Ditto! My entertainment center used 14 watts with everything turned off. Nothing there needed any power (Wii, stereo, TV, xbox 360) I don't need a red light to tell me my device is off, please don't give me one. I now have the entertainment center on a power strip, and find it easier to just hit that than to turn off the various devices one by one.
I own a Prius, and I hate when you see some mod site say "get 120mpg with our extended battery pack". Oh and by the way you have to plug it into the wall using diesel generated power at $0.35 a kilowatt hour (I also live on Hawaii, power is hella expensive here). At electricity rates here most of these cars are more expensive to run than hybrid gas cars. We need a price per mile measurement. I realize that both gas and power fluctuate, but something similar to an energy guide on appliances. This car costs $.10 a mile on power at $.15 a kwH and gas at $4.00 a gallon. It's not ideal, but we need to quit letting these electric car makers get away with saying 135mpg. They may as well say "our all electric model gets infinity miles per gallon! It's the awesomest!"
I for one don't like the idea of my player being hooked up to the internet. I like to watch movies, if I want to interact I'll get on my computer, or play video games. I guess that makes me an old fuddy duddy. Most people who listed that they use these features are probably "into" movies, so they like the PiP commentary or what not. I like movies, but I don't care about the directors or actors personal lives or what funny thing happened while they were filming this scene. For me I just want to put a disc in, hit play, watch 10 minutes of messages telling me that it's wrong to pirate their movie but ok to pirate my time to tell me about it, and then watch the movie.
The other thing that scares me about the ethernet hookup is that somehow it will make fair use harder with your discs. If all the players can be upgraded it may mean every 6 months there is a 2 month period where I can't take movies on the plane with me(on the lappy's hard drive)
I think the battery life argument is a sham. I think the real reason had more to do with AT&T's data network in the US. I read a report (I think in the NY Times, but could have been elsewhere) that the NYC metro area saw a 300% increase in data on AT&T's network due to the large number of iPhones with unlimited data plans hitting the streets. I think if all these phones were 3G the amount of traffic would have grounded AT&Ts data network to their cell sites. oblig: Then they wouldn't have had enough spare capacity to route all the calls and data to NSA HQ.
I can't imagine anyone who would pay $120 for this. Bricks are un-sightly problem, but you can buy 20 $6 power strips at the meglo-mart for this and string them along.
In the US Both AT&Ts and Verizions plans have 5GB caps. There were articles here in the past about the new york settlement with Verizion. In my state though they still advertise it as unlimited, with the print on the box now being more specific that unlimited means 5GB. May be fine for email and web surfing, start watching some iTunes movies and you're done.
Remember if it's not 100%, it's not Kona Coffee. Brought to you by you Hawaii County coffee police. Seriously though I important Dunkin Donuts coffee, it costs as much as Kona here on Hawaii, but I like my bland swill!
For 90% of the time I don't use much bandwidth. But recently we downloaded and watch a movie in HD off the xbox 360. That single HD movie was 5.2G. I'm sure they have nightmares of thousands of the "other 95%" starting to have these options to suck huge tons of bandwidth. So there is a real problem, in addition to them just being greedy bastards and wanting you to watch their pay-per-view.
Another thing to remember is that consoles have relatively poor graphics compared to a PC. 480p is roughly 640x480, imagine running a PC game at that resolution, it'd be awful. Even new gen games like Halo 3 have the much angered not quite 720p resolution. 1300x720 is still not the 1900x1600 or even 1280x1024 that PC games demand. It takes a lot more to push that many more pixels.
So my iPhone that is all nice and unmodified has nothing to worry about, oh so the iPhone updated to the latest release hasn't been hacked, but an old one with unauthorized software and old firmware. This is just some wannabe getting media attention on the hot toy of the year. You may as well say that your pirated version of windows that fails WGA has holes because you can't get security updates for it. (I know, I know, It's just a slashrant, don't bother me with the facts of my statement)
Oh noes, your code caused me trouble. Well mostly it just came back with a bunch of permission denied errors, sorry file is in use errors, and the like. But your point is quite valid, I can write a piece of code for any platform that fscks it up if I have a user (or worse yet a privileged user) run it on their machine for me. The Bonus(tm) of mac/linux/BSD is that 99.5% of people don't run as root even on their own machine for day to day use. While Vista moves this way, it just annoys users with "is this ok?" boxes enough that it's a matter of course to click yes now.
Um, I live in Hawaii on the Big Island, which saw all of it's sugar production evaporate into nothing in the mid to late 80's. I'm certain this was because our powerful sugar lobby protected our cane farms. On the plus side I live on a nice acre of bankrupt sugar land.
Opportunity cost is only valid if you can get paid for the time. If he took 2 hours off work to put in the water heater then he lost pay/vacation etc and he had that "cost" associated with it. Most people enjoy working on their house so he probably considers it equal to spending those 2 hours reading slashdot/playing wii/ etc. Plus if you are on salary then you couldn't make that extra money by working more anyway. So the $100 he didn't have to pay a plumber is indeed $100 saved to him in that he didn't have to write a $100 check.
I've had a Wii for just over a year (Got one 2 days after launch). I got a xbox 360 this past week mainly for my girlfriend to play katamari, and so that we'd have some more generes to play. The Wii has disappointed with engaging titles. I loved Zelda, played Super Paper Mario, and lots of virtual console titles. But there is no real engaging 20 hour+ story line games on it right now. As much as I hated to give money to M$, I hated more to give it to sony. The xbox has ads everywhere, but has a smooth experience and timidly I admit that I like the HD graphics (30" 720p LCD panel, low end for HD, but nice for us). Even on a game like Katamari where graphics are very cartoony, the HD looks nice and clear compared to some games on the Wii. I hope next year 3rd parties step up and give us some good games on the Wii. The graphics can be quite good on it if they try.
I installed leopard on opening night. It borked my hard drive right away requiring a clean install instead of an upgrade on my Macbook. I've had a few more apps crash than with Tiger, but that has seemed to lessen significantly with 10.5.1. I was able to upgrade fine on my powermac at work and other people I know haven't had issues. I haven't seen a grey screen of death in like a year. I'm not saying leopard is perfect, but it's no crash monster either in my experience.
I'm sure the pages will fill will Vonage horror stories. They have $40 of mine that they owe me back but I'll never see. Vonage makes AT&T seem like, well AT&T. I don't see a big difference between them, both slimy greedy telcom companies with products that are ok unless you have an issue, then you're screwed.
Something that no one has mentioned so far is that these mp3s are 256k bitrate (at least the few I checked). I'm not an audiophile with tubes or anything, but I do think that straight mp3 at 128 sounds off. I for one welcome our new DRM-free music overlords.
I was really surprised how many upper level folks at my rather large organization at the time paid attention to SCO. It hit at just the right time when Linux was being seriously considered by timid managers, the lawsuit threat scared them and they didn't want to get stuck. It was sad, all the tech guys would say it was crap, but the idea of a lawsuit is scary to some. (myself included). The last year or two the case was known to almost everyone to be without merit, but it's the opposite of shock and awe, it came about so slowly that there was never a great "Linux is ok again" moment.
Vonage is the Worst to cancel, since despite advertising heavily that they have no contract. You still have to pay $40 fee if it's within the first year, no matter what you do with their router. They now make this fee clearer on their page, but I'm nearly certain it wasn't there when I first signed up (about 2 years ago now) I charged back the fee but they sent in a "terms of service" and had the charge-back reversed. It's not worth more hassle for me at this point over $40, but they were slimy on the phone and now send me "important information about your account" every 2 weeks that is bulk rate junk mail trying to get me to re-subscribe. Never you bastards!
As a constantly annoyed US listener, these things overpower legit stations all the time in my area (Washington DC MEtro area). There are a few programs on PBS that I like and I honestly can't make it on a trip without hearing howard stern or rap or other peoples music 3 or 4 times. (The PBS station happens to be on 88.1, the default that many of these are tuned too)
As a photographer specializing in pet photography I decided to start sharing some of my buying choices and review what I use. I've put it up at Nikon Camera reviews . Some people seem to think that it's usefull for Nikon reviews. It's biased towards what works for me but it could help someone out.
This is a rule I sort of made up for purchasing these sorts of things. People sell home automation on things you want a few times a year. How many times have you wanted to change the temp of your house from work? Yeah, every now and then you may be leaving early/late etc and want the house to be warm/cold when you get home. To me this is about 5 times a year, I have a programmable thermostat that turns the heat on and off at preset times that are set broadly enough to cover most days. Also for laundry dishes etc, I don't care when they are done. Maybe if I was in an apt sharing washers with several other people, but my clothes can sit there for a while, even overnight if I forget, no biggie. Agian, this would be useful about 5 times a year. Now if you made some home automation that folded clothes and put them away, I would use that 52 times a year or more. I'd be willing to pay Big Bucks(tm) for this. Basicly I want rosie the robot to do my chores. I have a roomba for the floors and it's pretty nice, although it doesn't clean as well as a full sized vacuum I feel that it lets me vacuum by hand about half as often. I await you home automation overloads.
For gas...
I'm now "well off" in the sense that I can afford to pay $3 for peppers if I want a pepper; however, when I was in college, and the first 5 years or so out of college I darn well shopped around. I would go to 3 grocery stores (all within 2 miles, me living in a pretty populated area) and get different things at different places depending what was on sale that week, after the first month or so I knew which stores were likely to be cheaper on which items. I would guess this saved me 30% or so on my average food bill. With gas there is no shopping around. Gas prices are all within 5% of each other for the most part. A nickle a gallon isn't a big deal, $2 a gallon is. Also I think it burns when we see Exxon make record profits while I can't afford to take a nice road trip vacation that I wanted since it would now cost hundreds of dollars in fuel. Just my 2 cents
Here is a brief review with video of my experience and a screen shot of the interface. Bottom line: Pretty cool, lots of time goes into making even a simple robot.
Lego Mindstorms NXT review
No, I advertise my photography company on Google. You pay per click, worse, you bid per click so pay more for fancier keywords. My photography keywords tend to cost anywhere from.05 - 1.00 per click. Try wedding photography, want to be the first one on the google list? Try $8 or $9 PER CLICK! I seem to have about a 5-10% conversion ratio of clicks to sales, so that's $100 per sale in advertising for a wedding photographer. This is part of the reason I do mostly animals and non-getting-married people. I once heard on PBS that the average consumer spends like $500 a year on advertising. (ie. you buy a coke for $1.00, and coke spends.05 of every dollar they get on advertising, so in their model you just spent.05 on advertising). As a small bidniz owner I'm saddened by all you punks that ignore my ads:-p just my.02. By the way, go to my site and click all the "get a camera free" google links, also click on them on any site you see, then maybe we can put those scammers out of business. I wish google had a "no skeezy" advertising option.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto! My entertainment center used 14 watts with everything turned off. Nothing there needed any power (Wii, stereo, TV, xbox 360) I don't need a red light to tell me my device is off, please don't give me one. I now have the entertainment center on a power strip, and find it easier to just hit that than to turn off the various devices one by one.
I own a Prius, and I hate when you see some mod site say "get 120mpg with our extended battery pack". Oh and by the way you have to plug it into the wall using diesel generated power at $0.35 a kilowatt hour (I also live on Hawaii, power is hella expensive here). At electricity rates here most of these cars are more expensive to run than hybrid gas cars. We need a price per mile measurement. I realize that both gas and power fluctuate, but something similar to an energy guide on appliances. This car costs $.10 a mile on power at $.15 a kwH and gas at $4.00 a gallon. It's not ideal, but we need to quit letting these electric car makers get away with saying 135mpg. They may as well say "our all electric model gets infinity miles per gallon! It's the awesomest!"
I for one don't like the idea of my player being hooked up to the internet. I like to watch movies, if I want to interact I'll get on my computer, or play video games. I guess that makes me an old fuddy duddy. Most people who listed that they use these features are probably "into" movies, so they like the PiP commentary or what not. I like movies, but I don't care about the directors or actors personal lives or what funny thing happened while they were filming this scene. For me I just want to put a disc in, hit play, watch 10 minutes of messages telling me that it's wrong to pirate their movie but ok to pirate my time to tell me about it, and then watch the movie.
The other thing that scares me about the ethernet hookup is that somehow it will make fair use harder with your discs. If all the players can be upgraded it may mean every 6 months there is a 2 month period where I can't take movies on the plane with me(on the lappy's hard drive)
I think the battery life argument is a sham. I think the real reason had more to do with AT&T's data network in the US. I read a report (I think in the NY Times, but could have been elsewhere) that the NYC metro area saw a 300% increase in data on AT&T's network due to the large number of iPhones with unlimited data plans hitting the streets. I think if all these phones were 3G the amount of traffic would have grounded AT&Ts data network to their cell sites.
oblig: Then they wouldn't have had enough spare capacity to route all the calls and data to NSA HQ.
I can't imagine anyone who would pay $120 for this. Bricks are un-sightly problem, but you can buy 20 $6 power strips at the meglo-mart for this and string them along.
In the US Both AT&Ts and Verizions plans have 5GB caps. There were articles here in the past about the new york settlement with Verizion. In my state though they still advertise it as unlimited, with the print on the box now being more specific that unlimited means 5GB. May be fine for email and web surfing, start watching some iTunes movies and you're done.
Remember if it's not 100%, it's not Kona Coffee. Brought to you by you Hawaii County coffee police. Seriously though I important Dunkin Donuts coffee, it costs as much as Kona here on Hawaii, but I like my bland swill!
For 90% of the time I don't use much bandwidth. But recently we downloaded and watch a movie in HD off the xbox 360. That single HD movie was 5.2G. I'm sure they have nightmares of thousands of the "other 95%" starting to have these options to suck huge tons of bandwidth. So there is a real problem, in addition to them just being greedy bastards and wanting you to watch their pay-per-view.
Another thing to remember is that consoles have relatively poor graphics compared to a PC. 480p is roughly 640x480, imagine running a PC game at that resolution, it'd be awful. Even new gen games like Halo 3 have the much angered not quite 720p resolution. 1300x720 is still not the 1900x1600 or even 1280x1024 that PC games demand. It takes a lot more to push that many more pixels.
So my iPhone that is all nice and unmodified has nothing to worry about, oh so the iPhone updated to the latest release hasn't been hacked, but an old one with unauthorized software and old firmware. This is just some wannabe getting media attention on the hot toy of the year. You may as well say that your pirated version of windows that fails WGA has holes because you can't get security updates for it. (I know, I know, It's just a slashrant, don't bother me with the facts of my statement)
Oh noes, your code caused me trouble. Well mostly it just came back with a bunch of permission denied errors, sorry file is in use errors, and the like. But your point is quite valid, I can write a piece of code for any platform that fscks it up if I have a user (or worse yet a privileged user) run it on their machine for me. The Bonus(tm) of mac/linux/BSD is that 99.5% of people don't run as root even on their own machine for day to day use. While Vista moves this way, it just annoys users with "is this ok?" boxes enough that it's a matter of course to click yes now.
Um, I live in Hawaii on the Big Island, which saw all of it's sugar production evaporate into nothing in the mid to late 80's. I'm certain this was because our powerful sugar lobby protected our cane farms. On the plus side I live on a nice acre of bankrupt sugar land.
Opportunity cost is only valid if you can get paid for the time. If he took 2 hours off work to put in the water heater then he lost pay/vacation etc and he had that "cost" associated with it. Most people enjoy working on their house so he probably considers it equal to spending those 2 hours reading slashdot/playing wii/ etc. Plus if you are on salary then you couldn't make that extra money by working more anyway. So the $100 he didn't have to pay a plumber is indeed $100 saved to him in that he didn't have to write a $100 check.
I've had a Wii for just over a year (Got one 2 days after launch). I got a xbox 360 this past week mainly for my girlfriend to play katamari, and so that we'd have some more generes to play. The Wii has disappointed with engaging titles. I loved Zelda, played Super Paper Mario, and lots of virtual console titles. But there is no real engaging 20 hour+ story line games on it right now. As much as I hated to give money to M$, I hated more to give it to sony. The xbox has ads everywhere, but has a smooth experience and timidly I admit that I like the HD graphics (30" 720p LCD panel, low end for HD, but nice for us). Even on a game like Katamari where graphics are very cartoony, the HD looks nice and clear compared to some games on the Wii. I hope next year 3rd parties step up and give us some good games on the Wii. The graphics can be quite good on it if they try.
I installed leopard on opening night. It borked my hard drive right away requiring a clean install instead of an upgrade on my Macbook. I've had a few more apps crash than with Tiger, but that has seemed to lessen significantly with 10.5.1. I was able to upgrade fine on my powermac at work and other people I know haven't had issues. I haven't seen a grey screen of death in like a year. I'm not saying leopard is perfect, but it's no crash monster either in my experience.
I'm sure the pages will fill will Vonage horror stories. They have $40 of mine that they owe me back but I'll never see. Vonage makes AT&T seem like, well AT&T. I don't see a big difference between them, both slimy greedy telcom companies with products that are ok unless you have an issue, then you're screwed.
Something that no one has mentioned so far is that these mp3s are 256k bitrate (at least the few I checked). I'm not an audiophile with tubes or anything, but I do think that straight mp3 at 128 sounds off. I for one welcome our new DRM-free music overlords.
I was really surprised how many upper level folks at my rather large organization at the time paid attention to SCO. It hit at just the right time when Linux was being seriously considered by timid managers, the lawsuit threat scared them and they didn't want to get stuck. It was sad, all the tech guys would say it was crap, but the idea of a lawsuit is scary to some. (myself included). The last year or two the case was known to almost everyone to be without merit, but it's the opposite of shock and awe, it came about so slowly that there was never a great "Linux is ok again" moment.
Vonage is the Worst to cancel, since despite advertising heavily that they have no contract. You still have to pay $40 fee if it's within the first year, no matter what you do with their router. They now make this fee clearer on their page, but I'm nearly certain it wasn't there when I first signed up (about 2 years ago now) I charged back the fee but they sent in a "terms of service" and had the charge-back reversed. It's not worth more hassle for me at this point over $40, but they were slimy on the phone and now send me "important information about your account" every 2 weeks that is bulk rate junk mail trying to get me to re-subscribe. Never you bastards!
As a constantly annoyed US listener, these things overpower legit stations all the time in my area (Washington DC MEtro area). There are a few programs on PBS that I like and I honestly can't make it on a trip without hearing howard stern or rap or other peoples music 3 or 4 times. (The PBS station happens to be on 88.1, the default that many of these are tuned too)
As a photographer specializing in pet photography I decided to start sharing some of my buying choices and review what I use. I've put it up at Nikon Camera reviews . Some people seem to think that it's usefull for Nikon reviews. It's biased towards what works for me but it could help someone out.
This is a rule I sort of made up for purchasing these sorts of things. People sell home automation on things you want a few times a year. How many times have you wanted to change the temp of your house from work? Yeah, every now and then you may be leaving early/late etc and want the house to be warm/cold when you get home. To me this is about 5 times a year, I have a programmable thermostat that turns the heat on and off at preset times that are set broadly enough to cover most days. Also for laundry dishes etc, I don't care when they are done. Maybe if I was in an apt sharing washers with several other people, but my clothes can sit there for a while, even overnight if I forget, no biggie. Agian, this would be useful about 5 times a year. Now if you made some home automation that folded clothes and put them away, I would use that 52 times a year or more. I'd be willing to pay Big Bucks(tm) for this. Basicly I want rosie the robot to do my chores. I have a roomba for the floors and it's pretty nice, although it doesn't clean as well as a full sized vacuum I feel that it lets me vacuum by hand about half as often. I await you home automation overloads.
For gas... I'm now "well off" in the sense that I can afford to pay $3 for peppers if I want a pepper; however, when I was in college, and the first 5 years or so out of college I darn well shopped around. I would go to 3 grocery stores (all within 2 miles, me living in a pretty populated area) and get different things at different places depending what was on sale that week, after the first month or so I knew which stores were likely to be cheaper on which items. I would guess this saved me 30% or so on my average food bill. With gas there is no shopping around. Gas prices are all within 5% of each other for the most part. A nickle a gallon isn't a big deal, $2 a gallon is. Also I think it burns when we see Exxon make record profits while I can't afford to take a nice road trip vacation that I wanted since it would now cost hundreds of dollars in fuel. Just my 2 cents
Here is a brief review with video of my experience and a screen shot of the interface. Bottom line: Pretty cool, lots of time goes into making even a simple robot. Lego Mindstorms NXT review
No, I advertise my photography company on Google. You pay per click, worse, you bid per click so pay more for fancier keywords. My photography keywords tend to cost anywhere from .05 - 1.00 per click. Try wedding photography, want to be the first one on the google list? Try $8 or $9 PER CLICK! I seem to have about a 5-10% conversion ratio of clicks to sales, so that's $100 per sale in advertising for a wedding photographer. This is part of the reason I do mostly animals and non-getting-married people. I once heard on PBS that the average consumer spends like $500 a year on advertising. (ie. you buy a coke for $1.00, and coke spends .05 of every dollar they get on advertising, so in their model you just spent .05 on advertising). As a small bidniz owner I'm saddened by all you punks that ignore my ads :-p just my .02. By the way, go to my site and click all the "get a camera free" google links, also click on them on any site you see, then maybe we can put those scammers out of business. I wish google had a "no skeezy" advertising option.