How is that wrong? The applications you list are areas where you would want something strong, lightweight, and people are usually willing to pay a bit more for a good bike or pair of shades, meaning cost isn't as much of an issue. Hence titanium.
I think the poster was refering to titanium graphics cards, laptops, mp3 players, speakers, credit cards, or whatever where titanium is more of a buzzword more than anything eles.
what about places like MIT where they use norm referencing for grading their students? I would certainly be pissed off at a doper because it directly affects my grade in the class.
I think that's more a problem with places that grade on a curve, rather than doping in general.
...And seat 14C has established and maintained a single encrypted tunnel to a non-resolving IP, over which he appears to have routed a high volume of bidirectional traffic.
That's assuming they would even allow that in the first place.
Most places with electric heat either have sources of plentiful, cheap electricity such as hydro or geothermal, or are located in areas were you might need heat for a couple days a year, and it's easier just to use electric as it is very low maintance.
To answer the original poster's question, incandescent light bulbs are very efficient electric heaters. The only concern might be heat lost into the attic from ceiling mounted lights, and the stray photons escaping out your windows.
I find they do fine in a light fixture that gets a lot of of airflow, and if they are mounted with the ballast at the bottom, such as a regular light with a lampshade. I haven't had one go out yet in my lamps. I found they don't last very long in an enclosed fixture, especially if they are mounted upside-down like for ceiling recessed light-fixtures. I think in many cases, it's the ballast that's going bad because it's getting too hot, rather than the actual bulb.
ARM mortgages aren't bad. It put people into houses that couldn't have bought a house any other way. The problem is those people didn't try to improve their credit and find more steady employment before the rate started adjusting in 2 years. Had they improved their credit and got a better job they could have refinanced within 2 years to a 30 year fixed.
That's the kind of thinking that got us into this mess. "Oh, I'll just worry about it tomorrow." A lot of people are stuck in these ARMs because they can't refinance their house (no equity in it), and even with a better job or improved credit they still don't have the thousands of dollars sitting around to do it. They would have been much better off sticking with what they can afford.
Besides, the only reason the house was so expensive to begin with is all the easy credit floating around in the first place.
I've found that most LED lights for things like that tend to have very simple power supplies, usually just a resistor to step the AC voltage down (due to tolerances in the resistors, this can make the brightness vary dramitically from one unit to the next), or they try to put enough LEDs in series to step the voltages down enough (especially bad if the LEDs are different colors like for Christmas lights). They should be using a current source to light up the LEDs instead. Furthermore, they like to overdrive the LEDs a bit to make them bright, which has the side effect of really cutting down on their lifespan (as opposed to putting them on a DC power to light them continously). Sadly, it's not really easy to tell from just looking at the product on the shelf how they are doing things inside. You can check to see if they are 110V only, or if the product will also accept 230V (a good indication they are using an AC to DC power supply somewhere), or if they have a demo unit lit up on display you can check to see if it's flickering at 60Hz (which is a bad sign).
Just wondering, if where I live (in France) all the power I consume comes from a nuclear power plant, does it still matter if I do all of that?
Well, most of those will still reduce your energy use regardless of how you get your power. The only things you could ignore in that list if you wanted to would be more efficient appliances and having your computers go to sleep when idle if you have electric heat.
I don't get how satellites can be cheaper than simply setting up bunches of solar panels on the ground. Putting poundage into space and managing it is damned expensive, let alone the precision aiming technology. I don't get the accounting here. Please help me, I'm a doctor, not an accountant (well ok, I'm not actually a doc, but it makes a better cliche).
Well, apparently you aren't a good reader either. From TFA: "It could be done with today's technology, experts say. But the prohibitive cost of lifting thousands of tons of equipment into space makes it uneconomical."
The article then goes on to describe how it is a demonstration to show that such a project is feasible and safe.
Especially since any light that the satellite is reflecting is essentially light it did not capture. Of course, the cells themselves are probably going to reflect some light, but if they reflecting at Earth that means they would be misaligned (you want them facing towards the sun). I doubt that it's going to be a very bright object in the sky, though you could probably find it if you knew where to look.
Actually, that would only be true when the satellite is not between the earth and the sun. Otherwise, the satellite going to be blocking light that would otherwise be hitting the earth anyway. The net amount of energy isn't going to change (ignoring inefficiencies in the satellite), just the form of the energy. Now he would be right if the satellite was in the Lagrange point or something like that, but even then I would think we could safely ignore it.
Sure, it isn't hard to figure that over time, computers were going to get faster, and things like graphics capabilities were going to improve. But 20 years ago, you imagined the internet as it is today? Flash? Myspace? Youtube? eBay? eCommerce? The free software movement? Porn? Carrying around thousands of albums in the palm of your hand? Trading feature-length films with people on the other side of the planet? Sharing your photos with people all over the planet? Broadband? 1TB harddrives? Multi-GHz processors? Checking your email on your mobile phone? Maybe you were particularly imaginative, or maybe you're just talking out of your ass. 20 years ago, computers were for the hobbiests, video gamers, and business types. Most people, even the ones that used them, saw little reason for Joe Average to want a computer. Or are you telling me that 20 years ago, you imagined an age where every 14 year old girl could not live without her own personal computer?
People were saying the same thing 20 years ago, I'm sure. The thing is, we currently use computers for things that they probably never imagined. Sure, the average computer now seems plenty powerful for the average user, but just wait until the next big thing comes around. One of those could be high DPI screens. I would like to make my 1600x1200 monitor a 16000x12000 monitor, with two orders of magnitude more pixels, you're going to need some serious computing power to back that up.
Lenovo ranks very middle of the road for reliability for 2007. Apple is the top ranked vendor according to Consumer Reports. Behind them is Sony, by a small margin, and (in the laptop category only) Dell. Then there is a significant drop to the middle range of reliability where you have Lenovo and Toshiba, then another drop and HP and Gateway. I picked Sony because even though when objectively tested they are not quite as reliable as Apple's systems, they are the closest major brand.
I'm relying upon Consumer Reports for the numbers, because they're the best source I know. They have no bias, take no advertising dollars from anyone, don't accept free hardware to test, buying everything from normal retail channels, and their entire business relies upon their reputation. I trust their testing and surveys just a wee bit more than your unsupported assertion.
I've seen that survey, and it just doesn't jive with my experience. Here's one that does:
Apple and Lenovo (along with Fijitsu, who I'm not familiar as a notebook maker) take the top spots. Sony and Toshiba follow them up, Dell is in the middle, and things get progressively worse until you end at the bottom with makers like Acer, which are exactly where they belong.
Your analogy is flawed. In such an analogy, you cannot substitute Honda or Ford for PCs. It would have to be every other manufacturer of car except Lexus. Some are cheaper and some are more expensive. In fact, I can go configure hundreds of gaming PCs that are twice to three times the most expensive desktop from Apple. Thus, Apple machines are cheaper than PCs by your argument, after all we're just talking price, not value.
No, because you can configure a PC to be an expensive gaming machine*, or you can configure it to be a cheaper. Macs are not as flexible, you can only pick the more expensive configurations. Hence, Macs are either more expensive, or in the best case, or about the same price.
*Besides, a high end gaming PC is still going to be cheaper than a Mac (re-)geared for gaming.
Except it isn't a flawed methodology and it isn't the whole methodology. When comparing Apple machines to everything else, you have a fixed variable. Say you wanted to compare the prices of Lenovo machines with others, a good place to start is finding one or more Lenovo systems, then looking for a vender that offers something similar. Choosing a random machine from another vendor an hoping Lenovo happens to offer something similar to compare to it, is not really a useful starting point.
You reconfigure both machines, the Apple and the other systems to be as close as possible, but if there is nothing offered from some vendor that is even close, well it isn't a very good comparison, is it?
The problem comes in when you extrapolate it out to make the general statement "Macs are not more expensive than PCs". It just doesn't work that way. To use the car flawed car analogy again it's like saying that Lexus is not more expensive than Ford because the low end Lexus is similar in price and features to the high-end Ford. Nevermind that Ford sells cars from $15-32K and Lexus sells cars from $32-$80k (numbers made up).
Yeah, it is sort of like that, except you can't really add aftermarket reliability, now can you? When you're talking about the cost of Apple versus other vendors, what is the point of making a comparison at all unless you're comparing similar offerings. I have a 18 year old, used, TI calculator worth about $0.10. By comparison, Lenovo systems are tens of thousands of times more expensive. Lenovo systems are overpriced. Gee was that useful to anyone? Nope.
You seem to really like the word "comparison". Open your eyes up to the big picture. It would be like shopping for a car with a list of things like how many radio presets it can store, how many watts the foglights are, and what shade faux wood trim is, and how many cubic inches the door map pocket can hold, as opposed to looking for something that's comfortable, reliable, has four doors, and isn't too expensive.
Well, they made a bad decision when they hired him, at that point it's obvious. To give him $151 million dollars of company money is another bad decision. To simply fire him would be a good decision. Perhaps that's just too much common sense?
Why is it dumb? The service life of a car is probably around 15 years or so, which is an eternity for cell phones. How can they anticipate where cell phones are headed 15 years in advance?
It's not new at all. My 1988 model car would pop up the door lock knob whenever you shut the door, therefore unlocking the door if you had set the locks (it did this mechanically). Therefore, you couldn't lock yourself out because you needed the keys to lock the car. Didn't keep me from locking my keys in it once, as the trunk did not have the same protection.
Actually, most car keys since 2002 are chipped, and you can use this to your advantage. Get a copy of the key made on a regular blank. It won't start the car, but it will still open the doors.
Hmmm... Not sure it is gonna happen. Apple supports only limited range of hardware to ensure hardware really works stable. Allowing user to add some more hardware, which could be extremely poor -- this situation will dramatically increase phonecalls to Apple and you probably will not be very happy if Apple will turn to be non-responsive company, like Microsoft...
This is bunk. They allow you to install pretty much anything you want in a PowerMac/Mac Pro, and it doesn't affect the stability of those machines and seems to cause little fuss. The only reason Apple doesn't sell an expandable is because they don't want to.
I do not have cable, but the few times I've watched at my parent's house I've seen commercials outlining very simply that analog TV is going away and your current TV will cease to function unless you have a converter. Does that mean my parents know.. No! My Dad who's a little savvy in such matters has no idea.
Well, if they have cable, they have nothing to worry about. Their TVs will continue to work until both the cable company stops providing analog cable service and no longer offers a cable box with an analog output. In other words, likely for many years to come. Same for the people buying TVs at Target - most of those TVs are probably not going to be used for OTA broadcasts and will work fine for whatever they were bought for.
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How is that wrong? The applications you list are areas where you would want something strong, lightweight, and people are usually willing to pay a bit more for a good bike or pair of shades, meaning cost isn't as much of an issue. Hence titanium.
I think the poster was refering to titanium graphics cards, laptops, mp3 players, speakers, credit cards, or whatever where titanium is more of a buzzword more than anything eles.
what about places like MIT where they use norm referencing for grading their students? I would certainly be pissed off at a doper because it directly affects my grade in the class.
I think that's more a problem with places that grade on a curve, rather than doping in general.
Things you can do (or atleast attempt) on a plane right now:
1. View porn stored on your laptop's harddrive.
2. View porn stored on your video iPod.
3. Read a dirty magazine.
Seemingly this hasn't been a problem. Why does everyone think the internet is going to change things and must be censored?
...And seat 14C has established and maintained a single encrypted tunnel to a non-resolving IP, over which he appears to have routed a high volume of bidirectional traffic.
That's assuming they would even allow that in the first place.
Idiots on the web can only be an even worse idea.
Why? Most people who are going to be surfing the web are going to be keeping pretty much to themselves.
Most places with electric heat either have sources of plentiful, cheap electricity such as hydro or geothermal, or are located in areas were you might need heat for a couple days a year, and it's easier just to use electric as it is very low maintance.
To answer the original poster's question, incandescent light bulbs are very efficient electric heaters. The only concern might be heat lost into the attic from ceiling mounted lights, and the stray photons escaping out your windows.
I find they do fine in a light fixture that gets a lot of of airflow, and if they are mounted with the ballast at the bottom, such as a regular light with a lampshade. I haven't had one go out yet in my lamps. I found they don't last very long in an enclosed fixture, especially if they are mounted upside-down like for ceiling recessed light-fixtures. I think in many cases, it's the ballast that's going bad because it's getting too hot, rather than the actual bulb.
ARM mortgages aren't bad. It put people into houses that couldn't have bought a house any other way. The problem is those people didn't try to improve their credit and find more steady employment before the rate started adjusting in 2 years. Had they improved their credit and got a better job they could have refinanced within 2 years to a 30 year fixed.
That's the kind of thinking that got us into this mess. "Oh, I'll just worry about it tomorrow." A lot of people are stuck in these ARMs because they can't refinance their house (no equity in it), and even with a better job or improved credit they still don't have the thousands of dollars sitting around to do it. They would have been much better off sticking with what they can afford.
Besides, the only reason the house was so expensive to begin with is all the easy credit floating around in the first place.
I've found that most LED lights for things like that tend to have very simple power supplies, usually just a resistor to step the AC voltage down (due to tolerances in the resistors, this can make the brightness vary dramitically from one unit to the next), or they try to put enough LEDs in series to step the voltages down enough (especially bad if the LEDs are different colors like for Christmas lights). They should be using a current source to light up the LEDs instead. Furthermore, they like to overdrive the LEDs a bit to make them bright, which has the side effect of really cutting down on their lifespan (as opposed to putting them on a DC power to light them continously). Sadly, it's not really easy to tell from just looking at the product on the shelf how they are doing things inside. You can check to see if they are 110V only, or if the product will also accept 230V (a good indication they are using an AC to DC power supply somewhere), or if they have a demo unit lit up on display you can check to see if it's flickering at 60Hz (which is a bad sign).
Just wondering, if where I live (in France) all the power I consume comes from a nuclear power plant, does it still matter if I do all of that?
Well, most of those will still reduce your energy use regardless of how you get your power. The only things you could ignore in that list if you wanted to would be more efficient appliances and having your computers go to sleep when idle if you have electric heat.
I don't get how satellites can be cheaper than simply setting up bunches of solar panels on the ground. Putting poundage into space and managing it is damned expensive, let alone the precision aiming technology. I don't get the accounting here. Please help me, I'm a doctor, not an accountant (well ok, I'm not actually a doc, but it makes a better cliche).
Well, apparently you aren't a good reader either. From TFA:
"It could be done with today's technology, experts say. But the prohibitive cost of lifting thousands of tons of equipment into space makes it uneconomical."
The article then goes on to describe how it is a demonstration to show that such a project is feasible and safe.
Especially since any light that the satellite is reflecting is essentially light it did not capture. Of course, the cells themselves are probably going to reflect some light, but if they reflecting at Earth that means they would be misaligned (you want them facing towards the sun). I doubt that it's going to be a very bright object in the sky, though you could probably find it if you knew where to look.
Actually, that would only be true when the satellite is not between the earth and the sun. Otherwise, the satellite going to be blocking light that would otherwise be hitting the earth anyway. The net amount of energy isn't going to change (ignoring inefficiencies in the satellite), just the form of the energy. Now he would be right if the satellite was in the Lagrange point or something like that, but even then I would think we could safely ignore it.
Sure, it isn't hard to figure that over time, computers were going to get faster, and things like graphics capabilities were going to improve. But 20 years ago, you imagined the internet as it is today? Flash? Myspace? Youtube? eBay? eCommerce? The free software movement? Porn? Carrying around thousands of albums in the palm of your hand? Trading feature-length films with people on the other side of the planet? Sharing your photos with people all over the planet? Broadband? 1TB harddrives? Multi-GHz processors? Checking your email on your mobile phone? Maybe you were particularly imaginative, or maybe you're just talking out of your ass. 20 years ago, computers were for the hobbiests, video gamers, and business types. Most people, even the ones that used them, saw little reason for Joe Average to want a computer. Or are you telling me that 20 years ago, you imagined an age where every 14 year old girl could not live without her own personal computer?
What kind of flat rate is that?
It's like the Mighty Mouse. Atleast one button, but oftentimes it is more than that.
People were saying the same thing 20 years ago, I'm sure. The thing is, we currently use computers for things that they probably never imagined. Sure, the average computer now seems plenty powerful for the average user, but just wait until the next big thing comes around. One of those could be high DPI screens. I would like to make my 1600x1200 monitor a 16000x12000 monitor, with two orders of magnitude more pixels, you're going to need some serious computing power to back that up.
Here's the reliablity survey:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2184105,00.asp
Lenovo ranks very middle of the road for reliability for 2007. Apple is the top ranked vendor according to Consumer Reports. Behind them is Sony, by a small margin, and (in the laptop category only) Dell. Then there is a significant drop to the middle range of reliability where you have Lenovo and Toshiba, then another drop and HP and Gateway. I picked Sony because even though when objectively tested they are not quite as reliable as Apple's systems, they are the closest major brand.
I'm relying upon Consumer Reports for the numbers, because they're the best source I know. They have no bias, take no advertising dollars from anyone, don't accept free hardware to test, buying everything from normal retail channels, and their entire business relies upon their reputation. I trust their testing and surveys just a wee bit more than your unsupported assertion.
I've seen that survey, and it just doesn't jive with my experience. Here's one that does:
Apple and Lenovo (along with Fijitsu, who I'm not familiar as a notebook maker) take the top spots. Sony and Toshiba follow them up, Dell is in the middle, and things get progressively worse until you end at the bottom with makers like Acer, which are exactly where they belong.
Your analogy is flawed. In such an analogy, you cannot substitute Honda or Ford for PCs. It would have to be every other manufacturer of car except Lexus. Some are cheaper and some are more expensive. In fact, I can go configure hundreds of gaming PCs that are twice to three times the most expensive desktop from Apple. Thus, Apple machines are cheaper than PCs by your argument, after all we're just talking price, not value.
No, because you can configure a PC to be an expensive gaming machine*, or you can configure it to be a cheaper. Macs are not as flexible, you can only pick the more expensive configurations. Hence, Macs are either more expensive, or in the best case, or about the same price.
*Besides, a high end gaming PC is still going to be cheaper than a Mac (re-)geared for gaming.
Except it isn't a flawed methodology and it isn't the whole methodology. When comparing Apple machines to everything else, you have a fixed variable. Say you wanted to compare the prices of Lenovo machines with others, a good place to start is finding one or more Lenovo systems, then looking for a vender that offers something similar. Choosing a random machine from another vendor an hoping Lenovo happens to offer something similar to compare to it, is not really a useful starting point.
You reconfigure both machines, the Apple and the other systems to be as close as possible, but if there is nothing offered from some vendor that is even close, well it isn't a very good comparison, is it?
The problem comes in when you extrapolate it out to make the general statement "Macs are not more expensive than PCs". It just doesn't work that way. To use the car flawed car analogy again it's like saying that Lexus is not more expensive than Ford because the low end Lexus is similar in price and features to the high-end Ford. Nevermind that Ford sells cars from $15-32K and Lexus sells cars from $32-$80k (numbers made up).
Yeah, it is sort of like that, except you can't really add aftermarket reliability, now can you? When you're talking about the cost of Apple versus other vendors, what is the point of making a comparison at all unless you're comparing similar offerings. I have a 18 year old, used, TI calculator worth about $0.10. By comparison, Lenovo systems are tens of thousands of times more expensive. Lenovo systems are overpriced. Gee was that useful to anyone? Nope.
You seem to really like the word "comparison". Open your eyes up to the big picture. It would be like shopping for a car with a list of things like how many radio presets it can store, how many watts the foglights are, and what shade faux wood trim is, and how many cubic inches the door map pocket can hold, as opposed to looking for something that's comfortable, reliable, has four doors, and isn't too expensive.
Well, they made a bad decision when they hired him, at that point it's obvious. To give him $151 million dollars of company money is another bad decision. To simply fire him would be a good decision. Perhaps that's just too much common sense?
Why is it dumb? The service life of a car is probably around 15 years or so, which is an eternity for cell phones. How can they anticipate where cell phones are headed 15 years in advance?
It's not new at all. My 1988 model car would pop up the door lock knob whenever you shut the door, therefore unlocking the door if you had set the locks (it did this mechanically). Therefore, you couldn't lock yourself out because you needed the keys to lock the car. Didn't keep me from locking my keys in it once, as the trunk did not have the same protection.
Actually, most car keys since 2002 are chipped, and you can use this to your advantage. Get a copy of the key made on a regular blank. It won't start the car, but it will still open the doors.
Hmmm... Not sure it is gonna happen. Apple supports only limited range of hardware to ensure hardware really works stable. Allowing user to add some more hardware, which could be extremely poor -- this situation will dramatically increase phonecalls to Apple and you probably will not be very happy if Apple will turn to be non-responsive company, like Microsoft...
This is bunk. They allow you to install pretty much anything you want in a PowerMac/Mac Pro, and it doesn't affect the stability of those machines and seems to cause little fuss. The only reason Apple doesn't sell an expandable is because they don't want to.
You should have just gotten an Apple and you are able to run most any OS that you want.
Unless that list includes OSX, you might as well just buy the PC because it'll run everything else the Mac can (ignoring the hackintoshes, of course).
I do not have cable, but the few times I've watched at my parent's house I've seen commercials outlining very simply that analog TV is going away and your current TV will cease to function unless you have a converter. Does that mean my parents know.. No! My Dad who's a little savvy in such matters has no idea.
Well, if they have cable, they have nothing to worry about. Their TVs will continue to work until both the cable company stops providing analog cable service and no longer offers a cable box with an analog output. In other words, likely for many years to come. Same for the people buying TVs at Target - most of those TVs are probably not going to be used for OTA broadcasts and will work fine for whatever they were bought for.