Actually, WinAmp is one of the better music players available for Android. They've made it freemium, trying to get you to pay $30 for an EQ and whatnot, but it's still got one of the better UIs if you want to use your phone as an MP3 player.
I've switched to RocketPlayer, because I want more format support, like MusePack, AAC, etc., and being able to EDIT those tags you're at the mercy of, in the player is a killer feature, too.
It's not the job of the power supply to protect malfunctioning devices from themselves. It's the job of the devices to have fuses, regulators, etc. This has been true, forever.
Your wall outlets will provided whatever is requested. Your car's alternator and battery will do the same. 12V devices plugged into a cig plug will get whatever they want, if they were designed so poorly as to not have a dammed fuse.
In all those cases, though, I read the specs on the charger, and/or observe how fast my phone is charging, and don't NEED a stupid meter to tell me what I'll find out in a few minutes.
In fact it doesn't MATTER how much power your charger can supply, if it isn't wired in a way your cell phone recognizes it, it won't TRY to draw that much power, anyhow. And Apple and Android were oh-so-nice to choose mutually-incompatible methods of signaling this, so one charger cannot work for both. Though expensive "charging-only" cables offer a workaround.
IMHO, we should switch (back) to 12V DC barrel plugs ASAP, as those will supply enough power for any device, and are infinitely more durable connectors than flimsy and directional microUSB.
Your car charger would be a big one... Fire up Google Navigation for your weekend drive out-of-town, and connect it to your $2 cigarette lighter charger, and before you get to your destination, your phone shuts off because it has run out of juice. Other apps like the free MapQuest use less power and offer better routing, but even those commonly use more than the 500mAH basic old USB chargers can supply, so your battery will be drained rather than charge.
The second would be a living room USB charger... If you use your phone for lots of things, like reading eBooks or RSS feeds, listening to podcasts, playing games, looking-up information, etc., your phone won't make it through half a day on a charge. An extra charger in your living room allows you to keep things charged, and the FASTER that one charges your phone, the sooner you can un-tether yourself and return to pretending cell phones don't have horrific battery life.
Algae has never worked outside of the lab. They've been doing R&D since the OPEC embargo in the Carter years, dvdand still haven't been able to get it to scale up.
If the person who killed the woman actually didn't understand that his actions would cause her death (or even injury), then no crime was committed at all.
Not true. The threshold for manslaughter is "SHOULD have known" the actions would cause death. And...
Nobody is talking about accidental crime here. In a just society, there would be no such thing as "accidental crime" since crime requires criminal intent.
...there is such a thing as INVOLUNTARY manslaughter.
Failing-over to a redundant internet connection would be the smarter way to go, all-around... In fact it was years ago that our bank was trying hard to get us to replace all our old modem-based units with internet/IPSec based replacements.
Sears had a reputation for quality, and while some people still see them as such, it's long been the case that "Kenmore" is just a private label on a white box made in the Maytag/Whirlpool factory.
A cheap Maytag/Whirlpool appliance is still a good thing.
As I said, Kenmore is right at the bottom of the price range, competing NOT with Maytag/Whirlpool, but with poorly designed, no-name junk like: GE, Magic Chef, Hot Point, etc.
Just remember: K-Mart bought them. That's how weak they were after their bankruptcy.
I'm well aware of that... Which is why I started my post with:
"If anything, appliances (and perhaps tools) will be what keeps Sears around"
I'll be exclusively buying appliances, car batteries, tools, and clothes with Sears, until they disappear. They are a throwback, in that they take responsibility, and don't stock utterly cheap junk Walmart-esque crap that doesn't work, and just throw-up their hands when you complain, and/or return it. I don't like retailers that are hoping to trick me, who hope I'll be too busy to return their junk in time.
Nissan and Honda have tried to break into the truck market for years but the market is not the same as the car market.
Umm... I just read that Nissan is the #2 small-truck manufacturer in the US.
If Tesla succeeds at making a durable truck that gets at least 300 - 400 miles with a decent load capacity, a price tag to compete and more power, I can see some changing their preferred brand.
Yeah, and if they come up with magic fairy dust that'll let us fly to our destinations, they'll do just fine...
Are you SERIOUS? A 400 mile range electric pickup, with a price-tag comparable to current conventional pickups? Did you want a pony with that?
Have you been to beta.slashdot.org? It's only a matter of time until they deploy it and I'm gone.
I'd say the same thing about the CURRENT/. interface, except there's still an option in the preferences to use "classic" mode. If classic mode gets bumped off, and it's necessary to use either the current or beta interface, I'm done, no more comments for sure.
If anything, appliances (and perhaps tools) will be what keeps Sears around and kicking for years to come. Shipping prices will prevent the likes of Amazon from ever competing in that market. And the nature of appliances being a long-term investment, requires trust that cheap junk retailers like Walmart / Home Depot don't earn.
Sears has earned a reputation for quality that Walmart and Home Depot can't match. When you go into a Sears and buy the cheapest refrigerator they've got, you can be pretty sure it's a decent piece of kit. With Walmart / Home Depot, you might be getting a complete piece of junk that is terribly misdesigned, and will fail shortly outside of the warranty.
A big part of this is Sears' Kenmore brand being inexpensive while top-notch quality. So much so that I'm often able to find GOOD Kenmore appliances cheaper than the no-name worthless junk appliances ("GE" / "Magic Chef" / etc.), that Walmart / Home Depot stock. Whatever Sears' overhead and problems may be, they're still out-competing everyone in household appliances. And the Kenmore (and Craftsman) brand was one of the few big reasons K-Mart bought the company.
Light trucks are also dying in part because stow-n-go seating is now so common in mini-vans.
Stowable seating was common in minivans two decades ago, too... That's not a recent change, and can't account for recent falling sales of small pickups.
Personally, I'm not sure why minivans haven't died yet. Small and light SUVs can be a fairly small step away from a mini-van, while being much more capable, and less despised.
Most of their internal systems are still green-screens, FFS!
That's the sign of a good, lean company. It at least means they don't have clueless executives forcing IT to switch all their systems to the latest fads every few years. They save money over PCs in up-front costs, maintenance, power, etc.
And the green-screens don't indicate the back-end is ancient... There are extremely capable terminal servers available that are just network connected SSH clients, which can connect to Amazon's "cloud" just as easily as they could an on-site mainframe.
I do admit to migrating several companies off of "green-screens", but it's typically a long, slow payback, which may only be advisable for the greater flexibility, and commodity prices of PCs versus the shrinking market for green-screens, and often moves along at the pace that existing (old) equipment dies off.
The store can run with the network down for a considerable period of time. About the only customer facing thing that might not work is the gift registry kiosk. Most employees would never notice anything was wrong either.
What the HELL are you talking about? Haven't you ever heard of CREDIT CARDS?
2. Connectivity to the internet... Uh, going to have to spend money on that one.. NO check..
Malls seem to always be very centrally located. Right near the interchanges of major freeways/highways, not far from big population centers, etc. And furthermore, I'm betting any decent sized mall already has more than 128K DSL lines going in and out, what with companies so heavily automating their inventory systems and needing reliable internet service to do so. Give that, I have to assume getting a few OC lines run to their mini-data centers is going to be considerably cheaper than some new building out in the middle of nowhere.
3. Electrical power, backup power, cooling, security infrastructure? Uh on, we don't have that either... No Check...
They'll have some "Electrical power" already. Being located in a mall, they might be able to just use existing (large) transmission lines. Building wiring will obviously need to be installed from scratch, but not paying for a transmission line is a big up-front savings.
They will have some existing commercial cooling systems to build on, and with an operating store right next to it, it's possible they'll be able to combine duties for their HVAC and other maintenance personnel, saving money.
They'll need some new, dedicated security guards for the data center. But they're probably in an area that's already getting frequent police patrols. The Sears auto center nearest me is located in a major shopping mall, which has it's own large police department satellite office.
They'll still need to dump in a lot of money to convert it, but they're not starting from a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere. Locating your data center in abandoned stores in shopping malls has some advantage.
And in this case, Sears doesn't have to make a big profit on it... The property is essentially FREE, as their rental agreement surely has some stiff fines for early termination, so they're just trying to make *SOME* money off of it, rather than it being a complete loss.
While this won't fly for big companies I've worked for that have a big and expanding footprint, the smaller ones that just need a single rack for DR, or just need faster/cheaper/reliable internet access than they can get at their offices for their web presence, could really benefit from small, conveniently located data centers like these. With the suburban locations, there might be an easy supply of inexpensive employees tired of commuting. And with the free rent, Sears might manage to offer some decent hosting prices. Hell, if Amazon can do it...
If you're thinking about buying a new TV for yourself or as a gift this holiday season, you might want to listen to what Dr. Poor has to say on the subject before you do.
Well, that was a piss-poor tie-in. Why would someone who's buying a TV possibly care what some pundit has to say? I don't care how sure he is that 3D is the future, I'm still not buying a 3D TV at any price.
And just what does he have to say? He's mostly giving us his take on what consumers are buying... So how should we use his projections of what we are buying, to decide what we want to buy? I'd prefer to just skip the unnecessary extra step in there.
I'd put the number around HALF that, for a lighter person walking, as you're using, but that kind of calculation is vastly oversimplified and misleading.
They are also a casual runner, so they run 3 miles in the morning.
Well, that makes a hell of a lot of difference, and you're acting like it's a minor afterthought.
and they DON'T run marathons.
The person you've described is nearly running a marathon every single week, and WALKING a second marathon during that week as well.
And your basic assumption of zero activity sitting on the couch, is not accurate. There have been studies of school-aged children that find even the most active school sports athletes don't burn ANY more calories than an inactive child. The energy you might have used up walking or running, will instead turn into lots of small twitches and movements over the course of a normal day.
If physical activity has no significant effect on energy needs then exercise is useless for weight loss and a sedentary lifestyle shouldn't bring about obesity
That's 100% true. No experts on the planet will tell you to exercise for weight loss. They will ALL tell you to change your diet, though they might mention that some exercise would also be a good thing. You need to have extremely high physical activity, on the order of running a marathon, to burn enough calories to lose weight without dieting.
Strange that you're happily asserting how wrong and out of date my information is, when you're trotting out this utter myth.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, WinAmp is one of the better music players available for Android. They've made it freemium, trying to get you to pay $30 for an EQ and whatnot, but it's still got one of the better UIs if you want to use your phone as an MP3 player.
I've switched to RocketPlayer, because I want more format support, like MusePack, AAC, etc., and being able to EDIT those tags you're at the mercy of, in the player is a killer feature, too.
And I have no idea what you are talking about, here...
I'm talking about USB charger/power supply, not cables specifically... And the "tester" is to determine if you've got a good one or not.
Yeah, but we're not talking about the WIRES. We're talking about a "defective ... device".
Your wall outlets absolutely offer devices that plug-in, "the opportunity to catch fire by delivering it as much current as possible."
It's not the job of the power supply to protect malfunctioning devices from themselves. It's the job of the devices to have fuses, regulators, etc. This has been true, forever.
Your wall outlets will provided whatever is requested. Your car's alternator and battery will do the same. 12V devices plugged into a cig plug will get whatever they want, if they were designed so poorly as to not have a dammed fuse.
In all those cases, though, I read the specs on the charger, and/or observe how fast my phone is charging, and don't NEED a stupid meter to tell me what I'll find out in a few minutes.
In fact it doesn't MATTER how much power your charger can supply, if it isn't wired in a way your cell phone recognizes it, it won't TRY to draw that much power, anyhow. And Apple and Android were oh-so-nice to choose mutually-incompatible methods of signaling this, so one charger cannot work for both. Though expensive "charging-only" cables offer a workaround.
IMHO, we should switch (back) to 12V DC barrel plugs ASAP, as those will supply enough power for any device, and are infinitely more durable connectors than flimsy and directional microUSB.
Your car charger would be a big one... Fire up Google Navigation for your weekend drive out-of-town, and connect it to your $2 cigarette lighter charger, and before you get to your destination, your phone shuts off because it has run out of juice. Other apps like the free MapQuest use less power and offer better routing, but even those commonly use more than the 500mAH basic old USB chargers can supply, so your battery will be drained rather than charge.
The second would be a living room USB charger... If you use your phone for lots of things, like reading eBooks or RSS feeds, listening to podcasts, playing games, looking-up information, etc., your phone won't make it through half a day on a charge. An extra charger in your living room allows you to keep things charged, and the FASTER that one charges your phone, the sooner you can un-tether yourself and return to pretending cell phones don't have horrific battery life.
"University of Calgary Professor" "Tom Flanagan, a former aide to the Canadian prime minister, has called for Assange's assassination"
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40467957/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/t/assange-lawyer-condemns-calls-assassination-wikileaks-founder/
Canada is part of the US by now, isn't it? Did the kids sew another star on the flag yet?
Of course he was "obviously talking tongue-in-cheek" and got quoted out-of-context by idiotic reporters.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/flanagan-regrets-wikileaks-assassination-remark-1.877548
Algae has never worked outside of the lab. They've been doing R&D since the OPEC embargo in the Carter years, dvdand still haven't been able to get it to scale up.
Except EVERYTHING I mentioned is cheaper than Soylent...
Not true. The threshold for manslaughter is "SHOULD have known" the actions would cause death. And...
Failing-over to a redundant internet connection would be the smarter way to go, all-around... In fact it was years ago that our bank was trying hard to get us to replace all our old modem-based units with internet/IPSec based replacements.
A cheap Maytag/Whirlpool appliance is still a good thing.
As I said, Kenmore is right at the bottom of the price range, competing NOT with Maytag/Whirlpool, but with poorly designed, no-name junk like: GE, Magic Chef, Hot Point, etc.
I'm well aware of that... Which is why I started my post with:
"If anything, appliances (and perhaps tools) will be what keeps Sears around"
I'll be exclusively buying appliances, car batteries, tools, and clothes with Sears, until they disappear. They are a throwback, in that they take responsibility, and don't stock utterly cheap junk Walmart-esque crap that doesn't work, and just throw-up their hands when you complain, and/or return it. I don't like retailers that are hoping to trick me, who hope I'll be too busy to return their junk in time.
The Honda Odyssey came out in 1995. Others followed suit quickly, though there have been a few holdouts.
Umm... I just read that Nissan is the #2 small-truck manufacturer in the US.
Yeah, and if they come up with magic fairy dust that'll let us fly to our destinations, they'll do just fine...
Are you SERIOUS? A 400 mile range electric pickup, with a price-tag comparable to current conventional pickups? Did you want a pony with that?
I'd say the same thing about the CURRENT /. interface, except there's still an option in the preferences to use "classic" mode. If classic mode gets bumped off, and it's necessary to use either the current or beta interface, I'm done, no more comments for sure.
If anything, appliances (and perhaps tools) will be what keeps Sears around and kicking for years to come. Shipping prices will prevent the likes of Amazon from ever competing in that market. And the nature of appliances being a long-term investment, requires trust that cheap junk retailers like Walmart / Home Depot don't earn.
Sears has earned a reputation for quality that Walmart and Home Depot can't match. When you go into a Sears and buy the cheapest refrigerator they've got, you can be pretty sure it's a decent piece of kit. With Walmart / Home Depot, you might be getting a complete piece of junk that is terribly misdesigned, and will fail shortly outside of the warranty.
A big part of this is Sears' Kenmore brand being inexpensive while top-notch quality. So much so that I'm often able to find GOOD Kenmore appliances cheaper than the no-name worthless junk appliances ("GE" / "Magic Chef" / etc.), that Walmart / Home Depot stock. Whatever Sears' overhead and problems may be, they're still out-competing everyone in household appliances. And the Kenmore (and Craftsman) brand was one of the few big reasons K-Mart bought the company.
Stowable seating was common in minivans two decades ago, too... That's not a recent change, and can't account for recent falling sales of small pickups.
Personally, I'm not sure why minivans haven't died yet. Small and light SUVs can be a fairly small step away from a mini-van, while being much more capable, and less despised.
That's the sign of a good, lean company. It at least means they don't have clueless executives forcing IT to switch all their systems to the latest fads every few years. They save money over PCs in up-front costs, maintenance, power, etc.
And the green-screens don't indicate the back-end is ancient... There are extremely capable terminal servers available that are just network connected SSH clients, which can connect to Amazon's "cloud" just as easily as they could an on-site mainframe.
I do admit to migrating several companies off of "green-screens", but it's typically a long, slow payback, which may only be advisable for the greater flexibility, and commodity prices of PCs versus the shrinking market for green-screens, and often moves along at the pace that existing (old) equipment dies off.
What the HELL are you talking about? Haven't you ever heard of CREDIT CARDS?
Malls seem to always be very centrally located. Right near the interchanges of major freeways/highways, not far from big population centers, etc. And furthermore, I'm betting any decent sized mall already has more than 128K DSL lines going in and out, what with companies so heavily automating their inventory systems and needing reliable internet service to do so. Give that, I have to assume getting a few OC lines run to their mini-data centers is going to be considerably cheaper than some new building out in the middle of nowhere.
They'll have some "Electrical power" already. Being located in a mall, they might be able to just use existing (large) transmission lines. Building wiring will obviously need to be installed from scratch, but not paying for a transmission line is a big up-front savings.
They will have some existing commercial cooling systems to build on, and with an operating store right next to it, it's possible they'll be able to combine duties for their HVAC and other maintenance personnel, saving money.
They'll need some new, dedicated security guards for the data center. But they're probably in an area that's already getting frequent police patrols. The Sears auto center nearest me is located in a major shopping mall, which has it's own large police department satellite office.
They'll still need to dump in a lot of money to convert it, but they're not starting from a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere. Locating your data center in abandoned stores in shopping malls has some advantage.
And in this case, Sears doesn't have to make a big profit on it... The property is essentially FREE, as their rental agreement surely has some stiff fines for early termination, so they're just trying to make *SOME* money off of it, rather than it being a complete loss.
While this won't fly for big companies I've worked for that have a big and expanding footprint, the smaller ones that just need a single rack for DR, or just need faster/cheaper/reliable internet access than they can get at their offices for their web presence, could really benefit from small, conveniently located data centers like these. With the suburban locations, there might be an easy supply of inexpensive employees tired of commuting. And with the free rent, Sears might manage to offer some decent hosting prices. Hell, if Amazon can do it...
Well, that was a piss-poor tie-in. Why would someone who's buying a TV possibly care what some pundit has to say? I don't care how sure he is that 3D is the future, I'm still not buying a 3D TV at any price.
And just what does he have to say? He's mostly giving us his take on what consumers are buying... So how should we use his projections of what we are buying, to decide what we want to buy? I'd prefer to just skip the unnecessary extra step in there.
I understand. You've got nothing at all to back up you ridiculous claims.
That's an amazing display of ignorance, there. I suppose a fitting follow up, though.
I'd put the number around HALF that, for a lighter person walking, as you're using, but that kind of calculation is vastly oversimplified and misleading.
Well, that makes a hell of a lot of difference, and you're acting like it's a minor afterthought.
The person you've described is nearly running a marathon every single week, and WALKING a second marathon during that week as well.
And your basic assumption of zero activity sitting on the couch, is not accurate. There have been studies of school-aged children that find even the most active school sports athletes don't burn ANY more calories than an inactive child. The energy you might have used up walking or running, will instead turn into lots of small twitches and movements over the course of a normal day.
That's 100% true. No experts on the planet will tell you to exercise for weight loss. They will ALL tell you to change your diet, though they might mention that some exercise would also be a good thing. You need to have extremely high physical activity, on the order of running a marathon, to burn enough calories to lose weight without dieting.
Strange that you're happily asserting how wrong and out of date my information is, when you're trotting out this utter myth.