smiling mantis

I am also laptop shopping, and since it has been 4 years since I last brought myself up to speed on the technology, I find myself at a loss to determine what processor equals what performance.

I get the i3 i5 i7 thing, but then they have different speeds

and as far as AMD chips are concerned I can't even begin to understand the hierarchy.

I need a laptop that is occasionally able to do some video editing and some Photoshop work.

But it will primarily be a take along computer that will be my link to the web.

14- 15 inch not too heavy, and a decent battery life too

I think any bonafide laptop these days is more than capable of that. Just watch out for netbooks, with CPU's like the Intel Atom, or an ARM.

In some segments of the market, it actually looks like things are going backwards. My MacBook Pro has now been superseded by two new models and yet it still sports the faster CPU of all of them, at least on paper.

And you get lots of reports from people about how SSD's make their systems appear to be twice as fast... and probably in applications like the two you cite.

I'd get a MacBook Air if I were making the choice today, but looking at some of these other laptops, like from Asus for instance, I'm not seeing many I wouldn't be happy with.

Why be so harsh in judgement. If he had let water release from dams - and it turned out to be a dry latter part of the monsoon, then he would be blamed not storing enough water for the 2nd or 3rd rice crop.

Completely agree. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The only blame I can see being usefully applied at this point concerns the information flow. Both in obtaining correct information in the first place, and then in properly disseminating it. The Yingluck administration is blameless in the former case, but for the latter the situation is murkier. Too many officials shooting from the hip caused a lot of problems, but then too, a lot of this can be traced to the lack of good, hard data.

The government should press the U.S. to release its super-accurate radar elevation data for Thailand, vastly expand the number of locations over which rainfall data is collected, institute a regimen whereby these same locations are tasked with providing accurate flood water levels when the floods do hit, and then finally commission the creation of software that will allow all of the above data to be used to create accurate and timely predictions on the movement of flood waters.

Maybe the guys who produce the software Air Asia uses for its website are also customers who try to use book flights on it, and decided a little turnabout is fair play.

You want PHP on this page? You sure you don't want our new Perl module? What about Python? Click yes to not install Python, or no if you don't want to install PHP but do want to go to another screen asking you if you want Perl.

I've got a D-Link DNS-320 and I want to run tranmission on it but am waiting to fix whatever this issue is that is keeping me from mounting a USB drive on the thing as I do not want to stress my main drives with the chatter torrents can generate.

Just to follow up on this...

I'm an idiot. The drive was formatted as HFS Plus. The NAS only recognizes ext3. What to do? Install Fonz Fun Plug! They've got instructions on how to build your own kernel modules (though you have to download a 400MB gzip file from D-Link first to do it, ugh.) I built one for HFS Plus, and also one for ext4 (some net stuff can take advantage of its sparse files).

It's not exactly a new kernel they've got in there (2.6.22.18) so the ext4 module is still marked as experimental, but hey, it's Linux.

You can pick up a DNS-320 at IT City for ~3100B if memory serves. Put two 2TB WD green drives in there. Was getting the expected 22MB/s on writes in JBOD mode, but since reformatting as RAID 1 I'm getting half of that. Kernel RAID isn't as fast as hardware but it isn't that slow either, so I guess I got more fiddling to do.

Very happy with the purchase. It's basically a $100 Linux box that sips power. Only 128MB and an armv5 but that's enough for quite a few things, and it lets my router concentrate on what's important, which is doing QoS, firewall, etc. Play more with that later, but like I said, Tomato as delivered is just wonderful on that device so why mess with success.

Full model number?

Hi Jiu Jitsu,, its a Toshiba Equium U400,, other numbers following the U400 look like PSU-42E although they are not very clear, and my paperwork for the machine are back in UK.

Thanks

Google is going downhill fast but it's still useful for technical stuff like this. Enter "Toshiba Equium U400 trackpad problem" you'll get a link to the Toshiba support forum talking about this very problem and how either reinstalling the driver or removing it(!) solves the problem.

It seems to me I can eat or drink or smoke just about anything else that's unhealthy, and other people won't say a thing, but when people find out I drink lots of diet pop the snide comments just won't stop. It's very weird.

If you think about it though it makes perfect sense. Greasy food, alcohol, cigarettes... none of these things are being marketed as being good for you, whereas diet soda is. So I think it's the BS factor.

BTW, whatever happened to diet sodas that use sucralose? Used to enjoy these greatly in Mexico, and I believe the research on sucralose does point to its being non-toxic. Everywhere I look though it's aspartame. If I could get a Coca-Cola that used sucralose as a sweetener I'd be doing rum-and-cokes in the place of beer most nights.

Hmm - wonder if they are going to make it even more tortuous to avoid paying extra charges. Had just got used to the old routine:

* check the baggage to delete the 20kg baggage assumption. Remember to scroll down to get the return journey changed separately (nice one Mr Fernandes - you caught me out booking a medium bag I did not want on the return leg once!)

* delete the seat allocation - a three step stage requiring you to click on ok at least once to avoid a seat charge; a sort of 'are you sure' - 'ok, are you really sure?' process

* delete the insurance by clicking on cancel twice (rather than OK - nice clever little trick that Tony - you caught me out once on that one too!

Let's just hope that Tony Fernandes has finally had a twinge of remorse for his dodgy business ethics. Your flights are still good value mate and I laud the way you are opening up the Thai domestic skies - no need to dress the fares up in a way we can all see through and detest.

+1

The planes are great and the prices are great but the website is like what I would imagine a parody of an airline's website would look like.

And it still takes me fifteen minutes to figure out how to opt out of the seat selection, and this is after using their site several times now.

My plans in the future are, should I fly Air Asia again, to make a drinking game out of it. Every silly little gimmick they throw my way to get a few more baht out of me, I have another drink. Don't know how else to avoid getting so aggravated trying to book a flight!

Whether you want to get the visa or not depends on whether or not you think your airline won't seize on an opportunity to sell you a ticket you neither want nor need.

I'm not usually a meticulous, careful planner but eight years of international travel has changed that. When you let details like this slip they rise up to burn you when you least expect it, or when it's the most inconvenient and expensive. Traveling is already a super stressful experience today, why give yourself something else to worry about?

Sounds like a driver problem. You using a mouse?

I saw an unusual T Shirt for sale at the Theprasit Night Market. It read ' DUCK MY SICK '

I wonder what it means..

It's a special edition shirt for sock-cookers....

My friend Joe Blob has one.

Not in Thailand, but the worst t-shirt I ever saw was one with a picture of beautiful breasts on a guy with serious man boobs. First reaction is, oh yeah.., OH GOD NO!

Sorry I don't have the pic (not really).

Airport Tops still out of all beer. Zero beer. On a date like 11/11/11, you'd think there'd be at least ONE beer. Nada.

Walk a hundred meters north to Rimping, and it's like the floods never happened. They've got a sign up apologizing for some items being out-of-stock, but what these items are is anyone's guess. If I die and go to heaven I'm fairly certain within it will be a German-Thai premium grocery. Hope I can still get money out of the ATM up there.

And for those who keep calling the NATO-led forces "invaders" and keep standing up for the Taliban, saying that our drone strikes are far worse than what the Taliban does, this is one huge difference between the two sides. When our soldiers do wrong, we generally hold them accountable.

There is a world of difference.

And when our politicians do far greater wrongs?

If the leaders of the Taliban did what our leaders have done, they'd cut off their heads. They hold their leaders accountable.

There is indeed a world of difference.

[What is it about this salt thing chaps ??? The quantity of salt you would need to alter the density of the water would be so huge you would probably need stockpiles as big as the flooded are itself. However lets come back to a guiding principle here and its momentum as the previous poster identified. Momentum = mass x velocity.

So lets say you are able to physically increase the mass of the water flowing by adding salt which as above you cant do due to physical constraints but lets say you do. Against a defined force i.e the water pressure exerted against the water flowing then an increased mass of water would only result in a lower velocity....

This strikes me as counterintuitive somehow, but intuition doesn't make for good argument, so I'll dispense with the water chemistry business.

Ok first what is the scenario we face as it pertains to next floods scenario

1) Bangkok is built on a natural river delta basin at sea level.

2) Thailand rivers are subject to seasonal flooding due to monsoonal variances

3) Allot of the natural canal and drainage pathways that were in existence have been plugged up

4) Water travelling through the north is also subject to collection points for rice irrigation purposes

5) Deforestation in natural catchment areas in the north has contributed to excessive water run off

6) Current drainage arrangement can probably handle unseasonal heavy rains in the Bangkok delta area but not when combined with huge monsoonal deliveries up north.

So solution would be to build a array of inland seas via viaducts that stem off the main flow lines of monsoonal rains... these inland seas are located well up north and are basically like big diversionary ponds interconnected with canals and control gates... The purpose of these ponds which would need to be numerous and large is to basically channel any huge monsoonal dumps. The water could be stored there and via series of sluice gates drained back into the main rivers and tributaries in such a manner that it doesn't casue appreciable flooding.

Some degree of aqua culture based industries could be established in some areas as well.

If the down stream geographical and political networks are never going to handle massive floods like this ( which i don't think they ever will do) then the idea is to alleviate serious monsoonal flooding up towards the source and perhaps do something useful with it.

Cost would be enormous of course but then so is cost of flooding.. potential to employ displaced farmers and villages in maintenance of ponds/ aqua cultural industries etc.

Gut call here is that if you let the wtaer approach Bangkok then there is nothing that can be done effectively.. better to trap or manage the water closer to source.

Rgds monty

Yes this is what theblether suggested above. I like especially the fact that we can find productive uses for the water while its being stored up in this manner, uses that for obvious reasons the addition of large quantities of salt would make impossible. This is like the monkey cheek project proposed by the King, as alluded to by another poster, is it not?

So we're left with known solutions but are supposed to sit silently as they go unimplemented? What am I missing here?

However let me go back to first principles here.. there is an underlying thread that heavier will move faster.. a chap many years ago called Galileo who showed from a funny leaning tower in Pisa Italy that heavier doesn't mean faster.. suspend lead in the water it aint going to move any faster.

I want to say you're wrong but I'm not sure I know how. I would just point out that gravity isn't the only thing operating here, you also have the momentum of the water to consider. More mass means more momentum. More momentum means it goes faster. If it goes faster, it gets off the land sooner.

You seem to be stuck on a notion of speeding up water will alleviate the woes.. unfortunately this is not a finite eperimental situation.. you have a huge mass of water in the gulf subject to a force more powerful then all the water combined in the flood and that force is simply gravity.... the moons gravitational effect on the tides is a far more encompassing factor to rate of water drainage than whatever means or ideas man can dream up.

Well, yes, this is true, but only during times of high tide, right? The idea would be to exploit periods of low tide to get more of the water out so that high tide isn't as much of an issue.

I get it that it seems far-fetched, but then too, I'm watching them using pumps to try to move the water along. Against that, stockpiling massive quantities of salt doesn't seem so crazy.

as an aside, and in no way meant as a joke at your expense - polymerisation of water to make it flow faster is like suggesting making air thicker to slow wind down.

polymerisation is the creation of long chain type molecules the basic links or blocks of which are a rather more simple molecule which is repeated - like a long string of pearls, with each pearl being a simple repeated molecular unit.

typical examples are plastics which are made by polymerisation of hydrocarbons.

water is a simple molecule that made by two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom (H20), and with out going into the nitty-gritty of the chemistry of a water molecule, suffice it to say that is is not a suitable molecule to use as a building block for a polymer.

so, not possible at all i'm afraid.

Ok, polymerization is the wrong term then. Somebody else mentioned changing the viscosity. Is that like changing its weight?

So what if you add salt to the water. Makes it denser, and thus heavier, no? Wouldn't that increase the rate of flow? Bonus, no obvious environmental damage when discharged out to sea.

I know we're talking about insane amounts of salt here but there is the Gulf of Thailand close by and we can and do harvest large quantities of salt all of the time from water like this and of course we're not talking about doing it all at once... I'm imagining this to be an ongoing effort over many years where you harvest and then transport the stuff up country and stockpile it for the day when its needed.

Why would someone need a foreign currency deposit account they maintain a bank account in their home country? Hubby's pension is direct deposited into Bangkok Bank in NYC and somehow it's magically converted into Thai baht when it shows up in our joint Bangkok Bank ATM account. Can't take long -- it shows up the same day of the month as it did when it was direct deposited into our U.S. credit union account located in the same city as the corporate headquarters of his former employer.

Because then you can control the exchange rate. You can see what the rate is before you change dollars into baht. If you don't like the rate the bank offers (and it's always been spot on every time I've checked) you always have the option of pulling out the dollars yourself and taking them to a money changer, or simply waiting for a day when the rate is more favorable.

From my experience, you can tell ROUGHLY how long a person has been in pratet Thai buy the beer they drink.

Chang - Backpackers and first time visitors.

Singha - Visitors that holiday here regularly or newbie 'expats'.

Leo - expats.

This is based on my observations over many years. Research mak mak!

Holds about true as far as I'm concerned.... a very recent expat who prefers Singha, but now that I'm back to looking in the mirror its San Miguel Light for the most part.

BTW, Airport Tops as of 5PM yesterday had only Red Horse and I bought it all up (4 bottles). Only thing left now is non-alcoholic beer.

To my knowledge most of the Bangkok Bank branches in CM will allow someone on a tourist visa to open an account, especially if they say they immediatly want to transfer in 800,000 baht to start down the road for an O visa.

This may be true but if you're retiring here then I strongly recommend opening a foreign currency deposit account at Bangkok Bank, and as of a year ago you can only do this in Bangkok at the main Silom branch. And if you're doing that you might as well go for the baht passbook account with the ATM and Internet banking all in one go.

Just remember to then change your branch after its all approved to one in CM so you don't get hit with the inter-provincial charges all of the time.

SGD 1088 is THB 26012.60 for those who don't have the Mac OS X Dashboard Currency Converter at their fingertips.

Wow - thanks this is really nice! I'd been using Google but this is better and quicker.

What I like about it is I can set up a kind of "war room" display using it, with a long row of clocks at the top for the different time zones I'm in, along with multiple currency converters for the cities in those zones.

You could of course just create a web page to do this too but I don't think it would look as nice nor is it likely to be assigned its own key combination (fn F4 in my case). I was initially very skeptical of this feature but now I kind of love it.

To be effective, this committee must plan for a future beyond the political lifespan of current politicians.

That's it. That's it right there.

But is it constructive to pretend that Thailand is alone in this regard?

SGD 1088 is THB 26012.60 for those who don't have the Mac OS X Dashboard Currency Converter at their fingertips.

Lots of finger-pointing going on but not a lot of constructive criticism, nor do I see any new ideas on how to better deal with flooding here in Thailand. Maybe the best thing we can do right now is create a space where people can just throw out ideas without fear of being called crazy, stupid or off their meds. I know there's a lot of smart people here because I've met some of you in person... you probably have lots of really good ideas but you can't or don't want to deal with being ridiculed.

I've got two probably very stupid ideas but I don't know enough about science or technology to shoot them down myself so I invite you all to do so in my stead and hopefully my surviving this will encouraging the more intelligent amongst you to volunteer your own ideas, and maybe we can help Thailand, even if not today.

Stupid idea #1:

I don't understand why it is so difficult to know where the floodwaters are going to go next. Some of you may remember NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. This was the Space Shuttle flying around the Earth measuring exactly how high everything was above sea level. This information should be enough to give us a very accurate map of where water will flow, if you combine it with rainfall measurements around the country and measurements of how high the floodwaters are in those areas affected. Shouldn't this be enough information that if fed into a computer will provide good predictions on which way the water is going to move? I get it that it's probably an enormous computation, but isn't this exactly what weather forecasters are doing all of the time, only with air pressure in the atmosphere? What's the difference?

I did a little Googling on this and one onerous issue has to do with the fact that the U.S. government has decided to only release the most accurate data for the terrain the United States itself sits on. Everybody else has to make do with a sort of demo-ware version of the data. I don't know if this limited accuracy is actually an impediment to improving the prediction technology we have today (which is obviously very poor) but surely exceptions can be made in cases like Thailand, where the military applications of such data (which is what I presume the reason is for not sharing) are less relevant than, for example, the Middle East.

Maybe farmers throughout the country could be given secondary occupations as weathermen, and be tasked with the job of measuring rainfall, and when necessary, the height of the floodwaters at their location? There really should be no excuse for not having the information needed to know what areas are going to be affected next.

If this is already happening, then excuse my ignorance, but then please explain why knowing where the floodwaters are going to be in advance is so problematic. If you know where the water is, its volume, and what the terrain is, how is it not possible to know where it's going to be tomorrow?

Stupid idea #2:

There's a branch of physics concerned with how fluid behaves, and one of the terms used to describe how fluid moves is elasticity. The more elastic a fluid is, the faster it moves. The process by which a fluid becomes elastic is called polymerization. I'm a layman so I probably got this wrong, but not too wrong I hope.

So the question is, is there a way of polymerizing floodwaters so that they become more elastic and thus move down the rivers and canals more quickly?

I would just point out that even a small increase in the rate of flow would make all of the difference in the world here. I don't know whether we're talking chemical additives, or electrical charge, or vengeful meditation, but if there's any way of doing it, it needs to be explored.

The point of an exercise like this shouldn't be a platform to criticize the current government for whatever failures it's perceived to be guilty of. Rather, it should be a platform upon which to criticize the next government which fails to implement any sensible conclusions this exercise might avail it.

Not for nothing, but I was just at the Tops in Central Airport Plaza, Chiang Mai, and I grabbed the last of the beer there... four big bottles of Red Horse. The only stuff remaining is non-alcoholic beer and those mixed drink things.

They did a great job of not making it appear too obvious, filling the shelves normally full of beer with Pringles potato chips. So when you first walk into the aisle, your eye is greeted with row after row of tall vertical goods where the beer is supposed to be and the brain says "Yes!" but it only lasts a second or two until you realize the swindle.

Given that the alternative is to go to Bangkok to get my money, I'm happy with the small fee.

But yeah, it's past time to change my home branch.

I love the tuk-tuks. But then too, I usually grab them at Central Airport Plaza, where there's a big sign clearly showing what the rates are to the various destinations in town. Had one take me to a destination that was 90B on the sign, waited five minutes, and then returned me to where we started, all for 120B.

Beats the snot out of the experience in Bangkok or Pattaya (though I do greatly prefer the baht buses to the songthaews). And if you're coming from the Philippines, then you're comparing with the trike drivers, and believe me, there is absolutely no comparison here (unless you're way out in the provinces, then it can be a decent experience).