Meh, not great, mostly because there's still some bug in VeGAN's wifi suspend/resume that makes it drain and/or reboot every few hours after suspending. Supposedly they have it fixed if I layer on another kernel on top of it, but I'll just wait until the next release.
It lasts longer than my eeePC 901... maybe 4-5 hours of active use, but I've never really measured.
The Power Control widget makes it easy to toggle all the radios and other battery hogs. But I usually don't have too much trouble keeping it near a charger for a quick fix every once in a while.
I'm pretty happy with my Viewsonic G-Tablet running VeGAN Tab 7.0.0rc1 or something (still based on Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread). The custom ROMs are indispensible, but it's quite functional now, and they're down to under $300. Essential apps:
Dolphin Browser HD + Flash + StumbleUpon = pr0n in bed (yeah yeah, I suppose it does other web stuff too)
Google Maps / Google Earth : sure, I have to use BlueGPS to pair it to my android phone's GPS for location data, but they work almost as well as the desktop version. I really want a tablet mount for my car soon.
Netflix : the G-Tablet actually has stereo speakers, and it's quite pleasant to watch crap on the couch or on the can or wherever
WikiDroyd : carry 2GB or 6GB of wikipedia-en around with you offline
TubeMate : downloads stuff from YouTube so you can have it available to instruct people how to eat sushi in its native setting without wait... buffering
Plus you can also plug in and use a USB keyboard or storage in addition to a microSD slot... pretty much everything people complain about other tablets works on the G-Tablet. Too bad their stock ROM was crap.
I mostly use it to play with high-end Android apps, so I don't have to dink with my Android phone (also a relatively inexpensive midrange HTC 3G Slide).
I've never actually played with anything that runs iOS, but that's fine with me since I always found the Apple Straightjacket-in-a-walled-garden experience incredibly frustrating since the MacOS9 days.
Heh, I think Acer's products are fine, they're just always late to the party. I bought one of their dual-core atom nettops for work, and it's actually pretty nice compared to some of the other small PCs I played with before it. It had good specs and nicely integrated packaging. But by the time it came out it was just sort of pointless now that the little cheaper special-purpose nettops like rokus or googletvs or boxee boxes are out. Sure, those devices are more limited in what they can do, but the few things they do have a nicer interface than the more flexible nettop PC.
But if I ever needed an old netbook or nettop for some 5-year-old home automation / robotics project, I wouldn't hesitate to toss a cheap Acer at it.
Thanks guys, for pushing forward the state of the art in web-based conversation and assembling this awesome community. I stumbled upon this site out of the blue, but followed just about every post with zeal for several years afterwards. I don't always read the comments, but when I do, they are among the most unique and interesting perspectives that I've seen on myriad topics of import. Even the trolls have a different flavor here (yes I do browse at -1). What you've achieved is quite remarkable. No one talks about the "Fark effect", and certainly no one would bother reading and commenting on a Jon Katz article if it was posted to arstechnica. And I like how you've grown the comment system over the years, even if javascript makes it unwieldy at times and the interface is almost impossible to use on a mobile device. But I've never complained! Thanks for setting the light-hearted tone, not becoming whiny like kuro5hin, and enriching our lives leading these discussions about stuff that matters!
Word. Not to mention that most ATM skimmers are very difficult to detect, and are often indistinguishable from some of the regular "bling" that an ATM might have adorning their card slot.
But I guess it's worthwhile to attempt to rip it out anyway and see what happens:-P
Hmm, I knew there was a reason that I rested all of my fingers uniformly across the keypad, gently caressing their every ridge and facet as I discreetly pumped out my digits into their PIN pad. Well, another reason, at least.
Also I try to think about a completely different song than the one that corresponds to the letters that correspond to the numbers of my PIN, just to thwart any brainwave phreaking attacks as well.
But still hoping we score some decent security measures out of this, like maybe a bank-issued gold card or something.
I used psyco for my thesis back in 2007. It improved my SimPy runtimes by a factor of 100, merely with a simple "import psyco" in the beginning of the project!
Unfortunately psyco only works on 32-bit architectures, and after I got my degree I finally upgraded to a 64-bit system and sat on my work waiting for something to happen. Now I guess I finally need to pull it out again and see what's up.
10 years ago I installed Slackware on an old 486 monochrome laptop through a serial port. I was too cheap to buy the proprietary external floppy drive.
I think I ended up resizing the 120MB [sic] DOS partition down to 40MB, and then using some serial port transfer program to send over a minimal linux loader that could load the installer kernel from DOS. Then I think I had to keep booting to DOS to erase and transfer over a few more of the 80MB+ of slackware floppies and install a few packages at a time until I had enough of a system to get a PCMCIA NIC working, and eventually X. But I think I spent most of the time in screen and emacs.
If you really wanted to do it, you'd probably replace the weight and expense of the electric gear with a heavier and more cumbersome transmission gearbox.
Maybe for ships it would be OK, but only when they're cruisin'. Still need more control of the power output for piloting / docking.
Also sounds like 1g of Thorium probably only translates to 7500 gal of gasoline under optimal conditions, which I take to mean unrealistic efficiencies and economies of scale beyond what's achievable for a turbine that would fit in a small car. Just one of the silly things about steam turbines, they're only really efficient enough to be practical when they're really really big (like, 777 or better yet factory-sized).
Meh, it worked OK for my thesis. I managed not to need too many international characters, I guess.
lyx (eventually I migrated it to emacs so I could stop wrestling with the GUI, which was having a cow with some of my larger figures) -> latex -> latex2html -> pluckr
also had a makefile to generate/update the.dvi ->.ps ->.pdf targets as well.
Pretty much... from the FCC pdf, all of the cable ISPs pretty much delivered ~22mbps. But their marketing branded them as "20" , "25", or "30".
Interesting that the FiOS consistently delivered 110% - 115% of their marketed value. And that practically no one mentions latency, which is probably a bigger selling point, esp. with mobile networks.
Huh, weird... does this prevent teachers from using Moodle / Blackboard or other online learning sites to run their courses as well? PROGRESS!!:-P
Heh, well, it's about time I got in trouble for setting up Moodle sites for my wife's classes:-P Is she going to have to take "uses technology" out of her resume as well?
Meh, it's similar in the US gov't & defense contracting sector, mostly for tax reasons.
For a largish contractor, if a PC is purchased for under $3000-$5000, it comes out of the expense budget, which tends to be relatively low year to year. If it's over that amount, it can come out of the much larger capital budget, which tends to be much bigger, and the company can take tax breaks for depreciation of that equipment over 3-5 years. So to the bean counters, it's much more desirable to have stuff come out of the capital budget, even if they are 3-10x overpriced. It also goes on the books as something that makes the company look like it has "capital resources", instead of sinking money into "expenses".
It's been funny to see computers overspec'd to cost $3k-$5k... usually through some combination of overpriced nVidia Quadro GPU (which can get up into the $1000s, but at least you can still buy the same outdated model number for a couple of years), 12-32GB+ RAM in 32-bit systems, RAID adapters that are never configured or used, loaded up with extra disks that might get pulled and stored in a pile elsewhere so they don't have to be bought individually separately (and often for cheaper when not bundled with an OEM's equipment build).
The other magic number is something like $200,000 for a single purchase or system of computers, so you'll see lots of the big iron companies dish out a rackfull of product for about that amount, like EMC storage etc. when there's stuff like NetApp that does the same thing for maybe 10% of the cost. So if the IT department can plan ahead enough, they can make a large purchase of cheap PCs for over $200k and still depreciate them, which is why the desktop/laptop you actually get to use is still a piece of crap. But the computers that can't be planned and spec'd a year in advance get to cost way more.
Works on any deck of pdf / image files in a directory that you throw at it. Uses OpenGL effects... effectively! Not just as useless eye-candy (though the transitions available are posh), but to help visualize, highlight, and zoom into parts of your presentation as you go.
It won't actually help you create content, though. You'll still need some tools for that. Open/LibreOffice is still kinda squishy, but works (though still too PPT-like). Inkscape is worth the time investment for learning to create reasonably involved diagrams... I've more or less switched to it from xfig and Dia.
Oh, I don't know... I remember reading a book on ecology systems in the public library when I was in high school back in the early 90's, and Gore turned up in it a few times. I was like, "wow, I didn't know there were any politicians that took interest in science."
I think the true genius was from Gore figuring out how to translate the environmentalism movement into something that Wall Street would actually care about. Unfortunately, he was a bit too successful, and now the businesses on Wall Street are actively resisting.
Sure, I'd whine that he oversimplified things a bit by pegging everything to CO^2 levels and then over-vilifying it. I mean, it is a decent indicator for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and moving to other forms of energy production, and most of the intended target audience really needed things oversimplified to a single metric. But I support the goal of leading a cleaner, more efficient lifestyle that puts less load on the environmental systems that support us, even if it's a bit more work.
Hmm, I was given the impression that stock Ubuntu is pretty dismal on netbooks. Try one of the netbook remixes that actually use the array kernel tuned for Atom chips and other netbook hardware.
My favorite was eeebuntu 3.0 , but it hasn't been updated recently while waiting for the devs to polish off their new Aurora distro.
I've also played with Fuduntu, which seems like a nice rpm-based distro, but my machine didn't survive a yum update. I might try again.
Then there's the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which probably tracks the stock Ubuntu the closest, but I've never really played with it.
Re:They've got a point
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, the "+ 0" looks kinda weird in an equation, but it's just the computation of the more useful
e^(i*tau) = cos(tau) + i*sin(tau)
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, not great, mostly because there's still some bug in VeGAN's wifi suspend/resume that makes it drain and/or reboot every few hours after suspending. Supposedly they have it fixed if I layer on another kernel on top of it, but I'll just wait until the next release.
It lasts longer than my eeePC 901... maybe 4-5 hours of active use, but I've never really measured.
The Power Control widget makes it easy to toggle all the radios and other battery hogs. But I usually don't have too much trouble keeping it near a charger for a quick fix every once in a while.
I'm pretty happy with my Viewsonic G-Tablet running VeGAN Tab 7.0.0rc1 or something (still based on Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread). The custom ROMs are indispensible, but it's quite functional now, and they're down to under $300. Essential apps:
Plus you can also plug in and use a USB keyboard or storage in addition to a microSD slot... pretty much everything people complain about other tablets works on the G-Tablet. Too bad their stock ROM was crap.
I mostly use it to play with high-end Android apps, so I don't have to dink with my Android phone (also a relatively inexpensive midrange HTC 3G Slide).
I've never actually played with anything that runs iOS, but that's fine with me since I always found the Apple Straightjacket-in-a-walled-garden experience incredibly frustrating since the MacOS9 days.
Heh, I think Acer's products are fine, they're just always late to the party. I bought one of their dual-core atom nettops for work, and it's actually pretty nice compared to some of the other small PCs I played with before it. It had good specs and nicely integrated packaging. But by the time it came out it was just sort of pointless now that the little cheaper special-purpose nettops like rokus or googletvs or boxee boxes are out. Sure, those devices are more limited in what they can do, but the few things they do have a nicer interface than the more flexible nettop PC.
But if I ever needed an old netbook or nettop for some 5-year-old home automation / robotics project, I wouldn't hesitate to toss a cheap Acer at it.
Yeah, really, the best thing we can do at this point is sell them all of the oceanfront property.
So, like, we should plant more plants for each additional unit of CO2 we produce? Sounds... reasonable.
http://xkcd.com/808/
Are insurance companies selling flood insurance on coastal homes? If they are, are they making a killing on them? ^_^
Thanks guys, for pushing forward the state of the art in web-based conversation and assembling this awesome community. I stumbled upon this site out of the blue, but followed just about every post with zeal for several years afterwards. I don't always read the comments, but when I do, they are among the most unique and interesting perspectives that I've seen on myriad topics of import. Even the trolls have a different flavor here (yes I do browse at -1). What you've achieved is quite remarkable. No one talks about the "Fark effect", and certainly no one would bother reading and commenting on a Jon Katz article if it was posted to arstechnica. And I like how you've grown the comment system over the years, even if javascript makes it unwieldy at times and the interface is almost impossible to use on a mobile device. But I've never complained! Thanks for setting the light-hearted tone, not becoming whiny like kuro5hin, and enriching our lives leading these discussions about stuff that matters!
Did anyone turn on their radio?
No one here did :P
Word. Not to mention that most ATM skimmers are very difficult to detect, and are often indistinguishable from some of the regular "bling" that an ATM might have adorning their card slot.
But I guess it's worthwhile to attempt to rip it out anyway and see what happens :-P
http://images.google.com/search?q=ATM+skimmer&hl=en&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&biw=1270&bih=810
Hmm, I knew there was a reason that I rested all of my fingers uniformly across the keypad, gently caressing their every ridge and facet as I discreetly pumped out my digits into their PIN pad. Well, another reason, at least.
Also I try to think about a completely different song than the one that corresponds to the letters that correspond to the numbers of my PIN, just to thwart any brainwave phreaking attacks as well.
But still hoping we score some decent security measures out of this, like maybe a bank-issued gold card or something.
I used psyco for my thesis back in 2007. It improved my SimPy runtimes by a factor of 100, merely with a simple "import psyco" in the beginning of the project!
Unfortunately psyco only works on 32-bit architectures, and after I got my degree I finally upgraded to a 64-bit system and sat on my work waiting for something to happen. Now I guess I finally need to pull it out again and see what's up.
10 years ago I installed Slackware on an old 486 monochrome laptop through a serial port. I was too cheap to buy the proprietary external floppy drive.
I think I ended up resizing the 120MB [sic] DOS partition down to 40MB, and then using some serial port transfer program to send over a minimal linux loader that could load the installer kernel from DOS. Then I think I had to keep booting to DOS to erase and transfer over a few more of the 80MB+ of slackware floppies and install a few packages at a time until I had enough of a system to get a PCMCIA NIC working, and eventually X. But I think I spent most of the time in screen and emacs.
Good times.
Steam turbines aren't great for direct drive engines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine#Direct_drive
If you really wanted to do it, you'd probably replace the weight and expense of the electric gear with a heavier and more cumbersome transmission gearbox.
Maybe for ships it would be OK, but only when they're cruisin'. Still need more control of the power output for piloting / docking.
"abundant" "rare earth mineral"
Sounds like like it's only relatively abundant.
Also sounds like 1g of Thorium probably only translates to 7500 gal of gasoline under optimal conditions, which I take to mean unrealistic efficiencies and economies of scale beyond what's achievable for a turbine that would fit in a small car. Just one of the silly things about steam turbines, they're only really efficient enough to be practical when they're really really big (like, 777 or better yet factory-sized).
I lol'd :-P
Meh, it worked OK for my thesis. I managed not to need too many international characters, I guess.
lyx (eventually I migrated it to emacs so I could stop wrestling with the GUI, which was having a cow with some of my larger figures) -> latex -> latex2html -> pluckr
also had a makefile to generate/update the .dvi -> .ps -> .pdf targets as well.
Meh, I run Linux Mint, so someone else already made the right decision for me and give me a recent version of Ubuntu with the Unity stuff removed.
I know if I left it up to myself, I'd end up trying to use some monstrosity like Enlightenome or something.
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/misc/Screenshot-enlightenome.png
Yeah, I caught the NPR bit, and knew something was amiss when they quoted "Firefox" as the browser with the highest-IQ users instead of Opera.
Yay for reporting what people want to hear.
Pretty much... from the FCC pdf, all of the cable ISPs pretty much delivered ~22mbps. But their marketing branded them as "20" , "25", or "30".
Interesting that the FiOS consistently delivered 110% - 115% of their marketed value. And that practically no one mentions latency, which is probably a bigger selling point, esp. with mobile networks.
Huh, weird... does this prevent teachers from using Moodle / Blackboard or other online learning sites to run their courses as well? PROGRESS!! :-P
Heh, well, it's about time I got in trouble for setting up Moodle sites for my wife's classes :-P Is she going to have to take "uses technology" out of her resume as well?
Meh, it's similar in the US gov't & defense contracting sector, mostly for tax reasons.
For a largish contractor, if a PC is purchased for under $3000-$5000, it comes out of the expense budget, which tends to be relatively low year to year. If it's over that amount, it can come out of the much larger capital budget, which tends to be much bigger, and the company can take tax breaks for depreciation of that equipment over 3-5 years. So to the bean counters, it's much more desirable to have stuff come out of the capital budget, even if they are 3-10x overpriced. It also goes on the books as something that makes the company look like it has "capital resources", instead of sinking money into "expenses".
It's been funny to see computers overspec'd to cost $3k-$5k... usually through some combination of overpriced nVidia Quadro GPU (which can get up into the $1000s, but at least you can still buy the same outdated model number for a couple of years), 12-32GB+ RAM in 32-bit systems, RAID adapters that are never configured or used, loaded up with extra disks that might get pulled and stored in a pile elsewhere so they don't have to be bought individually separately (and often for cheaper when not bundled with an OEM's equipment build).
The other magic number is something like $200,000 for a single purchase or system of computers, so you'll see lots of the big iron companies dish out a rackfull of product for about that amount, like EMC storage etc. when there's stuff like NetApp that does the same thing for maybe 10% of the cost. So if the IT department can plan ahead enough, they can make a large purchase of cheap PCs for over $200k and still depreciate them, which is why the desktop/laptop you actually get to use is still a piece of crap. But the computers that can't be planned and spec'd a year in advance get to cost way more.
For *nix, try: Impress!ve
Works on any deck of pdf / image files in a directory that you throw at it. Uses OpenGL effects... effectively! Not just as useless eye-candy (though the transitions available are posh), but to help visualize, highlight, and zoom into parts of your presentation as you go.
It won't actually help you create content, though. You'll still need some tools for that. Open/LibreOffice is still kinda squishy, but works (though still too PPT-like). Inkscape is worth the time investment for learning to create reasonably involved diagrams... I've more or less switched to it from xfig and Dia.
Al Gore isn't a climate scientist.
Oh, I don't know... I remember reading a book on ecology systems in the public library when I was in high school back in the early 90's, and Gore turned up in it a few times. I was like, "wow, I didn't know there were any politicians that took interest in science."
I think the true genius was from Gore figuring out how to translate the environmentalism movement into something that Wall Street would actually care about. Unfortunately, he was a bit too successful, and now the businesses on Wall Street are actively resisting.
Sure, I'd whine that he oversimplified things a bit by pegging everything to CO^2 levels and then over-vilifying it. I mean, it is a decent indicator for reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and moving to other forms of energy production, and most of the intended target audience really needed things oversimplified to a single metric. But I support the goal of leading a cleaner, more efficient lifestyle that puts less load on the environmental systems that support us, even if it's a bit more work.
Hmm, I was given the impression that stock Ubuntu is pretty dismal on netbooks. Try one of the netbook remixes that actually use the array kernel tuned for Atom chips and other netbook hardware.
My favorite was eeebuntu 3.0 , but it hasn't been updated recently while waiting for the devs to polish off their new Aurora distro.
I've also played with Fuduntu, which seems like a nice rpm-based distro, but my machine didn't survive a yum update. I might try again.
Then there's the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which probably tracks the stock Ubuntu the closest, but I've never really played with it.
Yeah, the "+ 0" looks kinda weird in an equation, but it's just the computation of the more useful
e^(i*tau) = cos(tau) + i*sin(tau)