Don't forget, room lighting has the same affect on an LCD. So, the higher contrast and better (best?) color reproduction you can start out with, the better.
No, not really; the unlit areas of my LCD look black with a little bit of diffuse light reflecting from the anti-glare fascia. The unlit areas of a CRT look... gray.
Black is better than gray.
Of course, in a dark room, the CRT does indeed look darker, and its limited light-emission capaciity is no longer a handicap compared to the much-brighter LCD. But I don't work in a cave, so the LCD wins the real-world contrast competition.
As have I, and I disagree entirely. Actually I don't know if I have *thousands* of hours staring at an LCD. Easily hundreds, thousands may be stretching it for me personally.
Most people who prefer CRTs over LCDs seem to be those who have used nice CRTs and crappy LCDs. Certainly, I would not care to use nine out of ten LCD models on the shelf at CompUSA, myself. And I do know one guy who has some sort of persistence-of-vision issue that makes LCDs look terrible to him, though. It may not be possible to make everyone happy with an LCD, but for most people, they are the best choice.
Perception is logarithmic, though. That is 30 dB of dynamic range versus 40 dB -- not such an impressive ratio.
Personally, I don't understand how contrast measurements are meaningful on CRTs. Not many people use them in a totally-dark environment, so their visual dynamic range will be severely curtailed by room light reflecting off the phosphor. What makes reflected room light somehow better than LCD backlight bleedthrough?
In any real-world environment, the best LCDs are much nicer to work with than the best CRTs. I've spent thousands of hours in front of both.
Maybe he should have used mad cow disease as a better example. One disease which has significant evidence of being directly contributed by the fast food industry.
More people died of starvation while I typed this post, and more will die of starvation while you read it, than have died of human variant-CJD in the past ten years.
The reason they don't make 1 GHz CPUs is because they would never sell enough of them for proportionally-lower pricing to make sense. Chip manufacturing is full of sweet spots. This is why Mini-ITX boards with the slower Centaur processors are actually significantly more expensive than commodity Intel/AMD boards. They amount to a low-volume niche product with no economies of scale to speak of, so you won't save any money just because you're buying a slower CPU. You are paying for the privilege of not having a fan.
The industry believes it has the right to enforce that license, and to revoke it as it sees fit. If you want them to think otherwise, you'll have to attack the very foundation of their side of the argument by redefining their concept of creative rights. Do you think society would welcome that plan?
But, as another poster pointed out above, why is it fair for them to be able to revoke their license when I'm unable to "revoke" (reclaim) the cash I paid for it?
DRM is a morally-neutral technical means for implementing morally-repugnant asymmetrical transactions. It shifts power toward content producers and publishers in a way that is fundamentally unfair to consumers, who do not benefit in any way from having the publisher exert control over a paid-for product.
That is, and will continue to be, acceptable to some consumers. But not all.
Deep down, secretly, I bet Apple could give a rat's ass about DRM.
That's no secret at all. Jobs was upfront with the recording-industry people from square one, telling them that airtight DRM couldn't possibly work. I can't imagine the RD field strength he must have generated to make them agree to release content with FairPlay encryption. Jobs is truly the fourteenth avatar of Yoda, or something.
What do I care if the system in my bedroom corner is sucking down 200w or 90w?
It adds up. I just discovered (via a forum post) a "PowerSave" feature I didn't know my Laserjet 4si had. It cuts the printer's standby power drain from 220W down to 75W.
Not knowing about that feature has cost me about $1,000 in electricity over ten years. I am starting to wonder about my habit of leaving a half-dozen PCs running 24/7 all over the house...
This is a Nobel Prize-category topic. Our existing understanding of physics and biochemistry is simply insufficient to account for any interaction between microwave radiation and DNA.
The last time anyone observed an interaction that dramatic and unexpected was a hundred years ago, when Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus by bouncing alpha particles off a piece of gold foil. Discovery of a mechanism of interaction between cell-phone RF and DNA strands would be that big a deal.
I don't know if they do any incoming filtering or not; I don't use my @speakeasy.net account for anything. There are definitely no viruses in the mail, just classical phishing content (eBay logos and such). They are just naively assuming that anyone who sends that type of traffic is either a criminal or a spam zombie.
I didn't try to forward it to my Hotmail or GMail accounts, because I assumed that Speakeasy's SMTP server would still refuse to accept the message. eBay does have web forms, but they're buried in a maze of twisty links that takes all day to navigate, and I'm only willing to go to so much trouble to help them with their security issues.
Um, no, that's the whole thing... there aren't any goods to mail.
The idea is, I use your account to post an auction for an expensive piece of equipment with a glowing description stolen from another successful auction, photos courtesy of Google Image Search, and a Buy It Now price around 20% of retail. The victim hits the BIN button and, at my request, sends me a Western Union transfer to pay. That's the last anyone hears from me.
Typically this scam is operated from Internet cafes in Eastern European countries with twentieth-century technology and twelfth-century ethics.
Annoyingly, my ISP (Speakeasy) has stopped allowing its customers to forward phishing emails to spoof@ebay.com.
They are doing content filtering on outgoing mail, which is something I really wish they wouldn't do. I have no idea what aspect of the message triggers the filter, but any attempt to forward an HTML phishing mail without converting it to plaintext first (and losing the href fields that would allow eBay to shut down the phishing sites) yields "Server Response: '554 message permanently rejected, you may have a virus (#5.3.0)'."
All attempts to communicate my displeasure to Speakeasy's support department have met with the usual language barrier (I speak English, they speak Moronese). I simply could not find a way to convince them that I wasn't having trouble sending email in the general case. If anybody from Speakeasy is reading this, it would be nice if they got the clue bat after whoever implemented this filter. Customers need to be able to opt out of all content filters, both incoming and outgoing.
What I would like to see, just once, is somebody who is against video game censorship admit that video games can have a negative effect on some portions of society.
I would, too. Because that admission will have to cite some very different statistics on crime rates than the ones I've seen.
It's awfully tough to prove that games cause crime when games go up and crime goes down.
Because they don't have a financial interest in it.
Gee, that sounds like a recipe for a great auction site. Let the lawyers design it! For free! I'll bet users will trip all over each others' shoelaces signing up for that.
It is definately in eBay's interest to write their software in such as to screw buyers out a dollar or two here and there. They may not have done this on purpose, but this is how it ended up...
<shrug> As long as the only people getting "screwed," as you put it, are the ones who didn't bother to read the eBay terms of service before they started bidding, I don't see how anyone is getting screwed here but eBay.
Let me ask you do you think it is right that a person should be able to bid against himself?
Let's turn the question around. Why do you think a court of law is more qualified to design an online auction system than, say, eBay?
If you have a problem with eBay's rules and procedures, there is a very simple remedy that doesn't involve the legal system at all: don't use eBay. Unfortunately for the members of the eBay user community who will ultimately have to pay the costs associated with this lawsuit, there are big bucks to be made in the professional-victim business.
Once again the little-guy gets the short end of the stick
Maybe the 'little guy' needs to be a little more careful with the pointy end of the stick, if he doesn't want the big guys to come and take the stick away.
This is a perfect example of a frivolous lawsuit. Some functional illiterate from the Land of Fruits and Nuts logged onto eBay and placed a couple of bids without having his mommy read him the eBay terms of service first. It's amazing (and frightening) how few eBay users actually understand how eBay auctions work.
True, but remanufactured cartridges and assemblies are still pretty easy to find. It wouldn't be economical to keep an old LJ III/4 printer running with HP's replacement-part prices anyway.
http://www.fixyourownprinter.com is a great source for buying almost anything the old Laserjets are likely to need.
I know of several Laserjet 3 printers in active use that still have their origional drive trains. It's too bad you can't get any replacement parts for them any more.
I've riced my 4si up with a duplex adapter ($25 if I remember correctly) and 16 MB of RAM (too cheap to remember) from eBay... and I won't buy toner anywhere else. At 80K pages, it's not quite 10% through its useful life.
Surely you gest. Haven't you heard of Moore's Law? In the past 20 years transistor counts have grown a thousandfold from 1e5 to 1e8. So if Oracle were $10,000 back then it would now be $10,000,000, and $100,000,000 by 2007. I don't think that will fly.
Nobody is arguing for a linear progression. (For that matter, Moore's Law as an predictor of general-purpose CPU power is almost tapped out, which is why we're having this discussion in the first place.)
Speaking of thousandfold increases, we may very well see 1,000-core CPUs in the next 20 years, if the current massively-multicore experiments bear fruit. How does that per-core plan sound now?
Well, that's not an unresonable way to go. In an argument with a friend over the Cell architecture, I pointed out that the ultimate determinant of a general-purpose CPU's performance has never really been its architecture, but how many mm^2 of real estate it takes up and how many electrons per second go from the Vcc pins to the Gnd pins. Everything else is either a side-effect of application specificity (e.g., rendering), or marketing hype.
The only fair way to license software is by looking at the amount of silicon used to run it. It's beyond ridiculous for Oracle to charge on the basis of how many program counters are going through the code. If they stick to those guns, all they'll accomplish will be to ensure that no one will be running Oracle five years from now on mainstream chips from at least two very major vendors.
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Don't forget, room lighting has the same affect on an LCD. So, the higher contrast and better (best?) color reproduction you can start out with, the better.
No, not really; the unlit areas of my LCD look black with a little bit of diffuse light reflecting from the anti-glare fascia. The unlit areas of a CRT look... gray.
Black is better than gray.
Of course, in a dark room, the CRT does indeed look darker, and its limited light-emission capaciity is no longer a handicap compared to the much-brighter LCD. But I don't work in a cave, so the LCD wins the real-world contrast competition.
As have I, and I disagree entirely. Actually I don't know if I have *thousands* of hours staring at an LCD. Easily hundreds, thousands may be stretching it for me personally.
Most people who prefer CRTs over LCDs seem to be those who have used nice CRTs and crappy LCDs. Certainly, I would not care to use nine out of ten LCD models on the shelf at CompUSA, myself. And I do know one guy who has some sort of persistence-of-vision issue that makes LCDs look terrible to him, though. It may not be possible to make everyone happy with an LCD, but for most people, they are the best choice.
Perception is logarithmic, though. That is 30 dB of dynamic range versus 40 dB -- not such an impressive ratio.
Personally, I don't understand how contrast measurements are meaningful on CRTs. Not many people use them in a totally-dark environment, so their visual dynamic range will be severely curtailed by room light reflecting off the phosphor. What makes reflected room light somehow better than LCD backlight bleedthrough?
In any real-world environment, the best LCDs are much nicer to work with than the best CRTs. I've spent thousands of hours in front of both.
Maybe he should have used mad cow disease as a better example. One disease which has significant evidence of being directly contributed by the fast food industry.
More people died of starvation while I typed this post, and more will die of starvation while you read it, than have died of human variant-CJD in the past ten years.
Priorities, priorities.
eBay is a good place to buy EPIA boards.
The reason they don't make 1 GHz CPUs is because they would never sell enough of them for proportionally-lower pricing to make sense. Chip manufacturing is full of sweet spots. This is why Mini-ITX boards with the slower Centaur processors are actually significantly more expensive than commodity Intel/AMD boards. They amount to a low-volume niche product with no economies of scale to speak of, so you won't save any money just because you're buying a slower CPU. You are paying for the privilege of not having a fan.
The industry believes it has the right to enforce that license, and to revoke it as it sees fit. If you want them to think otherwise, you'll have to attack the very foundation of their side of the argument by redefining their concept of creative rights. Do you think society would welcome that plan?
But, as another poster pointed out above, why is it fair for them to be able to revoke their license when I'm unable to "revoke" (reclaim) the cash I paid for it?
DRM is a morally-neutral technical means for implementing morally-repugnant asymmetrical transactions. It shifts power toward content producers and publishers in a way that is fundamentally unfair to consumers, who do not benefit in any way from having the publisher exert control over a paid-for product.
That is, and will continue to be, acceptable to some consumers. But not all.
Sweet Jesus. They've banned Warriner's English Grammar and Composition. Those bastards!
Deep down, secretly, I bet Apple could give a rat's ass about DRM.
That's no secret at all. Jobs was upfront with the recording-industry people from square one, telling them that airtight DRM couldn't possibly work. I can't imagine the RD field strength he must have generated to make them agree to release content with FairPlay encryption. Jobs is truly the fourteenth avatar of Yoda, or something.
Are there any Software Engineers out there that use BASIC
Yep, a vast proportion of corporate applications are still written in (Visual) BASIC.
BASIC will not die until Bill Gates does.
What do I care if the system in my bedroom corner is sucking down 200w or 90w?
It adds up. I just discovered (via a forum post) a "PowerSave" feature I didn't know my Laserjet 4si had. It cuts the printer's standby power drain from 220W down to 75W.
Not knowing about that feature has cost me about $1,000 in electricity over ten years. I am starting to wonder about my habit of leaving a half-dozen PCs running 24/7 all over the house...
You will have some number of photons leaving your antenna at 2, 3, 4, 5, etc times your 'desired' wavelength.
But not a whole heck of a lot of them at 1,000 times the 'desired' wavelength, which is what it takes if you want to cause ionization.
Unless you live in a salt cavern, you're taking more ionizing radiation from Cygnus X-1 than you are from your cell phone.
No antenna is perfect, nor is any transmitter perfect. Thus there will be some fairly high energy photons at some predictable -- and non-zero -- rate.
You are confusing field strength with energy. A photon's energy level is determined only by its frequency multiplied by Planck's Constant (E=hv).
It doesn't matter if your cell phone puts out 1.21 gigawatts -- the RF radiation still won't break chemical bonds by any mechanism other than heating.
This is a Nobel Prize-category topic. Our existing understanding of physics and biochemistry is simply insufficient to account for any interaction between microwave radiation and DNA.
The last time anyone observed an interaction that dramatic and unexpected was a hundred years ago, when Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus by bouncing alpha particles off a piece of gold foil. Discovery of a mechanism of interaction between cell-phone RF and DNA strands would be that big a deal.
I don't know if they do any incoming filtering or not; I don't use my @speakeasy.net account for anything. There are definitely no viruses in the mail, just classical phishing content (eBay logos and such). They are just naively assuming that anyone who sends that type of traffic is either a criminal or a spam zombie.
I didn't try to forward it to my Hotmail or GMail accounts, because I assumed that Speakeasy's SMTP server would still refuse to accept the message. eBay does have web forms, but they're buried in a maze of twisty links that takes all day to navigate, and I'm only willing to go to so much trouble to help them with their security issues.
Um, no, that's the whole thing... there aren't any goods to mail.
The idea is, I use your account to post an auction for an expensive piece of equipment with a glowing description stolen from another successful auction, photos courtesy of Google Image Search, and a Buy It Now price around 20% of retail. The victim hits the BIN button and, at my request, sends me a Western Union transfer to pay. That's the last anyone hears from me.
Typically this scam is operated from Internet cafes in Eastern European countries with twentieth-century technology and twelfth-century ethics.
Annoyingly, my ISP (Speakeasy) has stopped allowing its customers to forward phishing emails to spoof@ebay.com.
They are doing content filtering on outgoing mail, which is something I really wish they wouldn't do. I have no idea what aspect of the message triggers the filter, but any attempt to forward an HTML phishing mail without converting it to plaintext first (and losing the href fields that would allow eBay to shut down the phishing sites) yields "Server Response: '554 message permanently rejected, you may have a virus (#5.3.0)'."
All attempts to communicate my displeasure to Speakeasy's support department have met with the usual language barrier (I speak English, they speak Moronese). I simply could not find a way to convince them that I wasn't having trouble sending email in the general case. If anybody from Speakeasy is reading this, it would be nice if they got the clue bat after whoever implemented this filter. Customers need to be able to opt out of all content filters, both incoming and outgoing.
What I would like to see, just once, is somebody who is against video game censorship admit that video games can have a negative effect on some portions of society.
I would, too. Because that admission will have to cite some very different statistics on crime rates than the ones I've seen.
It's awfully tough to prove that games cause crime when games go up and crime goes down.
Because they don't have a financial interest in it.
Gee, that sounds like a recipe for a great auction site. Let the lawyers design it! For free! I'll bet users will trip all over each others' shoelaces signing up for that.
It is definately in eBay's interest to write their software in such as to screw buyers out a dollar or two here and there. They may not have done this on purpose, but this is how it ended up...
<shrug> As long as the only people getting "screwed," as you put it, are the ones who didn't bother to read the eBay terms of service before they started bidding, I don't see how anyone is getting screwed here but eBay.
Let me ask you do you think it is right that a person should be able to bid against himself?
Let's turn the question around. Why do you think a court of law is more qualified to design an online auction system than, say, eBay?
If you have a problem with eBay's rules and procedures, there is a very simple remedy that doesn't involve the legal system at all: don't use eBay. Unfortunately for the members of the eBay user community who will ultimately have to pay the costs associated with this lawsuit, there are big bucks to be made in the professional-victim business.
You're right; I stand corrected. The attorney, not the plaintiff, is in California.
Once again the little-guy gets the short end of the stick
Maybe the 'little guy' needs to be a little more careful with the pointy end of the stick, if he doesn't want the big guys to come and take the stick away.
This is a perfect example of a frivolous lawsuit. Some functional illiterate from the Land of Fruits and Nuts logged onto eBay and placed a couple of bids without having his mommy read him the eBay terms of service first. It's amazing (and frightening) how few eBay users actually understand how eBay auctions work.
... that makes me wonder if Dubya's plan to take class-action suits out of the state courts is actually a good one.
Anything that makes the legal system look less like a lottery is sounding pretty good right now.
True, but remanufactured cartridges and assemblies are still pretty easy to find. It wouldn't be economical to keep an old LJ III/4 printer running with HP's replacement-part prices anyway.
http://www.fixyourownprinter.com is a great source for buying almost anything the old Laserjets are likely to need.
I know of several Laserjet 3 printers in active use that still have their origional drive trains. It's too bad you can't get any replacement parts for them any more.
Like hell you can't!
I've riced my 4si up with a duplex adapter ($25 if I remember correctly) and 16 MB of RAM (too cheap to remember) from eBay... and I won't buy toner anywhere else. At 80K pages, it's not quite 10% through its useful life.
Surely you gest. Haven't you heard of Moore's Law? In the past 20 years transistor counts have grown a thousandfold from 1e5 to 1e8. So if Oracle were $10,000 back then it would now be $10,000,000, and $100,000,000 by 2007. I don't think that will fly.
Nobody is arguing for a linear progression. (For that matter, Moore's Law as an predictor of general-purpose CPU power is almost tapped out, which is why we're having this discussion in the first place.)
Speaking of thousandfold increases, we may very well see 1,000-core CPUs in the next 20 years, if the current massively-multicore experiments bear fruit. How does that per-core plan sound now?
I charge on a per logic gate basis.
Well, that's not an unresonable way to go. In an argument with a friend over the Cell architecture, I pointed out that the ultimate determinant of a general-purpose CPU's performance has never really been its architecture, but how many mm^2 of real estate it takes up and how many electrons per second go from the Vcc pins to the Gnd pins. Everything else is either a side-effect of application specificity (e.g., rendering), or marketing hype.
The only fair way to license software is by looking at the amount of silicon used to run it. It's beyond ridiculous for Oracle to charge on the basis of how many program counters are going through the code. If they stick to those guns, all they'll accomplish will be to ensure that no one will be running Oracle five years from now on mainstream chips from at least two very major vendors.