The idea is to make the consumer portion "green" and non-emissive, because then over time the underlying power generation can be made less polluting or swapped out for entirely new methods of generating power without requiring any "upgrades" or action by the consumer. It is definitely easier to regulate, and probably less expensive and more efficient to implement, emissions control at a handful of large power stations than millions of individual car engines.
Analog controls use no power at all (unless they have an indicator LED, which would be nearly trivial power consumption). The only case I can think of where an analog control would consume power would be a potentiometer that gets warm when set at high resistance.
Do they have an equation, given a specific kWh cost (which varies by region), that shows how much it costs to charge the various sized battery packs? The charging process isn't 100% efficient so there is some amount of loss. That is really the bottom line number people want to know - how much does it cost per mile in electricity to operate.
Right now with gas prices dropping to below $3 a gallon in my area, a Prius operating at 50 MPG costs 6 cents a mile in fuel. How does the Tesla compare?
There wasn't anything innovative about the Windows CE / Pocket PC hardware even after generation after generation of devices. Devices would get a slightly faster CPU, or slightly better LCD panels, and that was it. It is my personal opinion that the capacitive method of touchscreen is what truly allowed the iPhone and following devices to succeed. The resistive touchscreen was a hardware limitation that could only support a single touch, did not register a touch when the screen was physically touched (and that makes all the difference in the world, see below), and suffered from accuracy / calibration issues. Microsoft could not create a UI that did not revolve around the stylus until those hardware limitations were overcome, and none of the OEMs had any motivation to invent new hardware that wouldn't even be utilized or accommodated by the OS.
For example, let's say that Dell invented capacitive touch and wanted to put it in the Dell Axim line of Pocket PCs. So they contact Microsoft and told them of this amazing new touch capability. Do you think Microsoft would then completely throw out their stylus based GUI and embrace the new technology, leaving HP, Casio, Asus and other Pocket PC manufactures totally in the dark? Both Microsoft and the OEMs were crippled in their own ways by relying on the other to make advances. It becomes a "chicken or the egg" first kind of problem.
Now about touch screens. The problem with using fingers on resistive touchscreens is that you can physically touch the screen, but not press hard enough for it to register. So there was no correlation between sensory reception and interacting with the device. With capacitive touch it can be tuned such that the moment you physically contact the screen (and thus "feel" you touched the screen) a touch will register. That subtlety makes all the difference in the world. Anyone who spent much time using resistive touch, and trying to use it without a stylus (playing games, using 3rd party "touch based" keyboards etc) knows what I'm talking about. My thumbs would be very sore after a gaming session from pushing the screen extra hard to make sure it registered my presses.
Further, pixel perfect positioning is less important with higher DPI. On a low res device, like 240x320, it made a big difference because you could see individual pixels so easily. Nowadays if things are fudged by a pixel or few then it's not visually apparent.
This reminds me of when everything was so lo-res it took a great deal of talent to create a 16x16 icon with a 16 color palette to portray some meaning. Every single pixel mattered, and you couldn't just take a large image and scale it down - you had to manipulate pixels individually, sometimes in non-obvious ways, to get the intended visual result. Now with 128x128 and higher resolution icons you can create them vector and just render them to whatever resolution is needed, or scale a massive image down to size, and it looks perfectly fine.
Cheap mobile devices like these (including cheap portable DVD players) save money by skimping on batteries and going with NiMH instead of Lithium Ion. I would be surprised if this netbook could run for two hours off of its batteries.
I would think lots of honeypots, dead ends, and misinformation would be effective. It would be difficult for the hacker to know when they have accessed legitimate machines or information. That's one of the problems with typical security is that it typically provides confirmation when an access attempt has failed. If instead of indicating failed access, you instead direct them to bogus data, it would make the hacker's life rather miserable.
I think this silliness needs to end. We don't refer to any other occupation in the language of the worker's native tongue. What is the origin of this when it comes to spacefarers? Probably the cold war, and attempting to portray Soviet cosmonauts as inferior by not even referring to them by the same word we use to describe our astronauts. Regardless, it's lame, and the more countries that send people in to space, the stupider this gets.
Someone is going to come across your comment a few years down the road, and the context of your joke will be completely lost. Dear future reader: sorry, but I'm not going to fill you in on this joke either. We'll just have to see how good your google skills are (is google still around?).
Does this provide any leverage to help insure net neutrality by taking some power away from the core backbones, or is it moot since ISPs still reign supreme by providing that last mile connectivity?
Good point. Gas furnaces are already over 98% efficient. That is so efficient that the exhaust gas is cool enough to simply vent via a PVC pipe, and a drain is required because water condenses out of the exhaust gases.
Shouldn't they be able to throw more powerful, dual-core CPUs into the Pi pretty trivially? It would mainly be a matter of whether there is enough demand at a higher price point. I would think a dual core, 1 GHz processor would make a tremendous difference spec-wise.
I think one of the primary hurdles is that there are mobile-optimized apps, and then there are power-hungry desktop apps. The pi is technically a desktop machine from the software standpoint, but it really needs mobile apps due to its slow ARM CPU. For example, I'm sure Opera Mobile would perform fine on that hardware, but how do you get it to run without Android, Windows Mobile or iOS?
Do not buy a consumer laptop, make sure you shop around in the Business/Small Business areas of leading manufacturers (HP, Lenovo, Dell).
That's funny, because in a recent Slashdot discussion about laptops the exact opposite was recommended - business grade laptops are typically priced higher for essentially the same hardware you get in the "consumer" grade.
Tell me, what can you do with a clean conscience? Can you eat meat you buy from the store? Or even produce for that matter? Can you flip on the light switch in your home and consume electricity? Start your car? Wax philosophical all you want, but life is inherently unfair, whether within a species, or amongst species. Sure, many things can be improved, but you'll be afraid to take a step lest you kill an ant if you delve too deep here.
The method in which a user ends up with a browser - by default or by choice, etc - is a whole different topic. What is important for web developers are accurate statistics. I agree with MS on this one, because it sounds like the stats were quite skewed by page preloading, etc. How people ended up with IE doesn't change who is actually using what. I'm trying to figure out why Firefox and Chrome usage is so low on iPad devices - it's quite an anomaly - but again, that's a whole different topic.
(to save those who don't grasp subtle sarcastic humor, my comment about iPad browsers is totally tongue-in-cheek)
They certainly increase evaporation, and probably absorption of water back into the ground. Whether or not that amount of water is negligible or not is the question. Simply put, less water makes it to the ocean after a river is dammed than before.
Ahhh, this will make parenting a little easier. Kid 1: "It's my turn!!" Kid 2: "I need to check my FB!" Kid 1: "You used the tablet all day yesterday!" Kid 2: "DID NOT!" Me: "Here, give me that blasted thing." Whips out tin snips. "Half for you, and half for you."
I doubt the pilots did knew the terrain that well. They were Russian pilots demoing a jet in a foreign country, so it would not have been an area they fly over regularly. They were touring.
I believe they were trying to show off, and here's why I think that. One of the news sites had a video (looked like Google Earth) showing where the plane took off, and where it crashed. The mountain it crashed into is this really isolated and abrupt thing sticking way up out of lower elevation terrain. It was very clear from that imagery that the plane took off and made a bee line for those scenic mountains for impressive views for those on board. I think the pilot tried to do a close fly by and did not realize just how steep that mountain was (it is practically vertical where the plane impacted).
Again, if you look at the topography, it is clear that if the plane had some sort of engine trouble, especially up at 10,000 feet, there was much lower elevation land they could have easily headed toward instead of happening to drop on that isolated mountain.
Remember, this was flying around for the sake of showing off a plane - a sightseeing tour that they wanted those on board to have a memorable impression of. Thus they would have headed towards something like that mountain to give the passengers something more interesting to look at than boring cloud tops or flat land.
Did this actually happen, or is it a modern urban legend that employers were requiring passwords? And if it really happened, aren't there existing privacy laws in place that could have been used to sue these businesses out of existence?
Um, it's called voting. It's ridiculous what absurdly obvious and trivial things can be patented. Well I'll one up them and patent the same thing, but for regulating the temperature of the room.
It takes effort. Period. Why do you have photographs back from ww2? Because family expended the effort it took to keep them safe and sound all these years. That meant storing them properly, keeping them out of the hands of unsupervised kids, looking after them whenever family moved to a new home, etc. You simply have to do the same thing with your data. That means storing data redundantly on more than one format of physical storage. I would go with USB flash, micro sd and DVD rom all three. Then a decade down the road you may have to convert them over to new media of the day. No big deal. Regardless it will take effort, and if the data is important to you, then you'll expend that effort.
I have a comment about physical media. Why did the 3.5" floppy replace the 5 1/4"? Smaller form factor and greater data density. Why was PC Card (PCMCIA) flash / hdd replaced by Compact flash, which was replaced by SD, which is being replaced by Micro SD? Smaller form factor and greater data density. Well guess what. Micro SD is the pinnacle of small form factor. You cannot make it any smaller or else the average human simply cannot physically work with the media. In fact, there are millions of people that don't have good enough eyesight or motor control to work with Micro SD card sized media. My point in all this is all that is left to improve is data density and transfer rate. It is my opinion that micro sd is going to be around for a very, very long time. Barring some sort of proprietary format war (like Apple finally including removable storage in iOS hardware, but going with a new proprietary media) I don't see much improvement over the sd form factor, and so I think it's going to be with us for quite a while.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is to make the consumer portion "green" and non-emissive, because then over time the underlying power generation can be made less polluting or swapped out for entirely new methods of generating power without requiring any "upgrades" or action by the consumer. It is definitely easier to regulate, and probably less expensive and more efficient to implement, emissions control at a handful of large power stations than millions of individual car engines.
Analog controls use no power at all (unless they have an indicator LED, which would be nearly trivial power consumption). The only case I can think of where an analog control would consume power would be a potentiometer that gets warm when set at high resistance.
Do they have an equation, given a specific kWh cost (which varies by region), that shows how much it costs to charge the various sized battery packs? The charging process isn't 100% efficient so there is some amount of loss. That is really the bottom line number people want to know - how much does it cost per mile in electricity to operate.
Right now with gas prices dropping to below $3 a gallon in my area, a Prius operating at 50 MPG costs 6 cents a mile in fuel. How does the Tesla compare?
There wasn't anything innovative about the Windows CE / Pocket PC hardware even after generation after generation of devices. Devices would get a slightly faster CPU, or slightly better LCD panels, and that was it. It is my personal opinion that the capacitive method of touchscreen is what truly allowed the iPhone and following devices to succeed. The resistive touchscreen was a hardware limitation that could only support a single touch, did not register a touch when the screen was physically touched (and that makes all the difference in the world, see below), and suffered from accuracy / calibration issues. Microsoft could not create a UI that did not revolve around the stylus until those hardware limitations were overcome, and none of the OEMs had any motivation to invent new hardware that wouldn't even be utilized or accommodated by the OS.
For example, let's say that Dell invented capacitive touch and wanted to put it in the Dell Axim line of Pocket PCs. So they contact Microsoft and told them of this amazing new touch capability. Do you think Microsoft would then completely throw out their stylus based GUI and embrace the new technology, leaving HP, Casio, Asus and other Pocket PC manufactures totally in the dark? Both Microsoft and the OEMs were crippled in their own ways by relying on the other to make advances. It becomes a "chicken or the egg" first kind of problem.
Now about touch screens. The problem with using fingers on resistive touchscreens is that you can physically touch the screen, but not press hard enough for it to register. So there was no correlation between sensory reception and interacting with the device. With capacitive touch it can be tuned such that the moment you physically contact the screen (and thus "feel" you touched the screen) a touch will register. That subtlety makes all the difference in the world. Anyone who spent much time using resistive touch, and trying to use it without a stylus (playing games, using 3rd party "touch based" keyboards etc) knows what I'm talking about. My thumbs would be very sore after a gaming session from pushing the screen extra hard to make sure it registered my presses.
Further, pixel perfect positioning is less important with higher DPI. On a low res device, like 240x320, it made a big difference because you could see individual pixels so easily. Nowadays if things are fudged by a pixel or few then it's not visually apparent.
This reminds me of when everything was so lo-res it took a great deal of talent to create a 16x16 icon with a 16 color palette to portray some meaning. Every single pixel mattered, and you couldn't just take a large image and scale it down - you had to manipulate pixels individually, sometimes in non-obvious ways, to get the intended visual result. Now with 128x128 and higher resolution icons you can create them vector and just render them to whatever resolution is needed, or scale a massive image down to size, and it looks perfectly fine.
Cheap mobile devices like these (including cheap portable DVD players) save money by skimping on batteries and going with NiMH instead of Lithium Ion. I would be surprised if this netbook could run for two hours off of its batteries.
I would think lots of honeypots, dead ends, and misinformation would be effective. It would be difficult for the hacker to know when they have accessed legitimate machines or information. That's one of the problems with typical security is that it typically provides confirmation when an access attempt has failed. If instead of indicating failed access, you instead direct them to bogus data, it would make the hacker's life rather miserable.
I think this silliness needs to end. We don't refer to any other occupation in the language of the worker's native tongue. What is the origin of this when it comes to spacefarers? Probably the cold war, and attempting to portray Soviet cosmonauts as inferior by not even referring to them by the same word we use to describe our astronauts. Regardless, it's lame, and the more countries that send people in to space, the stupider this gets.
Someone is going to come across your comment a few years down the road, and the context of your joke will be completely lost. Dear future reader: sorry, but I'm not going to fill you in on this joke either. We'll just have to see how good your google skills are (is google still around?).
Does this provide any leverage to help insure net neutrality by taking some power away from the core backbones, or is it moot since ISPs still reign supreme by providing that last mile connectivity?
Good point. Gas furnaces are already over 98% efficient. That is so efficient that the exhaust gas is cool enough to simply vent via a PVC pipe, and a drain is required because water condenses out of the exhaust gases.
Shouldn't they be able to throw more powerful, dual-core CPUs into the Pi pretty trivially? It would mainly be a matter of whether there is enough demand at a higher price point. I would think a dual core, 1 GHz processor would make a tremendous difference spec-wise.
I think one of the primary hurdles is that there are mobile-optimized apps, and then there are power-hungry desktop apps. The pi is technically a desktop machine from the software standpoint, but it really needs mobile apps due to its slow ARM CPU. For example, I'm sure Opera Mobile would perform fine on that hardware, but how do you get it to run without Android, Windows Mobile or iOS?
I'm actually referencing a slashdot comment from another story. I've gone mad. Oh well.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2861513&cid=40052379
Do not buy a consumer laptop, make sure you shop around in the Business/Small Business areas of leading manufacturers (HP, Lenovo, Dell).
That's funny, because in a recent Slashdot discussion about laptops the exact opposite was recommended - business grade laptops are typically priced higher for essentially the same hardware you get in the "consumer" grade.
Tell me, what can you do with a clean conscience? Can you eat meat you buy from the store? Or even produce for that matter? Can you flip on the light switch in your home and consume electricity? Start your car? Wax philosophical all you want, but life is inherently unfair, whether within a species, or amongst species. Sure, many things can be improved, but you'll be afraid to take a step lest you kill an ant if you delve too deep here.
Googling for "recallroque log-in" is just pure genius. Why hack if google will just point you straight to the credentials you need!
That's nothing. Wait until you see what happens when the clock rolls around on midnight on Dec 31st, 1999.
The method in which a user ends up with a browser - by default or by choice, etc - is a whole different topic. What is important for web developers are accurate statistics. I agree with MS on this one, because it sounds like the stats were quite skewed by page preloading, etc. How people ended up with IE doesn't change who is actually using what. I'm trying to figure out why Firefox and Chrome usage is so low on iPad devices - it's quite an anomaly - but again, that's a whole different topic.
(to save those who don't grasp subtle sarcastic humor, my comment about iPad browsers is totally tongue-in-cheek)
They certainly increase evaporation, and probably absorption of water back into the ground. Whether or not that amount of water is negligible or not is the question. Simply put, less water makes it to the ocean after a river is dammed than before.
Ahhh, this will make parenting a little easier.
Kid 1: "It's my turn!!"
Kid 2: "I need to check my FB!"
Kid 1: "You used the tablet all day yesterday!"
Kid 2: "DID NOT!"
Me: "Here, give me that blasted thing."
Whips out tin snips.
"Half for you, and half for you."
Cat pee and pocket change. I can handle that.
I doubt the pilots did knew the terrain that well. They were Russian pilots demoing a jet in a foreign country, so it would not have been an area they fly over regularly. They were touring.
I believe they were trying to show off, and here's why I think that. One of the news sites had a video (looked like Google Earth) showing where the plane took off, and where it crashed. The mountain it crashed into is this really isolated and abrupt thing sticking way up out of lower elevation terrain. It was very clear from that imagery that the plane took off and made a bee line for those scenic mountains for impressive views for those on board. I think the pilot tried to do a close fly by and did not realize just how steep that mountain was (it is practically vertical where the plane impacted).
Again, if you look at the topography, it is clear that if the plane had some sort of engine trouble, especially up at 10,000 feet, there was much lower elevation land they could have easily headed toward instead of happening to drop on that isolated mountain.
Remember, this was flying around for the sake of showing off a plane - a sightseeing tour that they wanted those on board to have a memorable impression of. Thus they would have headed towards something like that mountain to give the passengers something more interesting to look at than boring cloud tops or flat land.
Did this actually happen, or is it a modern urban legend that employers were requiring passwords? And if it really happened, aren't there existing privacy laws in place that could have been used to sue these businesses out of existence?
Um, it's called voting. It's ridiculous what absurdly obvious and trivial things can be patented. Well I'll one up them and patent the same thing, but for regulating the temperature of the room.
It takes effort. Period. Why do you have photographs back from ww2? Because family expended the effort it took to keep them safe and sound all these years. That meant storing them properly, keeping them out of the hands of unsupervised kids, looking after them whenever family moved to a new home, etc. You simply have to do the same thing with your data. That means storing data redundantly on more than one format of physical storage. I would go with USB flash, micro sd and DVD rom all three. Then a decade down the road you may have to convert them over to new media of the day. No big deal. Regardless it will take effort, and if the data is important to you, then you'll expend that effort.
I have a comment about physical media. Why did the 3.5" floppy replace the 5 1/4"? Smaller form factor and greater data density. Why was PC Card (PCMCIA) flash / hdd replaced by Compact flash, which was replaced by SD, which is being replaced by Micro SD? Smaller form factor and greater data density. Well guess what. Micro SD is the pinnacle of small form factor. You cannot make it any smaller or else the average human simply cannot physically work with the media. In fact, there are millions of people that don't have good enough eyesight or motor control to work with Micro SD card sized media. My point in all this is all that is left to improve is data density and transfer rate. It is my opinion that micro sd is going to be around for a very, very long time. Barring some sort of proprietary format war (like Apple finally including removable storage in iOS hardware, but going with a new proprietary media) I don't see much improvement over the sd form factor, and so I think it's going to be with us for quite a while.