Those non-incandescent lights cost an arm and a leg? Not my experience, now that CFLs are often available for under $1. Granted, there is some subsidy from the electric utilities in that price.
The Chromebook is actually a fine tool for some content creation. If you are a writer it's likely to be all you need (the word processor part of Google Docs works offline so you don't need an internet connection) and it's cheap and portable. And the web browser is right there for research.
I will grant that it's probably not the right tool if you are creating audio or visual content, and it's clearly right out for CAD and the like. It can be made to serve to some extent by enabling developer mode and installing Crouton (a Linux user mode environment that runs underneath Chrome OS) but then you're back to the usual negatives of managing a desktop OS.
In some cases you can use your wireless tablet in foreign countries. First, you need an unlocked tablet that covers all the broadband frequencies so it will work in most countries; examples would include the iPad line and the Nexus 7. (LTE on your US-model tablet probably won't work outside North America but HSPA+ is fast enough for most purposes.) A phablet might also do nicely, especially the over 6" ones. (I love my Xperia Z Ultra! It's a bit large for holding up to your ear though it does work. But I rarely talk on my phone; it's primarily a portable data device.)
Then you need one of two things: one of the new T-Mobile plans that includes reasonably priced international data, or a locally purchased SIM. Prepaid plans with inexpensive data are available in many countries; buy one of those in a local shop along with a top-up card and you're good to go. If you can't deal with the local shopping there are companies on the internet that will sell you SIMs and ship them to you in the US so you have them before your trip, but you'll pay a bit of a premium for that.
Don't buy one of the "worldwide SIMs" that some companies offer except perhaps as an emergency backup if you end up in an unexpected location; the rates are very high. But it might be handy if you have to make an unplanned landing due to weather or mechanical problems on the plane. Most likely there will be some WiFi available in the airport anyway so you won't need your 3G data there. Just keep in mind that airports are prime locations for man-in-the-middle attacks and plan your web use accordingly. WiFi of unknown provenance is fine for checking schedules or sending a quick message home to let people know about the delay but I'd be wary of doing any shopping.
If you choose the right monitor you don't even need to buy a stand. I have an inexpensive BenQ monitor ($100 on sale at Newegg) that comes with a pivot stand and I use it rotated. (It's one of two monitors on that system; the other is in landscape mode.) Windows and Linux both handle a rotated monitor with no fuss, and I believe OS X does as well but I'm not using that. A portrait monitor plus a landscape monitor is a very useful setup for many purposes (though not so much for creating a huge immersive gaming display, you want two monitors in the same orientation for that) and it takes up less desk space than two landscape monitors.
Two stations that moved TO the VHF band are WNAC-TV in Providence (actual locaiton Rehoboth MA, formerly channel 64, now broadcasts on channel 12) and WWLP-TV in Springfield MA (actual location Chicopee, formerly channel 22, now broadcasts on channel 11).
A major change when the US made its digital transition is that many stations moved to UHF. Stations operating on UHF are allowed to use more power and the UHF signals have better penetration of buildings and suffer less interference from household devices, so urban reception is generally superior, but reception at the edges of the station's fringe area may suffer.
Most high VHF (channels 7 through 13) were allowed to return to their VHF frequencies after the full digital transition but some chose not to, and some stations were allowed to relocate to high VHF frequencies. Low VHF stations (channels 2 through 6) in major markets were required to move to other frequencies; a few smaller markets still have stations on those channels.
Channel 7 here in Boston is an example of a high VHF station that moved to UHF. They briefly returned to their original channel but found that reception was problematic. This was in part because they were the only Boston station to return to VHF (Boston had also had stations on low VHF channels 2, 4, and 5, all of which were required to relocate to UHF) so most viewers had installed UHF-only DTV antennas. As a result, channel 7 got permission to go back to the UHF channel that they used during the digital transition (while analog and digital broadcasts were being done simultaneously) and shut down VHF operation.
Yes, that would qualify as a heavy plan. And it would cost a lot more in the US. From the major carriers, a comparable plan would be $70/month (T-Mobile), $80/month (Sprint), $120/month (Verizon), or $125/month (AT&T). And calls outside the US cost extra. T-Mobile no longer subsidizes phones; the other three carriers do. You can do a little better by going prepaid on a minor carrier ($55/month on Virgin Mobile and $60/month on Metro PCS are two examples), but can't get as low as your price.
If your phone is mostly a text and data device (you don't talk much) you can get substantially lower prepaid prices, such as $30/month from T-Mobile prepaid (100 minutes + 5GB data) or $35/month from Virgin (300 minutes + unlimited data).
That means it should work well as a 3G (HSDPA/HSPA+) phone on the AT&T network but only partly on T-Mobile. T-Mobile still uses their 1700MHz frequencies for HSPA+ in some markets, though it is in the process of transferring HSPA+ to 1900MHz and reusing the 1700MHz spectrum for LTE.
LTE probably won't work with any US carrier. LTE compatibility is more complex than HSPA compatibility; at the current state of the art, separate LTE phone versions are necessary for the US and Europe.
Whether that is sufficient US compatibility to justify importing one is up to the buyer.
Nobody seems to talk about what will happen to the other part of OCZ - power supplies. They bought PC Power and Cooling in 2007, and still sell power supplies under that name as well as OCZ. But none of the stories I have seen say anything about their fate.
And the 50" version is about $1000. Now if only they had a way to display 4K/60p. The inputs of the Seiki TVs aren't capable of that; perhaps next year's version will be now that the HDMI 2.0 standard is complete.
The games that people play on the XBox and PS are much more graphically complex than Wii U games, so their rendering demands are higher. The PS4 has a more powerful integrated GPU than the XBox One so it can handle 1080p better.
My experience here in Boston is that the standard shipping is actually much faster than the promised 5-7 days most of the time. It only takes a week if they have to ship from a west coast warehouse; most of my Newegg shipments come from New Jersey.c
The TDI gets nothing like the mileage of a hybrid in city driving. And here in the US, the prices are pretty close. Jetta TDI: $23,195, mileage 30 city, 42 highway. Prius: $24,200, mileage 51 city, 48 highway. And don't forget that diesel costs more at the pump, reducing your savings. Urban dwellers who are VW fans are likely to be much happier with the Jetta Hybrid: $25,195, mileage 42 city, 48 highway.
If you step down to the Prius C at $19,080 you have a car that's cheaper than any available TDI in the US.
That electric SUV doesn't exist yet because the kind of environmentally minded drivers who buy EVs don't want them. The majority of SUV drivers don't have any real need for a vehicle of that size, though some do and you may be one of them.
An SUV EV presents some other difficulties as well. The high boxy shape of most SUVs has lousy aerodynamics which means poor efficiency. A vehicle the size and weight of an SUV, even if the aerodynamics are improved, is going to need a lot more battery for a given range than a small EV, which means a lot more money. Consider that the longest range version of the Tesla model S contains something like $30,000 worth of batteries, then double that number for an full sized SUV with comparable range. The result: a vehicle that sell for over $100,000.
Toyota makes a RAV4 EV. (It was originally only sold to fleet owners and in California; it's more widely available now.) But that's a cute ute, not a full sized SUV like yours. And the $50,000 price tag is rather steep, though it presumably qualifies for the EV tax credit which will reduce the sting a bit.
Those roadside checks are not common in the US. But a widely available method that does work for US drivers is to use a GPS. TomTom and Garmin GPS units (and possibly other brands though I have no personal experience with them) show your speed of travel, and you can compare that result to the speedometer display. Do this on a straight level stretch of road; hills and curves decrease the accuracy of the GPS-derived speed readout.
Perhaps that's one reason why Bobby Fischer remains so fascinating. Fischer DID utterly destroy opponents on the way to the chess championship. He won the Interzonal tournament by 3.5 points (a HUGE margin for such a strong tournament) and followed that by 6-0 defeats of Mark Taimanov and Bent Larssen. Next was a 6.5-2.5 defeat of Tigran Petrosian, a bulldog of a player who was notoriously difficult to score a full point on. Finally, he won the championship match against Spassky by a 12.5-8.5 score, despite many weird occurrences during the course of the match, including losing what should have been a drawn endgame in game 1 and then forfeiting game 2 over a dispute about playing conditions.
Your point about the inaccuracy of chess ratings of computers is well taken. Although there are occasional tournaments where both humans and computers play (none of which are rated by FIDE), computers are indeed banned from the mainstream of human chess competition, and so there are few computer-human results factored into chess ratings. We won't know how Carlsen would do against a top computer unless he chooses to play a match against one.
He's with Oculus now. He hasn't left gaming. Gaming is currently the main application of the Oculus Rift though it can be used for other purposes as well.
So far as I know, Mozilla doesn't do any television advertising; I've never seen one. I know that their promotional budget includes holding events, placing banner ads, and sending representatives to technical conventions. Mozilla also employs evangelists to promote the cause of developing for Firefox, and those salaries and associated expenses are probably included as part of the $30 million for branding.
$230,000 per developer employee is par for the course. First, you have their salary, which may be close to $100,000 per year. Then you have benefits, and overhead costs like buildings, computers and network infrastructure, internet services, and power.
Of course, it's not the case that 100% of their employees are developers. But Mozilla is a pretty lean organization, so I'm sure that well over 75% developers and development managers, the rest being clerical staff and evangelists.
The USB port on the original Nexus 7 is indeed a weak point of the hardware. And the replacement part to fix it is absurdly expensive (over $50). That model doesn't have wireless charging but a dock that uses pins on the tablet body is available, though Google no longer sells them directly.
I don't know whether it's a problem on the updated Nexus 7. They haven't been in the wild long enough to have sufficient history.
A popular use of Winamp is as a simple Shoutcast streaming server. Install the Shoutcast DSP plugin and you're ready to go. It's the simplest streaming setup around; once the stream information is in place and the stream is started, all you have to do is play your songs, and the song info (extracted from the ID3 tags in your files) is automatically sent as well.
There used to be a comparable solution for Foobar2000 - the Edcast plugin. (There was also a version for Winamp and a standalone program.) It was more work to install because you had to download and install some components separately (notably LAME if you wanted to stream MP3) but equally simple to use once it was set up. Sadly, the author of Edcast stopped distributing it about three years ago, though the old downloads can still be found on archive.org. A Sourceforce project to do a new version sprung up but never produced a stable program and it's been inactive for two years.
VLC fills a somewhat different need. The great thing about VLC is that it will play just about everything - both audio and video files including strange formats. But its playlist and music management capabilities are poor compared to other programs.
Slashdot Mirror
You can use iTunes long enough to buy the track and then play it with other music software. Most current music players will play Apple's music files.
Those non-incandescent lights cost an arm and a leg? Not my experience, now that CFLs are often available for under $1. Granted, there is some subsidy from the electric utilities in that price.
The Chromebook is actually a fine tool for some content creation. If you are a writer it's likely to be all you need (the word processor part of Google Docs works offline so you don't need an internet connection) and it's cheap and portable. And the web browser is right there for research.
I will grant that it's probably not the right tool if you are creating audio or visual content, and it's clearly right out for CAD and the like. It can be made to serve to some extent by enabling developer mode and installing Crouton (a Linux user mode environment that runs underneath Chrome OS) but then you're back to the usual negatives of managing a desktop OS.
In some cases you can use your wireless tablet in foreign countries. First, you need an unlocked tablet that covers all the broadband frequencies so it will work in most countries; examples would include the iPad line and the Nexus 7. (LTE on your US-model tablet probably won't work outside North America but HSPA+ is fast enough for most purposes.) A phablet might also do nicely, especially the over 6" ones. (I love my Xperia Z Ultra! It's a bit large for holding up to your ear though it does work. But I rarely talk on my phone; it's primarily a portable data device.)
Then you need one of two things: one of the new T-Mobile plans that includes reasonably priced international data, or a locally purchased SIM. Prepaid plans with inexpensive data are available in many countries; buy one of those in a local shop along with a top-up card and you're good to go. If you can't deal with the local shopping there are companies on the internet that will sell you SIMs and ship them to you in the US so you have them before your trip, but you'll pay a bit of a premium for that.
Don't buy one of the "worldwide SIMs" that some companies offer except perhaps as an emergency backup if you end up in an unexpected location; the rates are very high. But it might be handy if you have to make an unplanned landing due to weather or mechanical problems on the plane. Most likely there will be some WiFi available in the airport anyway so you won't need your 3G data there. Just keep in mind that airports are prime locations for man-in-the-middle attacks and plan your web use accordingly. WiFi of unknown provenance is fine for checking schedules or sending a quick message home to let people know about the delay but I'd be wary of doing any shopping.
If you choose the right monitor you don't even need to buy a stand. I have an inexpensive BenQ monitor ($100 on sale at Newegg) that comes with a pivot stand and I use it rotated. (It's one of two monitors on that system; the other is in landscape mode.) Windows and Linux both handle a rotated monitor with no fuss, and I believe OS X does as well but I'm not using that. A portrait monitor plus a landscape monitor is a very useful setup for many purposes (though not so much for creating a huge immersive gaming display, you want two monitors in the same orientation for that) and it takes up less desk space than two landscape monitors.
Two stations that moved TO the VHF band are WNAC-TV in Providence (actual locaiton Rehoboth MA, formerly channel 64, now broadcasts on channel 12) and WWLP-TV in Springfield MA (actual location Chicopee, formerly channel 22, now broadcasts on channel 11).
A major change when the US made its digital transition is that many stations moved to UHF. Stations operating on UHF are allowed to use more power and the UHF signals have better penetration of buildings and suffer less interference from household devices, so urban reception is generally superior, but reception at the edges of the station's fringe area may suffer.
Most high VHF (channels 7 through 13) were allowed to return to their VHF frequencies after the full digital transition but some chose not to, and some stations were allowed to relocate to high VHF frequencies. Low VHF stations (channels 2 through 6) in major markets were required to move to other frequencies; a few smaller markets still have stations on those channels.
Channel 7 here in Boston is an example of a high VHF station that moved to UHF. They briefly returned to their original channel but found that reception was problematic. This was in part because they were the only Boston station to return to VHF (Boston had also had stations on low VHF channels 2, 4, and 5, all of which were required to relocate to UHF) so most viewers had installed UHF-only DTV antennas. As a result, channel 7 got permission to go back to the UHF channel that they used during the digital transition (while analog and digital broadcasts were being done simultaneously) and shut down VHF operation.
Yes, that would qualify as a heavy plan. And it would cost a lot more in the US. From the major carriers, a comparable plan would be $70/month (T-Mobile), $80/month (Sprint), $120/month (Verizon), or $125/month (AT&T). And calls outside the US cost extra. T-Mobile no longer subsidizes phones; the other three carriers do. You can do a little better by going prepaid on a minor carrier ($55/month on Virgin Mobile and $60/month on Metro PCS are two examples), but can't get as low as your price.
If your phone is mostly a text and data device (you don't talk much) you can get substantially lower prepaid prices, such as $30/month from T-Mobile prepaid (100 minutes + 5GB data) or $35/month from Virgin (300 minutes + unlimited data).
That means it should work well as a 3G (HSDPA/HSPA+) phone on the AT&T network but only partly on T-Mobile. T-Mobile still uses their 1700MHz frequencies for HSPA+ in some markets, though it is in the process of transferring HSPA+ to 1900MHz and reusing the 1700MHz spectrum for LTE.
LTE probably won't work with any US carrier. LTE compatibility is more complex than HSPA compatibility; at the current state of the art, separate LTE phone versions are necessary for the US and Europe.
Whether that is sufficient US compatibility to justify importing one is up to the buyer.
Nobody seems to talk about what will happen to the other part of OCZ - power supplies. They bought PC Power and Cooling in 2007, and still sell power supplies under that name as well as OCZ. But none of the stories I have seen say anything about their fate.
If you're going to be a shoe-in he has to be an insensitive clog. Now if you had been a shoo-in...
The Best Buy deal on the original Surface pales next to the deal at Micro Center: $179.95 INCLUDING the black Touch Cover.
And the 50" version is about $1000. Now if only they had a way to display 4K/60p. The inputs of the Seiki TVs aren't capable of that; perhaps next year's version will be now that the HDMI 2.0 standard is complete.
The games that people play on the XBox and PS are much more graphically complex than Wii U games, so their rendering demands are higher. The PS4 has a more powerful integrated GPU than the XBox One so it can handle 1080p better.
My experience here in Boston is that the standard shipping is actually much faster than the promised 5-7 days most of the time. It only takes a week if they have to ship from a west coast warehouse; most of my Newegg shipments come from New Jersey.c
The TDI gets nothing like the mileage of a hybrid in city driving. And here in the US, the prices are pretty close. Jetta TDI: $23,195, mileage 30 city, 42 highway. Prius: $24,200, mileage 51 city, 48 highway. And don't forget that diesel costs more at the pump, reducing your savings. Urban dwellers who are VW fans are likely to be much happier with the Jetta Hybrid: $25,195, mileage 42 city, 48 highway.
If you step down to the Prius C at $19,080 you have a car that's cheaper than any available TDI in the US.
That electric SUV doesn't exist yet because the kind of environmentally minded drivers who buy EVs don't want them. The majority of SUV drivers don't have any real need for a vehicle of that size, though some do and you may be one of them.
An SUV EV presents some other difficulties as well. The high boxy shape of most SUVs has lousy aerodynamics which means poor efficiency. A vehicle the size and weight of an SUV, even if the aerodynamics are improved, is going to need a lot more battery for a given range than a small EV, which means a lot more money. Consider that the longest range version of the Tesla model S contains something like $30,000 worth of batteries, then double that number for an full sized SUV with comparable range. The result: a vehicle that sell for over $100,000.
Toyota makes a RAV4 EV. (It was originally only sold to fleet owners and in California; it's more widely available now.) But that's a cute ute, not a full sized SUV like yours. And the $50,000 price tag is rather steep, though it presumably qualifies for the EV tax credit which will reduce the sting a bit.
Those roadside checks are not common in the US. But a widely available method that does work for US drivers is to use a GPS. TomTom and Garmin GPS units (and possibly other brands though I have no personal experience with them) show your speed of travel, and you can compare that result to the speedometer display. Do this on a straight level stretch of road; hills and curves decrease the accuracy of the GPS-derived speed readout.
Perhaps that's one reason why Bobby Fischer remains so fascinating. Fischer DID utterly destroy opponents on the way to the chess championship. He won the Interzonal tournament by 3.5 points (a HUGE margin for such a strong tournament) and followed that by 6-0 defeats of Mark Taimanov and Bent Larssen. Next was a 6.5-2.5 defeat of Tigran Petrosian, a bulldog of a player who was notoriously difficult to score a full point on. Finally, he won the championship match against Spassky by a 12.5-8.5 score, despite many weird occurrences during the course of the match, including losing what should have been a drawn endgame in game 1 and then forfeiting game 2 over a dispute about playing conditions.
Your point about the inaccuracy of chess ratings of computers is well taken. Although there are occasional tournaments where both humans and computers play (none of which are rated by FIDE), computers are indeed banned from the mainstream of human chess competition, and so there are few computer-human results factored into chess ratings. We won't know how Carlsen would do against a top computer unless he chooses to play a match against one.
He's with Oculus now. He hasn't left gaming. Gaming is currently the main application of the Oculus Rift though it can be used for other purposes as well.
So far as I know, Mozilla doesn't do any television advertising; I've never seen one. I know that their promotional budget includes holding events, placing banner ads, and sending representatives to technical conventions. Mozilla also employs evangelists to promote the cause of developing for Firefox, and those salaries and associated expenses are probably included as part of the $30 million for branding.
$230,000 per developer employee is par for the course. First, you have their salary, which may be close to $100,000 per year. Then you have benefits, and overhead costs like buildings, computers and network infrastructure, internet services, and power.
Of course, it's not the case that 100% of their employees are developers. But Mozilla is a pretty lean organization, so I'm sure that well over 75% developers and development managers, the rest being clerical staff and evangelists.
The USB port on the original Nexus 7 is indeed a weak point of the hardware. And the replacement part to fix it is absurdly expensive (over $50). That model doesn't have wireless charging but a dock that uses pins on the tablet body is available, though Google no longer sells them directly.
I don't know whether it's a problem on the updated Nexus 7. They haven't been in the wild long enough to have sufficient history.
A popular use of Winamp is as a simple Shoutcast streaming server. Install the Shoutcast DSP plugin and you're ready to go. It's the simplest streaming setup around; once the stream information is in place and the stream is started, all you have to do is play your songs, and the song info (extracted from the ID3 tags in your files) is automatically sent as well.
There used to be a comparable solution for Foobar2000 - the Edcast plugin. (There was also a version for Winamp and a standalone program.) It was more work to install because you had to download and install some components separately (notably LAME if you wanted to stream MP3) but equally simple to use once it was set up. Sadly, the author of Edcast stopped distributing it about three years ago, though the old downloads can still be found on archive.org. A Sourceforce project to do a new version sprung up but never produced a stable program and it's been inactive for two years.
VLC fills a somewhat different need. The great thing about VLC is that it will play just about everything - both audio and video files including strange formats. But its playlist and music management capabilities are poor compared to other programs.