Category: Technology

Article courtesy of Business Insider.

Answer courtesy of Betteridge’s law of headlines:

No.

My daughters have already informed me that we are seeing Monsters University (no argument from me, I loved Monsters Inc.). But this article sealed it.

Pixer created new software called Global Illumination that handles lighting much more automatically. A key quote:

The biggest struggle was to keep each frame down to 20GB of memory

20GB per frame. We’ve come a long way since Walt Disney’s first animations.

I had heard of this before, but I saw it today on Daring Fireball. It’s a simple adage:

Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

This is the link Daring Fireball was referring to, but I’d be hard pressed to find an exception to that rule.

We got FiOS about two weeks ago. Overall the comparison to Time Warner cable is no comparison.

The big issue was internet speed. We had also been having big issues needing to reboot the DVR box with Time Warner a couple of times a week.

Internet speed is no contest. We started on Verizon’s 50/25 package. We wanted a few more TV channels so as a package upgrading the internet to 70/35 was only $5/month more. So we did that.

The speeds are only guaranteed with a wired connection. That is important since we function wireless 95% of the time. But for Netflix or if I need to download something big, wired we are actually getting 80Mb down. Crazy fast. Wireless, it tends to be a consistent 18Mb down. But here the key word is consistent. Unlike cable, it never slows down. And the upload speeds are just as good.

TV wise, they are pretty comparable. We have yet to need to reboot the FiOS DVR and the box seems faster overall (using the guide, on demand etc.). We also got a second DVR and we’re still saving money.

There is one area that FiOS is not as good. They don’t have full “watch TV on your other devices” capabilities yet. It’s supposedly coming, but with Time Warner I could watch any TV on my laptop, Nexus, iPad, whatever.

FiOS, you need to catch up here.

So overall, a better experience (way better on the internet) and we are saving money every month. Clear win.

This is a long, fascinating, and fairly depressing read. Safety technology that has existed for ten years, still not used.

“What the industry saw as a problem was not the amputations and injuries occurring on their product, but the advent of a technology that could prevent those injuries. That was the problem we created.”