To me, no. But I'm a tree-hugging dirt worshipper, and that's essentially preaching to the choir. In my mind's eye there can be no doubt that we're at least partly responsible for the quickening global warming, and as a scuba diver to boot, I have seen first-hand the impact that man is having on some of the most fragile ecosystems in the world.
That being said, I was trying to meet him halfway, and give him a reason that didn't depend on global warming to try to reduce emissions and plant trees, because he seemed to think that global warming/climate change is a load of bunk.:) If the end result is the same and beneficial for everybody, I don't really care how it was rationalized.
We've been measuring the global average temperature for 150 years, and the graph in the top right tells the story of what's been happening to global averages. Only an idiot looks at that graph and says that the temperature is actually going down.
What may or may not be in question is how much of an impact we're actually having on it, and how much of it is a natural trend. They argue that there was actually a mini ice age in the middle ages, and that this is a natural warming of the world as a result of coming out of it. They point to what the Vikings called Vineland, and remind us that they used to grow grapes for wine in Greenland. What they forget is that this mini ice age was caused by the Romans deforesting Europe, and that most of those trees have not grown back... there has to be another reason that the global cooling they caused has been reversing itself.
Beyond that, the thing that's particularly annoying about climate change deniers is that we know that these hydrocarbons (which most climate change scientists are saying is the root cause) are not good for human health. They have been linked to several types of cancers, and are a contributing factor to other quality-of-life diseases like asthma. We also know that exposure to smog has detrimental effects on the local flora and fauna. (well, some plants it's like super fertilizer, but it kills others). Knowing these detrimental effects exist, what surprises me is that some climate change deniers are actively campaigning against change, because they believe global warming to be a myth. Even if we can't agree whether humankind is responsible for the climate change, can we at least agree that reducing hydrocarbon emissions is a good thing to be trying to do regardless on its impact on the global average temperature?
Unless you've met all of them, I wouldn't presume that the specific transgendered person in question finds it offensive.
"Shemale" carries context and connotation tied to the porn industry. It's specifically because of that that I've never met a trans person who was comfortable with the term. Pretty much everybody I know within that community finds the term extremely offensive.
I suspect that the only trans people you will ever find who are not uncomfortable with the term are the ones who actually work in porn as "shemales", and even within that small group, I think you'll find several who don't like the term.
And while I suspect that you posted this before the person who originally said it clarified, but they're not in North America, and were translating from "ladyboy" which is more common in their part of the world. I expect that if the trans person in question knew the context surrounding the word "shemale" they'd be just as offended by it as trans people in NA and Europe are.
What makes you think I have any intention of running Windows on it? I haven't owned/used a Windows device in years, and I'm not about to start just so I can have a locked down useless device running on an ARM processor... I'd buy an Android-based device or a Chromebook before I bought a Win8-on-ARM device.
What I want is an ARM-based 13" laptop with no optical drive, a respectable amount of memory, built-in GigE and 802.11n networking. Don't even need a card reader, as long as it has USB, and if it only has a 16GB SSD, that'd be fine, as long as I can install my operating system of choice... my preferred Linux distro has an ARM build based on Debian Sid, which I am quite happy with on other devices.
How fast is normal typing speed for you, though? I have been using a standard layout/size keyboard since I was in grade 5, and normal typing speed is over 100wpm, with peak over 130wpm when I'm typing in English, and about 70wpm when I'm typing in French (using scancodes for the accented characters, not an actual French keyboard which is worse for me than the netbook). The fact that the keys have different spacing and are not always in the same place *really* throws me off, and my hands usually start cramping quite badly within about 15 minutes of using one.... I _can_ type on a netbook, and in fact, I used one for about 4 years before I gave it away, but my typing speed dropped by about 50wpm when I was using it, and I ended up never typing anything more important than a twitter post, or the occasional slashdot rant when I was using it.
But the screen is too small, which means that the keyboard is too small. I can't type on a netbook with any efficiency, because of the way they scrunch the keys together. If that was available with a 13" screen instead of a 10" screen, and all other specs identical, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
you accept no graphics for more CPU vs Bobcat, and pay significantly more for it
Please find me an ultraportable AMD-based laptop that costs less than $500. If you can't, then your point is moot, because including tax & delivery, I paid about $450 for my laptop from Dell. They're selling its successor for $459, which is a little more but has higher specs (Vostro V131 if you want to look it up, my laptop is a V130). It's available with Ubuntu at that price, too, for the Linux folks.
ARM, on the other hand, has not yet tried to compete in PC or server markets
Actually, they have. And they succeeded for many years. They used to be known as Acorn, and provided processors for *many* systems in the 1980's and early 1990's. The very first generation known as ARM was powering the BBC Micro in 1987, and there's several other computers made around that time that used Acorn hardware.
It is a different market, today, than it was in the 80's, though... most mainstream Linux distros have an ARM version available, and even Microsoft is going to be officially supporting ARM. It was Microsoft's anti-competitive moves in the early 90's that killed ARM in the desktop, and now that MS has 90% desktop market share, if they're supporting ARM, it's a good time for them to make a move.
The only Intel consumer product ARM licensees are currently able to threaten is the Atom product line. Apart from that, both kinds of CPUs are simply serving two completely different purposes.
Yeah, but...
The only reason my ultraportable laptop has an Intel Celeron U3600 in it (1.2GHz dual core arrandale, 18W TDP) instead of an ARM is because I couldn't find a laptop in the same class with an ARM chip. They're serving completely different markets, but ARM is easily powerful enough for most users (just look at the R-Pi running 1080p H.264 video over HDMI), and there's absolutely no reason my laptop needs an x86 processor. I just couldn't, at the time, find a 13" ultraportable with an ARM chip in it. (closest I could find was an ASUS Transformer, but I want to run a full desktop OS on it, not Android, and it was actually more expensive than I paid for my laptop).
BTW, if somebody can find one now, I'd love to hear about it... I'm not in the market right now, but I like to know about that kind of thing for when I'm shopping next time... and also so I can make suggestions for family.:)
Atom was running at a TDP of half the TDP of your Bobcat, and it was doing it 5 years ago. That wonderful 18W TDP that you cite for AMD Fusion/Bobcat? Yeah... that's actually the same as the Celeron U3600 in my ultraportable laptop... sure the Celeron is running at 1.2GHz instead of the 1.6GHz for the Bobcat, but the U3600 outperforms a Core2 Duo T5450 on benchmarks, let alone the AMD Fusion ( http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html... you'll have to scroll down quite a bit to reach the AMD E-450 Fusion, which is the highest rated AMD Fusion on the list), and the graphics have not had a problem with anything I've thrown at it. The only reason that my 13" lappy doesn't have the same battery life as your netbook is because the screen has 4x the real estate with the same size battery. That's a compromise I'm willing to make, since I get a larger screen, a full-size keyboard, more memory, and a much more usable system out of the equation... it still lasts 4h on battery, which isn't bad for a $400 laptop.
And the U3600 is the *last* generation of Intel's offerings. The current generation uses even less power. And if that's not good enough for you, you can still switch to an Atom, which uses even *less* power than either, but has a corresponding power tradeoff
Yeah. Right. Intel's being utterly dominated by AMD in that arena.....
They *are* being dominated in power consumption, however. Just not by AMD. Intel is talking about TDP of 15W in their consumer hardware. ARM is talking about TDP of 2W.
The number of weapons required to malfunction to cause serious problems: ONE. Even if it's a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001% probability; the more weapons you have in more places, the more likely something goes wrong.
With you until you said that. Nuclear weapons are not stored in an armed state, and they aren't designed to keep a critical mass in such a configuration that it could turn into an uncontrolled fission. The absolute 100% worst case scenario possible would be that the non-nuclear part of the payload (which is used to mash the nuclear components together and trigger a critical mass detonation) could go off prematurely, but as the weapon is not stored in an armed state, that would not trigger a nuclear detonation (in the un-armed state, the physical position of the nuclear fuel is such that it would be blown away from each other, not towards, in the event that the explosive went off accidentally). It would, essentially, be a dirty bomb whose effective area would be contained to the storage facility in which it went off... dirty bombs are most effective when they're used outside where the local weather can carry the nuclear contaminants. Even that is not very likely, because the type of explosives they're using in modern weapons are extremely difficult to set off accidentally. (check youtube for a video of somebody cooking their lunch with burning c4... that stuff does not accidentally explode).
A *far* more likely scenario than anything you suggest would actually be some nuclear fuel "going missing". The problem with stealing a bomb is that somebody will notice it pretty much immediately. They're big, and difficult to transport. While you could fit one in an 18-wheeler, you'd have a hard time sneaking that truck into a military facility without being noticed. On the other hand, the nuclear fuel is significantly smaller and easier to transport. In theory, somebody could take the nuclear fuel from a weapon while working on it, and sneak it out in a briefcase. I would be extremely surprised if anybody ever managed to successfully do that, because my understanding is that they film people when working on nuclear weapons, and that nobody's ever left alone with a bomb.
You're right, it only takes one, but there are safeguards in place that provide an extremely small chance that any of the situations you suggest could ever happen. I would prefer nuclear disarmament too, but given that it's never going to happen, I'm comfortable with the safeguards in place. The engineers who designed these things are not morons, and designed them to fail safe (or at least, as safe as you can get with several kilograms of nuclear fuel involved).
That being said, I picked up a USB numeric keypad for my laptop about 10 years ago, and it hasn't caused me any problems. I don't use it any more because I've switched to ultraportable laptops and it's literally half the size of my laptop, but it still works.
So does Subaru... my parents' Legacy was built in Indiana.:)
Still a Japanese design, with Japanese specs, though, so the point stands... though interestingly (and perhaps it proves the point), the Legacy is a 2004, back from when GM had its talons in Subaru, and their car has the worst automatic transmission I have ever driven... downshift lag is at least 4-5 seconds when you try accelerating, and it seems that whoever designed the thresholds for upshifting was drunk, as they're not consistent at all. I don't like automatic transmissions in general, but on the rare occasion I've been forced to use one, I have driven much better than theirs. It's still never had any major repairs, though, even though the odometer is pushing 460,000 kms.
I've certainly heard of people who seek cars made in a certain country, but does anyone actually value this more than whether their car is a piece of shit?
I've owned two American cars in my life. A 1988 Pontiac Firefly, which was basic transportation, and very good on gas. I was driving it in high school, and for my limited means at the time, it made sense. It's also a car that can't be made any more, because it would never pass modern safety standards. Those same safety standards would add a significant amount of weight to the car, and it would never get the mileage that it used to, even if they were to remake it.
The second American car I owned was a 2007 Chev Aveo. That was complete unadulterated shit. It was a terrible ride, it was not as good on gas as they advertised, it was uncomfortable, it handled like you were driving through a lake, in all, it was a terrible car. For the time that I owned it, it was in for several major repairs, including one where I was without car for 2 weeks... the dealer fixed me up with a Pontiac Grand Prix as a loaner for that 2 week period. That car had a better interior, but it was still low quality/plasticky, it still handled like you were driving through a lake, and it was even worse on gas.
Contrast that with the numerous Japanese cars I have owned... I have never had a major repair on any of the Subarus I have owned, despite having more than a million km's between them. My 2011 Impreza is immensely better in ride quality and handling than any American car I've ever driven, and it actually gets the gas mileage that they advertised for the Aveo, even though it's got all-wheel drive and I'm not even trying to drive it efficiently. And it's not just Subaru that I can say that about... in my family, we have owned Honda and Toyota cars that we can say the same about.
While there are certainly European brands that I would buy if I could get them here, I would never consider buying an American car until the Americans figure out how to make a car that goes around corners. In the mean time, I have never had a bad experience with a Japanese car, and would definitely recommend them to anybody looking for a car. It's not that individual American cars which are good don't exist, it's that most of the "good" American cars are actually European or Japanese designed/built and just rebadged.
Maybe they're using low-quality feeds? I watch Hulu and Youtube at 240p, which is only ~200 megabyte per hour streamed. So it doesn't add up to a lot even over a month of viewing.
Even a high quality feed on Netflix doesn't eat up that much data. It doesn't even come close to saturating my 12mbit DSL connection when I watch it, and even though I watch maybe 10h of Netflix a week, my monthly usage has only gone up by about 30GB.
Actually, that speed/cap is pretty normal for Canada, regardless of whether you're rural or urban. A handful of resellers offer more reasonable caps, but most people either don't know they exist, or aren't in their coverage area.
I really wish people would stop spreading this FUD.
It's not FUD, though, it's absolute truth. Docsis 3 is a 480mbit LAN, which is divided into channels that can be bonded to provide the advertised "50mbit" service that some carriers have. The problem is, it's a LAN, and the more subscribers you have, the fewer channels are available. Even if there's no backhaul saturation at all (which almost never happens), it's still possible that your 50mbit service will cap out at much less than that if there's enough subscribers in the area, and no free channels to bond to.
DSL, on the other hand, is a dedicated ATM connection between your modem and the DSLAM. At no point between you and the DSLAM is your connection shared (and in fact, if it was shared your connection would crash and be completely unusable), which means that any saturation issues you encounter are from the backhaul and beyond. Each individual connection is separated into a vlan, and the backhaul can dynamically reassign bandwidth between vlans as needed, which can't be done at the neighbourhood level on a cable connection (you're still limited to the number of open channels on cable). There's still load balancing happening, and that same load balancing *does* happen on a cable connection as well, once you reach the D3 head end, but because it's not a shared LAN between all of the subscribers in a neighbourhood, you don't usually have any slowdowns caused by what your neighbour is doing, nor by how many neighbours you have connected. And in fact, for *most* of our uses of the Internet, having a faster sync rate on DSL actually improves the experience for everybody, because it means that you don't need your bandwidth on the backhaul for as long when you're opening websites. The result is, generally, that with DSL your sync rate = your throughput rate, 24/7.
In a perfect world, what you say is absolutely correct. The problem is we don't live in a perfect world. Cable companies *do* over-sell the area, because they don't actually need new ports to connect a new subscriber. They just have to run a drop in to your cable modem and configure DHCP to give you an IP address. The only limitation on whether they can provide you service on the existing D3 card is whether the cable reaches your house, and in some cases, they have hundreds of customers sharing a single D3 LAN. DSL doesn't have that luxury: each connection requires a port, and if there's no ports available, they can't provide you with service. It's specifically because of that limitation that DSL generally provides a better overall customer experience, even though the maximum advertised speed is often lower than cable.
The carrier usually has a pretty good idea what you're going to get before you sign up, though, because they know (roughly) how long your cable run is from the DSLAM. If they're even halfway ethical, they're not going to sell you a 25mbit VDSL connection if you're 5km from the equipment. They can't usually predict line problems, but they can repair them when they find them.
While my carrier doesn't guarantee the speed, they do say I *should* be able to get about 30mbit sync rate on VDSL, because I'm only 800m from the equipment (Alcatel 7330 ARAM-D, fed by 2x10GbE fibre). As it happens, there's a bridge tap on my line, and I can't stably hold more than about 16mbit, but that's fine for me, because I'm only paying for 12mbit ADSL2. They're holding off on fixing the bridge tap, because they're going to be rolling out IPTV service later this year, and will be grooming the lines for that anyway.
Whether your throughput will actually equal your sync rate depends on the backhaul, and how saturated the slam is. If you have something like a Lucent Stinger, which can have up to 144 customers fed by a single gigabit connection, then you're going to have slowdowns if they're all on 25mbit service. Even the 20GbE connection feeding an ARAM-D can get saturated, because that's feeding up to 672 customers. And that's all assuming that you can even get the advertised sync rate, which not everybody can.
As several others have pointed out, pretty much every DSL service contract advertises the speed as "up to X", rather than "you will get X". That being said, I do have one question for the person who posed the original question: are you 100% sure that it's your throughput that's changing, and not the sync rate? I have seen cases where DSL becomes unusable at night, and the two causes that stick in my mind are a case where it was a junction that wasn't sealed properly (condensation as the equipment cooled off causing poor connectivity), and a case where the street lamps weren't properly grounded, and were causing induction current in the buried service cables. Those are extreme examples, but you'd do well to check your line stats when it starts slowing down like that, to see whether you're still synced at the full rate. If it's actually backhaul congestion, then your option is essentially "wait until they get around to upgrading your area, or move". But if it's a drop in actual sync rate, they can usually fix it.
Also... have you considered cellular? That's an option now that wasn't an option 6 years ago, as 3G speeds are capable of giving you a connection that's faster than 3mbit DSL. If there's a carrier that doesn't have a stupidly low usage cap, it's an alternative.
Admittedly a lot can change in 5 years, but I had a 2007 Aveo. It was good for what it was, but all it was was basic transportation. It got me from A to B, without an ounce of comfort, and luxury was something you read about in magazines. Once my means had improved enough to afford it, I actually broke the lease early to buy a better car. (buy, not lease). It was worth it, to me, to pay out the lease and trade up for a 2011 Subaru Impreza (as an aside, it will probably be the last gasoline car I ever get... next one will be a turbodiesel. I hope Subaru brings the diesel version of the Impreza to NA by then, because I really like this car...).
If you have the money, I'd take the $12,000 that you are saying you can afford to lay down on a car, and put it as a down payment on a 5-year loan for something in the $20,000-25,000 range. Unless you have *really* bad credit, you'll probably end up with a monthly around $200/mo, and you'll have a much better car out of it. It does mean making a monthly commitment which you may not be planning for, but it really is worth it.
And if you don't have the ability to commit $200/mo towards it, then take the $12,000 and buy an off-lease car instead... you can pick up a 3-year old car that was in the same price range I'm suggesting for about that.
PS - If you're in a northern climate, the Aveo is a piece of shit. It does not handle at all on ice. I have never tried the Sonic, but the problem with the Aveo will probably apply to any car in that class: it's too light, and it has front-wheel drive. The two together combine to make for really poor traction and handling on slippery roads.
There's a difference between an MVNO and a Fight Brand... While I don't really have any experience with Virgin in the US, they are considered a fight brand here in Canada, because they're wholly owned/operated by Bell.
And honestly... you may call it a "crappy phone", because it's not a quad core 2GHz processor with 4GB of RAM, but the Samsung Galaxy Ace which I have from my carrier has no problem with anything I've thrown at it, despite only having 512MB of RAM and an 800MHz processor. Unless you're doing heavy gaming, you really don't need the latest and greatest, and if you *are* gaming, why not buy a DS or a PSP?
In the UK, there's loads of legally binding things to make sure you can keep your number. In fact, it has to be transferred to your new provider within 48hours and I think that time frame is getting shorter.
Same in Canada... As long as you're not moving to a different LD calling area, you can take your number with you (and even if you are, you can, you'll just be paying LD rates with most carriers). The rules say within 48h, but personal experience switching providers says it's closer to about 5 minutes... I have had the same phone number with 4 different providers in the last 10 years, and the longest it has actually taken to port the number was about 20 minutes. And they warned me it might take longer than usual that time, because they were having a system outage at the time.
It boggles the mind that the US hasn't heard of LNP.
Why not since I can buy the same gun that was used in the Montreal Massacre? How come that wasn't banned?
The Browning 9mm HP is a restricted firearm, meaning you need a special permit to own it, it is illegal to transport it unless it's locked in a case in a "made safe" state (firing pin removed, not loaded, magazine stored in a separate case). Additionally, it doesn't support a fully automatic firing mode like an MP5 or an AK-47, and the maximum legally allowed magazine size is 5 rounds.
These laws/requirements existed before the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, btw... the reason the laws didn't get updated is because the person who was responsible for the massacre was already violating a half dozen gun laws. More laws wouldn't have made a difference in that case, and the one thing that they *could* have done to prevent it from happening has already been done: it's *significantly* harder to get a restricted weapons permit today than it was 20 years ago. Of course, the cons scrapped the gun registry, which was the *other* law that got changed as a result of that event.
Despite your claims that the party is so far right, it in fact governs pretty much in the centre, as most gov'ts find they must do unless they want to lose power. On at least some issues, the Conservative Party is to the left of the previous Progressive Conservative government from 1984-1993.
Most of the actual Progressive conservatives, you know, the ones who actually know what the word "progressive" means, have jumped ship and are now part of the other parties. Just ask the premier of Quebec.
The only remnants of the original Progressive Conservatives who are still supporting the CPC are the ones who are too stupid to realize that it's not the PC party any more, and the ones who were the right-wing extremist minority in the days of the PC.
And no, they really don't govern in the center. A centrist government would never have put forward the internet surveillance bill being discussed here. They also never would have allowed one of their members to put forward a bill defining a 3-day old zygote as a human being. They're nowhere near the center of the political compass.
Depends what you're using for remote desktop... I've been able to run a browser or a word processor through NX/SSH on a laptop wirelessly tethered to a cell phone with 3G turned off... 115kbit/s is more than enough bandwidth to handle a word processor or a spreadsheet when you're using the right protocols. VNC, particularly VNC with compression turned off, or worse, RDP6 or earlier, however, and you'll never get anything done.
My father used to do full desktop remote access over a 28.800 dialup connection, when I was in high school, using a piece of software called ReachOut, by Stac, Inc. It wasn't the very high resolution desktops that we have now, but that was enough for an 800x600 display on an NT4 client, and was quite usable.
Of course, if you have no Internet access at all, you're still screwed.
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Do I need to say more?
To me, no. But I'm a tree-hugging dirt worshipper, and that's essentially preaching to the choir. In my mind's eye there can be no doubt that we're at least partly responsible for the quickening global warming, and as a scuba diver to boot, I have seen first-hand the impact that man is having on some of the most fragile ecosystems in the world.
That being said, I was trying to meet him halfway, and give him a reason that didn't depend on global warming to try to reduce emissions and plant trees, because he seemed to think that global warming/climate change is a load of bunk. :) If the end result is the same and beneficial for everybody, I don't really care how it was rationalized.
Global warming *is* happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record
We've been measuring the global average temperature for 150 years, and the graph in the top right tells the story of what's been happening to global averages. Only an idiot looks at that graph and says that the temperature is actually going down.
What may or may not be in question is how much of an impact we're actually having on it, and how much of it is a natural trend. They argue that there was actually a mini ice age in the middle ages, and that this is a natural warming of the world as a result of coming out of it. They point to what the Vikings called Vineland, and remind us that they used to grow grapes for wine in Greenland. What they forget is that this mini ice age was caused by the Romans deforesting Europe, and that most of those trees have not grown back... there has to be another reason that the global cooling they caused has been reversing itself.
Beyond that, the thing that's particularly annoying about climate change deniers is that we know that these hydrocarbons (which most climate change scientists are saying is the root cause) are not good for human health. They have been linked to several types of cancers, and are a contributing factor to other quality-of-life diseases like asthma. We also know that exposure to smog has detrimental effects on the local flora and fauna. (well, some plants it's like super fertilizer, but it kills others). Knowing these detrimental effects exist, what surprises me is that some climate change deniers are actively campaigning against change, because they believe global warming to be a myth. Even if we can't agree whether humankind is responsible for the climate change, can we at least agree that reducing hydrocarbon emissions is a good thing to be trying to do regardless on its impact on the global average temperature?
Unless you've met all of them, I wouldn't presume that the specific transgendered person in question finds it offensive.
"Shemale" carries context and connotation tied to the porn industry. It's specifically because of that that I've never met a trans person who was comfortable with the term. Pretty much everybody I know within that community finds the term extremely offensive.
I suspect that the only trans people you will ever find who are not uncomfortable with the term are the ones who actually work in porn as "shemales", and even within that small group, I think you'll find several who don't like the term.
And while I suspect that you posted this before the person who originally said it clarified, but they're not in North America, and were translating from "ladyboy" which is more common in their part of the world. I expect that if the trans person in question knew the context surrounding the word "shemale" they'd be just as offended by it as trans people in NA and Europe are.
What makes you think I have any intention of running Windows on it? I haven't owned/used a Windows device in years, and I'm not about to start just so I can have a locked down useless device running on an ARM processor... I'd buy an Android-based device or a Chromebook before I bought a Win8-on-ARM device.
What I want is an ARM-based 13" laptop with no optical drive, a respectable amount of memory, built-in GigE and 802.11n networking. Don't even need a card reader, as long as it has USB, and if it only has a 16GB SSD, that'd be fine, as long as I can install my operating system of choice... my preferred Linux distro has an ARM build based on Debian Sid, which I am quite happy with on other devices.
How fast is normal typing speed for you, though? I have been using a standard layout/size keyboard since I was in grade 5, and normal typing speed is over 100wpm, with peak over 130wpm when I'm typing in English, and about 70wpm when I'm typing in French (using scancodes for the accented characters, not an actual French keyboard which is worse for me than the netbook). The fact that the keys have different spacing and are not always in the same place *really* throws me off, and my hands usually start cramping quite badly within about 15 minutes of using one.... I _can_ type on a netbook, and in fact, I used one for about 4 years before I gave it away, but my typing speed dropped by about 50wpm when I was using it, and I ended up never typing anything more important than a twitter post, or the occasional slashdot rant when I was using it.
Yeah... they're starting to creep into the market already. Closest I can find that meets what I'm looking for is this: http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook
But the screen is too small, which means that the keyboard is too small. I can't type on a netbook with any efficiency, because of the way they scrunch the keys together. If that was available with a 13" screen instead of a 10" screen, and all other specs identical, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
you accept no graphics for more CPU vs Bobcat, and pay significantly more for it
Please find me an ultraportable AMD-based laptop that costs less than $500. If you can't, then your point is moot, because including tax & delivery, I paid about $450 for my laptop from Dell. They're selling its successor for $459, which is a little more but has higher specs (Vostro V131 if you want to look it up, my laptop is a V130). It's available with Ubuntu at that price, too, for the Linux folks.
While you're looking for that, you may also want to check some benchmarks... http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=Intel+HD+Celeron+U3600 You might, upon reading, notice that it gets almost exactly the same score in PassMark that the AMD does.
ARM, on the other hand, has not yet tried to compete in PC or server markets
Actually, they have. And they succeeded for many years. They used to be known as Acorn, and provided processors for *many* systems in the 1980's and early 1990's. The very first generation known as ARM was powering the BBC Micro in 1987, and there's several other computers made around that time that used Acorn hardware.
It is a different market, today, than it was in the 80's, though... most mainstream Linux distros have an ARM version available, and even Microsoft is going to be officially supporting ARM. It was Microsoft's anti-competitive moves in the early 90's that killed ARM in the desktop, and now that MS has 90% desktop market share, if they're supporting ARM, it's a good time for them to make a move.
The only Intel consumer product ARM licensees are currently able to threaten is the Atom product line. Apart from that, both kinds of CPUs are simply serving two completely different purposes.
Yeah, but...
The only reason my ultraportable laptop has an Intel Celeron U3600 in it (1.2GHz dual core arrandale, 18W TDP) instead of an ARM is because I couldn't find a laptop in the same class with an ARM chip. They're serving completely different markets, but ARM is easily powerful enough for most users (just look at the R-Pi running 1080p H.264 video over HDMI), and there's absolutely no reason my laptop needs an x86 processor. I just couldn't, at the time, find a 13" ultraportable with an ARM chip in it. (closest I could find was an ASUS Transformer, but I want to run a full desktop OS on it, not Android, and it was actually more expensive than I paid for my laptop).
BTW, if somebody can find one now, I'd love to hear about it... I'm not in the market right now, but I like to know about that kind of thing for when I'm shopping next time... and also so I can make suggestions for family. :)
Atom was running at a TDP of half the TDP of your Bobcat, and it was doing it 5 years ago. That wonderful 18W TDP that you cite for AMD Fusion/Bobcat? Yeah... that's actually the same as the Celeron U3600 in my ultraportable laptop... sure the Celeron is running at 1.2GHz instead of the 1.6GHz for the Bobcat, but the U3600 outperforms a Core2 Duo T5450 on benchmarks, let alone the AMD Fusion ( http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html ... you'll have to scroll down quite a bit to reach the AMD E-450 Fusion, which is the highest rated AMD Fusion on the list), and the graphics have not had a problem with anything I've thrown at it. The only reason that my 13" lappy doesn't have the same battery life as your netbook is because the screen has 4x the real estate with the same size battery. That's a compromise I'm willing to make, since I get a larger screen, a full-size keyboard, more memory, and a much more usable system out of the equation... it still lasts 4h on battery, which isn't bad for a $400 laptop.
And the U3600 is the *last* generation of Intel's offerings. The current generation uses even less power. And if that's not good enough for you, you can still switch to an Atom, which uses even *less* power than either, but has a corresponding power tradeoff
Yeah. Right. Intel's being utterly dominated by AMD in that arena.....
They *are* being dominated in power consumption, however. Just not by AMD. Intel is talking about TDP of 15W in their consumer hardware. ARM is talking about TDP of 2W.
The number of weapons required to malfunction to cause serious problems: ONE. Even if it's a 0.0000000000000000000000000000000001% probability; the more weapons you have in more places, the more likely something goes wrong.
With you until you said that. Nuclear weapons are not stored in an armed state, and they aren't designed to keep a critical mass in such a configuration that it could turn into an uncontrolled fission. The absolute 100% worst case scenario possible would be that the non-nuclear part of the payload (which is used to mash the nuclear components together and trigger a critical mass detonation) could go off prematurely, but as the weapon is not stored in an armed state, that would not trigger a nuclear detonation (in the un-armed state, the physical position of the nuclear fuel is such that it would be blown away from each other, not towards, in the event that the explosive went off accidentally). It would, essentially, be a dirty bomb whose effective area would be contained to the storage facility in which it went off... dirty bombs are most effective when they're used outside where the local weather can carry the nuclear contaminants. Even that is not very likely, because the type of explosives they're using in modern weapons are extremely difficult to set off accidentally. (check youtube for a video of somebody cooking their lunch with burning c4... that stuff does not accidentally explode).
A *far* more likely scenario than anything you suggest would actually be some nuclear fuel "going missing". The problem with stealing a bomb is that somebody will notice it pretty much immediately. They're big, and difficult to transport. While you could fit one in an 18-wheeler, you'd have a hard time sneaking that truck into a military facility without being noticed. On the other hand, the nuclear fuel is significantly smaller and easier to transport. In theory, somebody could take the nuclear fuel from a weapon while working on it, and sneak it out in a briefcase. I would be extremely surprised if anybody ever managed to successfully do that, because my understanding is that they film people when working on nuclear weapons, and that nobody's ever left alone with a bomb.
You're right, it only takes one, but there are safeguards in place that provide an extremely small chance that any of the situations you suggest could ever happen. I would prefer nuclear disarmament too, but given that it's never going to happen, I'm comfortable with the safeguards in place. The engineers who designed these things are not morons, and designed them to fail safe (or at least, as safe as you can get with several kilograms of nuclear fuel involved).
A quick search on Google reveals a very large number of USB numeric keypads which have more than just 9 keys. If I were going to buy one today, I'd probably get one of these: http://www.logitech.com/en-ca/keyboards/keyboard/devices/wireless-number-pad-n305
That being said, I picked up a USB numeric keypad for my laptop about 10 years ago, and it hasn't caused me any problems. I don't use it any more because I've switched to ultraportable laptops and it's literally half the size of my laptop, but it still works.
So does Subaru... my parents' Legacy was built in Indiana. :)
Still a Japanese design, with Japanese specs, though, so the point stands... though interestingly (and perhaps it proves the point), the Legacy is a 2004, back from when GM had its talons in Subaru, and their car has the worst automatic transmission I have ever driven... downshift lag is at least 4-5 seconds when you try accelerating, and it seems that whoever designed the thresholds for upshifting was drunk, as they're not consistent at all. I don't like automatic transmissions in general, but on the rare occasion I've been forced to use one, I have driven much better than theirs. It's still never had any major repairs, though, even though the odometer is pushing 460,000 kms.
Actually, I compared a $21,000 Subaru to a $40,000 Pontiac Grand Prix as well... Good reading skills, though. :)
I've certainly heard of people who seek cars made in a certain country, but does anyone actually value this more than whether their car is a piece of shit?
I've owned two American cars in my life. A 1988 Pontiac Firefly, which was basic transportation, and very good on gas. I was driving it in high school, and for my limited means at the time, it made sense. It's also a car that can't be made any more, because it would never pass modern safety standards. Those same safety standards would add a significant amount of weight to the car, and it would never get the mileage that it used to, even if they were to remake it.
The second American car I owned was a 2007 Chev Aveo. That was complete unadulterated shit. It was a terrible ride, it was not as good on gas as they advertised, it was uncomfortable, it handled like you were driving through a lake, in all, it was a terrible car. For the time that I owned it, it was in for several major repairs, including one where I was without car for 2 weeks... the dealer fixed me up with a Pontiac Grand Prix as a loaner for that 2 week period. That car had a better interior, but it was still low quality/plasticky, it still handled like you were driving through a lake, and it was even worse on gas.
Contrast that with the numerous Japanese cars I have owned... I have never had a major repair on any of the Subarus I have owned, despite having more than a million km's between them. My 2011 Impreza is immensely better in ride quality and handling than any American car I've ever driven, and it actually gets the gas mileage that they advertised for the Aveo, even though it's got all-wheel drive and I'm not even trying to drive it efficiently. And it's not just Subaru that I can say that about... in my family, we have owned Honda and Toyota cars that we can say the same about.
While there are certainly European brands that I would buy if I could get them here, I would never consider buying an American car until the Americans figure out how to make a car that goes around corners. In the mean time, I have never had a bad experience with a Japanese car, and would definitely recommend them to anybody looking for a car. It's not that individual American cars which are good don't exist, it's that most of the "good" American cars are actually European or Japanese designed/built and just rebadged.
Maybe they're using low-quality feeds? I watch Hulu and Youtube at 240p, which is only ~200 megabyte per hour streamed. So it doesn't add up to a lot even over a month of viewing.
Even a high quality feed on Netflix doesn't eat up that much data. It doesn't even come close to saturating my 12mbit DSL connection when I watch it, and even though I watch maybe 10h of Netflix a week, my monthly usage has only gone up by about 30GB.
Actually, that speed/cap is pretty normal for Canada, regardless of whether you're rural or urban. A handful of resellers offer more reasonable caps, but most people either don't know they exist, or aren't in their coverage area.
I really wish people would stop spreading this FUD.
It's not FUD, though, it's absolute truth. Docsis 3 is a 480mbit LAN, which is divided into channels that can be bonded to provide the advertised "50mbit" service that some carriers have. The problem is, it's a LAN, and the more subscribers you have, the fewer channels are available. Even if there's no backhaul saturation at all (which almost never happens), it's still possible that your 50mbit service will cap out at much less than that if there's enough subscribers in the area, and no free channels to bond to.
DSL, on the other hand, is a dedicated ATM connection between your modem and the DSLAM. At no point between you and the DSLAM is your connection shared (and in fact, if it was shared your connection would crash and be completely unusable), which means that any saturation issues you encounter are from the backhaul and beyond. Each individual connection is separated into a vlan, and the backhaul can dynamically reassign bandwidth between vlans as needed, which can't be done at the neighbourhood level on a cable connection (you're still limited to the number of open channels on cable). There's still load balancing happening, and that same load balancing *does* happen on a cable connection as well, once you reach the D3 head end, but because it's not a shared LAN between all of the subscribers in a neighbourhood, you don't usually have any slowdowns caused by what your neighbour is doing, nor by how many neighbours you have connected. And in fact, for *most* of our uses of the Internet, having a faster sync rate on DSL actually improves the experience for everybody, because it means that you don't need your bandwidth on the backhaul for as long when you're opening websites. The result is, generally, that with DSL your sync rate = your throughput rate, 24/7.
In a perfect world, what you say is absolutely correct. The problem is we don't live in a perfect world. Cable companies *do* over-sell the area, because they don't actually need new ports to connect a new subscriber. They just have to run a drop in to your cable modem and configure DHCP to give you an IP address. The only limitation on whether they can provide you service on the existing D3 card is whether the cable reaches your house, and in some cases, they have hundreds of customers sharing a single D3 LAN. DSL doesn't have that luxury: each connection requires a port, and if there's no ports available, they can't provide you with service. It's specifically because of that limitation that DSL generally provides a better overall customer experience, even though the maximum advertised speed is often lower than cable.
The carrier usually has a pretty good idea what you're going to get before you sign up, though, because they know (roughly) how long your cable run is from the DSLAM. If they're even halfway ethical, they're not going to sell you a 25mbit VDSL connection if you're 5km from the equipment. They can't usually predict line problems, but they can repair them when they find them.
While my carrier doesn't guarantee the speed, they do say I *should* be able to get about 30mbit sync rate on VDSL, because I'm only 800m from the equipment (Alcatel 7330 ARAM-D, fed by 2x10GbE fibre). As it happens, there's a bridge tap on my line, and I can't stably hold more than about 16mbit, but that's fine for me, because I'm only paying for 12mbit ADSL2. They're holding off on fixing the bridge tap, because they're going to be rolling out IPTV service later this year, and will be grooming the lines for that anyway.
Whether your throughput will actually equal your sync rate depends on the backhaul, and how saturated the slam is. If you have something like a Lucent Stinger, which can have up to 144 customers fed by a single gigabit connection, then you're going to have slowdowns if they're all on 25mbit service. Even the 20GbE connection feeding an ARAM-D can get saturated, because that's feeding up to 672 customers. And that's all assuming that you can even get the advertised sync rate, which not everybody can.
As several others have pointed out, pretty much every DSL service contract advertises the speed as "up to X", rather than "you will get X". That being said, I do have one question for the person who posed the original question: are you 100% sure that it's your throughput that's changing, and not the sync rate? I have seen cases where DSL becomes unusable at night, and the two causes that stick in my mind are a case where it was a junction that wasn't sealed properly (condensation as the equipment cooled off causing poor connectivity), and a case where the street lamps weren't properly grounded, and were causing induction current in the buried service cables. Those are extreme examples, but you'd do well to check your line stats when it starts slowing down like that, to see whether you're still synced at the full rate. If it's actually backhaul congestion, then your option is essentially "wait until they get around to upgrading your area, or move". But if it's a drop in actual sync rate, they can usually fix it.
Also... have you considered cellular? That's an option now that wasn't an option 6 years ago, as 3G speeds are capable of giving you a connection that's faster than 3mbit DSL. If there's a carrier that doesn't have a stupidly low usage cap, it's an alternative.
Admittedly a lot can change in 5 years, but I had a 2007 Aveo. It was good for what it was, but all it was was basic transportation. It got me from A to B, without an ounce of comfort, and luxury was something you read about in magazines. Once my means had improved enough to afford it, I actually broke the lease early to buy a better car. (buy, not lease). It was worth it, to me, to pay out the lease and trade up for a 2011 Subaru Impreza (as an aside, it will probably be the last gasoline car I ever get... next one will be a turbodiesel. I hope Subaru brings the diesel version of the Impreza to NA by then, because I really like this car...).
If you have the money, I'd take the $12,000 that you are saying you can afford to lay down on a car, and put it as a down payment on a 5-year loan for something in the $20,000-25,000 range. Unless you have *really* bad credit, you'll probably end up with a monthly around $200/mo, and you'll have a much better car out of it. It does mean making a monthly commitment which you may not be planning for, but it really is worth it.
And if you don't have the ability to commit $200/mo towards it, then take the $12,000 and buy an off-lease car instead... you can pick up a 3-year old car that was in the same price range I'm suggesting for about that.
PS - If you're in a northern climate, the Aveo is a piece of shit. It does not handle at all on ice. I have never tried the Sonic, but the problem with the Aveo will probably apply to any car in that class: it's too light, and it has front-wheel drive. The two together combine to make for really poor traction and handling on slippery roads.
There's a difference between an MVNO and a Fight Brand... While I don't really have any experience with Virgin in the US, they are considered a fight brand here in Canada, because they're wholly owned/operated by Bell.
And honestly... you may call it a "crappy phone", because it's not a quad core 2GHz processor with 4GB of RAM, but the Samsung Galaxy Ace which I have from my carrier has no problem with anything I've thrown at it, despite only having 512MB of RAM and an 800MHz processor. Unless you're doing heavy gaming, you really don't need the latest and greatest, and if you *are* gaming, why not buy a DS or a PSP?
In the UK, there's loads of legally binding things to make sure you can keep your number. In fact, it has to be transferred to your new provider within 48hours and I think that time frame is getting shorter.
Same in Canada... As long as you're not moving to a different LD calling area, you can take your number with you (and even if you are, you can, you'll just be paying LD rates with most carriers). The rules say within 48h, but personal experience switching providers says it's closer to about 5 minutes... I have had the same phone number with 4 different providers in the last 10 years, and the longest it has actually taken to port the number was about 20 minutes. And they warned me it might take longer than usual that time, because they were having a system outage at the time.
It boggles the mind that the US hasn't heard of LNP.
Why not since I can buy the same gun that was used in the Montreal Massacre? How come that wasn't banned?
The Browning 9mm HP is a restricted firearm, meaning you need a special permit to own it, it is illegal to transport it unless it's locked in a case in a "made safe" state (firing pin removed, not loaded, magazine stored in a separate case). Additionally, it doesn't support a fully automatic firing mode like an MP5 or an AK-47, and the maximum legally allowed magazine size is 5 rounds.
These laws/requirements existed before the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, btw... the reason the laws didn't get updated is because the person who was responsible for the massacre was already violating a half dozen gun laws. More laws wouldn't have made a difference in that case, and the one thing that they *could* have done to prevent it from happening has already been done: it's *significantly* harder to get a restricted weapons permit today than it was 20 years ago. Of course, the cons scrapped the gun registry, which was the *other* law that got changed as a result of that event.
Despite your claims that the party is so far right, it in fact governs pretty much in the centre, as most gov'ts find they must do unless they want to lose power. On at least some issues, the Conservative Party is to the left of the previous Progressive Conservative government from 1984-1993.
Most of the actual Progressive conservatives, you know, the ones who actually know what the word "progressive" means, have jumped ship and are now part of the other parties. Just ask the premier of Quebec.
The only remnants of the original Progressive Conservatives who are still supporting the CPC are the ones who are too stupid to realize that it's not the PC party any more, and the ones who were the right-wing extremist minority in the days of the PC.
And no, they really don't govern in the center. A centrist government would never have put forward the internet surveillance bill being discussed here. They also never would have allowed one of their members to put forward a bill defining a 3-day old zygote as a human being. They're nowhere near the center of the political compass.
Especially for something like remote desktop.
Depends what you're using for remote desktop... I've been able to run a browser or a word processor through NX/SSH on a laptop wirelessly tethered to a cell phone with 3G turned off... 115kbit/s is more than enough bandwidth to handle a word processor or a spreadsheet when you're using the right protocols. VNC, particularly VNC with compression turned off, or worse, RDP6 or earlier, however, and you'll never get anything done.
My father used to do full desktop remote access over a 28.800 dialup connection, when I was in high school, using a piece of software called ReachOut, by Stac, Inc. It wasn't the very high resolution desktops that we have now, but that was enough for an 800x600 display on an NT4 client, and was quite usable.
Of course, if you have no Internet access at all, you're still screwed.