netbook to act as a wireless bridge for other devices, and provide wifi and network access for your tablet, smartphone, ultrabook, etc.
Even if I could install a real OS like Linux on a piece of tablet hardware, the universal lack of RJ45 ports would be a continual problem. Carrying around a bunch of dongles is a nightmare. And netbooks are cheaper than decent tablets anyhow.
Now, if anyone can find me a nice cheap and small laptop that also has actual RS-232 ports built-in, I'll buy one in a second, since USB only provides 5V, and some serial devices strictly need the old +12V/-12V signaling to work... Not to mention issues with timing and similar...
An inverter is a terribly wasteful way to power a laptop, and when that waste is powered by gasoline in an ICE, you might be quadrupling the expense.
My old EeePC is powered by 12V, so I can use an old $2 car cig-lighter cord, with no dual-conversion waste. If your laptop is not (most aren't) I strongly suggest a $12 investment, which you will get a return on in a matter of days:
http://dx.com/p/universal-car-cigarette-powered-adapter-charger-for-laptop-cell-phone-pda-gps-81013
I get no such spam. Of course every time I sign-up for a bank account, I jump through hoops sending in cards or calling-up automated phone numbers to opt-out of ALL information sharing.
That only proves you are a fool. There is no "debit reporting agency".
Debit cards do not affect your public credit history. Credit cards, do.
There's no truth in that at all. The fact that you have to write a check doesn't obviate any responsibility you have to pay your bill, nor does the bank's possession of your money obviate them of the responsibility to fully reimburse you for fraud very quickly. Legally, the two are entirely equivalent.
Information about debit cards are NOT shared with anyone outside of the issuing bank. They are every bit as private as writing a check, doing a wire transfer, or similar. Credit cards are the polar opposite, with all your financial information being reported, and being easy for anyone on the planet to access.
Superior, how? Superior as in just about anybody is able to easily find out about all your credit cards, and plenty of purchase details? Is that the kinds of "superior" you were talking about?
How often would you say people need to make backups? Servers aren't read-only devices that get updated in batches once a month... Losing a week's worth of work can be a nightmare. Even losing a day of work can hurt. Spending more money on reliable hard drives is well worth it. Even if we're talking about your transactional database, and you've got real-time streaming backups to a peer node, the downtime of one of them is going to be costly, and again worth buying more reliable equipment.
Cheap UPSes are horribly unreliable. What's more, they can be less reliable than grid power... APC's horrid SmartUPS devices had an awful tendency for a significant percentage to drop the load during a self-test, even when both battery and utility power were in perfect working order...
Even if you have dual power supplies, and connect to different UPSes, you're screwed. The SmartUPS all perform a self-test at exactly the same time, two weeks from the last power outage, we had hundreds, and they all self-tested almost to the second...
Big UPSes don't guarantee reliability, either. I've seen refrigerator-sized units that dropped the load during brownouts so short that servers NOT on the UPS didn't see the interruption.
Of course UPSes CAN be designed in completely fail-safe ways, failing-over to grid power bypass, but since I've seen even very expensive units failing, I expect nobody is willing to pay for that, and most instead architect a power system where individual UPSes failing still doesn't cause interruptions.
Datawind is always late to the party. They make big annoucements about incredibly inexpensive items years in the future to generate interest. Then by the time they're actually selling something, everyone else has passed them by. Even now, you can pickup a tablet with similar specs from walmart for $50. By the time we see any DW tablets on the shelves, several companies will be selling $40 tablets, or better.
And my magic 8-ball agrees whole heartedly...
None of that is the major problem... Declining channel quality is. In the past decade and a half, everyone has been following the model of making a good channel, keeping it that way until a lot of providers pick it up, then turning it into a piece of crap, and moving all the good content on it onto 3 other new cable channels your cable company has to start carrying.
Remember when the History Channel had shows about History? Remember when the Discovery Channel had shows with science and discovery? Remember when the Learning Channel taught viewers anything?
Proliferation of channels caused a steep decline in signal to noise ratio. Now, the lowest-common-denominator broadcast channels look very high quality in comparison, even as those morons keep chasing low-budget crap shows, and "reality" TV proliferates.
Take the money you spend on cable TV every month for a year, spend at most $150 of it on a top-of-the-line antenna system, and donate the rest to your local PBS station. You'll still get 100 channels, picture quality will be far better, and you'll quickly forget you've ever heard of Honey Boo Boo.
It's the airlines' fault for hidden charges for checked bags, and so it's only right that they reap the fallout.
Personally, I wish airlines would do away with their checked baggage fees. Besides the obvious, I'd also like to be able to take more than 10oz of hair gel, deodorant, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc., when I travel. Not to mention a pocket knife, nail clippers, etc, which TSA won't allow in the cabin but are fine if checked.
Southwest has gotten a lot of mileage out of their "bags fly free" advertising campaign, making fools of the other airlines. And so when I need to fly, I check their routes and rates first.
That's utter nonsense. I'd say *most* politicians hold *numerous* beliefs that are not based on any evidence, and they are unwilling to debate or reconsider.
That's a pretty stupid thing to say. I'm pretty sure the combined death tolls of Stalin and Mao outweigh the sum total of all religious conflicts in modern history.
That makes no sense at all. If religion is to blame, why can't you show a clear breakdown of votes by affiliation? How could it be otherwise?
And name ANY issue you want, that you wish to attribute to religion, and I'm sure I can point to a rather non-religious country somewhere on the planet that similarly has laws against it.
Thank you for calling the US "rabid" and "religious right". Now I will point out that homosexual marriage was legal in the US before almost any other nation on earth. Only the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada beat the US by a year or two. The undeniably secular and oh-so-enlightened England was a downright laggard on this issue. Why weren't they advancing LGBT rights a century before the knuckle-dragging US with their "rabid", "religious right" population?
Any and every person on the planet holds one or more beliefs or opinions you will disagree with. Singling out religion as one harmful dark and sinister belief is absolutely baseless.
Would you prefer an atheist politician who has utterly opposite cultural, solical, economic, political, diplomatic and military views as you, over a Protestant who you otherwise agree with?
It's particularly hard to understand this view today, when religious views are hardly ever deciding factors in legislation. Votes on LGBT policies never fall on religious lines, nor do all Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, etc., universally vote for or against them. Ditto for abortion, civil rights, affirmative action, social programs, economic policies, etc.
Where is the great harm that all these damn religious politicians are causing?
Where are the horde of atheists that voted the separation of church and state into law? Where are the atheists that are fighting to keep the protestants from repealing it? Where are these atheists judges that continue to enforce it?
The holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim read like exhaustive historical texts. If you can't find something significant in there that is disprovable, you're not trying.
Complaining that religion is not "easily disproven by experiment" is like complaining that the history of Russia has no experimental basis, and therefore must be false.
"RECENTLY"? What are you, 1,000 years old? The big studios have been doing that for DECADES AND DECADES.
Funny that you're disagreeing with the parent, touting how much faster software has gotten, and then complain that video playback doesn't work, when your problem is the steaming pile of crap that is Adobe Flash.
I guarantee that your old Dell can play back H.264 video just fine, using something like MPlayer instead of Flash for the decoding...