The range of the Model S with the largest battery option is 294 miles according to the EPA. The projected range of the Model 3 is 200 miles; there will be no official EPA estimates until the car is ready for sale.
The actual range of an electric car varies with speed, outside temperature, terrain, battery condition, and whether the heat or AC is on. Tesla has a range estimator on their web site that lets you see the effect of some of the variables: https://www.teslamotors.com/mo... - scroll down a while to get to it. Slowing down can extend your range by a LOT - one car has a range of 275 miles at 70 mph (temperature 70F, no AC) but it increases to 443 miles at 45 mph.
I suspect they're more likely to do it as a flat fee per charge for simplicity. But they could do metered charging, either by time or by KWh. Once they are offering charge-for-pay they could also open up the charging network to non-Tesla cars, perhaps with a discounted rate for Teslas to offer an incentive to buy them.
Actually, Comcast may have to allow that. But only because the government is considering forcing them to.
Here is a Washington Post article about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com... (It really should have included a disclosure that the owner of the Washington Post also owns Amazon.com, which is likely to produce an open cable box if this proposal passes.) And here is an earlier article on The Verge with more speculations on what it would mean: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1...
I've never wanted one and I don't have one; what I have is a rare UHD TV with no smart features. Smart features in a TV generally become obsolete within three years anyway. A media box or stick (Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, etc.), a DVR (TiVo, etc), or a home theater PC are much better ideas; they're more likely to get updates and they are also cheaper to replace if necessary.
These days it's hard to buy a TV that doesn't have any form of smart features. (My buying advice: don't reject them if they come along with the TV you want for other reasons, but don't pay extra to get them.) You can always ignore the smart features and refuse to connect the TV to a network. It's easiest if you get a TV without WiFi, in which case keeping it unconnected is a simple matter of not plugging in an Ethernet cable. If you have one with WiFi, turn it off in setup if you can. If you can't turn off WiFi it might glom onto an unsecured network if one is available, so the safest course is to do the network setup for your secured network and then firewall out the TV's address in your router.
If anybody ever markets a smart TV that flat out refuses to work properly as a TV if it is not connected, just say no and buy something else.
There are a number of reasons for using an app only once or a few times. Some of them signal failure by the developers; some do not.
The out and out failures: the app may be poorly designed. It may not do what it claims to do. It may not run reliably on my hardware. It may have advertising that is excessively intrusive. It may continually update and drain my battery. It may not provide as good an experience as the company's web site does.
The competitive failures: I may discover an app that I like more. When I'm looking for an app for something I will often download three or four competing apps, try them out, and choose one to keep.
The semi-failures: It might be a game that I enjoy playing a few times but then get bored with.
The non-failures: I may have downloaded an app for a one-time or short-term need. An example is a transit app for a city I am visiting. The app is just fine, but I no longer need it once I leave that city.
Exactly. That's why I have one computer that still runs Windows 7 and won't be upgraded in the foreseeable future. There isn't any good replacement for Windows Media Center yet.
This compares more directly to the ultra-light MacBook, not the MacBook Air. The earlier ZenBook models are more like the Air.
Compared to the MacBook, it offers marginally lower weight and thickness, larger (12.5" vs 12") but lower resolution screen (1080p vs 2304x1440), and significantly more processing power (a ULV i7 rather than an m5), RAM (16GB vs 8GB), and flash storage (1TB vs 512GB). The base model is less expensive than the MacBook but the fully tricked out version is more.
All in all, looks like a decent option for somebody who wants a really light system but doesn't want an Apple product.
ASUS makes QHD touchscreen versions of their earlier ZenBooks, the UX303 and UX305. I'm guessing they aren't offering that here because they didn't want this system to pay the weight and battery life penalties for that screen.
My biggest complaint is the single USB-C port. I'd have liked to see at least one more so you could dedicate one to low speed devices, rather than taking the big performance hit to your fast devices if you plug in an HID. But the expectation is that you will use Bluetooth keyboards and mice if you want them rather than plugging something into USB.
OS X isn't going to happen; Apple doesn't license it for use on non-Apple products. A Linux version could happen; ASUS has marketed Linux-based laptops in the past. Users can certainly install Linux if they like, but they will want a new distro based on the 4.4 kernel to get full Skylake support.
It used to be possible to buy computers that had cow logos. But now they say Acer instead. Acer bought Gateway in 2007; Gateway-branded products continued for a while but now have been discontinued.
McAfee has a history as a successful tech entrepreneur and is therefore relevant to Slashdot. He founded McAfee Associates, an early anti-virus company, in 1987; he resigned in 1994 and sold his stake shortly after that. Afterward, he had successful investments in Tribal Voice and Zone Labs. But still later he lost a lot of his fortune due to bad investments and the 2007 financial crash, which caused heavy losses on his stock holdings and his mansions. He continues to start and invest in tech companies.
This is not the way that I would have liked this case to be won. But at least it allows Android to continue to exist in its current form.
What I really want is a legal principle: "APIs are not legally protectable." But then I also want the same principle for user interface. By "not legally protectable", I mean that any attempt to patent, copyright, or trademark things that fall into the categories of API or UI would be automatically rejected, and any that have already been granted would be considered invalid.
I'm willing to grant one exception. Each application should be allowed to have ONE (and exactly one) icon that it could trademark and copyright as a visual representation of that application. That would, for example, mean that no other application could use the Facebook icon to represent itself, or to represent any function in the application other than some form of interaction with Facebook.
The wash temperatures in different models of washing machine are not created equal.
Old school washers in the US offered three wash temperatures (if that many): hot, warm, and cold. None of them were temperature regulated. Hot is whatever comes out of your hot water tap (usually somewhere in the range of 120F to 140F), cold is whatever comes out of your cold water tap (which may be anywhere from 35F to 80F depending on location and season), and warm is a 50/50 mix in theory. (If the water pressure of your two taps differs substantially the mix will be changed.) If you have a washer like that, cold water washing is likely to work poorly, especially in the winter in northern states; detergents simply don't work very well in 40F degree water, and under those circumstances the warm wash will be safe for cold water washables because the actual water temperature will only be 80F or so.
Newer washers also offer the same three settings, and perhaps some additional ones. But they are usually temperature regulated (really low end machines may be an exception) so the wash water is never as cold as it would have been in one of those older machines. A properly designed machine adheres to the standards that are used on clothing labels: cold is 30C (86F), warm is 40C (104F), and hot is 50C (122F). (My washer has an additional super-hot 60C setting.) The machine achieves those by mixing from the hot and cold taps as needed, and may also have an electric heater to get the water hotter if necessary. Cold washing in a new machine is far more effective than it was in those older washers where the water was far too cold.
No matter which wash temperature you choose, the rinse water is whatever comes out of the cold water tap. Some old washers had a warm rinse setting, which there is never any good reason to use.
If you are willing to wear nothing but cotton and linen that might be feasible. Even then it would wear out your clothes a lot more quickly and make the dyes fade. Other fabrics, including all those modern stretch ones - forget about it. And no more elastic waistbands in your cotton pants or skirts; you'd have to go back to drawstrings.
TSP is sold in home improvement stores for household cleaning - in particular cleaning walls before repainting. It is the recommended cleaner for that use because modest amounts of TSP residue doesn't interfere with paint adhesion, whereas the surfactants used in most current day cleaners do - which means that you need to rinse walls much more thoroughly if you clean them with something else. The environmental impact is manageable if it is reserved for that use.
Using TSP routinely in laundry would lead to far too much phosphorous in the wastewater stream, which is a big problem. That's why laundry detergents are no longer allowed to contain phosphates in most areas. Using a cleaner that is sold for non-laundry use in your washing machine is both a bad idea and illegal in many places.
I think 4GB SODIMMs were the largest ones available when your 2011 MBP was introduced, and that's why Apple said the maximum amount of RAM was 8GB. Larger modules came later.
Also, when you upgrade older systems and want to go above the original RAM maximum, you have to be careful about which modules you get. I'm typing this on an old Lenovo x200 that I recently bought used ($20!). When I went to upgrade it from the 2GB it came with to 8GB (which works although the original spec maximum was 4GB), the first set of modules I received didn't work. You have to use low-density modules (8 chips on each side), not higher density ones (4 chips on each side or 8 on just one side), because they're the only 4GB modules that the motherboard will recognize.
Yes, I spend $50 to upgrade the memory on a $20 laptop. The modules that were incompatible would have only been $30. But all in all that means that I have a $70 laptop that suits my needs and has a wonderful keyboard. I'll take that.
That trailer tells us absolutely nothing about what the new series will be like. It shows off some special effects and the new logo, and that's it. I'm waiting for the next trailer before I'll even think about offering an opinion on the series.
At the current state of the art at least, cloud based voice recognition simply works better than anything you can implement on an affordable local system. There are two reasons.
One is that the cloud system can devote massive amounts of resources intermittently when you need them to recognize a voice command, but give those resources to other people when you do not. Current day voice recognition systems really aren't very intelligent; they work by comparing massive amounts of data with the recorded voice data, and by doing recognition of words in the context of the surrounding words rather than one at a time.
The other is that the cloud system can massively crowdsource the problem of training the system. They can use the experience of their millions of users to make it work better. A locally based voice recognition system cannot match that.
We can make inexpensive local systems that can recognize a small number of sentences. We can make expensive ones like Dragon NaturallySpeaking that need the computing power of a decent PC or Mac and a couple of gigabytes of RAM to work decently, and even with all of that it doesn't work as well as the cloud-based personal assistants that are now ubiquitous. For example, Alexa can process voice requests to play any artist on Spotify, from a library of over 35 million songs and tens of thousands of artists, and usually gets it right. Nothing you could run on your home entertainment system could come close; even Dragon wouldn't be much help because you need a specialized database of performer names to make that application work well.
I was talking about the installed base of FM radios vs the installed base of digital FM radios for a hypothetical new digital radio service. People may not be in hearing distance of an FM radio at any given time but most have easy access to one, either an old portable radio or one in a car, so it can be useful for emergency information.
The CPU is a big part of the difference in price between an Ultrabook and a Chromebook. The tray price of a Skylake Core M starts at $281 for a 6Y30 and goes up to $393 for a 6Y75. The price of a Celeron N3150, a high end CPU by Chromebook standards (leaving aside premium models), is $108; the ARM CPUs in under-$200 Chromebooks are much less expensive. OEMs don't pay quite that much because they're buying in larger quantities but the relative cost picture is similar.
The other difference is that the Ultrabook is probably a more premium build with costlier materials. Once people are spending over $500 they expect a bit more from the physical construction of the system. It also needs a somewhat larger battery to match the battery life of the Chromebook; that costs more money, and may also call for lighter body materials to allow the use of that larger battery without making the system too heavy.
You can buy cheap Windows laptops with the same hardware specs as a Chromebook (they're a little more expensive because of the cost of the Windows license, but not a lot more because Microsoft offers a lower price for Windows on those systems) but they won't provide a satisfactory user experience with most Windows software. You can also buy cheap Windows laptops with acceptable performance but that can't match the weight and battery life of the Chromebook because they don't use ultra-low-power CPUs. In the past they also typically had rotating hard disks rather than SSDs, but now that the price of an entry level SSD is under $50 that may change.
Slashdot Mirror
The range of the Model S with the largest battery option is 294 miles according to the EPA. The projected range of the Model 3 is 200 miles; there will be no official EPA estimates until the car is ready for sale.
The actual range of an electric car varies with speed, outside temperature, terrain, battery condition, and whether the heat or AC is on. Tesla has a range estimator on their web site that lets you see the effect of some of the variables: https://www.teslamotors.com/mo... - scroll down a while to get to it. Slowing down can extend your range by a LOT - one car has a range of 275 miles at 70 mph (temperature 70F, no AC) but it increases to 443 miles at 45 mph.
I suspect they're more likely to do it as a flat fee per charge for simplicity. But they could do metered charging, either by time or by KWh. Once they are offering charge-for-pay they could also open up the charging network to non-Tesla cars, perhaps with a discounted rate for Teslas to offer an incentive to buy them.
Actually, Comcast may have to allow that. But only because the government is considering forcing them to.
Here is a Washington Post article about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com... (It really should have included a disclosure that the owner of the Washington Post also owns Amazon.com, which is likely to produce an open cable box if this proposal passes.) And here is an earlier article on The Verge with more speculations on what it would mean: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1...
I've never wanted one and I don't have one; what I have is a rare UHD TV with no smart features. Smart features in a TV generally become obsolete within three years anyway. A media box or stick (Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, etc.), a DVR (TiVo, etc), or a home theater PC are much better ideas; they're more likely to get updates and they are also cheaper to replace if necessary.
These days it's hard to buy a TV that doesn't have any form of smart features. (My buying advice: don't reject them if they come along with the TV you want for other reasons, but don't pay extra to get them.) You can always ignore the smart features and refuse to connect the TV to a network. It's easiest if you get a TV without WiFi, in which case keeping it unconnected is a simple matter of not plugging in an Ethernet cable. If you have one with WiFi, turn it off in setup if you can. If you can't turn off WiFi it might glom onto an unsecured network if one is available, so the safest course is to do the network setup for your secured network and then firewall out the TV's address in your router.
If anybody ever markets a smart TV that flat out refuses to work properly as a TV if it is not connected, just say no and buy something else.
There are a number of reasons for using an app only once or a few times. Some of them signal failure by the developers; some do not.
The out and out failures: the app may be poorly designed. It may not do what it claims to do. It may not run reliably on my hardware. It may have advertising that is excessively intrusive. It may continually update and drain my battery. It may not provide as good an experience as the company's web site does.
The competitive failures: I may discover an app that I like more. When I'm looking for an app for something I will often download three or four competing apps, try them out, and choose one to keep.
The semi-failures: It might be a game that I enjoy playing a few times but then get bored with.
The non-failures: I may have downloaded an app for a one-time or short-term need. An example is a transit app for a city I am visiting. The app is just fine, but I no longer need it once I leave that city.
Exactly. That's why I have one computer that still runs Windows 7 and won't be upgraded in the foreseeable future. There isn't any good replacement for Windows Media Center yet.
DVD? Where would you put that? Easier to use a USB stick.
This compares more directly to the ultra-light MacBook, not the MacBook Air. The earlier ZenBook models are more like the Air.
Compared to the MacBook, it offers marginally lower weight and thickness, larger (12.5" vs 12") but lower resolution screen (1080p vs 2304x1440), and significantly more processing power (a ULV i7 rather than an m5), RAM (16GB vs 8GB), and flash storage (1TB vs 512GB). The base model is less expensive than the MacBook but the fully tricked out version is more.
All in all, looks like a decent option for somebody who wants a really light system but doesn't want an Apple product.
ASUS makes QHD touchscreen versions of their earlier ZenBooks, the UX303 and UX305. I'm guessing they aren't offering that here because they didn't want this system to pay the weight and battery life penalties for that screen.
My biggest complaint is the single USB-C port. I'd have liked to see at least one more so you could dedicate one to low speed devices, rather than taking the big performance hit to your fast devices if you plug in an HID. But the expectation is that you will use Bluetooth keyboards and mice if you want them rather than plugging something into USB.
OS X isn't going to happen; Apple doesn't license it for use on non-Apple products. A Linux version could happen; ASUS has marketed Linux-based laptops in the past. Users can certainly install Linux if they like, but they will want a new distro based on the 4.4 kernel to get full Skylake support.
It used to be possible to buy computers that had cow logos. But now they say Acer instead. Acer bought Gateway in 2007; Gateway-branded products continued for a while but now have been discontinued.
You will soon be able to have a bash shell on Windows 10, thanks to Ubuntu for Windows. People running the Insider Preview can already try it out.
McAfee has a history as a successful tech entrepreneur and is therefore relevant to Slashdot. He founded McAfee Associates, an early anti-virus company, in 1987; he resigned in 1994 and sold his stake shortly after that. Afterward, he had successful investments in Tribal Voice and Zone Labs. But still later he lost a lot of his fortune due to bad investments and the 2007 financial crash, which caused heavy losses on his stock holdings and his mansions. He continues to start and invest in tech companies.
You have an excellent point about the importance of the Brexit. The site hasn't been completely silent on the subject - see https://politics.slashdot.org/... and https://politics.slashdot.org/... - but there is plenty of room for more discussion of this story.
This is not the way that I would have liked this case to be won. But at least it allows Android to continue to exist in its current form.
What I really want is a legal principle: "APIs are not legally protectable." But then I also want the same principle for user interface. By "not legally protectable", I mean that any attempt to patent, copyright, or trademark things that fall into the categories of API or UI would be automatically rejected, and any that have already been granted would be considered invalid.
I'm willing to grant one exception. Each application should be allowed to have ONE (and exactly one) icon that it could trademark and copyright as a visual representation of that application. That would, for example, mean that no other application could use the Facebook icon to represent itself, or to represent any function in the application other than some form of interaction with Facebook.
The wash temperatures in different models of washing machine are not created equal.
Old school washers in the US offered three wash temperatures (if that many): hot, warm, and cold. None of them were temperature regulated. Hot is whatever comes out of your hot water tap (usually somewhere in the range of 120F to 140F), cold is whatever comes out of your cold water tap (which may be anywhere from 35F to 80F depending on location and season), and warm is a 50/50 mix in theory. (If the water pressure of your two taps differs substantially the mix will be changed.) If you have a washer like that, cold water washing is likely to work poorly, especially in the winter in northern states; detergents simply don't work very well in 40F degree water, and under those circumstances the warm wash will be safe for cold water washables because the actual water temperature will only be 80F or so.
Newer washers also offer the same three settings, and perhaps some additional ones. But they are usually temperature regulated (really low end machines may be an exception) so the wash water is never as cold as it would have been in one of those older machines. A properly designed machine adheres to the standards that are used on clothing labels: cold is 30C (86F), warm is 40C (104F), and hot is 50C (122F). (My washer has an additional super-hot 60C setting.) The machine achieves those by mixing from the hot and cold taps as needed, and may also have an electric heater to get the water hotter if necessary. Cold washing in a new machine is far more effective than it was in those older washers where the water was far too cold.
No matter which wash temperature you choose, the rinse water is whatever comes out of the cold water tap. Some old washers had a warm rinse setting, which there is never any good reason to use.
If you are willing to wear nothing but cotton and linen that might be feasible. Even then it would wear out your clothes a lot more quickly and make the dyes fade. Other fabrics, including all those modern stretch ones - forget about it. And no more elastic waistbands in your cotton pants or skirts; you'd have to go back to drawstrings.
TSP is sold in home improvement stores for household cleaning - in particular cleaning walls before repainting. It is the recommended cleaner for that use because modest amounts of TSP residue doesn't interfere with paint adhesion, whereas the surfactants used in most current day cleaners do - which means that you need to rinse walls much more thoroughly if you clean them with something else. The environmental impact is manageable if it is reserved for that use.
Using TSP routinely in laundry would lead to far too much phosphorous in the wastewater stream, which is a big problem. That's why laundry detergents are no longer allowed to contain phosphates in most areas. Using a cleaner that is sold for non-laundry use in your washing machine is both a bad idea and illegal in many places.
Could work, so long as you are not also using chlorine bleach. The two don't mix.
I think 4GB SODIMMs were the largest ones available when your 2011 MBP was introduced, and that's why Apple said the maximum amount of RAM was 8GB. Larger modules came later.
Also, when you upgrade older systems and want to go above the original RAM maximum, you have to be careful about which modules you get. I'm typing this on an old Lenovo x200 that I recently bought used ($20!). When I went to upgrade it from the 2GB it came with to 8GB (which works although the original spec maximum was 4GB), the first set of modules I received didn't work. You have to use low-density modules (8 chips on each side), not higher density ones (4 chips on each side or 8 on just one side), because they're the only 4GB modules that the motherboard will recognize.
Yes, I spend $50 to upgrade the memory on a $20 laptop. The modules that were incompatible would have only been $30. But all in all that means that I have a $70 laptop that suits my needs and has a wonderful keyboard. I'll take that.
Somebody has to develop the apps for those iPads. You can't do it on an iPad, you need a Mac.
That trailer tells us absolutely nothing about what the new series will be like. It shows off some special effects and the new logo, and that's it. I'm waiting for the next trailer before I'll even think about offering an opinion on the series.
Classic TV isn't a big part of what Netflix does. Those shows are much more likely to show up on Hulu.
At the current state of the art at least, cloud based voice recognition simply works better than anything you can implement on an affordable local system. There are two reasons.
One is that the cloud system can devote massive amounts of resources intermittently when you need them to recognize a voice command, but give those resources to other people when you do not. Current day voice recognition systems really aren't very intelligent; they work by comparing massive amounts of data with the recorded voice data, and by doing recognition of words in the context of the surrounding words rather than one at a time.
The other is that the cloud system can massively crowdsource the problem of training the system. They can use the experience of their millions of users to make it work better. A locally based voice recognition system cannot match that.
We can make inexpensive local systems that can recognize a small number of sentences. We can make expensive ones like Dragon NaturallySpeaking that need the computing power of a decent PC or Mac and a couple of gigabytes of RAM to work decently, and even with all of that it doesn't work as well as the cloud-based personal assistants that are now ubiquitous. For example, Alexa can process voice requests to play any artist on Spotify, from a library of over 35 million songs and tens of thousands of artists, and usually gets it right. Nothing you could run on your home entertainment system could come close; even Dragon wouldn't be much help because you need a specialized database of performer names to make that application work well.
I was talking about the installed base of FM radios vs the installed base of digital FM radios for a hypothetical new digital radio service. People may not be in hearing distance of an FM radio at any given time but most have easy access to one, either an old portable radio or one in a car, so it can be useful for emergency information.
The CPU is a big part of the difference in price between an Ultrabook and a Chromebook. The tray price of a Skylake Core M starts at $281 for a 6Y30 and goes up to $393 for a 6Y75. The price of a Celeron N3150, a high end CPU by Chromebook standards (leaving aside premium models), is $108; the ARM CPUs in under-$200 Chromebooks are much less expensive. OEMs don't pay quite that much because they're buying in larger quantities but the relative cost picture is similar.
The other difference is that the Ultrabook is probably a more premium build with costlier materials. Once people are spending over $500 they expect a bit more from the physical construction of the system. It also needs a somewhat larger battery to match the battery life of the Chromebook; that costs more money, and may also call for lighter body materials to allow the use of that larger battery without making the system too heavy.
You can buy cheap Windows laptops with the same hardware specs as a Chromebook (they're a little more expensive because of the cost of the Windows license, but not a lot more because Microsoft offers a lower price for Windows on those systems) but they won't provide a satisfactory user experience with most Windows software. You can also buy cheap Windows laptops with acceptable performance but that can't match the weight and battery life of the Chromebook because they don't use ultra-low-power CPUs. In the past they also typically had rotating hard disks rather than SSDs, but now that the price of an entry level SSD is under $50 that may change.