It's still a cost saving measure. There's no reason they have to use a belt or a ribbon cable with soldered ends. It's just those are the cheapest options.
Besides, my DVD player (the only one I've ever purchased) is now 10 years old. Heck, my 5 CD changer is 12 years old. Both still work. I fully intend to see how long they last.
Some cars, particularly Cadillacs but also some others, dim their LED tailights by flickering the lights on and off rapidly rather than simply lowering the voltage to the bulbs. I'm not sure what the exact frequency it is, but it has to be around 40-80 Hz. It's very noticeable on the cars that do it this way.
If you're heating your home electrically, and you live in a cold climate, you should be using a heat pump as it's way more efficient than resistive electric heating.
The only places where resistive electric heaters make any sense is relatively mild climates where you may only need heat a few days a year, and it's not worth the cost of installing a heat pump system.
You're probably thinking of the Sony XEL-1, which was an 11" OLED TV, and as far as I know the only OLED TV ever offered to the general public (in the US). It's out of production now.
Since you generally get the energy for your car from a different place than your electric appliances, people don't think to compare them and generally don't. Hence, many people don't think of their car as the most energy-hungry thing they have, even though it almost certainly is.
That's because around here, nuclear power and Apple are two things that everyone has pretty much already made up their minds on (hence, the "fanboy" effect). Therefore, any article that comes up here on those topics is pretty much either people fellating the author/submitter, or going through whatever contortions they think are necessary to try and dismiss the article as bullshit.
Other similar topics include (but are not limited to): HTML5, global warming, vi vs emacs, and whether or not the second Matrix movie was any good.
Around here, such a device is illegal and any cop that sees it on your car can pull you over for it. Something like that is not going to be subtle either, so don't expect to drive around for long without the cops noticing it. Same thing with those license plate covers that I sometimes see people put on their cars.
Visualization is pretty useless for this kind of thing. Usually these older PCs have custom propriety PCI and ISA cards in them that interact with the hardware and/or make heavy use RS232, GPIB, and other connections. You pretty much have to run the OS on the bare metal.
The new stuff coming out may be a bit more virtualization friendly, since the push is to move towards USB and ethernet.
I'm pretty sure any new computer that comes with XP nowadays actually comes with a Windows 7 license that has downgrade rights, and the OEM has conveniently already downgraded the machine for you. The giveaway is the Windows 7 OEM sticker on the side of the computer. This is still allowed by Microsoft, though I'm sure they would prefer you ran Windows 7 over XP. Oh, and you can do this a very, very long time (you could still downgrade back to Windows 3.1 as late as 2008).
Well, they did force you to move to IE6 SP2 when installing XP SP2. IE6 SP1, as seen in XP SP1 and Windows 2000 is unsupported. Mayibe that's what he meant?
Why? Switching between keyboard layouts isn't really any more challenging than switching between languages for a bi-lingual person.
Though if you're learning another layout, it doesn't hurt to make sure that you still use qwerty occasionally. My qwerty skills got pretty rusty when I went Dvorak years back on my home PC, and at that time that was the only computer I used on a regular basis.
Also, as laptops go, you can buy stickers to relabel the keycaps, or just learn to touchtype. Not sure there's much you can do about the Blackberry.
Why would aliens be more understanding of the metric system than imperial? Granted, they'd probably get the conversions between units a lot easier as they would be more consistent, but in the end most of the base units for the metric system are pretty much just as arbitrary as the imperial system. I know the base SI units are defined differently now, but the second is based upon the motion of the planet we live on, and the meter is based upon the dimensions of said planet. That would probably make equally as much sense to aliens as basing a unit of length on the size of various parts of our body, like the foot, or a unit of weight based upon a commonly available object, like seed from a certain plant.
If anything, aliens would be more likely to understand Planck units than metric.
If you're trying to approximate something, a meter is close enough to a yard to be essentially the same thing:) If you want to be slightly more precise, subtract 10% when going from yards to meters.
Besides, a yard/meter is about the length of one stride. It's also about half my height, or half the distance between the ends of my fingertips when I have my arms stretched out.
Guess it depends on what you're using it for. As weather goes, 0 degrees F is really cold, and 100 degrees F is really hot. Most weather falls within that range, and the weather that doesn't is usually considered pretty extreme.
Why don't you throw some more ram into them? If they are only 5 years old you should be able to take them up to 1-2GB, possibly more. Then they'd likely be just fine with Vista or 7.
Besides XP has grown over the years with all the patches. The initial release runs pretty decently on a P3 with 256MB, but XP + SP3 + IE8 is pretty unhappy on P4 with 512 MB too.
Why? There actually isn't much different in 7 than Vista nowadays. Vista is on SP2 now, the actual problems with the OS are for the most part, fixed. The rest of the problems, mainly the lack of proper drivers, isn't really an issue nowadays either unless you're running hardware that's pretty out of date by 2011 standards. What's left is pretty much just a bunch of UI tweaks in Windows 7 that I really don't care for anyway, though the desktop slideshow thing is kind of spiffy.
We tried that in the US. In many ways, it's counter-productive in terms of removing the worst cars off the road, as a new car had to be purchased in order to get a rebate. For the most part, it's not the people who can afford a new car that are driving around the old, polluting, barely going deathtraps - it's the people who can't afford a new car who are driving those vehicles around. So what ended up happening is we took a bunch of perfectly serviceable vehicles, most of which were around 10-12 years old and destroyed them. Meanwhile, the people who would have otherwise purchased those vehicles on the used market had to hold onto their old polluting deathtraps for even longer due to the reduced supply of cheap used cars available.
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It's still a cost saving measure. There's no reason they have to use a belt or a ribbon cable with soldered ends. It's just those are the cheapest options.
Besides, my DVD player (the only one I've ever purchased) is now 10 years old. Heck, my 5 CD changer is 12 years old. Both still work. I fully intend to see how long they last.
2^30 years?
I'd like to introduce you to the HotPlug.
Some cars, particularly Cadillacs but also some others, dim their LED tailights by flickering the lights on and off rapidly rather than simply lowering the voltage to the bulbs. I'm not sure what the exact frequency it is, but it has to be around 40-80 Hz. It's very noticeable on the cars that do it this way.
If you're heating your home electrically, and you live in a cold climate, you should be using a heat pump as it's way more efficient than resistive electric heating.
The only places where resistive electric heaters make any sense is relatively mild climates where you may only need heat a few days a year, and it's not worth the cost of installing a heat pump system.
You're probably thinking of the Sony XEL-1, which was an 11" OLED TV, and as far as I know the only OLED TV ever offered to the general public (in the US). It's out of production now.
You mean something like this?
Since you generally get the energy for your car from a different place than your electric appliances, people don't think to compare them and generally don't. Hence, many people don't think of their car as the most energy-hungry thing they have, even though it almost certainly is.
That's because around here, nuclear power and Apple are two things that everyone has pretty much already made up their minds on (hence, the "fanboy" effect). Therefore, any article that comes up here on those topics is pretty much either people fellating the author/submitter, or going through whatever contortions they think are necessary to try and dismiss the article as bullshit.
Other similar topics include (but are not limited to): HTML5, global warming, vi vs emacs, and whether or not the second Matrix movie was any good.
Around here, such a device is illegal and any cop that sees it on your car can pull you over for it. Something like that is not going to be subtle either, so don't expect to drive around for long without the cops noticing it. Same thing with those license plate covers that I sometimes see people put on their cars.
That doesn't work (for long). Around here, when they started that, people stopped taking the yellow lights seriously.
Visualization is pretty useless for this kind of thing. Usually these older PCs have custom propriety PCI and ISA cards in them that interact with the hardware and/or make heavy use RS232, GPIB, and other connections. You pretty much have to run the OS on the bare metal.
The new stuff coming out may be a bit more virtualization friendly, since the push is to move towards USB and ethernet.
I'm pretty sure any new computer that comes with XP nowadays actually comes with a Windows 7 license that has downgrade rights, and the OEM has conveniently already downgraded the machine for you. The giveaway is the Windows 7 OEM sticker on the side of the computer. This is still allowed by Microsoft, though I'm sure they would prefer you ran Windows 7 over XP. Oh, and you can do this a very, very long time (you could still downgrade back to Windows 3.1 as late as 2008).
Well, they did force you to move to IE6 SP2 when installing XP SP2. IE6 SP1, as seen in XP SP1 and Windows 2000 is unsupported. Mayibe that's what he meant?
Why? Switching between keyboard layouts isn't really any more challenging than switching between languages for a bi-lingual person.
Though if you're learning another layout, it doesn't hurt to make sure that you still use qwerty occasionally. My qwerty skills got pretty rusty when I went Dvorak years back on my home PC, and at that time that was the only computer I used on a regular basis.
Also, as laptops go, you can buy stickers to relabel the keycaps, or just learn to touchtype. Not sure there's much you can do about the Blackberry.
Why would aliens be more understanding of the metric system than imperial? Granted, they'd probably get the conversions between units a lot easier as they would be more consistent, but in the end most of the base units for the metric system are pretty much just as arbitrary as the imperial system. I know the base SI units are defined differently now, but the second is based upon the motion of the planet we live on, and the meter is based upon the dimensions of said planet. That would probably make equally as much sense to aliens as basing a unit of length on the size of various parts of our body, like the foot, or a unit of weight based upon a commonly available object, like seed from a certain plant.
If anything, aliens would be more likely to understand Planck units than metric.
If you're trying to approximate something, a meter is close enough to a yard to be essentially the same thing :) If you want to be slightly more precise, subtract 10% when going from yards to meters.
Besides, a yard/meter is about the length of one stride. It's also about half my height, or half the distance between the ends of my fingertips when I have my arms stretched out.
Guess it depends on what you're using it for. As weather goes, 0 degrees F is really cold, and 100 degrees F is really hot. Most weather falls within that range, and the weather that doesn't is usually considered pretty extreme.
Maybe not on newer cars, but I've seen that recommendation in the manuals of plenty of older cars.
Yeah, that would be like Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone. Oh...wait....
From reading his post, I'm going to guess it's a LG BD390.
In that case, he'd probably have an nVidia Quadro card. The 8800gt is for gamers.
Why don't you throw some more ram into them? If they are only 5 years old you should be able to take them up to 1-2GB, possibly more. Then they'd likely be just fine with Vista or 7. Besides XP has grown over the years with all the patches. The initial release runs pretty decently on a P3 with 256MB, but XP + SP3 + IE8 is pretty unhappy on P4 with 512 MB too.
Why? There actually isn't much different in 7 than Vista nowadays. Vista is on SP2 now, the actual problems with the OS are for the most part, fixed. The rest of the problems, mainly the lack of proper drivers, isn't really an issue nowadays either unless you're running hardware that's pretty out of date by 2011 standards. What's left is pretty much just a bunch of UI tweaks in Windows 7 that I really don't care for anyway, though the desktop slideshow thing is kind of spiffy.
We tried that in the US. In many ways, it's counter-productive in terms of removing the worst cars off the road, as a new car had to be purchased in order to get a rebate. For the most part, it's not the people who can afford a new car that are driving around the old, polluting, barely going deathtraps - it's the people who can't afford a new car who are driving those vehicles around. So what ended up happening is we took a bunch of perfectly serviceable vehicles, most of which were around 10-12 years old and destroyed them. Meanwhile, the people who would have otherwise purchased those vehicles on the used market had to hold onto their old polluting deathtraps for even longer due to the reduced supply of cheap used cars available.