And since 99% (ass statistic) of the computer users simply don't need that much horse power, we may find that this does become the norm and our desktops may become somewhat esoteric and have a price to suit (in relative terms).
I feel it's probably still progress towards a better state, but there will be some transition pain like with many disruptive technologies - in a few years you phone will probably have the power of your Deskop(tm) and we'll just plug it into our nice monitors and keyboard - I'm actually waiting for this day. Real mobile computing, just plug your phone (or equivalent device) in to the closest terminal dock and go... need to run, unplug and keep your session running.
Yes you can almost do that with a laptop today, but it just doesn't feel good in your pocket...
I know it's not exactly the same and it might not be Google's motive, but I don't like it and I complain when someone is punching me in the face, but when that happens I find it justified to punch them in the face too. In the current climate with all the frivolous patent lawsuits going around, it would be foolish for Google to not amass/acquire a patent portfolio of their own, it's a crazy game and the industry has set the rules - you either play by the rules or you don't play at all unfortunately.
But I do agree with the rest of your post - it's getting just a tad silly now.
I think you meant $2.7M not $97M (I expect a typo) it was 97M documents, which could have each contained X pages.
There's more than just drag and drop the document folder - that probably included the labour of all the finding/sorting/sifting. I also know little to nothing about the legal system they were operating in, but it might be necessary to provide printed copies of these document - that would really start to add up. $2.7M is probably fair if that is the case.
There are many industries where the choice is taken out of your hands. If your customer has a legacy system that has hard dependencies on the OS (perhaps even a customised version of it) then it IS the right and probably only choice.
Not everyone has the luxury of just switching OS versions.
Yes this is in it's own right a recipe for disaster, but it is also possible that the customer is working in parallel to upgrade to a more modern OS, but sometimes these things take years or decades.
Think manufacturing, military, banking, etc.
I know this is the case, I've been there and suffered situations where the cost of switching OS's would have cost 10's or 100's of millions of dollars - not always the right choice.
Wealthier, healthier populations tend to have less children anyway. Once we are in a position where we can comfortably grow our populations without hardship, we will also not be growing our populations
That sounds great - but I can't see that working out in the long run. I'm not overly well versed in economics, demographics and the like but I'm of the feeling that our 'wealthier, healthier populations' are at the cost of others'. We in our western world see our populations becoming wealthier and healthier (although that is debatable) but this wealth and health doesn't come for free.
This planet has finite resources, these resources must 'go around' and I'm pretty sure that we all have less to share as the population increases - we can't get more of our finite resources hence we can only get/have less each. Yes we are artificially getting more at-the-moment but that can't go on for long, we're getting far more than our share and depleting our resources at an ever increasing pace. As such we can't all become wealthier and healthier at the same time and there will be more and more non-wealthy and non-healthy as time goes on, unless something phenomenally revolutionary happens.
So as our global population increases we will as a whole become less wealthy with respect to disposable resources. So while a few less populated and wealthier nations may be decreasing our population growth, this is unlikely to impact the global population much at all.
This is without taking into consideration that a good lot (if not most) of western wealth is in fact based on debt (trillions of dollars of debt) which is in essence a claim on future resources that we don't even have yet - this will unfold one day and may already be unfolding now as we watch our financial systems melt down under the weight of this debt. But I'm digressing even further off topic now - sorry.
What I'm really trying to say is that it is possible that the population decreases we are seeing now from wealthier nations are a side effect of our current situation that I don't see lasting long enough to make any difference to our global population growth situation due to the factors that described above.
I wasn't disagreeing with you - I was pointing out that it is not a black and white situation, both you and the AC make valid points that are not mutually exclusive. My choice would be to help relieve human suffering and I think Gates is trying to do good.
But it would be foolish to simply ignore any unintended consequences. As a race we've done that too many times and it often causes more harm and suffering to humans (and nature). If you've explored for and considered the unintended consequences and you still think it's a good idea, well so be it, sometimes that might be the right decision. But to not consider them is foolish in its own right.
A good lot of our current problems (if not all) are caused by solutions to past/other problems, regardless of how noble they may have been/are.
Although that AC does have a point - it is immoral to not attempt to help eradicate disease but it is also not ideal to increase our population growth. Something needs to curb its growth, that can either be 1) leave it to nature (disease, famine, etc) or 2) change human behavior (lower birth rates, or increase death rates).
Please don't get me wrong, I am in support of helping the needy and that includes curing disease and I think Bill Gates is doing more than most in his position - but it doesn't mean it's the best strategy for the long term existence of our race, perhaps that's ok - we're not going to survive for ever, our demise will come eventually.
I don't think we have much chance of doing 2, this may happen by its self, but I expect that will be too late for human existence to remain sustainable like we perceive it today (although in reality, it is already not sustainable).
Remember, population growth is exponential - this get nasty and out of hand very quickly.
The solution to this problem is - we either decrease our growth or the planet will do it for us (anarchy, war, disease, starvation, etc).
Let's put this in context. If we continue to grow at just 1% a year we only have 780 years until there is about 1 square meter of dry land per person on this planet, see: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html That's a ridiculously short period of time when put in context of human existence. Obviously this is not going to happen, something will have to change well before we get there. I expect it will be anarchy, war, disease, starvation, etc.
Having said this though, recent evidence does suggest that population growth is starting to slow - this could be our savior and could make all my points above moot. But we should keep an open mind and try to factor in the outcome of our actions regardless of how far into the future those outcome have their effect.
While in my day-to-day life I often use the "the intent in more important than the actions" argument as I am a forgiving person, but in business I don't think it really applies mostly because it is a subjective assessment - not a reliable way to enforce rules. Using this rationale is like saying that MS are not allowed to bundle any software with the OS just in case it harms a competitor to that software - that's a bit unfair.
I do see your point, and it's a fair one - but in business the cookies crumble like that sometimes. I don't think it was unfair for MS to use their advantage (monopoly) over Netscape - that's a bit like banning the guy with long arms from competing in darts.
I hate IE and I understand that people hate(d) Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and the browser just made it worse, but really people, do we really think that's such an evil thing? Why don't we get so upset about Notepad, Regedit, Paint, etc? They're equally crap. Why was IE singled out from all the other non OS features included with Windows? IE is just a feature shipped with the OS. Don't Apple ship Safari with OSX?
If anything, shipping IE for free with the OS was (in the long run) a good thing (standards compliance aside), as it forced the competitors to be innovative and have made browsers much better (in my opinion).
Just curious - if IE was not included with the OS, how would you get a competitor's browser? Sure it's not an unsolvable problem, but I know when I install Windows on a friends machine, the first thing I do is fire up IE and download a decent browser. It's good for that if nothing else.
I think a good car analogy is: Manufacturers of cars ship radios in their cars - can you believe that? And they are not super simple for the end user to remove, some can't even be replaced with 3rd party ones (think of the big in console jobs) as they're integrated into the car's computer systems... Never heard anyone complain about that.
But sarcasm aside, I never really understood why MS copped such flack for including IE, it seems perfectly fair in my mind, don't like it? Don't use it. Rather simple really... Sure it made it harder for the competition, but heck, don't enter that space if you're not willing to compete against (crappy) IE. I just wish they'd made it standards compliant.
(bye bye Karma.....) But before you do blast my Karma away, I'm not an MS fan, I haven't used their OS on my machines for well over 10 years, but I never really understood why shipping a feature for free with an OS was so evil.
Really? I'm no economist but I don't think these jobs are lost, the moved elsewhere surely?
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of those jobs were lost/moved to Samsung, and I'm pretty sure Samsung products are not primarily made in China. Though I could be wrong, but I thought Samsung manufacture a lot of their products in Vietnam and Taiwan. Not that this makes any difference.
Don't get me wrong, I really hope the rest of the world can regain some manufacturing capability from those who have the strong hold on it now - but we need to be smarter about it and our governments need to be smarter about it. If we don't make changes ourselves, it's going to be a long drawn out cycle until it comes back around to us (being the western world that's lost its manufacturing capability).
Personally I saw Nokia's demise as soon as they decided to go with Windows Mobile - I don't have any real hate of Windows Mobile, but it has never proven popular in the past and I couldn't see it catching on fast enough to dig Nokia out of its hole.
While the job 'losses' are never nice for the workers, their families or their local economies - this surely should not be a surprise to anyone and can only be blamed on Nokia's poor business decisions - and to the casual observer they seemed like obvious bad decisions at the time they were being made and shows that senior management at Nokia are out of touch with the market they are embedded in.
It's a shame, I always like Nokia phones, but they've offered nothing of interest for years now.
Certainly not a troll - I don't have enough time for that.
My post was to illustrate why I don't think this kind of device will have much impact on Android's success. The masses will not change the configuration on the machine as you suggest, they buy a device and expect it to work well without tweaking, configuring etc - having the ability is somewhat moot if the user doesn't know, understand or care about doing so. Perhaps if they came configured as you suggest by default, things might be different.
I'm not saying that it is inherently flawed, I'm saying that for most users (ie, not the/. crowed) the experience is not particularly good for the casual use device. Just as the (current) tablets are not particularly good for 'desktop' work. They are different markets and I don't see a Frankenstein incarnation harming either market.
I like choice and I'm glad companies are creating lots of different devices for us to choose from. My point was just a response to the idea that "the Android will die in the tablet market if Win8+x86 transformers take off", or more to the point, I don't believe they will take off anywhere near as well as the Android tablets have due to the points I made.
It is the masses who produce the revenue for the manufacturers - tablets are aimed at the masses and not the tech minded geek - although we love them too.
While not related to my original points, but as you pointed out, you can get nice name brand ICS tablets for about $200, at this price point it's going to be hard to challenge and at this rate they could even be $50-$100 in a year or so...
For me the Android tablets are a big win for two reasons:
1) Good battery performance. 2) I can pick the thing up and use it when ever I want with out the damn "Windows in installing update 1 of 18".. "Windows is restarting to finish applying updates"... "Please don't turn your machine off, windows is applying a critical update"..
This may sound frivolous, and the configuration can probably be changed to avoid this. But my last netbook (with Windows 7) was not used too frequently, but every time I turned that thing on, waited for what felt like 5 minutes for it to boot up then get nagged to apply updates, postpone them, etc, then a java update would pop-up, then some other update... What's worse, if I walked away after turning it on (while it was booting, perhaps to make a coffee or get a beer) I'd return and find I missed the opportunity to postpone the update and find the thing shutting down again to apply an update (without me asking it to) - really not a convenient way for a device like this to behave.
I see tablets and netbooks as a convenience machine not a workhorse, and Windows just sours that experience. Let's hope Windows 8 fixes these short comings.
I know you probably think I'm just a Microsoft basher, but I'm not, despite being a Linux user I find Windows 7 is a perfectly reasonable desktop OS and don't really have much to complain about. I'd suggest it to any non tech savvy user who didn't want a Mac. But on a tablet? Given past experiences, no-thank-you.
I don't know about your success, but even with a fan I've had nothing but trouble with discrete mobile nVidia graphics chips overheating and giving up pretty quick.
A thin device with no fan and an nVidia graphics chip just sounds like a recipe for the same overheating issues they've been plagued with in the past.
Of course, things might have changed with the newer generation chips, but I'm not holding my breath.
To their credit though, I've had less issues on my desktop systems that have more suitable cooling. But I can't say the same for their discrete mobile offerings.
I often ask questions that I already have an opinion about (or believed expertise) to either validate my thoughts or to bring in additional insights from others.
Just because he's asked the questions doesn't mean that he is not competent in this area.
Personally, I think *not* asking these types of questions is arrogant and closed minded.
If you think you're an expert that has nothing more to learn, you are a lot less smart than you think - this is just another take on the Dunning–Kruger effect.
If they were 'close enough' why do so many whine about it?
What are your 'intents and purposes'? I'm whining because for *my* intents and purposes it isn't 'close enough'. 1920x1080 is just a horrible size screen for doing any serious work on, never mind the stupid 1366x768 screens.
I agree with many comments here - screen resolutions have gone backwards and I have a sneaky suspicion that it just so manufacturers can put a "FULL HD" sticker on the things.
and I know this is not what he asked for, but wouldn't the simplest solution be to purchase a second external drive (maybe an SSD for durability) and actually have a complete backup on the road... Or even just take his current external with him - he has it backed up in the cloud any way...
I ask because he never stated why that external drive was stuck at home..
If that won't do, another possible solution.
1) I don't see a need to sync the USB stick when he returns - just perform your usual backup when you return and only care about the USB stick if it you have a failure before returning home.
If (1) is workable for him then: 2) how much data will he really need to backup when out-and-about? Can't you setup an 'away from home' backup profile that will only backup the things you'll be changing while away - document, current working folders, but skip the movies, porn and music for this backup (it's still at home and in the cloud anyway)..
Since he expects the deltas to fit on a USB stick, I'm assuming he's not wanting to backup a heap of video editing or some other hungry activity...
So we only have an estimated population of around 7 billion people, yet as of November 2006 there were 200 individuals worldwide diagnosed with mad cow disease, including 164 people in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, the 3 in the US, 2 in the Netherlands, and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Spain, according to the CDC. Of these individuals, most (170) had lived in the UK for over 6 months during the years 1980-1996; 20 others had lived in France during that time. [taken from: http://rarediseases.about.com/od/rarediseases1/a/vcjd.htm ]
So using CDC math we should only have a 0.7 reported cases........
Slashdot Mirror
And since 99% (ass statistic) of the computer users simply don't need that much horse power, we may find that this does become the norm and our desktops may become somewhat esoteric and have a price to suit (in relative terms).
I feel it's probably still progress towards a better state, but there will be some transition pain like with many disruptive technologies - in a few years you phone will probably have the power of your Deskop(tm) and we'll just plug it into our nice monitors and keyboard - I'm actually waiting for this day. Real mobile computing, just plug your phone (or equivalent device) in to the closest terminal dock and go... need to run, unplug and keep your session running.
Yes you can almost do that with a laptop today, but it just doesn't feel good in your pocket...
I know it's not exactly the same and it might not be Google's motive, but I don't like it and I complain when someone is punching me in the face, but when that happens I find it justified to punch them in the face too. In the current climate with all the frivolous patent lawsuits going around, it would be foolish for Google to not amass/acquire a patent portfolio of their own, it's a crazy game and the industry has set the rules - you either play by the rules or you don't play at all unfortunately.
But I do agree with the rest of your post - it's getting just a tad silly now.
I think you meant $2.7M not $97M (I expect a typo) it was 97M documents, which could have each contained X pages.
There's more than just drag and drop the document folder - that probably included the labour of all the finding/sorting/sifting. I also know little to nothing about the legal system they were operating in, but it might be necessary to provide printed copies of these document - that would really start to add up. $2.7M is probably fair if that is the case.
There are many industries where the choice is taken out of your hands. If your customer has a legacy system that has hard dependencies on the OS (perhaps even a customised version of it) then it IS the right and probably only choice.
Not everyone has the luxury of just switching OS versions.
Yes this is in it's own right a recipe for disaster, but it is also possible that the customer is working in parallel to upgrade to a more modern OS, but sometimes these things take years or decades.
Think manufacturing, military, banking, etc.
I know this is the case, I've been there and suffered situations where the cost of switching OS's would have cost 10's or 100's of millions of dollars - not always the right choice.
Wealthier, healthier populations tend to have less children anyway. Once we are in a position where we can comfortably grow our populations without hardship, we will also not be growing our populations
That sounds great - but I can't see that working out in the long run. I'm not overly well versed in economics, demographics and the like but I'm of the feeling that our 'wealthier, healthier populations' are at the cost of others'. We in our western world see our populations becoming wealthier and healthier (although that is debatable) but this wealth and health doesn't come for free.
This planet has finite resources, these resources must 'go around' and I'm pretty sure that we all have less to share as the population increases - we can't get more of our finite resources hence we can only get/have less each. Yes we are artificially getting more at-the-moment but that can't go on for long, we're getting far more than our share and depleting our resources at an ever increasing pace. As such we can't all become wealthier and healthier at the same time and there will be more and more non-wealthy and non-healthy as time goes on, unless something phenomenally revolutionary happens.
So as our global population increases we will as a whole become less wealthy with respect to disposable resources. So while a few less populated and wealthier nations may be decreasing our population growth, this is unlikely to impact the global population much at all.
This is without taking into consideration that a good lot (if not most) of western wealth is in fact based on debt (trillions of dollars of debt) which is in essence a claim on future resources that we don't even have yet - this will unfold one day and may already be unfolding now as we watch our financial systems melt down under the weight of this debt. But I'm digressing even further off topic now - sorry.
What I'm really trying to say is that it is possible that the population decreases we are seeing now from wealthier nations are a side effect of our current situation that I don't see lasting long enough to make any difference to our global population growth situation due to the factors that described above.
I wasn't disagreeing with you - I was pointing out that it is not a black and white situation, both you and the AC make valid points that are not mutually exclusive. My choice would be to help relieve human suffering and I think Gates is trying to do good.
But it would be foolish to simply ignore any unintended consequences. As a race we've done that too many times and it often causes more harm and suffering to humans (and nature). If you've explored for and considered the unintended consequences and you still think it's a good idea, well so be it, sometimes that might be the right decision. But to not consider them is foolish in its own right.
A good lot of our current problems (if not all) are caused by solutions to past/other problems, regardless of how noble they may have been/are.
Although that AC does have a point - it is immoral to not attempt to help eradicate disease but it is also not ideal to increase our population growth. Something needs to curb its growth, that can either be 1) leave it to nature (disease, famine, etc) or 2) change human behavior (lower birth rates, or increase death rates).
Please don't get me wrong, I am in support of helping the needy and that includes curing disease and I think Bill Gates is doing more than most in his position - but it doesn't mean it's the best strategy for the long term existence of our race, perhaps that's ok - we're not going to survive for ever, our demise will come eventually.
I don't think we have much chance of doing 2, this may happen by its self, but I expect that will be too late for human existence to remain sustainable like we perceive it today (although in reality, it is already not sustainable).
Remember, population growth is exponential - this get nasty and out of hand very quickly.
A great example is: http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/bacteria_exponential_growth
The solution to this problem is - we either decrease our growth or the planet will do it for us (anarchy, war, disease, starvation, etc).
Let's put this in context. If we continue to grow at just 1% a year we only have 780 years until there is about 1 square meter of dry land per person on this planet, see: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy_transcript_english.html That's a ridiculously short period of time when put in context of human existence. Obviously this is not going to happen, something will have to change well before we get there. I expect it will be anarchy, war, disease, starvation, etc.
Having said this though, recent evidence does suggest that population growth is starting to slow - this could be our savior and could make all my points above moot. But we should keep an open mind and try to factor in the outcome of our actions regardless of how far into the future those outcome have their effect.
So It's not what they included, it's why?
While in my day-to-day life I often use the "the intent in more important than the actions" argument as I am a forgiving person, but in business I don't think it really applies mostly because it is a subjective assessment - not a reliable way to enforce rules. Using this rationale is like saying that MS are not allowed to bundle any software with the OS just in case it harms a competitor to that software - that's a bit unfair.
I do see your point, and it's a fair one - but in business the cookies crumble like that sometimes. I don't think it was unfair for MS to use their advantage (monopoly) over Netscape - that's a bit like banning the guy with long arms from competing in darts.
Surely this was meant as humor, no?
I hate IE and I understand that people hate(d) Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and the browser just made it worse, but really people, do we really think that's such an evil thing? Why don't we get so upset about Notepad, Regedit, Paint, etc? They're equally crap. Why was IE singled out from all the other non OS features included with Windows? IE is just a feature shipped with the OS. Don't Apple ship Safari with OSX?
If anything, shipping IE for free with the OS was (in the long run) a good thing (standards compliance aside), as it forced the competitors to be innovative and have made browsers much better (in my opinion).
Just curious - if IE was not included with the OS, how would you get a competitor's browser? Sure it's not an unsolvable problem, but I know when I install Windows on a friends machine, the first thing I do is fire up IE and download a decent browser. It's good for that if nothing else.
I think a good car analogy is: Manufacturers of cars ship radios in their cars - can you believe that? And they are not super simple for the end user to remove, some can't even be replaced with 3rd party ones (think of the big in console jobs) as they're integrated into the car's computer systems... Never heard anyone complain about that.
But sarcasm aside, I never really understood why MS copped such flack for including IE, it seems perfectly fair in my mind, don't like it? Don't use it. Rather simple really... Sure it made it harder for the competition, but heck, don't enter that space if you're not willing to compete against (crappy) IE. I just wish they'd made it standards compliant.
(bye bye Karma.....) But before you do blast my Karma away, I'm not an MS fan, I haven't used their OS on my machines for well over 10 years, but I never really understood why shipping a feature for free with an OS was so evil.
Google has been using this for some time and is used on Android devices - you can see their patent here: http://www.google.com/patents/US7532158
A-GPS is not new (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS), though they seem to want to extend it to other radio sources.
Really? I'm no economist but I don't think these jobs are lost, the moved elsewhere surely?
I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of those jobs were lost/moved to Samsung, and I'm pretty sure Samsung products are not primarily made in China. Though I could be wrong, but I thought Samsung manufacture a lot of their products in Vietnam and Taiwan. Not that this makes any difference.
Don't get me wrong, I really hope the rest of the world can regain some manufacturing capability from those who have the strong hold on it now - but we need to be smarter about it and our governments need to be smarter about it. If we don't make changes ourselves, it's going to be a long drawn out cycle until it comes back around to us (being the western world that's lost its manufacturing capability).
Personally I saw Nokia's demise as soon as they decided to go with Windows Mobile - I don't have any real hate of Windows Mobile, but it has never proven popular in the past and I couldn't see it catching on fast enough to dig Nokia out of its hole.
While the job 'losses' are never nice for the workers, their families or their local economies - this surely should not be a surprise to anyone and can only be blamed on Nokia's poor business decisions - and to the casual observer they seemed like obvious bad decisions at the time they were being made and shows that senior management at Nokia are out of touch with the market they are embedded in.
It's a shame, I always like Nokia phones, but they've offered nothing of interest for years now.
Certainly not a troll - I don't have enough time for that.
My post was to illustrate why I don't think this kind of device will have much impact on Android's success. The masses will not change the configuration on the machine as you suggest, they buy a device and expect it to work well without tweaking, configuring etc - having the ability is somewhat moot if the user doesn't know, understand or care about doing so. Perhaps if they came configured as you suggest by default, things might be different.
I'm not saying that it is inherently flawed, I'm saying that for most users (ie, not the /. crowed) the experience is not particularly good for the casual use device. Just as the (current) tablets are not particularly good for 'desktop' work. They are different markets and I don't see a Frankenstein incarnation harming either market.
I like choice and I'm glad companies are creating lots of different devices for us to choose from. My point was just a response to the idea that "the Android will die in the tablet market if Win8+x86 transformers take off", or more to the point, I don't believe they will take off anywhere near as well as the Android tablets have due to the points I made.
It is the masses who produce the revenue for the manufacturers - tablets are aimed at the masses and not the tech minded geek - although we love them too.
While not related to my original points, but as you pointed out, you can get nice name brand ICS tablets for about $200, at this price point it's going to be hard to challenge and at this rate they could even be $50-$100 in a year or so...
For me the Android tablets are a big win for two reasons:
1) Good battery performance.
2) I can pick the thing up and use it when ever I want with out the damn "Windows in installing update 1 of 18".. "Windows is restarting to finish applying updates"... "Please don't turn your machine off, windows is applying a critical update"..
This may sound frivolous, and the configuration can probably be changed to avoid this. But my last netbook (with Windows 7) was not used too frequently, but every time I turned that thing on, waited for what felt like 5 minutes for it to boot up then get nagged to apply updates, postpone them, etc, then a java update would pop-up, then some other update... What's worse, if I walked away after turning it on (while it was booting, perhaps to make a coffee or get a beer) I'd return and find I missed the opportunity to postpone the update and find the thing shutting down again to apply an update (without me asking it to) - really not a convenient way for a device like this to behave.
I see tablets and netbooks as a convenience machine not a workhorse, and Windows just sours that experience. Let's hope Windows 8 fixes these short comings.
I know you probably think I'm just a Microsoft basher, but I'm not, despite being a Linux user I find Windows 7 is a perfectly reasonable desktop OS and don't really have much to complain about. I'd suggest it to any non tech savvy user who didn't want a Mac. But on a tablet? Given past experiences, no-thank-you.
So I think the likes of Android is safe.
I don't know about your success, but even with a fan I've had nothing but trouble with discrete mobile nVidia graphics chips overheating and giving up pretty quick.
A thin device with no fan and an nVidia graphics chip just sounds like a recipe for the same overheating issues they've been plagued with in the past.
Of course, things might have changed with the newer generation chips, but I'm not holding my breath.
To their credit though, I've had less issues on my desktop systems that have more suitable cooling. But I can't say the same for their discrete mobile offerings.
I often ask questions that I already have an opinion about (or believed expertise) to either validate my thoughts or to bring in additional insights from others.
Just because he's asked the questions doesn't mean that he is not competent in this area.
Personally, I think *not* asking these types of questions is arrogant and closed minded.
If you think you're an expert that has nothing more to learn, you are a lot less smart than you think - this is just another take on the Dunning–Kruger effect.
If they were 'close enough' why do so many whine about it?
What are your 'intents and purposes'? I'm whining because for *my* intents and purposes it isn't 'close enough'. 1920x1080 is just a horrible size screen for doing any serious work on, never mind the stupid 1366x768 screens.
I agree with many comments here - screen resolutions have gone backwards and I have a sneaky suspicion that it just so manufacturers can put a "FULL HD" sticker on the things.
Well that's another copy - not a backup.
I'm guessing the OP isn't taking the external HDD with him because it's something else to carry and/or loose
But he's taking a USB flash drive anyway - it's not that different.
and it's also his backup drive.
He could purchase another as I suggested - they're not exactly prohibitively expensive.
Having a backup of your laptop isn't going to help in a lot of situations if you keep the backup in the same bag as the laptop.
It doesn't need to be stored in his laptop bag, and let's not forget his main backup is sill in the cloud...
and I know this is not what he asked for, but wouldn't the simplest solution be to purchase a second external drive (maybe an SSD for durability) and actually have a complete backup on the road... Or even just take his current external with him - he has it backed up in the cloud any way...
I ask because he never stated why that external drive was stuck at home..
If that won't do, another possible solution.
1) I don't see a need to sync the USB stick when he returns - just perform your usual backup when you return and only care about the USB stick if it you have a failure before returning home.
If (1) is workable for him then: 2) how much data will he really need to backup when out-and-about? Can't you setup an 'away from home' backup profile that will only backup the things you'll be changing while away - document, current working folders, but skip the movies, porn and music for this backup (it's still at home and in the cloud anyway)..
Since he expects the deltas to fit on a USB stick, I'm assuming he's not wanting to backup a heap of video editing or some other hungry activity...
Those stats aren't mine, they were lifted straight from the link provided...
Also note those stats were from 2006 and on about.com...
My original post was a symptom of engaging keys before brain..
I see the flaws in my comment :)
Oh well, at least the other's thinking the same silly idea will now see where our thinking was flawed.
Thanks for correcting my blabber!
(indeed, I am far from a epidemiologist)
That is a good point...
So we only have an estimated population of around 7 billion people, yet as of November 2006 there were 200 individuals worldwide diagnosed with mad cow disease, including 164 people in the United Kingdom, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, the 3 in the US, 2 in the Netherlands, and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Spain, according to the CDC. Of these individuals, most (170) had lived in the UK for over 6 months during the years 1980-1996; 20 others had lived in France during that time. [taken from: http://rarediseases.about.com/od/rarediseases1/a/vcjd.htm ]
So using CDC math we should only have a 0.7 reported cases........
Ummm, was there a virus or not?