I think they mean "summarily close."

I've tried pretty much the same thing using an Asus Transformer TF101. It has been less than a success.

Basically the tablet is great for email, which fortunately I write a lot of, but rubbish for office productivity. Word processing, spreadsheets and presentations are all difficult to create and edit with the installed Polaris Office. The original article above mentions Hootsuite. I use Hootsuite for managing my social networks. On an Android tablet, the experience is less than stellar. The Hootsuite app is clearly built for a mobile phone. In a web browser though, Hootsuite is brilliant. Sadly, web browsers on an Android tablet are largely crap at dealing with Javascript. And I've tried pretty much all of them. I need at least 4 (standard Google Android browser, Opera, Dolphin HD and Firefox Beta) to ensure that I will be able to load and interact with all websites I come across. Google Docs also fails in a web browser, and the app is once again mobile phone focussed.

The battery life of the Transformer is brilliant, especially with the dockable keyboard, which makes writing anything of length bearable.

A while ago I installed Ubuntu 11.10 as a dual boot operating system. I now use this OS much, much more on the Transformer. It's not perfect and a few things don't work, such as the mini-HDMI out, but when it comes to browsing and office productivity, I find this much more useful.

There are a few electric light sport aircraft starting to emerge:

http://www.yuneec.com/index.html
http://www.electraflyer.com/
http://www.sonexaircraft.com/research/e-flight.html

None of these have the same glide ratio as a motor glider, and are the beginnings of an emerging electric light sport aircraft industry. A long way to go, but with the rising prices and limited availability of Avgas in many regions of the world, many changes are needed within the General Aviation community to ensure a sustainable future.

Is electric flight the way forward? Maybe, maybe not in the short term. With options like Rotax engines already commonly available for many types and "diesel" (JetA1) engine options also growing for many legacy airframes, as well as new models, there is hope and a number of different routes GA could end up going down.

If you intend to edit the HD content, you might like it to be more than 100Mbps. For example, the default settings for ProRes HQ 50i content results in variable bitrate files up to 185Mbps and DNxHD 50i is 184Mbps. (60i content differs, with DNxHD at 220Mbps). AVC-Ultra (and AVC-Intra derivative) is up to 200Mbps.

There are other sub-100Mbps options, such as XDCAM HD422 @ 50Mbps, but it really depends on your productions - high-end natural history and drama, then I'd want as much more than 100Mbps as my systems could handle. Factual, comedy and news/current affairs would most likely be fine at the lower bitrates. HD content is broadcast at atrociously low bitrates anyway. However, from an archival point of view, I'd like to see higher bitrates used.

HDCamSR is only compressed at 440Mbps.

In the Winter Olympics there's biathlon and in the Summer Olympics firearm related competitions include 50 metre pistol, 50 metre rifle, double trap, skeet, trap and some air rifle events too. Lots of people care about all of them.

Actually, is it even in an FLV container? I don't watch video on Facebook, so I don't know. What I do know is that H.264 in a MOV or MP4 container, works just as well in Flash as H.264 in an FLV container. If historic content is in an FLV container, perhaps for new content they just changed the default container, so no remuxing is necessary at all.

Yeah, you're right. I guess I just see the transport links to Heathrow better than Stansted. I'd rather be marooned at Heathrow late at night, than Stansted. My options for getting somewhere else are better.

I agree with your points about Gatwick and City though. I've always had better experiences at those airports than at Stansted.

It already happened in Madrid in 2004.

Stansted is a pain in the arse.

I live in South West London (Twickenham), well within the M25, and had cause to go to Stansted on Sunday. Firstly, I take a train from Twickenham to London Waterloo station (20 minutes). I'm now pretty much in the city centre, with easy access to most areas via the Underground. Next, the Underground to Liverpool Street station (20 minutes). Then I had expected to take the Stansted Express train to to Stansted (45 minutes). But wait, it's a Sunday and there is engineering works on the line and all services are replaced by buses. The bus to Stansted took 90 minutes! In total, my journey time to Stansted was over two hours. My friend's flight to Graz, in Austria was only 2.5 hours.

I used to fly regularly to Riga, Latvia from Stansted, which is a 3 hour flight. There's only a limited direct service, and into Stansted was the best return option on a Sunday evening. However, the flight would arrive at 11pm. The last train to London departs at midnight. Any delay whatsoever, and I would estimate at least 50% of the time there was, one would miss that final train. Only other option is a bus. Even if you did catch the train to Liverpool Street, by the time you arrived, the Underground service was finished and a night bus was the only option (or a taxi of course, but that's pretty expensive). It used to take me somewhere between 3.5 hours and 5 hours on a bad night, to return home after arriving at Stansted. I could fly across the breadth of Europe quicker than that!

Traveling to Heathrow is a lot easier and quicker. Granted, I live in South West London. However, even if I lived further into the city, there is a direct Heathrow Express train, as well as a direct Underground service on the Piccadilly Line. From most areas of London, within Zone 6 (Zone 1 is inner city, Zone 6 the furthest out for the metropolitan public transport service) I would estimate no more than 90 minutes maximum to get to Heathrow. It's much closer to the city, so a taxi is a lot cheaper too. In general, I will pay up to £50 more for a ticket, for the convenience of flying from Heathrow.

I'm sure someone will prove me wrong, showing that it only takes the 10 minutes to get to Stansted and 1.5 days to Heathrow, but the above is my personal experience.

The BBC is also up for an award for their dabbling in 3D: http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/technology/bbc-stereo-3d-rugby-project-up-for-rts-award/5007769.article

Someone mentioned reserved instances earlier.

If you get the High-CPU Extra Large, and pay for a 12 month reserved instances ($1820), then $0.24/hour ($173), your monthly cost is down to £325. Reserve it for 3 years ($2800) and $0.24/hour and you're down to $251 per month.

It sounds like your website needs to be up 24/7, so when considering EC2 a reserved instance might be a better way to go. If you didn't need your instance 24/7, then just pay for it by the hour.

The reserved instance does take away some of the advantage of scalability, but you have the same issue with your ISP hosted dedicated box anyway.

As far as the whole 9 yards goes, I've just re-instated a landline number after attempting to live without one for the last 2 months. Why? Because suddenly my mobile bills rocketed! I live in the UK and make a lot of calls to Ireland, Australia, continental Europe and the US. These aren't business calls, these are personal calls to friends around the world. Going back to a landline is a whole lot cheaper in these cases.

Yes, I could have purchased a cheap rate call card and used that from my mobile, however this still meant my overseas friends needed to call my mobile number, so more expensive for them.

Yes, I could have used a VOIP service, and indeed some of my friends have Skype accounts and we do communicate that way. However, many of my friends are not tethered to their computers all day/night or own a fancy pants mobile phone that allows one to install Skype.

Overall I figured that if I wanted the whole 9 yards, including the ability to phone overseas cheaply and have my friends phone me cheaply as well, having a landline number was a better option.

Can you post a link to the discussion please?

As far as I know, the only H.264 encoder that is regularly superior to x264 is the offering from MainConcept. Read the Fifth Annual MSU Codec comparison, recently published in May 2009.

For quality comparisons, x264 and MainConcept are clearly the best options, with MainConcept slightly ahead. However, on speed, x264 is quite slow. It depends what it more important to you. For me, it's quality and I'll take the speed hit. x264 is truly fighting it out with the commercial products for market leadership.

While the article summary is, strictly speaking, probably correct in stating that "x264 is NOT the best encoder around", it is pretty damn close to being the best H.264 encoder around, and clearly better than its rivals in some areas.