A sales tax would simply give rich people an even better excuse to ferret their money away. A person earning $1 million yearly could spend 10% of his income and live pretty damn well. Someone working at Burger King, making $20,000 will probably have to spend all of it.
That means that 10% of the millionaire's income is taxed at 10%, whereas 100% of the Burger King guy's income is taxed at 10%. That sure seems fair.
I have a 4Mbit(down) cable connection, and I routinely get 420+ kBps when I connect to a busy torrent, or one that has a few pretty quick-uploading peers. With protocol overhead accounted for, that's quite near maxed.
What could be causing your problems is that your download is being choked by ACKs. That is, packets are acknowledged when you receive them. On a non-symmetrical link, if your uploads have your entire upload capacity filled, your computer can't send many acknowledgements, and the peer(s) have to wait to get them--so they know when to send more data... Or something along those lines.
You might try lowering the upload cap on your torrent client just a bit to see if it helps. If it does, that might have been the problem.
It's hard to say, though. Perhaps your ISP has implemented some QOS rules that really slow down torrent traffic, or your firewalls/routers are incorrectly configured. It could be a dozen things. But, in my experience, Bittorrent works damn well, and usually much faster than a plain old connection to a very high in demand file.
The public are complete morons, and not because they may not know the differences between realplayer and WMP... No, the issue is much deeper. This was understood by philosophers thousands of years ago. The fact that the world is still run by demagogues is about the best symptom I can think of indicating people are stupuid.
The fact is, our leaders not only think, but *know* that they lead idiots. Why should they be worng? They have millions of dollars and red phones!
Let's assume that it does happen. All the middle-class people won't notice it because they are paying monthly cable fees and cable TV will not be affected by the VHF/UHF shutdown. However, let's assume that in poor neighborhoods the convertor boxes don't work well, or are prohibitively expensive, or are too technically complex for the general population. Suddenly there's no television.
That's a joke, in my experience. My family rents out many (small) appartments, and several houses. Many of the tenants certianly qualify as poor, certianly they're on fixed incomes... And the overwhelming majority have cable today, and always have had it in the past. You can't blame it on poor reception, either. It's fine.
A couple of tenants have even gone as far as losing their water service, but they still had to have their $60/month cable service. It's like goddamned crack. They'll do anything, as long as they have a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and America's Funniest Home Videos on the TV.
My family dosn't belive in much TV. We're too busy managing our small corner of the universe, and actually having fun when we're not doing that. I only got cable a year ago when Qwest pissed me off to the point where I had to ditch DSL through them.
For $3 extra than the cable internet service I get basic, anaglog cable, and that's fine because I get a few chanels that I do enjoy. Discovery (love them motorcycles!), Food Network, and I think TBS. There's some others but they mostly have crap/reruns(crap).
I think many Middle Class Americans hold off on overly superfluous things like pay-TV. Not to sound clichéd, but do people really need more than 64 channels? Unless you spend all day in front of the boobtube, you can't remotely hope to watch enough to justify it--if you don't have money to throw away, that is.
I suspect that this phenomenon echos throught our country. I think many lower-class people (from the Blacks in the ghetto, to the whites in the trailer courts) are either too lazy to do anything else, unable (by injury, or illness, including mental--including TV addiction), or they just don't know what the hell else to do.
Having that said, I doubt pirate broadcasts will pop up all over. There's the thing about the price of the equipment (unless they steal it that is), the knowledge of how to hook it up, and, well, it takes effort. People don't like effort.
What pisses me off about windows, and user directories is that it's so incredibly frustrating to copy a directory over, and have it *just work*.
No, instead, if that user didn't exist prior, it creates another, brand new directory, called user.computer. Being a long time unix user, it's mind blowingly simple to just untar a backup and have it work compared to all the crap windows makes one go through. It's like dancing with a hippo.
There's probably some easy enough way to do it that meshes with the thought pattern of average MCSEs, but I certianly haven't found it. It really sucks, because my relations seem to screw over thier computers so often. I'm tempted to buy a bulk liscense of Norton Ghost and be done with it.
Indeed, my mother, who's been (happily) working at the same company for the last 35 years is facing a company listening to consultants and headhuhters... It's a 3rd generation family owned business that used to have a hundred people and do $5 million a year in *pure profit*, and probably $15 million gross. The adopted son took over--who's genes obviously don't include sound business thinking (unlike his adoptive father and his grandfather), and he's basically hired people to run the company for him. In 4 years since this transition, they're projecting $6 million in business--who knows the actual profits.
They've even gone as far to buy a bunch of the Brainwashing line of "employment guides" from Price Pritchett. *shudder* If you want something to scare the shit out of you (or at least induce a depressive catatonia) before you go to bed, I highly reccomend these. They've scared off over half their skilled workers, and if my mom didn't have so much time invested there, she'd be gone too... Like any sane person would.
I just don't understand how successful businesses like this so often fall into the hands of completely inept assholes--and I'm talking about the CEO position of the largest companies, to the ownership of small businesses... It dosen't make sense.
It wouldn't be so bad if they only effected themselves, but no, they get a $4 mil bonus for walking in, fucking up a company, screwing its employees of their pensions, etc. They get to walk away and buy a few Ferrraris and a yacht. It's a joke.
So, an Italian walks into a bar with a bad knee and notices a guy sitting at the end of the bar. He asks the bartender who it was. The bartender told him it was Jesus. The Italian ordered a drink for himself and Jesus.
Next, a carpenter walks in. He asked if that was Jesus. He then ordered a drink for himself and for Jesus.
Finally, a redneck walks in and orders a drink for himself and Jesus.
A few minutes later, Jesus gets up and goes to the Italian. He thanked him for his generosity and healed him. Jesus walked over to the carpenter, thanked him, and healed him. Then, he walked over to the redneck. The redneck jumped up and shouted, "Don't heal me, I'm on disability!"
Of coure that's just a joke, in reality we know the redneck would be healed--he'd just act disabled.
Indeed. Pretty much all large commercial inkjets use this. HP's are kind'a stupid in that they use it, but the ink still comes in (pretty expensive) cartridges.
They do this at all of the DLP theatres in Denver, and it's so bad that they've managed to start the film many minutes later than it was advertised because of it.. It was a good 10 minutes when I went to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico (which I thought sucked anyhow).
Even though the newer theaters are teh r0xx0r in terms of movie quality, I'd rather see it on a "lesser" screen if I don't have to deal with that crap. I gotta admit, I don't mind local slide-show commercials, with non-annoying music. Sometimes they show something good to do that I've never done before. This pop-culture pushing mega-money machine bullshit has become oh-so-boorish, though.
So, for now, I've sworn off going to newer theatres. Piss on them.
D'oh! Yeah, that might've been helpful. It's a BenQ T903, I got it from Microcenter for $369, and I forgot that it had a $40 rebate on top of that. I need to send that in! It's funny, because that actually made it cheaper than the 17" BenQ they had there, though I do belive that was a 12ms model. Anyway, it's serving me better than I expected, it has one stuck pixel, in the lower right hand corner. It's stuck blue, and it's pretty hard to see, so no biggie.
If it'll last me a couple years (I'm more than sure it will), it'll be better than the Viewsonic P220F I had that still has my room smelling of magic smoke. If I had a few days lead time, I would've got the 19" BenQ from newegg, 12ms, and with shipping it would've been the same price. Maybe I'll get one of those dual-dvi cards they have there and go dual LCD! It's amazing, because it's actually affordable today. Heh.
I've never heard about a correlation of increased refresh rate to increased radiation output...
Thinking about it, it dosen't make much sense, though perhaps my instinct is wrong. Does the output of the cathode increase somehow? I confess, I don't know much about CRT design, but I'd think that the potential between the cathode and anode would have to remain fairly constant. I'd expect that the electromagnets which direct the electron beam would need more power. More switching per second and all.
I've always thought that the values vendors give was designed around the phosphors themselves. If a phosphor mix is designed to exhaust it's energy at a certian frequency, it dosen't make much sense to go much more than that, because the phosphor dosen't have time enough to dim befor it's re-excited. I'm probably not being clear.
For instance, if a phosphor mix were designed to operate at 60Hz without flickering--that is the phosphors don't get the chance to fully discharge in 1/60th of a second--illumination is fairly constant, but it's prone to blurring in the same way LCDs are today because the phosphors can't react fast enough. There was a day when monitors operated at 60Hz and we didn't have problems. Only when you run a monitor that has phosphors that were designed to react at 72+Hz at 60Hz will you notice the flickering.
As far as I can see, the only advantage and difference between running a monitor designed to operate at 72Hz vs. one designed to operate at 60Hz is that the time in which a transition between pure white to pure black will be 20% faster... 20% less blurring, so to say.
I'll have to read up on all this and see if what you say is true... 'Cause it's interesting, and unexpected that a CRT would operate that way, I think.
You can get better, of course, if the pannels are rated to Class I, they must be perfect, i.e. no dead pixels.
And in truth that would only be important if it were being used in a medical setting or similar. Wouldn't want to mistake a dead pixel for a budding prostate cancer or anything.
That's called interpolation. Not blurring, or ghosting. The monitor has to scale the image up to it's native resolution. Sometimes, a resolution that's a factor of an LCD's native resolution will look okay. This isn't an issue for most people.
What he's talking about is response time, which is the amount of time it takes an individual pixel to fully change from one color to another.. It's usually measured as the time between going from white to black, or from one grey to another grey... There is a definite, measurable response time on both LCDs and CRTs, but they have different implications.
Indeed, they've got LCDs around that claim ~10ms response time. I have a 19" touting 16ms response time, and I'm proud to say that it plays movies well, plays fast paced games well--Enemy Territory, HL2 both look beautiful, even with lots of fast movement.
Of course, there's people that will poo-poo LCDs until they render every itty-bitty thing perfectly at 100hz... As if their "super high quality" CRTs have phosphors that react fast enough to make a difference, and their eyes are from the planet Krypton....
Truthfully, I don't notice that much of a difference between this and my old CRT, except text is sharper, and I swear that colors in the magenta range seem more vibrant. The price was more than reasonable too--$360. You can find the 12 ms screens for around that now, but I needed mine in a hurry and couldn't find a place that carried them locally.
Same here, in fact, I've chosen not to "upgrade" beyond Win2K, mostly because of that bowel-irritating color scheme. Yes, I know, I could change it... But every time I've used XP I've never made it as far as that without having to run to the toilet to puke. Who cares about the activation and other crap? The colors! UGH! Oh, and the start button, and menus. WTF. Seriously, if I could get someone to change the theme for me to something less, well, craptastic (that high contrast one, where everything is safety yellow and black would be much more tolerable), and then figure out how to make the start button behave like it always has--I could probably live with it.
Oh, and whoever thought the default behavior of menus in Word2000 would be ideal deserves to be skull-fucked.
Furthermore, I'm convinced that Longhorn will feature satan-worshiping clowns that will incessantly bite the heads off of Peeps (those delicious sugar coated Easter treats--the horror!) and also possessed mauve colored cotton candy that will threaten to eat my soul.
Truely, I liked the monitor, but it's not worth the hassle fixing it, maybe if it were a bit more minor, but it was almost meltdown... Whatever fun those electons had there, it was hot, and there were a few caps that got roasted at least. On top of that, I understand that those monitors had some problems.
I ordered a brand new "12ms" BenQ LCD for $360, about half the cost of the 22" CRT, it's crisp and beautiful, dosen't blur noticibly, great for CAD, and I'm pretty darn happy--it's almost the same size even. For the price it's a steal... And even if the CRT was still in warranty, I'd be looking at nearly a hundred bucks to ship and insure it.
Too bad it happened, but I gained alot of desk space as a result!:D
I just threw away a Viewsonic P220F 22" monitor away. It was kinda' depressing, because it did have a good picture, but one day last week it decided to give up a goodly amount of magic smoke... Just outside warranty, of course.
I took it apart to see what the deal was, and there was a pretty large part of the PCB burned out, right under the connector that supplies the guns their juice, and it de-soldered quite a few joints around it... Probably fixable, but probably not worth it either. That and it stank. Bad. And I'm lucky I was there to catch it, or my house probably would've looked like the inside of my monitor shortly thereafter.
That's about the only time I'll throw a computer part away. Most of the others seem to find their way into friends and family's computers.
The only problem with turbines is that their efficiency at low rpms suck--literally. The compression ratio is variable, the lower the compression ratio, the less efficient, also the lower the combustion temperature (related to the compression ratio) the lower the efficiency.
One could make a very efficient gas turbine, that would have a high compression ratio, and very high heat--we have the materials and ability to do it... But it would be spewing out nitrous oxides like no tomorrow because of the heat.
And that still dosen't solve the problem of low power and low efficiency at low RPMs. A hybrid approach would be ideal, but unless you can go in a straight line at highway speeds, using the full horsepower your engine was designed for (100 hp at most would be practical for an automobile, and more is wasted), it's still not going to be especially efficient.
What would really be cool would be a hydrogen peroxide car, with a silver screen to catalyze the hydrogen peroxide, and shoot that through a turbine... Insane power, and an awesome vapor trail!
Slashdot Mirror
A sales tax would simply give rich people an even better excuse to ferret their money away. A person earning $1 million yearly could spend 10% of his income and live pretty damn well. Someone working at Burger King, making $20,000 will probably have to spend all of it.
That means that 10% of the millionaire's income is taxed at 10%, whereas 100% of the Burger King guy's income is taxed at 10%. That sure seems fair.
I have a 4Mbit(down) cable connection, and I routinely get 420+ kBps when I connect to a busy torrent, or one that has a few pretty quick-uploading peers. With protocol overhead accounted for, that's quite near maxed.
What could be causing your problems is that your download is being choked by ACKs. That is, packets are acknowledged when you receive them. On a non-symmetrical link, if your uploads have your entire upload capacity filled, your computer can't send many acknowledgements, and the peer(s) have to wait to get them--so they know when to send more data... Or something along those lines.
You might try lowering the upload cap on your torrent client just a bit to see if it helps. If it does, that might have been the problem.
It's hard to say, though. Perhaps your ISP has implemented some QOS rules that really slow down torrent traffic, or your firewalls/routers are incorrectly configured. It could be a dozen things. But, in my experience, Bittorrent works damn well, and usually much faster than a plain old connection to a very high in demand file.
The public are complete morons, and not because they may not know the differences between realplayer and WMP... No, the issue is much deeper. This was understood by philosophers thousands of years ago. The fact that the world is still run by demagogues is about the best symptom I can think of indicating people are stupuid.
The fact is, our leaders not only think, but *know* that they lead idiots. Why should they be worng? They have millions of dollars and red phones!
I'm never one to turn down a compliment, but I have a strange feeling that you may have had Chinese food last night :P
Let's assume that it does happen. All the middle-class people won't notice it because they are paying monthly cable fees and cable TV will not be affected by the VHF/UHF shutdown. However, let's assume that in poor neighborhoods the convertor boxes don't work well, or are prohibitively expensive, or are too technically complex for the general population. Suddenly there's no television.
That's a joke, in my experience. My family rents out many (small) appartments, and several houses. Many of the tenants certianly qualify as poor, certianly they're on fixed incomes... And the overwhelming majority have cable today, and always have had it in the past. You can't blame it on poor reception, either. It's fine.
A couple of tenants have even gone as far as losing their water service, but they still had to have their $60/month cable service. It's like goddamned crack. They'll do anything, as long as they have a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and America's Funniest Home Videos on the TV.
My family dosn't belive in much TV. We're too busy managing our small corner of the universe, and actually having fun when we're not doing that. I only got cable a year ago when Qwest pissed me off to the point where I had to ditch DSL through them.
For $3 extra than the cable internet service I get basic, anaglog cable, and that's fine because I get a few chanels that I do enjoy. Discovery (love them motorcycles!), Food Network, and I think TBS. There's some others but they mostly have crap/reruns(crap).
I think many Middle Class Americans hold off on overly superfluous things like pay-TV. Not to sound clichéd, but do people really need more than 64 channels? Unless you spend all day in front of the boobtube, you can't remotely hope to watch enough to justify it--if you don't have money to throw away, that is.
I suspect that this phenomenon echos throught our country. I think many lower-class people (from the Blacks in the ghetto, to the whites in the trailer courts) are either too lazy to do anything else, unable (by injury, or illness, including mental--including TV addiction), or they just don't know what the hell else to do.
Having that said, I doubt pirate broadcasts will pop up all over. There's the thing about the price of the equipment (unless they steal it that is), the knowledge of how to hook it up, and, well, it takes effort. People don't like effort.
What pisses me off about windows, and user directories is that it's so incredibly frustrating to copy a directory over, and have it *just work*.
No, instead, if that user didn't exist prior, it creates another, brand new directory, called user.computer. Being a long time unix user, it's mind blowingly simple to just untar a backup and have it work compared to all the crap windows makes one go through. It's like dancing with a hippo.
There's probably some easy enough way to do it that meshes with the thought pattern of average MCSEs, but I certianly haven't found it. It really sucks, because my relations seem to screw over thier computers so often. I'm tempted to buy a bulk liscense of Norton Ghost and be done with it.
Indeed, my mother, who's been (happily) working at the same company for the last 35 years is facing a company listening to consultants and headhuhters... It's a 3rd generation family owned business that used to have a hundred people and do $5 million a year in *pure profit*, and probably $15 million gross. The adopted son took over--who's genes obviously don't include sound business thinking (unlike his adoptive father and his grandfather), and he's basically hired people to run the company for him. In 4 years since this transition, they're projecting $6 million in business--who knows the actual profits.
They've even gone as far to buy a bunch of the Brainwashing line of "employment guides" from Price Pritchett. *shudder* If you want something to scare the shit out of you (or at least induce a depressive catatonia) before you go to bed, I highly reccomend these. They've scared off over half their skilled workers, and if my mom didn't have so much time invested there, she'd be gone too... Like any sane person would.
I just don't understand how successful businesses like this so often fall into the hands of completely inept assholes--and I'm talking about the CEO position of the largest companies, to the ownership of small businesses... It dosen't make sense.
It wouldn't be so bad if they only effected themselves, but no, they get a $4 mil bonus for walking in, fucking up a company, screwing its employees of their pensions, etc. They get to walk away and buy a few Ferrraris and a yacht. It's a joke.
Isn't Monad sort of like having one testicle? That's the first thing I thought of when I heard of it. (mono-gonad)...
And before anyone says anything, all you would-be metaphysicians can go stuff it--whatever it is.
Yeah, southern democrat :D
:P
But yeah, that person trying to get fired is an idiot. Shouldn't have told anyone!
Who needs an excuse? It's fun to do regardless!
So, an Italian walks into a bar with a bad knee and notices a guy sitting at the end of the bar. He asks the bartender who it was. The bartender told him it was Jesus. The Italian ordered a drink for himself and Jesus.
Next, a carpenter walks in. He asked if that was Jesus. He then ordered a drink for himself and for Jesus.
Finally, a redneck walks in and orders a drink for himself and Jesus.
A few minutes later, Jesus gets up and goes to the Italian. He thanked him for his generosity and healed him. Jesus walked over to the carpenter, thanked him, and healed him. Then, he walked over to the redneck. The redneck jumped up and shouted, "Don't heal me, I'm on disability!"
Of coure that's just a joke, in reality we know the redneck would be healed--he'd just act disabled.
Don't forget about the laywers!
Indeed. Pretty much all large commercial inkjets use this. HP's are kind'a stupid in that they use it, but the ink still comes in (pretty expensive) cartridges.
Yeah, that's very true.
They do this at all of the DLP theatres in Denver, and it's so bad that they've managed to start the film many minutes later than it was advertised because of it.. It was a good 10 minutes when I went to see Once Upon a Time in Mexico (which I thought sucked anyhow).
Even though the newer theaters are teh r0xx0r in terms of movie quality, I'd rather see it on a "lesser" screen if I don't have to deal with that crap. I gotta admit, I don't mind local slide-show commercials, with non-annoying music. Sometimes they show something good to do that I've never done before. This pop-culture pushing mega-money machine bullshit has become oh-so-boorish, though.
So, for now, I've sworn off going to newer theatres. Piss on them.
Haha, that's too good. Thanks for the laugh.
NASDUCK... hehe.
No. Well, yes. You see, he's a congressman. :O
D'oh! Yeah, that might've been helpful. It's a BenQ T903, I got it from Microcenter for $369, and I forgot that it had a $40 rebate on top of that. I need to send that in! It's funny, because that actually made it cheaper than the 17" BenQ they had there, though I do belive that was a 12ms model. Anyway, it's serving me better than I expected, it has one stuck pixel, in the lower right hand corner. It's stuck blue, and it's pretty hard to see, so no biggie.
If it'll last me a couple years (I'm more than sure it will), it'll be better than the Viewsonic P220F I had that still has my room smelling of magic smoke. If I had a few days lead time, I would've got the 19" BenQ from newegg, 12ms, and with shipping it would've been the same price. Maybe I'll get one of those dual-dvi cards they have there and go dual LCD! It's amazing, because it's actually affordable today. Heh.
I've never heard about a correlation of increased refresh rate to increased radiation output...
Thinking about it, it dosen't make much sense, though perhaps my instinct is wrong. Does the output of the cathode increase somehow? I confess, I don't know much about CRT design, but I'd think that the potential between the cathode and anode would have to remain fairly constant. I'd expect that the electromagnets which direct the electron beam would need more power. More switching per second and all.
I've always thought that the values vendors give was designed around the phosphors themselves. If a phosphor mix is designed to exhaust it's energy at a certian frequency, it dosen't make much sense to go much more than that, because the phosphor dosen't have time enough to dim befor it's re-excited. I'm probably not being clear.
For instance, if a phosphor mix were designed to operate at 60Hz without flickering--that is the phosphors don't get the chance to fully discharge in 1/60th of a second--illumination is fairly constant, but it's prone to blurring in the same way LCDs are today because the phosphors can't react fast enough. There was a day when monitors operated at 60Hz and we didn't have problems. Only when you run a monitor that has phosphors that were designed to react at 72+Hz at 60Hz will you notice the flickering.
As far as I can see, the only advantage and difference between running a monitor designed to operate at 72Hz vs. one designed to operate at 60Hz is that the time in which a transition between pure white to pure black will be 20% faster... 20% less blurring, so to say.
I'll have to read up on all this and see if what you say is true... 'Cause it's interesting, and unexpected that a CRT would operate that way, I think.
You can get better, of course, if the pannels are rated to Class I, they must be perfect, i.e. no dead pixels.
And in truth that would only be important if it were being used in a medical setting or similar. Wouldn't want to mistake a dead pixel for a budding prostate cancer or anything.
That's called interpolation. Not blurring, or ghosting. The monitor has to scale the image up to it's native resolution. Sometimes, a resolution that's a factor of an LCD's native resolution will look okay. This isn't an issue for most people.
What he's talking about is response time, which is the amount of time it takes an individual pixel to fully change from one color to another.. It's usually measured as the time between going from white to black, or from one grey to another grey... There is a definite, measurable response time on both LCDs and CRTs, but they have different implications.
Indeed, they've got LCDs around that claim ~10ms response time. I have a 19" touting 16ms response time, and I'm proud to say that it plays movies well, plays fast paced games well--Enemy Territory, HL2 both look beautiful, even with lots of fast movement.
Of course, there's people that will poo-poo LCDs until they render every itty-bitty thing perfectly at 100hz... As if their "super high quality" CRTs have phosphors that react fast enough to make a difference, and their eyes are from the planet Krypton....
Truthfully, I don't notice that much of a difference between this and my old CRT, except text is sharper, and I swear that colors in the magenta range seem more vibrant. The price was more than reasonable too--$360. You can find the 12 ms screens for around that now, but I needed mine in a hurry and couldn't find a place that carried them locally.
Like I said, that's an agonizing 30 seconds. I like to think my pain threshold is pretty high, but I just can't take XP.
I'd rather get my nipples pierced!
Same here, in fact, I've chosen not to "upgrade" beyond Win2K, mostly because of that bowel-irritating color scheme. Yes, I know, I could change it... But every time I've used XP I've never made it as far as that without having to run to the toilet to puke. Who cares about the activation and other crap? The colors! UGH! Oh, and the start button, and menus. WTF. Seriously, if I could get someone to change the theme for me to something less, well, craptastic (that high contrast one, where everything is safety yellow and black would be much more tolerable), and then figure out how to make the start button behave like it always has--I could probably live with it.
Oh, and whoever thought the default behavior of menus in Word2000 would be ideal deserves to be skull-fucked.
Furthermore, I'm convinced that Longhorn will feature satan-worshiping clowns that will incessantly bite the heads off of Peeps (those delicious sugar coated Easter treats--the horror!) and also possessed mauve colored cotton candy that will threaten to eat my soul.
Truely, I liked the monitor, but it's not worth the hassle fixing it, maybe if it were a bit more minor, but it was almost meltdown... Whatever fun those electons had there, it was hot, and there were a few caps that got roasted at least. On top of that, I understand that those monitors had some problems.
:D
I ordered a brand new "12ms" BenQ LCD for $360, about half the cost of the 22" CRT, it's crisp and beautiful, dosen't blur noticibly, great for CAD, and I'm pretty darn happy--it's almost the same size even. For the price it's a steal... And even if the CRT was still in warranty, I'd be looking at nearly a hundred bucks to ship and insure it.
Too bad it happened, but I gained alot of desk space as a result!
I just threw away a Viewsonic P220F 22" monitor away. It was kinda' depressing, because it did have a good picture, but one day last week it decided to give up a goodly amount of magic smoke... Just outside warranty, of course.
I took it apart to see what the deal was, and there was a pretty large part of the PCB burned out, right under the connector that supplies the guns their juice, and it de-soldered quite a few joints around it... Probably fixable, but probably not worth it either. That and it stank. Bad. And I'm lucky I was there to catch it, or my house probably would've looked like the inside of my monitor shortly thereafter.
That's about the only time I'll throw a computer part away. Most of the others seem to find their way into friends and family's computers.
The only problem with turbines is that their efficiency at low rpms suck--literally. The compression ratio is variable, the lower the compression ratio, the less efficient, also the lower the combustion temperature (related to the compression ratio) the lower the efficiency.
One could make a very efficient gas turbine, that would have a high compression ratio, and very high heat--we have the materials and ability to do it... But it would be spewing out nitrous oxides like no tomorrow because of the heat.
And that still dosen't solve the problem of low power and low efficiency at low RPMs. A hybrid approach would be ideal, but unless you can go in a straight line at highway speeds, using the full horsepower your engine was designed for (100 hp at most would be practical for an automobile, and more is wasted), it's still not going to be especially efficient.
What would really be cool would be a hydrogen peroxide car, with a silver screen to catalyze the hydrogen peroxide, and shoot that through a turbine... Insane power, and an awesome vapor trail!