Honestly, Froyo or Gingerbread on a tablet isn't that bad. I'm perfectly happy with the interface of Froyo on my Huawei S7. (What I'm not happy about is how long Huawei took to release Froyo, the fact that they only released it in Indonesia and only via "authorized service center" making it take forever to get a leaked version of the update, and how horribly buggy their Eclair build and radio baseband was.)
However, if you're going to make a Froyo tablet, you should at least include the normal Android buttons. It sounds like Viewsonic's Froyo build is even worse than Huawei's Eclair build was.
Midseason hiatus is pretty standard for SyFy shows nowadays. I think it may have to do more with international syndication/cooperation - In foreign countries, seasons are typically half as long as in the United States.
So one season for us = two seasons internationally on SyFy's partner networks outside of the USA.
SGU started out kinda "meh" and too "soap-opera-y", but by the time they had the typical midseason hiatus it had picked up and was starting to get good.
It was right around when it got canned that the real promising "We've found Destiny's true mission" plotline started showing up and the "who is fucking who" plotlines started dying down.
For a period of time on Cablevision back when I was in grad school, the only way to get Sci-Fi (it was not SyFy back then) was the top-tier premium package - it was bundled with stuff like HBO and the like. (Maybe not HBO - but it was a package above the typical 70-channel "family package" that Sci-Fi was usually a part of.)
You realize that to get to the shale you have to dig a hole down to it.
That hole then gets pressurized with whatever is down in the shale.
If that hole leaks because someone slacked on their casing cement job, then you have methane from deep origins leaking out at the level of the water table.
The nearest flammable well I know of is in Dimock, PA, about 45 minutes south of me. That one is clearly due to drilling - those wells ran clean for decades and then went downhill right after drilling commenced.
There's also the recent major blowout/frac water spill in Bradford County.
Yeah, the water in the Owego/Binghamton area isn't so hot (high mineral content, rusty), but no one on this side of the border has fizzy flammable water.
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process, whether it be frac water dumping, well casing failure (gotta get that pressurized water down there somehow), or the (far less likely but not yet confirmed to be impossible) slight possibility those fractures are of much greater extent than expected, is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The gas companies deny it's happening and still say fracking is "safe" - whenever a water well starts producing methane the gas company claims it's naturally occuring biogenic methane. Really, do you expect ANYONE to believe that multiple wells across the country which been producing clean drinking water for decades suddenly got contaminated with methane-producing bacteria within 1-2 years of fracking operations commencing nearby?
I live on top of the Marcellus, so I've been following the situation pretty closely (and yeah, I've watched GASLAND - scary material and one of the reasons I'm pro-nuclear - that industry has a far better track record in the USA and constantly strives to improve safety. Gas companies say they're safe when they clearly are not, and refuse to make any improvements.)
I am fairly certain Meejahor is a professional photographer - so he knows what he's talking about. If I recall correctly he has frequently sold photos to various UK newspapers.
(He's fairly active on the Strobist flickr groups. I've seen the guy's name before.)
Why do people keep on talking about BlackBerry running QNX?
It's like talking incessantly about Android phones running Linux and iOS devices running BSD - the core kernel doesn't really matter that much, it's what you layer on top of it.
There's nothing new about QNX, it's been around for well over a decade. Just like there's nothing new about Linux (even about Linux on mobile phones), but Google's userland layer on top of it has made major waves in the smarphone market.
Because an actual nuclear explosion could easily breach any of the containment measures non-Soviet reactors have in place.
A steam explosion in the core, however, cannot.
A graphite fire (the primary method of dispersal of substances at Chernobyl) would have rapidly run out of oxygen. (Ignoring the more basic fact that in most non-Soviet countries, there is a clear separation of military and civilian reactors, and hence graphite moderated water cooled reactors aren't used anywhere else for power generation - Nearly all graphite moderated reactors in existence were designed for weapons production with power generation being a secondary benefit in some designs.)
Whoever wrote the article had no clue. Chernobyl consisted of a steam explosion followed by a graphite fire of the exposed reactor core. There may have also been a subsequent brief prompt criticality incident that released less energy than the steam explosion, however the article implies that Chernobyl's radiation release was entirely by a bomb-like nuclear explosion.
I wouldn't call that "no one cares" pricing as far as blank media - Blu-Ray isn't there yet (finding reasonably priced non-crap media is quite difficult) - But I remember when DVD-Rs were around this same price and difficulty of finding "good" media. It was only a year or so more before you could get cheap high-quality DVD-R discs anywhere.
So BR isn't there yet, but it's getting close. However, in terms of $0.25 for DVD vs $1.25 for Blu-Ray blanks - that's a 5x price difference...
Yup. Basically every argument in the article for why Blu-Ray should be catching on is false.
"Clearly Superior" - Yes, Blu-Ray is superior, but not clearly so. You need a fairly nice TV to be able to tell the difference, and even if you can, most people don't car, DVD at 480p is good enough. From DVD to Blu-Ray is not nearly the leap in quality from VHS (not even 480i really) to DVD, not counting the fact that DVDs had MAJOR convenience improvements over VHS - Blu-Ray only adds a small handful of new features and significantly worse DRM.
Price - That $70 Blu-Ray player claimed is the first time I've seen one that was under $100 regular-price. Heck, even $150 is hard unless it's a barebones unit that gets crap reviews for stability/freezing/hanging. Meanwhile, you can get solid reliable DVD players for $20-30, and high-end HDMI upscaling ones for $40-50.
Ubiquity - Every new computer sold for the past 5-6 years has had a DVD player if it had an optical drive at all. Nearly all of those have DVD burners. Few laptops have Blu-Ray drives, even fewer have BD-R drives.
That's weird, since the whole intent of the update was to knock down the rankings for the content-scrapers - it SHOULD have helped you instead of hurting you.
Really, if you were making a living off of copypasta - well, you get what you deserve.
I don't know how many eHow articles were clear copypasta that were fundamentally wrong. (Like a howto for 2005+ Subaru Outback vehicles that was clearly copypasta'ed from an article on 2000-2004 vehicles - the howto was completely wrong and non-applicable for 2005+ vehicles, but the article specifically claimed it was for such vehicles.)
Nuclear containment buildings are specifically designed to withstand the impact equivalent of a fully loaded passenger jet, or a supersonic fighter aircraft.
You're correct about passive cooling - the ESBWR has what effectively amount to heatpipes going to cooling pools at the top of the reactor building. Eventually you have to refill the pools, but at most you need a fire truck at the 72 hour mark.
It wouldn't be too hard to improve that number - Use cooling towers and more heatpipes to achieve much longer term passive cooling. Problem is that cooling towers make the NIMBYs go berserk.
I think a few more people have died in the history of United States nuclear:
HOWEVER - All of them were involved in the early days of nuclear R&D. Louis Slotin (Manhattan Project), Harry Dahglian (Manhattan Project), and the SL-1 crew (Remember, it was three military personnel at a military research reactor) come to mind.
Admittedly, it's hard to properly estimate which cancer deaths were due to a release of substances and which were due to something else, but Chernobyl itself (reactor with no containment filled with highly combustible graphite had its core fully exposed to outside air) is estimated to have cause 4,000 deaths.
The guy in that article is stirring up some nice sensationalism to sell page views, as usual.
Yup. This will actually improve in-house wifi - Your neighbors won't cause as much interference to your network.
If you need outdoor wifi - set up an access point outside.
It will be detrimental to cell phone reception indoors however - but there are technical solutions to that. The amount of money you save on energy by having reflective barriers will make up for the cost of a Wilson amplifier setup - http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/ProductListing.aspx?Category=9 . Interestingly enough, the shielding of the home will be beneficial here - Such amp systems break if there is insufficient isolation between the outdoor antenna and the indoor one.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, Froyo or Gingerbread on a tablet isn't that bad. I'm perfectly happy with the interface of Froyo on my Huawei S7. (What I'm not happy about is how long Huawei took to release Froyo, the fact that they only released it in Indonesia and only via "authorized service center" making it take forever to get a leaked version of the update, and how horribly buggy their Eclair build and radio baseband was.)
However, if you're going to make a Froyo tablet, you should at least include the normal Android buttons. It sounds like Viewsonic's Froyo build is even worse than Huawei's Eclair build was.
Midseason hiatus is pretty standard for SyFy shows nowadays. I think it may have to do more with international syndication/cooperation - In foreign countries, seasons are typically half as long as in the United States.
So one season for us = two seasons internationally on SyFy's partner networks outside of the USA.
SGU started out kinda "meh" and too "soap-opera-y", but by the time they had the typical midseason hiatus it had picked up and was starting to get good.
It was right around when it got canned that the real promising "We've found Destiny's true mission" plotline started showing up and the "who is fucking who" plotlines started dying down.
For a period of time on Cablevision back when I was in grad school, the only way to get Sci-Fi (it was not SyFy back then) was the top-tier premium package - it was bundled with stuff like HBO and the like. (Maybe not HBO - but it was a package above the typical 70-channel "family package" that Sci-Fi was usually a part of.)
Obviously, I didn't watch SciFi back then.
My apartment is literally 100 feet from the Susquehanna, and I live right on top of the Marcellus.
Owego's water is marginal enough without adding frac fluid to the mix, thank you very much.
You realize that to get to the shale you have to dig a hole down to it.
That hole then gets pressurized with whatever is down in the shale.
If that hole leaks because someone slacked on their casing cement job, then you have methane from deep origins leaking out at the level of the water table.
Dimock's water ran clean prior to fracking operations commencing.
Give an example of the towns affected?
The nearest flammable well I know of is in Dimock, PA, about 45 minutes south of me. That one is clearly due to drilling - those wells ran clean for decades and then went downhill right after drilling commenced.
There's also the recent major blowout/frac water spill in Bradford County.
Yeah, the water in the Owego/Binghamton area isn't so hot (high mineral content, rusty), but no one on this side of the border has fizzy flammable water.
Let's face it, SOME aspect of the fracturing process, whether it be frac water dumping, well casing failure (gotta get that pressurized water down there somehow), or the (far less likely but not yet confirmed to be impossible) slight possibility those fractures are of much greater extent than expected, is contaminating wells on a widespread basis.
The gas companies deny it's happening and still say fracking is "safe" - whenever a water well starts producing methane the gas company claims it's naturally occuring biogenic methane. Really, do you expect ANYONE to believe that multiple wells across the country which been producing clean drinking water for decades suddenly got contaminated with methane-producing bacteria within 1-2 years of fracking operations commencing nearby?
I live on top of the Marcellus, so I've been following the situation pretty closely (and yeah, I've watched GASLAND - scary material and one of the reasons I'm pro-nuclear - that industry has a far better track record in the USA and constantly strives to improve safety. Gas companies say they're safe when they clearly are not, and refuse to make any improvements.)
I am fairly certain Meejahor is a professional photographer - so he knows what he's talking about. If I recall correctly he has frequently sold photos to various UK newspapers.
(He's fairly active on the Strobist flickr groups. I've seen the guy's name before.)
Why do people keep on talking about BlackBerry running QNX?
It's like talking incessantly about Android phones running Linux and iOS devices running BSD - the core kernel doesn't really matter that much, it's what you layer on top of it.
There's nothing new about QNX, it's been around for well over a decade. Just like there's nothing new about Linux (even about Linux on mobile phones), but Google's userland layer on top of it has made major waves in the smarphone market.
Crud that was meant as a reply to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2105846&cid=35956660, not this one.
Because an actual nuclear explosion could easily breach any of the containment measures non-Soviet reactors have in place.
A steam explosion in the core, however, cannot.
A graphite fire (the primary method of dispersal of substances at Chernobyl) would have rapidly run out of oxygen. (Ignoring the more basic fact that in most non-Soviet countries, there is a clear separation of military and civilian reactors, and hence graphite moderated water cooled reactors aren't used anywhere else for power generation - Nearly all graphite moderated reactors in existence were designed for weapons production with power generation being a secondary benefit in some designs.)
"Nuclear blast"?
Whoever wrote the article had no clue. Chernobyl consisted of a steam explosion followed by a graphite fire of the exposed reactor core. There may have also been a subsequent brief prompt criticality incident that released less energy than the steam explosion, however the article implies that Chernobyl's radiation release was entirely by a bomb-like nuclear explosion.
I wouldn't call that "no one cares" pricing as far as blank media - Blu-Ray isn't there yet (finding reasonably priced non-crap media is quite difficult) - But I remember when DVD-Rs were around this same price and difficulty of finding "good" media. It was only a year or so more before you could get cheap high-quality DVD-R discs anywhere.
So BR isn't there yet, but it's getting close. However, in terms of $0.25 for DVD vs $1.25 for Blu-Ray blanks - that's a 5x price difference...
Even without the AT&T block, the fact that this tablet needs the bridge is ridiculous.
There are Tegra 2 tablets with fully functional WiFi for far less (ViewSonic 10" G-Tablet is $300)
What's the point? How many consumer ISPs support IPv6?
Yup. Basically every argument in the article for why Blu-Ray should be catching on is false.
"Clearly Superior" - Yes, Blu-Ray is superior, but not clearly so. You need a fairly nice TV to be able to tell the difference, and even if you can, most people don't car, DVD at 480p is good enough. From DVD to Blu-Ray is not nearly the leap in quality from VHS (not even 480i really) to DVD, not counting the fact that DVDs had MAJOR convenience improvements over VHS - Blu-Ray only adds a small handful of new features and significantly worse DRM.
Price - That $70 Blu-Ray player claimed is the first time I've seen one that was under $100 regular-price. Heck, even $150 is hard unless it's a barebones unit that gets crap reviews for stability/freezing/hanging. Meanwhile, you can get solid reliable DVD players for $20-30, and high-end HDMI upscaling ones for $40-50.
Ubiquity - Every new computer sold for the past 5-6 years has had a DVD player if it had an optical drive at all. Nearly all of those have DVD burners. Few laptops have Blu-Ray drives, even fewer have BD-R drives.
That's weird, since the whole intent of the update was to knock down the rankings for the content-scrapers - it SHOULD have helped you instead of hurting you.
Really, if you were making a living off of copypasta - well, you get what you deserve.
I don't know how many eHow articles were clear copypasta that were fundamentally wrong. (Like a howto for 2005+ Subaru Outback vehicles that was clearly copypasta'ed from an article on 2000-2004 vehicles - the howto was completely wrong and non-applicable for 2005+ vehicles, but the article specifically claimed it was for such vehicles.)
Nuclear containment buildings are specifically designed to withstand the impact equivalent of a fully loaded passenger jet, or a supersonic fighter aircraft.
You're correct about passive cooling - the ESBWR has what effectively amount to heatpipes going to cooling pools at the top of the reactor building. Eventually you have to refill the pools, but at most you need a fire truck at the 72 hour mark.
It wouldn't be too hard to improve that number - Use cooling towers and more heatpipes to achieve much longer term passive cooling. Problem is that cooling towers make the NIMBYs go berserk.
I think a few more people have died in the history of United States nuclear:
HOWEVER - All of them were involved in the early days of nuclear R&D. Louis Slotin (Manhattan Project), Harry Dahglian (Manhattan Project), and the SL-1 crew (Remember, it was three military personnel at a military research reactor) come to mind.
A perfect example.
Admittedly, it's hard to properly estimate which cancer deaths were due to a release of substances and which were due to something else, but Chernobyl itself (reactor with no containment filled with highly combustible graphite had its core fully exposed to outside air) is estimated to have cause 4,000 deaths.
The guy in that article is stirring up some nice sensationalism to sell page views, as usual.
Yup. This will actually improve in-house wifi - Your neighbors won't cause as much interference to your network.
If you need outdoor wifi - set up an access point outside.
It will be detrimental to cell phone reception indoors however - but there are technical solutions to that. The amount of money you save on energy by having reflective barriers will make up for the cost of a Wilson amplifier setup - http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/ProductListing.aspx?Category=9 . Interestingly enough, the shielding of the home will be beneficial here - Such amp systems break if there is insufficient isolation between the outdoor antenna and the indoor one.
In the era of tablets, laptops, and wireless Internet - speed matters less. Some people might want a longer train ride so they can get more work done!