He didn't say the *ring* was crushed, he said the *finger* was crushed. The ring doesn't have to deform at all for the finger to be injured enough to swell up larger than the ring, which necessitates cutting the ring off. But titanium shouldn't present a problem to the emergency department. Even one without a special tool for titanium rings will likely improvise just fine, as in the original poster's example. There's no shortage of interesting tools in a hospital, and doctors are reasonably smart people.
I know an ER doc who thought the same thing, until somebody came into her ER with one, and it was as trivial to cut off as anything else. Even if they lack a proper cutting tool, you can just squeeze it until it shatters. Titanium is strong, but it's not like a ring made of the stuff is somehow immune to being cut or broken. Hospitals are full of interesting tools, and it sounds like even in your story, they improvised fairly well.
it only works when the sun is out so you need a crap-load of batteries or $15-20k worth of automated switching equipment which allows you to be simultaneously connected to the grid without electrocuting the lineman who is working on your pole and thinks the power is off
The "automated switching equipment" is a good order of magnitude cheaper than you specify, and is typically built into the inverter. Total cost, maybe $2k.
, you probably need to multiply your number by at least 4, because you need to generate power for the 75% of the time you're not getting good sun in the 25% of the time that you are,
Why? Why not just leave your connection to the grid and use power from them when you can't make it yourself? Most installations are grid-tied these days, for obvious reasons. But as long as our daytime demand greatly exceeds our nighttime demand, and our cooling power requirements rise when the sun is out, our demand will float nicely with the availability of the sun.
and you need some pricey inverters if you want to run devices designed for 110V AC...
Oooh, pricey. $2000 or less. If you're considering solar panels, this is a drop in the budget compared to what you're going to spend on the panels themselves.
Additionally, they're not actually $1/watt. That's the theoretical cost if they are able to ramp up production as planned.
Sorta. I have no idea what cost they're actually being manufactured for, because nanosolar is sold out at full capacity for the next 18 months. They could be making them at a nickel a watt, but as long as all their competition is selling at $4 or $6 a watt, they'll just undercut a little and make tons o' money. We won't find out how low they can really go until they have some competition.
There're a few, like Ultima Underworld that manage to be great ET or Bridge To Terabithia type
Please, for the love of all that's nerdy, don't ever refer to ET as "great" in the context of videogames without clarifiying that you mean the movie ever again.
I keep trying not to post, but I give. Why does everybody hate the force-critters so much? They change nothing.
But it fits perfectly with the story that an organized Jedi school might know a hair more about the specifics than one old guy in the desert and a half-insane swamp cave hermit midget. All it did for me was point out how much they'd lost in the fall. They used to know stuff. In IV-V-VI, they were mystics only because they'd been hunted to extinction, and the specifics had been lost. That sort of "magic is just leftover technology from before the fall" thing is such a sci-fi staple I'm surprised it enrages people so much.
What does it change? Everybody's still got 'em, they said so. Han can still pick up some tricks from Obi-Wan if he feels like it. Some people have more jedi blood cells than others. That much was obvious from the get-go in the original, or nobody would have been looking for Luke in the first place. Instead, it's Vader, Luke, and his Sister, and a couple of childless bachelors-- and despite misgivings, the bachelors are forced to train up less-than-ideal Luke despite a wide variety of well behaved children of appropriate age they could have picked. If they could teach any kid, they'd have been doing it already. It's clear that the Force is as widespread as being able to run... but olympic-quality runners are hard to find. The *only change* is that they haven't forgotten how to take the jedi equivalent of a blood glucose level, and Obi-Wan hadn't misplaced his testing meter on a trip to Mos Eisley in the intervening years.
I think you can blame most of this problem on a less-than-stellar track record on scientific reporting in the media.
Consider the perennial reports that "a glass of wine a day is good for you," followed shortly by "any amount of alcohol is bad for you."
Here's how those statements came to appear in the newspaper:
Scientist 1: "I have just finished a 20-year study that indicates that alcohol causes liver disease and increases the risk of several other specific health issues." Scientist 2: "I have just finished a 20-year study that indicates that moderate drinking lowers the risk of heart disease. We did not look at any other effects." Newspaper 1: "I talked to scientist 1, and he said that alcohol is bad." Newspaper 2: "I talked to scientist 2, and he said that alcohol is good."
The scientists are specific, but the reporting on the issues are often in nonspecific generalities. Almost nothing in life is so simple that we can simply declare "it's good for you!" or "it's bad for you!" Unfortunately, optimizing what people eat in real life is a complex problem that involves a wide array of simutaneous upsides and downsides that have to be balanced.
That said... weight loss isn't rocket science, it's just hard. "Why can't it be easy?" is the part that's rocket science.
Using the web on a phone has always sucked. At least until I installed the dedicated Google Maps application on my Treo 650. It's fast, brilliant to use, and better yet-- can quickly deliver me the phone number I would need to call if I wanted voice directions instead.
Google is the first provider I've seen get this right, and they did it on somebody else's generic, crappy hardware and OS. If google's phone platform is anything like their existing mobile app, I don't think they'll have any trouble. With a GPS receiver to save you the time of punching in where you are, it's a killer app.
I've not had that problem in the year since I picked up the Series 3. Nonetheless, it underscores the problem with DRM-- even a well-behaved customer who is playing by the rules (connecting his DRM-protected DVR to his DRM-protected TV with an approved DRM connector) is subject to glitches in the DRM implementation. It's not helping anybody, since I'm not likely to have any illegal programs on my Tivo in the first place... but it sure bugs honest people when it breaks.
You've got to be kidding. You're kidding, right? Right?
I just picked up a 22" LCD monitor, not on sale, for $270. Even Apple's 20" display is $600. 20" iMacs start at $1200 or so. Where are you finding iMacs for a price that's "about the same" as an equivalent-sized screen without a computer?
I'll grant that they take less space and have fewer cables. But as cheap as an LCD they are not.
But by and large they are successful, and people respond to this.
You won't hear me arguing otherwise. I picked Apple as an example of somebody widely regarded for their designs to illustrate how hard it is even for the best to get the balance of functionality and aesthetics right.
I certainly wouldn't call them the *only* company that values design, though.
How can you say "No benefit beyond aesthetics" to these tradeoffs?
I'm so, so sorry. I tried to be clear, but was not. "No benefit TO ME beyond aesthetics" would have been better. I was just trying to illustrate the difficulty in finding the balance between aesthetics and function. I like Apple. I like Apple's designs. Which is why I thought they made a good case to point out a few examples of how hard it is to balance everybody's functionality needs with aesthetics.
Or... it could insert ID3 tags based on folders and then use that instead, and then you would complain that iTunes is modifying your music.
I wouldn't have complained. I'm a geek. Any music file I have is probably already meticulously tagged, with a filename that contains all the same info as in the tags, and in folders on top of that. I highly doubt my wife would have complained, either-- that solution does almost exactly what the perl script I had to write for her does, and would have been brilliant. Without automated retagging of all her files, though, the iPod and iTunes were utterly useless to her. If Steve Jobs himself had flown in by helicopter with a free iMac for her that day, she probably would have split his head open with it.
I suppose I should have expected a backlash. These are personal opinions on things that make a few Apple devices less functional *for me*. I thought I was clear that this is a difficult balance to reach and that the balance is different for many people based on personal preferences. I'm not attacking your preferences, or even Apple's design choices. They were just the first to jump to mind because they are both widely known *and* widely discussed in regard to design.
A physical keyboard on the iPhone would either increase its size or decrease the screen's size.
Sure. But the only reason I carry a smartphone instead of a tiny little flip phone in the first place is so that I can quickly answer email. The choice to sacrifice a tactile keyboard for screen real estate is a tradeoff that makes the device significantly less fit for my use, but more fit for some other people.
You do realize that the size of a notebook computer is an important feature, right? You do realize that basically every notebook computer has a worse keyboard, dimmer screen (at least when on battery), slower and smaller hard drive, less expansion capability, and is more expensive when compared to a desktop, right? Sacrificing power for size has been a prime objective of portable computers since day one!
I'm not comparing Apple's laptops to desktops-- I'm comparing them to smaller, lighter laptops. Apple stressed thinness over weight *and* functionality, and ended up having to underclock a video chip that runs at full speed in other laptops, some of which are actually lighter. This is an aesthetic choice that affected functionality, but for many it is a worthwhile tradeoff. Just not for me.
Uh, what are you complaining about here?
In trying to simplify their interface, iTunes relies solely on tags for track information. If you have multiple files with the same name (like, say... "chapter1") in different folders but no tags-- iTunes will "helpfully" drop them all into the same spot with no distinguishing info.
At any rate, I'm not trying to start a flamewar. I'm just pointing out how hard it is to get the balance of aesthetics and functionality right, and that even Apple occasionally makes an aesthetic decision that has functionality tradeoffs. I'm not saying there was no reason to make them-- just that there is a tradeoff and that the balance is tough to hit for a varied consumer base.
I'm not an architecture expert, but I have read several times that one of the largest complaints with actually living in Frank Lloyd Wright's home designs is that they were designed to look fantastic in photographs but are inconvenient to actually live in.
Regardless of whether or not that is true, it underscores the critical thing about design and function-- it's a delicate balance, and designers must be careful not to trade too much functionality for aesthetics and vice versa. Everyone's tastes differ, but Apple frequently makes design choices that I find detrimental to function with no benefit beyond aesthetics. (lack of tacticle keyboard on iPhone, gorgeous all-in-one PCs that make your monitor a disposable item, elegant slim notebooks that offer inadequate cooling for the GPU and necessitate factory underclocking, iTunes' ignorance of audio organized by folder rather than tags, no handy screws for battery replacement on the clean, mirror-finished backs of iPods, etc...)
Sure, you can call your current email client the "same basic thing" as PINE or whatever you were using a decade ago-- but that's a bit dishonest. It's like calling a Honda Civic "the same basic thing" as a covered wagon. It's not all bloat, and not all of the bloat is there for no reason.
Some of what you think of as "bloat" is what made the applications you're using feasible in the first place. It's annoying to need the whole.net framework for some 15k utility app you downloaded, but without the.net framework... would the guy who wrote it have had the time to code up all the support and infrastructure he needed? Sure, you could argue his approach was "lazy," but that's precisely the point. And even leaving frameworks like.net aside, not everybody has the time or inclination to turn out tightly optimized assembly code for an app that tags your mp3 files based on parsed filename text or that rotates all your jpegs based on exif data. Sure, it could run much faster if meticulously optimized... but if that sort of work was required to put the app out, it never would have been written in the first place.
It took me a minute to spot it, but you're absolutely right. It's a law of the internet that if you correct somebody, you'll make a mistake yourself in the correction.
Four possible values, not four times as many values.
A cell that can hold two bits holds four times as many possible values as a cell that can hold one bit.
[0] [1] [00] [01] [10] [11]
Of course, two one-bit cells hold the same number of values.
[0][0] [0][1] [1][0] [1][1]
Two one-bit cells = one two-bit cell. Twice the capacity. Not that the article is terribly clear-- if their "miracle device" can really only hold 00 and 01, they've just invented a crappy new notation for binary.
GOATSE IS NOT GARBAGE. It's a transcendental meditation on the flexibility of human nature. Get some taste.
The coward makes a good point, and it's important to remember this, as well. Despite what you think about 99% of what's on TV, it's only there because somebody is watching it.
If 1/99 of everything on TV is crap, and you get 990 channels... hopefully you get ten times as much watchable stuff as you do with 99 channels.
It's like the internet, where we've got a reliable 99.99999999% crap-rating, containing every sort of garbage from the goatse man to Klingon Furry Fanfic to blogs about other blogs that are about blogging about blogs. There's just SO MUCH STUFF on the internet that you can always find something interesting to read, despite the overwhelming crapflood.
I don't think they're referring to just the relatively still "rippled mirror surface" water in a pond. They're still absolutely miserable at realistically simulating water that flows or splashes, and even worse than that at interactions between other objects and water. The oceans in games these days look fantastic right up until something falls in.
This slightly tangent to your point, but unlike most companies, Westinghouse televisions have a user-configurable standby mode. You can choose the default instant-on mode, or a lower power standby that takes about 12 seconds to start up, since it's actually booting instead of constantly using extra power to maintain the state of the RAM. The instant-on mode uses 11W when it's "off," and the low-power mode uses 2W when it's "off". It was an easy setting to change via onscreen menus, and it's nice to have the choice.
Nobody's gonna argue that we couldn't make do with less bloat. But just two hours out of a laptop? I haven't had a hog that bad in five or six years. I remember the Pentium III generation of laptops, though-- not pretty. I had a thinkpad at work that could handle 90 minutes on a good day. My current Dell piece-o-crap manages more than four and a half hours on a year-old battery, with an Nvidia graphics card. Battery life has been improving somewhat since they started paying attention to it again, and things started moving in the right direction again when the Pentium M first appeared.
If you're talking about the plug-in Prius from the article, then yes, it's a hybrid that also has a gas engine. It's just like a current Prius, except the battery is a little bigger and they added a plug so you can top off the battery when you're not driving. The idea is that most of the trips you make in a car are short-- the store, a restaurant, your kids' school, and so forth-- so adding the ability to run the hybrid battery-only for short distances allows you to avoid using most of the gas you normally would.
So you can top off the battery at home, and most of your short-range driving will be all electric. But if you run out of charge, the car still has a 12-gallon gas tank and an ICE that will take you hundreds and hundreds of miles when you need it.
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He didn't say the *ring* was crushed, he said the *finger* was crushed. The ring doesn't have to deform at all for the finger to be injured enough to swell up larger than the ring, which necessitates cutting the ring off. But titanium shouldn't present a problem to the emergency department. Even one without a special tool for titanium rings will likely improvise just fine, as in the original poster's example. There's no shortage of interesting tools in a hospital, and doctors are reasonably smart people.
I know an ER doc who thought the same thing, until somebody came into her ER with one, and it was as trivial to cut off as anything else. Even if they lack a proper cutting tool, you can just squeeze it until it shatters. Titanium is strong, but it's not like a ring made of the stuff is somehow immune to being cut or broken. Hospitals are full of interesting tools, and it sounds like even in your story, they improvised fairly well.
You have to clear the snow off of it,
This may be the only thing you got right.
it only works when the sun is out so you need a crap-load of batteries or $15-20k worth of automated switching equipment which allows you to be simultaneously connected to the grid without electrocuting the lineman who is working on your pole and thinks the power is off
The "automated switching equipment" is a good order of magnitude cheaper than you specify, and is typically built into the inverter. Total cost, maybe $2k.
, you probably need to multiply your number by at least 4, because you need to generate power for the 75% of the time you're not getting good sun in the 25% of the time that you are,
Why? Why not just leave your connection to the grid and use power from them when you can't make it yourself? Most installations are grid-tied these days, for obvious reasons. But as long as our daytime demand greatly exceeds our nighttime demand, and our cooling power requirements rise when the sun is out, our demand will float nicely with the availability of the sun.
and you need some pricey inverters if you want to run devices designed for 110V AC...
Oooh, pricey. $2000 or less. If you're considering solar panels, this is a drop in the budget compared to what you're going to spend on the panels themselves.
Additionally, they're not actually $1/watt. That's the theoretical cost if they are able to ramp up production as planned.
Sorta. I have no idea what cost they're actually being manufactured for, because nanosolar is sold out at full capacity for the next 18 months. They could be making them at a nickel a watt, but as long as all their competition is selling at $4 or $6 a watt, they'll just undercut a little and make tons o' money. We won't find out how low they can really go until they have some competition.
There're a few, like Ultima Underworld that manage to be great ET or Bridge To Terabithia type
Please, for the love of all that's nerdy, don't ever refer to ET as "great" in the context of videogames without clarifiying that you mean the movie ever again.
I keep trying not to post, but I give. Why does everybody hate the force-critters so much? They change nothing.
But it fits perfectly with the story that an organized Jedi school might know a hair more about the specifics than one old guy in the desert and a half-insane swamp cave hermit midget. All it did for me was point out how much they'd lost in the fall. They used to know stuff. In IV-V-VI, they were mystics only because they'd been hunted to extinction, and the specifics had been lost. That sort of "magic is just leftover technology from before the fall" thing is such a sci-fi staple I'm surprised it enrages people so much.
What does it change? Everybody's still got 'em, they said so. Han can still pick up some tricks from Obi-Wan if he feels like it. Some people have more jedi blood cells than others. That much was obvious from the get-go in the original, or nobody would have been looking for Luke in the first place. Instead, it's Vader, Luke, and his Sister, and a couple of childless bachelors-- and despite misgivings, the bachelors are forced to train up less-than-ideal Luke despite a wide variety of well behaved children of appropriate age they could have picked. If they could teach any kid, they'd have been doing it already. It's clear that the Force is as widespread as being able to run... but olympic-quality runners are hard to find. The *only change* is that they haven't forgotten how to take the jedi equivalent of a blood glucose level, and Obi-Wan hadn't misplaced his testing meter on a trip to Mos Eisley in the intervening years.
I think you can blame most of this problem on a less-than-stellar track record on scientific reporting in the media.
Consider the perennial reports that "a glass of wine a day is good for you," followed shortly by "any amount of alcohol is bad for you."
Here's how those statements came to appear in the newspaper:
Scientist 1: "I have just finished a 20-year study that indicates that alcohol causes liver disease and increases the risk of several other specific health issues."
Scientist 2: "I have just finished a 20-year study that indicates that moderate drinking lowers the risk of heart disease. We did not look at any other effects."
Newspaper 1: "I talked to scientist 1, and he said that alcohol is bad."
Newspaper 2: "I talked to scientist 2, and he said that alcohol is good."
The scientists are specific, but the reporting on the issues are often in nonspecific generalities. Almost nothing in life is so simple that we can simply declare "it's good for you!" or "it's bad for you!" Unfortunately, optimizing what people eat in real life is a complex problem that involves a wide array of simutaneous upsides and downsides that have to be balanced.
That said... weight loss isn't rocket science, it's just hard. "Why can't it be easy?" is the part that's rocket science.
Using the web on a phone has always sucked. At least until I installed the dedicated Google Maps application on my Treo 650. It's fast, brilliant to use, and better yet-- can quickly deliver me the phone number I would need to call if I wanted voice directions instead.
Google is the first provider I've seen get this right, and they did it on somebody else's generic, crappy hardware and OS. If google's phone platform is anything like their existing mobile app, I don't think they'll have any trouble. With a GPS receiver to save you the time of punching in where you are, it's a killer app.
I've not had that problem in the year since I picked up the Series 3. Nonetheless, it underscores the problem with DRM-- even a well-behaved customer who is playing by the rules (connecting his DRM-protected DVR to his DRM-protected TV with an approved DRM connector) is subject to glitches in the DRM implementation. It's not helping anybody, since I'm not likely to have any illegal programs on my Tivo in the first place... but it sure bugs honest people when it breaks.
You've got to be kidding. You're kidding, right? Right?
I just picked up a 22" LCD monitor, not on sale, for $270. Even Apple's 20" display is $600. 20" iMacs start at $1200 or so. Where are you finding iMacs for a price that's "about the same" as an equivalent-sized screen without a computer?
I'll grant that they take less space and have fewer cables. But as cheap as an LCD they are not.
But by and large they are successful, and people respond to this.
You won't hear me arguing otherwise. I picked Apple as an example of somebody widely regarded for their designs to illustrate how hard it is even for the best to get the balance of functionality and aesthetics right.
I certainly wouldn't call them the *only* company that values design, though.
How can you say "No benefit beyond aesthetics" to these tradeoffs?
I'm so, so sorry. I tried to be clear, but was not. "No benefit TO ME beyond aesthetics" would have been better. I was just trying to illustrate the difficulty in finding the balance between aesthetics and function. I like Apple. I like Apple's designs. Which is why I thought they made a good case to point out a few examples of how hard it is to balance everybody's functionality needs with aesthetics.
Or... it could insert ID3 tags based on folders and then use that instead, and then you would complain that iTunes is modifying your music.
I wouldn't have complained. I'm a geek. Any music file I have is probably already meticulously tagged, with a filename that contains all the same info as in the tags, and in folders on top of that. I highly doubt my wife would have complained, either-- that solution does almost exactly what the perl script I had to write for her does, and would have been brilliant. Without automated retagging of all her files, though, the iPod and iTunes were utterly useless to her. If Steve Jobs himself had flown in by helicopter with a free iMac for her that day, she probably would have split his head open with it.
I suppose I should have expected a backlash. These are personal opinions on things that make a few Apple devices less functional *for me*. I thought I was clear that this is a difficult balance to reach and that the balance is different for many people based on personal preferences. I'm not attacking your preferences, or even Apple's design choices. They were just the first to jump to mind because they are both widely known *and* widely discussed in regard to design.
A physical keyboard on the iPhone would either increase its size or decrease the screen's size.
Sure. But the only reason I carry a smartphone instead of a tiny little flip phone in the first place is so that I can quickly answer email. The choice to sacrifice a tactile keyboard for screen real estate is a tradeoff that makes the device significantly less fit for my use, but more fit for some other people.
You do realize that the size of a notebook computer is an important feature, right? You do realize that basically every notebook computer has a worse keyboard, dimmer screen (at least when on battery), slower and smaller hard drive, less expansion capability, and is more expensive when compared to a desktop, right? Sacrificing power for size has been a prime objective of portable computers since day one!
I'm not comparing Apple's laptops to desktops-- I'm comparing them to smaller, lighter laptops. Apple stressed thinness over weight *and* functionality, and ended up having to underclock a video chip that runs at full speed in other laptops, some of which are actually lighter. This is an aesthetic choice that affected functionality, but for many it is a worthwhile tradeoff. Just not for me.
Uh, what are you complaining about here?
In trying to simplify their interface, iTunes relies solely on tags for track information. If you have multiple files with the same name (like, say... "chapter1") in different folders but no tags-- iTunes will "helpfully" drop them all into the same spot with no distinguishing info.
At any rate, I'm not trying to start a flamewar. I'm just pointing out how hard it is to get the balance of aesthetics and functionality right, and that even Apple occasionally makes an aesthetic decision that has functionality tradeoffs. I'm not saying there was no reason to make them-- just that there is a tradeoff and that the balance is tough to hit for a varied consumer base.
I'm not an architecture expert, but I have read several times that one of the largest complaints with actually living in Frank Lloyd Wright's home designs is that they were designed to look fantastic in photographs but are inconvenient to actually live in.
Regardless of whether or not that is true, it underscores the critical thing about design and function-- it's a delicate balance, and designers must be careful not to trade too much functionality for aesthetics and vice versa. Everyone's tastes differ, but Apple frequently makes design choices that I find detrimental to function with no benefit beyond aesthetics. (lack of tacticle keyboard on iPhone, gorgeous all-in-one PCs that make your monitor a disposable item, elegant slim notebooks that offer inadequate cooling for the GPU and necessitate factory underclocking, iTunes' ignorance of audio organized by folder rather than tags, no handy screws for battery replacement on the clean, mirror-finished backs of iPods, etc...)
Sure, you can call your current email client the "same basic thing" as PINE or whatever you were using a decade ago-- but that's a bit dishonest. It's like calling a Honda Civic "the same basic thing" as a covered wagon. It's not all bloat, and not all of the bloat is there for no reason.
.net framework for some 15k utility app you downloaded, but without the .net framework... would the guy who wrote it have had the time to code up all the support and infrastructure he needed? Sure, you could argue his approach was "lazy," but that's precisely the point. And even leaving frameworks like .net aside, not everybody has the time or inclination to turn out tightly optimized assembly code for an app that tags your mp3 files based on parsed filename text or that rotates all your jpegs based on exif data. Sure, it could run much faster if meticulously optimized... but if that sort of work was required to put the app out, it never would have been written in the first place.
Some of what you think of as "bloat" is what made the applications you're using feasible in the first place. It's annoying to need the whole
No worries. Thanks for catching me. I'd rather the right answer get posted and I look stupid than an uncorrected error sit at +5.
It took me a minute to spot it, but you're absolutely right. It's a law of the internet that if you correct somebody, you'll make a mistake yourself in the correction.
Four possible values, not four times as many values.
Apparently, I can't count.
A cell that can hold two bits holds four times as many possible values as a cell that can hold one bit.
[0] [1]
[00] [01] [10] [11]
Of course, two one-bit cells hold the same number of values.
[0][0] [0][1] [1][0] [1][1]
Two one-bit cells = one two-bit cell. Twice the capacity. Not that the article is terribly clear-- if their "miracle device" can really only hold 00 and 01, they've just invented a crappy new notation for binary.
Anonymous Coward says:
GOATSE IS NOT GARBAGE. It's a transcendental meditation on the flexibility of human nature. Get some taste.
The coward makes a good point, and it's important to remember this, as well. Despite what you think about 99% of what's on TV, it's only there because somebody is watching it.
If 1/99 of everything on TV is crap, and you get 990 channels... hopefully you get ten times as much watchable stuff as you do with 99 channels.
It's like the internet, where we've got a reliable 99.99999999% crap-rating, containing every sort of garbage from the goatse man to Klingon Furry Fanfic to blogs about other blogs that are about blogging about blogs. There's just SO MUCH STUFF on the internet that you can always find something interesting to read, despite the overwhelming crapflood.
I wonder if he's as good as my daddy?
I don't think they're referring to just the relatively still "rippled mirror surface" water in a pond. They're still absolutely miserable at realistically simulating water that flows or splashes, and even worse than that at interactions between other objects and water. The oceans in games these days look fantastic right up until something falls in.
I'm confused. Why wouldn't I be?
This slightly tangent to your point, but unlike most companies, Westinghouse televisions have a user-configurable standby mode. You can choose the default instant-on mode, or a lower power standby that takes about 12 seconds to start up, since it's actually booting instead of constantly using extra power to maintain the state of the RAM. The instant-on mode uses 11W when it's "off," and the low-power mode uses 2W when it's "off". It was an easy setting to change via onscreen menus, and it's nice to have the choice.
Nobody's gonna argue that we couldn't make do with less bloat. But just two hours out of a laptop? I haven't had a hog that bad in five or six years. I remember the Pentium III generation of laptops, though-- not pretty. I had a thinkpad at work that could handle 90 minutes on a good day. My current Dell piece-o-crap manages more than four and a half hours on a year-old battery, with an Nvidia graphics card. Battery life has been improving somewhat since they started paying attention to it again, and things started moving in the right direction again when the Pentium M first appeared.
If you're talking about the plug-in Prius from the article, then yes, it's a hybrid that also has a gas engine. It's just like a current Prius, except the battery is a little bigger and they added a plug so you can top off the battery when you're not driving. The idea is that most of the trips you make in a car are short-- the store, a restaurant, your kids' school, and so forth-- so adding the ability to run the hybrid battery-only for short distances allows you to avoid using most of the gas you normally would.
So you can top off the battery at home, and most of your short-range driving will be all electric. But if you run out of charge, the car still has a 12-gallon gas tank and an ICE that will take you hundreds and hundreds of miles when you need it.