That was my first thought too, but I think the fact that they use https connections to real websites, and that the boxes use a private key, should mean that the government box wouldn't work unless they got access to the private key. I'm still not sure if it would work well in practice, but at least this aspect shouldn't be a problem.
I was fortunate enough to attend a launch a couple years ago, I've never seen anything like it. The sound when the rumble from the main engines hits you, even from miles away, is pretty amazing. Even so, I'm still jealous of anyone who gets to go to this one.
That was the thing that most impressed me, too - we were sitting on our car about ten miles away. It was a predawn launch, and at first you just saw the flames going up. About 30 seconds later, when it was already quite high up, the sound hit & the car was shaking. It ranks up with the aurora borealis for awesome (literally) things I've seen.
It was neat seeing it in the dark, because about 20 minutes before launch you could see the space station come by, and you realized that pretty soon the shuttle was going to be joining it.
But who sells it? Google Product Search doesn't appear to list it.
I found one place in the UK selling it for $335. So about $100 more than a touch and who knows if that one site was a scam.
I am also waiting for an Android alternative to the touch, but I'm not willing to pay way more for one. So in answer to your original question, there isn't really an alternative to the touch.
While true, 20W running all day every day still comes to 1226 kWH per year, which is 2.75 times as much as the set-top box discussed in the article. Your Wifi link alone, at 8 watts, draws more power per year (490 kWH). Those numbers surprise me, and make think there must be a lot of lower-hanging fruit around the average household.
That's far from $10/month, more like $1.50. Not a whole lot.
Isn't that kind of the point? If their drives and tuners weren't running then they couldn't record stuff while you were away. (I mean how else would it build up a buffer of the last 30 minutes of a show or record suggestions if it wasn't running.)
A scheduler running in low power mode can wake up the device (including hard drive) shortly before the scheduled recording. Depending on how long it takes the STB to get its shit together this could be a few minutes or as little as a few seconds.
The buffer is not related to scheduled recordings - they buffer the last 30 minutes of whatever channel you leave it on, regardless of what's scheduled. So you can always turn on and rewind half an hour. So they're never going to go to sleep. Maybe you could buffer to a lower power SD card or something, 4GB should do, but that adds to the complexity of the device.
I also bought a Westinghouse TV from Costco to use as a TV/Monitor in our office. It was fine as a TV, but as a monitor it was unusable - really blurry. Returned it, bought a Sharp, which was fine as a monitor but amazingly bad as a TV - even all the way up the sound was barely audible. Returned it, got a Samsung, works as a TV & monitor just great. Of course, the next year I cancelled the satellite so now all I really need is a monitor, but there you go.
Flash on my Revo HTPC actually works quite well - Silverlight's lack of GPU acceleration makes it a non-starter. 5 is supposed to have it, but no sign of it working yet & if MS ditches it it might never happen.
I use it all the time, so that's one. I bet a lot of laptop owners use it too. I would use it on my Ion/Atom HTPC, but Silverlight still doesn't have GPU acceleration so I use my BD player in the living room.
But there are easier, more secure ways to verify that a book hasn't been altered. To verify that all the books in Project Gutenberg have been maintained in an unaltered state, all I need is a computer file listing a hash function computed on each of the books.
His point is, how do you know that the Project Gutenberg book was correctly OCR'd & proofread in the first place? If you've read many, you'd know that most are very far from perfect. Even if you kept the scans, there's no guarantee that the scanner didn't skip some pages that were stuck together. Keeping the original book lets you go back to verify these things; it's nothing to do with making sure the digital versions propagate cleanly.
But some of your claims don't make a lot of sense. I've never seen any ebook that was more expensive than paperback, let alone hardcover.
Go to Amazon, look up "Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life" (my daughter just got a Kindle and chews through stuff like this). Hardback - $7.79 (Used $5.49) Kindle $9.99. Much of the young adult stuff is like this, it's crazy pricing. Right now, she's reading Alice in Wonderland and some of the other free classics, and this fall Amazon is supposed to add library epub support. We're not going to be buying a whole lot of ebooks this summer.
Sorry, I was talking about the US. Here (Maryland), electricity is about $0.11/kwh, so payoff is more like 30 years if everything goes well. Not worth it for a utility company to invest in. But concentrated thermal solar can still be an economical option for a company.
When it gets down to about a 10-12 year payback I'll install PV on my house, but with an average insolation of 4.5 hours it's going to be a few years before it makes sense. In Florida & California it will make sense sooner.
'There is still a $25 million reward that no one has collected, and the reward says dead or alive, well, if -- in fact -- he is dead, then I could collect the $25 million reward. Why not?'
"Why not?" is that the reward is given at the discretion of the US government, and they're not going to give it to you.
With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player.
This I have to question. When I was a student and buying my first CD player back in the dark ages, I had plenty of time and ended up going around & listening to lots of different players. They all had different digital/analog converters, and that really did make a difference. Even though I didn't have much money I ended up buying the $500 one rather than the $200 one (there were no $20 ones then). I could hear the difference, but I couldn't hear the difference between the $500 one & the $1000 one. Now, it may be that you just can't buy a bad DAC these days, and I know that a $20 T-amp can give amazingly good sound, but there's certainly the CHANCE that a lower end DAC may affect the "digital" sound you hear.
The ipod touch also has the retina display, though maybe the iphone screen is better in some way; all the other chips (GPS, 3G, etc) can't be anywhere near $100 - I'd bet the cost difference to manufacture is under $50. I agree that it's the value they're selling, it's not the cost of the components.
Considering that you can buy a 32GB ipod touch for $300, an extra $450 to add phone functionality seems really steep. But they're looking to maximize their profits, so I guess they figure that someone will pay it.
I don't live in Hong Kong, but those blue batteries look just like the battery packs you use in cordless telephones. I bet you'd get a decent life out of them if you were only waking up the device when you were recording or transmitting.
So if you want to reduce the need for power plants, you're talking about reducing demand, and the only way to do that through the grid is to turn people's stuff off whether they like it or not. Do not want.
I actually signed up for a program that lets my power company turn off my AC for an hour at a time during peak demand - I know they activated it last week when it was up near 100 degrees. I don't really care if the temperature goes up a couple of degrees in the house on a really hot day, plus they give me $80 towards my bill for being part of the program. I think stuff like that is better than building plants that only get spun up once in a while, or having rolling brownouts.
Electric cars charging at night might well be a great way to even out demand, especially if there's a program to allow them to provide power back to the grid at peak demand times.
I use it - as others have said, it gives me a backup, and I like that I can easily access multiple accounts (like hotmail accounts that I use for various things, etc). It's a decent email client, and I'm used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought too, but I think the fact that they use https connections to real websites, and that the boxes use a private key, should mean that the government box wouldn't work unless they got access to the private key. I'm still not sure if it would work well in practice, but at least this aspect shouldn't be a problem.
I was fortunate enough to attend a launch a couple years ago, I've never seen anything like it. The sound when the rumble from the main engines hits you, even from miles away, is pretty amazing. Even so, I'm still jealous of anyone who gets to go to this one.
That was the thing that most impressed me, too - we were sitting on our car about ten miles away. It was a predawn launch, and at first you just saw the flames going up. About 30 seconds later, when it was already quite high up, the sound hit & the car was shaking. It ranks up with the aurora borealis for awesome (literally) things I've seen.
It was neat seeing it in the dark, because about 20 minutes before launch you could see the space station come by, and you realized that pretty soon the shuttle was going to be joining it.
Windows runs the apps I use, and doesn't get in my way. I don't know what more I could ask of an OS, to be honest.
A BASH shell, for starters....
Cygwin takes care of that...
Galaxy player. Samsung makes it.
But who sells it? Google Product Search doesn't appear to list it.
I found one place in the UK selling it for $335. So about $100 more than a touch and who knows if that one site was a scam.
I am also waiting for an Android alternative to the touch, but I'm not willing to pay way more for one. So in answer to your original question, there isn't really an alternative to the touch.
Virgin Mobile MiFi is $150, their USB Modem is more like $80 if that would work for you.
But the summary (and my response) talks about $10/month. I was thinking that 1226 + 490kWh per year only comes out to about $1.50 per month.
While true, 20W running all day every day still comes to 1226 kWH per year, which is 2.75 times as much as the set-top box discussed in the article. Your Wifi link alone, at 8 watts, draws more power per year (490 kWH).
Those numbers surprise me, and make think there must be a lot of lower-hanging fruit around the average household.
That's far from $10/month, more like $1.50. Not a whole lot.
Isn't that kind of the point? If their drives and tuners weren't running then they couldn't record stuff while you were away. (I mean how else would it build up a buffer of the last 30 minutes of a show or record suggestions if it wasn't running.)
A scheduler running in low power mode can wake up the device (including hard drive) shortly before the scheduled recording. Depending on how long it takes the STB to get its shit together this could be a few minutes or as little as a few seconds.
The buffer is not related to scheduled recordings - they buffer the last 30 minutes of whatever channel you leave it on, regardless of what's scheduled. So you can always turn on and rewind half an hour. So they're never going to go to sleep. Maybe you could buffer to a lower power SD card or something, 4GB should do, but that adds to the complexity of the device.
I also bought a Westinghouse TV from Costco to use as a TV/Monitor in our office. It was fine as a TV, but as a monitor it was unusable - really blurry. Returned it, bought a Sharp, which was fine as a monitor but amazingly bad as a TV - even all the way up the sound was barely audible. Returned it, got a Samsung, works as a TV & monitor just great. Of course, the next year I cancelled the satellite so now all I really need is a monitor, but there you go.
I should have said, lack of support for acceleration with Ion GPUs. It's a great HTPC platform, it would be nice to be able to have Netflix on it.
Flash on my Revo HTPC actually works quite well - Silverlight's lack of GPU acceleration makes it a non-starter. 5 is supposed to have it, but no sign of it working yet & if MS ditches it it might never happen.
I use it all the time, so that's one. I bet a lot of laptop owners use it too. I would use it on my Ion/Atom HTPC, but Silverlight still doesn't have GPU acceleration so I use my BD player in the living room.
Who in the U.S. has an affordable wireless data plan?
Virgin Mobile, but you'd have to use one of their phones. Or get their MiFi for data. Only if Sprint has good coverage where you are.
But there are easier, more secure ways to verify that a book hasn't been altered. To verify that all the books in Project Gutenberg have been maintained in an unaltered state, all I need is a computer file listing a hash function computed on each of the books.
His point is, how do you know that the Project Gutenberg book was correctly OCR'd & proofread in the first place? If you've read many, you'd know that most are very far from perfect. Even if you kept the scans, there's no guarantee that the scanner didn't skip some pages that were stuck together. Keeping the original book lets you go back to verify these things; it's nothing to do with making sure the digital versions propagate cleanly.
I'm not sure I follow. There are cheaper ebooks available on Amazon, so why would Apple have an effect on some but not all?
But some of your claims don't make a lot of sense. I've never seen any ebook that was more expensive than paperback, let alone hardcover.
Go to Amazon, look up "Dork Diaries: Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life" (my daughter just got a Kindle and chews through stuff like this). Hardback - $7.79 (Used $5.49) Kindle $9.99. Much of the young adult stuff is like this, it's crazy pricing. Right now, she's reading Alice in Wonderland and some of the other free classics, and this fall Amazon is supposed to add library epub support. We're not going to be buying a whole lot of ebooks this summer.
Sorry, I was talking about the US. Here (Maryland), electricity is about $0.11/kwh, so payoff is more like 30 years if everything goes well. Not worth it for a utility company to invest in. But concentrated thermal solar can still be an economical option for a company.
When it gets down to about a 10-12 year payback I'll install PV on my house, but with an average insolation of 4.5 hours it's going to be a few years before it makes sense. In Florida & California it will make sense sooner.
'There is still a $25 million reward that no one has collected, and the reward says dead or alive, well, if -- in fact -- he is dead, then I could collect the $25 million reward. Why not?'
"Why not?" is that the reward is given at the discretion of the US government, and they're not going to give it to you.
Mod parent up. PV isn't cost effective yet; thermal plants with molten salt reservoirs can be.
With digital, there's no audible difference between a $500 CD changer and a $20 CD player.
This I have to question. When I was a student and buying my first CD player back in the dark ages, I had plenty of time and ended up going around & listening to lots of different players. They all had different digital/analog converters, and that really did make a difference. Even though I didn't have much money I ended up buying the $500 one rather than the $200 one (there were no $20 ones then). I could hear the difference, but I couldn't hear the difference between the $500 one & the $1000 one. Now, it may be that you just can't buy a bad DAC these days, and I know that a $20 T-amp can give amazingly good sound, but there's certainly the CHANCE that a lower end DAC may affect the "digital" sound you hear.
The ipod touch also has the retina display, though maybe the iphone screen is better in some way; all the other chips (GPS, 3G, etc) can't be anywhere near $100 - I'd bet the cost difference to manufacture is under $50. I agree that it's the value they're selling, it's not the cost of the components.
Considering that you can buy a 32GB ipod touch for $300, an extra $450 to add phone functionality seems really steep. But they're looking to maximize their profits, so I guess they figure that someone will pay it.
I don't live in Hong Kong, but those blue batteries look just like the battery packs you use in cordless telephones. I bet you'd get a decent life out of them if you were only waking up the device when you were recording or transmitting.
So if you want to reduce the need for power plants, you're talking about reducing demand, and the only way to do that through the grid is to turn people's stuff off whether they like it or not. Do not want.
I actually signed up for a program that lets my power company turn off my AC for an hour at a time during peak demand - I know they activated it last week when it was up near 100 degrees. I don't really care if the temperature goes up a couple of degrees in the house on a really hot day, plus they give me $80 towards my bill for being part of the program. I think stuff like that is better than building plants that only get spun up once in a while, or having rolling brownouts.
Electric cars charging at night might well be a great way to even out demand, especially if there's a program to allow them to provide power back to the grid at peak demand times.
I use it - as others have said, it gives me a backup, and I like that I can easily access multiple accounts (like hotmail accounts that I use for various things, etc). It's a decent email client, and I'm used to it.