Exactly. The power strip is your friend. In my living room I've got a bunch of equipment that I use for, maybe, a few hours a day: TV, VCR, DVD, stereo, cable modem, wireless router, printer, phone charger, brick for external harddrive, brick for laptop. These are plugged into two power strips - one for the A/V, another for computing. I reckon that, if left on, these devices would be pulling about 40-60 W, especially since the modem and router have no standby mode. But, just by flicking the glowing red switch on both power strips, I avoid losing that power during the 18 or so hours a day when I'm not even awake or around to use them. It is usually the case, too, that when I'm on the computer I'm not using the A/V stuff. Think of it as a mass unplugging - just with a flick of a switch.
Your point about ATX PC's, CRTs, and other typical office equipment is well made. It is for those reasons that I, after I shut down my workstation at the end of the day, I actually reach down and turn off the power strip they're all plugged in to. Viola! No power draw overnight. It probably saves my company a few cents a night - one machine out of about 50,000 on the campus - but I feel better about the principle of the thing.
Flight attendant? Heck no! That's Balmer with a dynamite vest strapped on (and sweaty pits if you look closely enough). He's going to take out the plane, isn't that cute?
The card's liquid cooler is only responsible for cooling the GPU. That's it.
Everywhere else Sapphire's TOXIC board is basically identical to every over Radeon X1950 XTX on the market. Sapphire has made no design changes to ATI's reference board design, or the PCB itself.
So, it's a stock card that has liquid cooling. The only reason this is noteworth, aside from the geek factor, is that the cooling allows for moderate overclocking (695 vs 650 MHz), resulting in moderate performance gains.
It depends, in part, on which theory you are using to describe the conditions inside the event horizon. General Relativity will say that, without question, the black hole's mass will collapse on itself down to a single, infinitessimal point which, because it has finite mass and zero volume, has infinite density. It is, as some people say, what happens when God divides by zero. Others call it a singularity, which has all kinds of mathematical connotations.
Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, doesn't like to cut it so fine. Things like infinite density or existing at an infinitessimal point are anathema in QM. A QM description of the singularity would use a probability density function, which would effectively smear the (very large, but finite) mass over a (very small, but nonzero) region of space. Just as the probability density is smeared out, so too would the mass density, indicating a non-infinite density.
Who's right? Probably neither. This is a case that demonstrates the seeming irreconcilability of relativity and quantum mechanics. It's the kind of thing that people far smarter than me that been grappling with for decades.
Yes, all that even considering East Germany had a halfway functioning economy and infrastructure at the time. How difficult will it be to rehabilitate a country like north korea, where infrastructure is crumbling and there are annual famines?
Six axes for six degrees of freedom. Three are translational (X, Y, Z), and three are rotational (roll, pitch, yaw; some textbooks call them phi, theta, and psi). With these six coordinates, one can completely describe the position and orientation of an object in three-space. Oftentimes, the rotational axes will correspond to the translational axes, so that roll is rotation about X, pitch is about Z, and yaw is about Y, but it can become difficult, in the dynamics of moving bodies, to keep that consistent. Generally, the rotational axes are allowed to reorient relative to the translational axes, though they keep a common origin.
Probably not very much. In the picture, you can see the rotor is about the size of a match and probably weighs less than a gram. This means that its moment of inertia isn't all that large (moment of inertia goes like radius squared, in this case, r is on the order of 10^-3 m). Even at 500,000 rpm, the amount of kinetic energy stored in the rotor probably isn't large enough to be a major concern. The relative bulk of the stator probably would be enough to contain it, should it catastrophically fail.
The same is true of the gyroscopic motion - the reactive force is a function of the applied force and the angular momentum. If the moment of inertia of the rotor is very small, the reactant force is likewise small.
Also keep in mind that this device has a designed power output of 100 W, which is at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude greater than what you'd need for an mp3 player.
Our experiment used the carrier suppressed return-to-zero differential quadrature phase shift keying (CSRZ-DQPSK)*1 format and ultra-wide-bandwidth amplifiers.
Try saying "CSRZ-DQPSK" three times fast! I guess this acronym does serve the purpose of being easier to say than "carrier suppressed return-to-zero differential quadrature phase shift keying," but couldn't they have chosen a snazzy acronym that was hip to say and then worked out what it meant, like NASA?
it's "wrong" when it's bad for the general populace just to that the few can profit from it.
In the long run, forcing ourselves off oil now benefits all of us in a substantial way. The pain of making the transition gradually, even integrated over a long time, is far less than the pain of, for instance, suddenly facing $5/gal for gasoline, or being dragged into an all out energy war with China.
Thank Goodness someone pointed this out. It was never a White House initiative, and many members of Congress had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to make it happen. For the interested, here is a link to Senator Obama's semi-regular podcast, where he outlines the bill and what he and Coburn set out to do with it.
Also, a link to the/. posting on Sen. Stevens' obstruction of the bill.
One of the nice things about the new release of iTunes (v7.0). The view mode that allows you to flip through the album art means that you can continue (or restart) to associate that image with the music. There are tracks in my library that I...uh...got a bunch of years ago, not knowing or really caring what the cover art is. What a cool few hours I spent when I had iTunes 7 download the album art for my library, then flipped through it. Now if only I had a color-screen iPod to go with it (alas, my 3G iPod just ain't up to it).
You mentioned that the smaller form factor led to smaller covers, which affords less space for detail. Unfortunately, this extends even to cover art in iTunes. Unless you have a monstrously large screen and the album cover viewer taking up most of that space, you'll never be able to display the cover art at the same size as vinyl albums'. The resolution of most screens is a lot lower than printed material, too. The cover art feature in iTunes doesn't do anything about the liner notes that, thankfully, you can still get with most CDs.
For those of you who don't want to register (even for free) to newscientist.com.
I Saw The Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google
by Bruce Sterling
Los Angeles, 2026
Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have "high abuse potential". So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can't buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.
I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I'm a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad's business jacket, with cash in hand. They're cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what's on our minds. The store wouldn't sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray.
That creepy "differential permissioning" sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just... magically off limits. It's a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative... Jesus, I love those words... Where was I?
Right. We teenagers have to live in "controlled spaces". Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They "protect" us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We're "secured". We're juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There's no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch.
So my pal Ted, who stupidly loved to tag his own name on the walls, got sent to reform school, where the security is insanely great. Me, I had a much higher grade-point average than Ted, but with no handy Ted to steal spray cans, the words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls. So much for my campaign to cover the town with graffiti street-stencils of my favourite teen pop stars: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
And Shakespeare. I used to hate Shakespeare, because the teachers would park us in front of the webcam terminals, turn on the Shakespeare lessons and leave the building. But then, somehow, they showed us Macbeth, a play which actually MEANS something to us. Grown-ups don't understand that (or they wouldn't be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth's world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those "Three Weird Sisters", who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those "Three Weird Sisters" are the "Internet of Things", they're "Ubiquitous Computation", they're "Ambient Findability". The truth is written all over the page (or the screen - my school can't afford to give us any "pages"). Just read that awesome part where they're boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers!
"The words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls"
Macbeth stumbles around seeing ghosts and virtual-reality daggers. That sure makes sense. Every day of my life, I see people with cellphones yelling eerie gibberish in public. The world of Macbeth is totally haunted and paranoid! You can't get one minute's privacy, even inside your own bed!
So, I did my class report about Macbeth, and every kid in my English class instantly agreed with me. I'm not the most popular guy in school, but they started CHEERING me. And Debbie, this wacky Goth chick in my class who identifies with Lady Macbeth... After my class report, Debbie sleep-walked out of the classroom and pretended to hang herself! Of cour
One thing that many people forget - mostly due to the impression given by hollywood - is that gasoline and diesel don't explode at the drop of a hat. But the liquid form doesn't ignite, it must first be vaporized and mixed with oxygen before you have something that will readily combust. If you had a closed container of fuel, and prevented oxygen from getting in, it would be pretty safe. Even when liquids were allowed on airplanes, there weren't many stories [possibly none - does someone know of any?] of terrorists using gasoline in a bomb, despite the fact that it is easier to get than explosives and readily concealed.
Even a gas tank, which gets filled with air as the gas is used, rarely explodes even in the most violent car crashes. Usually what happens is that the fuel gets sprayed everywhere and burns on the surface. An explosion wouldn't come from all the gas suddenly burning, as happens with a genuine explosive, but from the vapors in the tank combusting and causing the tank to rupture.
The Children of Hurin, from what I remember from the previously published excerpts, is a tragic epic. The children are separated, there's amnesia, revenge, killing, bloodshed, betrayal, more killing, grief, backstabbing, and ultimately suicide. A compelling story, but not a happy story where the good guys win in the end. Actually, I'm not sure you could say there are any good guys in the whole thing.
Until it can automatically subtitle in seven different languages, help you create Matrix-like effects, split the atom, and turn my crap home movies into Oscar contenders, I won't be satisfied.
I'll safely call this rumor until further notice. The addition of Eric Schmidt to the Apple board is strategic, but not necessarily linked to iTV. After all, iTV has probably been in development for a year or more, Schmidt's only been on the board a few weeks. Perhaps his appointment was quid pro quo for an ongoing (and heretofore secret) development alliance between the two companies, but I don't think so.
My guess is that it is a stripped-down version of OS X. It uses some portions of the kernel, is heavy into Quartz, Cocoa, and Quicktime (as you said), but could not (out of the box) run OS X programs arbitrarily. You'll note that there hasn't yet been a mention of an internal hard drive or other mass media storage, nor an optical drive. From that I would argue that the internal software has a relatively small footprint (less than 1 GB) and isn't meant to be frequently upgraded. This would make it akin in complexity to a TiVo.
A calculator with a comparable set of capabilities to MATLAB, etc., even with the same monochrome screen, probably wouldn't last too long on a set of AAAs. Even back when I was using my TI-83 for long problem sets in college, I could still get months of daily use, probably a few hundred hours, out of a single set of batteries. No portable device of such power and flexibility can come close.
I'll concede the point about the price-point, though. For $100 you can get an entry-level PDA with color screen. It won't be nearly as rock-solid reliable, though, nor have as much of a user base and support.
I agree that they don't seem to have changed much over the last decade. But, I would contend that a a TI graphing calculator can do an aweful lot. I'm not talking about graphing a Calabi-Yau manifold, or something handled by one of Matlab's extensive toolboxes, but the actual manipulation and display of numbers and algebra. What do you wish they could do that they don't do now? If you'll look at user-pages for TI and other graphing calculators, you'll see that people have been able to program them to do amazingly complex things.
I don't use my graphing calculator for much these days, but that's mostly because it would take me less time to use MATLAB, mainly due to having a full-sized screen, keyboard and mouse.
Humans don't listen to the digital stream. Have you ever listened to a digital waveform, something like a squarewave? It sounds like crap, just listening to the digital waveform would. Humans live in an analog world and perceive analog waveforms. There is plenty of variation in those analog signals, because they are continuous (not discrete) and are more easily affected by spurious things like electronic noise, crappy components etc. I don't doubt that you know what sounds the same or different. You spend all your time listening to the analog signal, and adjusting the EQ or recommending higher end stereo components because of it. You should not have anything to do with diagnosing the digital waveforms. The beauty and value of digital is that, so long as the computer still reads a one as a one and a zero as a zero, any distortion of the digital waveform won't make a lick of difference to the content of that information. I happen to know an aweful lot about transmission over wires and signal processing, and can tell you without question that the distortion to the digital waveform will not bear out in the audio signal at the end, unless the distortion causes random bitflips here and there. Read about Information Theory and Claude Shannon. The reason why modems connect at different rates does depend on the transmission characteristics of the line, but that has nothing to do with how digital audio signals are transmitted around stereo equipment. Modems negotiate a baud rate based on the amount of noise in the line, transmission distance, competing traffic, and random chance. But that doesn't apply to pieces of stereo equipment, which don't negotiate transmission rates - they just blindly send and receive.
The Dell recall affects some 4.1 million batteries, which is only about 18% of those sold over the last few years. The Apple recall affects 1.1 million batteries, a similar fraction of their products.
Of the six batteries in my household (some dell, some apple), just one of those has been recalled. There are far more Dell and Apple batteries out there that aren't affected by the recall than are. If someone were able to furbish documentation that their battery is in the clear, will Virgin be able to continue banning it? Will any business traveler continue to use them?
[note: most of this was in all caps - the lameness filter at/. made me retype it]
cyber d-sign crew is responsible 4 cutting edge web, print and business card designs.[/all caps]
We offer services using the latest technologies and plugins.
all cyber design productions are y2k-bug tested and compliant. you have our guarantee.
if you are not happy with finished project you take it and pay us.
we do not consult with clients - we unleash the project
there is a difference between being elitist and being elite.
WE ARE BOTH.
Anybody want to raise money for a front page ad in the NY Times? Maybe with a little extra money left over to donate to local fire departments?:-)
Alas, the NYT doesn't place advertisements on its front page. I'd back it, though.
Thankfully, my company outfits its laptops with iPass Connect, which gets me access to just about any fee-for-service aiport hotspot in the U.S., and quite a few other locations, too. This has been particularly useful in airports: let iPass find the network and log on, fire up the VPN, and let my company pick up the tab. Nevermind that most of what I then do with the connection is random surfing.
I'll also note that my dinky local airport, which has all of four gates, has free wifi access. Unfortunately, it didn't make the list for some reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. The power strip is your friend. In my living room I've got a bunch of equipment that I use for, maybe, a few hours a day: TV, VCR, DVD, stereo, cable modem, wireless router, printer, phone charger, brick for external harddrive, brick for laptop. These are plugged into two power strips - one for the A/V, another for computing. I reckon that, if left on, these devices would be pulling about 40-60 W, especially since the modem and router have no standby mode. But, just by flicking the glowing red switch on both power strips, I avoid losing that power during the 18 or so hours a day when I'm not even awake or around to use them. It is usually the case, too, that when I'm on the computer I'm not using the A/V stuff. Think of it as a mass unplugging - just with a flick of a switch.
Your point about ATX PC's, CRTs, and other typical office equipment is well made. It is for those reasons that I, after I shut down my workstation at the end of the day, I actually reach down and turn off the power strip they're all plugged in to. Viola! No power draw overnight. It probably saves my company a few cents a night - one machine out of about 50,000 on the campus - but I feel better about the principle of the thing.
Flight attendant? Heck no! That's Balmer with a dynamite vest strapped on (and sweaty pits if you look closely enough). He's going to take out the plane, isn't that cute?
So, it's a stock card that has liquid cooling. The only reason this is noteworth, aside from the geek factor, is that the cooling allows for moderate overclocking (695 vs 650 MHz), resulting in moderate performance gains.
It depends, in part, on which theory you are using to describe the conditions inside the event horizon. General Relativity will say that, without question, the black hole's mass will collapse on itself down to a single, infinitessimal point which, because it has finite mass and zero volume, has infinite density. It is, as some people say, what happens when God divides by zero. Others call it a singularity, which has all kinds of mathematical connotations.
Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, doesn't like to cut it so fine. Things like infinite density or existing at an infinitessimal point are anathema in QM. A QM description of the singularity would use a probability density function, which would effectively smear the (very large, but finite) mass over a (very small, but nonzero) region of space. Just as the probability density is smeared out, so too would the mass density, indicating a non-infinite density.
Who's right? Probably neither. This is a case that demonstrates the seeming irreconcilability of relativity and quantum mechanics. It's the kind of thing that people far smarter than me that been grappling with for decades.
Yes, all that even considering East Germany had a halfway functioning economy and infrastructure at the time. How difficult will it be to rehabilitate a country like north korea, where infrastructure is crumbling and there are annual famines?
Six axes for six degrees of freedom. Three are translational (X, Y, Z), and three are rotational (roll, pitch, yaw; some textbooks call them phi, theta, and psi). With these six coordinates, one can completely describe the position and orientation of an object in three-space. Oftentimes, the rotational axes will correspond to the translational axes, so that roll is rotation about X, pitch is about Z, and yaw is about Y, but it can become difficult, in the dynamics of moving bodies, to keep that consistent. Generally, the rotational axes are allowed to reorient relative to the translational axes, though they keep a common origin.
Probably not very much. In the picture, you can see the rotor is about the size of a match and probably weighs less than a gram. This means that its moment of inertia isn't all that large (moment of inertia goes like radius squared, in this case, r is on the order of 10^-3 m). Even at 500,000 rpm, the amount of kinetic energy stored in the rotor probably isn't large enough to be a major concern. The relative bulk of the stator probably would be enough to contain it, should it catastrophically fail.
The same is true of the gyroscopic motion - the reactive force is a function of the applied force and the angular momentum. If the moment of inertia of the rotor is very small, the reactant force is likewise small.
Also keep in mind that this device has a designed power output of 100 W, which is at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude greater than what you'd need for an mp3 player.
Try saying "CSRZ-DQPSK" three times fast! I guess this acronym does serve the purpose of being easier to say than "carrier suppressed return-to-zero differential quadrature phase shift keying," but couldn't they have chosen a snazzy acronym that was hip to say and then worked out what it meant, like NASA?
Thank Goodness someone pointed this out. It was never a White House initiative, and many members of Congress had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to make it happen. For the interested, here is a link to Senator Obama's semi-regular podcast, where he outlines the bill and what he and Coburn set out to do with it.
/. posting on Sen. Stevens' obstruction of the bill.
Also, a link to the
One of the nice things about the new release of iTunes (v7.0). The view mode that allows you to flip through the album art means that you can continue (or restart) to associate that image with the music. There are tracks in my library that I...uh...got a bunch of years ago, not knowing or really caring what the cover art is. What a cool few hours I spent when I had iTunes 7 download the album art for my library, then flipped through it. Now if only I had a color-screen iPod to go with it (alas, my 3G iPod just ain't up to it).
You mentioned that the smaller form factor led to smaller covers, which affords less space for detail. Unfortunately, this extends even to cover art in iTunes. Unless you have a monstrously large screen and the album cover viewer taking up most of that space, you'll never be able to display the cover art at the same size as vinyl albums'. The resolution of most screens is a lot lower than printed material, too. The cover art feature in iTunes doesn't do anything about the liner notes that, thankfully, you can still get with most CDs.
For those of you who don't want to register (even for free) to newscientist.com.
I Saw The Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google
by Bruce Sterling
Los Angeles, 2026
Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have "high abuse potential". So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can't buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.
I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I'm a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad's business jacket, with cash in hand. They're cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what's on our minds. The store wouldn't sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray.
That creepy "differential permissioning" sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just... magically off limits. It's a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative... Jesus, I love those words... Where was I?
Right. We teenagers have to live in "controlled spaces". Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They "protect" us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We're "secured". We're juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There's no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch.
So my pal Ted, who stupidly loved to tag his own name on the walls, got sent to reform school, where the security is insanely great. Me, I had a much higher grade-point average than Ted, but with no handy Ted to steal spray cans, the words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls. So much for my campaign to cover the town with graffiti street-stencils of my favourite teen pop stars: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
And Shakespeare. I used to hate Shakespeare, because the teachers would park us in front of the webcam terminals, turn on the Shakespeare lessons and leave the building. But then, somehow, they showed us Macbeth, a play which actually MEANS something to us. Grown-ups don't understand that (or they wouldn't be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth's world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those "Three Weird Sisters", who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those "Three Weird Sisters" are the "Internet of Things", they're "Ubiquitous Computation", they're "Ambient Findability". The truth is written all over the page (or the screen - my school can't afford to give us any "pages"). Just read that awesome part where they're boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers! "The words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls"
Macbeth stumbles around seeing ghosts and virtual-reality daggers. That sure makes sense. Every day of my life, I see people with cellphones yelling eerie gibberish in public. The world of Macbeth is totally haunted and paranoid! You can't get one minute's privacy, even inside your own bed!
So, I did my class report about Macbeth, and every kid in my English class instantly agreed with me. I'm not the most popular guy in school, but they started CHEERING me. And Debbie, this wacky Goth chick in my class who identifies with Lady Macbeth... After my class report, Debbie sleep-walked out of the classroom and pretended to hang herself! Of cour
One thing that many people forget - mostly due to the impression given by hollywood - is that gasoline and diesel don't explode at the drop of a hat. But the liquid form doesn't ignite, it must first be vaporized and mixed with oxygen before you have something that will readily combust. If you had a closed container of fuel, and prevented oxygen from getting in, it would be pretty safe. Even when liquids were allowed on airplanes, there weren't many stories [possibly none - does someone know of any?] of terrorists using gasoline in a bomb, despite the fact that it is easier to get than explosives and readily concealed.
Even a gas tank, which gets filled with air as the gas is used, rarely explodes even in the most violent car crashes. Usually what happens is that the fuel gets sprayed everywhere and burns on the surface. An explosion wouldn't come from all the gas suddenly burning, as happens with a genuine explosive, but from the vapors in the tank combusting and causing the tank to rupture.
The Children of Hurin, from what I remember from the previously published excerpts, is a tragic epic. The children are separated, there's amnesia, revenge, killing, bloodshed, betrayal, more killing, grief, backstabbing, and ultimately suicide. A compelling story, but not a happy story where the good guys win in the end. Actually, I'm not sure you could say there are any good guys in the whole thing.
Until it can automatically subtitle in seven different languages, help you create Matrix-like effects, split the atom, and turn my crap home movies into Oscar contenders, I won't be satisfied.
I'll safely call this rumor until further notice. The addition of Eric Schmidt to the Apple board is strategic, but not necessarily linked to iTV. After all, iTV has probably been in development for a year or more, Schmidt's only been on the board a few weeks. Perhaps his appointment was quid pro quo for an ongoing (and heretofore secret) development alliance between the two companies, but I don't think so.
My guess is that it is a stripped-down version of OS X. It uses some portions of the kernel, is heavy into Quartz, Cocoa, and Quicktime (as you said), but could not (out of the box) run OS X programs arbitrarily. You'll note that there hasn't yet been a mention of an internal hard drive or other mass media storage, nor an optical drive. From that I would argue that the internal software has a relatively small footprint (less than 1 GB) and isn't meant to be frequently upgraded. This would make it akin in complexity to a TiVo.
A calculator with a comparable set of capabilities to MATLAB, etc., even with the same monochrome screen, probably wouldn't last too long on a set of AAAs. Even back when I was using my TI-83 for long problem sets in college, I could still get months of daily use, probably a few hundred hours, out of a single set of batteries. No portable device of such power and flexibility can come close.
I'll concede the point about the price-point, though. For $100 you can get an entry-level PDA with color screen. It won't be nearly as rock-solid reliable, though, nor have as much of a user base and support.
I agree that they don't seem to have changed much over the last decade. But, I would contend that a a TI graphing calculator can do an aweful lot. I'm not talking about graphing a Calabi-Yau manifold, or something handled by one of Matlab's extensive toolboxes, but the actual manipulation and display of numbers and algebra. What do you wish they could do that they don't do now? If you'll look at user-pages for TI and other graphing calculators, you'll see that people have been able to program them to do amazingly complex things.
I don't use my graphing calculator for much these days, but that's mostly because it would take me less time to use MATLAB, mainly due to having a full-sized screen, keyboard and mouse.
Humans don't listen to the digital stream. Have you ever listened to a digital waveform, something like a squarewave? It sounds like crap, just listening to the digital waveform would. Humans live in an analog world and perceive analog waveforms. There is plenty of variation in those analog signals, because they are continuous (not discrete) and are more easily affected by spurious things like electronic noise, crappy components etc. I don't doubt that you know what sounds the same or different. You spend all your time listening to the analog signal, and adjusting the EQ or recommending higher end stereo components because of it. You should not have anything to do with diagnosing the digital waveforms. The beauty and value of digital is that, so long as the computer still reads a one as a one and a zero as a zero, any distortion of the digital waveform won't make a lick of difference to the content of that information. I happen to know an aweful lot about transmission over wires and signal processing, and can tell you without question that the distortion to the digital waveform will not bear out in the audio signal at the end, unless the distortion causes random bitflips here and there. Read about Information Theory and Claude Shannon. The reason why modems connect at different rates does depend on the transmission characteristics of the line, but that has nothing to do with how digital audio signals are transmitted around stereo equipment. Modems negotiate a baud rate based on the amount of noise in the line, transmission distance, competing traffic, and random chance. But that doesn't apply to pieces of stereo equipment, which don't negotiate transmission rates - they just blindly send and receive.
The Dell recall affects some 4.1 million batteries, which is only about 18% of those sold over the last few years. The Apple recall affects 1.1 million batteries, a similar fraction of their products.
Of the six batteries in my household (some dell, some apple), just one of those has been recalled. There are far more Dell and Apple batteries out there that aren't affected by the recall than are. If someone were able to furbish documentation that their battery is in the clear, will Virgin be able to continue banning it? Will any business traveler continue to use them?
[note: most of this was in all caps - the lameness filter at
I want to run out and hire them right now.
Thankfully, my company outfits its laptops with iPass Connect, which gets me access to just about any fee-for-service aiport hotspot in the U.S., and quite a few other locations, too. This has been particularly useful in airports: let iPass find the network and log on, fire up the VPN, and let my company pick up the tab. Nevermind that most of what I then do with the connection is random surfing.
I'll also note that my dinky local airport, which has all of four gates, has free wifi access. Unfortunately, it didn't make the list for some reason.