Suspicion is one thing, confirmation is quite another. It's going to make the next ICANN meeting more interesting, given that it's no longer politically neutral for any part of the internet's infrastructure to be hosted in the US.
Unlike watches, TVs, or wallets, phones contain technology that should make it trivial to either retrieve the device or reduce its resale value to near-zero by rendering it inoperative. The former reduces the victim's burden and the latter reduces the thief's incentive.
I ran Vista, and Windows 7 very easily on a 2GB machine. It only went above the 1GB line when I was running a VM that soaked up 512MB for itself, despite my best efforts. You do know that much (most?) of the memory usage on a modern system is caching, right? Empty memory is wasted memory.
Nokia was researching a power-sipping basic phone that could charge itself off the inductive power of the cellular radio transmitters themselves, and still keep up because the power usage was so low. (Their basic models already do about 30 days to a 1 Ah battery.) I think that project died though.
There's a tension between the advantages of bigger displays and more battery capacity, and the reality that smartphones are stepping into a niche in people's pockets normally occupied by a cellphone the size of a deck of cards. I certainly can't fit anything bigger than a 4-inch screen in my usual jeans pocket.
The beauty of storage batteries for power generation is that they don't need to be very high-capacity per unit volume or mass. They're not going anywhere, so you can go with something cheap but bulky.
Battery runtimes have improved enormously in the past five years; the bottom-end machine I bought then could barely break two hours, my new low-end laptop easily manages four. However that's more due to improvements in the computer hardware's power efficiency than the battery's capacity.
Unfortunately they're meanings that are both of little relevance to actual usage, like describing the human diet in terms of the most extreme non-fatal cases.
The scheduled content is only available in the UK, where a single timezone applies. For example the iPlayer is unambiguous about the current time because there is no ambiguity about what time zone the viewer is in.
The TV broadcasts are at least ostensibly only to be received in the UK. Leakage happens but obviously anyone receiving the signal has no expectation of a standard of service, and therefore the BBC's accuracy requirement doesn't apply. The World Service is a global broadcast and is formatted as such, e.g. it doesn't include explicit time references.
The display has a certain amount of dead weight: first it turns regular light into polarised light by filtering out all of the light of the wrong polarisation, which is wasted, then you have a matrix of coloured filters where everything that's not the right colour is thrown out, then you have electronics around each subpixel which get in the way and block even more light. Before you actually show anything on the screen, you've thrown out well over 90% of the light you originally created.
The electronics part increases the more pixels you have, meaning more wasted energy, which is why retina displays require more backlighting.
And they could run a burger joint easily too, but they're a publicly-funded organisation, they're not permitted to throw money at activities outside their remit.
I can't see anyone going to even the small amount of effort needed to set their time zone on the BBC web site clock when there's one in the bottom right hand corner of their screen at all times.
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Suspicion is one thing, confirmation is quite another. It's going to make the next ICANN meeting more interesting, given that it's no longer politically neutral for any part of the internet's infrastructure to be hosted in the US.
Unlike watches, TVs, or wallets, phones contain technology that should make it trivial to either retrieve the device or reduce its resale value to near-zero by rendering it inoperative. The former reduces the victim's burden and the latter reduces the thief's incentive.
So it's a minimum maximum sentence?
I ran Vista, and Windows 7 very easily on a 2GB machine. It only went above the 1GB line when I was running a VM that soaked up 512MB for itself, despite my best efforts. You do know that much (most?) of the memory usage on a modern system is caching, right? Empty memory is wasted memory.
Nokia was researching a power-sipping basic phone that could charge itself off the inductive power of the cellular radio transmitters themselves, and still keep up because the power usage was so low. (Their basic models already do about 30 days to a 1 Ah battery.) I think that project died though.
If anyone was making phones in that form factor I'd be all for it, but it's small and thin or large and thin. I can get a battery case at least.
(That thickness might still be pushing it.)
I should clarify, the "very palpable gains" I'm referring to are in laptop battery life, not battery performance.
There's a tension between the advantages of bigger displays and more battery capacity, and the reality that smartphones are stepping into a niche in people's pockets normally occupied by a cellphone the size of a deck of cards. I certainly can't fit anything bigger than a 4-inch screen in my usual jeans pocket.
The beauty of storage batteries for power generation is that they don't need to be very high-capacity per unit volume or mass. They're not going anywhere, so you can go with something cheap but bulky.
It's going to happen, yes, but I want to emphasise that it's not why these very palpable gains in battery life are being made at the moment.
Battery runtimes have improved enormously in the past five years; the bottom-end machine I bought then could barely break two hours, my new low-end laptop easily manages four. However that's more due to improvements in the computer hardware's power efficiency than the battery's capacity.
What explodes in an li-ion battery failure is usually the flammable electrolyte, fed oxygen by cathode decomposition products, and not lithium itself.
Unfortunately they're meanings that are both of little relevance to actual usage, like describing the human diet in terms of the most extreme non-fatal cases.
Err, explicit local time references. Obviously they have a schedule.
The scheduled content is only available in the UK, where a single timezone applies. For example the iPlayer is unambiguous about the current time because there is no ambiguity about what time zone the viewer is in.
The TV broadcasts are at least ostensibly only to be received in the UK. Leakage happens but obviously anyone receiving the signal has no expectation of a standard of service, and therefore the BBC's accuracy requirement doesn't apply. The World Service is a global broadcast and is formatted as such, e.g. it doesn't include explicit time references.
The display has a certain amount of dead weight: first it turns regular light into polarised light by filtering out all of the light of the wrong polarisation, which is wasted, then you have a matrix of coloured filters where everything that's not the right colour is thrown out, then you have electronics around each subpixel which get in the way and block even more light. Before you actually show anything on the screen, you've thrown out well over 90% of the light you originally created.
The electronics part increases the more pixels you have, meaning more wasted energy, which is why retina displays require more backlighting.
Why show the local time on a web site? The gripping hand is, aside from being a cute widget, there's little reason for a clock to be there.
Why would a web site visitor want to know the local time of the page they're viewing?
The BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22768861
Further reading on dodgy assumptions about how computers handle time.
And they could run a burger joint easily too, but they're a publicly-funded organisation, they're not permitted to throw money at activities outside their remit.
So your algorithm for determining the time on the local computer is
local time = (local time - remote time) + remote time
?
You realise that simplifies to:
local time = local time
Their TV broadcasts (and the live streams of the channels) occur in a single timezone.
I can't see anyone going to even the small amount of effort needed to set their time zone on the BBC web site clock when there's one in the bottom right hand corner of their screen at all times.