220V is too much for everyday electronics. Why does your vacuum cleaner or table lamp need 220V?
Well, 110V is too much for everyday electronics, too. Fact is, the voltage standards have nothing to do with appliances or electronics. Most of the world chose 220V over 110V due to reduced transmission costs. They can get away with a smaller diameter wire to transmit the same amount of power. After WW2, they had to string up a LOT of wire when copper was none too cheap.
However, if there's a fault in an appliance, and the current carrying lead is exposed, you can touch the conductor without anything more than severe discomfort (wouldn't even call it pain - this has happened to me with a bad light socket). I doubt you could pull this off with 220V.
You could plausibly say that 110V is theoretically "safer" than 220V. But in practice, there's not that much difference. It's like getting hit by either a car or a pickup at the same speed. The voltage isn't what hurts you, it's the current. 110V is still plenty deadly, ask the roughly 400 people that die from it in the U.S. every year. If you're interested, only 40 people die of electrocution every year in the U.K. If you take into account that the U.S. has a little more than 5 times more people, that means that you're twice as likely to die electrocution in the U.S. than you are in the U.K.
The upshot of this is the US has many more circuit breakers, and a lot more granularity.
This really depends on a lot of things. The age of the house, the local electric code, the work ethic of the electrician doing the job, and so on. The house that I bought three years ago was built in the 1940's and had only main breakers: one for the upstairs and one for the downstairs and basement. All of the other breakers were for things like the water heater, fridge, stove, furnace, AC, etc. (For the record, I've never seen an average-sized house with 30-40 separate circuits.)
I would imagine the situation is much the same in the U.K. Chances are pretty good that new developments in every developed country have better wiring practices than decades before. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the modern U.K. electrical code is much MORE stringent than most US codes are, owing to their world-class bureaucracy.
UK plugs are fused, so the appliances are about as safe,
I guess it depends on what you mean by "safe." Safe from fire maybe. Apart from that, fuses do NOTHING to protect people, they protect equipment and property only. An electrical system with a third grounding leg, and GFCI outlets, those things help protect BOTH life and property.
In the late 90's, hundreds of companies[1] thought that Network Appliances were going to be the next big thing. Turns out, almost nobody wants a device which is 100% paperweight as soon as the network goes away. Until we have wireless broadband that is ubiquitous, robust, and (most importantly) cheap, network appliances are going nowhere.
1. Sun was the biggest of these, see their "The network is the computer" marketing slogan
As a Linux user for 13 years, I have to say that the greatest improvement in X over that time period is: I don't have to fuck with it anymore.
I became something of an unwilling expert on XFree86.conf and xorg.conf. Nowadays, I never have to touch it. And if I did try to touch it, I wouldn't know what to do since so much of it has changed or is automagically managed now.
I don't know which company is in the right on this, but I feel the need to point out that adding a color touchscreen to an otherwise ordinary ebook reader is not really that novel a concept.
In fact, when I first read about the Nook, I thought it was a ridiculous idea... why not just live with monochrome and make the whole display a touch-screen like the Sony reader? But I guess it's a reasonable stop-gap for web, video, and games until e-Ink technology can be made to work in color and with a decent refresh rate.
*sigh* We see these kinds of articles on every major new release of Ubuntu/Fedora/Windows/OSX. This is NOT news. When you're swapping out major parts of your OS and applications, things are bound to break. I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy or anything, but this kind of stuff gets on my nerves. To everyone who claims they were "stung" by this update, I have two questions:
1) Did you bother to test the new release at any point during its 6-month development cycle? The alpha and beta builds are available as a Live CD well ahead of the final release, it's a trivial matter to burn a copy, stick it in your machine, and give it a test run.
2) If stability is important to you (and I assume it is by the use of the word "stung"), why did you upgrade anyway? If I'm not mistaken, Karmic is not even an LTS release.
To provide a counter-example, I have 5 machines under my control that have been running Ubuntu for years. Out of those, NONE have ever had a problem upgrading to any version of Ubuntu, even Karmic.
Would any of the currently proposed net neutrality laws prevent Cablevision from charging other people for web content that it gives to its own ISP customers for free?
No. And they shouldn't, as long as Cablevision is not interfering with their customers' use of other news services.
Or is this considered an acceptable competitive practice?
As a membership benefit, my credit union used to sell tickets to local movie theaters at a discount. Consumer Reports lets you subscribe to their online content at a reduced rate if you already receive the printed publication. This is no different.
In Nintendo's defense, I have to say that in order to innovate, you have to design your ideas and products to fit the future rather than the present. Most of us here on Slashdot can probably remember a time when multiple games would fit on a single floppy disk. Many can also recall how nearly every new version of Quake or Doom required a top-of-the-line PC to play at the time of release.
The only problem with Nintendo's plans is that the cellular telcos have traditionally refused to upgrade or adapt their networks in any way, unless said modifications enable new strategic methods to nickel-and-dime their customers.
If a child ever says, "when I grow up I'm going to be a musician", we need to tell them - no you're not. Being a musician is a hobby that you do in your spare time.
This is generally the correct answer regardless of legal or economic structure. There are millions of individuals with artistic aspirations but only a small minority with the talent and ability to make a full-time job of it. The problem with our current copyright laws (and most of the proposed replacements) is that they produce a system which encourages mediocrity. There's no room in it for the folks who are genuinely talented yet lack industry connections. They don't have the means to promote themselves. Even when they give their work away for free, they are barely noticed because consumers have been conditioned to believe that "downloading an MP3 from the Internet" is the same thing as "stealing a bike from a garage."
Medical records are recognized by law as special exemptions to most laws that deal with (or more usually, codify the general lack of) personal information and privacy. See HIPPA.
Precisely. I think today's gamers forget that handhelds have typically had a much longer life expectancy than traditional consoles. The original Game Boy was "active" from 1989 to 2001. If we're to compare the DS to this, then it's not even halfway through its life-cycle.
'Law enforcement groups, which include the Serious and Organized Crime Agency and the Metropolitan Police's e-crime unit, believe that more encryption will increase the costs and workload for those attempting to monitor internet traffic.
I like this. In reality, properly-implemented encryption will completely prevent even the most well-funded government agency from monitoring your Internet traffic. But Police and Three Letter Agencies would never admit as much in a press release. Instead, encryption just "increases their costs and workload." Feh.
I think one of the reasons that the average person doesn't care enough about encryption to use it is because they have no idea how effective it is.
we dont' know that they didn't predict the end of their civilization,
Perhaps not conclusively, but we know that the Mayans were generally pretty good at documenting things. This they did not document or hint at. (To my knowledge. I am not an expert.)
Isn't traffic usually higher during business days than during the weekends? If so, during a pandemic I'd expect lower traffic, not higher.
Exactly. But as a thought experiment, let's stop and consider what would happen if every single child and adult in the country stayed home for a day and watched TV or surfed the web. In terms of Internet traffic and operations, how exactly would that be any different than every single weeknight between the hours of 8PM and 10PM? How about during the holidays where there is an entire week out of the year where almost no one goes work or school?
Why do big government agencies never seem to realize that the Internet is really pretty robust as it is? Can we stop already with the wacky movie-plot security theories?
Whoever in the GAO wasted the American people's taxes on this asinine venture needs to be reported via FraudNet.
Ask anyone who's worked in the capacity of corporate I.T. helpdesk peon what they think of.PST files and your answer every single time will be a punch in the face.
I hear you. There was a time I thought that Slashdotters, given their ability to create a free account or post anonymously, could one day shape the ideas of millions through their multitude of Informative or Insightful opinions. Instead, all we got were a bunch of jaded windbags complaining incessantly about how mediocre everyone else in the world is.
Penn and Teller did an entire Bullshit episode on this. Basically, the conclusion was: The Mayans themselves never predicted any doomsday. At all. They couldn't even predict the annihilation of their own civilization, let alone the human race. Their descendants don't know anything about a supposed doomsday. The whole was something invented by some crackpot authors to sell books to and get attention from gullible people. Just like every other doomsday prophesy in history.
It's easy to think of "useless" home automation features. Here are some that aren't so useless.
* automatic energy monitoring/control
- have your washer/dryer/whatever run during non-peak hours
- automate the opening/closing of heading/AC vents around the house depending on time of day, who's home, etc
- activate a solar water heater on days that it's worthwhile * phone system, media integration
- have your media collection available no matter which room you're in
- have your playing music/show follow you around the house
- show caller ID or take a call on whichever terminal or phone you happen to be near * security
- control video cameras and configure the system to react when something "interesting" happens
- get a live view of your house anywhere you have an Internet connection
Total price is in the neighbourhood of $220. Best bang for your buck, period. If I ever feel like putting Arch, Gentoo, or FreeBSD on it, the dual-core CPU will make building packages a breeze. The machine I built runs around 35W whilst doing nothing and a lot of that can be knocked off by spinning down the disk when idle.
There are some CRTs with horrible latency. I don't recall the technical details, but some manufacturers do some kind of "cheat" in the hardware that improves image quality but makes latency suffer tremendously. Which is fine for web browsing, photo-editing, and word-processing, but is horrible for video games. (There are tons of gaming-related forum threads about this, Google if you're interested.)
That said, modern LCDs without this defect have more than caught up with CRTs. For example, I'm running a bog-standard Acer X243W which, if the spec sheet is correct, has a response time of 5ms. The frame rate of an NTSC console like the Genesis has a maximum frame rate of 60fps, which translates to 17ms. As long as there is nothing funky going on in the video drivers, graphics adapter, or monitor, this monitor (and most any other on the market) is capable of playing Sonic just fine.
Can anyone tell me why a computer that is 10 times faster with 4 times the memory is so much slower at responding to simple inputs? There's a perceptible lag when just single clicking a desktop icon to highlight it.
I would guess that the hard disk in the XP laptop is some seriously slow shit. Lots of laptops ship with hard disks that are good on the battery, but horrible on performance (especially latency). Windows has to hit the disk for damn near everything you do, so having a slow hard disk hurts its performance badly. Upgrade the HDD, and you'll be golden. I've seen plenty of XP machines with good disks run circles, performance-wise, around machines with slow 5400 RPM PATA disks but twice the CPU and memory.
1) That Vista had a horrible word-of-mouth reputation that all of Microsoft's considerable marketing ability couldn't counter.
2) That Microsoft could re-release Vista with superficial tweaks under a different name, with much better marketing, and the general public would eat it up.
3) That you could stick an average moron in front of a computer and a camera, show them some eye-candy, and they *still* wouldn't know what they were talking about when it comes to computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, 110V is too much for everyday electronics, too. Fact is, the voltage standards have nothing to do with appliances or electronics. Most of the world chose 220V over 110V due to reduced transmission costs. They can get away with a smaller diameter wire to transmit the same amount of power. After WW2, they had to string up a LOT of wire when copper was none too cheap.
You could plausibly say that 110V is theoretically "safer" than 220V. But in practice, there's not that much difference. It's like getting hit by either a car or a pickup at the same speed. The voltage isn't what hurts you, it's the current. 110V is still plenty deadly, ask the roughly 400 people that die from it in the U.S. every year. If you're interested, only 40 people die of electrocution every year in the U.K. If you take into account that the U.S. has a little more than 5 times more people, that means that you're twice as likely to die electrocution in the U.S. than you are in the U.K.
This really depends on a lot of things. The age of the house, the local electric code, the work ethic of the electrician doing the job, and so on. The house that I bought three years ago was built in the 1940's and had only main breakers: one for the upstairs and one for the downstairs and basement. All of the other breakers were for things like the water heater, fridge, stove, furnace, AC, etc. (For the record, I've never seen an average-sized house with 30-40 separate circuits.)
I would imagine the situation is much the same in the U.K. Chances are pretty good that new developments in every developed country have better wiring practices than decades before. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the modern U.K. electrical code is much MORE stringent than most US codes are, owing to their world-class bureaucracy.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "safe." Safe from fire maybe. Apart from that, fuses do NOTHING to protect people, they protect equipment and property only. An electrical system with a third grounding leg, and GFCI outlets, those things help protect BOTH life and property.
In the late 90's, hundreds of companies[1] thought that Network Appliances were going to be the next big thing. Turns out, almost nobody wants a device which is 100% paperweight as soon as the network goes away. Until we have wireless broadband that is ubiquitous, robust, and (most importantly) cheap, network appliances are going nowhere.
1. Sun was the biggest of these, see their "The network is the computer" marketing slogan
As a Linux user for 13 years, I have to say that the greatest improvement in X over that time period is: I don't have to fuck with it anymore.
I became something of an unwilling expert on XFree86.conf and xorg.conf. Nowadays, I never have to touch it. And if I did try to touch it, I wouldn't know what to do since so much of it has changed or is automagically managed now.
And that's the way it should be.
I don't know which company is in the right on this, but I feel the need to point out that adding a color touchscreen to an otherwise ordinary ebook reader is not really that novel a concept.
In fact, when I first read about the Nook, I thought it was a ridiculous idea... why not just live with monochrome and make the whole display a touch-screen like the Sony reader? But I guess it's a reasonable stop-gap for web, video, and games until e-Ink technology can be made to work in color and with a decent refresh rate.
*sigh* We see these kinds of articles on every major new release of Ubuntu/Fedora/Windows/OSX. This is NOT news. When you're swapping out major parts of your OS and applications, things are bound to break. I'm not an Ubuntu fanboy or anything, but this kind of stuff gets on my nerves. To everyone who claims they were "stung" by this update, I have two questions:
1) Did you bother to test the new release at any point during its 6-month development cycle? The alpha and beta builds are available as a Live CD well ahead of the final release, it's a trivial matter to burn a copy, stick it in your machine, and give it a test run.
2) If stability is important to you (and I assume it is by the use of the word "stung"), why did you upgrade anyway? If I'm not mistaken, Karmic is not even an LTS release.
To provide a counter-example, I have 5 machines under my control that have been running Ubuntu for years. Out of those, NONE have ever had a problem upgrading to any version of Ubuntu, even Karmic.
A glorified DVD, photo, video, music player with networking, streaming, playlist abilities, profiles, and meta-data management, yes.
No. And they shouldn't, as long as Cablevision is not interfering with their customers' use of other news services.
As a membership benefit, my credit union used to sell tickets to local movie theaters at a discount. Consumer Reports lets you subscribe to their online content at a reduced rate if you already receive the printed publication. This is no different.
Huh? There are already ridiculously easy ways to do that.
XBMC is a media player only. If you want to record TV, you still need Myth. If you don't, XBMC is roughly 325 million times easier to set up and use.
In Nintendo's defense, I have to say that in order to innovate, you have to design your ideas and products to fit the future rather than the present. Most of us here on Slashdot can probably remember a time when multiple games would fit on a single floppy disk. Many can also recall how nearly every new version of Quake or Doom required a top-of-the-line PC to play at the time of release.
The only problem with Nintendo's plans is that the cellular telcos have traditionally refused to upgrade or adapt their networks in any way, unless said modifications enable new strategic methods to nickel-and-dime their customers.
This is generally the correct answer regardless of legal or economic structure. There are millions of individuals with artistic aspirations but only a small minority with the talent and ability to make a full-time job of it. The problem with our current copyright laws (and most of the proposed replacements) is that they produce a system which encourages mediocrity. There's no room in it for the folks who are genuinely talented yet lack industry connections. They don't have the means to promote themselves. Even when they give their work away for free, they are barely noticed because consumers have been conditioned to believe that "downloading an MP3 from the Internet" is the same thing as "stealing a bike from a garage."
Medical records are recognized by law as special exemptions to most laws that deal with (or more usually, codify the general lack of) personal information and privacy. See HIPPA.
What does the FDA think of this?
Precisely. I think today's gamers forget that handhelds have typically had a much longer life expectancy than traditional consoles. The original Game Boy was "active" from 1989 to 2001. If we're to compare the DS to this, then it's not even halfway through its life-cycle.
I like this. In reality, properly-implemented encryption will completely prevent even the most well-funded government agency from monitoring your Internet traffic. But Police and Three Letter Agencies would never admit as much in a press release. Instead, encryption just "increases their costs and workload." Feh.
I think one of the reasons that the average person doesn't care enough about encryption to use it is because they have no idea how effective it is.
Perhaps not conclusively, but we know that the Mayans were generally pretty good at documenting things. This they did not document or hint at. (To my knowledge. I am not an expert.)
Exactly. But as a thought experiment, let's stop and consider what would happen if every single child and adult in the country stayed home for a day and watched TV or surfed the web. In terms of Internet traffic and operations, how exactly would that be any different than every single weeknight between the hours of 8PM and 10PM? How about during the holidays where there is an entire week out of the year where almost no one goes work or school?
Why do big government agencies never seem to realize that the Internet is really pretty robust as it is? Can we stop already with the wacky movie-plot security theories?
Whoever in the GAO wasted the American people's taxes on this asinine venture needs to be reported via FraudNet.
Ask anyone who's worked in the capacity of corporate I.T. helpdesk peon what they think of .PST files and your answer every single time will be a punch in the face.
I hear you. There was a time I thought that Slashdotters, given their ability to create a free account or post anonymously, could one day shape the ideas of millions through their multitude of Informative or Insightful opinions. Instead, all we got were a bunch of jaded windbags complaining incessantly about how mediocre everyone else in the world is.
Penn and Teller did an entire Bullshit episode on this. Basically, the conclusion was: The Mayans themselves never predicted any doomsday. At all. They couldn't even predict the annihilation of their own civilization, let alone the human race. Their descendants don't know anything about a supposed doomsday. The whole was something invented by some crackpot authors to sell books to and get attention from gullible people. Just like every other doomsday prophesy in history.
It's easy to think of "useless" home automation features. Here are some that aren't so useless.
* automatic energy monitoring/control
- have your washer/dryer/whatever run during non-peak hours
- automate the opening/closing of heading/AC vents around the house depending on time of day, who's home, etc
- activate a solar water heater on days that it's worthwhile
* phone system, media integration
- have your media collection available no matter which room you're in
- have your playing music/show follow you around the house
- show caller ID or take a call on whichever terminal or phone you happen to be near
* security
- control video cameras and configure the system to react when something "interesting" happens
- get a live view of your house anywhere you have an Internet connection
1. Intel Atom 330 (dual-core, 64-bit) CPU + motherboard: $80
2. 1TB low-power disk: $80
3. 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 667: $30
4. Crappy mini-tower case: $30
5. Ubuntu Server: free!
Total price is in the neighbourhood of $220. Best bang for your buck, period. If I ever feel like putting Arch, Gentoo, or FreeBSD on it, the dual-core CPU will make building packages a breeze. The machine I built runs around 35W whilst doing nothing and a lot of that can be knocked off by spinning down the disk when idle.
There are some CRTs with horrible latency. I don't recall the technical details, but some manufacturers do some kind of "cheat" in the hardware that improves image quality but makes latency suffer tremendously. Which is fine for web browsing, photo-editing, and word-processing, but is horrible for video games. (There are tons of gaming-related forum threads about this, Google if you're interested.)
That said, modern LCDs without this defect have more than caught up with CRTs. For example, I'm running a bog-standard Acer X243W which, if the spec sheet is correct, has a response time of 5ms. The frame rate of an NTSC console like the Genesis has a maximum frame rate of 60fps, which translates to 17ms. As long as there is nothing funky going on in the video drivers, graphics adapter, or monitor, this monitor (and most any other on the market) is capable of playing Sonic just fine.
I would guess that the hard disk in the XP laptop is some seriously slow shit. Lots of laptops ship with hard disks that are good on the battery, but horrible on performance (especially latency). Windows has to hit the disk for damn near everything you do, so having a slow hard disk hurts its performance badly. Upgrade the HDD, and you'll be golden. I've seen plenty of XP machines with good disks run circles, performance-wise, around machines with slow 5400 RPM PATA disks but twice the CPU and memory.
You remember the Mojave Experiment, right? It proved:
1) That Vista had a horrible word-of-mouth reputation that all of Microsoft's considerable marketing ability couldn't counter.
2) That Microsoft could re-release Vista with superficial tweaks under a different name, with much better marketing, and the general public would eat it up.
3) That you could stick an average moron in front of a computer and a camera, show them some eye-candy, and they *still* wouldn't know what they were talking about when it comes to computers.