I picked up one of these http://www.digginchina.com/irobot-iped-apad-tablet-china-ipad-tablet-pc-mid-p-3336.html also not a phone but $100, works very respectably for the price too. Resistive touchscreen not as nice, and it runs Android 1.5 so wont run the Kindle app but works great for browsing, email, anything else Id get an iPad for. Havent tried the alarm clock yet but I assume it works:-)
Very curious, which cheap Chinese Android tablet? I was toying with picking one up but wasnt sure if they worked, were supported, could be used as a dev platform, etc. Any pointers?
Without all those handy Windows stickers peeled from laptops, what else would I stick to my coworkers' Linux workstations? And to me 'Intel Inside' looks as good on their Prius' gas cap as the "EnergyStar" sticker looks on their Yukon's.
Very true. But hiring within budget constraints leads to the same results. If my hiring budget is $50k/yr I dont see a lot of 50-something resumes. Experience costs money. What TFA doesnt mention is that since experienced 50-somethings are expensive, they are in fact getting compensated appropriately, otherwise the market would force them to price themselves lower.
I would suggest that "honest open minded intelligent conservative" persons gave up trying to have intelligent conversations here. I would say the same about "honest open minded intelligent liberals". Nor would I limit that to slashdot. Im horrified by what the GOP has become, but slightly less so than by what the DNC has become, and in both cases because the intelligent moderate centrists have been utterly drowned out by the sheer noise of the mobs. There are many moderate Democrats I would choose over Republicans, but many of these are targeted by their own party. The right is no different. I briefly had hope that the Tea Party was going to evolve into a bipartisan centrist movement but that clearly didnt happen.
I blame the Internet. With virtually unlimited access to information, both good and bad, and no reliable separation of fact from opinion or fiction, virtually any belief framework can be reinforced with a few clicks. And, unfortunately, it doesnt seem to be in our nature to expend the effort to question our beliefs or collaborate with un-like-minded people. Those who do, those that listen and think, tend to not post. Anyone that listens a lot, and realizes the world is pretty damned complicated, tends to not proselytize. I predict that trend will continue to get worse, that there is no end to it, and that we are collectively screwed.
Maybe the continued erosion of anonymity will help; people might stop saying such stupid shit if doing so had even the slightest consequences. What would/. comments look like if people had to sign their names on their posts. Probably smaller, and probably better. It's certainly 99% crap now.
Over and over we see illustrations of the claim that no man (or woman) does evil in their own eyes. Like Sauron, depicted by Tolkien as a great single eye, those who commit evil in Narnia have lost any capacity for self-criticism. Sensitive readers will wonder to what extent in their own lives, they, like Edmund, are guilty of blaming others for their own failings. And at the same time, also like Edmund, they may wonder if they are totally blind to this fact.
The great desire of Lewis's evil doers is dominance. As the poet W. H. Auden has noted, this kind of evil "is not satisfied if another creature does what it wants; he must be made to do it against his will."
I'd argue that this applies well to Murdoch, but applies equally if not more so to his detractors. It's become quite fashionable to wail about the failings of the powerful, but the loudest complaints come from those that would impose their own petty little dictatorships on us all. If you're wishing anyone a slow painful death from cancer, I'd say that according to Devin Brown's definition above, you're far more evil than Murdoch
Protecting commerce is a good thing. Depending on civil litigation for all copyright issues favors big business over small business. Without federal law enforcement exercising criminal prosecution, the Microsoft's and IBM's of the world could flat-out steal whatever they wanted. They already pretty much do, since the risk of prosecution is small and the financial rewards are high and (currently) the possibility of criminal charges even in blatant cases is non-existent. I have no problem with the FBI leveling the playing field. Copyright isnt all just about the RIAA (though we may have to wait and see which copyright cases receive their attention).
US News study found Fox as the most balanced in straight reporting, but that doesnt include the nutty far-right infomercial opinion/commentary stuff that (to me anyway) seems to be what takes most of the air time. In that same vein I think CNN/MSNBC do their straight reporting more center-left (well, CNN anyway) and rely less on commentary. My biggest objection to Fox isnt their political leaning, but that it's mostly theater.
Generally, dont lend your phone to security researchers at hacking conferences. Writing a rootkit makes good headlines but the article says they freely admit they dont have a clue how to install it with a rogue application.
My 70's Triumph still gets 48mpg. Of course it's a death trap, but its a hoot to drive. The powerplant was based on a 1956 tractor engine. And 30+ years later the automakers crow about 32 mpg efficiency.
Its a portmanteau of the French word for sh*t - "Merde" and "Douche" thus "Merde-Douche" or "Merdouche". Wikipedia style guidelines require the entry to include the word "portmanteau".
Sorry, I was responding to a flame so didnt bother to qualify it. What I worked on was large multi-core ASIC's based on ARM7/9 and DSP's with lots of processing-assist blocks. Units were million-piece runs. I didnt do the CPU's but then again most embedded SOC's on the market are based on licensed CPU libraries. So, this is a case where the heavy R&D is mostly amortized in the license fee of the core(s), and the costs are largely in fab tooling and risks are relatively low.
Hey its not the greatest analogy, but the point is that it's pretty straight-forward these days to fab a custom chip, and within the means of small start-ups. And the chip itself is very very inexpensive once its tooled. Lots of small companies do in fact make custom silicon devices, but I dont know of any that make custom disposable ink jet cartridges. But you're right its not a great comparison.
Actually some of the aftermarket inks are (were) excellent. But when people buy refill kits they almost always choose the lowest cost options so the cheapest refill kits dominate the markets. The one good ink company I worked with got out of the business because they couldnt compete.
As many people point out here, it's not the right technology for everyone or every use. While I have an HP inkjet I only use it for short one-off light duty color prints and $35 for a cartridge every 8 months isnt that much of a burden. The big color jobs go to the large-format Epson with larger cartridges and bigger reservoirs, and everything else goes to lasers.
Incidentally I've really soured on HP laser cartridges lately... HP build quality on consumer lasers and cartridges is not what it used to be, IMO.
"a bunch of years back"=1987 so yes. I did tear-downs on all HP products and consumables through about '93. I was surprised at the number of changes, if not complete redesigns, every time. It was neat stuff. But, it was a long time ago, maybe it is a cash cow now as you say. If so, good for them, they earned it more than some.
something that is 99% moulded plastic with a few small parts is harder to fabricate than a part with several hundred million transistors
It is. Cranking out a ASIC takes 60 days, and any idiot startup can do it for a few hundred $k and it will generally work first try. And wafers cost pennies, why aren't you bitching about Intel's BS? Printing technology takes time to get right, and not many companies do it, not many on their own without buying licensed technology from someone.
Go build a printer head from scratch and get back to me on how that goes. Or better yet, I have a few thousand empty HP cartridges left... get me your contact info and I'll send you a few dozen. You can fill them with homemade or off the shelf ink and see how well it works. You can get back to everyone here with your results on how simple it is. (Hint: out-gassing isnt something you do after leaving Taco Bell) Deal?
I got to spend some time with the HP engineers a bunch of years back when I was building printers. We used empty HP cartridges, filled them with our own ink formulations, and drove them with custom electronics. Yeah they 'work' just fine with just about any fluid imaginable (ink, food coloring, PCB etch resist, antifreeze, perfume) as long as you're flexible with your definition of 'work'. The 'ink' cant eat the cartridge body, clog the orifice plate, leave residue (cogation) on the heating elements, form crust on the plate or orifices, have sufficient surface tension to draw ink into the head when printing at 100% duty cycle, exactly the right surface tension and viscosity to form exactly one single droplet for every heating cycle (no satellites, now!), not dribble during shipping, have exactly the same properties when using (at least) four different dye formulations, not evaporate in the printer, form consistent droplet sizes and shapes that travel at exactly the same velocity, stick to paper without splattering, penetrate the paper coating without bleeding and not smudge after just seconds, have proper thermal mass to carry waste heat away from the head, and the list just goes on and on and on. HP was even doing things like tuning the heating profile to get cavitation in the ink reservoir at the just right frequency to act like a microscopic ultrasonic cleaner to blast impurities away from the heating elements. Maybe I impress easily but I was impressed.
And thats just the ink. The R&D and engineering that goes into the cartridge and printer is unbelievable, and you get one of them for your $35 too, your own little piece of a few billion invested in R&D, tooling, and cartridge factory. It stinks to have to throw it away, but that's the model you bought into when you bought a cheap printer with disposable cartridges. There used to be lots of piezo-base (and other) printing technologies, but while the ink refills came in pints for cheap the printers were expensive, and no one bought them (not my printers, anyway).
If your idea of accurate pricing is how much a refill maker charges to rip off HP's formulations, have HP effectively give away the cartridges, and have you do the labor filling them, then I guess you could say the ink is cheap. I hate spending money on those cartridges too (more so my large format Epson), and I refill them sometimes, but I dont begrudge HP their business model, especially since we are all the people that made it the dominant technology by buying into it.
Slashdot Mirror
I picked up one of these http://www.digginchina.com/irobot-iped-apad-tablet-china-ipad-tablet-pc-mid-p-3336.html also not a phone but $100, works very respectably for the price too. Resistive touchscreen not as nice, and it runs Android 1.5 so wont run the Kindle app but works great for browsing, email, anything else Id get an iPad for. Havent tried the alarm clock yet but I assume it works :-)
we are just going to watch it happen unless the two parties cooperate better.
WTF!! We have two parties?????
Well duh! We need that kind of compute power to keep track of the debt.
Very curious, which cheap Chinese Android tablet? I was toying with picking one up but wasnt sure if they worked, were supported, could be used as a dev platform, etc. Any pointers?
Tricking his captors into letting him send a Tweet is nothing compared to tricking VC's into giving twitter $50M.
Without all those handy Windows stickers peeled from laptops, what else would I stick to my coworkers' Linux workstations? And to me 'Intel Inside' looks as good on their Prius' gas cap as the "EnergyStar" sticker looks on their Yukon's.
Very true. But hiring within budget constraints leads to the same results. If my hiring budget is $50k/yr I dont see a lot of 50-something resumes. Experience costs money. What TFA doesnt mention is that since experienced 50-somethings are expensive, they are in fact getting compensated appropriately, otherwise the market would force them to price themselves lower.
I would suggest that "honest open minded intelligent conservative" persons gave up trying to have intelligent conversations here. I would say the same about "honest open minded intelligent liberals". Nor would I limit that to slashdot. Im horrified by what the GOP has become, but slightly less so than by what the DNC has become, and in both cases because the intelligent moderate centrists have been utterly drowned out by the sheer noise of the mobs. There are many moderate Democrats I would choose over Republicans, but many of these are targeted by their own party. The right is no different. I briefly had hope that the Tea Party was going to evolve into a bipartisan centrist movement but that clearly didnt happen.
/. comments look like if people had to sign their names on their posts. Probably smaller, and probably better. It's certainly 99% crap now.
I blame the Internet. With virtually unlimited access to information, both good and bad, and no reliable separation of fact from opinion or fiction, virtually any belief framework can be reinforced with a few clicks. And, unfortunately, it doesnt seem to be in our nature to expend the effort to question our beliefs or collaborate with un-like-minded people. Those who do, those that listen and think, tend to not post. Anyone that listens a lot, and realizes the world is pretty damned complicated, tends to not proselytize. I predict that trend will continue to get worse, that there is no end to it, and that we are collectively screwed.
Maybe the continued erosion of anonymity will help; people might stop saying such stupid shit if doing so had even the slightest consequences. What would
From a review of CS Lewis:
Over and over we see illustrations of the claim that no man (or woman) does evil in their own eyes. Like Sauron, depicted by Tolkien as a great single eye, those who commit evil in Narnia have lost any capacity for self-criticism. Sensitive readers will wonder to what extent in their own lives, they, like Edmund, are guilty of blaming others for their own failings. And at the same time, also like Edmund, they may wonder if they are totally blind to this fact. The great desire of Lewis's evil doers is dominance. As the poet W. H. Auden has noted, this kind of evil "is not satisfied if another creature does what it wants; he must be made to do it against his will."
I'd argue that this applies well to Murdoch, but applies equally if not more so to his detractors. It's become quite fashionable to wail about the failings of the powerful, but the loudest complaints come from those that would impose their own petty little dictatorships on us all. If you're wishing anyone a slow painful death from cancer, I'd say that according to Devin Brown's definition above, you're far more evil than Murdoch
Protecting commerce is a good thing. Depending on civil litigation for all copyright issues favors big business over small business. Without federal law enforcement exercising criminal prosecution, the Microsoft's and IBM's of the world could flat-out steal whatever they wanted. They already pretty much do, since the risk of prosecution is small and the financial rewards are high and (currently) the possibility of criminal charges even in blatant cases is non-existent. I have no problem with the FBI leveling the playing field. Copyright isnt all just about the RIAA (though we may have to wait and see which copyright cases receive their attention).
Do you have a credit card ...with a chip inside?.
No, actually, I dont. I chose not to, and thats fine because its optional. Big difference.
Best to preempt any questions with "I'll bet you $50 you're going to give me a ticket"
My kingdom for mod points :-)
US News study found Fox as the most balanced in straight reporting, but that doesnt include the nutty far-right infomercial opinion/commentary stuff that (to me anyway) seems to be what takes most of the air time. In that same vein I think CNN/MSNBC do their straight reporting more center-left (well, CNN anyway) and rely less on commentary. My biggest objection to Fox isnt their political leaning, but that it's mostly theater.
What can we do to defend against this?
Generally, dont lend your phone to security researchers at hacking conferences. Writing a rootkit makes good headlines but the article says they freely admit they dont have a clue how to install it with a rogue application.
My 70's Triumph still gets 48mpg. Of course it's a death trap, but its a hoot to drive. The powerplant was based on a 1956 tractor engine. And 30+ years later the automakers crow about 32 mpg efficiency.
Then how does it smell?
Terrible! Da dum dum.
Environmental agencies are referring to the oil slick as the "black screen of death".
In their press releases, yes. In their internal memos its referred to as "the best thing that ever happened to our fund-raising efforts".
Its a portmanteau of the French word for sh*t - "Merde" and "Douche" thus "Merde-Douche" or "Merdouche". Wikipedia style guidelines require the entry to include the word "portmanteau".
Sorry, I was responding to a flame so didnt bother to qualify it. What I worked on was large multi-core ASIC's based on ARM7/9 and DSP's with lots of processing-assist blocks. Units were million-piece runs. I didnt do the CPU's but then again most embedded SOC's on the market are based on licensed CPU libraries. So, this is a case where the heavy R&D is mostly amortized in the license fee of the core(s), and the costs are largely in fab tooling and risks are relatively low.
Hey its not the greatest analogy, but the point is that it's pretty straight-forward these days to fab a custom chip, and within the means of small start-ups. And the chip itself is very very inexpensive once its tooled. Lots of small companies do in fact make custom silicon devices, but I dont know of any that make custom disposable ink jet cartridges. But you're right its not a great comparison.
Actually some of the aftermarket inks are (were) excellent. But when people buy refill kits they almost always choose the lowest cost options so the cheapest refill kits dominate the markets. The one good ink company I worked with got out of the business because they couldnt compete.
As many people point out here, it's not the right technology for everyone or every use. While I have an HP inkjet I only use it for short one-off light duty color prints and $35 for a cartridge every 8 months isnt that much of a burden. The big color jobs go to the large-format Epson with larger cartridges and bigger reservoirs, and everything else goes to lasers.
Incidentally I've really soured on HP laser cartridges lately... HP build quality on consumer lasers and cartridges is not what it used to be, IMO.
Ive done 2 CPU's, or at least been on teams that did, though you will surely say thats BS too. But glad I could amuse you.
"a bunch of years back"=1987 so yes. I did tear-downs on all HP products and consumables through about '93. I was surprised at the number of changes, if not complete redesigns, every time. It was neat stuff. But, it was a long time ago, maybe it is a cash cow now as you say. If so, good for them, they earned it more than some.
something that is 99% moulded plastic with a few small parts is harder to fabricate than a part with several hundred million transistors
It is. Cranking out a ASIC takes 60 days, and any idiot startup can do it for a few hundred $k and it will generally work first try. And wafers cost pennies, why aren't you bitching about Intel's BS? Printing technology takes time to get right, and not many companies do it, not many on their own without buying licensed technology from someone.
Go build a printer head from scratch and get back to me on how that goes. Or better yet, I have a few thousand empty HP cartridges left... get me your contact info and I'll send you a few dozen. You can fill them with homemade or off the shelf ink and see how well it works. You can get back to everyone here with your results on how simple it is. (Hint: out-gassing isnt something you do after leaving Taco Bell) Deal?
I got to spend some time with the HP engineers a bunch of years back when I was building printers. We used empty HP cartridges, filled them with our own ink formulations, and drove them with custom electronics. Yeah they 'work' just fine with just about any fluid imaginable (ink, food coloring, PCB etch resist, antifreeze, perfume) as long as you're flexible with your definition of 'work'. The 'ink' cant eat the cartridge body, clog the orifice plate, leave residue (cogation) on the heating elements, form crust on the plate or orifices, have sufficient surface tension to draw ink into the head when printing at 100% duty cycle, exactly the right surface tension and viscosity to form exactly one single droplet for every heating cycle (no satellites, now!), not dribble during shipping, have exactly the same properties when using (at least) four different dye formulations, not evaporate in the printer, form consistent droplet sizes and shapes that travel at exactly the same velocity, stick to paper without splattering, penetrate the paper coating without bleeding and not smudge after just seconds, have proper thermal mass to carry waste heat away from the head, and the list just goes on and on and on. HP was even doing things like tuning the heating profile to get cavitation in the ink reservoir at the just right frequency to act like a microscopic ultrasonic cleaner to blast impurities away from the heating elements. Maybe I impress easily but I was impressed.
And thats just the ink. The R&D and engineering that goes into the cartridge and printer is unbelievable, and you get one of them for your $35 too, your own little piece of a few billion invested in R&D, tooling, and cartridge factory. It stinks to have to throw it away, but that's the model you bought into when you bought a cheap printer with disposable cartridges. There used to be lots of piezo-base (and other) printing technologies, but while the ink refills came in pints for cheap the printers were expensive, and no one bought them (not my printers, anyway).
If your idea of accurate pricing is how much a refill maker charges to rip off HP's formulations, have HP effectively give away the cartridges, and have you do the labor filling them, then I guess you could say the ink is cheap. I hate spending money on those cartridges too (more so my large format Epson), and I refill them sometimes, but I dont begrudge HP their business model, especially since we are all the people that made it the dominant technology by buying into it.