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Comment: battery life (Score 2) 164

by MoreDruid (#42515917) Attached to: LEGO Announces GNU/LInux-Powered Mindstorms EV3 Platform
I hope they truly address battery life. I understand that making motors turn and sensory input costs energy but boy the NXT 2.0 eats through a pack of batteries like a pothead with munchies. In the RC world there are lots of energy efficient battery types, and for the price I think Lego should have included a decent rechargeable battery pack (NiMh, if not LiPo).

+ - Polymer implants could help heal brain injuries->

Submitted by cylonlover
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:It's because they removed the SD Card (Score 3, Informative) 209

by MoreDruid (#41607053) Attached to: HTC Profits Drop By 79%
Don't get me wrong, I fell in love with the specs and screen as well. I still like the model, I just happened to have gotten a lousy unit and HTC has been very reluctant to help me out for about 3 months now which is dissappointing if you've just shelled out 579 Euros (almost $ 750) for a smartphone. When I went shopping for it it was a toss-up between the SIII and the One X and brand loyalty (and the fact that I think that the blue plasticy shell of the SIII is hideous) made me choose the HTC. I've owned the Touch, Desire and bought the Wildfire for my kid and they were all good phones, where everything just worked. There are more people than just the ones on the XDA board, like I said, 2 family members have the same issue as I have but didn't notice it because they don't use the navigation on the phone.

The guys that do the pickup do all the pickups for HTC in the Netherlands and at the 3rd visit (I got the same driver each time) he told me they were picking up lots of the HTC Ones, a lot of Apple iPhones but very few Samsungs, and those were mostly by user defect (cracked screen, etc).

All that leads me to not recommending it. However: if the unit you get doesn't have issues it's a very good phone, I like the build quality and feel of it, very good phone quality, the CPU is fast and doesn't drain the battery too fast, the screen is very nice and bright, the OS is responsive, basically everything you'd ask from a top model, and something I've come to expect by using my previous HTC phones.

Comment: Re:It's because they removed the SD Card (Score 1) 209

by MoreDruid (#41606561) Attached to: HTC Profits Drop By 79%
Don't get the HTC One X. I have had a terrible experience with this unit, I might be unlucky but an XDA developers thread of 11 pages seems to confirm that I'm not the only one: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1594281

I have had the same GPS issue (as did 2 other units from family members, but they hadn't used GPS yet) as mentioned on the forum, but I've heard (from the repair pickup guy) that some units also have lots of issues with Wifi. My phone has now been picked up 3 times, once they stated nothing was wrong but that it would be fixed in a software update (your non-existent issue will be fixed in our future software update, uhuh), which it didn't. 2nd pickup (after a 3 week long escalation to their 2nd/3rd line) they changed out the mainboard but that had the same issue. 3rd pickup, unit returned with yet another mainboard swapped and the issue seems to be resolved, however the USB connector on the mainboard doesn't align properly with the body opening so I need to wiggle and force to get the phone connected to the charger/PC. I can't properly seat it on my Brodit car holder for this model because of the misalignment, and previously I had no issues.

With regards to the SIII: I like the hardware and SD card upgrade possibility, they have a decent in-ear headphone included as well (HTC has the same cheap set as they did with the HTC Desire), I just don't like the look & feel of the Samsung body. Putting a sleeve/skin on it is not an option if you want to use a proper car holder since they expect the bare phone, no extra's on it.
There are a few other things I don't like about the HTC but those can be solved in software/apps. They have no automatic rotation for the home screen and their car app only has Google Maps and HTC Locations as navigation software choices. If you have purchased a different Satnav (or you use Waze) you won't be able to choose it.

Comment: Re:Just the OS (Score 1) 197

by MoreDruid (#40815557) Attached to: Malware now infesting my primary computer:
I'd go a little further still regarding the popups: depending on your status you get different alerts:
  • online: popup with part of message
  • busy: blink once or twice, after that once every minute until acknowledged
  • invisible: blink once or twice in notification area

Or make the blinks customizeable. Even better.

Comment: virtualze on mainframe (Score 1) 464

by MoreDruid (#40179219) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Type of Asset Would You Not Virtualize?
What surprises me is that I see a lot of advice on Vmware, very little on KVM/qemu (which performs better btw) and none on HyperV (that makes sense) nor on mainframe. Mainframe has been doing virtualization for decades and is lightyears ahead in I/O, segmentation, auditing, redundancy, reliability, performance, accuracy etc.

The latest offering from IBM scales to 300 virtualized servers (on a z114 in the cheapest config, realisticly @ $100K). Redundancy is built in the hardware. CRC is done at the hardware level. Mind you, these systems are designed to run at 100% utilization non-stop. Not this if higher than 15% you should run physical c(r)ap from VMware.

Comment: Re:$5? that's nothing (Score 1) 1205

by MoreDruid (#39208281) Attached to: The Specter of Gasoline At $5 a Gallon

GDP/PPP is not telling everything.

Country - Population million - Electricity consumption (GWh/yr)

  • USA - 307 - 4,401,698
  • EU - 541 - 3,635,604

So with about 250 million people more we consume about 800,000 GWh/yr LESS

Figures taken from here.

So yes I'd say the USA is a wasteful economy and should do something about it.
