I'm not saying I'm average. I'm just saying that older technologies like incadescent bulbs waste a whole lot of electricity unnecessarily.
And what is the point of leaving your computer on if you are at work or sleeping? That's 400Watts * 16 hours. Complete waste. I do use my AC in the summer, but I try to use fans when practical.
I was also talking about electricity consumption, which is completely different from gasoline which is non renewable. We would probably have to more than double our electrical capacity to produce the needed hydrogen to replace gasoline. The only way to do that would likely be nuclear.
5KW's? That's ridiculus. I live in an apartment and essentially the only thing I use a significant amount of power on is my fridge and my computer. I'm always amazed when I visit someone's house, I look up at the ceiling and notice 10, 60w light bulbs, a couple 100W halogen's just lighting up the ceiling, etc. And that's just a couple rooms. You can light up an entire house on less than 100W if you switch to flourencent. And people also do stupid things like leave their computer on 24 hours a day.
It's no wonder we have to keep building new power plants. With electricity at only $0.10 per Kwatt hour no one cares enough to conserve.
But what about all that fancy TV entertainment homecenter furniture???
I see way too many people with expensive TV's put them in the corner or some off angle in a room. And then they go on to haphazardly place the surround speakers in whatever location seemed good at the time.
Seriously, I don't think people want to put a projector on their ceiling or the middle of their room and reserve a large screen space because it would look "ugly" or it wouldn't fit in the "family room".
Two other serious disadvantages:
Daylight coming through windows. You wouldn't be able to see anything.
I'm still avoiding LCD's too for a few reasons: 1) Slower refresh rate. Can you set 8ms displays to 85Hz through DVI? This has actually improved quite a bit since they first came out. 2) Poor scaling of lower resolutions. I mean, it's nice to play a game at 1600x1200, but if your framerate suffers it's better to run 1024x768. I have yet to see an LCD scale an image as well as a CRT. It's too bad video cards don't have some sort of built in bicubic interpolation with sharpening to mitigate this effect. 3) Poor color contrast. This doesn't effect gaming so much, it's just ugly.
For FPS I need at least a consistent 60fps. Think of it as trying to catch a ball being thrown at you. What if you could only see two images of it before you could catch it? It would be difficult to judge it's speed wouldn't it? That's why it's so critical to have a high frame rate when gaming.
Saying all that, I'm having a hard time finding a 22" NEC monitor in a local store here, and I live in the CA Bay Area. I fear ordering a 100lb package online only to have the CRT tube smashed by the time it gets here.
It's impossible to show the quality of a display in a picture. You have no idea what the background lighting is. And most images can only represent 256 levels of light in a linear fashion on your monitor, so it's impossible to say show a picture of the sun next to a light bulb and see a fair comparison on your computer monitor.
Why don't they say how many lumens the new display has instad of saying "ultra bright!" Some quantity that can be traced to NIST standards.
If you are dumb enough to install a virus on your phone after getting all those warnings shown in those screenshots you should immediately return the phone and buy one of those cheap $50 phones. If you don't understand the core features of your phone, you have no business owning one just because it's expensive and looks high tech.
I can just imagine those antivirus companies love this. They'll be selling antivirus programs for your phone for a $30/year subscription.
It never amazes me how ignorant the CA voting population is. People wonder how this state got into so much debt, well it's exactly because of things like this where the public gets swayed into voting for more tax increases on unneccessary services.
If companies want to make a profit on stem cell research, let them do it with their own wallet. These grants are simply going to make the state go further into debt.
Plans call for a 17,000-square-foot office with a maximum of 50 employees who will help dole out nearly $300 million in research grants annually over 10 years.
No actual stem cell research is planned at the headquarters, but supporters said winning the bid would give the successful city scientific and marketing prestige that can be used to attract biotechnology companies.
So this means that every citizen of California is funnelling money into the city of San Francisco? Hmm.... is it just me or does it seem like some favors are being traded around here? My guess is that maybe 20% of the money actually goes to research if not less.
Some SATA HDDs are actually IDE HDDs with an interface board built on top of them
Yes, this occured the first few months after SATA was released just to get something out the door, but most manufacutures are starting to build their own SATA specific chipsets now. The problem overall is still latency, not bandwidth with hard drives. Doing random seeks will never get faster unless you increase the RPM or number of read heads.
My old PDA is fine for what I need, and has got only a serial interface, hence I'd like my next computer to include a serial port:-)
Then get a USB2.0 to Serial adapter. I use them at work all the time and they are so much more flexible because you can have as many serial ports as you want.
My old Printer is just fine. So is mine. I have an HP LaserJet 4L that is about 12 years old. I'll still use it in the future too. They have USB to Parallel adapters. They do not cost a lot.
My mouse I have connected to the PS/2 port using a little converter because it feels more responsive in games compared to being connected to the USB port. While this is not a big factor for me, I suppose I'd like a PS/2 port on a new motherboard for the mouse.
"feels" more responsive? How technical. You want PS/2 on a new computer for a mouse because of how it "feels"? The latency of USB is in the microseconds.
My AT-type keyboard is connected to a PS/2 port because when I got my new (at the time) motherboard, a DIN5-to-PS/2 converter was cheaper than a new keyboard.
I'm surprised your keyboard has lasted that long. I have to replace mine at least every couple years or so just from wear. I have a PS/2 right now, but wouldn't mind spending $20 for a USB when it comes time.
My conclusion is: With a parallel port, you can only plug a printer into it. With a PS/2 port, you can only connect a mouse or keyboard. With USB you can connect ANYTHING to them. If you have 8 USB ports to start with you have much more options as to what to plug in.
I mean, if you really have all those old devices then why not just stick with an old computer to go with them?
And the floppy disk and IDE connectors are still hanging around... They just don't get it. I'd be willing to pay a $100 premium for a board with 8 SATA ports, 2 NICs, 8 USB, and 3 firewire ports on the back with no more legacy devices.
Only 2-4 meters? I'm able to get about 5-20 meters with my headset now depending on line of site. I think the range for this new technology should be at least far enough that you can use a wireless device around your house without having to carry the phone with you.
Your teacher helped you debug your Apple II code? In 6th grade, I had to debug my Apple II code myself. I mostly took programs I found it books and modified them in some way. Sometimes I even did it during recess instead of going outside to "play" with the other kids.
I made a lot of "screen savers" that seemed to impress people for whatever reason. But yeah, if it wasn't for at least some computers in schools I would probably never have been interested in programming to the extent that I am. I might not have been in the career I'm in now if it wasn't for computers in schools.
Also, if anyone suggests students should have to learn to write in cursive or write out documents you're nuts. There is no benefit whatsoever in that, unless of course you want to teach them Palm's Grafitti, then that's okay.:)
If your phone has it, which it should, use the T9 input method. It predicts fairly accurately what word you want to type when pressing keys. For example, to type the word "This" you would simply press 8447 on your phone and it predicts you meant "This". However, if you were to use standard text messaging you would have to do this: 844,4447777 T h i s
Where , is a one second pause to wait for the cursor to return so you can type the next letter. Although T9 is not as fast as touch typing (I normally use Dvorak), I'm able to type fast enough on my phone to compose a paragraph or so to e-mail within a few minutes.
In the future, I would like to seem them include accelerometers on cellphones as a standard input devices. With such a device and maybe just a few buttons, you could program gestures to represent words so that you could type incredibly fast.
It's syncronous bandwidth, which means 1.5mbps up and down. DSL typically has a slow upload rate
No restrictions: You're ISP isn't going to complain or shut off your service if you use 1.5Mbps the entire month of service
Quality of service: For a business, losing your network connection for one day could mean a loss of much greater than the $800 paid for one month of service. The ISP's for business service usually have some uptime guarantee, whereas with home users, your connection could be down for 2 days without explanation.
I don't consider a computer that still utilizes floppy disk technology "high end" regardless of the other system components. It would be nice if they would let you take it out as an option like Dell does.
What's interesting is that it only takes about 5 cellphone subscribers per year to pay for that fee. I'm sure at least 50-100 people may be using it concurrently. I think you could get a better deal than 28k:)
At the university I went to, they were smart enough to have the student techs go around and shut off all the computers each night. Sure this caused some inconvience the next morning having to turn the computers back on, but come on... think of the cost savings.
It amazes me sometimes the stupid things people want to do to "help" the environment but then they do stuff like leave their computers on 24/7.
30fps? I'm still waiting for 60fps frame rates on TV. I think that would do much more to improve video quality than HD. When I watch a movie at 24fps it feels like a slideshow during action scenes. Very disappointing.
There is no reason for any electronic device to be tied to the power line frequency anymore. All devices should have their own internal frequencies and filtering to compensate.
That makes me so mad when I see any 16:9 TV stretching a 4:3 image. Either keep it the same aspect ratio and crop or make the original image 16:9. I'm sick of the stupidity of people thinking that no one is going to notice. We notice. It looks ugly. Stop doing this. I do not want to watch any TV shows with everything looking twice as fat as normal.
Even worse, is when they somehow take a film that's originally 16:9, crop it to 4:3, and then play it on a 16:9 projector cropped! Why????
Geee, you mean you have to HACK a motorola phone to get that functionallity?
With Nokia's phone's you just copy your own files and tell the phone to use them as ring tones. No hoops to jump through! Imagine, a world where the phone manufactures care more about their customers than appeasing the cellphone phone companies.
As for the cameras, I use mine quite often, but mostly to document stuff. Like if I see a product I like in the store, I take a picture of it. Or if there is piece of paper with text on it, I can take a picture of it instead of writing it down.
Here's my theory: In order to install new cabling in the ground or on telephone poles requires an immense amount of paper work, regulation, and other beuracracies. Also include the cost of american labor to dig trenches and things start looking pretty unreasonable.
My guess is maybe the environment is different in asian countries to allow these rapid upgrades of infrastructure.
yeah, I had a bunch of the space lego kits. I think I learned more playing with the technic kits though. Gears, motors, and pneumatics were pretty fun. Kids today are spoiled with these robotic control kits. Wish they had those when I was a kid.
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I'm not saying I'm average. I'm just saying that older technologies like incadescent bulbs waste a whole lot of electricity unnecessarily.
And what is the point of leaving your computer on if you are at work or sleeping? That's 400Watts * 16 hours. Complete waste. I do use my AC in the summer, but I try to use fans when practical.
I was also talking about electricity consumption, which is completely different from gasoline which is non renewable. We would probably have to more than double our electrical capacity to produce the needed hydrogen to replace gasoline. The only way to do that would likely be nuclear.
5KW's? That's ridiculus. I live in an apartment and essentially the only thing I use a significant amount of power on is my fridge and my computer. I'm always amazed when I visit someone's house, I look up at the ceiling and notice 10, 60w light bulbs, a couple 100W halogen's just lighting up the ceiling, etc. And that's just a couple rooms. You can light up an entire house on less than 100W if you switch to flourencent. And people also do stupid things like leave their computer on 24 hours a day.
It's no wonder we have to keep building new power plants. With electricity at only $0.10 per Kwatt hour no one cares enough to conserve.
I see way too many people with expensive TV's put them in the corner or some off angle in a room. And then they go on to haphazardly place the surround speakers in whatever location seemed good at the time.
Seriously, I don't think people want to put a projector on their ceiling or the middle of their room and reserve a large screen space because it would look "ugly" or it wouldn't fit in the "family room".
Two other serious disadvantages:
I'm still avoiding LCD's too for a few reasons:
1) Slower refresh rate. Can you set 8ms displays to 85Hz through DVI? This has actually improved quite a bit since they first came out.
2) Poor scaling of lower resolutions. I mean, it's nice to play a game at 1600x1200, but if your framerate suffers it's better to run 1024x768. I have yet to see an LCD scale an image as well as a CRT. It's too bad video cards don't have some sort of built in bicubic interpolation with sharpening to mitigate this effect.
3) Poor color contrast. This doesn't effect gaming so much, it's just ugly.
For FPS I need at least a consistent 60fps. Think of it as trying to catch a ball being thrown at you. What if you could only see two images of it before you could catch it? It would be difficult to judge it's speed wouldn't it? That's why it's so critical to have a high frame rate when gaming.
Saying all that, I'm having a hard time finding a 22" NEC monitor in a local store here, and I live in the CA Bay Area. I fear ordering a 100lb package online only to have the CRT tube smashed by the time it gets here.
It's impossible to show the quality of a display in a picture. You have no idea what the background lighting is. And most images can only represent 256 levels of light in a linear fashion on your monitor, so it's impossible to say show a picture of the sun next to a light bulb and see a fair comparison on your computer monitor.
Why don't they say how many lumens the new display has instad of saying "ultra bright!" Some quantity that can be traced to NIST standards.
If you are dumb enough to install a virus on your phone after getting all those warnings shown in those screenshots you should immediately return the phone and buy one of those cheap $50 phones. If you don't understand the core features of your phone, you have no business owning one just because it's expensive and looks high tech.
I can just imagine those antivirus companies love this. They'll be selling antivirus programs for your phone for a $30/year subscription.
It never amazes me how ignorant the CA voting population is. People wonder how this state got into so much debt, well it's exactly because of things like this where the public gets swayed into voting for more tax increases on unneccessary services.
If companies want to make a profit on stem cell research, let them do it with their own wallet. These grants are simply going to make the state go further into debt.
Plans call for a 17,000-square-foot office with a maximum of 50 employees who will help dole out nearly $300 million in research grants annually over 10 years.
No actual stem cell research is planned at the headquarters, but supporters said winning the bid would give the successful city scientific and marketing prestige that can be used to attract biotechnology companies.
So this means that every citizen of California is funnelling money into the city of San Francisco? Hmm.... is it just me or does it seem like some favors are being traded around here? My guess is that maybe 20% of the money actually goes to research if not less.
Some SATA HDDs are actually IDE HDDs with an interface board built on top of them
Yes, this occured the first few months after SATA was released just to get something out the door, but most manufacutures are starting to build their own SATA specific chipsets now. The problem overall is still latency, not bandwidth with hard drives. Doing random seeks will never get faster unless you increase the RPM or number of read heads.
My old PDA is fine for what I need, and has got only a serial interface, hence I'd like my next computer to include a serial port :-)
Then get a USB2.0 to Serial adapter. I use them at work all the time and they are so much more flexible because you can have as many serial ports as you want.
My old Printer is just fine.
So is mine. I have an HP LaserJet 4L that is about 12 years old. I'll still use it in the future too. They have USB to Parallel adapters. They do not cost a lot.
My mouse I have connected to the PS/2 port using a little converter because it feels more responsive in games compared to being connected to the USB port. While this is not a big factor for me, I suppose I'd like a PS/2 port on a new motherboard for the mouse.
"feels" more responsive? How technical. You want PS/2 on a new computer for a mouse because of how it "feels"? The latency of USB is in the microseconds.
My AT-type keyboard is connected to a PS/2 port because when I got my new (at the time) motherboard, a DIN5-to-PS/2 converter was cheaper than a new keyboard.
I'm surprised your keyboard has lasted that long. I have to replace mine at least every couple years or so just from wear. I have a PS/2 right now, but wouldn't mind spending $20 for a USB when it comes time.
My conclusion is: With a parallel port, you can only plug a printer into it. With a PS/2 port, you can only connect a mouse or keyboard. With USB you can connect ANYTHING to them. If you have 8 USB ports to start with you have much more options as to what to plug in.
I mean, if you really have all those old devices then why not just stick with an old computer to go with them?
Unreal Tournament 2004 is actually pretty good. Much, much better than any multiplayer id has ever done.
And the floppy disk and IDE connectors are still hanging around... They just don't get it. I'd be willing to pay a $100 premium for a board with 8 SATA ports, 2 NICs, 8 USB, and 3 firewire ports on the back with no more legacy devices.
Only 2-4 meters? I'm able to get about 5-20 meters with my headset now depending on line of site. I think the range for this new technology should be at least far enough that you can use a wireless device around your house without having to carry the phone with you.
Your teacher helped you debug your Apple II code? In 6th grade, I had to debug my Apple II code myself. I mostly took programs I found it books and modified them in some way. Sometimes I even did it during recess instead of going outside to "play" with the other kids.
:)
I made a lot of "screen savers" that seemed to impress people for whatever reason. But yeah, if it wasn't for at least some computers in schools I would probably never have been interested in programming to the extent that I am. I might not have been in the career I'm in now if it wasn't for computers in schools.
Also, if anyone suggests students should have to learn to write in cursive or write out documents you're nuts. There is no benefit whatsoever in that, unless of course you want to teach them Palm's Grafitti, then that's okay.
If your phone has it, which it should, use the T9 input method. It predicts fairly accurately what word you want to type when pressing keys. For example, to type the word "This" you would simply press 8447 on your phone and it predicts you meant "This". However, if you were to use standard text messaging you would have to do this:
844,4447777
T h i s
Where , is a one second pause to wait for the cursor to return so you can type the next letter. Although T9 is not as fast as touch typing (I normally use Dvorak), I'm able to type fast enough on my phone to compose a paragraph or so to e-mail within a few minutes.
In the future, I would like to seem them include accelerometers on cellphones as a standard input devices. With such a device and maybe just a few buttons, you could program gestures to represent words so that you could type incredibly fast.
I don't consider a computer that still utilizes floppy disk technology "high end" regardless of the other system components. It would be nice if they would let you take it out as an option like Dell does.
What's interesting is that it only takes about 5 cellphone subscribers per year to pay for that fee. I'm sure at least 50-100 people may be using it concurrently. I think you could get a better deal than 28k :)
At the university I went to, they were smart enough to have the student techs go around and shut off all the computers each night. Sure this caused some inconvience the next morning having to turn the computers back on, but come on... think of the cost savings.
It amazes me sometimes the stupid things people want to do to "help" the environment but then they do stuff like leave their computers on 24/7.
30fps? I'm still waiting for 60fps frame rates on TV. I think that would do much more to improve video quality than HD. When I watch a movie at 24fps it feels like a slideshow during action scenes. Very disappointing.
There is no reason for any electronic device to be tied to the power line frequency anymore. All devices should have their own internal frequencies and filtering to compensate.
That makes me so mad when I see any 16:9 TV stretching a 4:3 image. Either keep it the same aspect ratio and crop or make the original image 16:9. I'm sick of the stupidity of people thinking that no one is going to notice. We notice. It looks ugly. Stop doing this. I do not want to watch any TV shows with everything looking twice as fat as normal.
Even worse, is when they somehow take a film that's originally 16:9, crop it to 4:3, and then play it on a 16:9 projector cropped! Why????
Geee, you mean you have to HACK a motorola phone to get that functionallity?
With Nokia's phone's you just copy your own files and tell the phone to use them as ring tones. No hoops to jump through! Imagine, a world where the phone manufactures care more about their customers than appeasing the cellphone phone companies.
As for the cameras, I use mine quite often, but mostly to document stuff. Like if I see a product I like in the store, I take a picture of it. Or if there is piece of paper with text on it, I can take a picture of it instead of writing it down.
Did anyone else notice the street sign they stole in the beginning of the movie? That's kind of dumb of them to include that in the video...
Can you also exchange the DVD media for a set of floppy disks?
(/me hates floppy disks and multiple CD install sets)
Here's my theory:
In order to install new cabling in the ground or on telephone poles requires an immense amount of paper work, regulation, and other beuracracies. Also include the cost of american labor to dig trenches and things start looking pretty unreasonable.
My guess is maybe the environment is different in asian countries to allow these rapid upgrades of infrastructure.
yeah, I had a bunch of the space lego kits. I think I learned more playing with the technic kits though. Gears, motors, and pneumatics were pretty fun. Kids today are spoiled with these robotic control kits. Wish they had those when I was a kid.