Seriously, why? Sure I look at the size of the drive when I buy a laptop. I look at it and go "Why the hell can't I get something smaller?" Smaller and faster means a big speed increase and the ability to NOT lose a lot of when the laptop inevitably gets bumped/dropped/water spills/etc. NO valuable data should reside primarily on a laptop hard drive. So when the smallest drive I could order for my wife's Lenovo was 250GB, I went with that... Let me tell you, her previous laptop had a 20GB drive, and it was only a hair over half full. My x40 is dual boot, with a 40GB drive. Sure, I've got some games on there, and sure, modern games are bigger, but you can't tell me I need anything more than 64GB tops.
Now maybe I'm odd for having a NAS at home that's RAID backed and easily accessible, but in this day and age, it doesn't seem that odd to me, nor was it expensive it doesn't get dropped, it doesn't mind if it loses a drive, it doesn't get hot, or make noise and create heat or suck battery down when I'm working on the laptop and if I work on files there, they stay centrally located. Now maybe I don't have tons of copies of DVD's on my laptop, and perhaps other people do, but DVD only tops out at 9GB a pop, and how many people rip Bluray's to play with them on trips?
I think it's really just a ploy by the HDD manufacturers to try to make us want more space for no good reason.I have a total of 750GB on my NAS, it's been 250+GB Free for the last two years and I've not made a concerted effort to delete things like videos and pictures when I'm done with them. Unless people are doing lots of HD video editing with uncompressed files on their laptops, I don't see how anyone can use 500GB+ drives in there during the current decade. I'm sure we'll want more eventually when screen res gets to a point where vidoes need to store greater than HD, but it seems kinda like a stupid to benchmark for a laptop.
Unfortunately, some panels look downright crappy when on their side. Seems manufacturers don't think about viewing angles from up and down, which when turned are then left and right. We have a few different ones here at work that look horrible from anywhere besides perfectly centered. otherwise they turn yellow or green.
I (unfortunately) used to be a cashier at a grocery store. What I find is that the machines for "Self Checkout" are so dumbed down that there's like a minimum wait time between items. On a normal register, if you had a stack of like items (like say cat food or koolaid packets or whatever) and I had a bagger, I could easily keep up 300 scan's per minute. I think the scans per minute metric on the self checkout machines is like 5. It's Horribly slower than the ones used in the normal lines and it really irks me. However, If there's no line for them, I'll use it every time. I know it saves the company money and therefore saves me money. It also is nice not having to deal with someone else who isn't very well trained, but the big benefit is that there are usually 4 machines for each "line" of people, so chances of getting stuck behind the one guy that has to have someone look something up or un-break the machine for him with the furthest manager from his location is usually a lot lower.
It also helps on those days that I just want to skip all human interaction...
Sounds like we'll just need to dump that video from the cameras in RAW, do the post processing and then compress it. Which is the way it should happen anyway if it wasn't for speed limitations in getting RAW 24fps 1080p video off of the camera.
I'd also like to add the T2i or the 7D. It's "Good Enough" for 1080p, continues to use great EOS lenses, does it cheaper than the 5D mk II and is $1k or less. As TFA points out, the cost of the system their pitching has a camera that STARTS at $2k and "More advanced sensor frontends could drastically increase this price". To me, Drastically increasing $2k puts you closer to a RED camera, and not quite so drastic, the 5D mk II, so the $2k camera is close to the same as the T2i or 7D and they cost quite a bit less, have chdk firmware (or will soon) and are proven systems with support lines and easily found warranty replacements. Because the last think you want to do is shoot a few perfect takes and then find out that the 'open source hardware' wasn't quite up to snuff.
Carbon fiber would have been cooler, thinner (what's with that raised edge and the fact that the buttons don't protrude at all from the face, that'd drive me nuts!) and a lot lighter weight, not to mention being easier to construct.
They spend all their time talking on their cell phones anyway... why don't we just use those to track them? We wouldn't have to physically attach anything and there's already a few network applications that do it. In fact, maybe that'd make them hang up and drive more often if they realized that radio silence is the only thing making them not detectable.
Seems like just yesterday that they canned the whole group that made Flight Simulator...
That lasted a long time. What was it like 9 months ago?
This 'Flight' better be pretty awesome. X was pretty nice once they patched it to use multiple cores and now you can find it cheap on sale. If 'Flight' doesn't add anything beyond graphics (which were awesome on X if you could crank them, including multiple positionable monitors/views) then there's no reason to upgrade.
Seriously. There are some sites that I really don't give a crap if they're hacked and steal my password. They can have fun with it for all I care, e-mail accounts are easily created and in this day and age the only thing I use them for are 'forgotten password' requests and spam lists anyway. Hell, if these people can figure out my logins in half the places I have to sign up for just to see a picture or download a user manual or software update they can have it. I can't even remember them most of the time.
You may not want everything in that book though. Don't want to slander yourself with something that may have only been a passing thought or thought exercise and is afterwards taken completely out of context.
While I agree with you, it might be best to have an easily found diary/journal/captain's log/whatever for your relatives to find upon your passing, perhaps even including said location in your will.
Seriously, instead of complaining that one is more expensive than the other, and "oh crap it's time to switch", lets dig into the real reasons why certain types are more expensive and address those issues.
For Solar, it's not only the fact that you have to produce the panels out of not-so-cheap materials/processes, but also because of the batteries to keep people happy at night.
For Nuclear, there's a lot of red tape, regulation, storage and distribution of waste (which should really just be processed ON SITE), cost of the fuel (which isn't going to get any cheaper while we all stand here arguing a for solar and not producing any more en masse), as well as the facility's and its operation.
Seems like we could address these issues if we just stopped to think about them for a bit. I like solar as much as the next guy, but don't stop working on one fairly green energy production method because a new one is "on the horizon".
It seems to me that most of the cost of solar goes into materials and most of the cost of nuclear goes into stuff we could solve if bureaucrats kept their nose out of it.
Around here, they gave up F's a while back... No one in the school districts in this area are allowed to give out F's... they give out E's instead.
There are a number of qualifications that must be met to which not many students who deserve it actually fail.
I'm sorta happy that TFA actually points out that we should fail kids and give them F's. That's like a large, and well needed I might add, boost to my belief in humanity at this point.
However, I still think there should be 5 grades, if for no other reason than C is supposed to be average. So now, if you're AT ALL below average, you're at a C-, and then well, what's next an F+? (I laugh, but I had a teacher that would give them... it was supposed to signify "so close! just try harder and you'll get it!" and I only felt it should be used as it's the complementary grade to an A-. Though there's no F-, so that sorta blew that theory away.
So, bringing back the F is a good start. Let's see if we can bring back D's and make it so the grades are consistent across classes and we'll be set!
I'm in VA, US, traveled around most of the country, have an iPhone on AT&T, and also have not experienced a single dropped call even when I was, as you said, walking into a Faraday cage (a.k.a. Elevator or Lift) as I'm smart enough (and polite enough) not to have calls in elevators. But then again, I also get pretty good 3G speeds and
I used to drive 3 seconds behind other cars. I found that to be a very bad idea because other people will cut in between, usually at the worst possible time, changing your 3 second cushion to 0.5 seconds. I've found paying attention and retaining a 1.5-2 second gap seems to be the best bet. I know I can stop in that time (unless a brick wall instantly appeared) and no one cuts in to screw up the cushion.
I've also found that it's much better to be slightly aggressive/pro-active than it is to be defensive or hesitant. In most cases I've seen accidents, it was due to one or more parties hesitating and not going when they should have.
'course this is something I've learned, and not something I was taught. I actually purposely changed my driving style after my first (and only) accident while in High School and I've been unscathed ever since, including many situations that would have otherwise ended in bent steel and free-flowing liquids had I hesitated and not acted quickly.
I actually have that setup on my WiFi at home... squid proxy. works well, and decreases the loading time of pages by quite a bit.
Though I'd have to say, along the same vein, I'm glad there's no flash on the iPhone, just imagine how much longer it'd take to pull all the flash based web ads. Bleh.
I was wondering the same thing myself... here at work we have biometric scanners to get into the data center. most people use their index finger, but the machine would not pick up my index finger (Busch Gardens, a theme park near by, also tried the same sort of deal for pass holders, but my finger never worked on their machine's either so they always just wave me through). I ended up having to use my thumb after a few other tries at various fingers. I wonder how many of these students have to use a finger instead of a thumb, and how many others just have trouble being scanned anyway.
On a boot note, I know personally I've had times where even my thumb had suddenly become either unreadable, or what was read was not verifiably me and I was locked out of our data center. This didn't make me feel too great about using biometrics as a whole. Personally, though I think it's cool in that 'not easy to loose your key' way, it really sucks in a 'so, yeah, you still got the key, but is it actually going to work today' way.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I have to wait at a restaurant to get seated and then wait for food, the only thing on my mind when that food appears is eating it. Sure I'll talk about how good it tastes and how great it looks, but that's gonna happen while eating it. I'm not going to go "Sweet! That's EXACTLY what I wanted and I'm starving, oh it smells so good I'm just going to whip out my iPhone and start blogging about it." No, I'm hungry gosh darn it, GET IN MY BELLY!
Well, personall 12.1 is kinda big for a netbook, but then I though the line was closer to 8"... I guess the only thing that makes the difference is the processor now-a-days. However, to narrow it down further, I believe you should run it though the flow chart found here:
Why do people have to jump to suing over something like this. It should be thrown out. If you didn't learn anything in the class and you complained while you were there and had valid claims showing that you were there, perhaps talked to the dean of the college about the professor's policies or whatever issues caused you not to be able to learn, then they'd probably look into it and reassign you or credit you. It's not lawsuit material, I don't care if it's a public school or not. I know when I went to college, professors wanted feedback and if they didn't like the feedback, their superiors always liked to hear it as well.
On the flip side if you do nothing, learn nothing, and continue to pay, then that's sort of a plus for your chosen money dispensary. And as a fellow student, I'll enjoy the extra oxygen in the room due to your absence.
IMHO, Tablets like the iPad and Slate are what Netbooks tried (and are still trying) to be. Except that I'd be much more likely to carry a super thin battery efficient quick enough physical keyboard-less tablet than I ever would have been carrying around an underpowered netbook. If I needed what a netbook gives me over a tablet (a clamshell shape with a physical keyboard and laptop like experience) I'd just get a laptop. The netbooks are an example of a product looking for a market as is evident by the fact that they started as 7" screened almost palm-top's and now come in 12" sizes, larger than my ultraportable x40 full laptop.
I, for one, am hoping that netbooks go away and tablets take their price point. Though I have to say that I'm glad they were there as they taught some of the laptop and chip makers how to make better battery life lower power devices still be useful (With combos like the Atom + Ion using low power, but offloaded 1080p playback). Perhaps they were a necessary evolutionary step on the road to a tablet, in that case, I'm glad they were here, and am glad I didn't waste any money on them.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you shut off your A/C, you'll automatically receive a discount on your bill... because it'll be cheaper, due to the reduced power draw when you would have usually used your A/C...
I mean, if you stopped using light bulbs at night and switched to a gas water heater and propane torches, you'd likely see a big decrease too.
But for the article, I guess i can see this being a good idea because there are so many idiots that leave their A/C cranked all day long... but then again, it's sort of the government/large corporation telling us what we can and can't do with our A/C. Seems a bit draconian and anti-freedom to me, but I suppose if you want to sell out, you might as well get a reduced electrical rate for it.
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Seriously, why? Sure I look at the size of the drive when I buy a laptop. I look at it and go "Why the hell can't I get something smaller?" Smaller and faster means a big speed increase and the ability to NOT lose a lot of when the laptop inevitably gets bumped/dropped/water spills/etc. NO valuable data should reside primarily on a laptop hard drive. So when the smallest drive I could order for my wife's Lenovo was 250GB, I went with that... Let me tell you, her previous laptop had a 20GB drive, and it was only a hair over half full. My x40 is dual boot, with a 40GB drive. Sure, I've got some games on there, and sure, modern games are bigger, but you can't tell me I need anything more than 64GB tops.
Now maybe I'm odd for having a NAS at home that's RAID backed and easily accessible, but in this day and age, it doesn't seem that odd to me, nor was it expensive it doesn't get dropped, it doesn't mind if it loses a drive, it doesn't get hot, or make noise and create heat or suck battery down when I'm working on the laptop and if I work on files there, they stay centrally located. Now maybe I don't have tons of copies of DVD's on my laptop, and perhaps other people do, but DVD only tops out at 9GB a pop, and how many people rip Bluray's to play with them on trips?
I think it's really just a ploy by the HDD manufacturers to try to make us want more space for no good reason.I have a total of 750GB on my NAS, it's been 250+GB Free for the last two years and I've not made a concerted effort to delete things like videos and pictures when I'm done with them. Unless people are doing lots of HD video editing with uncompressed files on their laptops, I don't see how anyone can use 500GB+ drives in there during the current decade. I'm sure we'll want more eventually when screen res gets to a point where vidoes need to store greater than HD, but it seems kinda like a stupid to benchmark for a laptop.
Unfortunately, some panels look downright crappy when on their side. Seems manufacturers don't think about viewing angles from up and down, which when turned are then left and right. We have a few different ones here at work that look horrible from anywhere besides perfectly centered. otherwise they turn yellow or green.
I (unfortunately) used to be a cashier at a grocery store. What I find is that the machines for "Self Checkout" are so dumbed down that there's like a minimum wait time between items. On a normal register, if you had a stack of like items (like say cat food or koolaid packets or whatever) and I had a bagger, I could easily keep up 300 scan's per minute. I think the scans per minute metric on the self checkout machines is like 5. It's Horribly slower than the ones used in the normal lines and it really irks me. However, If there's no line for them, I'll use it every time. I know it saves the company money and therefore saves me money. It also is nice not having to deal with someone else who isn't very well trained, but the big benefit is that there are usually 4 machines for each "line" of people, so chances of getting stuck behind the one guy that has to have someone look something up or un-break the machine for him with the furthest manager from his location is usually a lot lower.
It also helps on those days that I just want to skip all human interaction...
So does this mean, "I'll believe it when I see it left in a bar and stolen by Gizmondo" then?
Exactly! Because Oxygen, Food, Shelter, DVD's, BluRay's and CD's are required to live.
Sounds to me like someone is a bit full of themselves.
Sounds like we'll just need to dump that video from the cameras in RAW, do the post processing and then compress it. Which is the way it should happen anyway if it wasn't for speed limitations in getting RAW 24fps 1080p video off of the camera.
I'd also like to add the T2i or the 7D. It's "Good Enough" for 1080p, continues to use great EOS lenses, does it cheaper than the 5D mk II and is $1k or less. As TFA points out, the cost of the system their pitching has a camera that STARTS at $2k and "More advanced sensor frontends could drastically increase this price". To me, Drastically increasing $2k puts you closer to a RED camera, and not quite so drastic, the 5D mk II, so the $2k camera is close to the same as the T2i or 7D and they cost quite a bit less, have chdk firmware (or will soon) and are proven systems with support lines and easily found warranty replacements. Because the last think you want to do is shoot a few perfect takes and then find out that the 'open source hardware' wasn't quite up to snuff.
Carbon fiber would have been cooler, thinner (what's with that raised edge and the fact that the buttons don't protrude at all from the face, that'd drive me nuts!) and a lot lighter weight, not to mention being easier to construct.
They spend all their time talking on their cell phones anyway... why don't we just use those to track them? We wouldn't have to physically attach anything and there's already a few network applications that do it. In fact, maybe that'd make them hang up and drive more often if they realized that radio silence is the only thing making them not detectable.
Seems like just yesterday that they canned the whole group that made Flight Simulator...
That lasted a long time. What was it like 9 months ago?
This 'Flight' better be pretty awesome. X was pretty nice once they patched it to use multiple cores and now you can find it cheap on sale. If 'Flight' doesn't add anything beyond graphics (which were awesome on X if you could crank them, including multiple positionable monitors/views) then there's no reason to upgrade.
Seriously. There are some sites that I really don't give a crap if they're hacked and steal my password. They can have fun with it for all I care, e-mail accounts are easily created and in this day and age the only thing I use them for are 'forgotten password' requests and spam lists anyway. Hell, if these people can figure out my logins in half the places I have to sign up for just to see a picture or download a user manual or software update they can have it. I can't even remember them most of the time.
You may not want everything in that book though. Don't want to slander yourself with something that may have only been a passing thought or thought exercise and is afterwards taken completely out of context.
While I agree with you, it might be best to have an easily found diary/journal/captain's log/whatever for your relatives to find upon your passing, perhaps even including said location in your will.
Seriously, instead of complaining that one is more expensive than the other, and "oh crap it's time to switch", lets dig into the real reasons why certain types are more expensive and address those issues.
For Solar, it's not only the fact that you have to produce the panels out of not-so-cheap materials/processes, but also because of the batteries to keep people happy at night.
For Nuclear, there's a lot of red tape, regulation, storage and distribution of waste (which should really just be processed ON SITE), cost of the fuel (which isn't going to get any cheaper while we all stand here arguing a for solar and not producing any more en masse), as well as the facility's and its operation.
Seems like we could address these issues if we just stopped to think about them for a bit. I like solar as much as the next guy, but don't stop working on one fairly green energy production method because a new one is "on the horizon".
It seems to me that most of the cost of solar goes into materials and most of the cost of nuclear goes into stuff we could solve if bureaucrats kept their nose out of it.
Around here, they gave up F's a while back... No one in the school districts in this area are allowed to give out F's... they give out E's instead.
There are a number of qualifications that must be met to which not many students who deserve it actually fail.
I'm sorta happy that TFA actually points out that we should fail kids and give them F's. That's like a large, and well needed I might add, boost to my belief in humanity at this point.
However, I still think there should be 5 grades, if for no other reason than C is supposed to be average. So now, if you're AT ALL below average, you're at a C-, and then well, what's next an F+? (I laugh, but I had a teacher that would give them... it was supposed to signify "so close! just try harder and you'll get it!" and I only felt it should be used as it's the complementary grade to an A-. Though there's no F-, so that sorta blew that theory away.
So, bringing back the F is a good start. Let's see if we can bring back D's and make it so the grades are consistent across classes and we'll be set!
I'm in VA, US, traveled around most of the country, have an iPhone on AT&T, and also have not experienced a single dropped call even when I was, as you said, walking into a Faraday cage (a.k.a. Elevator or Lift) as I'm smart enough (and polite enough) not to have calls in elevators. But then again, I also get pretty good 3G speeds and
Yeap, this means it's time to get a hard copy of the entire internet so we can just keep surfing in offline mode.
I used to drive 3 seconds behind other cars. I found that to be a very bad idea because other people will cut in between, usually at the worst possible time, changing your 3 second cushion to 0.5 seconds. I've found paying attention and retaining a 1.5-2 second gap seems to be the best bet. I know I can stop in that time (unless a brick wall instantly appeared) and no one cuts in to screw up the cushion.
I've also found that it's much better to be slightly aggressive/pro-active than it is to be defensive or hesitant. In most cases I've seen accidents, it was due to one or more parties hesitating and not going when they should have.
'course this is something I've learned, and not something I was taught. I actually purposely changed my driving style after my first (and only) accident while in High School and I've been unscathed ever since, including many situations that would have otherwise ended in bent steel and free-flowing liquids had I hesitated and not acted quickly.
I actually have that setup on my WiFi at home... squid proxy. works well, and decreases the loading time of pages by quite a bit.
Though I'd have to say, along the same vein, I'm glad there's no flash on the iPhone, just imagine how much longer it'd take to pull all the flash based web ads. Bleh.
I was wondering the same thing myself... here at work we have biometric scanners to get into the data center. most people use their index finger, but the machine would not pick up my index finger (Busch Gardens, a theme park near by, also tried the same sort of deal for pass holders, but my finger never worked on their machine's either so they always just wave me through). I ended up having to use my thumb after a few other tries at various fingers. I wonder how many of these students have to use a finger instead of a thumb, and how many others just have trouble being scanned anyway.
On a boot note, I know personally I've had times where even my thumb had suddenly become either unreadable, or what was read was not verifiably me and I was locked out of our data center. This didn't make me feel too great about using biometrics as a whole. Personally, though I think it's cool in that 'not easy to loose your key' way, it really sucks in a 'so, yeah, you still got the key, but is it actually going to work today' way.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I have to wait at a restaurant to get seated and then wait for food, the only thing on my mind when that food appears is eating it. Sure I'll talk about how good it tastes and how great it looks, but that's gonna happen while eating it. I'm not going to go "Sweet! That's EXACTLY what I wanted and I'm starving, oh it smells so good I'm just going to whip out my iPhone and start blogging about it." No, I'm hungry gosh darn it, GET IN MY BELLY!
Well, personall 12.1 is kinda big for a netbook, but then I though the line was closer to 8"... I guess the only thing that makes the difference is the processor now-a-days. However, to narrow it down further, I believe you should run it though the flow chart found here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/13/miniature_computer_field_guide/
Except for the HDFury2: http://hd.engadget.com/2008/08/18/hdfury2-adapter-kit-tunnels-hdcp-laden-hdmi-content-via-componen/
HDCP compliant HDMI in, Audio Optical/Analog and Component/VGA&RGB out.
Why do people have to jump to suing over something like this. It should be thrown out. If you didn't learn anything in the class and you complained while you were there and had valid claims showing that you were there, perhaps talked to the dean of the college about the professor's policies or whatever issues caused you not to be able to learn, then they'd probably look into it and reassign you or credit you. It's not lawsuit material, I don't care if it's a public school or not. I know when I went to college, professors wanted feedback and if they didn't like the feedback, their superiors always liked to hear it as well.
On the flip side if you do nothing, learn nothing, and continue to pay, then that's sort of a plus for your chosen money dispensary. And as a fellow student, I'll enjoy the extra oxygen in the room due to your absence.
IMHO, Tablets like the iPad and Slate are what Netbooks tried (and are still trying) to be. Except that I'd be much more likely to carry a super thin battery efficient quick enough physical keyboard-less tablet than I ever would have been carrying around an underpowered netbook. If I needed what a netbook gives me over a tablet (a clamshell shape with a physical keyboard and laptop like experience) I'd just get a laptop. The netbooks are an example of a product looking for a market as is evident by the fact that they started as 7" screened almost palm-top's and now come in 12" sizes, larger than my ultraportable x40 full laptop.
I, for one, am hoping that netbooks go away and tablets take their price point. Though I have to say that I'm glad they were there as they taught some of the laptop and chip makers how to make better battery life lower power devices still be useful (With combos like the Atom + Ion using low power, but offloaded 1080p playback). Perhaps they were a necessary evolutionary step on the road to a tablet, in that case, I'm glad they were here, and am glad I didn't waste any money on them.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you shut off your A/C, you'll automatically receive a discount on your bill... because it'll be cheaper, due to the reduced power draw when you would have usually used your A/C...
I mean, if you stopped using light bulbs at night and switched to a gas water heater and propane torches, you'd likely see a big decrease too.
But for the article, I guess i can see this being a good idea because there are so many idiots that leave their A/C cranked all day long... but then again, it's sort of the government/large corporation telling us what we can and can't do with our A/C. Seems a bit draconian and anti-freedom to me, but I suppose if you want to sell out, you might as well get a reduced electrical rate for it.