I've been using Ubuntu, Fedora, and OS X for the last 8 years here. Haven't had a windows laptop for any more than the first 2 months I was here when I got the okay to wipe it. about 60 Dev's here, all use OS X with only a few that use Linux.
It greatly depends on your job. Your seriously not going to miss out on much... and it's Windows, it's not like it's that hard to figure it out if you really need to.
We're still on 5.5. It's been rock solid, but some managers thought Cisco's UCS VMWare based platform would be the way to go, so now we're running both. UCS for most of the VMs, and XenServer for the ones we care to keep running when UCS dies. We've been running the free license and missing out on some of the cool features of the XenServer 6.x branches... this might actually get me to upgrade things.
If my wife could stick with XP for the rest of her life, she'd be quite happy. Too bad it doesn't get updates anymore and will soon fail to do various things on modern hardware.
Innovation is cool, Forcing users to use their desktops like tablets just because you want to reduce the differences between them isn't. I don't want to touch my desktop screen, it's generally >3' from my face, I don't have 3' arms. Nor is it ergonomic for me to move my hands to and from the keyboard over and over again.
It's also a pain in the neck for me to have to explain how Windows 8 isn't the most horrible thing in the world because a relative doesn't understand that the metro full screen start menu IS the start menu. I'm tired of making excuses for Microsoft's failings. If they don't fix things I'm going to have to start moving my relatives over to Fedora. So far, it's been easier to tell them how to use it than Windows 8.
This is an interesting part. I've noticed recently there have been more and more places where the Cash price differs from the Credit price. It used to be this way growing up, and they're going back to it because of all the problems and costs associated with Credit. And yes, it's Cheaper to pay with Cash. (a few gas stations here charge 10 cents or more per gallon for credit over cash transactions.)
I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).
I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.
(Disclaimer, we have gmail for business here so if you open anything from the webmail client, it does it through Google Docs.)
Except that kids are much more likely to think nothing of wearing a helmet if the parents with them are also wearing helmets. My 2yo likes to wear hers, but only if we're wearing ours. It just becomes something you do as part of the activity. Just as much as wearing seat belts while in a car. If I put her in a normal car seat just to put her down to grab something while we're getting in the car, she starts saying "No, Dad! No, no, no, no..." until I put her in her seat and buckle her in. She's not used to a regular seat, and she's not used to biking without a helmet.
I was always brought up to wear a seat belt when I'm in a car, and if I don't now (like on a bus where there isn't one, or if I have to pull my car up the driveway a few feet to work on it) I just feel really weird not having it.
My 4S is definitely better than my 3G was, but then it was 3 years old when I traded up. I still get a days worth on either. The catch is that the 4S is so much faster and generally more useful that I end up doing more battery sucking things with it just because. It's smooth and does great transferring real time maps with GPS while streaming Pandora in the background, even over AT&T "4G".
If I leave both on the table and mostly ignore them for the day, the 4S gives me more battery life than the 3G ever did. If I actually use them as I usually would have, the 4S loses... but I find I actually use it A LOT MORE. When I first got it I found myself thinking "Man, the battery life sucks on this" but then I realized I was bascially using it non-stop. Once I got over the "OMG NEW-SHINY" period, it's on par with what the 3G was.
In short, I think the batteries Have improved, but we now expect our phones to do more, and have found more and more ways to use them more on a more regular basis. We cram more powerful AND power hungry chips in the same package and then get annoied and act surprised when it doesn't last as long as the older ones did.
The same thing has happened to laptops... and because this is slashdot, cars. I mean, I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG. Why don't we have that now? because the civic is huge in comparison, weighs almost twice as much (the old 90 DX was literally 1 ton), has A/C, power everything, huge beams and airbags for safety, etc. And everyone thinks we should have more MPG by now. Yeah. We should, except you wanted all this other crap in there too.
We have fingerprint readers here. Sometimes, they don't recognize my finger. It's still my finger, but there's nothing i can do to convince it it's me, so I'm stuck and can't do my job until it decides to let me in. Face recognition is the same way. There's no way I can change my face, or alter my fingerprint to make it work, so I basically am just screwed. If there's any chance of that with this, there's no way I want it.
Seriously, don't have a significant other or children at home. It's my biggest hurdle. I used to be all about working from home, but trying it after having a daughter means "Daddy's trying to do work" turns into "Yay! Daddy's Home!!! Let's bug him ALL DAY!".
If I got a job that required working from home, I'd probably build a small shed in the backyard with insulation, power, and ethernet and just work out there so they're less likely to bust in every 5 minutes or be screaming down the hall or whatever.
Why? I don't see a reason behind it. Sure it'd have been NICE if they spoke up sooner, but perhaps they didn't duplicate this glitch in the lab until now. I know personally I have no problem with the battery on my iPhone4S or iPad2 both running iOS5. You ever take your car to the dealer for a problem and have them not duplicate it, same deal.
To quote the article: ASA's complete environmental impact study estimated that, in the worst case (with an acute angle of entry in which Cassini would gradually burn up), a significant fraction of the 32.7 kg[4] of plutonium-238 inside the RTGs would have been dispersed into the Earth's atmosphere so that up to five billion people (i.e. the entire terrestrial population) could have been exposed, causing up to an estimated 5,000 additional cancer deaths[21] (0.0005 per cent, i.e. a fraction 0.000005, of 1 billion cancer deaths expected anyway from other causes; the product is incorrectly calculated elsewhere[22] as 500,000 deaths), but the odds against that happening were more than 1 million to one.
In other words, there was a 1 million to 1 chance that the space craft might have caused an additional 5000 deaths due to radiation. NOT the 10% you came up with. iirc from the news at the time, a malfunction of the space craft in most probable consequences could have resulted in a small population receiving about what you'd get from one X-ray as the PU-238 ball would mostly just fall through the atmosphere.
Does Anon realize that retaliation legitimises the captures of those people? I mean, as I see it, if there was a shred of doubt before that these people were part of Anon, retaliation just advertised that the belief was correct and those people are guilty of being part of the organization... I'm all about pointing out corruption and opening up closed doors when there are problems behind them, but keep getting sloppy like this Anon and it's going to be hard to find supporters in the future.
If stopping the use of Petroleum-based plastic frames is the goal to making glasses greener, then I've been pioneering this approach for a while... I hate plastic frames, It's been metal ones for me since 8th grade. Plastic frames snap. Metal frames bend and can be bent back.
Wow, I GOTTA jailbreak mine so I can get iSSH! oh, wait, that's right, I've got TouchTerm which looks quite a bit better.
And yes, I know there are other reasons to Jailbreak, but none have really been a big deal to me. Notifications and lock screen info are the only two reasons that persuade me enough to do it and well, they're part of iOS5. So, nothing to see here, moving along.
Seriously, this is much cheaper than some of the Wrist borne Chronographs... Tag Heuer look out!
Seriously though, I mean, sure you'll need a few more electronics and such to get it to show time, but over all, it wouldn't be a stretch to have a fully functional wall clock run off of atomic precision. Even better yet, it should have a SoC that'll hook it to your wifi network and advertise the time to anything in the area, and be accessible as part of the ntp pool.I know entire data centers that would be happy with something like that as a 1/2 U server, and I'm guessing it won't add much over and above this price, though someone will charge a premium for it anyway.
Seriously, I've been running iOS 4.x on my 3G iPhone since it was released. 4.0 kinda sucked... but 4.2.1 seems pretty stable and much faster than the other 4.x variants. Version 4.0 was released June 21, 2010... that's almost a full year ago. If you haven't upgraded to 4.x yet, you've either decided long ago you're not going to, or you're living under a rock.
Anyone know what the Return on Investment is for this? I mean, Beside the intangible "We're saving the earth" publicity... Sure they can sell some of it back to power companies, and perhaps gain some carbon credits... but I'm sure they'll also use it as power for a server farm. I have to believe there's some amount of time this pays for itself with any of those options, but the article is a bit light on those details.
The wooden looking Labyrinth game that came out years ago on the iPhone/iPod Touch did this with just the accelerometers. It's a really cool in game effect, and I'm glad they made the change to use the cameras, but without some API worked into the next OS release, this seems to not be too useful.
Also, what's the CPU load with this running? Is it the kind of thing that takes a lot of processing power, or is it something that can be done in the background of a game?
So what can your $200 laptop beat my $500 tablet at?
Web surfing? I don't know, the tablet interface with it's ability to just click, rescale, scroll and everything without having to use a mouse is quite an upgrade personally. Gaming? You mean, you have a $200 laptop with a good graphics card in it? I'm pretty sure an iPad 2 or Tegra 2 powered tablet could blow the socks off your $200 intel integrated graphics card. Size? I think the tablet's gonna win, unless you attached a brick to the back of it. 1/4"-1/2" thick tablet wins every time. Especially when I'm in a cramped coach seat flying for 6 hours and can't open the laptop up all the way because the screen hits the seat in front of me. Battery Life? We're talking about a $200 laptop here... not a netbook. And even then try getting 10 hours of good use out of a netbook or laptop.
And who makes a New, powerful $200 laptop in the first place?
Face it, There are cases for each item. They're not meant for the same tasks. We're trying to compare apples and oranges here and I'm starting to get tired of it. Although, I will say that I got a tablet because I don't want to have to take care of another laptop. the tablet just works for what I need, I have a perfectly powerful PC in my home office I can use if I want to do anything I need it for... and if I'm just doing simple things like web browsing, facebooking, some gaming, youtubing, etc the tablet works perfectly. (and if I felt like it, I could sync my keyboard to it or use a stylus to do text input.)
Ever hear of the Savannah? It was a Nuclear powered merchant ship. It won't satisfy your commercial aspirations as it was built as a show boat. 100 staterooms does not make a profitable cruise ship... And the addition of the 'first of it's kind' needing it's own support infrastructure didn't help either... but with fuel prices going up, and with the proper facilities in place to handle the ships, I think it'd actually end up being much cheaper in the long run, especially with modern reactors that don't need enriched fuel or fuel with very low levels of enrichment. Safety isn't a huge problem with modern designs, and for the amount of money the shipping companies bank on the products they ship, its something that seriously needs to be looked into again. Even if it doesn't come to fruition for another 10-15 years, it would greatly help the worlds oil reserves which are depleting as we speak.
Not to stick up for "the Man", because I hate him as much as anyone here... but one major reason why these devices aren't wide open in the first place is support. It's MUCH easier to support a phone that does {W,X,Y,Z} than it is one that does {W,X,Y,Z,$WhateverElseWasInstalled}. Especially when installing those extra things requires potentially rooting and altering the underlying system.
I'm all about the device being yours as soon as you purchase it. But if I bought a car and decided I wanted to swap the engine out for an electric engine and batteries, I'd not expect the manufacturer to even look my way when I drove it in to the shop.
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I've been using Ubuntu, Fedora, and OS X for the last 8 years here. Haven't had a windows laptop for any more than the first 2 months I was here when I got the okay to wipe it. about 60 Dev's here, all use OS X with only a few that use Linux.
It greatly depends on your job. Your seriously not going to miss out on much... and it's Windows, it's not like it's that hard to figure it out if you really need to.
We're still on 5.5. It's been rock solid, but some managers thought Cisco's UCS VMWare based platform would be the way to go, so now we're running both. UCS for most of the VMs, and XenServer for the ones we care to keep running when UCS dies. We've been running the free license and missing out on some of the cool features of the XenServer 6.x branches... this might actually get me to upgrade things.
If my wife could stick with XP for the rest of her life, she'd be quite happy. Too bad it doesn't get updates anymore and will soon fail to do various things on modern hardware.
Innovation is cool, Forcing users to use their desktops like tablets just because you want to reduce the differences between them isn't. I don't want to touch my desktop screen, it's generally >3' from my face, I don't have 3' arms. Nor is it ergonomic for me to move my hands to and from the keyboard over and over again.
It's also a pain in the neck for me to have to explain how Windows 8 isn't the most horrible thing in the world because a relative doesn't understand that the metro full screen start menu IS the start menu. I'm tired of making excuses for Microsoft's failings. If they don't fix things I'm going to have to start moving my relatives over to Fedora. So far, it's been easier to tell them how to use it than Windows 8.
I don't even have X installed on my CentOS and RHEL servers. It's so much easier to manage from the command line... especially remotely.
But then I'm the kinda guy MS had to come out with "Server Core" for, I suppose.
This is an interesting part. I've noticed recently there have been more and more places where the Cash price differs from the Credit price. It used to be this way growing up, and they're going back to it because of all the problems and costs associated with Credit. And yes, it's Cheaper to pay with Cash. (a few gas stations here charge 10 cents or more per gallon for credit over cash transactions.)
Might have a little competition from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope
25m is a bit less than 30m. Just saying.
I've got the same background and needs... and I've found more and more that Google Docs seems to work pretty well 98% of the time. It keeps getting better and better and for most interoffice stuff just works. Sometimes it hits a macro or something that it doesn't get and I have to download it, but the last time I did that was about 2 years ago (and it's improved a lot since then anyway).
I'm quite happy that I'll be able to completely ditch office software installs soon.
(Disclaimer, we have gmail for business here so if you open anything from the webmail client, it does it through Google Docs.)
Except that kids are much more likely to think nothing of wearing a helmet if the parents with them are also wearing helmets. My 2yo likes to wear hers, but only if we're wearing ours. It just becomes something you do as part of the activity. Just as much as wearing seat belts while in a car. If I put her in a normal car seat just to put her down to grab something while we're getting in the car, she starts saying "No, Dad! No, no, no, no..." until I put her in her seat and buckle her in. She's not used to a regular seat, and she's not used to biking without a helmet.
I was always brought up to wear a seat belt when I'm in a car, and if I don't now (like on a bus where there isn't one, or if I have to pull my car up the driveway a few feet to work on it) I just feel really weird not having it.
My 4S is definitely better than my 3G was, but then it was 3 years old when I traded up. I still get a days worth on either. The catch is that the 4S is so much faster and generally more useful that I end up doing more battery sucking things with it just because. It's smooth and does great transferring real time maps with GPS while streaming Pandora in the background, even over AT&T "4G".
If I leave both on the table and mostly ignore them for the day, the 4S gives me more battery life than the 3G ever did.
If I actually use them as I usually would have, the 4S loses... but I find I actually use it A LOT MORE. When I first got it I found myself thinking "Man, the battery life sucks on this" but then I realized I was bascially using it non-stop. Once I got over the "OMG NEW-SHINY" period, it's on par with what the 3G was.
In short, I think the batteries Have improved, but we now expect our phones to do more, and have found more and more ways to use them more on a more regular basis. We cram more powerful AND power hungry chips in the same package and then get annoied and act surprised when it doesn't last as long as the older ones did.
The same thing has happened to laptops... and because this is slashdot, cars. I mean, I remember in the 80's and early 90's when we had little civic hatchbacks that got 55+ MPG. Why don't we have that now? because the civic is huge in comparison, weighs almost twice as much (the old 90 DX was literally 1 ton), has A/C, power everything, huge beams and airbags for safety, etc. And everyone thinks we should have more MPG by now. Yeah. We should, except you wanted all this other crap in there too.
I'd Tap that... Strateghttp://www.xkcd.com/398/
We have fingerprint readers here. Sometimes, they don't recognize my finger. It's still my finger, but there's nothing i can do to convince it it's me, so I'm stuck and can't do my job until it decides to let me in. Face recognition is the same way. There's no way I can change my face, or alter my fingerprint to make it work, so I basically am just screwed. If there's any chance of that with this, there's no way I want it.
Seriously, don't have a significant other or children at home. It's my biggest hurdle. I used to be all about working from home, but trying it after having a daughter means "Daddy's trying to do work" turns into "Yay! Daddy's Home!!! Let's bug him ALL DAY!".
If I got a job that required working from home, I'd probably build a small shed in the backyard with insulation, power, and ethernet and just work out there so they're less likely to bust in every 5 minutes or be screaming down the hall or whatever.
Why? I don't see a reason behind it. Sure it'd have been NICE if they spoke up sooner, but perhaps they didn't duplicate this glitch in the lab until now. I know personally I have no problem with the battery on my iPhone4S or iPad2 both running iOS5. You ever take your car to the dealer for a problem and have them not duplicate it, same deal.
DNS-and-BIND: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source
To quote the article: ASA's complete environmental impact study estimated that, in the worst case (with an acute angle of entry in which Cassini would gradually burn up), a significant fraction of the 32.7 kg[4] of plutonium-238 inside the RTGs would have been dispersed into the Earth's atmosphere so that up to five billion people (i.e. the entire terrestrial population) could have been exposed, causing up to an estimated 5,000 additional cancer deaths[21] (0.0005 per cent, i.e. a fraction 0.000005, of 1 billion cancer deaths expected anyway from other causes; the product is incorrectly calculated elsewhere[22] as 500,000 deaths), but the odds against that happening were more than 1 million to one.
In other words, there was a 1 million to 1 chance that the space craft might have caused an additional 5000 deaths due to radiation. NOT the 10% you came up with. iirc from the news at the time, a malfunction of the space craft in most probable consequences could have resulted in a small population receiving about what you'd get from one X-ray as the PU-238 ball would mostly just fall through the atmosphere.
Does Anon realize that retaliation legitimises the captures of those people? I mean, as I see it, if there was a shred of doubt before that these people were part of Anon, retaliation just advertised that the belief was correct and those people are guilty of being part of the organization... I'm all about pointing out corruption and opening up closed doors when there are problems behind them, but keep getting sloppy like this Anon and it's going to be hard to find supporters in the future.
If stopping the use of Petroleum-based plastic frames is the goal to making glasses greener, then I've been pioneering this approach for a while... I hate plastic frames, It's been metal ones for me since 8th grade. Plastic frames snap. Metal frames bend and can be bent back.
Wow, I GOTTA jailbreak mine so I can get iSSH! oh, wait, that's right, I've got TouchTerm which looks quite a bit better.
And yes, I know there are other reasons to Jailbreak, but none have really been a big deal to me. Notifications and lock screen info are the only two reasons that persuade me enough to do it and well, they're part of iOS5. So, nothing to see here, moving along.
Seriously, this is much cheaper than some of the Wrist borne Chronographs... Tag Heuer look out!
Seriously though, I mean, sure you'll need a few more electronics and such to get it to show time, but over all, it wouldn't be a stretch to have a fully functional wall clock run off of atomic precision. Even better yet, it should have a SoC that'll hook it to your wifi network and advertise the time to anything in the area, and be accessible as part of the ntp pool.I know entire data centers that would be happy with something like that as a 1/2 U server, and I'm guessing it won't add much over and above this price, though someone will charge a premium for it anyway.
Seriously, I've been running iOS 4.x on my 3G iPhone since it was released. 4.0 kinda sucked... but 4.2.1 seems pretty stable and much faster than the other 4.x variants. Version 4.0 was released June 21, 2010... that's almost a full year ago. If you haven't upgraded to 4.x yet, you've either decided long ago you're not going to, or you're living under a rock.
Anyone know what the Return on Investment is for this? I mean, Beside the intangible "We're saving the earth" publicity... Sure they can sell some of it back to power companies, and perhaps gain some carbon credits... but I'm sure they'll also use it as power for a server farm. I have to believe there's some amount of time this pays for itself with any of those options, but the article is a bit light on those details.
The wooden looking Labyrinth game that came out years ago on the iPhone/iPod Touch did this with just the accelerometers. It's a really cool in game effect, and I'm glad they made the change to use the cameras, but without some API worked into the next OS release, this seems to not be too useful.
Also, what's the CPU load with this running? Is it the kind of thing that takes a lot of processing power, or is it something that can be done in the background of a game?
So what can your $200 laptop beat my $500 tablet at?
Web surfing? I don't know, the tablet interface with it's ability to just click, rescale, scroll and everything without having to use a mouse is quite an upgrade personally.
Gaming? You mean, you have a $200 laptop with a good graphics card in it? I'm pretty sure an iPad 2 or Tegra 2 powered tablet could blow the socks off your $200 intel integrated graphics card.
Size? I think the tablet's gonna win, unless you attached a brick to the back of it. 1/4"-1/2" thick tablet wins every time. Especially when I'm in a cramped coach seat flying for 6 hours and can't open the laptop up all the way because the screen hits the seat in front of me.
Battery Life? We're talking about a $200 laptop here... not a netbook. And even then try getting 10 hours of good use out of a netbook or laptop.
And who makes a New, powerful $200 laptop in the first place?
Face it, There are cases for each item. They're not meant for the same tasks. We're trying to compare apples and oranges here and I'm starting to get tired of it. Although, I will say that I got a tablet because I don't want to have to take care of another laptop. the tablet just works for what I need, I have a perfectly powerful PC in my home office I can use if I want to do anything I need it for... and if I'm just doing simple things like web browsing, facebooking, some gaming, youtubing, etc the tablet works perfectly. (and if I felt like it, I could sync my keyboard to it or use a stylus to do text input.)
Ever hear of the Savannah? It was a Nuclear powered merchant ship. It won't satisfy your commercial aspirations as it was built as a show boat. 100 staterooms does not make a profitable cruise ship... And the addition of the 'first of it's kind' needing it's own support infrastructure didn't help either... but with fuel prices going up, and with the proper facilities in place to handle the ships, I think it'd actually end up being much cheaper in the long run, especially with modern reactors that don't need enriched fuel or fuel with very low levels of enrichment. Safety isn't a huge problem with modern designs, and for the amount of money the shipping companies bank on the products they ship, its something that seriously needs to be looked into again. Even if it doesn't come to fruition for another 10-15 years, it would greatly help the worlds oil reserves which are depleting as we speak.
FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
The popular kids get more action... Wow. I'm glad they did this study.
Not to stick up for "the Man", because I hate him as much as anyone here... but one major reason why these devices aren't wide open in the first place is support. It's MUCH easier to support a phone that does {W,X,Y,Z} than it is one that does {W,X,Y,Z,$WhateverElseWasInstalled}. Especially when installing those extra things requires potentially rooting and altering the underlying system.
I'm all about the device being yours as soon as you purchase it. But if I bought a car and decided I wanted to swap the engine out for an electric engine and batteries, I'd not expect the manufacturer to even look my way when I drove it in to the shop.