my fourth bullet point was that i was willing to pay for a battery, which shouldn't be a big deal since it only has to last long enough to finish write back.
your point that the OS should be doing the caching is a very good one. what started me on this quest was that there is a certain OS and OS-supplied service that my employer uses that isn't very good at keeping files cached in RAM. it seems to prefer to let the thread pool fill up all available space in a few minutes, reserving only a small fixed amount for file caching.
i don't mean a flash drive that functions as a cache to speed something else up, i mean a flash drive that HAS a ram cache to speed itself up. sorry if i wasn't clear.
on board ram cache (let's say 1G) that stores most recently accessed files for really fast access.
the 1G cache is expandable if you want really high performance
modest battery or capacitor, enough to enable write-back instead of write-through
USB 2.0, firewire, or eSATA it's all good.
doesn't cost significantly more than you'd expect from the above components
when i google for something like this the closest hits i get are for products with spinning platters instead of the flash, some horrendously expensive SSD drives, and readyboost-branded flash drives.
"Nuclear" is loaded with negative connotations, you're right, but the fact remains that terrorists have targetted nuclear facilities in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The targetting is what concerns me, not the connotations.
This doesn't mean we can't deploy nuclear generators, but it might be a good idea to have more security for them than a typical apple orchard would have.
Not quite, the value to terrorists is PR not kilotons.
An organized terrorist raid on a couple dozen low-power nuclear generators would be in the headlines for YEARS, even if they didn't actually do anything but steal them and hide them. People would be falling over themselves speculating on what they could be working on, adding to the frenzy, doing the terrorists' job for them.
i dunno, if the kid just went to firefox.com and clicked on the button and the school laptop just let him install a program right off the internet, the lab is probably overrun with viruses and spyware already.
the teacher who runs the lab is probably frustrated by his own incompetence and taking it out on the kid. not cool.
1. semis with properly functioning and adjusted brakes can stop very quickly. not as fast as a car of course, but faster than you'd expect. some newer trucks/trailers have ABS and can really surprise you.
2. a two axle straight truck can stop almost as quickly as a car. these can look exactly like a trailer from behind. don't tailgate a straight truck.
3. you don't have to hang 5ft off the bumper. mythbusters examined this and found that 35 ft is pretty good for fuel economy. that's still tailgating but not atypical for urban area highways/freeways.
4. do not tailgate until you have established that the trailer's brake lights are working. they are more reliable than passenger car brake lights since the trucks get inspected all the time, but it's still something to be wary of.
5. trucks/trailers obscure your visibility of unfolding events ahead. you can see through, over, or around a smaller vehicle and react to upcoming events at the same time as (often earlier than) the drivers ahead of you. can't do that when there's a big trailer in front of you.
6. note the bumper height mismatch. some trailers have a bar around 16'' off the ground to match up with your bumper in collisions. these are great. if the trailer doesn't have this, you have substantially less protection since the trailer frame will probably meet up with your car around the height of your neck. drive accordingly.
>> If you're stopped completely you must overcome inertia, which takes even more energy.
Inertia follows the same rules no matter whether you are going zero mph or 100 mph.
It would be more accurate to say that if you are stopped you must overcome static friction.
However, I think most of the loss starting from 0 mph goes into the clutch or torque converter. Very little energy is needed to overcome the static friction of wheel bearings and driveline components aft of the transmission.
I'm under the impression that hybrid vehicles that start off on electric power pretty much eliminate any clutch/torque converter loss as well.
the vocal pickup can actually be better on cell phones. there is a lot of compute power in the cell handsets and some of them use it cancel background noise. very few landline phones have this feature.
Responding to my own message above as it apparently was ambiguous.
Just to clarify my personal view here...I'm not afraid of vehicles fire in an EV, I'm afraid of how public opinion of EV's might unfairly change after one well-publicized EV fire.
The expectation is that most electric cars would recharge overnight when there is plenty of spare capacity. Obviously there is a tipping point where there would be too many cars for the grid to support, but we're a long way from that.
Might help if they didn't call use the word 'pirate' in their name.
It just seems like they chose the name to invite attack, rather than fly under the radar.
Just sayin'.
Re:Don't understand the Kindle at all... for the..
on
Kindle Versus The iPhone
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This may sound kind of dumb, but here goes.
ebook readers are literally hardware. they are made with a tough plastic case, and an unbendable plastic screen that smudges easily. these materials conduct heat away from your hands quickly. some have pointy styluses.
this is not something that you want near you when taking a bath, reading in bed, or cuddled up on the sofa.
contrast that with a book, even a hardcover: the pages are soft and bendable. you can write on them, if you want. the cover materials are more like insulation than conductors so your hands stay warm. if you accidentally drop it, it won't break or shatter. some books even have a pleasant smell. it's pretty foolproof and if you do manage to destroy it, no big deal it was only $15, not $400 so you don't have that nervous i-have-to-protect-my-tech feeling and you can just enjoy the nice cuddly warm book on your cuddly warm sofa in your cuddly warm blanket.
yep, actual total of local and LD bills including taxes and surcharges is about $28/month.
long dx and local-long dx is by ECG which is pennies per minute. even if I spend hundreds of minutes on the phone it's still cheaper than going with one of AT&T's ridiculously expensive calling plans.
local loop is owned by AT&T but has been pac bell, pac tel, and sbc over the years. caller id is my only splurge. opted out of everything else they offered.
but i've had to stay on top of it. seems like once a year AT&T tacks on some new feature/fee and pretends like it's mandatory when it really isn't. i call 'em up and tell them to remove it and they give me a line of b.s. and i say remove it one more time and that's that.
one time (back when they were pac bell i think) was hilarious. they came out with a level of service they called Basic[tm] which included a bunch of extra crap. So when people called up and asked for basic phone service, they got Basic instead. Then they started converting people who had basic into Basic[tm] and the **** hit the fan when half the state realized their phone bills went up $10.
I expect better cell service in a couple of years, at which point I can drop the land line and use my $8/month cell phone (cingular prepaid).
obviously i am not a power user of the telephone, so i don't rack up tons of minutes on a regular basis, but i don't make any effort to keep calls short or anything either.
agreed, you will not get the flexibility of vonage using POTS.
if you have the patience, you might consider an asterix box so you can host your own voice mail and do whatever you want with it, without paying a tithe to the telco.
in fact, since voice mail flexibility was such a big advantage for vonage, it makes you wonder if some of the patents weren't about VOIP at all, but about voice mail over IP, or just some very broad voice mail (period) patents.
not a joke, i'm paying about $28 total per month for POTS + alt LD (incl regional). $6 of that is caller ID so if I skipped that it would be $22. this is in a major metro area with a bell system entity.
more to the topic though, just because vonage is likely to get more expensive or go away doesn't mean all your options are closed. there is still.... * skype * ditching the land line in favor of cell * cable modem "triple play" phone service
the incremental costs here can be very low, possibly less than vonage was charging. the main question is whether VZ will go after skype and cable companies using the same patents.
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my fourth bullet point was that i was willing to pay for a battery, which shouldn't be a big deal since it only has to last long enough to finish write back.
your point that the OS should be doing the caching is a very good one. what started me on this quest was that there is a certain OS and OS-supplied service that my employer uses that isn't very good at keeping files cached in RAM. it seems to prefer to let the thread pool fill up all available space in a few minutes, reserving only a small fixed amount for file caching.
i don't mean a flash drive that functions as a cache to speed something else up, i mean a flash drive that HAS a ram cache to speed itself up. sorry if i wasn't clear.
- flash drive, say 64G or so
- on board ram cache (let's say 1G) that stores most recently accessed files for really fast access.
- the 1G cache is expandable if you want really high performance
- modest battery or capacitor, enough to enable write-back instead of write-through
- USB 2.0, firewire, or eSATA it's all good.
- doesn't cost significantly more than you'd expect from the above components
when i google for something like this the closest hits i get are for products with spinning platters instead of the flash, some horrendously expensive SSD drives, and readyboost-branded flash drives.one thing i would like in my nifty smart dishwasher is a light bulb.
most of my other kitchen appliances have a light that illuminates the interior when the door is open and i'd like one for my dishwasher too, kthxbai.
Must be the writer's strike.
"Nuclear" is loaded with negative connotations, you're right, but the fact remains that terrorists have targetted nuclear facilities in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The targetting is what concerns me, not the connotations.
This doesn't mean we can't deploy nuclear generators, but it might be a good idea to have more security for them than a typical apple orchard would have.
Not quite, the value to terrorists is PR not kilotons.
An organized terrorist raid on a couple dozen low-power nuclear generators would be in the headlines for YEARS, even if they didn't actually do anything but steal them and hide them. People would be falling over themselves speculating on what they could be working on, adding to the frenzy, doing the terrorists' job for them.
Issues. You gots thems.
i dunno, if the kid just went to firefox.com and clicked on the button and the school laptop just let him install a program right off the internet, the lab is probably overrun with viruses and spyware already.
the teacher who runs the lab is probably frustrated by his own incompetence and taking it out on the kid. not cool.
safety issues i'd like to share:
1. semis with properly functioning and adjusted brakes can stop very quickly. not as fast as a car of course, but faster than you'd expect. some newer trucks/trailers have ABS and can really surprise you.
2. a two axle straight truck can stop almost as quickly as a car. these can look exactly like a trailer from behind. don't tailgate a straight truck.
3. you don't have to hang 5ft off the bumper. mythbusters examined this and found that 35 ft is pretty good for fuel economy. that's still tailgating but not atypical for urban area highways/freeways.
4. do not tailgate until you have established that the trailer's brake lights are working. they are more reliable than passenger car brake lights since the trucks get inspected all the time, but it's still something to be wary of.
5. trucks/trailers obscure your visibility of unfolding events ahead. you can see through, over, or around a smaller vehicle and react to upcoming events at the same time as (often earlier than) the drivers ahead of you. can't do that when there's a big trailer in front of you.
6. note the bumper height mismatch. some trailers have a bar around 16'' off the ground to match up with your bumper in collisions. these are great. if the trailer doesn't have this, you have substantially less protection since the trailer frame will probably meet up with your car around the height of your neck. drive accordingly.
>> If you're stopped completely you must overcome inertia, which takes even more energy.
Inertia follows the same rules no matter whether you are going zero mph or 100 mph.
It would be more accurate to say that if you are stopped you must overcome static friction.
However, I think most of the loss starting from 0 mph goes into the clutch or torque converter. Very little energy is needed to overcome the static friction of wheel bearings and driveline components aft of the transmission.
I'm under the impression that hybrid vehicles that start off on electric power pretty much eliminate any clutch/torque converter loss as well.
the vocal pickup can actually be better on cell phones. there is a lot of compute power in the cell handsets and some of them use it cancel background noise. very few landline phones have this feature.
WORST. DENTAL PLAN. EVER.
the students need to be educated about outsourcing too
hey, aren't poems supposed to rhyme?!?!
Responding to my own message above as it apparently was ambiguous.
Just to clarify my personal view here...I'm not afraid of vehicles fire in an EV, I'm afraid of how public opinion of EV's might unfairly change after one well-publicized EV fire.
The expectation is that most electric cars would recharge overnight when there is plenty of spare capacity. Obviously there is a tipping point where there would be too many cars for the grid to support, but we're a long way from that.
and where do you expect to get all that hydrogen from?
It's only going to take one vehicle fire involving lithium ion batteries and then the public will sour on the whole thing for years.
Might help if they didn't call use the word 'pirate' in their name.
It just seems like they chose the name to invite attack, rather than fly under the radar.
Just sayin'.
This may sound kind of dumb, but here goes.
ebook readers are literally hardware. they are made with a tough plastic case, and an unbendable plastic screen that smudges easily. these materials conduct heat away from your hands quickly. some have pointy styluses.
this is not something that you want near you when taking a bath, reading in bed, or cuddled up on the sofa.
contrast that with a book, even a hardcover: the pages are soft and bendable. you can write on them, if you want. the cover materials are more like insulation than conductors so your hands stay warm. if you accidentally drop it, it won't break or shatter. some books even have a pleasant smell. it's pretty foolproof and if you do manage to destroy it, no big deal it was only $15, not $400 so you don't have that nervous i-have-to-protect-my-tech feeling and you can just enjoy the nice cuddly warm book on your cuddly warm sofa in your cuddly warm blanket.
yep, actual total of local and LD bills including taxes and surcharges is about $28/month.
long dx and local-long dx is by ECG which is pennies per minute. even if I spend hundreds of minutes on the phone it's still cheaper than going with one of AT&T's ridiculously expensive calling plans.
local loop is owned by AT&T but has been pac bell, pac tel, and sbc over the years.
caller id is my only splurge. opted out of everything else they offered.
but i've had to stay on top of it. seems like once a year AT&T tacks on some new feature/fee and pretends like it's mandatory when it really isn't. i call 'em up and tell them to remove it and they give me a line of b.s. and i say remove it one more time and that's that.
one time (back when they were pac bell i think) was hilarious. they came out with a level of service they called Basic[tm] which included a bunch of extra crap. So when people called up and asked for basic phone service, they got Basic instead. Then they started converting people who had basic into Basic[tm] and the **** hit the fan when half the state realized their phone bills went up $10.
I expect better cell service in a couple of years, at which point I can drop the land line and use my $8/month cell phone (cingular prepaid).
obviously i am not a power user of the telephone, so i don't rack up tons of minutes on a regular basis, but i don't make any effort to keep calls short or anything either.
agreed, you will not get the flexibility of vonage using POTS.
if you have the patience, you might consider an asterix box so you can host your own voice mail and do whatever you want with it, without paying a tithe to the telco.
in fact, since voice mail flexibility was such a big advantage for vonage, it makes you wonder if some of the patents weren't about VOIP at all, but about voice mail over IP, or just some very broad voice mail (period) patents.
not a joke, i'm paying about $28 total per month for POTS + alt LD (incl regional).
$6 of that is caller ID so if I skipped that it would be $22.
this is in a major metro area with a bell system entity.
more to the topic though, just because vonage is likely to get more expensive or go away doesn't mean all your options are closed. there is still....
* skype
* ditching the land line in favor of cell
* cable modem "triple play" phone service
the incremental costs here can be very low, possibly less than vonage was charging. the main question is whether VZ will go after skype and cable companies using the same patents.
if you just need to save money, you can get POTS and an alternate LD carrier.
the combined costs should be within a few dollars a month of vonage.