Ideally, you should only run Li-Ion batteries flat to re-calibrate the charge metering electronics. For maximum life you should avoid regularly discharging to less than 40% capacity.
How preposterous. Guadalajara, Mexico is actually a high-tech city where IBM, Apple, Sony, amongst others have fully compliant ISO-9000 plants.
You do realise ISO 9000 says nothing about the quality of a product, don't you? It just says you have a consistent and well documented process. That process can be to produce the cheapest, nastiest, most poorly-designed crap on the planet.
I'm not saying Guadalajara produces crap, just that ISO 9000 is no guarantee of a quality product.
So if I phone Dell and say the battery went pop in my laptop, they would instantly recall the whole lot? No. They aren't that stupid. They'll get hold of the battery and inspect it. If they find a fault, they'll do a recall. If they can't find a fault, they won't. Most consumer goods which break/explode/burn do so because the consumer has done something monumentally stupid.
Congratulations, you just purchased a desktop PC for double the price.
I expect like many laptops, mine is used more often in the house but away from a desk than it is "on the road". Most of the time I don't plug my laptop in it's because I can't be bothered, not because there is no mains power available.
Which programmers is it though? The ones who wrote the apps or the ones who wrote the APIs and coding guidelines?
I suspect the latter. OS X rarely interrupts me and when it does it's for important stuff, like low battery (and even then, the window is at the front but doesn't get focus). Bouncing dock icons are the norm to get your attention if the app in question isn't in focus. Windows can do blinking taskbar icons instead of slapping a dialog in you face, so why don't app programmers do that? Is this a Microsoft style guideline?
Have you any idea how big a balloon which can carry 200kg+ (you, your comms, your pressure suit, your oxygen, your parachute) to 100,000 feet would be? You'd have to have it made for a start, people don't put payloads that size up on high-altitude balloons very often, so it's not an off-the-shelf item like weather baloons (which are around 100th the size you'd need to lift a human and the kit to keep them alive).
Can take down aircraft, but generally don't. Planes are designed to resist bird strikes, because they aren't all that uncommon. A bird-strike taking down an aircraft is the exception, not the rule.
My Microsoft Intellimouse developed a habit of registering a double-click when the left button was pressed only once. I guess Microsoft don't de-bounce their mouse buttons (or if they do, they suck at it).
I just realized, Amazon forces us to abandon shopping carts! They make you put the item in your cart just to see the price. How gimmiky, tacky, yeck!
Which Amazon are you using? Amazon.com and.co.uk both give me prices without adding something to a cart.
I don't use Amazon any more though, I spend too much time searching for items then realising Amazon don't actually have any - they just know what it is, or you can buy a second-hand one from some random seller. I go to Amazon to buy from Amazon, if I wanted to buy from some random factor I'd be on ebay, not Amazon.
Shop at commercial suppliers if you want something well-built. They aren't cheap, but if you want a stainless-steel toaster oven built to take some punishment (instead of built for as little as possible) commercial catering suppliers are the place to look, not Walmart.
An engineering search engine. They claim to offer loads of useful stuff, like parametric search of numerous manufacturers for a wide range of products. In reality they have an annoying website which never quite seems to tell you what you want to know and bombards you with crap if you subscribe.
I would like somewhere where I can find suppliers for a 52mm galvanized obtuse flange-compressor and compare prices, but using GlobalSpec is little better than typing "52mm galvanized obtuse flange-compressor" into any other search engine.
The bandwidth is much greater because the range sucks. Don't worry, cellular networks are here to stay. Perhaps it'll be integrated so your phone uses the cheapest transport it can find - your wi-fi at home and the office and cellular in the car - but it won't go much further. All these people thinking the world will be flooded with wi-fi that will be acessible to them are living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Smart cars are innovative, tiny, surprisingly roomy city cars with funky gearboxes and a delightful turbo chuckle when you lift off. But they aren't very cheap. You can buy a bigger car for less money from Kia, for example.
They are clever though. Remarkably the safety cage survives impact with a concrete block at 70mph. The occupants are dead from the deceleration of course, but they are damn strong. Not much room for a crumple zone in a Smart car.
I don't understand what you are talking about. Has it not occurred to you that, just perhaps, that snippet of information could be included? It is in fact a subset of the information "how to dig a water-well".
Dude, it's you who comes across as the one who needs to get real. People generally aren't starving in India. What are these *real* problems people have? How do you propose they make them better? Well, you could teach them how, or give them the tools to teach themselves. You know, information.
In case you hadn't read anything technology-related for the past two decades, you don't need mains electricity or telephone lines to communicate any more. The spread of communications throughout developing countries is being driven by mobile technology. Why? The infrastructure is cheaper.
If you want to educate remote populations, putting a off-grid powered (solar, ic generator, wind...) computer with wireless (radio, satelite, mobile phone) connectivity is the most cost-effective way. Sure, you need clean water and schools and roads and other things too, but India isn't as quite as backward as you seem to imply with your comment about *real* problems.
If you think India is misguided in trying to educate its populous just ask yourself why they are sucking up technology jobs from around the world. It's because they know the value of education.
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How are they going to hold your credit card when they don't ask for your CC details on the battery replacement form?
Ideally, you should only run Li-Ion batteries flat to re-calibrate the charge metering electronics. For maximum life you should avoid regularly discharging to less than 40% capacity.
You do realise ISO 9000 says nothing about the quality of a product, don't you? It just says you have a consistent and well documented process. That process can be to produce the cheapest, nastiest, most poorly-designed crap on the planet.
I'm not saying Guadalajara produces crap, just that ISO 9000 is no guarantee of a quality product.
So if I phone Dell and say the battery went pop in my laptop, they would instantly recall the whole lot? No. They aren't that stupid. They'll get hold of the battery and inspect it. If they find a fault, they'll do a recall. If they can't find a fault, they won't. Most consumer goods which break/explode/burn do so because the consumer has done something monumentally stupid.
I expect like many laptops, mine is used more often in the house but away from a desk than it is "on the road". Most of the time I don't plug my laptop in it's because I can't be bothered, not because there is no mains power available.
I suspect the latter. OS X rarely interrupts me and when it does it's for important stuff, like low battery (and even then, the window is at the front but doesn't get focus). Bouncing dock icons are the norm to get your attention if the app in question isn't in focus. Windows can do blinking taskbar icons instead of slapping a dialog in you face, so why don't app programmers do that? Is this a Microsoft style guideline?
Mod parent +5 funny!
Have you any idea how big a balloon which can carry 200kg+ (you, your comms, your pressure suit, your oxygen, your parachute) to 100,000 feet would be? You'd have to have it made for a start, people don't put payloads that size up on high-altitude balloons very often, so it's not an off-the-shelf item like weather baloons (which are around 100th the size you'd need to lift a human and the kit to keep them alive).
Can take down aircraft, but generally don't. Planes are designed to resist bird strikes, because they aren't all that uncommon. A bird-strike taking down an aircraft is the exception, not the rule.
My Microsoft Intellimouse developed a habit of registering a double-click when the left button was pressed only once. I guess Microsoft don't de-bounce their mouse buttons (or if they do, they suck at it).
Get out of my head, Bouncey Knolls!
Which Amazon are you using? Amazon.com and .co.uk both give me prices without adding something to a cart.
I don't use Amazon any more though, I spend too much time searching for items then realising Amazon don't actually have any - they just know what it is, or you can buy a second-hand one from some random seller. I go to Amazon to buy from Amazon, if I wanted to buy from some random factor I'd be on ebay, not Amazon.
Shop at commercial suppliers if you want something well-built. They aren't cheap, but if you want a stainless-steel toaster oven built to take some punishment (instead of built for as little as possible) commercial catering suppliers are the place to look, not Walmart.
You'll get piles. Trust me.
Apple paid Xerox? Goddamn hippy communists! They should have stolen the ideas like proper capitalists.
Just give it away in return for some Apple stock.
An engineering search engine. They claim to offer loads of useful stuff, like parametric search of numerous manufacturers for a wide range of products. In reality they have an annoying website which never quite seems to tell you what you want to know and bombards you with crap if you subscribe.
I would like somewhere where I can find suppliers for a 52mm galvanized obtuse flange-compressor and compare prices, but using GlobalSpec is little better than typing "52mm galvanized obtuse flange-compressor" into any other search engine.
And Darwin is based on... FreeBSD. There is a lot of other stuff but there's a whole bunch of BSD too. Common knowledge.
The bandwidth is much greater because the range sucks. Don't worry, cellular networks are here to stay. Perhaps it'll be integrated so your phone uses the cheapest transport it can find - your wi-fi at home and the office and cellular in the car - but it won't go much further. All these people thinking the world will be flooded with wi-fi that will be acessible to them are living in cloud-cuckoo land.
No clean water? Teach them how to dig wells. Teach them the importance of separation of waste and drinking water.
People starving? Teach them how to farm more efficiently. Give them good weather reports.
Disease? Teach them how the disease is spread and how they can avoid it (hand washing, mosquito nets, whatever is relevant).
Please, give me some examples of ongoing problems which cannot be helped by educating and informing the population to help themselves.
They are clever though. Remarkably the safety cage survives impact with a concrete block at 70mph. The occupants are dead from the deceleration of course, but they are damn strong. Not much room for a crumple zone in a Smart car.
I don't understand what you are talking about. Has it not occurred to you that, just perhaps, that snippet of information could be included? It is in fact a subset of the information "how to dig a water-well".
In case you hadn't read anything technology-related for the past two decades, you don't need mains electricity or telephone lines to communicate any more. The spread of communications throughout developing countries is being driven by mobile technology. Why? The infrastructure is cheaper.
If you want to educate remote populations, putting a off-grid powered (solar, ic generator, wind...) computer with wireless (radio, satelite, mobile phone) connectivity is the most cost-effective way. Sure, you need clean water and schools and roads and other things too, but India isn't as quite as backward as you seem to imply with your comment about *real* problems.
If you think India is misguided in trying to educate its populous just ask yourself why they are sucking up technology jobs from around the world. It's because they know the value of education.
Hey! Active Desktop was great. Before that came along I actually had to start an application to crash my PC.
Apple's X11 is a hardware accelerated X server running on a *nix box.