I pay like $36 a year for unlimited calls in the US. I have my own incoming number and I can call any phone in the US. That is not a bad deal at all!
I use it both in my home and my business. My telco demands $18/mo long distance to call my clients right across the state line which is like 5 miles from my home Skype is a great tool! Nobody even knows we are on skype.
My concern is I have a skype to phone adapter. I would eagerly embrace a change in the API if stand alone devices like some of the other VoIP providers have were available. I have seen little new skype hardware for use as a regular phone. I guess I need a new solution.
Microsoft can turn gold into sh-- better than any company I know!
Since there is no limit to how many genes you could add to a specific species of plant, it is still theoretically possible. It may just be easier to do so with certain plants. Why not just legalize all drugs and use our GMO skills on something useful. Marijuana is already designed. Change the laws, not the genes!
Power consumption depends on the hardware, so I use a kill-o-watt clone to test them. I have a 933mhz P3 that I use for my skype gateway and torrent downloading machine. Since, it needs to be up 24/7 I didn't want to have my main PC on all the time, over 150 watts. That P3 consumes only 45 watts. Sometimes an older machine is just what you need. Not too much power, but just enough.
I agree. For a long time now, I considered the CPU, MB and RAM a matched set due to the CPUs or MBs having such an assortment of memory controllers. If either dies, finding a good replacement years after it was made is not so easy. The only thing this makes hard is making good systems from bad parts. For example, I have a 939 MB for a HTC, but it was underpowered. I just happened to have a dual core Athlon64 from a system which the MB fried. So, a quick swap and my HTC went from usable to awesome. That part of the hobby will be gone someday, but that will still be years away.
I often need to tell clients it is time for a new computer time when a CPU (clogged cpu fan) or MB dies. Simply, you are left finding used or refurbed parts which only offer a lateral move in performance or will suffer the same fate of the original. At times, you end up needing to add a video card if the new MB doesn't have one built in or the RAM configuration may need to be different due to the part you replaced. Or, you find out both the CPU and MB are dead and then you certainly need new RAM. So, unless you have limitless piles of spare parts to swap in the cost and time will not be worth fixing it when for the same cost you can get a modern computer with a lot more power and an OS upgrade to boot. Fixing the only the RAM or the drives is usually cost effective, but replacement of the CPU/MB is just a big pain unless I give away my time for free.
Both the major parties are irreparably damaged to a Libertarian. We do not endorse handouts to the public or to businesses, we reject the wars and we want true limited government. Which of the Republicans or Democrats believe in that?
I am running for US Senate in Wisconsin as a Libertarian and have the same problems. They want 500k in contributions and 10% in polls I will never be in. It is quite frustrating.
Forget tracking, they used duct tape. You cannot have a multi-billion dollar project or even a $100 project that doesn't have a piece of duct tape holding something. It's almost a law of physics.
Do not blame the free market for a law that didn't provide for a free market. A 10% dig at wholesale and another 17% at retail is not a free market. The reason is clearly the government wants your money. You should reject a booze tax as much as a income tax. You still have a sin tax, apparently on steroids!
I agree. The fact I use LinHES for my HTPC does not mean it is an option for my laptop. There I went with Fedora and even my wife, mother-in-law and my kids were able to manage browsing the web on a recent vacation together. I do not think having different user interfaces are such a problem, but under the hood there needs to be more uniformity. They keep trying, but no 2 distros are the same when finding stuff in the filesystem. It is better than the past, but still not the plain simple of one distro of Windows.
The only glitch I have had with Fedora has been the Open/LibreOffice transition. The installers broke hard tripping over the left over pieces of OpenOffice. I had to track down all the extra packages to remove them. Then LibreOffice installed just fine. I do not find that to be unreasonable, but there is no real similarity to that in the Windows world when an OS upgrade updates every program installed causing many more points of failure. Imagine doing a Windows upgrade and having your WordPerfect replaced by Word without asking you. Those failures are still not any worse than what I have to fix under Windows with the Malware du jour!
Another issue is where to get software and sheer number of choices is confusing to the average user. Sure there are a great number of free applications, but folks have the shrink-wrapped package mindset. Maybe a level of binary compatibility needs to be created. Something that not only software vendors may depend on, but individual developers could use to market software in a more traditional manner.
There is some truth to that. DOS was well accepted in the hobbyist arena and they helped push everybody else, including grandma into computers. Windows just followed the trail blazed by DOS. Some dirty marketing tricks helped along the way, too.
I once found a wallet outside my local post office. I only checked for an ID so I could see if the guy was in the PO. Unfortunately, he must have lost it while leaving. I then ran over to the police station and dropped it off. I could have scrapped out the cash and dumped it into the trash, but I didn't . I have no clue if there was anything in it. I never checked.
Amazingly, doing the right thing is not any more difficult than being an asshole. I wonder why so many choose the latter.
Office Depot actually does PC repair, if not in your store possibly in many near you. I think it very well could be a conflict of interest. Do you suggest when people as for help they use you or the Office Depot stores that do PC repair?
We do not need to keep capitalism in check. Capital changes hands all the time in a true free market. Otherwise, RIM, Sears/Kmart and other failing firms would be rich forever. Companies which fail to provide good products and services at great prices will go away.
What we need to keep in check is our government. If the people demanded that government stay 100% out of the economy and never take from one person (taxes) to give to another (entitlements to individuals, companies, states or towns), we could have a free market. Well, mostly for we will still need to get government out of licensing and regulation which tends to favor existing companies over innovative new ones which challenge (keep in check) the existing ones.
You cannot blame free market capitalism for all the problems we have when we refuse to actually have a free market.
The company should create an account and Noah should just tweet to his followers to follow that new account if they so wish. Problem over. All the company wants is the damn followers, so why not just let them choose on their own.
If machines are used to the point that productivity becomes so high that many items become extremely inexpensive, then fewer people will need full time jobs in the first place, more people will work less and enjoy the benefits of a modern robotic world. The fact is before machines life was hard. Yes, no machines to take your place, but you worked virtually all day scraping out a meager existence which offered inadequate nutrition and limited options for shelter.
Remember that machines have made many things extremely cheap. Imagine a house being built with future concrete printing machines. A quality, strong home could cost a fraction of what a typical house is today. You could pay it off in 5 years, free and clear.
Just another perspective that shows there can be a bright side to automation. Maybe the ideal use of people is engineering and maintaining of machines and personal interaction with other people. Maybe working 70hrs a week and getting carpal tunnel is not an optimized use of a human being.
The space station would have a great advantage over a 0G plane. You get the time to be creative. However, there will be a few issues with Newton's Laws.
I do not mind them not actually having a working implementation. I worry that vague descriptions without a description of a specific implementations makes for patent trolls. I know that they always try for the most broad range possible, but some patents seem to seem more like generalizations than anything specific.
I suppose I could patent this:
Bovine LCD panels.
Claim 1: Use modified LCD panels to create displays to allow the manipulation of cattle in agricultural and slaughterhouse environments.
I could be quite vague on exactly what wavelengths or polarization schemes I had in mind in my patent, so even when someone comes up with an idea using different techniques from what I have created, their ideas would still fall under my patent.
Too many patents also seem to be nothing more than adding networking to it or using it in a different industry. We need to have it down to a specific quality or technique involved, so we can be certain what the inventor intended and to allow others ample room to innovate without being under continuous assault from patent trolls.
Capitalism is not the problem. It is corporatism where they state is too powerful to begin with and the corporations direct it to benefit them. Huge bloated companies would perish with true free markets. The state keeps the markets from getting too free.
When the state is not working for the corporations, it is working for itself consuming so much of the economy it drags everything down.
Government is the problem and freedom is the solution!
The one thing that could really stink about these lights will be the replacement cost post warranty. I doubt they will be 10-20 bucks at Autozone. Early on they may be several hundred dollars each when compared to other high end laser products.
Using a kill-a-watt or other real measurements, most PCs do not consume 300 watts unless stuffed with drives and doing Setiathome, bitcoin mining or folding@home.
I recently setup an old P3 as a skype gateway and it only uses 45 watts with a standard power supply. It runs an ATI RAGE 3D IIC. That video card is well burned in, has no fan and runs just fine. I actually have another mainboard for that system, so I can repair as needed in the future. It does the job and lets me turn off all the more modern power guzzlers when not needed.
I used to keep my workstation running all day and night to support that phone gateway. It used 115 watts. My newest PC is a quad Athlon II which consumes between 100-150 watts depending on what it is doing. So the newer hardware may not be more efficient, especially for small specific jobs. Plus, I do not have to use an otherwise powerful system to do much of nothing. I have added another task to that little skype gateway, too. It is my download machine. I download my big stuff onto its drive, so again I may turn off my other machines. That P3 is saving me money by doing all the small stuff that needs a machine to be on all the time.
I wish I could have a browser only system without Windows or Linux. I have always hated needing a whole bunch of OS just to run a browser.
However, the issue will be how far do they go. Networking and being able to save to a flash drive should not be too difficult, video handling will be a must and then it gets tricky. Printers? Games? External applications?
The only benefit I can see is if this new OS is light, very light. Potentially they could provide a more secure platform if they keep the bloat out. The less lines of code the better.
You almost got it right listing the green house gases. Water, CH4 and then CO2. CO2 is a poor greenhouse gas. The long term record that blows the lid off the "recent" AGW are the ice cores and that show temperature leads the CO2. Add into the mix that the sun is proving to be anything but static and that makes most of the models pure BS.
We need far more information in order to call the science complete, or even accurate. I would feel better about the science, if the researchers were not on the governmental teat as they lay the groundwork for the justifying the government run our lives down to our damn thermostats.
One simple solution for complex passwords would be a barcode reader. It may not be perfect in all situations, but I have used them and they act like keyboards, so it is easy to setup. The hard part is finding cheap ones, but I picked up 3 CueCats from BG micro in the past and they provide me with what I need for home use.
However, if they have your hash, then they are already inside, so you lose. If physical access to a system is an issue, you will need to encrypt the entire disk and keep you system off when you are not around.
I found that good passwords are not that hard to remember, if you do not change them. Extreme complexity seems quite the bitch, but when you type them everyday, your fingers tend to remember. I have several such passwords and I almost have to type them to actually remember them character by character.
Sentimentality may be an issue, but some stuff can be nice to have for buying it again is not an option.
I still like having some old pentium stuff for the socketed flash to be used for programming. Also, for low level projects where having the ISA slots can be useful for prototyping proof of concept. However, having more than a couple is overkill.
I tend to keep one all media drives I get my hands on. You never know when some client will bring in a 5 1/4 floppy or a 4mm dat tape in. I used an old hard disk's interface board just this week to save files off a dead drive some IT hack shorted out while upgrading. His great advice was telling them tough luck!
When I give lost data back to a client it makes me love my job. When you fix hardware you can feel useful, but virtually any hardware can be replaced for a fee. When you return the irreplaceable, you really feel like you matter, even, if only for that client on that day.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay like $36 a year for unlimited calls in the US. I have my own incoming number and I can call any phone in the US. That is not a bad deal at all!
I use it both in my home and my business. My telco demands $18/mo long distance to call my clients right across the state line which is like 5 miles from my home Skype is a great tool! Nobody even knows we are on skype.
My concern is I have a skype to phone adapter. I would eagerly embrace a change in the API if stand alone devices like some of the other VoIP providers have were available. I have seen little new skype hardware for use as a regular phone. I guess I need a new solution.
Microsoft can turn gold into sh-- better than any company I know!
Since there is no limit to how many genes you could add to a specific species of plant, it is still theoretically possible. It may just be easier to do so with certain plants. Why not just legalize all drugs and use our GMO skills on something useful. Marijuana is already designed. Change the laws, not the genes!
Power consumption depends on the hardware, so I use a kill-o-watt clone to test them. I have a 933mhz P3 that I use for my skype gateway and torrent downloading machine. Since, it needs to be up 24/7 I didn't want to have my main PC on all the time, over 150 watts. That P3 consumes only 45 watts. Sometimes an older machine is just what you need. Not too much power, but just enough.
I agree. For a long time now, I considered the CPU, MB and RAM a matched set due to the CPUs or MBs having such an assortment of memory controllers. If either dies, finding a good replacement years after it was made is not so easy. The only thing this makes hard is making good systems from bad parts. For example, I have a 939 MB for a HTC, but it was underpowered. I just happened to have a dual core Athlon64 from a system which the MB fried. So, a quick swap and my HTC went from usable to awesome. That part of the hobby will be gone someday, but that will still be years away.
I often need to tell clients it is time for a new computer time when a CPU (clogged cpu fan) or MB dies. Simply, you are left finding used or refurbed parts which only offer a lateral move in performance or will suffer the same fate of the original. At times, you end up needing to add a video card if the new MB doesn't have one built in or the RAM configuration may need to be different due to the part you replaced. Or, you find out both the CPU and MB are dead and then you certainly need new RAM. So, unless you have limitless piles of spare parts to swap in the cost and time will not be worth fixing it when for the same cost you can get a modern computer with a lot more power and an OS upgrade to boot. Fixing the only the RAM or the drives is usually cost effective, but replacement of the CPU/MB is just a big pain unless I give away my time for free.
Both the major parties are irreparably damaged to a Libertarian. We do not endorse handouts to the public or to businesses, we reject the wars and we want true limited government. Which of the Republicans or Democrats believe in that?
I am running for US Senate in Wisconsin as a Libertarian and have the same problems. They want 500k in contributions and 10% in polls I will never be in. It is quite frustrating.
Forget tracking, they used duct tape. You cannot have a multi-billion dollar project or even a $100 project that doesn't have a piece of duct tape holding something. It's almost a law of physics.
Do not blame the free market for a law that didn't provide for a free market. A 10% dig at wholesale and another 17% at retail is not a free market. The reason is clearly the government wants your money. You should reject a booze tax as much as a income tax. You still have a sin tax, apparently on steroids!
I agree. The fact I use LinHES for my HTPC does not mean it is an option for my laptop. There I went with Fedora and even my wife, mother-in-law and my kids were able to manage browsing the web on a recent vacation together. I do not think having different user interfaces are such a problem, but under the hood there needs to be more uniformity. They keep trying, but no 2 distros are the same when finding stuff in the filesystem. It is better than the past, but still not the plain simple of one distro of Windows.
The only glitch I have had with Fedora has been the Open/LibreOffice transition. The installers broke hard tripping over the left over pieces of OpenOffice. I had to track down all the extra packages to remove them. Then LibreOffice installed just fine. I do not find that to be unreasonable, but there is no real similarity to that in the Windows world when an OS upgrade updates every program installed causing many more points of failure. Imagine doing a Windows upgrade and having your WordPerfect replaced by Word without asking you. Those failures are still not any worse than what I have to fix under Windows with the Malware du jour!
Another issue is where to get software and sheer number of choices is confusing to the average user. Sure there are a great number of free applications, but folks have the shrink-wrapped package mindset. Maybe a level of binary compatibility needs to be created. Something that not only software vendors may depend on, but individual developers could use to market software in a more traditional manner.
There is some truth to that. DOS was well accepted in the hobbyist arena and they helped push everybody else, including grandma into computers. Windows just followed the trail blazed by DOS. Some dirty marketing tricks helped along the way, too.
I once found a wallet outside my local post office. I only checked for an ID so I could see if the guy was in the PO. Unfortunately, he must have lost it while leaving. I then ran over to the police station and dropped it off. I could have scrapped out the cash and dumped it into the trash, but I didn't . I have no clue if there was anything in it. I never checked.
Amazingly, doing the right thing is not any more difficult than being an asshole. I wonder why so many choose the latter.
Office Depot actually does PC repair, if not in your store possibly in many near you. I think it very well could be a conflict of interest. Do you suggest when people as for help they use you or the Office Depot stores that do PC repair?
We do not need to keep capitalism in check. Capital changes hands all the time in a true free market. Otherwise, RIM, Sears/Kmart and other failing firms would be rich forever. Companies which fail to provide good products and services at great prices will go away.
What we need to keep in check is our government. If the people demanded that government stay 100% out of the economy and never take from one person (taxes) to give to another (entitlements to individuals, companies, states or towns), we could have a free market. Well, mostly for we will still need to get government out of licensing and regulation which tends to favor existing companies over innovative new ones which challenge (keep in check) the existing ones.
You cannot blame free market capitalism for all the problems we have when we refuse to actually have a free market.
The company should create an account and Noah should just tweet to his followers to follow that new account if they so wish. Problem over. All the company wants is the damn followers, so why not just let them choose on their own.
If machines are used to the point that productivity becomes so high that many items become extremely inexpensive, then fewer people will need full time jobs in the first place, more people will work less and enjoy the benefits of a modern robotic world. The fact is before machines life was hard. Yes, no machines to take your place, but you worked virtually all day scraping out a meager existence which offered inadequate nutrition and limited options for shelter.
Remember that machines have made many things extremely cheap. Imagine a house being built with future concrete printing machines. A quality, strong home could cost a fraction of what a typical house is today. You could pay it off in 5 years, free and clear.
Just another perspective that shows there can be a bright side to automation. Maybe the ideal use of people is engineering and maintaining of machines and personal interaction with other people. Maybe working 70hrs a week and getting carpal tunnel is not an optimized use of a human being.
The space station would have a great advantage over a 0G plane. You get the time to be creative. However, there will be a few issues with Newton's Laws.
I do not mind them not actually having a working implementation. I worry that vague descriptions without a description of a specific implementations makes for patent trolls. I know that they always try for the most broad range possible, but some patents seem to seem more like generalizations than anything specific.
I suppose I could patent this:
Bovine LCD panels.
Claim 1: Use modified LCD panels to create displays to allow the manipulation of cattle in agricultural and slaughterhouse environments.
I could be quite vague on exactly what wavelengths or polarization schemes I had in mind in my patent, so even when someone comes up with an idea using different techniques from what I have created, their ideas would still fall under my patent.
Too many patents also seem to be nothing more than adding networking to it or using it in a different industry. We need to have it down to a specific quality or technique involved, so we can be certain what the inventor intended and to allow others ample room to innovate without being under continuous assault from patent trolls.
Capitalism is not the problem. It is corporatism where they state is too powerful to begin with and the corporations direct it to benefit them. Huge bloated companies would perish with true free markets. The state keeps the markets from getting too free.
When the state is not working for the corporations, it is working for itself consuming so much of the economy it drags everything down.
Government is the problem and freedom is the solution!
Great post! Great data!
The one thing that could really stink about these lights will be the replacement cost post warranty. I doubt they will be 10-20 bucks at Autozone. Early on they may be several hundred dollars each when compared to other high end laser products.
Using a kill-a-watt or other real measurements, most PCs do not consume 300 watts unless stuffed with drives and doing Setiathome, bitcoin mining or folding@home.
I recently setup an old P3 as a skype gateway and it only uses 45 watts with a standard power supply. It runs an ATI RAGE 3D IIC. That video card is well burned in, has no fan and runs just fine. I actually have another mainboard for that system, so I can repair as needed in the future. It does the job and lets me turn off all the more modern power guzzlers when not needed.
I used to keep my workstation running all day and night to support that phone gateway. It used 115 watts. My newest PC is a quad Athlon II which consumes between 100-150 watts depending on what it is doing. So the newer hardware may not be more efficient, especially for small specific jobs. Plus, I do not have to use an otherwise powerful system to do much of nothing. I have added another task to that little skype gateway, too. It is my download machine. I download my big stuff onto its drive, so again I may turn off my other machines. That P3 is saving me money by doing all the small stuff that needs a machine to be on all the time.
I wish I could have a browser only system without Windows or Linux. I have always hated needing a whole bunch of OS just to run a browser.
However, the issue will be how far do they go. Networking and being able to save to a flash drive should not be too difficult, video handling will be a must and then it gets tricky. Printers? Games? External applications?
The only benefit I can see is if this new OS is light, very light. Potentially they could provide a more secure platform if they keep the bloat out. The less lines of code the better.
Unions and government are the reasons, plain and simple. Together they have a list of rules that would drive anyone insane. Now, put it into code!
You almost got it right listing the green house gases. Water, CH4 and then CO2. CO2 is a poor greenhouse gas. The long term record that blows the lid off the "recent" AGW are the ice cores and that show temperature leads the CO2. Add into the mix that the sun is proving to be anything but static and that makes most of the models pure BS.
We need far more information in order to call the science complete, or even accurate. I would feel better about the science, if the researchers were not on the governmental teat as they lay the groundwork for the justifying the government run our lives down to our damn thermostats.
One simple solution for complex passwords would be a barcode reader. It may not be perfect in all situations, but I have used them and they act like keyboards, so it is easy to setup. The hard part is finding cheap ones, but I picked up 3 CueCats from BG micro in the past and they provide me with what I need for home use.
However, if they have your hash, then they are already inside, so you lose. If physical access to a system is an issue, you will need to encrypt the entire disk and keep you system off when you are not around.
I found that good passwords are not that hard to remember, if you do not change them. Extreme complexity seems quite the bitch, but when you type them everyday, your fingers tend to remember. I have several such passwords and I almost have to type them to actually remember them character by character.
Sentimentality may be an issue, but some stuff can be nice to have for buying it again is not an option.
I still like having some old pentium stuff for the socketed flash to be used for programming. Also, for low level projects where having the ISA slots can be useful for prototyping proof of concept. However, having more than a couple is overkill.
I tend to keep one all media drives I get my hands on. You never know when some client will bring in a 5 1/4 floppy or a 4mm dat tape in. I used an old hard disk's interface board just this week to save files off a dead drive some IT hack shorted out while upgrading. His great advice was telling them tough luck!
When I give lost data back to a client it makes me love my job. When you fix hardware you can feel useful, but virtually any hardware can be replaced for a fee. When you return the irreplaceable, you really feel like you matter, even, if only for that client on that day.