It's not as bad as that. They also got 2.3 billion dollars for a piece of Motorola (the set-top box business) that they previously sold. Motorola had 3 billion in cash when they bought it; I haven't yet seen reports on how much cash is going to Lenovo. And they are keeping most of the patents. When all of this is added up, it probably comes out to a break-even transaction: not a home run but not a strikeout either.
A pardon isn't enough. He deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Chelsea Manning should get the Medal of Honor; she's ex-military so she's eligible for that award.
Ubuntu Touch isn't ready for prime time yet. I'm hoping that it will be in better shape by the time the official 14.04 release comes out in April; right now I can only recommend it to developers and curious hackers. I have it installed on a Galaxy Nexus but that is no longer my primary phone.
Firefox OS is another open source OS for phones. It is less ambitious than Ubuntu Touch so it's not likely to scratch the itch of the OP. Their focus is on devices specifically designed for it (most of which are rather low-end) rather than on doing builds for phones that can be reflashed, though there is an unofficial build for the Nexus 4.
Until people switched to SSDs, boot time was mostly constrained by the seek time of hard disk drives. That has not improved substantially in the past 15 years. (It DID improve a lot in the preceding 15 year period, which were the first half of the PC and Mac era.) Data transfer rate has, which means that a large file takes less time to read or write, but the speed of skipping around to a bunch of small files like device drivers and services hasn't changed much.
Windows could improve boot time considerably (especially on systems that lack an SSD) by automatically building a boot pack for your configuration - gather up all your drivers and startup services and store them in a special file that would load at boot. But this technique would cause problems if the system did not reliably detect changes, or if the package of things to load changed often enough that you were spending too much time rebuilding it.
Microsoft made some improvements to startup time in Windows 7 and additional improvements in Windows 8. But most of that comes from deferring startup of less-essential services until after the system first becomes available for use. That's why you see continuing hard disk activity for a little while after the desktop is ready.
The popcorn button on mine (a $100 Panasonic) does something clever: it runs at full power for about a minute (the actual timing is determined by the moisture sensor) and then downshifts to 80%. Doing the final part of the popping at lower power makes it easier to stop the microwave when popping is done and thus avoid burning the popcorn. Though I'm not sure why nobody has designed a microwave that LISTENS to the popcorn...
It's also an inverter microwave, which means that reducing power actually reduces the power output rather than cycling on and off every few seconds. I find that more effective for thawing, and for sensitive warming tasks such as softening sticks of butter.
Finally, I find the touchpad controls convenient. It also displays the time and doubles as a kitchen timer when I'm cooking things on the stove. So to me it's worth the extra money over a basic model with a knob, if anybody actually still makes those.
As for the boiling a glass of water question, the time is going to be highly variable depending on the size of the glass. The kind of glass or cup you use also matters; if you use a typical coffee mug it will take a bit longer because the mug will absorb significant amounts of heat. But it won't shatter, whereas a typical drinking glass (which is not intended for hot liquids) might. For whatever reason I've never taken to boiling water in the microwave; I do mine in the whistling kettle.
Even a good Speedtest result to a server that is not run by your ISP is no guarantee. Your ISP's traffic shaping could be special-casing Speedtest to make their product look better.
A better test is to do a real-world download. Grab something large enough that it takes at least a minute to download on whatever connection you have. See how long it takes. For example, on my Comcast connection at non-peak times I will see download speeds of 5-6 megabytes/second; it drops to 1.5-2 megabytes/second during the evening, which is the busiest time for networks in a residential neighborhood. (These results are for a level of service advertised as "up to 50Mbps" - note that is megaBITS not megaBYTES - and are consistent with the company's promises. I avoid doing really big downloads like multi-gigabyte ISOs during the busy hours.) The real-world test may fail on a REALLY fast connection like Google Fiber because it will be difficult to find a download source that can keep up!
The fact that you get paid more for doing something. If the UBI is high enough you can eke out a bare existence on it, but most people don't enjoy that kind of existence. And in the UBI setup there is always an incentive to earn money because you get to keep the money you earn (minus the usual taxes), unlike the current system where there are disincentives under some circumstances.
One example: if you are receiving unemployment benefits, and if you take a part-time job and earn some money but less than the amount of your benefits, the money you earn reduces your benefits one-for-one so you have no more money than before. But working is more expensive than not working; you have transportation expenses to get to work, you have to wear good clothing (which costs money) unless the job provides a uniform, you can't have all your meals at home so your food expenses increase, and if you're doing physical labor your caloric expenditure rises so you have to buy and eat more food. So you end up worse off than if you didn't take the job.
Another example: many kinds of public assistance have income thresholds for qualifying. Medicaid and WIC are two well known cases; there are many more, such as the fuel assistance provided by some northern states. Making enough money to put you over the threshold causes you to lose the benefit, which may cost you far more than you earn from your job.
If there is a UBI, a small number of people will choose to live on it. (Many of those will be people who contribute to society in ways that don't make money, such as political activists, dedicated volunteers for causes with little money, and aspiring artists and musicians. Some will just be lazy.) Others will live on it but not by choice; there is no work available that fits their skills and abilities, or they may face discrimination in the workplace because of age, race, gender expression, or past criminal or financial record. (Read about how employers are using credit reports.) Some will live on it because the cost of working is higher than the amount of money they can earn; that is most likely to apply to people who are caretakers of young children, elderly parents, or disabled people. (Hiring care for those people is expensive; if the only work available pays minimum wage it is likely to be more cost effective to stay home and care for them yourself.) The vast majority will continue to work.
DNA cannot prove who the father is. The possibility remains that the real father is a close relative, or somebody who just happens to have a lot of DNA in common.
They can disprove the possibility that a given man is the father.
If you live in a city, move around by public transit, and go to a movie as part of your day (an after-work visit for example) rather than as a special trip from home, what you carry into the theater is whatever you carry around for your day. You can't leave the laptop in your car because you don't have one.
Most laptop CPUs are now coming in BGAs rather than PGAs. The push for thinner laptops is driving the change. It is also causing more laptops to come with memory soldered to the motherboard rather than socketed in SODIMMs.
GDDR5 is not currently available on DIMM sticks. The high speed of the memory may make it impossible to package effectively that way.
That ISP is in a rural area in Iowa. The cost of getting a high speed backbone feed is likely to be very high for them; much more than ISPs in urban areas pay. Urban ISPs either won't bother with metered rates or will charge much less per gigabyte.
Not entirely true. There are many engineering tradeoffs in the manufacture of incandescent bulbs. One of them is efficiency vs. mechanical ruggedness; you can buy rough service bulbs that will withstand more vibration, but they produce less light per watt of power. Another is efficiency vs. lifetime; you can buy long life bulbs that last longer, but they produce less light per watt of power. You can also produce a bulb that is less likely to shatter by using a thicker glass bulb, or possibly by using a plastic coating over the bulb (if a plastic that can withstand the temperature exists), but those approaches would also reduce efficiency (the thicker and/or coated bulb would be less transparent) and raise the manufacturing cost.
It might be possible to improve incandescent bulbs include different filament materials, though the industry settled into tungsten early on and then it remained unchanged for many years; that may indicate that nothing better was available, or at least not at an affordable price. You can also use halogen technology. Halogen replacement bulbs as replacements for standard incandescents have been available for over ten years, but high prices kept them from widespread acceptance until pressure from government regulations finally brought production volumes up and costs down. Halogen bulbs only gain 20-25% compared to conventional incandescents (when comparing identical lifetime, light output, and diffusion; the 43W replacements for 60W bulbs produce slightly less light so the wattage saving is exaggerated a bit), so they are a mostly a stopgap technology until LEDs are ready to take over completely.
Neither of those things matters for a programmer's monitor. (They also have poor black levels, also irrelevant.) They do matter if you want to watch or edit video or play games, so the $500 displays are not suitable for everybody.
Most likely, downscaling won't even be done when 4K movies are done for 4K TV. They'll just chop off the sides of the image a bit. And when documentaries and the like go 4K they'll probably be made at the UHD resolution, because that's what inexpensive consumer/prosumer cameras will shoot and because video is their primary market.
h, you meant that they aren't being used to run the Chrome user space. I don't think that's entirely true. I have Crouton on mine but it's a secondary user space for me; I spend most of my time in Chrome. One of my housemates has a Chromebook and he uses it entirely in Chrome. And plenty of non-geeks are buying them, plus the schools and a handful of businesses that have adopted Chromebooks.
Netbooks were a fad that fizzled because, although they were cheap, they were not Good Enough for most users. Chromebooks are Good Enough for many users so I expect them to endure for a while. Like all things in computing they won't last forever; competition from elsewhere may supplant them, or Google may replace the current offering with a unified ChromeOS / Android system.
Chrome OS is indeed a version of Linux. You can install Crouton on a Chromebook; that gives you an Ubuntu userspace as an alternative to the normal Chrome UI (but does not replace the Linux kernel used by Chrome OS) and you can switch back and forth.
The silicon that an IC is made on is called a die. (Trivia: the plural of this usage of die is die, not dice or dies.) According to Wikipedia, the size of the die used for the Celeron 2955U (the processor used in the latest generation of Intel-based Chromebooks) is 181 square millimeters, not 80. Wikipedia lists the price as $132 but Acer and HP are surely paying much less for them.
Nobody has yet made a Chromebook using a Bay Trail (latest generation of Atom CPU) Celeron such as the N2920. That would probably have a smaller die size; Intel hasn't released numbers.
It's also because it's much easier to get voters to fund capital projects than maintenance projects. That's why you end up with ludicrous things like beautiful libraries with no books.
Cheap tablets are already selling for under $50, like the Azpen model that Micro Center has recently offered for $40. The Datawind tablet has similar specs.
We don't even necessary need them to change their minds. All we need is for them, when faced with the two choices of all religious expression on public land or no religious expression, to choose the lesser evil (from their point of view; I see no religious expression on public land as a good) of no religious expression.
Research results often seem obvious. But every once in a while, sociological research comes up with results that contradict conventional wisdom. That is one reason we do studies; to get hard evidence.
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It's not as bad as that. They also got 2.3 billion dollars for a piece of Motorola (the set-top box business) that they previously sold. Motorola had 3 billion in cash when they bought it; I haven't yet seen reports on how much cash is going to Lenovo. And they are keeping most of the patents. When all of this is added up, it probably comes out to a break-even transaction: not a home run but not a strikeout either.
A pardon isn't enough. He deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Chelsea Manning should get the Medal of Honor; she's ex-military so she's eligible for that award.
Ubuntu Touch isn't ready for prime time yet. I'm hoping that it will be in better shape by the time the official 14.04 release comes out in April; right now I can only recommend it to developers and curious hackers. I have it installed on a Galaxy Nexus but that is no longer my primary phone.
Firefox OS is another open source OS for phones. It is less ambitious than Ubuntu Touch so it's not likely to scratch the itch of the OP. Their focus is on devices specifically designed for it (most of which are rather low-end) rather than on doing builds for phones that can be reflashed, though there is an unofficial build for the Nexus 4.
Until people switched to SSDs, boot time was mostly constrained by the seek time of hard disk drives. That has not improved substantially in the past 15 years. (It DID improve a lot in the preceding 15 year period, which were the first half of the PC and Mac era.) Data transfer rate has, which means that a large file takes less time to read or write, but the speed of skipping around to a bunch of small files like device drivers and services hasn't changed much.
Windows could improve boot time considerably (especially on systems that lack an SSD) by automatically building a boot pack for your configuration - gather up all your drivers and startup services and store them in a special file that would load at boot. But this technique would cause problems if the system did not reliably detect changes, or if the package of things to load changed often enough that you were spending too much time rebuilding it.
Microsoft made some improvements to startup time in Windows 7 and additional improvements in Windows 8. But most of that comes from deferring startup of less-essential services until after the system first becomes available for use. That's why you see continuing hard disk activity for a little while after the desktop is ready.
The popcorn button on mine (a $100 Panasonic) does something clever: it runs at full power for about a minute (the actual timing is determined by the moisture sensor) and then downshifts to 80%. Doing the final part of the popping at lower power makes it easier to stop the microwave when popping is done and thus avoid burning the popcorn. Though I'm not sure why nobody has designed a microwave that LISTENS to the popcorn...
It's also an inverter microwave, which means that reducing power actually reduces the power output rather than cycling on and off every few seconds. I find that more effective for thawing, and for sensitive warming tasks such as softening sticks of butter.
Finally, I find the touchpad controls convenient. It also displays the time and doubles as a kitchen timer when I'm cooking things on the stove. So to me it's worth the extra money over a basic model with a knob, if anybody actually still makes those.
As for the boiling a glass of water question, the time is going to be highly variable depending on the size of the glass. The kind of glass or cup you use also matters; if you use a typical coffee mug it will take a bit longer because the mug will absorb significant amounts of heat. But it won't shatter, whereas a typical drinking glass (which is not intended for hot liquids) might. For whatever reason I've never taken to boiling water in the microwave; I do mine in the whistling kettle.
Even a good Speedtest result to a server that is not run by your ISP is no guarantee. Your ISP's traffic shaping could be special-casing Speedtest to make their product look better.
A better test is to do a real-world download. Grab something large enough that it takes at least a minute to download on whatever connection you have. See how long it takes. For example, on my Comcast connection at non-peak times I will see download speeds of 5-6 megabytes/second; it drops to 1.5-2 megabytes/second during the evening, which is the busiest time for networks in a residential neighborhood. (These results are for a level of service advertised as "up to 50Mbps" - note that is megaBITS not megaBYTES - and are consistent with the company's promises. I avoid doing really big downloads like multi-gigabyte ISOs during the busy hours.) The real-world test may fail on a REALLY fast connection like Google Fiber because it will be difficult to find a download source that can keep up!
The fact that you get paid more for doing something. If the UBI is high enough you can eke out a bare existence on it, but most people don't enjoy that kind of existence. And in the UBI setup there is always an incentive to earn money because you get to keep the money you earn (minus the usual taxes), unlike the current system where there are disincentives under some circumstances.
One example: if you are receiving unemployment benefits, and if you take a part-time job and earn some money but less than the amount of your benefits, the money you earn reduces your benefits one-for-one so you have no more money than before. But working is more expensive than not working; you have transportation expenses to get to work, you have to wear good clothing (which costs money) unless the job provides a uniform, you can't have all your meals at home so your food expenses increase, and if you're doing physical labor your caloric expenditure rises so you have to buy and eat more food. So you end up worse off than if you didn't take the job.
Another example: many kinds of public assistance have income thresholds for qualifying. Medicaid and WIC are two well known cases; there are many more, such as the fuel assistance provided by some northern states. Making enough money to put you over the threshold causes you to lose the benefit, which may cost you far more than you earn from your job.
If there is a UBI, a small number of people will choose to live on it. (Many of those will be people who contribute to society in ways that don't make money, such as political activists, dedicated volunteers for causes with little money, and aspiring artists and musicians. Some will just be lazy.) Others will live on it but not by choice; there is no work available that fits their skills and abilities, or they may face discrimination in the workplace because of age, race, gender expression, or past criminal or financial record. (Read about how employers are using credit reports.) Some will live on it because the cost of working is higher than the amount of money they can earn; that is most likely to apply to people who are caretakers of young children, elderly parents, or disabled people. (Hiring care for those people is expensive; if the only work available pays minimum wage it is likely to be more cost effective to stay home and care for them yourself.) The vast majority will continue to work.
DNA cannot prove who the father is. The possibility remains that the real father is a close relative, or somebody who just happens to have a lot of DNA in common. They can disprove the possibility that a given man is the father.
If you live in a city, move around by public transit, and go to a movie as part of your day (an after-work visit for example) rather than as a special trip from home, what you carry into the theater is whatever you carry around for your day. You can't leave the laptop in your car because you don't have one.
Most laptop CPUs are now coming in BGAs rather than PGAs. The push for thinner laptops is driving the change. It is also causing more laptops to come with memory soldered to the motherboard rather than socketed in SODIMMs.
GDDR5 is not currently available on DIMM sticks. The high speed of the memory may make it impossible to package effectively that way.
That ISP is in a rural area in Iowa. The cost of getting a high speed backbone feed is likely to be very high for them; much more than ISPs in urban areas pay. Urban ISPs either won't bother with metered rates or will charge much less per gigabyte.
Not entirely true. There are many engineering tradeoffs in the manufacture of incandescent bulbs. One of them is efficiency vs. mechanical ruggedness; you can buy rough service bulbs that will withstand more vibration, but they produce less light per watt of power. Another is efficiency vs. lifetime; you can buy long life bulbs that last longer, but they produce less light per watt of power. You can also produce a bulb that is less likely to shatter by using a thicker glass bulb, or possibly by using a plastic coating over the bulb (if a plastic that can withstand the temperature exists), but those approaches would also reduce efficiency (the thicker and/or coated bulb would be less transparent) and raise the manufacturing cost.
It might be possible to improve incandescent bulbs include different filament materials, though the industry settled into tungsten early on and then it remained unchanged for many years; that may indicate that nothing better was available, or at least not at an affordable price. You can also use halogen technology. Halogen replacement bulbs as replacements for standard incandescents have been available for over ten years, but high prices kept them from widespread acceptance until pressure from government regulations finally brought production volumes up and costs down. Halogen bulbs only gain 20-25% compared to conventional incandescents (when comparing identical lifetime, light output, and diffusion; the 43W replacements for 60W bulbs produce slightly less light so the wattage saving is exaggerated a bit), so they are a mostly a stopgap technology until LEDs are ready to take over completely.
Neither of those things matters for a programmer's monitor. (They also have poor black levels, also irrelevant.) They do matter if you want to watch or edit video or play games, so the $500 displays are not suitable for everybody.
Most likely, downscaling won't even be done when 4K movies are done for 4K TV. They'll just chop off the sides of the image a bit. And when documentaries and the like go 4K they'll probably be made at the UHD resolution, because that's what inexpensive consumer/prosumer cameras will shoot and because video is their primary market.
h, you meant that they aren't being used to run the Chrome user space. I don't think that's entirely true. I have Crouton on mine but it's a secondary user space for me; I spend most of my time in Chrome. One of my housemates has a Chromebook and he uses it entirely in Chrome. And plenty of non-geeks are buying them, plus the schools and a handful of businesses that have adopted Chromebooks.
Netbooks were a fad that fizzled because, although they were cheap, they were not Good Enough for most users. Chromebooks are Good Enough for many users so I expect them to endure for a while. Like all things in computing they won't last forever; competition from elsewhere may supplant them, or Google may replace the current offering with a unified ChromeOS / Android system.
Chrome OS is indeed a version of Linux. You can install Crouton on a Chromebook; that gives you an Ubuntu userspace as an alternative to the normal Chrome UI (but does not replace the Linux kernel used by Chrome OS) and you can switch back and forth.
The silicon that an IC is made on is called a die. (Trivia: the plural of this usage of die is die, not dice or dies.) According to Wikipedia, the size of the die used for the Celeron 2955U (the processor used in the latest generation of Intel-based Chromebooks) is 181 square millimeters, not 80. Wikipedia lists the price as $132 but Acer and HP are surely paying much less for them.
Nobody has yet made a Chromebook using a Bay Trail (latest generation of Atom CPU) Celeron such as the N2920. That would probably have a smaller die size; Intel hasn't released numbers.
It's also because it's much easier to get voters to fund capital projects than maintenance projects. That's why you end up with ludicrous things like beautiful libraries with no books.
Cheap tablets are already selling for under $50, like the Azpen model that Micro Center has recently offered for $40. The Datawind tablet has similar specs.
Incandescent bulbs are pretty close to being perfect black-body radiators. The main impediment is the imperfect transparency of the glass bulb.
Yes. The idea of Steam OS is to be user-friendly; anybody should be able to install it.
We don't even necessary need them to change their minds. All we need is for them, when faced with the two choices of all religious expression on public land or no religious expression, to choose the lesser evil (from their point of view; I see no religious expression on public land as a good) of no religious expression.
Research results often seem obvious. But every once in a while, sociological research comes up with results that contradict conventional wisdom. That is one reason we do studies; to get hard evidence.
Except to the individual who gets redlined by the algorithm.
It hurts the people who are miscategorized, and therefore get inferior offers for goods and services that they might actually want to buy.