I've been trying to learn to use Inkscape lately on Windows, but I have to say it's woefully to slow, and the interface isn't intuitive. It feels like it's not using any hardware acceleration whatsoever. I would assume a vector based drawing program would be taking full advantage of the garphics card, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Point is, it makes using the software frustrating. I can see why people go for Adobe's products, there simply isn't any substitute if you need quality for professional work. For the average user? You're probably better off looking at other vendors like Corel, but open source graphics on windows always seem slow and lacking to me. My guess it's the underlying framework (screwy non native dialog boxes for example) they are built on, not so much the software itself.
Seriously, have you seen the dust and grime a computer accumulates after 10 years??? I'd want to replace the thing just because it's really ugly and disgusting by that point.
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
And this is the problem, countries like India and China can get away with horrible working conditions, lapses in saftey standards and employee rights that we take for granted in the U.S. I see examples of this all the time with illegal construction workers here in California. Since they are already in the country illegally, they have no insentive (or knowledge?) to follow OSHA saftey standards that a legitimate construction company would have to follow. If you can get away with the same thing with exported labor, exchanging a few lives for $$$ many companies are willing to do this.
So essentially, U.S. companies are deffering those costs by working overseas. I for one think companies should be punished financially in someway or guarantee the same worker rights in those foreign countries.
Another problem, and I think this is the biggest one, is the lack of national pride in the U.S. If the country you live in is say no more important to you then $200 off a plasma TV at Wal-Mart, what are you to care if jobs go overseas? I'm just saying that economically speaking, there is no added value in the tag "made in U.S.A." anymore since it is no longer associated with quality or pride with the average consumer. I suppose an employer sees their employees the same way now, looking at the individual and their qualities instead of "made in U.S.A.". However, if the U.S. does want to stay competitive it still must maintain self interest.
5. decimation can also mean: to cause great destruction or harm to
Nope, I e-mailed the company one time asking about alternative layouts for lanugages and Dvorak, and they said the usual "we have no plans at this time..." excuse. From what I read, the product probably isn't very useful for someone who's a touch-typist anyway.
"You're constantly starting from zero and whatever stats are saved are server based only so if you want any progression you need to constantly use the same server."
FPS games are not MMORPG games, there are no false "levels" or "items" that you collect. You have to realize that when you play a MMORPG you are simply making little numbers in a database somewhere increment. Has very little to do with skill in my opinion and only the ammount of time you put into it. That's why I've never been interested in them as they are an incredible time sink.
BTW, unreal tournment 2004 has a great persistent stats/scoring system. You can keep track of your history of just about everything. I wish valve had something like that for counter-strike before doing this stupid free market nonesense.
Okay, why the heck are alarm system manufacturers routing alarm information through Voip, through the internet, instead of through the internet directly? That's just crazy.
As far as reliability, I'd assume you that if the alarm system is very important to you, you would want redundant internet connections (a combination of cable, DSL, and CDMA service?). I'm sure you could at the very least get BETTER reliability than POTS.
The free market only produces lapses in service if that's what you pay for. 99.99% uptime is expensive and you pay for it. If you could get your electricity for $0.04/kwh and only have a 99.5% guaranteed uptime, you might find that a good deal. As long as their is competition this works. Free economics wins again!
Relying on powerplants operating at 100% is insane. There is no way any type of industrial process can operate that close because if something fails, you no longer have excess capacity to compensate. It is very expensive to operate equipment at 100% too due to the rush required for maintanace. I don't work at a power plant, but I'm just saying this from other general industrial control experience I have. 100% uptime on all equipment is almost impossible. A lot of equipment is simply ran to failure, because that's the most cost effective method (due to labor being expensive).
First the laptop manufactures have to get their act together and STANDARDIZE ON DC POWER! I'm sick of all the different types of power bricks required. You should be able to plug into a standard 24V port, with 2-3 amps current available. But no, we have to use 120V outlets for everything.:(
Wow, congratulations, you just posted an article full of explicits, lacking any facts what-so-ever. Why don't you post links to reports or balance sheets of companies outside of Enron that were "gouging" their customers? Enron != power companies, since enron doesn't even generate any power. Enron was corrupt, no doubt, but to blame the power plants directly is ridiculus. Unless they proved there was a cartel going on, this is all meaningless.
We have a choice of F150, F250, and electric GEM carts at work. I try to grab the GEM cart whenever I can simply because it's alot easier to find parking and manuever around tight spaces. The F250 quad cab on the other hand, I'm always worried I'm going to crash into something. That thing is huge. I'd really like to convince them to get more light trucks or GEM carts, as most of the time we just use them for transporting people, not heavy equipment.
That's B.S. How did energy companies "rob" California? Oh, was it because California was reluctant to build powerplants for the last 20 years and was thus forced to by power on the spot market? You know what private companies do? They buy long term contracts for power. I know an aluminum plant that did this many years ago and it came a point where their contract for electricity was so cheap, they stopped producing aluminum and resold their power. That's economics. Someone else needed the electricity more then them.
You don't get efficient power distribution when you start regulating it with the government. And BTW, true deregulation never occured in California, until it does they will continue to have problems.
Gray Davis got sacked because he was incompentent, even for a democrat, and people are pretty dumb about voting for hollywood celebrities too.
I don't want to hear anything about education spending. Most people around where I live pay almost as much in property tax then I do in rent. Why? Oh, it's for the CHILDREN. As if people aren't smart enough to choose their own schools to put their kids in.
I don't know about you, but even on a 2 hour flight I wouldn't be in the mood to surf the internet or trying to make a VOIP call. And to pay $10-$20 for the luxury of internet access for such a short flight? Not likely. Maybe a longer flight, but probably not most people who aren't flying first class already. Besides, they already charge that $10 fee just to use the in airport wifi. So if you have one connecting flight and a wait at each airport thats: 10*5 = $50. Once while you're waiting for the first flight, on the first flight, at the next airport, on your next plain, and finally when you're waiting to get picked up.
You know, most of the tax increases in California are voted for directly by the voters. Notice how many bond measures get passed? Yes, those are taxes. California is simply financially suicidle. The state would not fall into a deficit situation if they would stop giving money to special interest groups for projects that have nothing to do with basic govrnment services.
I have a personal hatred of the Sierra club in my area due to their campaining against turning a worthless small patch of cow grazing land into housing. And thus, housing around my area is still around $600k for the median home. Thanks Sierra club for again making the lives of Californians everywhere miserable so you can enjoy your weekend nature hikes. Of course, if those houses were there maybe so many people wouldn't have to drive 60 miles everyday to where housing is affordable. I ride my bike to work BTW, so I'm just speaking for those who don't have that luxury.
Re:The answer to a question nobody asked
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
This is the point of this product, not having to carry around a bunch of extra chargers and adapters. I love that USB is becoming a defacto low voltage standard. My cellphone and bluetooth headset both charge from USB ports, even with my computer off because I have a powered hub.
Maybe someday when we all have solar panels on our house, we'll have USB power outlets right next to our 120V ones.
(I really hated the days of 100+ different power adapters with different voltage/current/connectors)
Yes, because we should all make financial decisions that effect our lives based on a 90 minute movie to sway our emotions. By an electric car if it makes financial sense, not because it gives you warm fuzzies.
I love TI calcualtors and everything, don't get me wrong, the TI-89 is great.... the thing is, TI has improved there product SQUAT since I bought mine in freakin' 1999! The current generation of TI-89 is almost EXACTLY the same, despite the fact that it must now cost them a fraction of the cost to manufacture as it did in 1999. Lets face it, we are talking about an archaic CPU, a ultra low resolution black OR white display, limited memory, limited functionality. Now, I'm not saying that the next gen calculator should have more hardware for the sake of keeping up to date, but it should really at least have a large subset of the capabilities of PC software packages such as MATLAB, Mathcad, Mathematica, etc.... why are they holding back? They could improve the product so much, but they refuse to do so, and instead charge you $120 for something that costs them $5 to manufacture.
Actually, pretty much any lithium-ion battery is extremely dangerious and flammable under the right conditions. The only thing preventing most batteries from bursting into flames is a tiny IC that controls the charge/discharge current of the battery. I've seen a video where your standard lithium-ion battery is punctured and the battery instantly starts bursting into flames. A reaction with atmosphere is all that is needed.
Lead acid batteries on the other hand are even more dangerous, luckily, these are already banned, but I wouldn't be surprised if screeners missed them since they are too busy looking for bottles of water in your baggage.
Oh! you're wrong though. The description on newegg is wrong. If you go to XFX's website, the part number: PVT71JYHE9 definetly doesn't have a fan on it. I don't see a fan on any of the pictures.
I'll definately be putting this in my next computer I'm building. The AGP card I have now has a tiny fan that's noisier than anything even with it on the desktop. When are the 65nm based cards coming out?
Yeah those demos were pretty cool because they were optimized for the cards and really pushed the performance to the edge. Your average game available out now won't do that, since it's developed for a mainstream market. It would be rather pointless to make a game only work with the highest end card, and most games don't scale very well graphics-wise.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been trying to learn to use Inkscape lately on Windows, but I have to say it's woefully to slow, and the interface isn't intuitive. It feels like it's not using any hardware acceleration whatsoever. I would assume a vector based drawing program would be taking full advantage of the garphics card, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Point is, it makes using the software frustrating. I can see why people go for Adobe's products, there simply isn't any substitute if you need quality for professional work. For the average user? You're probably better off looking at other vendors like Corel, but open source graphics on windows always seem slow and lacking to me. My guess it's the underlying framework (screwy non native dialog boxes for example) they are built on, not so much the software itself.
That'll teach those pre-N-draft-802.11 not to jump the gun!
Hey look... it's Mr. Obvious Man!!!!
Seriously, have you seen the dust and grime a computer accumulates after 10 years??? I'd want to replace the thing just because it's really ugly and disgusting by that point.
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
And this is the problem, countries like India and China can get away with horrible working conditions, lapses in saftey standards and employee rights that we take for granted in the U.S. I see examples of this all the time with illegal construction workers here in California. Since they are already in the country illegally, they have no insentive (or knowledge?) to follow OSHA saftey standards that a legitimate construction company would have to follow. If you can get away with the same thing with exported labor, exchanging a few lives for $$$ many companies are willing to do this.
So essentially, U.S. companies are deffering those costs by working overseas. I for one think companies should be punished financially in someway or guarantee the same worker rights in those foreign countries.
Another problem, and I think this is the biggest one, is the lack of national pride in the U.S. If the country you live in is say no more important to you then $200 off a plasma TV at Wal-Mart, what are you to care if jobs go overseas? I'm just saying that economically speaking, there is no added value in the tag "made in U.S.A." anymore since it is no longer associated with quality or pride with the average consumer. I suppose an employer sees their employees the same way now, looking at the individual and their qualities instead of "made in U.S.A.". However, if the U.S. does want to stay competitive it still must maintain self interest.
5. decimation can also mean: to cause great destruction or harm to
Nope, I e-mailed the company one time asking about alternative layouts for lanugages and Dvorak, and they said the usual "we have no plans at this time..." excuse. From what I read, the product probably isn't very useful for someone who's a touch-typist anyway.
"You're constantly starting from zero and whatever stats are saved are server based only so if you want any progression you need to constantly use the same server."
FPS games are not MMORPG games, there are no false "levels" or "items" that you collect. You have to realize that when you play a MMORPG you are simply making little numbers in a database somewhere increment. Has very little to do with skill in my opinion and only the ammount of time you put into it. That's why I've never been interested in them as they are an incredible time sink.
BTW, unreal tournment 2004 has a great persistent stats/scoring system. You can keep track of your history of just about everything. I wish valve had something like that for counter-strike before doing this stupid free market nonesense.
5.1 audio? Do you really want conversations like this:
"I'm in front of you! No wait... I'm behind you! Look to your right! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM... feel that bass??"
Okay, why the heck are alarm system manufacturers routing alarm information through Voip, through the internet, instead of through the internet directly? That's just crazy.
As far as reliability, I'd assume you that if the alarm system is very important to you, you would want redundant internet connections (a combination of cable, DSL, and CDMA service?). I'm sure you could at the very least get BETTER reliability than POTS.
The free market only produces lapses in service if that's what you pay for. 99.99% uptime is expensive and you pay for it. If you could get your electricity for $0.04/kwh and only have a 99.5% guaranteed uptime, you might find that a good deal. As long as their is competition this works. Free economics wins again!
Relying on powerplants operating at 100% is insane. There is no way any type of industrial process can operate that close because if something fails, you no longer have excess capacity to compensate. It is very expensive to operate equipment at 100% too due to the rush required for maintanace. I don't work at a power plant, but I'm just saying this from other general industrial control experience I have. 100% uptime on all equipment is almost impossible. A lot of equipment is simply ran to failure, because that's the most cost effective method (due to labor being expensive).
First the laptop manufactures have to get their act together and STANDARDIZE ON DC POWER! I'm sick of all the different types of power bricks required. You should be able to plug into a standard 24V port, with 2-3 amps current available. But no, we have to use 120V outlets for everything. :(
Wow, congratulations, you just posted an article full of explicits, lacking any facts what-so-ever. Why don't you post links to reports or balance sheets of companies outside of Enron that were "gouging" their customers? Enron != power companies, since enron doesn't even generate any power. Enron was corrupt, no doubt, but to blame the power plants directly is ridiculus. Unless they proved there was a cartel going on, this is all meaningless.
We have a choice of F150, F250, and electric GEM carts at work. I try to grab the GEM cart whenever I can simply because it's alot easier to find parking and manuever around tight spaces. The F250 quad cab on the other hand, I'm always worried I'm going to crash into something. That thing is huge. I'd really like to convince them to get more light trucks or GEM carts, as most of the time we just use them for transporting people, not heavy equipment.
That's B.S. How did energy companies "rob" California? Oh, was it because California was reluctant to build powerplants for the last 20 years and was thus forced to by power on the spot market? You know what private companies do? They buy long term contracts for power. I know an aluminum plant that did this many years ago and it came a point where their contract for electricity was so cheap, they stopped producing aluminum and resold their power. That's economics. Someone else needed the electricity more then them.
You don't get efficient power distribution when you start regulating it with the government. And BTW, true deregulation never occured in California, until it does they will continue to have problems.
Gray Davis got sacked because he was incompentent, even for a democrat, and people are pretty dumb about voting for hollywood celebrities too.
I don't want to hear anything about education spending. Most people around where I live pay almost as much in property tax then I do in rent. Why? Oh, it's for the CHILDREN. As if people aren't smart enough to choose their own schools to put their kids in.
I don't know about you, but even on a 2 hour flight I wouldn't be in the mood to surf the internet or trying to make a VOIP call. And to pay $10-$20 for the luxury of internet access for such a short flight? Not likely. Maybe a longer flight, but probably not most people who aren't flying first class already. Besides, they already charge that $10 fee just to use the in airport wifi. So if you have one connecting flight and a wait at each airport thats: 10*5 = $50. Once while you're waiting for the first flight, on the first flight, at the next airport, on your next plain, and finally when you're waiting to get picked up.
You know, most of the tax increases in California are voted for directly by the voters. Notice how many bond measures get passed? Yes, those are taxes. California is simply financially suicidle. The state would not fall into a deficit situation if they would stop giving money to special interest groups for projects that have nothing to do with basic govrnment services.
I have a personal hatred of the Sierra club in my area due to their campaining against turning a worthless small patch of cow grazing land into housing. And thus, housing around my area is still around $600k for the median home. Thanks Sierra club for again making the lives of Californians everywhere miserable so you can enjoy your weekend nature hikes. Of course, if those houses were there maybe so many people wouldn't have to drive 60 miles everyday to where housing is affordable. I ride my bike to work BTW, so I'm just speaking for those who don't have that luxury.
This is the point of this product, not having to carry around a bunch of extra chargers and adapters. I love that USB is becoming a defacto low voltage standard. My cellphone and bluetooth headset both charge from USB ports, even with my computer off because I have a powered hub.
Maybe someday when we all have solar panels on our house, we'll have USB power outlets right next to our 120V ones.
(I really hated the days of 100+ different power adapters with different voltage/current/connectors)
Yes, because we should all make financial decisions that effect our lives based on a 90 minute movie to sway our emotions. By an electric car if it makes financial sense, not because it gives you warm fuzzies.
I love TI calcualtors and everything, don't get me wrong, the TI-89 is great.... the thing is, TI has improved there product SQUAT since I bought mine in freakin' 1999! The current generation of TI-89 is almost EXACTLY the same, despite the fact that it must now cost them a fraction of the cost to manufacture as it did in 1999. Lets face it, we are talking about an archaic CPU, a ultra low resolution black OR white display, limited memory, limited functionality. Now, I'm not saying that the next gen calculator should have more hardware for the sake of keeping up to date, but it should really at least have a large subset of the capabilities of PC software packages such as MATLAB, Mathcad, Mathematica, etc.... why are they holding back? They could improve the product so much, but they refuse to do so, and instead charge you $120 for something that costs them $5 to manufacture.
Go figure...
Actually, pretty much any lithium-ion battery is extremely dangerious and flammable under the right conditions. The only thing preventing most batteries from bursting into flames is a tiny IC that controls the charge/discharge current of the battery. I've seen a video where your standard lithium-ion battery is punctured and the battery instantly starts bursting into flames. A reaction with atmosphere is all that is needed.
Lead acid batteries on the other hand are even more dangerous, luckily, these are already banned, but I wouldn't be surprised if screeners missed them since they are too busy looking for bottles of water in your baggage.
Oh! you're wrong though. The description on newegg is wrong. If you go to XFX's website, the part number: PVT71JYHE9 definetly doesn't have a fan on it. I don't see a fan on any of the pictures.
I realize this.... I'm building a new computer :P
:(
2 E16814150189
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
I'll definately be putting this in my next computer I'm building. The AGP card I have now has a tiny fan that's noisier than anything even with it on the desktop. When are the 65nm based cards coming out?
Yeah those demos were pretty cool because they were optimized for the cards and really pushed the performance to the edge. Your average game available out now won't do that, since it's developed for a mainstream market. It would be rather pointless to make a game only work with the highest end card, and most games don't scale very well graphics-wise.