My VW Vanagon has a hard time climbing hills with 95 horsepower.
Well too bad for you. Meanwhile cars like the original VW Beatle have about 30 horespower (at the wheels), and don't have trouble climbing hills. Your VW might have 95HP PEAK, but at the wheels, especially while climbing, I bet you're getting a fraction of that. Electric cars don't need transmissions, and other horsepower-sapping equipment that ICEs need.
But that's really irrelevant, anyhow. The parent didn't even suggest that solar panels would be the sole source of fuel for future vehicles. If you've got an electric car, put a solar panel on the roof/hood/trunk, and you get more range. You'll save money from not having to plug-in as often. Horror movies will run out of plots, as people that run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere need only wait in their cars for an hour, (while it recharges itself) before continuing to drive. And people that use their vehicles for short, infrequent trips might never need to plug their vehicles in.
Note that "short" means distance, not time. Without the need to keep your engine running, you can sit in traffic for hours and use almost no power.
The cost of pumping a large volume of water that distance, combined with the small ammount of power you'd get from the minimal tempurature differences.
You really think something like this happens overnight? There have been plans for building a new, giant solar power plant in the area for years now. The previous one was going to be a gigantic glass chimney with a turbine at the top, plus a natrual-gas burner to suppliment the solar heat.
You can only credit Bush if you want to say he had a part in the Enron scheme, which increased the cost of electricity dramatically, spurring the construction of new powerplants across the state, and moving wind/solar plants into the range of profitablity.
I happen to live very near the area where this is going to be built, and I can tell you, it's extremely hard to find a tortoise. I believe the highways and interstate freeways served to kill-off most of them. You still come across a few, but very rarely.
The animals you can actually find here primarily (aproximately in-order of their comonality):
So although I'm sure some people will get bent out of shape, I don't see the land area requirements as a big deal.
Unless they decide to build maybe 5 more in the same area, I suspect few people will care. There is a lot of empty land here, and this seems a much less obtrusive use of it (in regards to wildlife) than homes, roads, factories, etc.
I am concerned that they just might decide to do exactly that. But no objections to the first one.
Demand is much lower after the sun sets. Hydro and others should be able to handle nighttime needs. The ammount of power they are able to supply when the sun IS shining more than makes up for their limitations.
Clowdy/Rainy days?
In the desert, extremely few. That's WHY it's called the desert.
Winter with snow on the dishes? Hailstorms/Tornadows/Hurricanes?
Once again, you will very rarely find any of that in the desert. The day-to-day winds are hurricane-force, but that's well-known, so I'm sure these are built to withstand, say, 80MPH winds.
Way too many natural disasters and techincal problems to have these things be our only source of power.
They won't ever be the ONLY source of power, but if they made up the MAJORITY of our power, that would be an incredibly good thing.
So - what's the catch? Why aren't fields of these things going up like crazy?
Because they weren't profitable. It wasn't until the whole Enron thing, when electricity prices went through the roof in California, that the rates got high enough to make Solar/Wind power viable without massive subsudies. The ever-increasing cost of oil is also keeping rewable-energy power plants profitable.
But intelligent use of battery stores along with some supplemental traditional powered generators might take care of that,
Battery stores are a terrible idea. A huge waste of power from the conversion.
The power drain IS much less at night, so conventional sources like hydro (which makes up 30% of California's electric power) and nuclear are used at night. If there is unusually high draw, the natural gas/coal power plants rev-up.
Yes, everything is relative. Even on top-of-the-line systems, I use Blackbox (or one of the improved clones) and still try to stick with GTK1 apps, because GTK2 is just so heavy.
Unlike most, I get a lot done, and don't wait for applications (Firefox being the sole exception).
Restriction to posting to registered users, a good idea in my book.
No, no, no!!! They aren't just restricting posting. You can't even READ COMMENTS without having an account.
I'm probably replying to a Netflix troll, especially since they didn't address Netflix and their SPAM background.
I see. Anyone neglecting to respond to one single issue you made therefore makes them a troll.
You know something, I don't think you replied to all the points I made. I guess you must be a troll.
The reason I didn't reply to your SPAM claims is because:
A) I've never seen any such spam
B) I've never heard of Netflix spam
C) A seach on Google finds very, very few cases of Netflix spam
D) In those few cases, it was almost certainly some 3rd party taking advantage of Netflix's perfectly benign Affiliate system
Your reference to the c82 leads me to believe that you were not.
No, I only referred to the C82 to illustrate what crappy hardware Epson makes these days.
and is for a completely different use (lots of prints at a fast rate vs photo / art).
Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
As I said, go order some prints. Try the 7750. The fact that you haven't seen any good laser printers, doesn't mean they don't exist. You just assume you've seen the best... DPI is only a small part of overall print quality.
Now if you want to start talking about tabloid and higher print sizes, Xerox doesn't have anything that is even remotely comparable.
Yes, that is, IMHO, the one niche that inkjets fill.
It worked fairly well, though the CD drive was incredibly loud in comparison.
I had the same problem.
The quietest DVD-ROM I found was Samsung's 16X. It's incredibly quiet (and still reading at 16X) on just about all DVDs.
There are a couple downsides, though. I bought 2, one has been working perfectly under lots of load for 6 months, while the other is DOA, with a subtle problem that was corrupting everything it read. Beware OEM hardware.
But the other problem, more specific to the topic, is that it ignores hdparm completely. In other words, you can't set it to 1X, 2X, etc., it's always at 16X. That's still nice and quiet for most DVDs, but you run into a few that are unbalanaced, and will buzz like a chainsaw even in this drive. If it would just honor the speed-setting, I'd be immensely happy, and buying dozens of these drives.
It looks to me like Netflix either doesn't process returned movies quick enough or delays them so you get less movies per month if you happen to be watching/returning them too fast. Anyone else have that issue?
Netflix does have an odd system. They don't overtly slow you down, but the very frequent renters seem to get put at the back of the queue.
I've also noticed they would never send back more than 1 movie each day, even though I might send them 3 at a time.
However, a few months ago, when the service really slowed to a crawl, I think they were having problems with their system. I'd send a movie back, and they wouldn't report it as recieved for several days. Getting rather annoyed, I just reported every movie as lost in the mail if they didn't get it within 2 days. They still got the movies back a few days later, so I wasn't marked as some truant customer. After about a month, everything cleared-up, they were back up to their old speed, and now they are even sending me movies 2 at a time. I have to assume they just over-taxed their distribution facilities. If I had problems like that back when they had raised their price, I would have dropped the service myself. Since it was after they had lowered their prices, I was willing to put-up with it for a while, and everything worked-out.
I think one thing Amazon will have going for them is their website.
Yeah, I sure do hate Netflix's simple and easy to use website. I'd much rather use Amazon's dense, impossible to read pages, packed full of usless information, mixed-in with lots of (text) ads for other products, from corner to corner.
Advantage: Netflix.
They also have a slew of fetaures Netflix doesn't offer. Some of the ones I've found useful include "the page you made", "customers who bought this also bought this", "customers who viewed this also viewed this".
You've been a Netflix customer for 2 years, and you don't realize that Netflix already has all of that? Every time you chose to rent a movie, it gives you a list of movies highly rated by those who highly rated that movie, and a list of movies with the same actor/director/etc.
But if you want an opinion from Netflix about the best movies of, say, Jim Jarmusch, well, you're just SOL.
Ratings... They're called ratings... Marked from 1-5 stars. Search for an actor, you'll get a list of all the movies they were in, and the ratings for each one.
All in all, I'd say Amazon's entry into this market will introduce some good competition, and we're all going to benefit.
I doubt it. Blockbuster has been enough competition to keep Netflix honest (and help squeeze Wal-mart out of the business). From what I know of Amazon, I suspect they will only fill-in the really low-end market that Walmart was going for, with a really crappy service, but with a price-tag lower than the better services can compete with.
Amazon bought IMDB a while back, and luckily, hasn't screwed it up.
So, to you, it's not ruining IMBD by including MASSIVELY LARGE banners on the site, making (additional) reviews and all of the forums off-limit to non-registered users, and contining to restrict more and more of the site...
No, Amazon is doing quite a good job ruining IMDB. They just haven't done it all at once.
If they tie it in with the IMDB, that would be pretty handy. Search for "Virginia Madsen" and you see a list of all her movies
Netflix already has exactly that same system in-place. It's better than IMDB IMHO just because it has a lot more useful info, trailers, etc. Netflix doesn't have as many obscure movies in it's database as IMDB, but they really don't need to.
Want a movie that isn't out on DVD yet? Add it to a wish list.
Netflix also already does that. There is a "Movies Awaiting Release" queue.
Amazon also has the setup with used DVDs ( and books ) to ofer deals if you want to buy the movies instead of, or after, renting them.
Amazon doesn't sell used anything. They have a section where 3rd parties can sell used/new items, but Amazon doesn't have much control over that, and they'd be crazy to make that a centerpiece of their business. Many of them are selling illegal copies, Amazon has no idea how much inventory they have, etc.
Just because you downloaded it with a usenet account you paid for doesn't mean it's legit.
No, it is a legit copy. Don't let the facts get in the way of your trolling though.
I'm not saying MS makes the best OS's in the world, but there has been steady progression and improvement.
In the DOS-based world, that has been true. In the NT world, it's quite the opposite. XP is insanely slow (even on the simplest operations) compared to 2000, and is much less stable.
2000 vs. NT4 is exactly the same situation. NT4 is still incredibly fast, and it's been extremely stable for me, and I've had it deployed across hundreds of machines.
haha! If you'd actually used NT4 you would be familiar with Mr. PageFileError and his good buddy BSOD.
Errors happen on occasion, but quite rarely. This most recent install of 2000 hasn't lasted a week due to the inabality to download updates. The previous install didn't last a week because certain programs (like media player classic) just would not work to save it's life. No virus, no spyware, no different drivers or 3rd-party anything, just a Windows 2000 system corrupting it's own files.
With NT4, it's pretty much only if you deleted a system file, or significantly changed the hardware that you get a BSOD on boot-up, and that can be taken care-of by loading a previous config before boot-up (almost the equivalent of safe-mode).
Who really wants DirectX 7+ anyhow?
~95% of all computer users on the planet?
Well, DirectX is exclusive to Windows, and the statistics are that only 90% of desktops run any version of Windows, I'm going to say you pulled that statistic straight out of your ass.
Of those 90%, a significant number are on older versions (95, 98, ME, NT4) that doesn't have a recent version of DirectX anyhow. I also doubt even the majority of those that are on 2000/XP play any high-end games (Solitare doesn't count).
If anything, I'd say your statistic is completely backwards, and it's ~95% of computer users that (like myself) don't care at all about recent DirectX versions.
EV1 was never workable - the battery weight and expense, combined with limited range, made it Not Practical as a mass market car from day one.
Gee, you want to quote some numbers? I ask because I'm rather sure you don't have any. It was the car that really demonstrated that fully-electric vehicles were practical at the time.
The EV1 got over 100 miles on a single charge, and it's estimated retail price was less than some hybrids are going for.
Gotta love the bit about recalling and destroying the cars due to liability concerns. Thank you US legal system.
No, that was the bullshit excuse they made-up. They put an immediate stop to the program the instant it became clear the deadline for the California law (which required a perctange of cars sold to be zero-emission) was going to be extended, and later overturned in court.
They had people driving the cars for several months, then they just up and decided one day it was too big of a risk? Nonsense. Look at the Ford Th!nk for another example of this exact same thing.
If you think spending 40 quid on a good soundcard and another 40 quid for some "good speakers for my PC" is what fidelity is about then you need to have your hearing checked out.
Hell, SoundBlaster Live! cards, which used-to go for $200, and sound great, go for about $20 now. The 24-bit SB-lives are only a little bit more. If you're spending $200 on an Audigy, you're paying for the marketing, and the artwork on the retail box.
As for speakers, if you avoid every branded as "PC Speakers" you can get some good ones quite cheap. $40 can get you some good speakers. They won't get very loud, won't have a subwoofer, won't have 5+ channels, etc., but can reproduce stereo music quite well.
Or you can get $20 studio-monitor headphones that will do the job just as well.
Certainly true about trackballs on notebooks. This is one area where everyone that can remember it agrees the world went completely backwards. Trackballs worked far better than touchpads.
Ask for desktops, trackballs are still around, they just aren't popular. Self-fullfulling prophecy here. You think trackballs are dead, so you don't look for a store that still sells trackballs. I have trackballs for all of my computers.
What's your excuse?
Analogue TV.
I disagree. There are plenty of things I dislike about digital, but the artifacts of an analog broadcast signal are far, far worse. After you've been watching cable/satellite TV for a few years, you forget how terrible OTA analog looks.
As for analog cable, it's been digital for quite some time now. With digital cable, they unfortunately chose to squeeze the streams down to intolerable bitrates, but I suspect this too with change with time.
They say Windows has 90% of the desktop. That means 1 in 10 people care if it works with something other than Windows. Of the other 9 out of 10, how many of them have a friend of family member that uses something else, and might end up using the printer?
Most people use USB and don't care.
Tell them they can just plug it in to their DSL modem/router and all their computers can print to it directly. Then tell them it's several times faster. They'll care real quick, once the terminology has been descrambled for them.
Most people don't know what that is and don't care.
"Don't need to install a driver" == People Care
Who cares as long as it prints I don't care if it's driven by Chipmunks.
Tell them it actually prints full-pages about 20Xs faster than their crappy little inkjet. They'll soil themselves...
You have to install the Windows drivers to use it from Windows? Well that sucks.
Haha. You just said nobody would care about the print driver, didn't you?
Nothing you listed makes it better than an inkjet for the vast majority of people,
Terribly, terribly, wrong.
and it's much more expensive for the low volume printing that most people do.
Not true. For low-volume printing, inkjets have a very nasty tendency to become seriously clogged. For most that means costly replacement. For Epson printers it means throwing the whole (expensive) unit away.
I have yet to see a laser printer that can provide the quality of say... even an Epson stylus 2200.
The fact that you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Go to Xerox.com and order print-samples from a few of their 1200x1200 color-laser printers. The least you'll be able to say is that the prints look as good as the best inkjets. The inital cost is higher than inkjets ($1,000), but you make up for it very quickly if you do a decent ammount of printing, due to the much lower cost of toner.
So ya, high end? Epson definitely.
I had a C82. Heads clogged after a month. Before that there were droplets of ink on every few printed pages (ruining completed full-page printouts), requiring me to clean the heads after about every 5 pages printed.
Biggest piece of crap, ever. Never buying anything from Epson again.
No, IBM's technology has little to do with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft's search technology. This isn't a competition until either three introduce similar technology.
Similar private-record search products? Like the google search appliance that has been around for years now?
It's always nice to hear that Linux/WINE users can download updates from Microsoft.com, menwhile my legit Windows 2000 install can't.
Seems like the more they try, the worse things get.
I'm really thinking of wiping the drive and installing good-old NT4. Never had any problems with it, and it smokes 2000/XP by a longshot. Who really wants DirectX 7+ anyhow?
He has a point... Wi-Fi really means nothing. It surprises me also that it is catching on. Not only does it mean absolutely nothing, it also sounds quite stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Well too bad for you. Meanwhile cars like the original VW Beatle have about 30 horespower (at the wheels), and don't have trouble climbing hills. Your VW might have 95HP PEAK, but at the wheels, especially while climbing, I bet you're getting a fraction of that. Electric cars don't need transmissions, and other horsepower-sapping equipment that ICEs need.
But that's really irrelevant, anyhow. The parent didn't even suggest that solar panels would be the sole source of fuel for future vehicles. If you've got an electric car, put a solar panel on the roof/hood/trunk, and you get more range. You'll save money from not having to plug-in as often. Horror movies will run out of plots, as people that run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere need only wait in their cars for an hour, (while it recharges itself) before continuing to drive. And people that use their vehicles for short, infrequent trips might never need to plug their vehicles in.
Note that "short" means distance, not time. Without the need to keep your engine running, you can sit in traffic for hours and use almost no power.
The cost of pumping a large volume of water that distance, combined with the small ammount of power you'd get from the minimal tempurature differences.
Yes, purely.
You really think something like this happens overnight? There have been plans for building a new, giant solar power plant in the area for years now. The previous one was going to be a gigantic glass chimney with a turbine at the top, plus a natrual-gas burner to suppliment the solar heat.
You can only credit Bush if you want to say he had a part in the Enron scheme, which increased the cost of electricity dramatically, spurring the construction of new powerplants across the state, and moving wind/solar plants into the range of profitablity.
I happen to live very near the area where this is going to be built, and I can tell you, it's extremely hard to find a tortoise. I believe the highways and interstate freeways served to kill-off most of them. You still come across a few, but very rarely.
The animals you can actually find here primarily (aproximately in-order of their comonality):
birds (pidegons, sparrows, doves, quail, blackbirds, ravens, hawks), jackrabbits, lizards, coyotes, ground squirrels, skunks, ducks, snakes, bats, then perhaps tortoises, beavers, etc.
Unless they decide to build maybe 5 more in the same area, I suspect few people will care. There is a lot of empty land here, and this seems a much less obtrusive use of it (in regards to wildlife) than homes, roads, factories, etc.
I am concerned that they just might decide to do exactly that. But no objections to the first one.
Demand is much lower after the sun sets. Hydro and others should be able to handle nighttime needs. The ammount of power they are able to supply when the sun IS shining more than makes up for their limitations.
In the desert, extremely few. That's WHY it's called the desert.
Once again, you will very rarely find any of that in the desert. The day-to-day winds are hurricane-force, but that's well-known, so I'm sure these are built to withstand, say, 80MPH winds.
They won't ever be the ONLY source of power, but if they made up the MAJORITY of our power, that would be an incredibly good thing.
Because they weren't profitable. It wasn't until the whole Enron thing, when electricity prices went through the roof in California, that the rates got high enough to make Solar/Wind power viable without massive subsudies. The ever-increasing cost of oil is also keeping rewable-energy power plants profitable.
Battery stores are a terrible idea. A huge waste of power from the conversion.
The power drain IS much less at night, so conventional sources like hydro (which makes up 30% of California's electric power) and nuclear are used at night. If there is unusually high draw, the natural gas/coal power plants rev-up.
Yes, everything is relative. Even on top-of-the-line systems, I use Blackbox (or one of the improved clones) and still try to stick with GTK1 apps, because GTK2 is just so heavy.
Unlike most, I get a lot done, and don't wait for applications (Firefox being the sole exception).
No, no, no!!! They aren't just restricting posting. You can't even READ COMMENTS without having an account.
I see. Anyone neglecting to respond to one single issue you made therefore makes them a troll.
You know something, I don't think you replied to all the points I made. I guess you must be a troll.
The reason I didn't reply to your SPAM claims is because:
A) I've never seen any such spam
B) I've never heard of Netflix spam
C) A seach on Google finds very, very few cases of Netflix spam
D) In those few cases, it was almost certainly some 3rd party taking advantage of Netflix's perfectly benign Affiliate system
To me, you sound like an Anit-Netflix troll.
No, I only referred to the C82 to illustrate what crappy hardware Epson makes these days.
Those two aren't mutually exclusive.
As I said, go order some prints. Try the 7750. The fact that you haven't seen any good laser printers, doesn't mean they don't exist. You just assume you've seen the best... DPI is only a small part of overall print quality.
Yes, that is, IMHO, the one niche that inkjets fill.
I had the same problem.
The quietest DVD-ROM I found was Samsung's 16X. It's incredibly quiet (and still reading at 16X) on just about all DVDs.
There are a couple downsides, though. I bought 2, one has been working perfectly under lots of load for 6 months, while the other is DOA, with a subtle problem that was corrupting everything it read. Beware OEM hardware.
But the other problem, more specific to the topic, is that it ignores hdparm completely. In other words, you can't set it to 1X, 2X, etc., it's always at 16X. That's still nice and quiet for most DVDs, but you run into a few that are unbalanaced, and will buzz like a chainsaw even in this drive. If it would just honor the speed-setting, I'd be immensely happy, and buying dozens of these drives.
Netflix does have an odd system. They don't overtly slow you down, but the very frequent renters seem to get put at the back of the queue.
I've also noticed they would never send back more than 1 movie each day, even though I might send them 3 at a time.
However, a few months ago, when the service really slowed to a crawl, I think they were having problems with their system. I'd send a movie back, and they wouldn't report it as recieved for several days. Getting rather annoyed, I just reported every movie as lost in the mail if they didn't get it within 2 days. They still got the movies back a few days later, so I wasn't marked as some truant customer. After about a month, everything cleared-up, they were back up to their old speed, and now they are even sending me movies 2 at a time. I have to assume they just over-taxed their distribution facilities. If I had problems like that back when they had raised their price, I would have dropped the service myself. Since it was after they had lowered their prices, I was willing to put-up with it for a while, and everything worked-out.
Yeah, I sure do hate Netflix's simple and easy to use website. I'd much rather use Amazon's dense, impossible to read pages, packed full of usless information, mixed-in with lots of (text) ads for other products, from corner to corner.
Advantage: Netflix.
You've been a Netflix customer for 2 years, and you don't realize that Netflix already has all of that? Every time you chose to rent a movie, it gives you a list of movies highly rated by those who highly rated that movie, and a list of movies with the same actor/director/etc.
Ratings... They're called ratings... Marked from 1-5 stars. Search for an actor, you'll get a list of all the movies they were in, and the ratings for each one.
I doubt it. Blockbuster has been enough competition to keep Netflix honest (and help squeeze Wal-mart out of the business). From what I know of Amazon, I suspect they will only fill-in the really low-end market that Walmart was going for, with a really crappy service, but with a price-tag lower than the better services can compete with.
So, to you, it's not ruining IMBD by including MASSIVELY LARGE banners on the site, making (additional) reviews and all of the forums off-limit to non-registered users, and contining to restrict more and more of the site...
No, Amazon is doing quite a good job ruining IMDB. They just haven't done it all at once.
Netflix already has exactly that same system in-place. It's better than IMDB IMHO just because it has a lot more useful info, trailers, etc. Netflix doesn't have as many obscure movies in it's database as IMDB, but they really don't need to.
Netflix also already does that. There is a "Movies Awaiting Release" queue.
Amazon doesn't sell used anything. They have a section where 3rd parties can sell used/new items, but Amazon doesn't have much control over that, and they'd be crazy to make that a centerpiece of their business. Many of them are selling illegal copies, Amazon has no idea how much inventory they have, etc.
Just then, a faint voice could be heard comming from Yahoo's headquarters...
"I'm not dead yet..."
Thanks for the tip. It's been a long time since I'd last heard about ReactOS, and I'm glad to see it's progressing.
No, it is a legit copy. Don't let the facts get in the way of your trolling though.
In the DOS-based world, that has been true. In the NT world, it's quite the opposite. XP is insanely slow (even on the simplest operations) compared to 2000, and is much less stable.
2000 vs. NT4 is exactly the same situation. NT4 is still incredibly fast, and it's been extremely stable for me, and I've had it deployed across hundreds of machines.
Errors happen on occasion, but quite rarely. This most recent install of 2000 hasn't lasted a week due to the inabality to download updates. The previous install didn't last a week because certain programs (like media player classic) just would not work to save it's life. No virus, no spyware, no different drivers or 3rd-party anything, just a Windows 2000 system corrupting it's own files.
With NT4, it's pretty much only if you deleted a system file, or significantly changed the hardware that you get a BSOD on boot-up, and that can be taken care-of by loading a previous config before boot-up (almost the equivalent of safe-mode).
Well, DirectX is exclusive to Windows, and the statistics are that only 90% of desktops run any version of Windows, I'm going to say you pulled that statistic straight out of your ass.
Of those 90%, a significant number are on older versions (95, 98, ME, NT4) that doesn't have a recent version of DirectX anyhow. I also doubt even the majority of those that are on 2000/XP play any high-end games (Solitare doesn't count).
If anything, I'd say your statistic is completely backwards, and it's ~95% of computer users that (like myself) don't care at all about recent DirectX versions.
Don't expect any reply.
Gee, you want to quote some numbers? I ask because I'm rather sure you don't have any. It was the car that really demonstrated that fully-electric vehicles were practical at the time.
The EV1 got over 100 miles on a single charge, and it's estimated retail price was less than some hybrids are going for.
No, that was the bullshit excuse they made-up. They put an immediate stop to the program the instant it became clear the deadline for the California law (which required a perctange of cars sold to be zero-emission) was going to be extended, and later overturned in court.
They had people driving the cars for several months, then they just up and decided one day it was too big of a risk? Nonsense. Look at the Ford Th!nk for another example of this exact same thing.
A Jaguar, huh? I thought those disappeared years ago. I didn't think they were very flashy, either.
</sarcasm>
Hell, SoundBlaster Live! cards, which used-to go for $200, and sound great, go for about $20 now. The 24-bit SB-lives are only a little bit more. If you're spending $200 on an Audigy, you're paying for the marketing, and the artwork on the retail box.
As for speakers, if you avoid every branded as "PC Speakers" you can get some good ones quite cheap. $40 can get you some good speakers. They won't get very loud, won't have a subwoofer, won't have 5+ channels, etc., but can reproduce stereo music quite well.
Or you can get $20 studio-monitor headphones that will do the job just as well.
Certainly true about trackballs on notebooks. This is one area where everyone that can remember it agrees the world went completely backwards. Trackballs worked far better than touchpads.
Ask for desktops, trackballs are still around, they just aren't popular. Self-fullfulling prophecy here. You think trackballs are dead, so you don't look for a store that still sells trackballs. I have trackballs for all of my computers.
What's your excuse?
I disagree. There are plenty of things I dislike about digital, but the artifacts of an analog broadcast signal are far, far worse. After you've been watching cable/satellite TV for a few years, you forget how terrible OTA analog looks.
As for analog cable, it's been digital for quite some time now. With digital cable, they unfortunately chose to squeeze the streams down to intolerable bitrates, but I suspect this too with change with time.
They say Windows has 90% of the desktop. That means 1 in 10 people care if it works with something other than Windows. Of the other 9 out of 10, how many of them have a friend of family member that uses something else, and might end up using the printer?
Tell them they can just plug it in to their DSL modem/router and all their computers can print to it directly. Then tell them it's several times faster. They'll care real quick, once the terminology has been descrambled for them.
"Don't need to install a driver" == People Care
Tell them it actually prints full-pages about 20Xs faster than their crappy little inkjet. They'll soil themselves...
Haha. You just said nobody would care about the print driver, didn't you?
Terribly, terribly, wrong.
Not true. For low-volume printing, inkjets have a very nasty tendency to become seriously clogged. For most that means costly replacement. For Epson printers it means throwing the whole (expensive) unit away.
The fact that you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Go to Xerox.com and order print-samples from a few of their 1200x1200 color-laser printers. The least you'll be able to say is that the prints look as good as the best inkjets. The inital cost is higher than inkjets ($1,000), but you make up for it very quickly if you do a decent ammount of printing, due to the much lower cost of toner.
I had a C82. Heads clogged after a month. Before that there were droplets of ink on every few printed pages (ruining completed full-page printouts), requiring me to clean the heads after about every 5 pages printed.
Biggest piece of crap, ever. Never buying anything from Epson again.
Similar private-record search products? Like the google search appliance that has been around for years now?
http://www.google.com/enterprise/
It's always nice to hear that Linux/WINE users can download updates from Microsoft.com, menwhile my legit Windows 2000 install can't.
Seems like the more they try, the worse things get.
I'm really thinking of wiping the drive and installing good-old NT4. Never had any problems with it, and it smokes 2000/XP by a longshot. Who really wants DirectX 7+ anyhow?
He has a point... Wi-Fi really means nothing. It surprises me also that it is catching on. Not only does it mean absolutely nothing, it also sounds quite stupid.