Hard to find true byte HDs. They are rounded to nearest 1000, dropping 24 for every 1000 and a K no longer means 1024 but just 1000.
Sigh.
You've got that backwards. HDD storage has always -- from the very first 5 MB IBM monster -- been measured in powers of 10, not powers of two. At that time, RAM was also generally measured in powers of 10. Communications bandwidth is and always has been measured in powers of 10. About 30 years ago we shifted from measuring RAM in powers of 10 to powers of 2, because it's more convenient, but everything else is still powers of 10.
You really think switching to "ChromeBook" there won't be any learning-curve, and the applications you know and love will ALL work?
The only app on the ChromeBook is... Chrome. And, no, there won't be any learning curve since she uses it all the time already.
Honestly, as vague as your requirements are, I don't see why one of (eg.) Walmart's several $80 7" Android 4.0 ICS (capacitive screen) tablets won't work for you just as well
She has a Galaxy Tab 10.1, and doesn't see it as a good platform for web browsing. I agree. I like my Nexus 7, but not for e-mail, etc. It's a great entertainment device, book reader, etc.
Yeah, her battery only lasts about an hour, and that's far from the only problem with the laptop. With light use it'll last a few more years -- by which time she probably won't need a full laptop any more. She already has an Android tablet, and doesn't much care for it. Even with a Bluetooth keyboard for it, it's still just not enough like a real computer. She's used my ChromeBook and found it very usable, so I don't worry about her not liking it.
I was already considering buying my wife the Samsung ChromeBook for Christmas; I'll need to see if I can play with one of these Acers to decide if the extra $50 is worth it.
She already has a laptop; this would be a second machine. Her MacBook is still very functional but is suffering some cosmetic damage and the battery life has declined a lot. I could buy her a new battery for less than the price of a ChromeBook... but there's also some value in having a "downstairs computer". The ChromeBook would probably live in the living room and kitchen, while the MacBook would stay in her bedroom.
I've also considered getting her a new computer... but I don't have a grand in the budget for a new Mac, and while I could probably deal with that I also have a moral objection to funding Apple's lawsuits -- and so does my wife, actually. I could buy her a regular laptop, but what OS would it run? I don't want to manage or mess with Windows, and she hasn't used Windows in many years so it'd be a learning curve for her... not so much the OS but the software she uses. I'd be happy to put Ubuntu on it, but the learning curve issue would be there, plus Netflix wouldn't work.
So, a ChromeBook is looking like a really excellent low-cost option. It would allow her to semi-retire the MacBook, keeping it around for the small amount of stuff she needs a "real" computer for, and not requiring her to learn new apps for photo editing, making greeting cards, videos, etc., but using the ChromeBook for e-mail, calendaring, docs, Facebook, TV, video chats, etc., which make up the bulk of her computing. Then I could spend the rest of her Christmas budget on other stuff.
I have always thought of chromebooks being pretty much dependant on a web connection to do anything useful, but the C7 has a pretty serious amount of local storage. does that mean it could be used to do most things offline? document editing? playing audio and video? photo editing?
Maybe that was just the smallest HDD available? I think a big part of the lower price is the use of a spinning disk instead of an SSD.
Very few people search the patent database looking for technical information.
Oh, it's much worse than that. The legal staff for every software development company in the country tells their technical staff specifically not to search the patent database. It adds trivial (if any) value and exposes the company to the risk of willful infringement, with the accompanying treble damages.
Let's not forget, patent laws aren't made to allow big incumbents to rape small inventors. They're made to allow small inventors to get money from their inventions.
Both views are wrong, at least in the United States. The purpose of patents isn't to favor big or small or to enable collection of money by anyone. Money is the mechanism, not the goal. The purpose of patents is to advance science and the useful arts by providing inventors with a motive to publish the details of their inventions, so that other inventors can learn from them, and either license them or explore new possibilities.
Like copyright, the intended beneficiary of our IP laws (at least in their original intent and form) isn't the owner of the temporary monopoly, it's society as a whole. The benefit to the owner is just the tool we use to encourage them to act in society's best interest, by spreading their ideas/expressions.
There are a lot of implications of this viewpoint, and if everyone (especially Congress) could keep it straight, our IP laws would be a lot more sane -- and would tend to achieve rather than undermine the underlying goal. In the case of patent law, one implication of the real goal is that we can measure the effectiveness of the system by how often inventors search the patent database looking for solutions to problems, or for ideas to spark new inventions.
When a student enters the world outside school, the graphing calculator will be largely useless. If you are an engineer and you need "smart features" when doing a particular problem, you will likely use a proper computer and a dedicated software package tailored to the task. The only reason you might need a small calculator is to do quick calculations.
I dunno. I regularly use four different tools for doing calculations at work: kcalc, an HP 50G, octave and Mathematica. kcalc I use for trivial arithmetic and occasional base conversions, and I use it mainly because it's three keystrokes away without even lifting my hands from the keyboard. For heavier calculations, I grab the 50G (which BTW, I only have because I bought it for my kids many years after my 28S died. Then the teacher demanded they have a TI because she couldn't help them do stuff on the HP, so I took the HP), and I use that for almost everything, unless I need vector or matrix calculations, or to operate on data from files, in which case I use octave. For symbolic math, especially calculus (I forgot how to integrate long ago) and for visualizations, I reach for Mathematica.
Granted that I don't use anywhere near the 50G's capabilities, and certainly don't do any graphing on it, and the 15C (wish I still had mine -- lent it to my wife who was a schoolteacher at the time and some kid stole it out of her desk) would be almost as good (I like being able to see the stack), I think there's plenty of value in a solid, reliable high-end calculator.
I don't know that I can really articulate it, either, but I can report the results of an interesting experiment I participated in about 20 years ago.
I was an RPN-lover even then, having recently graduated from my 15C to a 28S, but most of the other geeks in the university computer lab where I spent a ridiculous amount of time couldn't see the sense in it. Late one night the discussion got somewhat heated and someone said that an advantage of RPN was that it was faster because it required fewer keystrokes. A measurable claim like that immediately sparked a demand for proof, so we decided to do some comparisons.
One guy got on the whiteboard and wrote down four very complex arithmetic expressions. Then for each expression, two candidates were selected, one from the RPN camp and one from the infix camp. Each was to write down on the board, under the expression, the series of keystrokes that would be needed to evaluate it. In all cases the RPN keystroke list was shorter, often considerably, but after the first was done everyone noticed a second interesting and unexpected outcome: The RPN-wielder finished writing down his keystroke list long before the infix-wielder -- and not just because of the number of keystrokes. Everyone watching noticed that the infix-proponent often paused for a second or two to think about how to handle the next bit, or stopped for a moment to go back to count up parentheses. In contrast, the RPN-er never paused, never hesitated, just wrote down keystrokes as fast as he could.
After that, we all decided that we should also time the remaining trials, which were all conducted with different candidates. The RPN user consistently finished 25% faster than the infix user, even though the keystroke list was only about 5% shorter.
Then someone (I think it was actually someone from the RPN camp) decided to write a truly horrendously complex expression. It had fractions nested at least ten layers deep and was, frankly, ridiculous. Two more stepped up to try and, once again, the RPN user wrote down keystrokes in a long list, without any more hesitation than it took to find his place in the expression. The infix guy, on the other hand got badly bogged down, backed up several times and ultimately gave up after his RPN competitor had been watching him struggle for five minutes.
To top it all off, actually punching all those keystrokes into real calculators showed that RPN was more accurate. On only one of the five problems was the RPN calculation not correct, while the infix calculation was incorrect on three out of five (determining which answers were correct took significant time and much arguing).
Bottom line, per our impromptu tests and my personal experience, RPN is faster and easier.
I could easily explain why it requires fewer keystrokes, but why exactly it requires less cognitive effort is harder to describe. I believe, though, that it's because when you use RPN you pick a "path" through the expression, and then just follow it. At each point along the path you only have to remember where you've been and where you're going. The calculator keeps track of the stack. With infix you have to manage the "stack" in your head, figuring out when to add and remove nesting levels with parentheses. That's not exactly right, but it's as close as I've been able to come.
The authors of the article point out that they distinguished between "nigger" and "nigga". I think that's a pretty useful distinction. It seems to me that when people type the term they tend to use the former when they're using it in derogatory fashion and the latter otherwise.
and microsoft telling them that they're using it in wrong position that causes wrong stress on the seam.
I call BS. Nowhere in the linked articles is Microsoft cited for any such claim. Citation needed, please.
it is bs, because the suggestion is made with the mouth of an user. but it's apparently the reason for why it breaks, so I'd wager that MS would tell you just to fuck off after you're back to have it changed the third time.
I'll take that wager. In fact, if you'll bet me $1000, I'll give you two-to-one odds. If you agree, please respond and we'll nail down the details of the wager and the means for payment.
And those people are very often filled with hate and an authoritarian streak a mile wide.
Authoritarian streak, I'll grant. Hate? No. Well, there are some, I suppose, like Westboro Baptist, but the vast majority, and the LDS church in particular, are about love. Homosexuals who don't really understand the LDS position on homosexuality will disagree, but they're wrong.
the absolute certain fact that global warming will, if left unchecked for too long, deconstruct civilization
Global warming may be a fact but asserting that it will "deconstruct civilization" and that if we don't do something Earth will become uninhabitable is pretty strong spin for a "no spin zone".
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do anything, just suggesting that your over-the-top rhetoric is self-defeating.
AFAIK the LDS church has never availed itself of that 20% option. In general, the church scrupulously avoids politics, limiting itself to periodically reminding the members to actively participate in the political process. Granted, in areas where Mormons are numerous merely reminding them to vote will have an impact on outcomes of votes around moral questions.
The decision to semi-officially endorse that members should participate in the Prop 8 campaign was an unusual and large change from normal practice, and even then the church was careful to maintain its official/legal distance.
Hey its winter already, a watt used by your CPU is a watt less that has to be used by your radiant or convective heater.
The cooling towers used by many data centers become less efficient in cold weather. Keeping a data center cool is easiest/cheapest in warm, dry weather. As the temperature drops, relative humidity tends to rise which reduces the ability of evaporation to transfer heat. When it gets too cold, the water flowing through cooling towers may actually freeze, which stops all heat transfer and may damage the towers. Many cooling towers incorporate electric heating elements to keep the water flowing, which obviously further reduces efficiency.
In winter in cold climates, data centers care even more about CPU energy efficiency than they do in summer.
Same thing with the way Mormons are expected to pay a 10% tithe to the Mormon Church. But the Church turned around and spent $22 million of that to defeat the pro-gay-marraige Prop 8 in california.
That wasn't done with tithing money. It was money raised from the members of the church specifically for that purpose. In fact, I don't think it would even be legal for tithing (tax-deductible charitable donations) to be used to fight a political battle. In any case, I know that requests for donations were made, to support that battle, and that it was made clear to the members that such donations would not be tax deductible.
Breaking Google or Amazon up wouldn't eliminate the costs, it would increase them. You can't do the same job with less equipment, in fact you'd need more equipment without the extremely efficient automatic allocation of processing that Google does (it's pretty amazing stuff, actually). I suppose you could envision a world of many small service providers all operating on something like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute or AppEngine, to get the efficiencies of scale without the centralization of control -- but someone would still have to pay for it. How? There may be a way, but it appears that no one has found it yet.
On open source, I still maintain that relatively small, simple tasks is all that can be accomplished without significant, dedicated resources. Development tools are an area where pure hobby time often accomplishes some complexity and some polish, but that's really about it. Bringing technology to the point that it's usable by the masses -- which is what it takes if you want to "advance humanity" -- requires significant funding.
If you remove the funding, progress will slow to a crawl and service availability will decline to a tiny fraction of what it is now. Not Internet service, as you pointed out that is already subscriber funded not advertiser funded, but services to allow you to actually do stuff on-line would be much sparser.
If advertising is offensive to you, fine, I can understand and relate to that. But you have to replace it with something else. Paywalls everywhere, most likely. Personally, I'd rather have Google's vision of advertising: Show me discrete ads that are actually of interest to me, and which might often actually be of value to me. But I'd be open to another way, if I saw one.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard to find true byte HDs. They are rounded to nearest 1000, dropping 24 for every 1000 and a K no longer means 1024 but just 1000.
Sigh.
You've got that backwards. HDD storage has always -- from the very first 5 MB IBM monster -- been measured in powers of 10, not powers of two. At that time, RAM was also generally measured in powers of 10. Communications bandwidth is and always has been measured in powers of 10. About 30 years ago we shifted from measuring RAM in powers of 10 to powers of 2, because it's more convenient, but everything else is still powers of 10.
We have bluetooth keyboards and tablet stands -- and Chrome on both tablets.
That's important to know. Thanks. I suspect it'll work before too long, but still...
You really think switching to "ChromeBook" there won't be any learning-curve, and the applications you know and love will ALL work?
The only app on the ChromeBook is... Chrome. And, no, there won't be any learning curve since she uses it all the time already.
Honestly, as vague as your requirements are, I don't see why one of (eg.) Walmart's several $80 7" Android 4.0 ICS (capacitive screen) tablets won't work for you just as well
She has a Galaxy Tab 10.1, and doesn't see it as a good platform for web browsing. I agree. I like my Nexus 7, but not for e-mail, etc. It's a great entertainment device, book reader, etc.
Yeah, her battery only lasts about an hour, and that's far from the only problem with the laptop. With light use it'll last a few more years -- by which time she probably won't need a full laptop any more. She already has an Android tablet, and doesn't much care for it. Even with a Bluetooth keyboard for it, it's still just not enough like a real computer. She's used my ChromeBook and found it very usable, so I don't worry about her not liking it.
Why would I wait?
I was already considering buying my wife the Samsung ChromeBook for Christmas; I'll need to see if I can play with one of these Acers to decide if the extra $50 is worth it.
She already has a laptop; this would be a second machine. Her MacBook is still very functional but is suffering some cosmetic damage and the battery life has declined a lot. I could buy her a new battery for less than the price of a ChromeBook... but there's also some value in having a "downstairs computer". The ChromeBook would probably live in the living room and kitchen, while the MacBook would stay in her bedroom.
I've also considered getting her a new computer... but I don't have a grand in the budget for a new Mac, and while I could probably deal with that I also have a moral objection to funding Apple's lawsuits -- and so does my wife, actually. I could buy her a regular laptop, but what OS would it run? I don't want to manage or mess with Windows, and she hasn't used Windows in many years so it'd be a learning curve for her... not so much the OS but the software she uses. I'd be happy to put Ubuntu on it, but the learning curve issue would be there, plus Netflix wouldn't work.
So, a ChromeBook is looking like a really excellent low-cost option. It would allow her to semi-retire the MacBook, keeping it around for the small amount of stuff she needs a "real" computer for, and not requiring her to learn new apps for photo editing, making greeting cards, videos, etc., but using the ChromeBook for e-mail, calendaring, docs, Facebook, TV, video chats, etc., which make up the bulk of her computing. Then I could spend the rest of her Christmas budget on other stuff.
I have always thought of chromebooks being pretty much dependant on a web connection to do anything useful, but the C7 has a pretty serious amount of local storage. does that mean it could be used to do most things offline? document editing? playing audio and video? photo editing?
Maybe that was just the smallest HDD available? I think a big part of the lower price is the use of a spinning disk instead of an SSD.
Very good point. Thanks.
Very few people search the patent database looking for technical information.
Oh, it's much worse than that. The legal staff for every software development company in the country tells their technical staff specifically not to search the patent database. It adds trivial (if any) value and exposes the company to the risk of willful infringement, with the accompanying treble damages.
Let's not forget, patent laws aren't made to allow big incumbents to rape small inventors. They're made to allow small inventors to get money from their inventions.
Both views are wrong, at least in the United States. The purpose of patents isn't to favor big or small or to enable collection of money by anyone. Money is the mechanism, not the goal. The purpose of patents is to advance science and the useful arts by providing inventors with a motive to publish the details of their inventions, so that other inventors can learn from them, and either license them or explore new possibilities.
Like copyright, the intended beneficiary of our IP laws (at least in their original intent and form) isn't the owner of the temporary monopoly, it's society as a whole. The benefit to the owner is just the tool we use to encourage them to act in society's best interest, by spreading their ideas/expressions.
There are a lot of implications of this viewpoint, and if everyone (especially Congress) could keep it straight, our IP laws would be a lot more sane -- and would tend to achieve rather than undermine the underlying goal. In the case of patent law, one implication of the real goal is that we can measure the effectiveness of the system by how often inventors search the patent database looking for solutions to problems, or for ideas to spark new inventions.
My HP28S was slain by leaking AAA alkaline batteries. They should be replaced every few years, even if they're still functional.
When a student enters the world outside school, the graphing calculator will be largely useless. If you are an engineer and you need "smart features" when doing a particular problem, you will likely use a proper computer and a dedicated software package tailored to the task. The only reason you might need a small calculator is to do quick calculations.
I dunno. I regularly use four different tools for doing calculations at work: kcalc, an HP 50G, octave and Mathematica. kcalc I use for trivial arithmetic and occasional base conversions, and I use it mainly because it's three keystrokes away without even lifting my hands from the keyboard. For heavier calculations, I grab the 50G (which BTW, I only have because I bought it for my kids many years after my 28S died. Then the teacher demanded they have a TI because she couldn't help them do stuff on the HP, so I took the HP), and I use that for almost everything, unless I need vector or matrix calculations, or to operate on data from files, in which case I use octave. For symbolic math, especially calculus (I forgot how to integrate long ago) and for visualizations, I reach for Mathematica.
Granted that I don't use anywhere near the 50G's capabilities, and certainly don't do any graphing on it, and the 15C (wish I still had mine -- lent it to my wife who was a schoolteacher at the time and some kid stole it out of her desk) would be almost as good (I like being able to see the stack), I think there's plenty of value in a solid, reliable high-end calculator.
So I ask: Why do you, Slashdot users, like RPN?
I don't know that I can really articulate it, either, but I can report the results of an interesting experiment I participated in about 20 years ago.
I was an RPN-lover even then, having recently graduated from my 15C to a 28S, but most of the other geeks in the university computer lab where I spent a ridiculous amount of time couldn't see the sense in it. Late one night the discussion got somewhat heated and someone said that an advantage of RPN was that it was faster because it required fewer keystrokes. A measurable claim like that immediately sparked a demand for proof, so we decided to do some comparisons.
One guy got on the whiteboard and wrote down four very complex arithmetic expressions. Then for each expression, two candidates were selected, one from the RPN camp and one from the infix camp. Each was to write down on the board, under the expression, the series of keystrokes that would be needed to evaluate it. In all cases the RPN keystroke list was shorter, often considerably, but after the first was done everyone noticed a second interesting and unexpected outcome: The RPN-wielder finished writing down his keystroke list long before the infix-wielder -- and not just because of the number of keystrokes. Everyone watching noticed that the infix-proponent often paused for a second or two to think about how to handle the next bit, or stopped for a moment to go back to count up parentheses. In contrast, the RPN-er never paused, never hesitated, just wrote down keystrokes as fast as he could.
After that, we all decided that we should also time the remaining trials, which were all conducted with different candidates. The RPN user consistently finished 25% faster than the infix user, even though the keystroke list was only about 5% shorter.
Then someone (I think it was actually someone from the RPN camp) decided to write a truly horrendously complex expression. It had fractions nested at least ten layers deep and was, frankly, ridiculous. Two more stepped up to try and, once again, the RPN user wrote down keystrokes in a long list, without any more hesitation than it took to find his place in the expression. The infix guy, on the other hand got badly bogged down, backed up several times and ultimately gave up after his RPN competitor had been watching him struggle for five minutes.
To top it all off, actually punching all those keystrokes into real calculators showed that RPN was more accurate. On only one of the five problems was the RPN calculation not correct, while the infix calculation was incorrect on three out of five (determining which answers were correct took significant time and much arguing).
Bottom line, per our impromptu tests and my personal experience, RPN is faster and easier.
I could easily explain why it requires fewer keystrokes, but why exactly it requires less cognitive effort is harder to describe. I believe, though, that it's because when you use RPN you pick a "path" through the expression, and then just follow it. At each point along the path you only have to remember where you've been and where you're going. The calculator keeps track of the stack. With infix you have to manage the "stack" in your head, figuring out when to add and remove nesting levels with parentheses. That's not exactly right, but it's as close as I've been able to come.
The authors of the article point out that they distinguished between "nigger" and "nigga". I think that's a pretty useful distinction. It seems to me that when people type the term they tend to use the former when they're using it in derogatory fashion and the latter otherwise.
and microsoft telling them that they're using it in wrong position that causes wrong stress on the seam.
I call BS. Nowhere in the linked articles is Microsoft cited for any such claim. Citation needed, please.
it is bs, because the suggestion is made with the mouth of an user. but it's apparently the reason for why it breaks, so I'd wager that MS would tell you just to fuck off after you're back to have it changed the third time.
I'll take that wager. In fact, if you'll bet me $1000, I'll give you two-to-one odds. If you agree, please respond and we'll nail down the details of the wager and the means for payment.
I could use $500.
Ah, I see. You actually BELIEVE your rhetoric. Well then, by all means carry on.
And those people are very often filled with hate and an authoritarian streak a mile wide.
Authoritarian streak, I'll grant. Hate? No. Well, there are some, I suppose, like Westboro Baptist, but the vast majority, and the LDS church in particular, are about love. Homosexuals who don't really understand the LDS position on homosexuality will disagree, but they're wrong.
the absolute certain fact that global warming will, if left unchecked for too long, deconstruct civilization
Global warming may be a fact but asserting that it will "deconstruct civilization" and that if we don't do something Earth will become uninhabitable is pretty strong spin for a "no spin zone".
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do anything, just suggesting that your over-the-top rhetoric is self-defeating.
AFAIK the LDS church has never availed itself of that 20% option. In general, the church scrupulously avoids politics, limiting itself to periodically reminding the members to actively participate in the political process. Granted, in areas where Mormons are numerous merely reminding them to vote will have an impact on outcomes of votes around moral questions.
The decision to semi-officially endorse that members should participate in the Prop 8 campaign was an unusual and large change from normal practice, and even then the church was careful to maintain its official/legal distance.
Hey its winter already, a watt used by your CPU is a watt less that has to be used by your radiant or convective heater.
The cooling towers used by many data centers become less efficient in cold weather. Keeping a data center cool is easiest/cheapest in warm, dry weather. As the temperature drops, relative humidity tends to rise which reduces the ability of evaporation to transfer heat. When it gets too cold, the water flowing through cooling towers may actually freeze, which stops all heat transfer and may damage the towers. Many cooling towers incorporate electric heating elements to keep the water flowing, which obviously further reduces efficiency.
In winter in cold climates, data centers care even more about CPU energy efficiency than they do in summer.
Same thing with the way Mormons are expected to pay a 10% tithe to the Mormon Church. But the Church turned around and spent $22 million of that to defeat the pro-gay-marraige Prop 8 in california.
That wasn't done with tithing money. It was money raised from the members of the church specifically for that purpose. In fact, I don't think it would even be legal for tithing (tax-deductible charitable donations) to be used to fight a political battle. In any case, I know that requests for donations were made, to support that battle, and that it was made clear to the members that such donations would not be tax deductible.
Breaking Google or Amazon up wouldn't eliminate the costs, it would increase them. You can't do the same job with less equipment, in fact you'd need more equipment without the extremely efficient automatic allocation of processing that Google does (it's pretty amazing stuff, actually). I suppose you could envision a world of many small service providers all operating on something like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute or AppEngine, to get the efficiencies of scale without the centralization of control -- but someone would still have to pay for it. How? There may be a way, but it appears that no one has found it yet.
On open source, I still maintain that relatively small, simple tasks is all that can be accomplished without significant, dedicated resources. Development tools are an area where pure hobby time often accomplishes some complexity and some polish, but that's really about it. Bringing technology to the point that it's usable by the masses -- which is what it takes if you want to "advance humanity" -- requires significant funding.
If you remove the funding, progress will slow to a crawl and service availability will decline to a tiny fraction of what it is now. Not Internet service, as you pointed out that is already subscriber funded not advertiser funded, but services to allow you to actually do stuff on-line would be much sparser.
If advertising is offensive to you, fine, I can understand and relate to that. But you have to replace it with something else. Paywalls everywhere, most likely. Personally, I'd rather have Google's vision of advertising: Show me discrete ads that are actually of interest to me, and which might often actually be of value to me. But I'd be open to another way, if I saw one.
I never claimed telepathy. They say they don't, and I see no reason not to believe them. I don't watch it.
Not honesty and integrity... self-interest and self-promotion. Congressmen are very good at those.