I believe that the Intel HD 3000 and HD 4000 graphics chipsets found on laptops and some desktops built in the last few years meet the spec you mentioned, so they could do the effects in the new versions of Powerpoint and Excel.
I'd almost agree except RAM is very dirt-cheap nowadays and even the current low-cost "dual-core Pentium" (essentially more or less a Core i3 CPU with only 1 MB of CPU cache) supports x86-64 instructions, so you could build a very inexpensive system with 4 GB RAM and 500 GB hard drive that runs Windows 7 and the new Office 2013 quite well indeed.
In fact, it's always been my opinion that how much RAM your system has is a huge component in how fast your system runs. Under Windows XP, I'd recommend at minimum 1 GB in 32-bit mode, and under Windows Vista/7, I'd recommend 4 GB RAM in 64-bit mode--that way, you get a lot less "memory paging" back and forth from the hard drive, resulting in much "snappier" performance.
The problem with the EV-1 was the fact the car was essentially a rolling battery pack on wheels--much the interior of the car was occupied by the battery packs. In contrast, a modern electric car like the Nissan Leaf uses lithium-ion battery packs, so you actually have usable interior space for a change.
Thanks to research being done on dry-electrode lithium-ion and high-density ultracapacitor battery packs, we may by 2020 have a car about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf (with the battery pack about the same volume size of the current Golf's fuel tank!) go as far as 800 kilometers (497 miles) on a single full charge! If that happens, that will be the beginning of the end of gasoline and diesel fueled automobiles and light trucks.
Actually, MORE people care about international news because of the Internet. That's why I read the websites for BBC News, Times of India, and even People's Daily in China on a fairly frequent basis (the People's Daily web site is available in multiple languages). The scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's newspapers were well-covered in the USA, so most Americans knew of that scandal.
I think a lot of that problem is caused by the conversion of SD video to be shown on the HD format. The result is stretched and/or blurred video, and that can be quite unpleasant to watch. However, with a true HD source, the picture quality can be _outstanding_: the last few Super Bowl broadcasts I've seen on HD is so clear it feels like you're at the stadium itself.
I think the reasons why newspapers are dying is simple: the "de-massification of the media" (as described by Alvin Toffler in "The Third Wave"), thanks to the dramatic improvements in communications technology over the last 60 years.
The rise of cable TV in the 1970's and 1980's, paid online services in the 1980's, the public Internet and small-dish satellite TV in the 1990's, satellite radio in the early 2000's and smaller portable devices to get access to the Internet from circa 2006 on have effectively broken the "massified" means of news delivery such as newspapers and evening news broadcasts by major broadcasters. As such, by the time you get the newspaper in the morning, you may often be reading day-old news! Today, with tablet computers such as the Apple iPad, I can turn it on and within 20 minutes find out the latest news using the news apps for BBC, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, check on Twitter and Facebook feeds, and even check on various news sites around the world. In short, modern technology will make the printed newspaper just about obsolete.
In that case, I'd recommend getting a good 1080p plasma flat screen in the 46" to 50" display size. Unlike LCD displays, plasma displays with the 600 Hz refresh rates usually don't have motion artifacts and the black level on plasma displays are only now matched by the upcoming OLED panels coming later this year.
However, for EMP to be really effective, a bomb a yield of 20 kT (e.g., most fisson-based nuclear bombs) won't work very well even when detonated about 100 miles off the ground.
Remember, the "Starfish Prime" test used a _1.4 megaton_ nuclear warhead, and the Russians used a 300 kT warhead to get similar results with their K Project (which blew out all the circuit breaker fuses on an instrumented power line during the test). I think there was a reason why the Russians were reluctant to retire the SS-9 (R-36) ICBM--the 20 MT nuclear warhead detonated at 400-500 km off the ground over the central USA would have shorted out every unprotected electrical component over most of country---three such detonations would have crippled the entire continental US electrical grid.
What is interesting is that in Japan, they have to deal with the problem of TOO many people using mass transit in certain parts of Tokyo and Osaka.
For example, Shinjuku Station in Tokyo can be a nightmare for pedestrian traffic control, considering that 1) JR East has a LOT of trains going through that area, including a lot of trains that start and stop at that station, 2) Odakyu Electric Railway has its main station here, 3) Keio Corporation has its main station there, 4) both major subway operators in Tokyo have stations there, and 5) many long-distance bus companies operate stations around Shinjuku Station. And to think JR East nearly routed their Shinkansen trains going on the Nagano and Tohoku Shinkansen lines to Shinjuku Station....
I think the vulnerabilities are dropping because the three most commonly-used browsers, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, are all being patched and/or upgraded on a fairly frequent basis for a couple of years. Besides Microsoft's once-a-month (sometimes more) patches for IE, Chrome and Firefox are now on much faster update/patch cycles, and I think that has cut down on the number of issues with browser-based malware attacks.
I know that at least 3-4 reactors in the Kansai (Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe) and Chuubu (Nagoya) regions have been restarted in order to provide power for the factories in that region, mostly because of worries of the need for "rolling" blackouts if the reactors weren't restarted.
If I remember correctly, while using uranium-233 as the main fissile material in a bomb worked, the amount of uranium-233 needed was quite a lot, which defeated the purpose of such a weapons design compared to a "fissile" trigger based on uranium-235 or plutonium-239 (one major achievement of Los Alamos and Livermore National Labs was the dramatic reduction in the size of nuclear warheads, very necessary since the USAF relied on smaller planes for nuclear weapons delivery by 1970 and of course to keep the ICBM/SLBM re-entry vehicle size reasonably small for the Minuteman ICBM and the Posideon/Trident SLBM).
The iPhone was the first cellphone that included a touchscreen interface that is actually viable and useful--interestingly, an outgrowth of all that research into a tablet computer (it's been said the tablet computer development that resulted in the iPad came before the iPhone, but when engineers realized the interface they ended up with on the iPad was very adaptable to a small touchscreen cellphone, the result was a cellphone that totally changed the cellphone industry).
What makes the iPhone even more important is the fact that for the first time, control of updates was no longer dependent on approval of the cellphone carrier--Apple now provided the updates, and the user can select what to update. This is why I am holding out until the next-generation iPhone arrives this September, in spite of the very attractive Samsung Galaxy SIII available now.
After all, there are several parts of China that are quite earthquake-prone and given what happened at Fukushima, the Chinese will definitely build reactors with passive safety features so the reactor can be safely shut down even after a strong earthquake.
That's why China is aggressively pursuing molten-salt reactor technology such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), which are extremely safe to run even in areas of substantial earthquake danger. (It also helps that China has a large stockpile of thorium--a side product of their aggressive rare-Earth mining program. They Chinese might as well put good use to all that thorium.)
But still, isn't that a big wasteful? Given that the iPhone 4 can be easily upgraded to iOS 6.0, you will get to enjoy most of the functionality of iOS 6.0 on anyway and make your old iPhone 4 still very viable for at least one more year.
Also, a big issue with Android phones is the fact cellphone manufacturers put their own "skin" on Android, which seriously complicates updating Android itself. On an unlocked Samsung Galaxy SII, it took several months before Android 2.3 and the Samsung "TouchWiz" interface was updated to Android 4.0 and the current version of TouchWiz.
In short, the Canadians tried to duplicate the British National Health Service--and we know that until recently, NHS caused all kinds of problems with rationed health care.
If the US is to get universal health care, we need to go to the _German_ model, which works with a combination of public and private insurance. And unlike NHS, the German system works quite well and indeed, the best hospitals in Europe are mostly in Germany.
Besides RIM's bad management decisions, what has REALLY helped Apple is that the iPhone from the 3G on allows the _end user_ to install their own apps and update the phone operating system itself _without interference from the cellphone carrier_. That's why on the iPhone, bugs get fixed a lot quicker than even on Android platforms, because the update/bug fix process is completely controlled by Apple.
I am actually kind of surprised that supercomputer-speed trading of a larger number of stock shares are legal now, considering the fiasco in 1987 when programmed computerized trading in stocks caused that 25% one-day crash. I would not be surprised that such trades may be banned or very strict controls imposed in the near future, because I fear that if the European sovereign debt crisis runs out of control all this computerized flash trading could result in a Dow Jones Industrial Average crash of 1,500 points or more with disastrous consequences.
It should be noted that in most states, if you are stopped for a traffic violation and cannot produce proper identification, you will be arrested and the police will run a background check to prove you are a legal resident of the USA. And if you can't prove residency, deportation proceedings may follow. That's why the most important part of SB 1070 was upheld--most states are already doing the same thing.
Maybe it's time to set up an updated version of the "Bracero" program that allows Mexicans to work legally in the USA like what Germany did for workers from Turkey and subsequently Eastern Europe. That way, the Mexicans who come to work on farms come here _legally_, and it ends up benefiting the economies of two countries.
California requires a gasoline blend that is only available in California, Nevada, and Arizona. Small wonder why prices are high here, but the price is still dropping like crazy (the station near my house was charging US$4.15/US gallon a few months ago and now about to drop it fo US$3.65/US gallon very soon).
With all the business news sources doing their "Chicken LIttle" routine of saying that a European sovereign debt default will crash the economy, no wonder why everyone is closing their pocketbooks and conserving liquid assets like mad--all done out of fear. That's why the price of gasoline is nosediving--the demand has dropped through the floor.
I don't like streamed music for one reason: what happens if you lose Internet connectivity? On my 4G iPod touch, at least I can just download the music to the player and either listen to it through headphones or connect it via the iPod-compatible USB connection to my car stereo without worries about losing Internet connectivity.
I think one reason why IE is losing market share is the fact IE--unlike Firefox, Chrome and even Safari--lacks "on the fly" flagging of spelling errors. But now that IE 10.0 for Windows 7 (and the IE 10.0 built into Windows 8/RT) will flag spelling errors, we could see a lot less people in Windows 8 and Windows RT choose an alternate browser.
There's also another reason: on PC's, if you go beyond 1920x1080 resolution, you need to have a higher-end graphics card or on-board graphics to handle the higher resolution with decent graphics redraw speeds. And that costs money--sometimes serious money.
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I believe that the Intel HD 3000 and HD 4000 graphics chipsets found on laptops and some desktops built in the last few years meet the spec you mentioned, so they could do the effects in the new versions of Powerpoint and Excel.
I'd almost agree except RAM is very dirt-cheap nowadays and even the current low-cost "dual-core Pentium" (essentially more or less a Core i3 CPU with only 1 MB of CPU cache) supports x86-64 instructions, so you could build a very inexpensive system with 4 GB RAM and 500 GB hard drive that runs Windows 7 and the new Office 2013 quite well indeed.
In fact, it's always been my opinion that how much RAM your system has is a huge component in how fast your system runs. Under Windows XP, I'd recommend at minimum 1 GB in 32-bit mode, and under Windows Vista/7, I'd recommend 4 GB RAM in 64-bit mode--that way, you get a lot less "memory paging" back and forth from the hard drive, resulting in much "snappier" performance.
The problem with the EV-1 was the fact the car was essentially a rolling battery pack on wheels--much the interior of the car was occupied by the battery packs. In contrast, a modern electric car like the Nissan Leaf uses lithium-ion battery packs, so you actually have usable interior space for a change.
It may happen earlier than you think.
Thanks to research being done on dry-electrode lithium-ion and high-density ultracapacitor battery packs, we may by 2020 have a car about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf (with the battery pack about the same volume size of the current Golf's fuel tank!) go as far as 800 kilometers (497 miles) on a single full charge! If that happens, that will be the beginning of the end of gasoline and diesel fueled automobiles and light trucks.
Actually, MORE people care about international news because of the Internet. That's why I read the websites for BBC News, Times of India, and even People's Daily in China on a fairly frequent basis (the People's Daily web site is available in multiple languages). The scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's newspapers were well-covered in the USA, so most Americans knew of that scandal.
I think a lot of that problem is caused by the conversion of SD video to be shown on the HD format. The result is stretched and/or blurred video, and that can be quite unpleasant to watch. However, with a true HD source, the picture quality can be _outstanding_: the last few Super Bowl broadcasts I've seen on HD is so clear it feels like you're at the stadium itself.
I think the reasons why newspapers are dying is simple: the "de-massification of the media" (as described by Alvin Toffler in "The Third Wave"), thanks to the dramatic improvements in communications technology over the last 60 years.
The rise of cable TV in the 1970's and 1980's, paid online services in the 1980's, the public Internet and small-dish satellite TV in the 1990's, satellite radio in the early 2000's and smaller portable devices to get access to the Internet from circa 2006 on have effectively broken the "massified" means of news delivery such as newspapers and evening news broadcasts by major broadcasters. As such, by the time you get the newspaper in the morning, you may often be reading day-old news! Today, with tablet computers such as the Apple iPad, I can turn it on and within 20 minutes find out the latest news using the news apps for BBC, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, check on Twitter and Facebook feeds, and even check on various news sites around the world. In short, modern technology will make the printed newspaper just about obsolete.
In that case, I'd recommend getting a good 1080p plasma flat screen in the 46" to 50" display size. Unlike LCD displays, plasma displays with the 600 Hz refresh rates usually don't have motion artifacts and the black level on plasma displays are only now matched by the upcoming OLED panels coming later this year.
However, for EMP to be really effective, a bomb a yield of 20 kT (e.g., most fisson-based nuclear bombs) won't work very well even when detonated about 100 miles off the ground.
Remember, the "Starfish Prime" test used a _1.4 megaton_ nuclear warhead, and the Russians used a 300 kT warhead to get similar results with their K Project (which blew out all the circuit breaker fuses on an instrumented power line during the test). I think there was a reason why the Russians were reluctant to retire the SS-9 (R-36) ICBM--the 20 MT nuclear warhead detonated at 400-500 km off the ground over the central USA would have shorted out every unprotected electrical component over most of country---three such detonations would have crippled the entire continental US electrical grid.
What is interesting is that in Japan, they have to deal with the problem of TOO many people using mass transit in certain parts of Tokyo and Osaka.
For example, Shinjuku Station in Tokyo can be a nightmare for pedestrian traffic control, considering that 1) JR East has a LOT of trains going through that area, including a lot of trains that start and stop at that station, 2) Odakyu Electric Railway has its main station here, 3) Keio Corporation has its main station there, 4) both major subway operators in Tokyo have stations there, and 5) many long-distance bus companies operate stations around Shinjuku Station. And to think JR East nearly routed their Shinkansen trains going on the Nagano and Tohoku Shinkansen lines to Shinjuku Station....
I think the vulnerabilities are dropping because the three most commonly-used browsers, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, are all being patched and/or upgraded on a fairly frequent basis for a couple of years. Besides Microsoft's once-a-month (sometimes more) patches for IE, Chrome and Firefox are now on much faster update/patch cycles, and I think that has cut down on the number of issues with browser-based malware attacks.
I know that at least 3-4 reactors in the Kansai (Osaka/Kyoto/Kobe) and Chuubu (Nagoya) regions have been restarted in order to provide power for the factories in that region, mostly because of worries of the need for "rolling" blackouts if the reactors weren't restarted.
If I remember correctly, while using uranium-233 as the main fissile material in a bomb worked, the amount of uranium-233 needed was quite a lot, which defeated the purpose of such a weapons design compared to a "fissile" trigger based on uranium-235 or plutonium-239 (one major achievement of Los Alamos and Livermore National Labs was the dramatic reduction in the size of nuclear warheads, very necessary since the USAF relied on smaller planes for nuclear weapons delivery by 1970 and of course to keep the ICBM/SLBM re-entry vehicle size reasonably small for the Minuteman ICBM and the Posideon/Trident SLBM).
The iPhone was the first cellphone that included a touchscreen interface that is actually viable and useful--interestingly, an outgrowth of all that research into a tablet computer (it's been said the tablet computer development that resulted in the iPad came before the iPhone, but when engineers realized the interface they ended up with on the iPad was very adaptable to a small touchscreen cellphone, the result was a cellphone that totally changed the cellphone industry).
What makes the iPhone even more important is the fact that for the first time, control of updates was no longer dependent on approval of the cellphone carrier--Apple now provided the updates, and the user can select what to update. This is why I am holding out until the next-generation iPhone arrives this September, in spite of the very attractive Samsung Galaxy SIII available now.
After all, there are several parts of China that are quite earthquake-prone and given what happened at Fukushima, the Chinese will definitely build reactors with passive safety features so the reactor can be safely shut down even after a strong earthquake.
That's why China is aggressively pursuing molten-salt reactor technology such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), which are extremely safe to run even in areas of substantial earthquake danger. (It also helps that China has a large stockpile of thorium--a side product of their aggressive rare-Earth mining program. They Chinese might as well put good use to all that thorium.)
But still, isn't that a big wasteful? Given that the iPhone 4 can be easily upgraded to iOS 6.0, you will get to enjoy most of the functionality of iOS 6.0 on anyway and make your old iPhone 4 still very viable for at least one more year.
Also, a big issue with Android phones is the fact cellphone manufacturers put their own "skin" on Android, which seriously complicates updating Android itself. On an unlocked Samsung Galaxy SII, it took several months before Android 2.3 and the Samsung "TouchWiz" interface was updated to Android 4.0 and the current version of TouchWiz.
In short, the Canadians tried to duplicate the British National Health Service--and we know that until recently, NHS caused all kinds of problems with rationed health care.
If the US is to get universal health care, we need to go to the _German_ model, which works with a combination of public and private insurance. And unlike NHS, the German system works quite well and indeed, the best hospitals in Europe are mostly in Germany.
Besides RIM's bad management decisions, what has REALLY helped Apple is that the iPhone from the 3G on allows the _end user_ to install their own apps and update the phone operating system itself _without interference from the cellphone carrier_. That's why on the iPhone, bugs get fixed a lot quicker than even on Android platforms, because the update/bug fix process is completely controlled by Apple.
I am actually kind of surprised that supercomputer-speed trading of a larger number of stock shares are legal now, considering the fiasco in 1987 when programmed computerized trading in stocks caused that 25% one-day crash. I would not be surprised that such trades may be banned or very strict controls imposed in the near future, because I fear that if the European sovereign debt crisis runs out of control all this computerized flash trading could result in a Dow Jones Industrial Average crash of 1,500 points or more with disastrous consequences.
It should be noted that in most states, if you are stopped for a traffic violation and cannot produce proper identification, you will be arrested and the police will run a background check to prove you are a legal resident of the USA. And if you can't prove residency, deportation proceedings may follow. That's why the most important part of SB 1070 was upheld--most states are already doing the same thing.
Maybe it's time to set up an updated version of the "Bracero" program that allows Mexicans to work legally in the USA like what Germany did for workers from Turkey and subsequently Eastern Europe. That way, the Mexicans who come to work on farms come here _legally_, and it ends up benefiting the economies of two countries.
California requires a gasoline blend that is only available in California, Nevada, and Arizona. Small wonder why prices are high here, but the price is still dropping like crazy (the station near my house was charging US$4.15/US gallon a few months ago and now about to drop it fo US$3.65/US gallon very soon).
With all the business news sources doing their "Chicken LIttle" routine of saying that a European sovereign debt default will crash the economy, no wonder why everyone is closing their pocketbooks and conserving liquid assets like mad--all done out of fear. That's why the price of gasoline is nosediving--the demand has dropped through the floor.
I don't like streamed music for one reason: what happens if you lose Internet connectivity? On my 4G iPod touch, at least I can just download the music to the player and either listen to it through headphones or connect it via the iPod-compatible USB connection to my car stereo without worries about losing Internet connectivity.
I think one reason why IE is losing market share is the fact IE--unlike Firefox, Chrome and even Safari--lacks "on the fly" flagging of spelling errors. But now that IE 10.0 for Windows 7 (and the IE 10.0 built into Windows 8/RT) will flag spelling errors, we could see a lot less people in Windows 8 and Windows RT choose an alternate browser.
There's also another reason: on PC's, if you go beyond 1920x1080 resolution, you need to have a higher-end graphics card or on-board graphics to handle the higher resolution with decent graphics redraw speeds. And that costs money--sometimes serious money.