With all respect due to your low/. ID, it looks like you never used MS Word for heavy document creation.
Where I work, people (wrongly) use it for generating Data Sheets. These are highly structured documents with lots of pictures, graphs (coming from eXcel) and drawings (coming from visio - yuck!). It is always both sad and entertaining to see these writers, quite knowledgeable in the MS Office ways, struggling to prevent the whole document from self-destructing.
The truth is that, after so many years of development, MS Word is still a POS, good only for holding a low or moderate amount of formatted text and a couple of graphical elements. When the.doc file grows beyond 10-15MB, all sort of weird behaviors start showing up (formatting lost between saves, automatic renumbering going crazy, page flowing getting broken for no reason we can "see" or identify etc etc).
MS Word is possibly the best tool to write a fancy letter or a 10-page report (or even as the editor of choice for Outlook), but for serious document editing, it's a broken toy.
Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.
Give me elevation maps on a standalone GPS in a way that is fast, easy and doesn't cost 10 bucks each time I want to load in a new region. I don't think it's doable.
So far, I was not able to find such a thing. The truth is that the standalone GPS is an abomination in terms of user interaction friendliness. Each maker has its own, proprietary map system you can get only from it (or from the friendly cracked software peddler site), the map loading is a pain in the rear, the battery life is abysmal even for handheld models (less than 5 hours, sheesh!), what is to like? Yeah, they're sort of doing this function of placing a dot on the puny display saying that "you are here", but that's about it.
Until the GPS makers come to their senses and make GPS units that are convenient to setup and use, a lot of people would refrain from sinking hundreds of dollars into broken-by-design gadgets. Who knows, maybe the software in the smartphones will indeed evolve quicker and, improving on their shortcomings, take over the standalone GPS market...
Sure, but Anderson is dead wrong if he's waiting for the hardware price to drop to ZERO (i.e. free). Despite the spectacular price drop for all things hardware, they still have to be sold at a profit, otherwise no one would make them. They'll never get truly free, no matter how little you pay for them.
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Gladwell's writing abilities keep improving, his latest book being way better written than The Tipping Point. Who the heck is this Anderson guy and why can't he write in meaningful sentences?
too much righteous anger... the GP's p.o.v. was that the battery improvements over the years, while real, are less than spectacular. 200Wh/kg you say? Wow, that's so impressive! To put things in perspective, the light dino juice has an energy density of about 11000Wh/kg.
of the anecdote about Franklin and his entrance door. When a friend complained about how difficult was to push that door, Franklin explained that the door was connected to a ground pump and every time someone opened the door, 2 gallons of water were extracted as well...
Maintenance (4.67 cents per mile on a medium car) and Tires (0.85 cents per mile on a medium car).
Yeah, that's about right. I have 60,000 mile tires on my car, and I paid about $48,000 for them. They actually gave me the car for free with the tires!
That bullshit figure alone probably explains the complete bullshit number pointed out by the submitter...
How the heck was the parent post modded 'insightful'? It should have been 'math-impaired troll'...
Let's do the math: [(4.67+0.85)/100]*60000=$3312, which seems to be on the high-side of reasonable.
I certainly have no troubles using an iPhone to read books.
The backlit display has less contrast and fares poorly in well lit conditions.
If you're not affected by these shortcomings, all I can tell is that I wish I had your eyesight.
The other is a media pad, said to be smaller than a Kindle but with a bigger screen, that would let users listen to music, view photos, watch high-definition videos, and make calls over a Wi-Fi connection. (And read books?)
How can this gadget be compared to Kindle? The most important feature Kindle sports is its e-paper display, while the Apple gizmo uses an ordinary LCD screen with touch function.
IOW, Kindle is a document reader, while this thing is another hyped i-something - we're talking about oranges and apple(s) here.
happily, there is a very good solution. ultracapacitors, sometimes known as ultracaps. they hold more than batteries, weigh an order of magnitude less (sometimes 2 orders)
That's pure, unadulterated BS!
The best ultracaps have less than 10% of the energy density of a rechargeable battery: 30Wh/kg as compared to 300Wh/kg for LiIon and 370Wh/kg for zinc-air. To put things in perspective, the gasoline energy density is 12500Wh/kg, 30 times better than the best commercially available batteries...
Ultracapacitors cannot even begin to compete with batteries as the primary energy storage, their role is limited to storing regenerated energy (e.g. from braking).
That's where the future lies, not H2 and not LiIon. "Recharging" involves removing the spent anode and inserting a fresh array of zinc rods and can be done fast. The salt can then be processed off-site to retrieve the zinc metal, usually by electrolysis (that's the true recharging step).
It's a proven technology,already powering mass transit and postal systems in US, Europe and Singapore, it's cheap, has good power density while still having room for improvement, what's not to like about it?
yes, it will cost much more. In your LCD display, the PFC is done by a circuit essentially identical to the one in your notebook power brick. How much are these selling for? A lot. Even if you account for a 10X price factor, the cost is still above 2-3 bucks. And the components are bulky.
with our recent peanut/salmonella/spinach/drugs health scares, [snip] we're still lightyears ahead of many countries, but the gap is certainly closing quite quickly.
I use OO.org at home and have been doing that since the 1.2 times. OK, it's still slow as molasses and the font rendering is still very bad, but I can live with these issues.
However, typing a lot with 8859-2 characters, I need the ability to assign certain characters to key combinations. MSOffice had this ability since at least ver. 97, why OO.org is still missing it?
My point was that that video presented no actual content. Come on, showing malnourished black kids and then panning the camera to lush, green corn fields is a basic manipulation technique.
The thing about GM food is that it has been touted as a magnificent cure for all sort of issues, but the reality is that it keeps failing reaching its stated goals. There are no demonstrable examples where GM food is in any way better, hardier, more nutritious, higher yield or cheaper to produce comparing to the "conventional" agriculture. However, interested parties kept beating the drum about "in the past x years, GMO were shown to have saved y lives with no adverse effects etc" to such extents that it became a dogma. Keep repeating a lie and it starts ringing true.
For example, I read a little more about the beta-carotene producing rice, a.k.a. "golden rice". It's supposed to save untold number of children in Africa from blindness. In fact, the beta-carotene content is so low that a kid would have to eat a few pounds of rice every day to meet the required level. A vitamin booster tablet given twice a year cures the issue and costs less than half a dollar. Perfecting the useless golden rice strain cost several hundred million dollars. It looks to me that all was a PR stunt to improve the GM image after all the publicized failures from the nineties.
Again, try to push aside the PR fog and check a few facts; you'd be surprised by how much BS the big pharma and agri companies put out in the last two decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Joe,
With all respect due to your low /. ID, it looks like you never used MS Word for heavy document creation.
Where I work, people (wrongly) use it for generating Data Sheets. These are highly structured documents with lots of pictures, graphs (coming from eXcel) and drawings (coming from visio - yuck!). It is always both sad and entertaining to see these writers, quite knowledgeable in the MS Office ways, struggling to prevent the whole document from self-destructing.
The truth is that, after so many years of development, MS Word is still a POS, good only for holding a low or moderate amount of formatted text and a couple of graphical elements. When the .doc file grows beyond 10-15MB, all sort of weird behaviors start showing up (formatting lost between saves, automatic renumbering going crazy, page flowing getting broken for no reason we can "see" or identify etc etc).
MS Word is possibly the best tool to write a fancy letter or a 10-page report (or even as the editor of choice for Outlook), but for serious document editing, it's a broken toy.
Try adding raw fiber to your diet. Something like 2-3 tablespoons of psyllum every day. It will help tremendously with the hunger aspect.
Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.
Give me elevation maps on a standalone GPS in a way that is fast, easy and doesn't cost 10 bucks each time I want to load in a new region. I don't think it's doable.
So far, I was not able to find such a thing. The truth is that the standalone GPS is an abomination in terms of user interaction friendliness. Each maker has its own, proprietary map system you can get only from it (or from the friendly cracked software peddler site), the map loading is a pain in the rear, the battery life is abysmal even for handheld models (less than 5 hours, sheesh!), what is to like? Yeah, they're sort of doing this function of placing a dot on the puny display saying that "you are here", but that's about it.
Until the GPS makers come to their senses and make GPS units that are convenient to setup and use, a lot of people would refrain from sinking hundreds of dollars into broken-by-design gadgets. Who knows, maybe the software in the smartphones will indeed evolve quicker and, improving on their shortcomings, take over the standalone GPS market...
A similar thing happened in the nineties in the LA area where a huge inflatable depicting a semi-nude Kim Basinger was raised next to the highway...
.
Gladwell's writing abilities keep improving, his latest book being way better written than The Tipping Point. Who the heck is this Anderson guy and why can't he write in meaningful sentences?
too much righteous anger... the GP's p.o.v. was that the battery improvements over the years, while real, are less than spectacular. 200Wh/kg you say? Wow, that's so impressive! To put things in perspective, the light dino juice has an energy density of about 11000Wh/kg.
of the anecdote about Franklin and his entrance door. When a friend complained about how difficult was to push that door, Franklin explained that the door was connected to a ground pump and every time someone opened the door, 2 gallons of water were extracted as well...
For those who don't get the subtle joke (well done, AC!), Skype does not accept Discover/Novus...
Come on, Timothy, you can't be that ignorant!
Yeah, that's about right. I have 60,000 mile tires on my car, and I paid about $48,000 for them. They actually gave me the car for free with the tires!
That bullshit figure alone probably explains the complete bullshit number pointed out by the submitter...
How the heck was the parent post modded 'insightful'? It should have been 'math-impaired troll'...
Let's do the math: [(4.67+0.85)/100]*60000=$3312, which seems to be on the high-side of reasonable.
$48,000?
the recent attempt at Morales' life and the struggle of some of Bolivia's provinces to get full autonomy...
I certainly have no troubles using an iPhone to read books.
The backlit display has less contrast and fares poorly in well lit conditions. If you're not affected by these shortcomings, all I can tell is that I wish I had your eyesight.
The other is a media pad, said to be smaller than a Kindle but with a bigger screen, that would let users listen to music, view photos, watch high-definition videos, and make calls over a Wi-Fi connection. (And read books?)
How can this gadget be compared to Kindle? The most important feature Kindle sports is its e-paper display, while the Apple gizmo uses an ordinary LCD screen with touch function.
IOW, Kindle is a document reader, while this thing is another hyped i-something - we're talking about oranges and apple(s) here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
happily, there is a very good solution. ultracapacitors, sometimes known as ultracaps. they hold more than batteries, weigh an order of magnitude less (sometimes 2 orders)
That's pure, unadulterated BS!
The best ultracaps have less than 10% of the energy density of a rechargeable battery: 30Wh/kg as compared to 300Wh/kg for LiIon and 370Wh/kg for zinc-air. To put things in perspective, the gasoline energy density is 12500Wh/kg, 30 times better than the best commercially available batteries...
Ultracapacitors cannot even begin to compete with batteries as the primary energy storage, their role is limited to storing regenerated energy (e.g. from braking).
That's where the future lies, not H2 and not LiIon. "Recharging" involves removing the spent anode and inserting a fresh array of zinc rods and can be done fast. The salt can then be processed off-site to retrieve the zinc metal, usually by electrolysis (that's the true recharging step).
It's a proven technology,already powering mass transit and postal systems in US, Europe and Singapore, it's cheap, has good power density while still having room for improvement, what's not to like about it?
yes, it will cost much more. In your LCD display, the PFC is done by a circuit essentially identical to the one in your notebook power brick. How much are these selling for? A lot. Even if you account for a 10X price factor, the cost is still above 2-3 bucks. And the components are bulky.
except that I'm hovering the mouse pointer over this bad link and Firefox 3.07 happily shows a pop-up reading "capitalone.com"...
Similar idea but much cooler way of retrieving the equipment: http://www.members.shaw.ca/sonde/
with our recent peanut/salmonella/spinach/drugs health scares, [snip] we're still lightyears ahead of many countries, but the gap is certainly closing quite quickly.
Scary!
Internet Explorer looks ready to give Firefox 3 a real run for its money.
Hey, thanks for the link! It works in WinXP, don't know yet how well the autokey version works in Linux.
I use OO.org at home and have been doing that since the 1.2 times. OK, it's still slow as molasses and the font rendering is still very bad, but I can live with these issues.
However, typing a lot with 8859-2 characters, I need the ability to assign certain characters to key combinations. MSOffice had this ability since at least ver. 97, why OO.org is still missing it?
My point was that that video presented no actual content. Come on, showing malnourished black kids and then panning the camera to lush, green corn fields is a basic manipulation technique.
The thing about GM food is that it has been touted as a magnificent cure for all sort of issues, but the reality is that it keeps failing reaching its stated goals. There are no demonstrable examples where GM food is in any way better, hardier, more nutritious, higher yield or cheaper to produce comparing to the "conventional" agriculture. However, interested parties kept beating the drum about "in the past x years, GMO were shown to have saved y lives with no adverse effects etc" to such extents that it became a dogma. Keep repeating a lie and it starts ringing true.
For example, I read a little more about the beta-carotene producing rice, a.k.a. "golden rice". It's supposed to save untold number of children in Africa from blindness. In fact, the beta-carotene content is so low that a kid would have to eat a few pounds of rice every day to meet the required level. A vitamin booster tablet given twice a year cures the issue and costs less than half a dollar. Perfecting the useless golden rice strain cost several hundred million dollars. It looks to me that all was a PR stunt to improve the GM image after all the publicized failures from the nineties.
Again, try to push aside the PR fog and check a few facts; you'd be surprised by how much BS the big pharma and agri companies put out in the last two decades.
sorry, but this is simply propaganda, and not a very good one at that.