At first, the switch from IBM to Lenovo had no discernible impacts. But recently we've started to have problems.
I got a new T61p last week; I'm sending it back because of some frankly bizarre behavior and hardware flaws (e.g. no right speaker channel on the headset jack, unreliable sleep behavior, several others).
We're actually going to look at Macs with Parallels (for when we have to use Windows, which is a portion of the time).
Read the blog posts on the site to get a sense of what they are up to. I don't know why the Sourceforge stuff isn't current; they are actively developing.
It's very much a shoestring operation; why not throw 'em $5-10?
I find it's helpful to mix working alone with working (physically) with others.
As a consultant, I sometimes work on-site at a client, sometimes at our office with my colleagues, and sometimes at home.
All have their pluses and minuses. Sometimes you are literally 10x more productive on-site than anywhere else; sometimes being at the client is a total time-suck. Pretty much the same for office vs. home.
I would think that (aside from at-client stuff), 3-4 days in the office, 1-2 days at home is a reasonable mix. Any more time at home risks isolation & bad habits...
I'm a fairly responsible, straitlaced person, and always have been.
But I made some really poor choices while driving as a teenager. Fortunately, I just had a lot of near misses and a couple fender benders.
But I drove like an idiot.
I have four boys. The oldest are 6, so I got time still, but you bet they'll have GPS installed on any vehicle they drive that I control. And/or video cameras.
It's not being overprotective, it's realizing that 40k people die a year in the US in auto accidents, and young men have their hand in a sizable fraction of those.
As evidenced in, say, Somalia. I know Somalia's not a great model (it's missing the "enough basic laws" part), but it's not irrelevant.
I'm a big-government libertarian, which I know is inherently contradictory. I like the ideals of freedom, but in practice you always end up with so much market failure due to externalities, information asymmetries, etc., that a nice layer of medium cost bureaucratic inefficiency is actually a desirable thing.
Me, I value using different passwords for different online accounts, but suck at memorizing them, so I used Google Sync with a really strong master password.
I recognize that this is a security risk, but I value the convenience of only having to remember 1 really good password over the potential security risk, which I judge to be small (b/c I'm probably more secure than the next guy).
That said, I look forward to hosting this info on my home server.
This is true, but I don't think it would be *that* hard for e.g. Google to brute-force the key for the 90+% of users who use a weakish password.
I used Google sync and really liked it (I move between my work computer and 2-3 home computers all the time), but I was somewhat concerned that Google had all the keys to my kingdom (e.g. passwords for financial sites). So while I am usually too lazy for long, strong passwords, my one exception was my Google Sync key.
The use of a 10% risk free interest rate was also interesting.
Mod parent up; grandparent is so bad it's not even wrong. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) for PV is demonstrably quite positive.
The economic cost = energy argument is an interesting one but is simply wrong. There are multiple ways to attack this proposition; you could show that the energy intensity of economies (energy consumed per $ GDP produced) are not constant, labor costs are significant and do not pass through linearly to energy consumption, etc.
The economics of PV aren't great now, but are improving rapidly. The experience curve of solar shows a ~20% reduction in costs with every doubling of cumulative production, and the industry is currently growing at 30+% per year. Grid-parity could be as few as 5 years away (Solar is economically competitive in some markets today, like in sunny places with high electricity prices, e.g. Hawaii).
I know a couple people who made/make their money in private equity and managing investment funds, people who hard-nosed financial types, who are convinced it's more like 5 years away.
There's been a huge run on Si that's kept Si prices high and solar prices slightly up; once a ton of in-process Si capacity turns on, it should get interesting (hint: don't go long on Si right now).
BTW the qualifier to your prediction isn't that valid these days...
World solar photovoltaic (PV) market installations reached a record high of 2,826 megawatts (MW) in 2007, representing growth of 62% over the previous year...The PV industry raised nearly $10 billion in 2007. 84 identified financial transactions accounted for $7.5 billion in 2007, Of this amount, $5.3 billion came in the form of equity financing, while $2.2 billion came from debt financing.
3 GW (peak), isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but I tend to pay attention to markets that grow at over 50% a year. It'll get even more interesting once all the new silicon capacity comes online, and drives Si costs back to sane ranges.
1. Indirect costs (installation labor, racks, mounts, etc.) scale with the area of the array. The area of array required for a given power output goes with the inverse of efficiency. These costs are pretty significant, so efficiency has a direct impact on installed costs.
2. There's lots of area available for solar panels, but solar energy is pretty diffuse, so you need a lot of area anyway. If a 1% efficient system cost a dime per watt installed, great, but you'd have to cover huge areas to generate significant amounts of electricity. There are practical limits. Even at 10-20% efficiency, you're still looking at large areas to generate a meaningful amount of juice.
I agree that if you have 65k+ records or rows of data, a spreadsheet probably isn't the best tool.
However, there are several reasons why handling such data in Excel/OO is not unreasonable. These include:
Many people are much more proficient in Excel than in any other software, due to familiarity. The cost of moving the data over to other software and then figuring out how to do what you want to do is often not worth the time required.
Spreadsheets are inherently more flexible than a database. This is both a strength and weakness, but there are plenty of times when you need to do some sort of funky calculation to the data that is much, much easier to implement in a spreadsheet than via SQL (calculating a moving average of X records comes to mind).
I would argue that a DB is often not the best choice, given the difficulty of implementing certain calculations in SQL (yes, I know about Codd and relational theory, but just because something can be done in an RDBMS does not mean it can be done easily). Often, something like S+/R, Matlab/Octave, SPSS, Tableau, etc., is the better choice- they generally allow you to perform manipulations as flexibly as in Excel, with better performance and less likelihood of errors, but more easily than doing everything in SQL. But many people aren't familiar with these. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be, but they aren't.
So, the short answer is that if you have only think you have a hammer (Excel), everything starts looking like nails.
I tend to go to R or Tableau (which is basically a nice interface that sits on top of a database, Excel file or flat file) when I have many thousands of records, but the former has a learning curve, and the latter isn't cheap.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
I like noscript a lot, but it does appear to bog things down. Adding a new site to its 'allow' list seems to tie things up for a few seconds- a small problem, but a hassle nonetheless.
I have a ton of add-ins that I use, which probably doesn't help, but I get this effect even if I turn them all off.
The issue is that the pivot point on Mac laptops tends to be lower, so your screen is a little less likely to get crunched by the dude slamming his seat back onto you.
Older Thinkpads had plastic hinges that did not withstand abuse very well. The metal hinges introduced around the T40 or so fare much better.
My house has an Intel Mac Mini (hiding behind the HD-TV), and old 12" G4 Powerbook, a T43 running Ubuntu (old work machine), and a T60p with XP for work. I love them all. Using Synergy I can hook them up into a 4-monitor virtual machine, which is actually useful from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
Our company has always used thinkpads.
At first, the switch from IBM to Lenovo had no discernible impacts. But recently we've started to have problems.
I got a new T61p last week; I'm sending it back because of some frankly bizarre behavior and hardware flaws (e.g. no right speaker channel on the headset jack, unreliable sleep behavior, several others).
We're actually going to look at Macs with Parallels (for when we have to use Windows, which is a portion of the time).
OVC is very much in operation!
Read the blog posts on the site to get a sense of what they are up to. I don't know why the Sourceforge stuff isn't current; they are actively developing.
It's very much a shoestring operation; why not throw 'em $5-10?
I find it's helpful to mix working alone with working (physically) with others.
As a consultant, I sometimes work on-site at a client, sometimes at our office with my colleagues, and sometimes at home.
All have their pluses and minuses. Sometimes you are literally 10x more productive on-site than anywhere else; sometimes being at the client is a total time-suck. Pretty much the same for office vs. home.
I would think that (aside from at-client stuff), 3-4 days in the office, 1-2 days at home is a reasonable mix. Any more time at home risks isolation & bad habits...
Here's the study re: the grid and plug-ins. It came out a year ago.
Executive summary: Plug-ins are good. Even when powered with current coal technology. Anything else (natural gas, wind, etc.) is pure upside.
That's one great thing about electricity. Unlike gasoline, there are lots of ways to make it.
I'm a fairly responsible, straitlaced person, and always have been.
But I made some really poor choices while driving as a teenager. Fortunately, I just had a lot of near misses and a couple fender benders.
But I drove like an idiot.
I have four boys. The oldest are 6, so I got time still, but you bet they'll have GPS installed on any vehicle they drive that I control. And/or video cameras.
It's not being overprotective, it's realizing that 40k people die a year in the US in auto accidents, and young men have their hand in a sizable fraction of those.
As evidenced in, say, Somalia. I know Somalia's not a great model (it's missing the "enough basic laws" part), but it's not irrelevant.
I'm a big-government libertarian, which I know is inherently contradictory. I like the ideals of freedom, but in practice you always end up with so much market failure due to externalities, information asymmetries, etc., that a nice layer of medium cost bureaucratic inefficiency is actually a desirable thing.
Driving is never totally safe, etc.
Me, I value using different passwords for different online accounts, but suck at memorizing them, so I used Google Sync with a really strong master password.
I recognize that this is a security risk, but I value the convenience of only having to remember 1 really good password over the potential security risk, which I judge to be small (b/c I'm probably more secure than the next guy).
That said, I look forward to hosting this info on my home server.
This is true, but I don't think it would be *that* hard for e.g. Google to brute-force the key for the 90+% of users who use a weakish password.
I used Google sync and really liked it (I move between my work computer and 2-3 home computers all the time), but I was somewhat concerned that Google had all the keys to my kingdom (e.g. passwords for financial sites). So while I am usually too lazy for long, strong passwords, my one exception was my Google Sync key.
Benjamin Graham:
In the short-run, the market is a voting machine;
In the long-run, the market is a weighing machine.
He and his student Mr. Buffett have applied this principle (among others) fairly effectively.
As a French friend once told me, "You Americans don't know how to fight the government."
Get the tractors out, boys!
Having a volcano or two to tap into is helpful, too.
The use of a 10% risk free interest rate was also interesting.
Mod parent up; grandparent is so bad it's not even wrong. The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) for PV is demonstrably quite positive.
The economic cost = energy argument is an interesting one but is simply wrong. There are multiple ways to attack this proposition; you could show that the energy intensity of economies (energy consumed per $ GDP produced) are not constant, labor costs are significant and do not pass through linearly to energy consumption, etc.
The economics of PV aren't great now, but are improving rapidly. The experience curve of solar shows a ~20% reduction in costs with every doubling of cumulative production, and the industry is currently growing at 30+% per year. Grid-parity could be as few as 5 years away (Solar is economically competitive in some markets today, like in sunny places with high electricity prices, e.g. Hawaii).
I see your CS geek and raise you a math geek
I know a couple people who made/make their money in private equity and managing investment funds, people who hard-nosed financial types, who are convinced it's more like 5 years away.
There's been a huge run on Si that's kept Si prices high and solar prices slightly up; once a ton of in-process Si capacity turns on, it should get interesting (hint: don't go long on Si right now).
BTW the qualifier to your prediction isn't that valid these days...
3 GW (peak), isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but I tend to pay attention to markets that grow at over 50% a year. It'll get even more interesting once all the new silicon capacity comes online, and drives Si costs back to sane ranges.
The numbers are all over the place and constantly coming down with new technologies, but you're looking at breakeven after 1-5 years or so.
This is pretty good (EROEI is >> 1), and will continue to get better.
Efficiency matters, for a few reasons, including:
1. Indirect costs (installation labor, racks, mounts, etc.) scale with the area of the array. The area of array required for a given power output goes with the inverse of efficiency. These costs are pretty significant, so efficiency has a direct impact on installed costs.
2. There's lots of area available for solar panels, but solar energy is pretty diffuse, so you need a lot of area anyway. If a 1% efficient system cost a dime per watt installed, great, but you'd have to cover huge areas to generate significant amounts of electricity. There are practical limits. Even at 10-20% efficiency, you're still looking at large areas to generate a meaningful amount of juice.
I agree that if you have 65k+ records or rows of data, a spreadsheet probably isn't the best tool.
However, there are several reasons why handling such data in Excel/OO is not unreasonable. These include:
So, the short answer is that if you have only think you have a hammer (Excel), everything starts looking like nails.
I tend to go to R or Tableau (which is basically a nice interface that sits on top of a database, Excel file or flat file) when I have many thousands of records, but the former has a learning curve, and the latter isn't cheap.
This is
The scientific method in the media industry. Remarkable.
As someone who gets eBooks from eMusic, and doesn't share them via P2P (go get your own damn subscription- it's not that expensive), you're welcome.
I like noscript a lot, but it does appear to bog things down. Adding a new site to its 'allow' list seems to tie things up for a few seconds- a small problem, but a hassle nonetheless.
I have a ton of add-ins that I use, which probably doesn't help, but I get this effect even if I turn them all off.
Stupidity cannot adequately explain this move, which leaves...
The issue is that the pivot point on Mac laptops tends to be lower, so your screen is a little less likely to get crunched by the dude slamming his seat back onto you.
Older Thinkpads had plastic hinges that did not withstand abuse very well. The metal hinges introduced around the T40 or so fare much better.
My house has an Intel Mac Mini (hiding behind the HD-TV), and old 12" G4 Powerbook, a T43 running Ubuntu (old work machine), and a T60p with XP for work. I love them all. Using Synergy I can hook them up into a 4-monitor virtual machine, which is actually useful from time to time.
Consider giving a couple bucks to this group. Alan Dechert has been doing good work in CA and elsewhere.