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Comment Unicorns, unicorns, unicorns (Score 1) 325

What you need is servers. Laptops aren't designed to work like that. You could possibly get away with custom desktop PCs with crazy cooling but if you're pushing envelopes all day every day laptops are a piss poor excuse for productivity. You could get some high end laptops for local processing, and push all the major work to a few dedicated servers or even a blade system if you really needed sustained calculations. But laptops are not and most likely won't be designed for all this. Some other posters have pointed out that "sustained" top processing throttles down periodically because turbo boost is only made to kick in when absolutely necessary. It heats up the processor and it has to throttle or it'll melt.

So unless you're willing to haul around a liquid cooling system in your enormous gaming laptop (which someone has probably done), you're barking up the wrong physics.

Comment Re:Competition (Score 2) 437

I think it would need to be over two years, which is generally the amount of time anyone might be expected to hold onto a phone that was sold to them. There really ought to be some more responsibility and/or accountability on the part of the carriers to support devices that know full well people will be more or less forced to carry for the next two years.

Which isn't to say that every phone within the last two years needs to get 5.0, but they should continue to receive updates and support as problems arise. My original Galaxy S (Epic on Sprint) had zero support on day one, but i think that was less about the phone and more about Sprint just sucking at knowing what to do with the recent Android explosion. Either way I still find that carriers and manufacturers all suck butt when it comes to phone support and I'll likely never buy a non-Google phone again. If they stop making them, I may just go to Windows.

Closer to the topic, I think most people who keep their eyes on the mobile industry know EXACTLY why adoption of 5.0 isn't happening. Only the Nexus line is getting the upgrade, and the upgrade runs like shit (and the G3 apparently has it). I own a Nexus 5 and 10. The 10 chokes to death on 5.0, so I leave it on 4.4.4*. My Nexus 5 had awful battery life, and busted wifi on 5.0, so I reverted to 4.4.2. Then when 5.0.1 came out I heard that wifi and battery life weren't so much of an issue. I installed the update and am pretty happy with it so far. I thought about grabbing a Nexus 6, but since they're impossible to buy unlocked without a great deal of effort and scripting I just DGAF.

So I don't know why anybody is remotely surprised by the low adoption rate.

*Some of the games I like to play just won't run on any version of Lollipop. I don't know if this is a Dalvik/ART thing or not, but the Nexus 10 just doesn't have the power for modern applications anymore, and I'll replace it within a year or so if some really great stuff comes out.

Comment Re:I won't buy another nexus until they add miniSD (Score 2) 78

I have a 16GB Nexus 10 that I thought would be just fine. I'm almost never away from wifi. Boy-howdy was I wrong. After almost a year with it the biggest problem I've had is that Play Magazines (Motortrend) take up ridiculous amounts of space, so in those times when I can't be online (when I get around to reading them) it can get a bit constrictive. It's just not enough space, even if you're all cloudy-like.

Tablets really should have SD slots, too, so that's sort of a fail. I love Android but I may move on to non Nexus devices from now on if the price of the higher storage models doesn't come down.

Comment Re:Lease Tesla (Score 1) 461

Perhaps this should be reversed.

1. Buy Tesla
2. Lease Tesla to person of questionable credit at slightly higher rates (owing to their low credit score)
3. Refinance Tesla (repeat as necessary)
4. ???
5. Profit!

Wait, where would education fit in there...?

Comment Re:Costs (Score 1) 236

Probably for the same reason that phone companies can get away with charging up to $0.10 per text. Either the convenience seems to outweigh paying the charge or, well, they just can. And at $0.10 for 140 bytes of data, that comes out to somewheres around $748/MB.

Or more traditionally: AT&T will tack on 1000 SMS's for $10. Or about 136KB for $10.

Just sayin

Comment Re:Obviously wrong (Score 1) 236

I already mentioned this higher up, but so I'll try to summarize how it works (I was off put by how they were charging, too)

Amazon only charges for data and services that move through Whispernet over 3G. Amazon makes it super easy to control your spending if you decide to use 3G Whispernet services in your account, too. You can set limits on a maximum individual charge, which prevents you from accidentally sending enormous files to yourself and paying out the ass for it. Or you can just send things to your user@free.amazon.com account, which won't whisper its way to your Kindle until you're on wifi. Finally only approved email addresses can even send content in. True, it's very easy to spoof an email address, so I just created a very obscure email address name and use that as the only approved address.

Maybe that information will fill any gaps in what you've researched. It was all pretty confusing to me and I ended up just buying a book and having Whispernet give it to me over wifi to see if I was charged. Nope! As far as how much they charge? Well, that's one of those 'vote with your dollar' sort of things.

For my part, I owned a Nook and really didn't like it. When Kindle 3 came out I did a lot of reading. I didn't feel the need to buy the 3G since I can just flip it on in the morning at home and let it sync and then go about my day. I don't subscribe to periodicals, but even if I did I could set up a small script to hit up those websites and send it to my user@free.kindle.com account for free translation into their PDF format. And finally, well, I can't imagine (personally) sitting somewhere without access to wifi or a computer and thinking, "Shit! I need to buy and read a book RIGHT NOW!!" And if I do? Odds are my phone is around.

Comment Re:...why? (Score 2) 236

Any file transfer done with the Kindle's Wifi connection is free. It's just the 3G data that you'll have to pay for. You get free 3G for browsing, etc. But all the Whispernet services have chareges associated with them. IE, if you email a document to get converted and have it delivered over 3G, you'll have to pay for it. But if you email it and have it delivered by Wifi, no charge. Same with books. The only time you pay a delivery fee is over 3G.

I email documents that I have to review for work to Amazon for conversion all the time and never pay a cent. I also forward articles that I'd like to read later via instapaper's website. Amazon makes it painfully simple to prevent getting charged for anything by setting a set limit on how much of a bill you're allowed to rack up at any time. Set it to zero and you can't accidentally spend $10. So there really isn't any reason to get bent out of shape. Amazon isn't being (too) evil here. Somewhat like with phone subsidization, they're fronting the cash for your 3G connection, but you only pay if you use it.

Whether or not it's a fair price should be the question. When compared with, say, a cellular data plan, it's about 3-4x's more expensive per MB. When compared to texting plans? Well, let's say it sits much closer to cellular data fees. It's a convenience charge. It's up to you whether or not you want to pay it.

(Also, I have a Kindle 3, so I'm not sure what they do with Kindle 1/2 users.)

Submission + - Regulating coporate presence on the web

steveo777 writes: I work for a financial firm which doesn't have much web presence. Working with older owners who are just finding out about social networking is pretty interesting since I just explained how Facebook works to a room of people. It was brought to the owner's attention that our business has a fan page that spoofs the industry in which we work. He was fumed and demanded of our two person IT shop "Take this down, I won't put up with this!". I was secretly laughing inside until I realized he was already prepping to sick his legal department on Facebook saying "It's our company and we need to control what people say about it." While I know it's not likely that we'll even get a response, my question is this. Has anyone else out there been in this position, and what have you done to 'fix' the issue?

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