Toshiba Ultrabook Z935-P300 | Pop Culture Social Club

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Ultrabooks are the new hype in mobile computing. ?The basic differences between laptops and ultrabooks are performance and mobility. ?A basic laptop will weight more, contain faster hardware and stay alive on battery shorter than an ultrabook. ?Intel was looking to get into Apple?s realm of beauty with ultrabooks also ? they?re elegant in design. ?What are ultrabooks better for than laptops? ?Mobility and specific computing. ?If you want to have a lightweight, long battery life computer you can take anywhere to do basic tasks like browse the web then ultrabooks are for you. ?Laptops are more general purpose computers ? if you rather only have a few hours of battery life, don?t mind carrying a large heavy machine around and want to not only browse the web but play the newest video games then a laptop is for you.

I?ve had my eye set on the Toshiba Z935-P300 for a month now. ?It?s on the lower cost end of ultrabooks at $899 but the size and weight of this computer is beyond belief for me. ?I haven?t seen a sub-$1200 mobile computer that is nearly as light or thin as the Z935 ? it?s so beautiful and sleek it fits in both professional business and?leisure?coffee lounges. ?Another really nice aspect is availability because I hate making mobile device purchases online ? specs aren?t the same as the feel of a device and to me cell phones and mobile computers need to feel right. ?The Toshiba z935 is for sale at BestBuy so you can stop in and check it out yourself.

At the core (no pun intended) is the Intel Core i5-3317U processor which was released in the second quarter of 2012. ?In general CPU specs like operating frequency and cores really don?t matter much these days, it?s all about the manufacturing process size. ?This is even more important for a mobile computer because you want to get lots of battery life and have the CPU run cool ? both of these issues aren?t major in terms of desktops. ?The Core i5-3317U is an Ivy Bridge CPU built on a 22nm process ? the newest and most efficient CPU series today. ?After feeling the sleek design and seeing an Ivy Bridge CPU I was sold, but there are other features that I just can?t believe for the price.
4GB DDR3 1600 RAM is standard for any computer these days. ?Cheap laptops still come with 2GB, but the Z935 sticks to the 4GB standard and allows expansion to 6GB if you need it. ?My biggest issue with computers is the hard drive ? these ancient magnetic devices use motors to spin platters while another servo moves a read/write head over the platter. ?Any type of movable anything is prone to high failure rates and since the hard drive stores the only things of a computer that you need to have access to, a bad hard drive can leave you without important things from business files to priceless family photos. ?The remedy is solid state drives (SSD) that work like a big fast USB stick. ?This year we started seeing really affordable SSD prices but lower in storage than traditional hard drives. ?The Toshiba Z935-P300 comes with a 128GB SSD so as the computer bounces around while your mobile there are no moving parts to wear and tear. ?When an SSD ?dies? it can still be read so your files will always be safe from failure (but not other elements like water) this drive is much faster and safer than a hard drive but at 128GB make sure you only put the things you need on this ultrabook ? store all the ?want? data on huge traditional hard drives at home (hopefully in a RAID 5 array for speed increase and data?redundancy?when a drive fails you can keep your data). ?If you?re a Windows user I recommend researching how to fine tune Windows to use an SSD efficiently because Windows by default with rip apart your write cycles on an SSD ? but there?s always Linux that treats your hardware with love.

Connections are pretty standard, couple USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 so you can at least use new devices. ?HDMI output is standard on laptops now, and the Z935 is no different but if you use this ultrabook to play videos on your living room TV then what computer are you using while you watch the video? ?Just kidding? I?m a nerd and can?t not compute even when watching a movie. ?There is no optical drive ? no CD or DVD reader or writer, this is one of the traits of ultrabooks. ?The optical disc technology should be dead by now, it?s been dead to me for years and should be to you too. ?If you insist on being able to read/write CDs and DVDs just stop reading this and get a $399 Dell laptop right now. ?The typical Bluetooth, Wifi b/g/n and wired Gigabit ethernet are all found on the Z935 along with a webcam/microphone and the good old multi-card reader for SD media and the such. ?The 47Wh 8-cell battery will probably get you 5-7 hours of good use. ?Graphics are not for video games, you?ll need a normal laptop for that. ?The Intel Mobile HD GPU is integrated into the Core i5-3317U CPU and can display 1080p HD video onto the 13.3? widescreen display so enjoy your movies and YouTube but don?t get upset when it can?t run the latest and greatest video game.

I believe this ultrabook is the best for the price. ?Everything I do with a mobile computer is simple, the largest stress is the HD video playback both from a file on the hard drive and streaming from the Internet so I am biased toward features like weight and thickness for mobile devices. ?If I?m working in the cloud, programming robots, running neural networks written in C++ or simply enjoying a 1080p movie I want to do it unplugged from AC power with a super light, super thin computer for less than $1000 and the Toshiba Protege Z935-P300 is just that device. ?For any typical home user or business professional this ultrabook is a great introduction to the future of ultrabook computing.

Trust your technolust ? I?m an IT engineer/administrator professionally and an avid electronics nerd developing everything from robots to rockets. If it?s got logic, I like it.

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Source: http://www.thechatcast.com/2012/10/toshiba-ultrabook-z935-p300/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=toshiba-ultrabook-z935-p300

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NY State Parks Seeks Partners to Provide Outdoor Recreational ...

The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation announced today that it is seeking business or community service proposals to provide outdoor recreation and instruction programs that encourage state park visitors to participate in healthy activities. The information gathered will be examined to identify opportunities to expand outdoor recreational programming and instructional classes, introduce park patrons to new recreation opportunities and new outdoor skills, and increase visitation in the parks and historic sites of the state park system.

?The outdoor recreation economy has proved its significance over the past several years, and our parks offer the settings and facilities for a multitude of recreational opportunities, from paddle-sports and fishing to mountain biking and cross-country skiing,? said Rose Harvey, Commissioner of the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. ?There is a great opportunity for partnerships to offer new and innovative ways to invest in our parks and our visitors, and I look forward to reviewing the proposals.?

The Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEI) targets businesses, non-profit organizations and individuals, potential operators, user groups, and other prospective partners for ideas for outdoor recreation programs and activities at the parks or sites of their choice. After receiving responses, State Parks will assess the submissions and may elect to interview those received which meet the agency?s goals and objectives with potential benefits and impacts on the park system overall, as well as the park under consideration. State Parks intends that the RFEI will help in the development of one or more programs for the enhancement, improvement and future use of the parks.

To request a copy of the RFEI, please call 518-486-2932 or email concessions@parks.ny.gov.? Proposed projects will need to be submitted by November 9, 2012.? All expressions of interest responding to this RFEI must be in writing, signed by an authorized representative of the respondent, and submitted in a sealed envelope clearly marked ?Outdoor Education RFEI? and directed to the following designated contact:

Attention: Harold H. Hagemann, Jr.
Director, Concessions Management Bureau
NYS Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation
Albany, New York 12238
Telephone: 518-486-2932

Clearly marked responses may also be electronically submitted on or before the deadline to the following e-mail address: concessions@parks.ny.gov, or via a CD mailed to Mr. Hagemann as noted above.

New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation oversees 178 state parks and 35 historic sites. For more information on any of these recreation areas, call 518-474-0456 or visit www.nysparks.com, connect on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

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Source: http://newyorkoutdoors.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/ny-state-parks-seeks-partners-to-provide-outdoor-recreational-programming-by-nov-9/

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Why a clean Mars rover is a happy Mars rover

The Mars rover Curiosity is putting its dramatic explorations on hold, for tests and essential cleaning: After all, if it's going to accurately analyze Martian soil, it must shed its Earthly residue.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / October 4, 2012

This image taken Sept. 28, is a mosaic of images taken by the telephoto right-eye camera of the Mast Camera before the Mars rover arrived at Rocknest.

Courtesy of NASA/AP

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Two months and a just over half a mile into its mission, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is taking time out for tests of key tools for sampling the Martian soil ? and, it turns out, for some badly needed scrubbing.

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Over the next two to three weeks, engineers will direct Curiosity to scoop sand from a stone-dotted mini-dune the team has dubbed Rocknest and to run it through sample-processing hardware dubbed CHIMRA.

It's a cleaning approach akin to a camper scouring the last meal's cookware with sand. After the scrubbing, NASA controllers plan to test CHIMRA's ability to feed samples collected by the scoop, and later Curiosity's drill, into two key instrument packages inside the rover?s chassis.

The clean-out is in preparation for the rover's main mission: analyzing rocks and soils to see if Gale Crater and its central summit, Mt. Sharp, once hosted an environment that could have supported life.

Curiosity's science team already has started to build a strong case for the presence of significant quantities of water flowing ? at least periodically ? through the crater billions of years ago. Water is a key ingredient for organic life.

Images released last week of rock outcroppings showed clear evidence they were formed from solidified silt and water-tumbled stones. The team's consensus interpretation: The feature represents the remains of a stream bed, perhaps uplifted and exposed by a small meteor that could have struck the spot.

The outcroppings appeared to be associated with the leading edge of a broad fan of sediment that on Earth forms as water carries soil and rock down mountainsides to lower elevations, where it spreads in what geologists call alluvial fans. In this case, the fan would have built as water flowed down now-eroded hills that form part of Gale Crater's rim.

After capturing such suggestive images, cleaning and more testing may seem a bit mundane. But it's necessary, says Daniel Limonadi, the lead systems engineer for the rover's sampling and science systems.

"Even though we make this hardware super-squeaky clean, just by virtue of being on Earth you get this residual, oily film that is impossible to avoid," he says.

It's also impossible for the rover's internal chemistry labs to avoid picking up on that residue in any samples CHIMRA delivers ? contaminating the results. "So we're taking the sand samples and effectively using it to rinse out mouths three times and then kind of spit out."

The approach has all the subtlety of maracas. Once the scoop ? a bit larger than a tablespoon ? lifts the sand into CHIMRA, the device will vibrate by design to make sure the abrasive hits all the device's nooks and crannies. In normal operations, the strong vibrations are designed to move samples through sieves ? with a final sample for analysis containing a tiny fraction of its original material.

The cleaning itself is expected to take about a week and a half, and when it's over, the scoop will deliver a fourth sample to the rover's internal instruments. One device, called CheMin, uses X-rays to analyze the mineral content of samples, while another, called SAM, uses ovens and solvents to analyze the detailed chemical make-up of the rock, including the presence of compounds containing carbon, one of the key chemical building blocks of life.

But Curiosity's longer stay at Rocknest speaks to the importance the science and engineering teams are placing on what mission manager Michael Watkins describes as "keystone" instruments.

"We're being deliberately, incredibly careful," he says. Every time CHIMRA, located on a turret at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm, takes a scoop, the team will be taking videos before, during and after each step of each gargle to ensure "we understand exactly what's going on." The goal is to take the time now to get to know how the instruments, tested on Earth, operate on Mars so these extra steps can be eliminated later in the mission.

"We're being extremely slow and prudent here," Mr. Watkins says.

Once the teams finish up at Rocknest, it's on to Glenelg, a confluence of three intriguing geological formations where the teams expect to use Curiosity's sampling drill for the first time.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/w96wujgd6nk/Why-a-clean-Mars-rover-is-a-happy-Mars-rover

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Routine: Classic 80 - Video Game Blog, Video Game Reviews

Published: 03 October 2012 5:20 AM UTC

Posted in: Indi Games, PC, PC Games

Tags: greenlight, Indie games, Lunar Software, PC, Routine, Steam

Routine from Lunar Software is one of those rare Indie gems that break the mold, combining sci-fi elements with movie-style horror to bring an experience that can be equated to a Ridley Scott film.

Recently Greenlit on Steam Greenlight, Routine has had a considerable buzz within the world of Indie Games, being hailed as a vastly original and revolutionary PC Indie that just might resurrect the seldom used genre of first-person survival horror.

In Routine, players explore an abandoned moon base and investigate the mysterious disappearance of the crew. Something is lurking within the base, and it?s your job to survive long enough to collect data and puzzle together just what happened to the missing crew members.

This PC Indie is one part sci-fi detective mystery, one part thriller, putting emphasis on suspense that keeps gamers on the edge of their seat.

Here are a few unique features you can expect to find in Lunar Software?s upcoming Indie:

  • Non-Linear Gameplay - Players aren?t forced to follow a set path and are allowed to explore each section of the base at their leisure.
  • Original Game Mechanics - Routine?s Full-Body Awareness mechanics make for a realistic experience: deadzone aiming with no HUD?s immerse players into the game. Gamers must utilize their stealth skills and their wits in order to survive whatever lurks within the base.
  • Look before you Leap! - No health-packs, extra lives, and permanent-death system keeps players on-edge, making them weigh their decisions carefully.
  • Multiple Endings - View different endings that are based on in-game actions.

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Lunar Software makes use of unique blend of thrilling survival horror and investigative puzzler to bring an original gaming experience unlike most Indies out there. The game?s distinct 80?s style visuals, impressive high-def graphics, creepy atmosphere, and original in-game mechanics make it one of the most alluring spectacles on Greenlight today. Routine has also been greenlit, meaning that it has been officially approved by the community.

Routine from Lunar Software is slated for release in early 2013 for PC and Mac. For more information please visit the game?s official website.


Article from Gamersyndrome.com

Related posts:

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  3. Just Cause 2 Demo Now on Steam
  4. Greenlight Roundup 1
  5. Steam Account Sold For $1000
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Source: http://gamersyndrome.com/2012/pc/routine-classic-80s-style-sci-fi-horror-steam-greenlight/

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AA and unions agree to resume contract talks

(AP) ? American Airlines and its pilots' union have agreed to resume stalled contract negotiations.

The union also said Tuesday that it will delay releasing results of a strike-authorization vote scheduled to end Wednesday.

The developments could lead to a breakthrough in a bitter standoff between the nation's third-biggest airline and its 7,500 active pilots.

Thomas Horton, CEO of American parent AMR Corp., which is operating under bankruptcy protection, said Tuesday he was pleased that "intensive bargaining" was scheduled to begin this week.

Horton said that AMR has finished most of its financial restructuring and is steadily returning to profitability. This despite "a very challenging couple of weeks for our company," he said.

Noting that American's other unions agreed to new contracts, he said a deal with pilots was an important step for the company.

In a message to Allied Pilots Association members, union spokesman Gregg Overman said the group would seek "an industry-standard contract."

The pilots rejected American's last offer in August. In early September, a federal bankruptcy judge gave AMR permission to throw out the pilots' contract and impose terms for pay, benefits and work rules.

Last week, American said some pilots were conducting an illegal work slowdown that was causing delayed and canceled flights, and it threatened to take the union to court. The union says there was no sickout or slowdown.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2012-10-03-US-American-Airlines-Pilots/id-692414c49c5e4ef281370aeaebe445d1

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Skype Fiddles With Classrooms And WiFi PR Stunts While The Product Languishes

medium_Junked_Volvo_145-01Skype is coming out with a bunch of announcements today and perhaps (perhaps) it's sign of a re-invigorated operation even though there remains continuing grumbles from users about the actual product development and the lack-lustre, dated, interface and features. First up it's expanding its wireless offering in the UK and Ireland by partnering with wireless broadband provider Wicoms. "Free Skype WiFi" will be offered in high street retailers, hotels and businesses that carry a dedicated Wicoms router. Skype has normally offered free WiFi at travel hubs and on holidays, but this is broader. Users just need to go into those outlets and log on with their Skype ID using the Skype WiFi application, or sign up for one on the spot. Businesses can sign up to it by getting a free router in October only.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/bh44_AnpuFU/

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First Indication that Treasury is Serious about Student Loans Being ...

In discussions with many students, I get the sense that the prevailing thinking seems to be that the government will "do something" to eliminate the student loan burden. Not so fast.

The Treasury has no money to bailout the loans and the banksters will want to get paid. I can see riots and protests down the road on the issue, but for now, the Treasury has fired its first shot indicating that those holding student loans should get serious about paying the loans back.

?The Treasury, the D2D Fund, and Center for Financial Services Innovation today announced the winners of the App Design portion of the MyMoneyAppUp Challenge?a contest offering cash prizes and recognition for the best mobile app ideas and designs "to help Americans make smart financial choices, access high quality financial products and services, and ultimately control and shape their financial futures."

So was the winner someone who came up with a way to balance personal budgets, track banking accounts, etc.? Not quite.

It's almost comedic, but the Grand Prize, "for making smart financial choices" app, ?went to Nicole Kendrot, who designed MoneyApp: Z. From the Treasury release:

z helps to make student loans easy and simple to manage. ?Among other features, the app allows users to: ?link information about all of their student loans in one place; create a payoff plan that syncs with their budget; suggest ways the user can reduce their payment period and total interest paid by making extra payments; learn about managing student loans; and test their knowledge about student loans and personal finance.
(ht Bob English)

UPDATE:

A PR agent writes:

Nicole Kendrot, a good friend of mine, brought your post to my attention. The name of her app is actually Centz not Z. There was a typo in the Treasury's press release.

Nicole hopes that she will have the opportunity to make her app a reality to help the millions of individuals, including herself (and me), who have student debt.

Source: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/10/first-indication-that-treasury-is.html

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Seth MacFarlane Laughs Off Oscars Hosting Gig In 2011

'I think you have to at least be on a cable show first,' the 'Family Guy' funnyman joked last year when MTV News asked if he'd be up for the job.
By Kara Warner


Seth MacFarlane at the 2011 Vanity Fair Oscar party
Photo: George Pimentel/ WireImage

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1694743/seth-macfarlane-oscar-host.jhtml

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'Bag City' is a key to China's economic future

Aly Song / Reuters

People walk in front of posters advertising International Bag City in Pinghu, Zhejiang province September 28, 2012.

By Kevin Yao and Nick Edwards, Reuters

PINGHU, China?- Chinese luggage magnate Karohy Shi wants to add another name to the list of chic cities synonymous with style. Move over Milan, look out London, forget Paris. Say hello International Bag City, Pinghu.

But the $236 million trading center Shi is building in this coastal town about 100 kilometers from Shanghai is more than a place for foreign fashionistas to find the perfect purse.

It aims to help local firms develop their own domestic brands and markets and start scaling the global value chain.

"If we don't do this, maybe five years from now most of the factories around here will have only one thing in their future - going bankrupt," said Shi, chairman of International Bag City (IBC) and local luggage maker, Newcomer Group.

Newcomer is one of many Pinghu bag factories that employ some 40,000-50,000 people, operate on razor-thin margins after a decade of rising labor and raw material costs and where Europe's slump is a fresh threat to survival in an industry where 70-80 percent of output is for foreign clients.

It's a familiar story everywhere in China's vast manufacturing sector, which generated most of the roughly $2 trillion of revenues derived from exports last year.

Shi's example is the sort of initiative China's leaders want to see sprouting across the economy and provides a case study of the benefits and challenges the country will face as the government shifts the focus of factories away from exports.

Beijing wants home-grown firms to tap into China's fast-growing, foreign brand-focused, consumer class and transform the country's factories from low-end assembly lines for the likes of Apple Inc and Wal-Mart to high value-added product originators of their own.

Chinese leaders need manufacturers to move up the value chain to avoid the so-called "middle income trap" where wealth creation stagnates as market share is lost to lower cost competitors overseas and the attainment of high-income country status stays hopelessly out of reach.

The Communist Party fears the popular discontent that that could stoke, even though jobs are likely to be lost as China ditches its labor-intensive export model.

"Right now, we take overseas orders and earn processing fees, but we cannot survive just on processing fees. This model is dead," said Cao Liang, head of Pinghu municipal government's news department and the vice chief of propaganda for the local Communist Party branch.

Path to prosperity
Shi's IBC plan will bring together retailers, wholesalers, traders, raw material suppliers, designers and service providers into one location - with the aim of cutting costs and export dependency and developing home markets and brands.

Aggregation around a center of excellence is a well-trodden path to prosperity. Edward Lloyd did much the same in 1688, turning his coffee shop meeting venue for ship brokers, merchants and financiers into the Lloyd's of London insurance market that remains the world's leading provider of specialist insurance cover more than 300 years later.

Shi and his partners see IBC -- a 400,000 square meter development of office towers, wholesale market and design studios -- as the way to roughly double the value of annual bag revenues in Pinghu to 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) by 2020, while cutting export exposure to 50 percent of the industry's output.

Shi has proposed to the local Jiaxing government in Zhejiang province that it uses Pinghu's IBC - which will employ 10,000 people when it opens in September next year - as a template to build a fashion capital modeled on Milan and Paris. But his motivation is more about making a profit than leaving a mark on China's economic landscape.

"Now Chinese people have more money," 46-year-old Shi, who has an MBA from the China Europe International Business School, said in English.

"In the past, one bag was used for every purpose. But now, especially for young people, if they take the wrong bag to the wrong event, they are out, they will be laughed at," he said. "It's a big potential market."

Faltering foreign demand and soaring costs add urgency to the need for change. Many exporters are running at reduced capacity and some are struggling to survive.

The second slump in orders in four years has left China's export growth this year averaging around 7.8 percent versus 2011. It was just 2.7 percent in August from a year earlier and the Commerce Ministry has said things could get worse in the months ahead - jeopardizing the official 2012 target for a rise of 10 percent.

That's not great news in a country where exports generated 31 percent of gross domestic product in 2011, supported an estimated 200 million jobs and where analysts expect the weakest year of economic growth since 1999 at 7.7 percent.

Domestic retail sales growth meanwhile is averaging 14 percent this year, reinforcing Beijing's belief it must change China's economic mix towards domestic consumption.

A Beijing-backed World Bank report envisages per capita income rising to $16,000 by 2030 from about $5,000 now, with two thirds of economic activity forecast to come from domestic consumption against less than 50 percent at present.

Other reports suggest the shift could come sooner than policymakers expect. Analysts at McKinsey reckon China's mainstream consumer class will comprise 400 million people with household incomes between $16,000 and $34,000 by 2020. Boston Consulting Group says China will be the world's No.2 consumer market by 2015.

Margin multiplication
Fang Xiaodong is one Pinghu businessman thriving in the domestic market.

"The profit margin of a single piece of clothing for domestic sale is much higher than for exports. It could be five or 10 times higher," says the chairman of Zhejiang Yisijia Garments Co., a maker of clothes for the world's biggest brands in the outdoor activities market.

Fang is rapidly expanding his own range of gear for a growing number of Chinese consumers attracted to hiking, climbing, camping and skiing - the kind of outdoor activities that come with rising wealth and increased leisure time.

Fang started selling under the Yisijia label for domestic sales in 2005. It is now 35 percent of annual sales of 200 million yuan and competing so successfully with foreign brands in China he plans a launch in Europe under the name Esguard.

Fang expects his own-label domestic sales to grow 30 percent in 2012 as his overseas sales of foreign brands drop 10 percent.

The switch to a domestic focus forces up logistical costs as firms switch from exporting containers of gear straight off production lines to shipping individual cartons through China's fragmented retail network, in which producers bear the risk of unsold output.

"The cost of expanding domestic sales is high. Most companies that are switching to home markets are not successful," Li Yushi, vice head of the Commerce Ministry's think-tank in Beijing.

Skills shift
Others are investing to reduce labor costs. Linda Zhao, Newcomer's general manager, said the company spent 10 million yuan on automation in 2011.

New machinery and new processes need new skills. Pinghu, with a small permanent population of 480,000 supplemented by a migrant population of 250,000, has responded by providing city-sponsored re-training for workers laid off from low-end jobs.

If they up sticks in search of jobs elsewhere, Pinghu's enterprise zones and business parks will empty and a bustling city - where small businesses line streets intersecting housing developments built on ample waterside plots and a newly-finished fashion mall gleams at its edge - will shrivel.

"Demand for skills is higher this year than last. The structural change is being felt," Hu Jianfei, director of Pinghu Human Resources Centre, the city's official labor market, said.

"The situation forces companies to adjust and upgrade," said Hu, who helps 2,200 firms find workers each year.

Get the balance right and China could secure its manufacturing base years into the future, even for those in the low margin textiles business, like David Tien, executive vice president of Quang Viet Enterprise Co Ltd.

His firm makes sportswear for the world's biggest household names. Tien, from Taiwan, has no ambition to create his own brand or come up with his own designs. That makes him acutely sensitive to maximizing margins in a business where he says 3-5 percent is about as good as it gets.

Tien is bucking the apocryphal trend of textile makers leaving China for lower cost locations such as Vietnam. Instead, he set up a factory in Pinghu a decade ago to try to squeeze more profit from a business he's run from Vietnam for 20 years.

"I have 3,000 staff in China and 10,000 staff in Vietnam, but I get the same production volume and profit from both locations," Tien said.

Higher skill levels, adaptability to new technology and the willingness to work plenty of overtime to complete rush orders give his Chinese factory the edge.

The only downside is staff turnover, which leaves him recruiting and training roughly a third of his Chinese workforce every year. And it's getting harder to do so.

"We know that China's getting richer," Tien said. "It's got lots of young consumers and they know how to spend, but they are not so keen on the hard work to earn it.

"The real long-term problem for manufacturing business in China is that young people just don't want to work in factories anymore."

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Source: http://economywatch.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/01/14169019-international-bag-city-is-a-key-to-chinas-economic-future?lite

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Product Review Hot Toys- The Dark Knight- Lt Jim Gordon S.W.A.T ...

Sixth Scale Action Figure News, Reviews, & Discussion. Collect, Kitbash, Customize. All Brands, All Eras, All Genres.
WWII, Modern, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, etc. Anything directly related to 1/6th scale action figure collecting.

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Hot Toys- The Dark Knight- Lt Jim Gordon S.W.A.T outfit review


All the usual fun reviews and features are here- http://www.mwctoys.com/

And my views on the Jim Gordon (S.W.A.T outfit) can be found here-
http://www.mwctoys.com/REVIEW_100112b.htm

I'll post up more pics later.

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i believe in harvey dent

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Join Date: Aug 2012

Posts: 89

Re: Hot Toys- The Dark Knight- Lt Jim Gordon S.W.A.T outfit review


i have been reading a lot of grousing about qc issues with Gordon (bad patches, broken/missing pieces), but i have to say mine is perfect.

and despite knocking his glasses off every time i pick him up (clumsy me), i couldn't be happier with him. he is incredibly awesome.

this is a great review ~ and fair. he is ridiculously expensive, but those of us who bought him mostly don't care.

: D

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i believe in harvey dent

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Join Date: Aug 2012

Posts: 89

Re: Hot Toys- The Dark Knight- Lt Jim Gordon S.W.A.T outfit review


nice! is it just the lighting? mine is so blue by comparison.

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