I have seen this on multiple servers, usually when a person doesn't disconnect nicely. I had one clueless user that would do this frequently with one server I administered and at another company where we had to use VNC I would often find the server load to be quite high with one or more VNC sessions pegging the CPU. It's possible it may have been due to users letting the screen saver run or something but I think the users usually had disconnected.
I was just using NX last night to connect to my Linux work machine from home. I've used VNC but my experience is that NX is much faster over my internet connection (20/8) than VNC was over a LAN, and this is running NX on Windows in a VM on my Linux box (because I've had some issues with the VPN in Linux).
NX is a lot more intelligent than VNC in that it caches a lot of stuff on the client side and is X aware. I.e. it keeps track of X bitmaps and will use jpeg compression on them when sending them across, renders fonts locally, etc. It is *MUCH* more responsive than running an X app remotely over ssh.
I've found NX to be quite usable even when the available bandwidth is fairly low whereas VNC would be useless. It actually seemed faster to run my web browser over NX rather than running it locally.
Sometimes I wish it could behave more like running a remote X application without having to bring up the entire desktop, but other than I'm a convert.
I've also seen a lot of VNC servers get borked where a VNC session suddenly starts gobbling up 100% of the CPU. I don't know if that's been fixed yet, but it was a major problem when I used it.
The same could be said of the government requiring seat belts or anti-lock brakes. Driving is not a right but a privilege. Usually when the government mandates things, it's only after they have already been available for cars for several years. Look at anti-lock brakes, air bags, tire pressure sensors, etc.
It's also not like the cameras cost much. The last I checked, a good cell phone camera cost $10 for the module, and one for backup can be much lower resolution and doesn't need autofocus, just a cheap wide-angle lens. Similarly, LCDs are also quite cheap. Mass produced, it probably cost the car manufacturer less than $20. If they sell it as an option, they often charge $200 or more.
I have a rear-view backup camera in my car and I love it. It's not always a substitute for turning your head back and looking since it's difficult to judge distance since it's a very wide angle camera. It's good for seeing pedestrians and is great for parallel parking though since I see my own bumper. I also find it useful since as I get older it gets harder to turn my head back when backing up. Since it's so wide angle it also lets me see if there's any oncoming traffic I need to worry about as well.
I recently shipped a couple of packages when I traveled American Airlines and all of my TSA locks were totally bent or downright broken even though the TSA never opened anything. Then again, TSA locks are utter crap. Fortunately the contents were not really fragile and came through intact.
But USB is still quite useful for connecting things like SD readers (or better yet, have a SD reader slot) and thumb drives for data transfer. Not everything can easily be done over wireless.
By looking at my stock report in the last 12 months Amazon's revenue was 30.776 billion. A bit more than your $15 billion number. They made $14.835 billion back in 2007 so you're a bit out of datef with your numbers. My numbers are Q4 2009 through Q3 2010 from Standard & Poor's report.
When my father was in the US Navy in the 1963 the aircraft carrier he was on, the USS Ranger, had a drag-race with the USS Kitty Hawk. It made the cover of hot rod magazine. The USS Ranger won. I'd call this flooring it.
Apparently the captain asked the admiral if it was OK. He said no so the captain told him to go back to sleep and did it anyway.
A heat pump is vastly more efficient and obtains well over 100% efficiency due to the fact that it is pumping heat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency. A heat pump is the equivalent of 300-400% efficient compared to a strictly resistive load.
This sounds like a previous employer of mine. They have a couple hundred employees at most and have an entire class B. They could easily NAT their entire network since they use very few public IP addresses for services and use public IP addresses internally behind a firewall. I think they also have one or two class Cs as well only because they've been around for so long.
Lack of greater than 24 bit color is a deal killer for me. In my photo workflow, the raw images are 36 or 42 bit color and I prefer that my edits preserve as much detail as possible. There's a lot of shadow and highlight detail that is lost as soon as you drop to 24 bit color. I've also been very frustrated every time I try the raw support in GIMP. I use Bibble for workflow processing and there's no comparison between GIMP and Bibble (Linux version). For workflow, the UI of GIMP is useless.
My experience with Comcast VOIP has been I cannot tell the difference except that, if anything, the sound is clearer than POTS. I don't notice any significant latency. It is difficult to beat POTS for latency, though. For voice they typically send a burst of compressed voice data every 10 or 20ms. POTS typically uses a dedicated very lot latency network which will have a lower latency than packet switched networks.
I actually went to a university (University of California Santa Cruz) which had a pass/fail policy along with written evaluations. Grades were optional at the time. I never bothered with grades and the written evaluations were usually a lot more detailed. They could be converted to grades though without too much difficulty if you knew how to read them.
I own a Motorola Droid and I tried to replicate the problem the iPhone 4 is experiencing. The antenna is located in the base and at most I could get a 2-3db signal loss by covering the base with my hand, and I had to really work at it to get 3db. A 3db drop is roughly 1/2 the signal strength. A 20db loss (which Consumer Reports shows the iPhone 4 suffers from), is 1/100 the signal strength. To try and say that other phones suffer from the same problem is a cop-out. I also tend to hold phones such that it would kill the signal of an iPhone 4. I imagine it also is affected by how much ones hand conducts, i.e. damp or sweaty. I'm not an antenna expert, but even I realize how stupid it is to make an antenna like Apple's. Touching the antenna will change its impedance and change the wavelength of the antenna significantly. No software can work around that.
According to the video on Consumer Report's website touching the gap on the lower left side reduces the signal strength by around 20db. That's quite a big loss, the resulting signal strength being about 1/100 of the starting signal strength.. When I grip the base of my Motorola Droid phone around the base (where the antenna is located internally), I can only get about a 2-3db drop in signal strength.
This huge loss does not surprise me, since touching the gap is essentially changing the characteristics of the antenna significantly. I can only wonder whose bright idea it was to use this design or how they failed to catch this during their testing phase? It doesn't take rocket science to fix the problem either, I suspect just a clear insulating coating over the metal band would do wonders.
One of the problems is that the US and Britain do not have as strong requirements as other countries for deep water drilling. For example, several other countries require an acoustically activated remote shut-off valve.
Halliburton is under investigation for problems cementing near Australia and they had just done this to this rig. About half of the blowouts that have occurred in the gulf were due to cementing problems. There's also concern that curing cement raised the temperature of methane hydrates causing it to become unstable.
This reminds me when last year I was driving on the freeway near Richmond in the SF Bay Area and what looked like a thick fog was actually smoke belching out of one of the refineries. I regularly hear of alerts where people are told to stay indoors due to a mishap at one of the numerous refineries in the area.
While we continue to need oil for transportation the best thing we can do is to work harder to reduce our dependency on oil, both with more efficient vehicles and with better transportation planning to help reduce our dependency on cars. Down the road I think electric vehicles will make a lot of sense in urban areas as they come down in price and improve battery technology but I don't think we're quite there yet.
At least for me I think I'll stick with my netbook as well. I tend to use the USB ports and built-in SDHC slot on it quite a bit for things like copying photos off of my camera, burning DVDs, etc. I also tend to make heavy use of multitasking. It's nice when I can just plug a 500GB drive into one port and my camera into the other and copy several GB worth of photos off.
Add to this that the netbook is significantly cheaper than the iPad.
There is nothing wrong with my system. It's a 3.4GHz quad core I7 with 12GB of RAM running 64-bit Linux. The problem is that much of Firefox is single threaded and when I have a lot of tabs open some have active Javascript which will slow down Firefox to a crawl. This is especially apparent on my Atom-based netbook. Chrome, on the other hand, does not seem to suffer nearly as much. Also, by using separate processes for different tabs, Chrome is much better about reclaiming memory. It's easy to see Firefox consuming all of one thread of the CPU when it gets slow. If I can find the tab that's causing it, it will settle down and be useable again. By using separate processes for different tabs, Chrome does not suffer from this. Also, Chrome includes tools to show CPU and memory usage by tab.
I love Chrome because it's so fast and doesn't have all the bloat that's crept into Firefox. It's more stable than Firefox and I like the single search bar. Granted, I still think it could use improvement in a number of areas, but Firefox also has a lot of really annoying quirks to it.
On my netbook I will only use Chrome. It's far more efficient with the limited screen real estate than Firefox, plus with the slower processor the difference is night and day.
Something is really wrong if Chrome is so slow on your setup. For me, it's much much faster than Firefox, especially when I have a lot of tabs open.
The difference is even more apparent on my I7 desktop. Firefox seems to be single threaded whereas Chrome will make use of all of the cores and threads.
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I have seen this on multiple servers, usually when a person doesn't disconnect nicely. I had one clueless user that would do this frequently with one server I administered and at another company where we had to use VNC I would often find the server load to be quite high with one or more VNC sessions pegging the CPU. It's possible it may have been due to users letting the screen saver run or something but I think the users usually had disconnected.
This seems the obvious solution to me. If their previous releases were under GPL, there's nothing stopping anyone from releasing a fork.
I was just using NX last night to connect to my Linux work machine from home. I've used VNC but my experience is that NX is much faster over my internet connection (20/8) than VNC was over a LAN, and this is running NX on Windows in a VM on my Linux box (because I've had some issues with the VPN in Linux).
NX is a lot more intelligent than VNC in that it caches a lot of stuff on the client side and is X aware. I.e. it keeps track of X bitmaps and will use jpeg compression on them when sending them across, renders fonts locally, etc. It is *MUCH* more responsive than running an X app remotely over ssh.
I've found NX to be quite usable even when the available bandwidth is fairly low whereas VNC would be useless. It actually seemed faster to run my web browser over NX rather than running it locally.
Sometimes I wish it could behave more like running a remote X application without having to bring up the entire desktop, but other than I'm a convert.
I've also seen a lot of VNC servers get borked where a VNC session suddenly starts gobbling up 100% of the CPU. I don't know if that's been fixed yet, but it was a major problem when I used it.
I use it when I want to do something quick. It's far more lightweight than Open Office/Libre Office.
The same could be said of the government requiring seat belts or anti-lock brakes. Driving is not a right but a privilege. Usually when the government mandates things, it's only after they have already been available for cars for several years. Look at anti-lock brakes, air bags, tire pressure sensors, etc.
It's also not like the cameras cost much. The last I checked, a good cell phone camera cost $10 for the module, and one for backup can be much lower resolution and doesn't need autofocus, just a cheap wide-angle lens. Similarly, LCDs are also quite cheap. Mass produced, it probably cost the car manufacturer less than $20. If they sell it as an option, they often charge $200 or more.
I have a rear-view backup camera in my car and I love it. It's not always a substitute for turning your head back and looking since it's difficult to judge distance since it's a very wide angle camera. It's good for seeing pedestrians and is great for parallel parking though since I see my own bumper. I also find it useful since as I get older it gets harder to turn my head back when backing up. Since it's so wide angle it also lets me see if there's any oncoming traffic I need to worry about as well.
I recently shipped a couple of packages when I traveled American Airlines and all of my TSA locks were totally bent or downright broken even though the TSA never opened anything. Then again, TSA locks are utter crap. Fortunately the contents were not really fragile and came through intact.
But USB is still quite useful for connecting things like SD readers (or better yet, have a SD reader slot) and thumb drives for data transfer. Not everything can easily be done over wireless.
By looking at my stock report in the last 12 months Amazon's revenue was 30.776 billion. A bit more than your $15 billion number. They made $14.835 billion back in 2007 so you're a bit out of datef with your numbers. My numbers are Q4 2009 through Q3 2010 from Standard & Poor's report.
When my father was in the US Navy in the 1963 the aircraft carrier he was on, the USS Ranger, had a drag-race with the USS Kitty Hawk. It made the cover of hot rod magazine. The USS Ranger won. I'd call this flooring it.
Apparently the captain asked the admiral if it was OK. He said no so the captain told him to go back to sleep and did it anyway.
A heat pump is vastly more efficient and obtains well over 100% efficiency due to the fact that it is pumping heat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency. A heat pump is the equivalent of 300-400% efficient compared to a strictly resistive load.
This sounds like a previous employer of mine. They have a couple hundred employees at most and have an entire class B. They could easily NAT their entire network since they use very few public IP addresses for services and use public IP addresses internally behind a firewall. I think they also have one or two class Cs as well only because they've been around for so long.
Lack of greater than 24 bit color is a deal killer for me. In my photo workflow, the raw images are 36 or 42 bit color and I prefer that my edits preserve as much detail as possible. There's a lot of shadow and highlight detail that is lost as soon as you drop to 24 bit color. I've also been very frustrated every time I try the raw support in GIMP. I use Bibble for workflow processing and there's no comparison between GIMP and Bibble (Linux version). For workflow, the UI of GIMP is useless.
I use Keypoint Credit Union and have no problem viewing transactions going back years. (Formerly AEA - American Electronics Association credit union).
My experience with Comcast VOIP has been I cannot tell the difference except that, if anything, the sound is clearer than POTS. I don't notice any significant latency. It is difficult to beat POTS for latency, though. For voice they typically send a burst of compressed voice data every 10 or 20ms. POTS typically uses a dedicated very lot latency network which will have a lower latency than packet switched networks.
I actually have installed an antivirus program that also supports disabling or locating the phone if it's lost or stolen.
I actually went to a university (University of California Santa Cruz) which had a pass/fail policy along with written evaluations. Grades were optional at the time. I never bothered with grades and the written evaluations were usually a lot more detailed. They could be converted to grades though without too much difficulty if you knew how to read them.
I own a Motorola Droid and I tried to replicate the problem the iPhone 4 is experiencing. The antenna is located in the base and at most I could get a 2-3db signal loss by covering the base with my hand, and I had to really work at it to get 3db. A 3db drop is roughly 1/2 the signal strength. A 20db loss (which Consumer Reports shows the iPhone 4 suffers from), is 1/100 the signal strength. To try and say that other phones suffer from the same problem is a cop-out. I also tend to hold phones such that it would kill the signal of an iPhone 4. I imagine it also is affected by how much ones hand conducts, i.e. damp or sweaty. I'm not an antenna expert, but even I realize how stupid it is to make an antenna like Apple's. Touching the antenna will change its impedance and change the wavelength of the antenna significantly. No software can work around that.
According to the video on Consumer Report's website touching the gap on the lower left side reduces the signal strength by around 20db. That's quite a big loss, the resulting signal strength being about 1/100 of the starting signal strength.. When I grip the base of my Motorola Droid phone around the base (where the antenna is located internally), I can only get about a 2-3db drop in signal strength.
This huge loss does not surprise me, since touching the gap is essentially changing the characteristics of the antenna significantly. I can only wonder whose bright idea it was to use this design or how they failed to catch this during their testing phase? It doesn't take rocket science to fix the problem either, I suspect just a clear insulating coating over the metal band would do wonders.
One of the problems is that the US and Britain do not have as strong requirements as other countries for deep water drilling. For example, several other countries require an acoustically activated remote shut-off valve.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704423504575212031417936798.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/01/nation/la-na-oil-spill-investigation-20100501
Halliburton is under investigation for problems cementing near Australia and they had just done this to this rig. About half of the blowouts that have occurred in the gulf were due to cementing problems. There's also concern that curing cement raised the temperature of methane hydrates causing it to become unstable.
This reminds me when last year I was driving on the freeway near Richmond in the SF Bay Area and what looked like a thick fog was actually smoke belching out of one of the refineries. I regularly hear of alerts where people are told to stay indoors due to a mishap at one of the numerous refineries in the area.
While we continue to need oil for transportation the best thing we can do is to work harder to reduce our dependency on oil, both with more efficient vehicles and with better transportation planning to help reduce our dependency on cars. Down the road I think electric vehicles will make a lot of sense in urban areas as they come down in price and improve battery technology but I don't think we're quite there yet.
Maybe they're really Saddam's WMDs that Bush and Cheney were searching for all those years! Those sneaky Iraqis!
At least for me I think I'll stick with my netbook as well. I tend to use the USB ports and built-in SDHC slot on it quite a bit for things like copying photos off of my camera, burning DVDs, etc. I also tend to make heavy use of multitasking. It's nice when I can just plug a 500GB drive into one port and my camera into the other and copy several GB worth of photos off.
Add to this that the netbook is significantly cheaper than the iPad.
There is nothing wrong with my system. It's a 3.4GHz quad core I7 with 12GB of RAM running 64-bit Linux. The problem is that much of Firefox is single threaded and when I have a lot of tabs open some have active Javascript which will slow down Firefox to a crawl. This is especially apparent on my Atom-based netbook. Chrome, on the other hand, does not seem to suffer nearly as much. Also, by using separate processes for different tabs, Chrome is much better about reclaiming memory. It's easy to see Firefox consuming all of one thread of the CPU when it gets slow. If I can find the tab that's causing it, it will settle down and be useable again. By using separate processes for different tabs, Chrome does not suffer from this. Also, Chrome includes tools to show CPU and memory usage by tab.
I love Chrome because it's so fast and doesn't have all the bloat that's crept into Firefox. It's more stable than Firefox and I like the single search bar. Granted, I still think it could use improvement in a number of areas, but Firefox also has a lot of really annoying quirks to it.
On my netbook I will only use Chrome. It's far more efficient with the limited screen real estate than Firefox, plus with the slower processor the difference is night and day.
Something is really wrong if Chrome is so slow on your setup. For me, it's much much faster than Firefox, especially when I have a lot of tabs open.
The difference is even more apparent on my I7 desktop. Firefox seems to be single threaded whereas Chrome will make use of all of the cores and threads.
-Aaron