I carry a tool for dealing with these exact situations. Chances are good that you have one, too. I keep mine in between the ring and index fingers of my left hand, and use it to silently signify my disdain for the actions of those around me.
Neat. Expensive. Last-gen. Backordered until next year, next spring, or maybe-someday-we'll-built-some pre-order-only sleek tablet-convertible thing (depending on model).
Of the two models that actually will exist again, the smaller one has fewer USB ports and includes an Ethernet port, and the larger one has more ports (and no Ethernet).
Max RAM is 16GB and 32GB, respectively.
This is incongruous as all hell.
Is there an advantage to buying one of these over the cash I dumped on Black Friday at holidayhole.com? Nothing about them seems impressive, except for the high price and lack of availability.
Have new Skylake desktop, with persnickity Radeon RX 460 video card, with Ubuntu 16.04.
It is running drivers from both AMD and Intel's websites, and I'm using both the IGP and RX 460 to drive monitors. Works fine. I hotplug monitors with it, and they just work with the default Unity.
It was an unrepentant pain in the dick to actually download those drivers (since neither website is navigable using links or lynx): It is literally impossible to install AMD's drivers for this card on a new installation of Ubuntu without outside assistance. (I wound up using a thumb drive and another computer.)
But once the drivers were installed, I've had no problems. (OK, some problems: I get some video tearing on pornhub.com, but I don't find it distracting in that context. Youtube and other video sites work fine. Haven't done anything with local media and a real media player, but I expect it to be fine.)
Monitors sleep fine, everything runs cool and damn-near silent with no effort on my part -- power consumption must be low. Zero hangs, but it's only been a week of solid use. Who knows.
Anyhow, by all accounts I should have a ridiculously unstable, hard-to-configure system, and while the latter is true the former is not: Again, it's fine. I'm impressed by how well it works.
A laptop with Skylake's IGP should be exactly the same except perhaps for suspend/resume: After all, the functional difference (as software is concerned) between a laptop and a desktop, both with Skylake and IGP, is almost nil. This stuff is rather completely homogenized.
Go to their (any manufacturer's) website, look for laptops that are for business. And then look for the expensive lines to see what names they have in common.
For Dell, this is Latitude and Precision (and kinda XPS). For HP, it seems that Elitebook is the proper nomenclature.
HP's consumer notebooks are absolutely the worst I've ever had to fix. HP's good notebooks are fine.
My old, stripped-down Dell Precision has a magnesium bottom panel that comes off with one screw, and has been a joy to use: I wanted a budget computer with plenty of I/O for the work that I do, that was easy to work on, and I got it used for less than $200. (Runs Linux fine, of course, including bells and whistles. Slackware currently.)
A cheap consumerish Dell, though? I worked on one a couple of years ago that was unstable. Through troubleshooting, the next move was to simply re-seat the RAM.
The RAM was on the bottom of the motherboard as is commonly the case. But the chassis had no access panel there. The entire bloody thing had to be disassembled, and the motherboard removed, to re-seat the RAM. This did solve the problem, but holy fuck it was a PITA to fix this (amazingly common, anywhere) glitch.
The Diebold voting machines in my county have a paper trail: I get to watch it be printed, and can verify the contents of that printout before pushing the "Cast Ballot" button on the screen.
I'd have shot a photograph of it for proof, but there's that whole cameras-in-polling-places thing...
Or there's what my county does: Diebold machines (yep, still WinCE), with a printer that prints voter-verifiable duplicate ballots.
I understand this process, so I make sure that all of my X's are in the right spot both on-screen and on-paper before pushing the final "Cast Ballot" button.
I do wonder what sort of discrepancy might be needed before someone becomes tasked with reading the paper tape, and I'm not sure that all areas with Diebold machines have printers.
Harman has a penchant for dropping old tech out the window when it no longer serves them*. I guess this won't change under Samsung.
*: I have a $3.9k Lexicon receiver in my living room, which was designed and built under Harman before they shifted Lexicon's name completely to the pro-audio side of the business. The software is very buggy in many ways that are obvious and which would be trivial to fix, and appears to be of beta quality at best. I emailed them about this and actually found a thoughtful person there who wished he could help, but it was no use: Apparently, when the downsized the brand, they also downsized the engineering team and everything that went with it.
I can only imagine that what was left of the skeleton crew nuked any firmware improvements from orbit, just to be sure, right before throwing their office chairs through the windows and setting the place on fire on their last day.
The remains of what was once Crown are just as ugly.
I think it's very pretty, and I see it as a fine complement to existing displays.
The best, can't-keep-your-mouth-shut-because-of-awe shows I've seen combine encompassing sound that can be felt, explosions that are beautiful, and lights that amaze...all perfectly choreographed.
This adds another dimension to that kind of spectacle, like lasers did in the 80s. Except this time, it is precise movable points of light in the sky.
They can also be flown in the DMZ between the spectators and the fireworks launch site(s), increasing the scope of what is possible with envelopment.
I'd love to see the folks at, say, Pyrotechnica incorporate this tech into their already-brilliant displays.
I block reply notifications from ACs, and do not reply to an AC...usually.
I do this because it is important to me that my ideas are expressed conversationally, and my hope that they will be read by the person whose words I am responding to.
My S7 is IP-whatever rated, does wireless charging, has an easily-accessed SIM and SD slot, a headphone jack, and an exposed micro-USB connector.
It's a real motherfucker to change the battery, though. And I don't know whose cock got sucked by Corning to have them make the back cover out of curved glass because that's about the stupidest idea ever. Then again when my previous S5 died of other causes its battery was still performing about like new, so I'm not too worried about the battery itself shitting the bed.
But I digress. The wireless charging has, so far, been a useful tool for me. It keeps my phone charged at my desk if I bother with taking it out of my pocket, and I don't have to futz with cords spilling my water/beer/coffee/whatever all over the place.
I don't worry about charging this phone, really. It (usually) gets plugged in when I sleep, occasionally charges on the desk during the day, and also in the car if being used for GPS (because that's a universal battery-suck).
So far -- and it's been a few months -- that's been good enough, which is way better than any previous Android phone that I've had (going back to the OG Droid).
There were locusts at my mother's house a few years ago, in numbers rather short of a plague. They ate the swimming pool. They ate the vinyl siding. They ate the window screens.
Other than some rather high-end audio components, I don't see much around me that wasn't of Asian origin other than a Bic lighter and an old Craftsman screwdriver.
We get hail storms, tornadoes, heat waves, flooding, and blizzards here.
After the last good wind storm it took over a year to get most of the asphalt shingled roofs all fixed. Glass roofs made out of photovoltaic panels will just make the problem worse.
Pi is cheap. It's not documented well at all (because Broadcom), and it's far less widely available than commodity PCs, tablets, and phones (which I can buy cash-and-carry at Walmart and, sometimes, even Aldi).
Hobbyists like it because it is cheap, and it has the GPIO lines from the SoC built-out on a header.
End-users like it because it is cheap, speaks HDMI, and runs Kodi and Retropie.
But it's not fast. It's definitely built down to a price. And open? No. Not even a little bit, unless you count the fact that "it runs software, as long as you have the right binary blobs" as being "open."
In 10 minutes, I can walk to any of three different places and buy an automotive fuse.
Why in the fuck would anyone bother with going online and manually enter everything including blood type, just to buy an automotive fuse? Especially if they're going to pick it up in person anyway?
The difference in cost between 100 and 200 amp service is the feed from the power company's termination to the panel, and the difference between appropriate (where 200A does not cost nearly twice as much). We're talking small hundreds of dollars of difference here on any normal home, maybe a little more if the lines are buried. It shouldn't really be a factor either when building a new home, or refitting an old one: This is a very small budget item, down in "no-brainer" territory. They say it might be 30%, and they might be right, but the numbers are small compared to everything else that goes along with it.
200A FTW. It's enough for any normal-to-large American household, including the hot tub and the pool. 400A? Now we get into serious disconnect switches, multiple panels by default, and etc (which gets expensive!).
Srsly: I ran the same aforementioned ancient house (with all amenities including the dishwasher -- literally everything aside from the electric clothes drier) on a portable 6500W generator for two weeks following the Derecho a few years ago. Most of the lights were CFL, but the chandeliers weren't (by choice) and we burned the hell out of all of it. Multiple fridges, a deep freeze, etc.
It didn't ever really break a sweat, generally, even when it was over 100F for days at a time, all of the window air conditioners were cranked up, and we decided to have Movie Night with the BFT and the multi-kiloWatt audio system. I totally expected to be chasing popped breakers, overloaded cables, and had several fire extinguishers handy, but the 2x30A (ie, 30A @ 240V) from that portable genset was apparently enough*. (Sure, it would bog for an instant now and then when a compressor-load started up, but it recovered quickly and nothing that it was powering ever gave a shit.)
(As an aside: The neighbors hated us, but that wasn't anything new even though they were in the dark and we had a noisy generator. We also gave them all free wireless Internet for the duration, which was amazingly easy when the airwaves cleared during that long power outage, and many of them took advantage of that according to my logs.
We also tried hard to offer to let anyone nearby charge phones/whatever and run a fridge/whatever if they had enough extension cord to reach, but there weren't any takers, so fuck 'em.)
*: It wasn't at all cheap to fuel it, and it wasn't easy to find fuel, and it needed oil changes every 30 hours according to the manual, which I generally performed on-time. It also didn't seem to make anywhere near as much difference in fuel consumption as I expected between lightly-loaded and ridiculously-loaded, which is what led to the consumption-spree outlined above. But that's yet another topic.
**: And I still don't know what the 400A households are all about, except perhaps for them being sold a bill of goods. Nothing they have going on, even all-at-once, requires even a quarter of that.
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I carry a tool for dealing with these exact situations. Chances are good that you have one, too. I keep mine in between the ring and index fingers of my left hand, and use it to silently signify my disdain for the actions of those around me.
Neat. Expensive. Last-gen. Backordered until next year, next spring, or maybe-someday-we'll-built-some pre-order-only sleek tablet-convertible thing (depending on model).
Of the two models that actually will exist again, the smaller one has fewer USB ports and includes an Ethernet port, and the larger one has more ports (and no Ethernet).
Max RAM is 16GB and 32GB, respectively.
This is incongruous as all hell.
Is there an advantage to buying one of these over the cash I dumped on Black Friday at holidayhole.com? Nothing about them seems impressive, except for the high price and lack of availability.
Have new Skylake desktop, with persnickity Radeon RX 460 video card, with Ubuntu 16.04.
It is running drivers from both AMD and Intel's websites, and I'm using both the IGP and RX 460 to drive monitors. Works fine. I hotplug monitors with it, and they just work with the default Unity.
It was an unrepentant pain in the dick to actually download those drivers (since neither website is navigable using links or lynx): It is literally impossible to install AMD's drivers for this card on a new installation of Ubuntu without outside assistance. (I wound up using a thumb drive and another computer.)
But once the drivers were installed, I've had no problems. (OK, some problems: I get some video tearing on pornhub.com, but I don't find it distracting in that context. Youtube and other video sites work fine. Haven't done anything with local media and a real media player, but I expect it to be fine.)
Monitors sleep fine, everything runs cool and damn-near silent with no effort on my part -- power consumption must be low. Zero hangs, but it's only been a week of solid use. Who knows.
Anyhow, by all accounts I should have a ridiculously unstable, hard-to-configure system, and while the latter is true the former is not: Again, it's fine. I'm impressed by how well it works.
A laptop with Skylake's IGP should be exactly the same except perhaps for suspend/resume: After all, the functional difference (as software is concerned) between a laptop and a desktop, both with Skylake and IGP, is almost nil. This stuff is rather completely homogenized.
Go to their (any manufacturer's) website, look for laptops that are for business. And then look for the expensive lines to see what names they have in common.
For Dell, this is Latitude and Precision (and kinda XPS). For HP, it seems that Elitebook is the proper nomenclature.
HP's consumer notebooks are absolutely the worst I've ever had to fix. HP's good notebooks are fine.
My old, stripped-down Dell Precision has a magnesium bottom panel that comes off with one screw, and has been a joy to use: I wanted a budget computer with plenty of I/O for the work that I do, that was easy to work on, and I got it used for less than $200. (Runs Linux fine, of course, including bells and whistles. Slackware currently.)
A cheap consumerish Dell, though? I worked on one a couple of years ago that was unstable. Through troubleshooting, the next move was to simply re-seat the RAM.
The RAM was on the bottom of the motherboard as is commonly the case. But the chassis had no access panel there. The entire bloody thing had to be disassembled, and the motherboard removed, to re-seat the RAM. This did solve the problem, but holy fuck it was a PITA to fix this (amazingly common, anywhere) glitch.
I've had blanket insurance policies for myself that included $1 million in liability coverage.
It was not alarmingly expensive.
Lies, or Different Lies?
The Diebold voting machines in my county have a paper trail: I get to watch it be printed, and can verify the contents of that printout before pushing the "Cast Ballot" button on the screen.
I'd have shot a photograph of it for proof, but there's that whole cameras-in-polling-places thing...
Or there's what my county does: Diebold machines (yep, still WinCE), with a printer that prints voter-verifiable duplicate ballots.
I understand this process, so I make sure that all of my X's are in the right spot both on-screen and on-paper before pushing the final "Cast Ballot" button.
I do wonder what sort of discrepancy might be needed before someone becomes tasked with reading the paper tape, and I'm not sure that all areas with Diebold machines have printers.
Harman has a penchant for dropping old tech out the window when it no longer serves them*. I guess this won't change under Samsung.
*: I have a $3.9k Lexicon receiver in my living room, which was designed and built under Harman before they shifted Lexicon's name completely to the pro-audio side of the business. The software is very buggy in many ways that are obvious and which would be trivial to fix, and appears to be of beta quality at best. I emailed them about this and actually found a thoughtful person there who wished he could help, but it was no use: Apparently, when the downsized the brand, they also downsized the engineering team and everything that went with it.
I can only imagine that what was left of the skeleton crew nuked any firmware improvements from orbit, just to be sure, right before throwing their office chairs through the windows and setting the place on fire on their last day.
The remains of what was once Crown are just as ugly.
I think it's very pretty, and I see it as a fine complement to existing displays.
The best, can't-keep-your-mouth-shut-because-of-awe shows I've seen combine encompassing sound that can be felt, explosions that are beautiful, and lights that amaze...all perfectly choreographed.
This adds another dimension to that kind of spectacle, like lasers did in the 80s. Except this time, it is precise movable points of light in the sky.
They can also be flown in the DMZ between the spectators and the fireworks launch site(s), increasing the scope of what is possible with envelopment.
I'd love to see the folks at, say, Pyrotechnica incorporate this tech into their already-brilliant displays.
I block reply notifications from ACs, and do not reply to an AC...usually.
I do this because it is important to me that my ideas are expressed conversationally, and my hope that they will be read by the person whose words I am responding to.
My S7 is IP-whatever rated, does wireless charging, has an easily-accessed SIM and SD slot, a headphone jack, and an exposed micro-USB connector.
It's a real motherfucker to change the battery, though. And I don't know whose cock got sucked by Corning to have them make the back cover out of curved glass because that's about the stupidest idea ever. Then again when my previous S5 died of other causes its battery was still performing about like new, so I'm not too worried about the battery itself shitting the bed.
But I digress. The wireless charging has, so far, been a useful tool for me. It keeps my phone charged at my desk if I bother with taking it out of my pocket, and I don't have to futz with cords spilling my water/beer/coffee/whatever all over the place.
I don't worry about charging this phone, really. It (usually) gets plugged in when I sleep, occasionally charges on the desk during the day, and also in the car if being used for GPS (because that's a universal battery-suck).
So far -- and it's been a few months -- that's been good enough, which is way better than any previous Android phone that I've had (going back to the OG Droid).
They didn't test against asphalt shingles, which is the predominant type around here.
There were locusts at my mother's house a few years ago, in numbers rather short of a plague. They ate the swimming pool. They ate the vinyl siding. They ate the window screens.
I wish I were making any of this up.
What Western-made goods?
Other than some rather high-end audio components, I don't see much around me that wasn't of Asian origin other than a Bic lighter and an old Craftsman screwdriver.
We get hail storms, tornadoes, heat waves, flooding, and blizzards here.
After the last good wind storm it took over a year to get most of the asphalt shingled roofs all fixed. Glass roofs made out of photovoltaic panels will just make the problem worse.
Because sand/gravel plus water plus cold equals, essentially, permafrost.
Not necessarily.
I've been inside of numerous non-Apple laptops that had capacitive buttons for such features.
It's probably cheaper than switches, too.
Better to get rid of the W key, since uue can accomplish the same thing by using tuuo single Us.
But it's just a fuse.
Pi is cheap. It's not documented well at all (because Broadcom), and it's far less widely available than commodity PCs, tablets, and phones (which I can buy cash-and-carry at Walmart and, sometimes, even Aldi).
Hobbyists like it because it is cheap, and it has the GPIO lines from the SoC built-out on a header.
End-users like it because it is cheap, speaks HDMI, and runs Kodi and Retropie.
But it's not fast. It's definitely built down to a price. And open? No. Not even a little bit, unless you count the fact that "it runs software, as long as you have the right binary blobs" as being "open."
But it's just an automotive fuse.
In 10 minutes, I can walk to any of three different places and buy an automotive fuse.
Why in the fuck would anyone bother with going online and manually enter everything including blood type, just to buy an automotive fuse? Especially if they're going to pick it up in person anyway?
"most people" don't buy receivers at all: They stick with the built-in TV speakers, or buy a soundbar.
At least UL makes sure that it's not going to burn the house down.
That's interesting indeed. But meh.
The difference in cost between 100 and 200 amp service is the feed from the power company's termination to the panel, and the difference between appropriate (where 200A does not cost nearly twice as much). We're talking small hundreds of dollars of difference here on any normal home, maybe a little more if the lines are buried. It shouldn't really be a factor either when building a new home, or refitting an old one: This is a very small budget item, down in "no-brainer" territory. They say it might be 30%, and they might be right, but the numbers are small compared to everything else that goes along with it.
200A FTW. It's enough for any normal-to-large American household, including the hot tub and the pool. 400A? Now we get into serious disconnect switches, multiple panels by default, and etc (which gets expensive!).
Srsly: I ran the same aforementioned ancient house (with all amenities including the dishwasher -- literally everything aside from the electric clothes drier) on a portable 6500W generator for two weeks following the Derecho a few years ago. Most of the lights were CFL, but the chandeliers weren't (by choice) and we burned the hell out of all of it. Multiple fridges, a deep freeze, etc.
It didn't ever really break a sweat, generally, even when it was over 100F for days at a time, all of the window air conditioners were cranked up, and we decided to have Movie Night with the BFT and the multi-kiloWatt audio system. I totally expected to be chasing popped breakers, overloaded cables, and had several fire extinguishers handy, but the 2x30A (ie, 30A @ 240V) from that portable genset was apparently enough*. (Sure, it would bog for an instant now and then when a compressor-load started up, but it recovered quickly and nothing that it was powering ever gave a shit.)
(As an aside: The neighbors hated us, but that wasn't anything new even though they were in the dark and we had a noisy generator. We also gave them all free wireless Internet for the duration, which was amazingly easy when the airwaves cleared during that long power outage, and many of them took advantage of that according to my logs.
We also tried hard to offer to let anyone nearby charge phones/whatever and run a fridge/whatever if they had enough extension cord to reach, but there weren't any takers, so fuck 'em.)
*: It wasn't at all cheap to fuel it, and it wasn't easy to find fuel, and it needed oil changes every 30 hours according to the manual, which I generally performed on-time. It also didn't seem to make anywhere near as much difference in fuel consumption as I expected between lightly-loaded and ridiculously-loaded, which is what led to the consumption-spree outlined above. But that's yet another topic.
**: And I still don't know what the 400A households are all about, except perhaps for them being sold a bill of goods. Nothing they have going on, even all-at-once, requires even a quarter of that.