I didnt see that in his post. There are plenty of android tablets that dont require 'aftermarket wrenching', they install and run apps just like the ipad does.
What they do allow is a choice of applications markets (there are dozens, including googles and amazons), and usually the ability to add in a microsd card to upgrade storage while apple requires you to upgrade to a new tablet to go from 16 to 32gb.
His comments about it being a device that preserves a user inside the apple ecosystem is spot on. Be interesting to see how the upcoming amazon android tablet works out, if it makes a ploy to keep the user inside the amazon ecosystem or is out-of-the-box flexible.
By the way, you sound British. Do you know why the Brits never became major computer manufacturers? After trying for years they were unable to find a way to make them leak oil.
To be fair, you do have to hack the nook to get all that goodness, although its a very easy hack. At $205 you're also talking about a refurbished nook, not a new one. While there were a few bluebird deals where you could get a new nook for close to $200, they're not the sort of deals you can get most of the time, or even a lot of the time.
So we'd have to compare it with refurb galaxy tabs and refurbed original ipads, and those often come around for $300-400ish.
I keep hearing the Appleoids tell me that the ipad/ipad2 provide the only 'real tablet experience' and all the other esoterica from the title about polish and apps. I've used ipods, ipads and android tablets. For the life of me I cant sort out this 'special experience' from one to the other. The android tabs and ipads run most the exact same apps from the exact same publishers. I have a $100 android tablet from a year ago thats frankly pretty slow these days but I got to learn all about tablets with it. I just bought a $150 android tablet with the same innards as the original ipad, but with a supposedly lesser screen. The screen looks and works just fine to me, and I see very little difference between it and the ipad 2 screens. Plus I'll let my 6 year old play games on these without fear of breakage. I saw a mother hand her ipad 2 to her kid the other day and the kid dropped it, screen down. Smash.
I watch netflix, listen to music, watch ripped movies, play all sorts of games, browse the web, do video chat, make free internet phone calls, etc. Nothing I've tried was slow or made me think of a $600 dual core ipad, or a similarly priced galaxy pad.
Funny but the same strategy has worked for decades with computer hardware, televisions, cars and so forth. You can always spend 3-4x for something than whatever provides the basic function. If you can identify and value the special functions or capabilities that the more expensive one brings to the table, and you need those, buy it.
Of course, I dont drink the Apple kool-aid nor do I want to spend a similar amount on an android tablet. It'll be outdated in a year or two when version 3.8 or 4.0 android or ios v6 comes out and they leave legacy hardware behind. I'll be able to buy another $150 tablet that runs the new os, has mostly the same innards as the new expensive tablets, has a workable screen, maybe is a little thicker or bigger or heavier. But I sure wont be impressing others with my new $600 tablet, my $80,000 car, or my 73" LED 3d television set. Thats important, right?
I did retire when I was 39 though. Mostly by not wasting money.
The places where the shuttles are being placed are extremely high traffic tourist areas (#1 and #2 or #3 in the country) and where Texas wanted to put it wasnt.
Step 1: Draft a law that says anyone writing a computer virus or malware that causes significant damage to users computers to be liable for all the damage and spend up to life in prison for their efforts. This crap is no different than walking into 100,000 - 100,000,000 homes and either smashing their computer or taking a couple of hundred bucks out of their wallet. Step 2: Get all of the worlds nations to agree with the law and enforce it within their borders. Anyone who doesnt feel like it gets no aid from anyone else ever again. Step 3: Watch most of these morons find something else to do with their spare time. Step 4: Watch the ones that arent smart enough to do something else spend 45 years making license plates and sending their earnings to the computer users who had to buy a new computer or pay someone to fix theirs.
Despite loading antivirus and antimalware software on every computer in my extended family, about 75% of them annually get malware that cripples and eventually renders the machine useless. It usually takes me 3-5 hours to run scans, remove the malware, and recover their data. At this point I have a backup of everybody's machine so I can just restore them in 15 minutes to a previous working state. What a huge waste of my time and resources.
California has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Giving them more revenue in the form of additional sales taxes simply means we'd spend more on stupid stuff. In the last year or so my town paid $400k for a Rodeo Drive sign company to put in new town attractions signs, frequently right next to or in front of perfectly legible signs that said the same thing, which were in fine condition. Just not sexy enough. They built a pedestrian overpass at an intersection that nobody uses, because its about 8 times further to go over that than just push the walk button and walk in the crosswalk. That was over a million. Despite having 33 parks in a town maybe 10 miles by 10 miles, they spent $1.2M on a park because the local residents didnt want to go 1/4 mile to a nearby park that already existed. We spent $400k on a 'roadside beautification' project that involved putting in some shrubs, bark and an irrigation system which is right in front of an open trench street drainage system thats filled with waist high weeds. Really beautiful.
We need to shut off the money, not figure out ways to help the drunken sailors spend more.
Similarly to how the recent law worked out (amazon drops affiliates, state loses 25,000 jobs and $124M in revenue when they all 'relocate' to Oregon and Washington), if and when they get amazon (and other stores) to start paying sales tax in california, people will simply buy less from them, causing them to burp up jobs and profits. I'm not going to drive to 6 local retail stores looking for a widget that I can find in 10 seconds on Amazon, but if I have to pay 10% more for everything then I might just decide to live without it. If amazons revenues drop, they'll have to either cut costs (there goes the good customer service) or raise prices (there goes using them as an inexpensive online source of goodies.
Its the myopic view of the issue thats the problem. Our legislature is out of control and giving them more money isnt the solution. Further, they dont give a rats backside about what damage they incidentally cause to other state businesses or businesses that arent in CA.
In the spirit of actually reading the benchmarks, the gpu performance was typically closer to 1.5-1.75x, occasionally 2-3x, and didnt appear to ever approach 4x.
On the other hand, the sandybridge part transcoded video almost 3x faster than the llano part.
There are two problems with the whole strategy. One is that most (if not all) dvr's record live tv all the time and powering it off would disable that very helpful feature. I dont know how many times I turn the tv on and see a show on halfway through and it looks good so I hit record, or have the news on and I just missed something that sounded interesting.
Secondly, spinning drives up and down increases wear and tear on the drive and shortens drive life. If it was something you'd spin up and down once or twice a day, probably no biggie. But if its spinning up and down 10 times a day to record or play a show, then I think you'd find your hard drive dropping dead a lot sooner, taking all your shows with it.
Throw in all the other stuff dvr's are doing like remote scheduling, regular guide data updates (directv does this in real time, 24x7), etc...and the sleep or drive spin down stuff just doesnt work without major architectural changes.
What they COULD do is push the dvr manufacturers to go to lower power draw components and design lower power 'next gen' dvr parts. But my current dvr only uses about 30-40 watts, while my older tivo used 100+. So there isnt a lot of room for improvements, to be honest.
I guess one way to really save the power and reduce complexity in the home is to put everything on a server and stream it on demand to a very low power STB thats only on when you're watching tv. But that has its own set of problems, not many of them technical...
Rather than focus on the dvr, I think people ought to have a hard look at their sound systems receiver. A lot of people buy those and keep them for 10 years. Many of them suck down a lot more power than a dvr, even when turned off. Or you might find that replacing your old light bulbs with fluorescent or led bulbs to produce a much higher level of savings than powering down your dvr.
You've probably already found that management with degrees, particularly advanced ones, wont hire people who didnt also commit to the same course they did.
You'll soon discover that there isnt much actual learning in a 4 year degree program that someone with hands on experience and a few years in a job working for a good company doesnt already know.
The alleged 'rounding' experience is just to get you to pay extra for the piece of paper that'll serve as the entry ticket to certain jobs at certain companies.
My son is 7 now, and I figure in ten years I'd be better off spending $250k buying him a business he can run, be successful at, and make money. Otherwise its a tremendous waste of cash even if he does decide to follow a career in whatever his degree was focused on. Or if he finds a small business he wants to work for but they're sketchy about hiring him, I can just invest $100k into their business and make him a part owner/partner. Or just pay someone $20k to apprentice him for a year or two.
I started coding when I was a young teenager just like you, never went to college (hell, I barely crawled out of high school), and got a job working for a big computer company when I was 18. Over the next 6-7 years I had a few doors closed on me due to the lack of a degree. Sadly for those folks, I went on to become enormously successful, making hundreds of millions of dollars for the companies I worked for. After that initial 6-7 years, most people stopped caring about the degree, mostly just asking "Oh, where did you go to school?" at the end of the interview after realizing there wasnt anything about it on the resume. At that point, most didnt care. I looked a couple of times at company sponsored higher education opportunities. They'd have pretty much eaten my spare time at a time in my life when I was enjoying it.
I had a nice 25 year career, retired early with plenty of money, and am thoroughly enjoying my life. All it took was hard work, doing a good job, having the right attitude, never giving up, and making the most of every opportunity I had. I also made a habit of taking on jobs or owning technology areas that were old-school, werent sexy, or stuff other people didnt want to do, being successful with those, advertising my own accomplishments (jeez, dont rely on you manager for that), being very focused on doing my own job well, and only working on stuff that I could put a benefit or value on.
Heck, at the end of the day, being able to work office politics is far more valuable than a technical degree. Learning how to play golf might be more useful than a 4 year degree...
Hmm, someone else who thinks you can place an energy source next to any part of the power grid and it'll all work, and it'll be practically free!
I've personally experienced, as have many others, the plunging speeds of my wireless and cable connected internet service. Apparently there IS a constraint issue and to build more WILL cost more money. Do you really think that 80% of people going from broadcast/satellite/cable tv to internet provided streaming video wont cause an issue with wired bandwidth or that many wireless users choosing video delivery to their phones wont cause a limit to be hit by those providers, especially in highly congested areas?
Why would the wireless providers all be putting bandwidth caps and revoking unlimited usage plans if it was easy and cheap to provide additional bandwidth? Because it isnt easy, or cheap. Otherwise, why tick off all of your customers?
I've been calling this one for a while now. Even if you push aside the fact that we're limited in total backbone throughput without large capital investments, people wanting to do more with the internet presents a profit opportunity to the businesses that are slated to lose out on the phenomenon. When people stop using directv and comcast cable television in favor of internet streaming tv and movies, those entities can convert bandwidth over from tv to data, which will help the congestion problem. Only thing is, they're going to charge you $75-100 a month for internet, just like you paid for internet+tv until now.
It is a zero sum game. This stuff costs money and we're taking revenue away from businesses in a position to solve the capacity issue.
I do think its funny that the wired and wireless providers have been advertising people being fully connected and doing everything online, along with streaming video. Yet when that starts to become a reality, they cap it and will no doubt soon offer higher tiered packages with more data at higher costs.
Hmm, I sold personal computers for around 5 years before IBM rolled their first PC out, so I guess all the people that bought them will have to look back in embarrassment now that its been revealed that those really werent either personal or computers. Imsai, Altair, Poly, Xitan, Alpha Micro...all came long before IBM rolled anything out the door.
Plus we thought the IBM PC was lousy. It had a weird keyboard layout and it was slow. Real expensive compared to other alternatives of the day. You could get a much faster cpu with more memory and a larger capacity floppy drive for half the price.
I used to do this sort of thing 30-35 years ago. I remember building some of the first altair machines and hacking some cp/m code with Neil Colvin in his basement. I got together with a couple of guys to wire wrap one of the first (if not THE first) S100 bus graphics boards. We used to cobble up single board computers like this all the time, but they cost thousands of dollars to build.
Good times, good times. Glad its the 'in' thing now, I feel like I know something ahead of the curve.
Hmmm, my android 2.2 phone has excellent speech recognition for searches, messaging and anything else that requires text input. 95% of the time its 100% accurate. The rest of the time I might have to fix one word or change a few around. Takes 2 seconds.
Eh...I dont see any plan. I see a group that meets twice a month for a couple of hours that is trying to develop a plan. The research they're quoting on their site goes by the basis that if there is a big open area with lots of wind or sunshine and the power grid is somewhere near that, that it'll be cheap to implement a solution.
I'm a layman, and even I know that the tail end of the power grid isnt designed to channel gazillions of gigawatts back to the civilized world, and that perfect cost situations never work out that way. See "The Big Dig" for a fine example of how often zeros get added to the end of major projects and how the years to implement tend to multiply.
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I didnt see that in his post. There are plenty of android tablets that dont require 'aftermarket wrenching', they install and run apps just like the ipad does.
What they do allow is a choice of applications markets (there are dozens, including googles and amazons), and usually the ability to add in a microsd card to upgrade storage while apple requires you to upgrade to a new tablet to go from 16 to 32gb.
His comments about it being a device that preserves a user inside the apple ecosystem is spot on. Be interesting to see how the upcoming amazon android tablet works out, if it makes a ploy to keep the user inside the amazon ecosystem or is out-of-the-box flexible.
By the way, you sound British. Do you know why the Brits never became major computer manufacturers? After trying for years they were unable to find a way to make them leak oil.
To be fair, you do have to hack the nook to get all that goodness, although its a very easy hack. At $205 you're also talking about a refurbished nook, not a new one. While there were a few bluebird deals where you could get a new nook for close to $200, they're not the sort of deals you can get most of the time, or even a lot of the time.
So we'd have to compare it with refurb galaxy tabs and refurbed original ipads, and those often come around for $300-400ish.
I keep hearing the Appleoids tell me that the ipad/ipad2 provide the only 'real tablet experience' and all the other esoterica from the title about polish and apps. I've used ipods, ipads and android tablets. For the life of me I cant sort out this 'special experience' from one to the other. The android tabs and ipads run most the exact same apps from the exact same publishers. I have a $100 android tablet from a year ago thats frankly pretty slow these days but I got to learn all about tablets with it. I just bought a $150 android tablet with the same innards as the original ipad, but with a supposedly lesser screen. The screen looks and works just fine to me, and I see very little difference between it and the ipad 2 screens. Plus I'll let my 6 year old play games on these without fear of breakage. I saw a mother hand her ipad 2 to her kid the other day and the kid dropped it, screen down. Smash.
I watch netflix, listen to music, watch ripped movies, play all sorts of games, browse the web, do video chat, make free internet phone calls, etc. Nothing I've tried was slow or made me think of a $600 dual core ipad, or a similarly priced galaxy pad.
Funny but the same strategy has worked for decades with computer hardware, televisions, cars and so forth. You can always spend 3-4x for something than whatever provides the basic function. If you can identify and value the special functions or capabilities that the more expensive one brings to the table, and you need those, buy it.
Of course, I dont drink the Apple kool-aid nor do I want to spend a similar amount on an android tablet. It'll be outdated in a year or two when version 3.8 or 4.0 android or ios v6 comes out and they leave legacy hardware behind. I'll be able to buy another $150 tablet that runs the new os, has mostly the same innards as the new expensive tablets, has a workable screen, maybe is a little thicker or bigger or heavier. But I sure wont be impressing others with my new $600 tablet, my $80,000 car, or my 73" LED 3d television set. Thats important, right?
I did retire when I was 39 though. Mostly by not wasting money.
The places where the shuttles are being placed are extremely high traffic tourist areas (#1 and #2 or #3 in the country) and where Texas wanted to put it wasnt.
...and whichever politician we vote for gets one to use as a suppository?
Step 1: Draft a law that says anyone writing a computer virus or malware that causes significant damage to users computers to be liable for all the damage and spend up to life in prison for their efforts. This crap is no different than walking into 100,000 - 100,000,000 homes and either smashing their computer or taking a couple of hundred bucks out of their wallet.
Step 2: Get all of the worlds nations to agree with the law and enforce it within their borders. Anyone who doesnt feel like it gets no aid from anyone else ever again.
Step 3: Watch most of these morons find something else to do with their spare time.
Step 4: Watch the ones that arent smart enough to do something else spend 45 years making license plates and sending their earnings to the computer users who had to buy a new computer or pay someone to fix theirs.
Despite loading antivirus and antimalware software on every computer in my extended family, about 75% of them annually get malware that cripples and eventually renders the machine useless. It usually takes me 3-5 hours to run scans, remove the malware, and recover their data. At this point I have a backup of everybody's machine so I can just restore them in 15 minutes to a previous working state. What a huge waste of my time and resources.
Why is it that when I post on Slashdot, it removes all of the returns I put in the post to make it more readable?
Seems an undesirable default text mode.
California has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Giving them more revenue in the form of additional sales taxes simply means we'd spend more on stupid stuff. In the last year or so my town paid $400k for a Rodeo Drive sign company to put in new town attractions signs, frequently right next to or in front of perfectly legible signs that said the same thing, which were in fine condition. Just not sexy enough. They built a pedestrian overpass at an intersection that nobody uses, because its about 8 times further to go over that than just push the walk button and walk in the crosswalk. That was over a million. Despite having 33 parks in a town maybe 10 miles by 10 miles, they spent $1.2M on a park because the local residents didnt want to go 1/4 mile to a nearby park that already existed. We spent $400k on a 'roadside beautification' project that involved putting in some shrubs, bark and an irrigation system which is right in front of an open trench street drainage system thats filled with waist high weeds. Really beautiful. We need to shut off the money, not figure out ways to help the drunken sailors spend more. Similarly to how the recent law worked out (amazon drops affiliates, state loses 25,000 jobs and $124M in revenue when they all 'relocate' to Oregon and Washington), if and when they get amazon (and other stores) to start paying sales tax in california, people will simply buy less from them, causing them to burp up jobs and profits. I'm not going to drive to 6 local retail stores looking for a widget that I can find in 10 seconds on Amazon, but if I have to pay 10% more for everything then I might just decide to live without it. If amazons revenues drop, they'll have to either cut costs (there goes the good customer service) or raise prices (there goes using them as an inexpensive online source of goodies. Its the myopic view of the issue thats the problem. Our legislature is out of control and giving them more money isnt the solution. Further, they dont give a rats backside about what damage they incidentally cause to other state businesses or businesses that arent in CA.
In the spirit of actually reading the benchmarks, the gpu performance was typically closer to 1.5-1.75x, occasionally 2-3x, and didnt appear to ever approach 4x. On the other hand, the sandybridge part transcoded video almost 3x faster than the llano part.
Yes its true. I'm not cute, I'm not fuzzy, and believe it or not I'm not a bunny either. Thats the joke.
There are two problems with the whole strategy. One is that most (if not all) dvr's record live tv all the time and powering it off would disable that very helpful feature. I dont know how many times I turn the tv on and see a show on halfway through and it looks good so I hit record, or have the news on and I just missed something that sounded interesting. Secondly, spinning drives up and down increases wear and tear on the drive and shortens drive life. If it was something you'd spin up and down once or twice a day, probably no biggie. But if its spinning up and down 10 times a day to record or play a show, then I think you'd find your hard drive dropping dead a lot sooner, taking all your shows with it. Throw in all the other stuff dvr's are doing like remote scheduling, regular guide data updates (directv does this in real time, 24x7), etc...and the sleep or drive spin down stuff just doesnt work without major architectural changes. What they COULD do is push the dvr manufacturers to go to lower power draw components and design lower power 'next gen' dvr parts. But my current dvr only uses about 30-40 watts, while my older tivo used 100+. So there isnt a lot of room for improvements, to be honest. I guess one way to really save the power and reduce complexity in the home is to put everything on a server and stream it on demand to a very low power STB thats only on when you're watching tv. But that has its own set of problems, not many of them technical... Rather than focus on the dvr, I think people ought to have a hard look at their sound systems receiver. A lot of people buy those and keep them for 10 years. Many of them suck down a lot more power than a dvr, even when turned off. Or you might find that replacing your old light bulbs with fluorescent or led bulbs to produce a much higher level of savings than powering down your dvr.
You've probably already found that management with degrees, particularly advanced ones, wont hire people who didnt also commit to the same course they did. You'll soon discover that there isnt much actual learning in a 4 year degree program that someone with hands on experience and a few years in a job working for a good company doesnt already know. The alleged 'rounding' experience is just to get you to pay extra for the piece of paper that'll serve as the entry ticket to certain jobs at certain companies. My son is 7 now, and I figure in ten years I'd be better off spending $250k buying him a business he can run, be successful at, and make money. Otherwise its a tremendous waste of cash even if he does decide to follow a career in whatever his degree was focused on. Or if he finds a small business he wants to work for but they're sketchy about hiring him, I can just invest $100k into their business and make him a part owner/partner. Or just pay someone $20k to apprentice him for a year or two. I started coding when I was a young teenager just like you, never went to college (hell, I barely crawled out of high school), and got a job working for a big computer company when I was 18. Over the next 6-7 years I had a few doors closed on me due to the lack of a degree. Sadly for those folks, I went on to become enormously successful, making hundreds of millions of dollars for the companies I worked for. After that initial 6-7 years, most people stopped caring about the degree, mostly just asking "Oh, where did you go to school?" at the end of the interview after realizing there wasnt anything about it on the resume. At that point, most didnt care. I looked a couple of times at company sponsored higher education opportunities. They'd have pretty much eaten my spare time at a time in my life when I was enjoying it. I had a nice 25 year career, retired early with plenty of money, and am thoroughly enjoying my life. All it took was hard work, doing a good job, having the right attitude, never giving up, and making the most of every opportunity I had. I also made a habit of taking on jobs or owning technology areas that were old-school, werent sexy, or stuff other people didnt want to do, being successful with those, advertising my own accomplishments (jeez, dont rely on you manager for that), being very focused on doing my own job well, and only working on stuff that I could put a benefit or value on. Heck, at the end of the day, being able to work office politics is far more valuable than a technical degree. Learning how to play golf might be more useful than a 4 year degree...
Hmm, someone else who thinks you can place an energy source next to any part of the power grid and it'll all work, and it'll be practically free! I've personally experienced, as have many others, the plunging speeds of my wireless and cable connected internet service. Apparently there IS a constraint issue and to build more WILL cost more money. Do you really think that 80% of people going from broadcast/satellite/cable tv to internet provided streaming video wont cause an issue with wired bandwidth or that many wireless users choosing video delivery to their phones wont cause a limit to be hit by those providers, especially in highly congested areas? Why would the wireless providers all be putting bandwidth caps and revoking unlimited usage plans if it was easy and cheap to provide additional bandwidth? Because it isnt easy, or cheap. Otherwise, why tick off all of your customers?
I've been calling this one for a while now. Even if you push aside the fact that we're limited in total backbone throughput without large capital investments, people wanting to do more with the internet presents a profit opportunity to the businesses that are slated to lose out on the phenomenon. When people stop using directv and comcast cable television in favor of internet streaming tv and movies, those entities can convert bandwidth over from tv to data, which will help the congestion problem. Only thing is, they're going to charge you $75-100 a month for internet, just like you paid for internet+tv until now. It is a zero sum game. This stuff costs money and we're taking revenue away from businesses in a position to solve the capacity issue. I do think its funny that the wired and wireless providers have been advertising people being fully connected and doing everything online, along with streaming video. Yet when that starts to become a reality, they cap it and will no doubt soon offer higher tiered packages with more data at higher costs.
Hmm, I sold personal computers for around 5 years before IBM rolled their first PC out, so I guess all the people that bought them will have to look back in embarrassment now that its been revealed that those really werent either personal or computers. Imsai, Altair, Poly, Xitan, Alpha Micro...all came long before IBM rolled anything out the door. Plus we thought the IBM PC was lousy. It had a weird keyboard layout and it was slow. Real expensive compared to other alternatives of the day. You could get a much faster cpu with more memory and a larger capacity floppy drive for half the price.
I used to do this sort of thing 30-35 years ago. I remember building some of the first altair machines and hacking some cp/m code with Neil Colvin in his basement. I got together with a couple of guys to wire wrap one of the first (if not THE first) S100 bus graphics boards. We used to cobble up single board computers like this all the time, but they cost thousands of dollars to build. Good times, good times. Glad its the 'in' thing now, I feel like I know something ahead of the curve.
...one of the most vulnerable pieces of software kicking around these days? Does this 'safari mode' have access to the disk?
Hmmm, my android 2.2 phone has excellent speech recognition for searches, messaging and anything else that requires text input. 95% of the time its 100% accurate. The rest of the time I might have to fix one word or change a few around. Takes 2 seconds.
Eh...I dont see any plan. I see a group that meets twice a month for a couple of hours that is trying to develop a plan. The research they're quoting on their site goes by the basis that if there is a big open area with lots of wind or sunshine and the power grid is somewhere near that, that it'll be cheap to implement a solution. I'm a layman, and even I know that the tail end of the power grid isnt designed to channel gazillions of gigawatts back to the civilized world, and that perfect cost situations never work out that way. See "The Big Dig" for a fine example of how often zeros get added to the end of major projects and how the years to implement tend to multiply.