I was with you until you mentioned Palm Treo. I had one. That phone sucked so bad, Satan would have returned it.
What sucked? Well, about 10% of calls would pick up OK, but the other party wouldn't get any audio from you. About 20% of the time, about a minute into the call, it would just drop (could have been AT&T as the carrier, but my current iPhone is TONS more reliable) Typically once a day, I had to soft reset it (press the reset button). But the worst was that at least once a week, I had to yank the battery from it to get the damn thing to come back to life.
I used to be a huge Palm fan, and loved my last palm PDA (the Tungsten), but the Treo is a festering pile of dung. Based on that I will not even glance at a Pre. The Palm brand has been sullied...
Amen Brother. I have to use a dell for work, it is a decently config'd Latitude D630, NVidia discrete graphics, 4 G ram, and it runs Vista 64 business OK. (First thing done was to wipe and do a fresh install).
But it has a lot of little annoyances. For example I hae been through three keyboard/track pads in 9 months. THe damn trackpad keeps getting flakey. It has been through 2 mother boards. It fried its RAM once. And the cooling fan died, the sensor on the MoBo failed, so it fried the CPU.
In 4 MAc laptops I have had (a Ti 1GHZ G4, a 1.5GHZ G5 aluminum, and two MBP's), only one has needed service, and Applecare picked it up, fixed it, transferred my data to the replacement HD, and returned it to me in 36 hours. Not bad.
The last Dell on site service I had took 3 visits from their tech, 2 overnight shipments of parts, and a week of downtime (filled in by the MBP)
This is supposed high end dell systems, with their gold service. For what this Latitude cost my company, I could have had a MBP of that generation (but not the applecare).
Ding, we have a winner. I tried with Linux. It works, after a fashion, but you get really tired of constantly working around glitches and gotchas.
I tried with a MacBook Pro. Better, but not really seamless, and then suddenly one day it stopped connecting with our Citrix server and it became an untenable solution (I did for a time use VMWare Fusion, with XP and the Windows citrix client, until I got my Dell rebuilt. That mega sucked...)
Until there is a drop in replacement for AD, and exchange with all its messaging glory, this is going to be the case.
I had tried pre Yggdrasil, with limited success. Mostly as a hobby. In 93 or so, I got a full installation of Yggdrasil running (no x-windows, I didn't have a compatible graphics card/monitor).
I did get a system functional enough to take a course on C at the local Jr. College (prior to returing for my masters in Physics). Learned a lot about makefiles, dependencies and all the other stuff that the students who were using Turbo C were shielded from.
Sadly, I gave up shortly there after. I built a firewall box that ran some early version of Redhat (2? 3?) that was bulletproof, but finally it couldn't be updated (I brought it back to life with a version 5 Install). It finally was replaced by a firewall appliance (and a couple others since).
Now I am a Mac person. 4 between my Wife and I. I am also strange, as I prefer Vista to XP for my work laptop. It just works better for me than XP ever did (especially its support for multiple screens. XP licks balls in that situation).
Yet, there are many people (many of whom populate the talk show circuit) who seem to not follow this "selection by wallet size". I am amazed by the dregs of society who hook up, have kids, and move on.
There must be more to the female mate selection process than wallet size, or in about 10 generations, we would become a society of investment bankers (who are doing quite well even with the meltdown).
Can you build your own laptop?
I am not in IT, and building my own wouldn't be an option. I travel, hence the Latitude.
I used to use my own Mac laptop, but that got nixed buy the powers that be.
Geoff
I just have to respond to this. I had a Latitude 620 that had a bad video out port. Called the dell tech. Brought out new memory (?!?!?) and a motherboard. In the space of 8 days, it took 4 visits from Dell, 3 motherboards, 2 sets of RAM, and since the tech forgot on the last visit to plug in the fans, and the system overheated and damaged the CPU, a new CPU. For good measures, they finally upgraded me to a refurbed 630, but that was the worst tech support experience I have ever had.
Oh yeah. Brazil is one of my favorite movies of all time. I love the first line (on the TV screen after the bombing in the TV store). Fits in with the state of America after 9/11. (you will have to watch it to get the line.)
The real problem is that IBM thought that by printing the assembler listing of the BIOS, that they could prove that any copies were derivative, and poisoned by people reading it.
However, IBM learned how hard it was to prove that someone read that listing in a court case. Hence, Compaq prevailed.
I have to assume that you are referring to mathematics programs.
I went to a state university in California, got my BSc. degree in Physics, and had a metric ton of PDE's from a dedicated mathematics class, to a significant component of my upper division coursework so thoroughly intertwined with PDE's that it would make a lay person squeamish.
I have to agree. I travel in and out of the US probably 20 times a year, and I have yet to be harassed by the customs people about my laptop.
However, last year I forgot an apple (the fruit) that I grabbed at a hotel in Germany and promptly forgot in my backpack, and that damn beagle nailed me. Now I get extra screening, but they never look at my laptop or other electronics.
I tend to agree with you, and the fact that the processing of the silicon PV cells is far more straightforward, and relatively low-tech versus the giant vacuum chambers, complex chemistries, and in some cases voodoo recipes of the thin film PV, that it is hard to knock the good ol' silicon PV cells.
I was at the PVSEC conference in Valencia Spain last month, and the excitement and energy in the air around these technologies, all of them, is amazing.
Yes, all one has to do is go to Seoul and look at the high rise apartments, stacked like dominoes to realize that even the densest of Los Angeles, or Manhattan are sparse compared to a city like Singapore, Tokyo or Seoul.
The US lives in a barren wasteland compared to these "first world broadband" countries.
The definition is pretty specific. It is the conversion efficiency of one sun, at the equator, at noon. That is 1000W/m^2, so this cell will produce 408 in the equivalent of one sun at noon on the equator.
The benefit of these cells (technically called multijunction PV) is that they have different layers that are tuned to absorb and convert different wavelengths of light, and thus harvesting the maximum of energy from the light.
They are also beaucoup expensive, so even with concentrators, and sun trackers, they are hard to justify unless you are severely space constrained.
As a previous poster mentioned, these are mostly deployed in space where weight and efficiency trump the cost factor.
Not entirely correct. First Solar uses CdTe, not CIGS (CuInGaSe2). Nanosolar uses an ink like printing process for the absorber layer in the cell. However, they have yet to produce more than samples.
The CIGS companies who are making money (or nearly) today are Global Solar, Wuerth Solar, Showa-shell, and soon to be joined by Ascent Solar. Avancis Solar is scaling up as well. There is literally a metric ton of financing for thin film PV right now. I could probably add a dozen names (Miasole, heliovolt, Solibro, etc.)
The attraction to the thin film PV is due to the fact that the world output of metalurgical grade of silicon is throttling the growth of traditional PV. Last year, Si hit $500/kg. FWIW, in 2001, it was Yes, I have been doing a lot of esearch on this lately...
Well, the reality is that senior executives have always had personal assistants (used to be secretaries) who really opened all their mail, sorted it, and typed responses to the mundane, and took dictation for the serious ones.
The executives typically have 100% trust in their admin's and this feature is absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of a senior management team.
It may seem like a security risk, but in the cases that I am aware of, both users are aware of their status, and it rally operates like it did in the pen and paper days.
Oh yeah, it can happen at my company (which shall remain nameless)
True story: We had an senior manager leave a couple years ago. During his tenure, he had done some business development work with another company, and we wanted to get access to his notes from the time in question, pretty much all in email.
BZZZZZT: Wrong answer. IT just deleted his account, and the next time they did a backup, (actually they have a few sets that they roll through) the overwrote his mail store on the exchange server. Flash forward 2 years. His email is gone, they didn't ghost or even keep his HD from his laptop (the policy was to recycle laptops for new people), so all his data and all his communications are wiped out. That was an employee who had 12 years of time at the company.
Yep, I can believe companies have really poor ability to archive and retrieve email.
I was going to moderate this, but I have to respond. The Wiki article states in "Physics" and is thus correct. However, in general usage, quantum is a discrete shift in value, rather than a minor shift in a continuum. It can be small (as int he physics example), or it can be large. It all depends on the frame of reference, and what you are gaging.
It is this that I think that the article is referring to (correctly). Being a physics geek, I had to set the record straight.
In my life, (I am a product manager) my days are filled with tactical fire fighting, and little ability to do any long term items that need to happen for my product lines. I often do 2 hours of email and "strategic" items in the morning before I head to the office (to my wife's chagrin, I am a morning person), and two hours of email catchup at night before bed. Yep, it interferes with the home life, but I am compensated really well for it (my company knows how important that is), and I do it with both eyes open.
Of course, I can turn it off, and when I disconnect (like I will do the next two weeks), people understand that I am decompressing. It is a balance, not perfect, but works for me. I still hate my Treo with GoodLink though. Mostly, it reminds me how far behind I am getting.
You are correct, PowerPoint 2007 is immensely improved over 2003 or earlier versions. I personally think that it makes the case for adoption of Office 2007 on its strength. I have used Keynote (the last version) extensively. It is good, but lacking in some features and functionality. Perhaps the version I received with iWork08 will be closer.
Regardless, I work in a windows world (lone mac user in my company) so I must use Office. Office 2004 on the mac is OK, but the non-native intel binary drives me to distraction, and there are enough peculiarities with Powerpoint2004 to drive one to drink. So that means Office 2007 under VMware Fusion. Works great.
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I was with you until you mentioned Palm Treo. I had one. That phone sucked so bad, Satan would have returned it.
What sucked? Well, about 10% of calls would pick up OK, but the other party wouldn't get any audio from you.
About 20% of the time, about a minute into the call, it would just drop (could have been AT&T as the carrier, but my current iPhone is TONS more reliable)
Typically once a day, I had to soft reset it (press the reset button).
But the worst was that at least once a week, I had to yank the battery from it to get the damn thing to come back to life.
I used to be a huge Palm fan, and loved my last palm PDA (the Tungsten), but the Treo is a festering pile of dung. Based on that I will not even glance at a Pre. The Palm brand has been sullied...
Amen Brother. I have to use a dell for work, it is a decently config'd Latitude D630, NVidia discrete graphics, 4 G ram, and it runs Vista 64 business OK. (First thing done was to wipe and do a fresh install).
But it has a lot of little annoyances. For example I hae been through three keyboard/track pads in 9 months. THe damn trackpad keeps getting flakey. It has been through 2 mother boards. It fried its RAM once. And the cooling fan died, the sensor on the MoBo failed, so it fried the CPU.
In 4 MAc laptops I have had (a Ti 1GHZ G4, a 1.5GHZ G5 aluminum, and two MBP's), only one has needed service, and Applecare picked it up, fixed it, transferred my data to the replacement HD, and returned it to me in 36 hours. Not bad.
The last Dell on site service I had took 3 visits from their tech, 2 overnight shipments of parts, and a week of downtime (filled in by the MBP)
This is supposed high end dell systems, with their gold service. For what this Latitude cost my company, I could have had a MBP of that generation (but not the applecare).
Ding, we have a winner. I tried with Linux. It works, after a fashion, but you get really tired of constantly working around glitches and gotchas.
I tried with a MacBook Pro. Better, but not really seamless, and then suddenly one day it stopped connecting with our Citrix server and it became an untenable solution (I did for a time use VMWare Fusion, with XP and the Windows citrix client, until I got my Dell rebuilt. That mega sucked...)
Until there is a drop in replacement for AD, and exchange with all its messaging glory, this is going to be the case.
Geoff
I had tried pre Yggdrasil, with limited success. Mostly as a hobby. In 93 or so, I got a full installation of Yggdrasil running (no x-windows, I didn't have a compatible graphics card/monitor).
I did get a system functional enough to take a course on C at the local Jr. College (prior to returing for my masters in Physics). Learned a lot about makefiles, dependencies and all the other stuff that the students who were using Turbo C were shielded from.
Sadly, I gave up shortly there after. I built a firewall box that ran some early version of Redhat (2? 3?) that was bulletproof, but finally it couldn't be updated (I brought it back to life with a version 5 Install). It finally was replaced by a firewall appliance (and a couple others since).
Now I am a Mac person. 4 between my Wife and I. I am also strange, as I prefer Vista to XP for my work laptop. It just works better for me than XP ever did (especially its support for multiple screens. XP licks balls in that situation).
Geoff
Yet, there are many people (many of whom populate the talk show circuit) who seem to not follow this "selection by wallet size". I am amazed by the dregs of society who hook up, have kids, and move on.
There must be more to the female mate selection process than wallet size, or in about 10 generations, we would become a society of investment bankers (who are doing quite well even with the meltdown).
Can you build your own laptop? I am not in IT, and building my own wouldn't be an option. I travel, hence the Latitude. I used to use my own Mac laptop, but that got nixed buy the powers that be. Geoff
We pay the premium (lazy turds in our IT support group), and the service still sucks.
I just have to respond to this. I had a Latitude 620 that had a bad video out port. Called the dell tech. Brought out new memory (?!?!?) and a motherboard. In the space of 8 days, it took 4 visits from Dell, 3 motherboards, 2 sets of RAM, and since the tech forgot on the last visit to plug in the fans, and the system overheated and damaged the CPU, a new CPU. For good measures, they finally upgraded me to a refurbed 630, but that was the worst tech support experience I have ever had.
Oh yeah. Brazil is one of my favorite movies of all time. I love the first line (on the TV screen after the bombing in the TV store). Fits in with the state of America after 9/11. (you will have to watch it to get the line.)
Wow, you must work where I work. Same thing happening this week...
The real problem is that IBM thought that by printing the assembler listing of the BIOS, that they could prove that any copies were derivative, and poisoned by people reading it.
However, IBM learned how hard it was to prove that someone read that listing in a court case. Hence, Compaq prevailed.
I have to assume that you are referring to mathematics programs.
I went to a state university in California, got my BSc. degree in Physics, and had a metric ton of PDE's from a dedicated mathematics class, to a significant component of my upper division coursework so thoroughly intertwined with PDE's that it would make a lay person squeamish.
Ah yes, Matthews and Walker. A dear old friend.
It is a better (if more terse) book than Arfken. Nothing against Arfken, but I always reach first for the Matthews and Walker.
I have to agree. I travel in and out of the US probably 20 times a year, and I have yet to be harassed by the customs people about my laptop.
However, last year I forgot an apple (the fruit) that I grabbed at a hotel in Germany and promptly forgot in my backpack, and that damn beagle nailed me. Now I get extra screening, but they never look at my laptop or other electronics.
I tend to agree with you, and the fact that the processing of the silicon PV cells is far more straightforward, and relatively low-tech versus the giant vacuum chambers, complex chemistries, and in some cases voodoo recipes of the thin film PV, that it is hard to knock the good ol' silicon PV cells.
I was at the PVSEC conference in Valencia Spain last month, and the excitement and energy in the air around these technologies, all of them, is amazing.
Yes, all one has to do is go to Seoul and look at the high rise apartments, stacked like dominoes to realize that even the densest of Los Angeles, or Manhattan are sparse compared to a city like Singapore, Tokyo or Seoul.
The US lives in a barren wasteland compared to these "first world broadband" countries.
The definition is pretty specific. It is the conversion efficiency of one sun, at the equator, at noon. That is 1000W/m^2, so this cell will produce 408 in the equivalent of one sun at noon on the equator.
The benefit of these cells (technically called multijunction PV) is that they have different layers that are tuned to absorb and convert different wavelengths of light, and thus harvesting the maximum of energy from the light.
They are also beaucoup expensive, so even with concentrators, and sun trackers, they are hard to justify unless you are severely space constrained.
As a previous poster mentioned, these are mostly deployed in space where weight and efficiency trump the cost factor.
Not entirely correct. First Solar uses CdTe, not CIGS (CuInGaSe2). Nanosolar uses an ink like printing process for the absorber layer in the cell. However, they have yet to produce more than samples.
The CIGS companies who are making money (or nearly) today are Global Solar, Wuerth Solar, Showa-shell, and soon to be joined by Ascent Solar. Avancis Solar is scaling up as well. There is literally a metric ton of financing for thin film PV right now. I could probably add a dozen names (Miasole, heliovolt, Solibro, etc.)
The attraction to the thin film PV is due to the fact that the world output of metalurgical grade of silicon is throttling the growth of traditional PV. Last year, Si hit $500/kg. FWIW, in 2001, it was
Yes, I have been doing a lot of esearch on this lately...
Well, the reality is that senior executives have always had personal assistants (used to be secretaries) who really opened all their mail, sorted it, and typed responses to the mundane, and took dictation for the serious ones.
The executives typically have 100% trust in their admin's and this feature is absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of a senior management team. It may seem like a security risk, but in the cases that I am aware of, both users are aware of their status, and it rally operates like it did in the pen and paper days.
Oh yeah, it can happen at my company (which shall remain nameless)
True story: We had an senior manager leave a couple years ago. During his tenure, he had done some business development work with another company, and we wanted to get access to his notes from the time in question, pretty much all in email.
BZZZZZT: Wrong answer. IT just deleted his account, and the next time they did a backup, (actually they have a few sets that they roll through) the overwrote his mail store on the exchange server. Flash forward 2 years. His email is gone, they didn't ghost or even keep his HD from his laptop (the policy was to recycle laptops for new people), so all his data and all his communications are wiped out. That was an employee who had 12 years of time at the company.
Yep, I can believe companies have really poor ability to archive and retrieve email.
I was going to moderate this, but I have to respond. The Wiki article states in "Physics" and is thus correct. However, in general usage, quantum is a discrete shift in value, rather than a minor shift in a continuum. It can be small (as int he physics example), or it can be large. It all depends on the frame of reference, and what you are gaging.
It is this that I think that the article is referring to (correctly). Being a physics geek, I had to set the record straight.
In my life, (I am a product manager) my days are filled with tactical fire fighting, and little ability to do any long term items that need to happen for my product lines. I often do 2 hours of email and "strategic" items in the morning before I head to the office (to my wife's chagrin, I am a morning person), and two hours of email catchup at night before bed. Yep, it interferes with the home life, but I am compensated really well for it (my company knows how important that is), and I do it with both eyes open.
Of course, I can turn it off, and when I disconnect (like I will do the next two weeks), people understand that I am decompressing. It is a balance, not perfect, but works for me. I still hate my Treo with GoodLink though. Mostly, it reminds me how far behind I am getting.
You are correct, PowerPoint 2007 is immensely improved over 2003 or earlier versions. I personally think that it makes the case for adoption of Office 2007 on its strength. I have used Keynote (the last version) extensively. It is good, but lacking in some features and functionality. Perhaps the version I received with iWork08 will be closer.
Regardless, I work in a windows world (lone mac user in my company) so I must use Office. Office 2004 on the mac is OK, but the non-native intel binary drives me to distraction, and there are enough peculiarities with Powerpoint2004 to drive one to drink. So that means Office 2007 under VMware Fusion. Works great.
Amen Brother. I still carry foils with me. Why? Because all too
often, the damn projector fails, and you have to go back to viewgraphs.
I love technology, but I also believe in concrete backups.
I would be willing to bet that he was referring to "screen size" rather than the viewing distance.
Geoff