I recently bought a sub-$200 Acer with an N570 dual core Atom processor. It's better than I thought, especially after bumping the RAM. It looks like the Cedar Trail chips will offer a nice performance boost and lower manufacturing costs because of the SOIC integration.
But...
The stupid hardware restrictions Microsoft places on manufacturers to qualify for cheap OEM copies of Windows Starter have absolutely crippled the Netbook segment -- 1024x600 screen resolution and a maximum 1GB RAM is absolutely ridiculous in 2011. With a slightly higher resolution display and 2 to 4GB of memory, these machines would be extremely competitive in the low end portable market.
In Canada, you can buy a prepaid LG Optimus One with Android from Walmart for $88. I pay $10/month for 100MB of data (using wifi at home/work) and another $5 on calls/texts and 911 fees. Assuming that the phone lasts 24 months, my total cost is under $20 per month, contract-free.
Here's the absolutely honest reason I don't own a Macbook Air: My son is 9 and I want to take him to Disneyland when I attend a conference in a few weeks. So, instead of forking over $1300 for a sleek little Mac that I love, I spent $180 on a dual core netbook and another $20 on 2GB of RAM. Surprisingly, it's an OK machine.
The netbook will travel with me to Anaheim in a few weeks -- and it'll do a reasonable job -- and the rest of my Macbook Air fund will be spent enjoying life with my kid while he's still young enough to want me around. Win.
My Aspire One (with dual core Atom and 2GB memory) runs Win 7 just fine. Unfortunately, MS requires netbook manufacturers to cripple their machines with a max of 1GB RAM and a dismal 1024*600 screen to get the discounted OEM licenses that they need to sell with Windows. *that* is the real and overlooked story here.
As for tablets, they're brutally hard to use for real work. Coding? Design? CAD? Scientific modeling? There isn't a (decent) app for that.
Visit Parallax.com - lots of robot kits starting at about $130. These are great gateway products into "real" robotics, without the oversimplification of Lego bricks.
Ron looked around the job site and realized that most of the apprentices were firstee - young and keen, out to prove themselves. And then it struck him - Few of the journeyman electricians were over 40. Those who were had bad backs and repetitive stress injuries. Most of those left owned their own companies or had moved into management. The others wanted out.:)
Modded Insightful? Disseminating this research simply assists anyone insane enough to create and release a similar strain into the wild. Knowledge doesn't grant biological immunity. You'll just have a better cognitive grasp of what's killing you.
I live in Alberta, Canada and there *is* no keep-right law. The trouble is that many drivers assume that there is... and those drivers often seem to assume that should have the right to drive 30 km/h over the limit. It makes me wish for rear mounted missiles when I'm doing 10 km/h or so over the limit while passing and a massive monster truck pulls up on my bumper and lurks like something out of a Steven King noveluntil I've finished passing a line of slow moving transport trucks and pulled out of his way.
It isn't a legal contract rider. It's an email that he asks people who hire him as a speaker to read, and most of the stuff in it is entirely reasonable. He likes good tea (but travels with his own, too), is mildly allergic to cats, doesn't mind well-behaved small dogs, doesn't eat breakfast, is fine flying economy class, doesn't enjoy going out for dinner with large groups of people, likes well-cared for parrots and prefers to stay with locals rather than hotels. These are all good things to know.
Nest's fatal flaw is that one tends to adjust the thermostat in a reactionary manner, *after* you realize that you're too hot or cold. What's actually needed is an anticipatory algorithm. A case in point: the programmable thermostat in our house lets the temperature drop four degrees Celsius every night in the winter. It warms the house up again about half an hour before we get up. If I had a Nest, I would end up teaching it incorrectly -- it would assume that the time to heat the house was when I got out of bed and turned up the heat, when the reality is that we need the house warmed *before* getting up or returning home from work.
I can relate to this. I design embedded systems where memory and clock cycles are always in short supply - my latest project was about 4K of C and assembly. In that environment, it's all about squeezing the maximum performance out of each dollar. Oddly enough, the skills and low-level system design stuff that I learned as a teenager in the mid-1980s now makes me wickedly competitive when it comes to developing consumer electronics.
People often ask me about getting proper nutrition on a vegetarian diet. I always ask them if they carefully plan their current diets, and the answer is usually negative. There is a blind assumption that the inclusion of meat and dairy means that we're eating properly. It's wishful thinking.
The reality is that if you take 100 calories of plant-based foods (say a mix of legumes, tomatoes and other tasty stuff) and 100 calories of meat, the veggie mix will have almost the same amount of protein, 60x the folate, 10x the iron, 10x the magnesium, 2x the calcium, 70x the vitamin C and lots of other good stuff. In addition, it has dietary fiber (lacking in meat), zero cholesterol and 1/8th the fat.
Think, for a second, why cheese has been historically important. If you step back in time three centuries, making a few large rounds of cheese in the late summer was a very good idea. Cheese keeps for a long time and is energy-dense. In January, when fresh food is scarce, a family couls dip into their grain supplies and bake bread to go along with the cheese. There are animals in the barn and root vegetables in the cold cellar as well, so meaty stews were relatively easy. It was all about survival. However, a high-protein, high-cholesterol diet isn't required when we have easy access to fresh food.
It makes good sense from a health perspective to reduce meat intake and increase the number of fresh veggies and fruits you consume - that's relatively simple for most people. It's even easier to cut out soda pop and junk food because it's just a bad habit.
We should all eat vegetarian diets. It doesn't make sense to grow subsidized corn and then use it to sustain an animal that -- given a year or two -- will become food for us. Of course, we'd simply end up with a glut of food in the first world, along with some very angry dairy farmers because getting the food to those who need it is another issue entirely.
Kobo is a Canadian company run by the CEO of Canada's largest book retailer - indigo/chapters. They're seeking to maintain their presence in the market by preemptively offering a tablet before Amazon figures out their international content distribution issues. They have large bookstores in most Major Canadian cities with prominent Kobo ereader displays near the entrance. That kind of exposure is critical, because in Best Buy they'd be relegated to a corner beside much more impressive and expensive tablets. For once, it's not about the US market.;)
He was the co-founder of an American company that currently employs 49,000 people and actually designs and makes stuff. Don't confuse him with money-churning banking leeches.
The bulk of Apple's profit comes from every device that goes out the door—whether it's paid for by you or by a combination of you and your mobile carrier.
Don't worry, you pay 100% the cost of your iPhone. Your mobile carrier is nice enough to loan you the bulk of the purchase price and then extract it from you over the course of a 2-year contract, at an unspecified interest rate. It's similar to loan sharking, except there's no disclosure.:)
This is low voltage stuff - you're not going to be tying it into the grid. Trouble is, I can't really see this being of any use in the real world, unless you happen to live in an off-grid mansion with massive south-facing windows and don't mind green opaque strips blocking the view. It makes more sense to mount a conventional panel with manual tracking that can be adjusted throughout the year and receives sunlight 24 hours a day. A simply charge controller, lead acid battery or two and an inverter can provide enough AC power to run a notebook computer. Of course, *why* you'd want to do this is something else entirely.
Grr, I hate this. I'm in Canada, and the Fire is unavailable here. And it may *never* be available here because Amazon hasn't negotiated movie and audio rights north of the border.
The pilot was not visible in the cockpit in photos I've seen during the final seconds of the flight. Why? The loss of the elevator trim tab alone should not have caused a crash like that. The pilot would simply have had to apply more control pressure. A more probable reason for the crash: Medical emergency followed by extreme control movements at high speed that stressed the aircraft beyond design limits (it was a clipped wing racer with a number of aerodynamic mods). That could cause separation of the trim tab. I'm sure the NTSB report will be enlightening.
I find it interesting the pilot is not visible in photos of the cockpit during the last few of seconds. Had he been incapacitated by unexpected G loads? Was he reaching down to the floor of the cockpit for some reason? Was there a medical emergency? One shot clearly shows the left elevator trim tab was missing during the final plunge to the ground. The question, of course, is whether it separated as a result of extreme high speed maneuvering or whether it was a cause of the crash. I doubt the loss of elevator trim would be enough to cause the accident because its purpose is to adjust the pitch of flight so the pilot doesn't have to maintain control pressure. The pilot could controlled the aircraft without trim.
I just crunched the numbers. While Netflix stands to lose about 1m subscribers, they will have markedly higher revenue. Using the numbers from their July 25th guidance, they anticipated 25m customers with monthly revenue of $223.75 million. The revised numbers show 24m customers with revenue of $287.64 million per month. And that last number is a conservative estimated assuming that all of their DVD subscribers are on the cheapest 1 DVD at a time plan. So, to recap: Netflix has increased revenue per customer by 33.85% at a cost of 4% of their customer base. That's good business, folks.
It should read "35% of self-selected respondents to an online poll at an online shopping website indicate that they will buy the iPhone 5." In other words, it's meaningless. I am impressed by the brand loyalty that Apple has managed to generate in the short time they've been in the phone market, but it'll become increasingly difficult to sell $650+ handsets to consumers as the market matures.
The trouble is that the pope has no sway over the countries where population is growing at a rate of almost 4% per year - Liberia, Afghanistan, East Timor, etc. At this rate, their population will double in under 20 years. It's a function of lack of education and extreme poverty that's to blame in those nations. In comparison, Sweden and France have a growth rate of about 0.5%, and countries like Germany, Russia and Lithuania actually have negative growth.
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I recently bought a sub-$200 Acer with an N570 dual core Atom processor. It's better than I thought, especially after bumping the RAM. It looks like the Cedar Trail chips will offer a nice performance boost and lower manufacturing costs because of the SOIC integration.
But...
The stupid hardware restrictions Microsoft places on manufacturers to qualify for cheap OEM copies of Windows Starter have absolutely crippled the Netbook segment -- 1024x600 screen resolution and a maximum 1GB RAM is absolutely ridiculous in 2011. With a slightly higher resolution display and 2 to 4GB of memory, these machines would be extremely competitive in the low end portable market.
In Canada, you can buy a prepaid LG Optimus One with Android from Walmart for $88. I pay $10/month for 100MB of data (using wifi at home/work) and another $5 on calls/texts and 911 fees. Assuming that the phone lasts 24 months, my total cost is under $20 per month, contract-free.
Here's the absolutely honest reason I don't own a Macbook Air: My son is 9 and I want to take him to Disneyland when I attend a conference in a few weeks. So, instead of forking over $1300 for a sleek little Mac that I love, I spent $180 on a dual core netbook and another $20 on 2GB of RAM. Surprisingly, it's an OK machine. The netbook will travel with me to Anaheim in a few weeks -- and it'll do a reasonable job -- and the rest of my Macbook Air fund will be spent enjoying life with my kid while he's still young enough to want me around. Win.
My Aspire One (with dual core Atom and 2GB memory) runs Win 7 just fine. Unfortunately, MS requires netbook manufacturers to cripple their machines with a max of 1GB RAM and a dismal 1024*600 screen to get the discounted OEM licenses that they need to sell with Windows. *that* is the real and overlooked story here. As for tablets, they're brutally hard to use for real work. Coding? Design? CAD? Scientific modeling? There isn't a (decent) app for that.
Visit Parallax.com - lots of robot kits starting at about $130. These are great gateway products into "real" robotics, without the oversimplification of Lego bricks.
Ron looked around the job site and realized that most of the apprentices were firstee - young and keen, out to prove themselves. And then it struck him - Few of the journeyman electricians were over 40. Those who were had bad backs and repetitive stress injuries. Most of those left owned their own companies or had moved into management. The others wanted out. :)
Modded Insightful? Disseminating this research simply assists anyone insane enough to create and release a similar strain into the wild. Knowledge doesn't grant biological immunity. You'll just have a better cognitive grasp of what's killing you.
I live in Alberta, Canada and there *is* no keep-right law. The trouble is that many drivers assume that there is... and those drivers often seem to assume that should have the right to drive 30 km/h over the limit. It makes me wish for rear mounted missiles when I'm doing 10 km/h or so over the limit while passing and a massive monster truck pulls up on my bumper and lurks like something out of a Steven King noveluntil I've finished passing a line of slow moving transport trucks and pulled out of his way.
It isn't a legal contract rider. It's an email that he asks people who hire him as a speaker to read, and most of the stuff in it is entirely reasonable. He likes good tea (but travels with his own, too), is mildly allergic to cats, doesn't mind well-behaved small dogs, doesn't eat breakfast, is fine flying economy class, doesn't enjoy going out for dinner with large groups of people, likes well-cared for parrots and prefers to stay with locals rather than hotels. These are all good things to know.
Nest's fatal flaw is that one tends to adjust the thermostat in a reactionary manner, *after* you realize that you're too hot or cold. What's actually needed is an anticipatory algorithm. A case in point: the programmable thermostat in our house lets the temperature drop four degrees Celsius every night in the winter. It warms the house up again about half an hour before we get up. If I had a Nest, I would end up teaching it incorrectly -- it would assume that the time to heat the house was when I got out of bed and turned up the heat, when the reality is that we need the house warmed *before* getting up or returning home from work.
I can relate to this. I design embedded systems where memory and clock cycles are always in short supply - my latest project was about 4K of C and assembly. In that environment, it's all about squeezing the maximum performance out of each dollar. Oddly enough, the skills and low-level system design stuff that I learned as a teenager in the mid-1980s now makes me wickedly competitive when it comes to developing consumer electronics.
People often ask me about getting proper nutrition on a vegetarian diet. I always ask them if they carefully plan their current diets, and the answer is usually negative. There is a blind assumption that the inclusion of meat and dairy means that we're eating properly. It's wishful thinking.
The reality is that if you take 100 calories of plant-based foods (say a mix of legumes, tomatoes and other tasty stuff) and 100 calories of meat, the veggie mix will have almost the same amount of protein, 60x the folate, 10x the iron, 10x the magnesium, 2x the calcium, 70x the vitamin C and lots of other good stuff. In addition, it has dietary fiber (lacking in meat), zero cholesterol and 1/8th the fat.
Think, for a second, why cheese has been historically important. If you step back in time three centuries, making a few large rounds of cheese in the late summer was a very good idea. Cheese keeps for a long time and is energy-dense. In January, when fresh food is scarce, a family couls dip into their grain supplies and bake bread to go along with the cheese. There are animals in the barn and root vegetables in the cold cellar as well, so meaty stews were relatively easy. It was all about survival. However, a high-protein, high-cholesterol diet isn't required when we have easy access to fresh food.
It makes good sense from a health perspective to reduce meat intake and increase the number of fresh veggies and fruits you consume - that's relatively simple for most people. It's even easier to cut out soda pop and junk food because it's just a bad habit.
We should all eat vegetarian diets. It doesn't make sense to grow subsidized corn and then use it to sustain an animal that -- given a year or two -- will become food for us. Of course, we'd simply end up with a glut of food in the first world, along with some very angry dairy farmers because getting the food to those who need it is another issue entirely.
Kobo is a Canadian company run by the CEO of Canada's largest book retailer - indigo/chapters. They're seeking to maintain their presence in the market by preemptively offering a tablet before Amazon figures out their international content distribution issues. They have large bookstores in most Major Canadian cities with prominent Kobo ereader displays near the entrance. That kind of exposure is critical, because in Best Buy they'd be relegated to a corner beside much more impressive and expensive tablets. For once, it's not about the US market. ;)
He was the co-founder of an American company that currently employs 49,000 people and actually designs and makes stuff. Don't confuse him with money-churning banking leeches.
The bulk of Apple's profit comes from every device that goes out the door—whether it's paid for by you or by a combination of you and your mobile carrier.
Don't worry, you pay 100% the cost of your iPhone. Your mobile carrier is nice enough to loan you the bulk of the purchase price and then extract it from you over the course of a 2-year contract, at an unspecified interest rate. It's similar to loan sharking, except there's no disclosure. :)
It's the 21st century. You'd think /. would have edit functionality by now.
This is low voltage stuff - you're not going to be tying it into the grid. Trouble is, I can't really see this being of any use in the real world, unless you happen to live in an off-grid mansion with massive south-facing windows and don't mind green opaque strips blocking the view. It makes more sense to mount a conventional panel with manual tracking that can be adjusted throughout the year and receives sunlight 24 hours a day. A simply charge controller, lead acid battery or two and an inverter can provide enough AC power to run a notebook computer. Of course, *why* you'd want to do this is something else entirely.
Grr, I hate this. I'm in Canada, and the Fire is unavailable here. And it may *never* be available here because Amazon hasn't negotiated movie and audio rights north of the border.
The pilot was not visible in the cockpit in photos I've seen during the final seconds of the flight. Why? The loss of the elevator trim tab alone should not have caused a crash like that. The pilot would simply have had to apply more control pressure. A more probable reason for the crash: Medical emergency followed by extreme control movements at high speed that stressed the aircraft beyond design limits (it was a clipped wing racer with a number of aerodynamic mods). That could cause separation of the trim tab. I'm sure the NTSB report will be enlightening.
I find it interesting the pilot is not visible in photos of the cockpit during the last few of seconds. Had he been incapacitated by unexpected G loads? Was he reaching down to the floor of the cockpit for some reason? Was there a medical emergency? One shot clearly shows the left elevator trim tab was missing during the final plunge to the ground. The question, of course, is whether it separated as a result of extreme high speed maneuvering or whether it was a cause of the crash. I doubt the loss of elevator trim would be enough to cause the accident because its purpose is to adjust the pitch of flight so the pilot doesn't have to maintain control pressure. The pilot could controlled the aircraft without trim.
I just crunched the numbers. While Netflix stands to lose about 1m subscribers, they will have markedly higher revenue. Using the numbers from their July 25th guidance, they anticipated 25m customers with monthly revenue of $223.75 million. The revised numbers show 24m customers with revenue of $287.64 million per month. And that last number is a conservative estimated assuming that all of their DVD subscribers are on the cheapest 1 DVD at a time plan. So, to recap: Netflix has increased revenue per customer by 33.85% at a cost of 4% of their customer base. That's good business, folks.
As an inhabitant of the USA, I think the biggest problem is the strong individualistic streak that we have.
That's not individualism. It's a misplaced sense of entitlement. The customer is not always right. :)
It should read "35% of self-selected respondents to an online poll at an online shopping website indicate that they will buy the iPhone 5." In other words, it's meaningless. I am impressed by the brand loyalty that Apple has managed to generate in the short time they've been in the phone market, but it'll become increasingly difficult to sell $650+ handsets to consumers as the market matures.
The trouble is that the pope has no sway over the countries where population is growing at a rate of almost 4% per year - Liberia, Afghanistan, East Timor, etc. At this rate, their population will double in under 20 years. It's a function of lack of education and extreme poverty that's to blame in those nations. In comparison, Sweden and France have a growth rate of about 0.5%, and countries like Germany, Russia and Lithuania actually have negative growth.