How many people have actual mechanical-ringer phones any more? I have one specifically for the purpose of being heard anywhere in the house, but don't actually use it to talk.

Not when the gas stays in the tanks (at least until the liquids run out) and the liquids do the actual work.

And yet there was plenty of controversy caused by those same people a couple of years later. Sometimes people just don't get the joke, and explaining a joke almost never makes it funnier.

You can cue up people by beating them with a pool cue, but I don't think that is what was intended either.

Challenge accepted.

http://sjwar.blogspot.com/2014...

You said a single. There are many references to this case, and it's not the only case, but you can do your own homework.

Mind you, this is from experience with desktops rather than laptops, but just like individual CPUs differ in how hard they can be pushed (even if they are binned the same), so do different cores within a single package. "Turbo Boost" is basically saying "we know SOME of the cores can go this fast." You may get lucky and find they all can handle the sustained load (like my case -- 3.2 GHz, boosts to 3.6... rock-solid stable running at 3.8 24/7/365. Of course I had to turn OFF the boost and just crank it up in general...) But there's no guarantee, and if you are trying to treat these as interchangeable parts, you need to assume a "least common denominator" sort of attitude.

Turn off the Turbo Boost, throw some supplemental cooling at them, and live with how fast they go. Or, spend more for something considerably bulkier that includes said cooling and expects you to pound on it constantly. Either way you're not going to sustain "over 100%" when Intel did this knowing full well it wasn't a sustainable speed (for MOST CPUs, some might actually be OK with it).

And to think I had people oohing and aahing because I installed a functioning scoreboard in someone's Spleef arena, or a binary counter that would tell you how many people had entered and left a given space (though it could be fooled if people pushed through together), or a combination lock for a secured area (with user-configurable combinations). I understand redstone, even in its more recent, more analog-like form. Generating, detecting, and sorting pulses is not hard. Logic gates are not hard. Latches and flip-flops are not hard. Stringing them together is tedious, but not hard. Stacking them up and debugging them is another matter entirely. There are so many ways to do it wrong, not to mention having to have a grasp of the underlying principles of the circuits being emulated.

That's English.

How do you say the "were" part of "werewolf"? You say it just like "where". Or like "wear".

How do you pronounce "read", or "lead"? Is that "reed" or "read"? Is that "red" or "read"?

Some people can remember the rules, but not all of the exceptions. It's far worse if it's not even their native language and they didn't have this drilled in from early childhood. The fact that we write everything down with 26 letters is quite handy. Not so much the fact that there is no unique mapping of symbols to sounds.

ghoughpteighbteau tchoghs? ghoti?

If you can spell accurately, that's nice. It does make you seem more intelligent, or at least more literate. But it's really hard to lay this all at the feet of the people who have problems with it.

We've never had the need or opportunity to test this, but the sealed lead-acid battery built into the VoIP box that is attached to our fiber connection promises two hours of talk time and 36 hours of standby time with no power applied. If true, this would mean that we too could pass the dial tone test after 24 hours of continuous power outage. We did not buy this equipment, this facility was built into equipment provided by Verizon, presumably because they knew it was unacceptable to let phone service go out in the event of power failure.

The category of "multifunction devices that just happen to have a functional camera included" didn't exist in the film days, outside of spy-catalog novelties that took pictures as bad as the ones you're lamenting. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you compare a dedicated film camera to a dedicated digital camera.

Also, I take far more pictures with a digital camera than I did with a film SLR, and I was pretty serious about it back in the film days. Back then, even when I could get my film processed free (which was doable, you just had to know the right people and not consume anything that could be inventoried), I still had to BUY the film. Now all I have to worry about is charging some batteries. I take an order of magnitude more pictures now than I did then, because they're damn near free. If I get one truly worth archiving, I could have it copied to archival film -- the same process I'd have to do if it STARTED on film, because even the photojournalist film I preferred doesn't last forever.

My "keeper rate" has gone down, probably to a third of what it was on film. But I'm taking ten times as many images overall, and have the economic freedom to bracket and otherwise screw with multiple settings in difficult circumstances. Plus, I can immediately look at the result to see if I got the shot, or if I need to try again. The end result is that I get a lot more keepers, at the expense of some charge cycles on my batteries. I haven't even burned out the 2 GB SD card I've had in the camera for the last eight years.

I'm saying that one thing you're not going to get over a fiber-connected VoIP system is power, but the phone company took that into account and did something about it. If the problem is sufficiently severe that you can't restore power before the battery keels over, then there's a damn good chance your POTS line wouldn't be working either -- due to physical disconnection, or lack of power at the CO. Even though they have generators, they do eventually run out of fuel too.

I'd rather have paper and a scanned copy that can be kept somewhere else. Without going digital, what are you going to do? Ask someone to store a safe full of photocopies in their attic for you? All I have to do currently is swap external drives with someone. I get to raid their media collection, they get to raid mine, and we BOTH get an offsite backup. Is it permanent? No. But neither is film, nor is most paper. Yes there are archival papers, and archival film stock, but those have to be specifically chosen. Ordinary consumer-grade celluloid falls apart in a matter of decades. And don't even start with fire, flooding, or E-flats.

Analog is "better" in the sense that it existed first, so much of what you want to document is analog. If it was created digitally, then a digital copy is "better" in the sense of being able to produce more precise reproductions.

No, not necessarily. But that's the way it went. Digital displays are MUCH easier to use when you need to know what frequency you're on to three decimal places. It's far better than analog dials. The equipment also got cheaper largely because of the capabilities gained by being able to cram a lot of transistors into the space previously occupied by a handful of tubes and crystals. Now we're in the software-defined radio era, which is inherently digital, and it's DEFINITELY a good thing. The inadequacy of the controls of many radios is a design problem. They suck because it was cheaper to make them suck. There are plenty of analog radios with shite control interfaces too.

A paper map is great, if you have some idea where you are, and can dedicate the attention necessary to locate yourself on it. GPS is far from foolproof, and having the skill to read a map (and having one in the glove box) is certainly a wise precaution, but for the large majority of the time that it works just fine, GPS is so much easier. The problem isn't the technology, it's the ID10T's using it and forgetting how to read a map and use a compass.

Agreed, but digital radios can (and often do) have buttons and knobs. What's nice is that in many cases you can decide what a given control does, rather than it being hard-wired at the factory.

Huh? Never had that problem with an actual camera, digital or film. Your problem is with phones and other devices pretending to be cameras, to greater or lesser degrees of success.

And VoIP has a built-in battery backup for this exact reason.

That's because they only do one thing -- keep the temperature roughly between two defined points. If that's all you want to do with a digital thermostat, you don't need to read anything either. You only need the reference card (and I do mean card, it's the size of a credit card) if you want to do something like have it automatically expand the allowable temperature range during hours when nobody is home, or everyone is asleep. Having to read the card is a far sight better than a simple "NOPE, can't do that".

Nope, they just spit out paper for you to lose, damage, or destroy instead. Incidentally, so do printers.

Again, this depends on what it does. Try working split on a tube transceiver from the 1970s, and tell me with a straight face that things going solid-state in the 1980s wasn't a MASSIVE improvement. Reliability improved, ruggedness improved, feature set improved, and prices stayed about the same. Once the feature set started to level off, prices started to drop.

Now if you're talking about a guitar amp, you might have a more valid point (so long as the Russians keep making tubes).

That's because it can't tell you which way is north, only which direction the magnetic pole approximating north lies in. Depending on where you are, the two could be substantially different. Compasses are a good basic sanity check for other data, but precise, they are not.

I'm not claiming digital is always better, but most of your examples are poor ones.

I actually found something that looks exactly like what I want: the Mad Catz S.T.R.I.K.E. 5. Unfortunately it's $200.

If anyone else thought "hey that makes sense", at least this is one option. I don't want two separate devices, and would rather get something like the Evoluent with the keypad on the left if that's what it takes.

What I want is to minimize the space between the main keyboard segment and the mouse, so as to minimize the latency of reaching for said mouse and back for typing. To that end, I want something like a 60% keyboard, but do not delete the F-key row. I'm not looking to reduce the total footprint, just move my mouse a good 7 inches or so closer. Then I still want the remainder of the keyboard, but on the OTHER side of the mousepad. Obviously this will have to be attached via a separate cable.

Backlights would be nice. Mechanical switches like Cherry Brown would be nice. 18mm pitch would be super-nice. But none of those would increase my comfort level as much as just sawing the damn keyboard into two pieces and putting the mouse in between.

Yeah, this seems a little like saying "Our cafeteria food has improved. It used to be completely inedible. Now it just sucks."

If by "just fine" you mean having a small fraction of the throughput of the modern machinery. The automated systems can be (and thus are) run at damn near peak capacity at all times, which means that when they do fail, it will inevitably be at the worst possible time -- because it's always the worst possible time. The trick lies in determining whether this increased cost of failure is offset by the increase in production. From the widespread adoption of such processes worldwide, it would appear the answer is a resounding "yes".