Apple had the market all to itself for years because all the other hard drive players used bigger and heavier 2.5" laptop drives. Those days are over. Dell, Iriver, and Rio all have lower priced players built with the same kind of drives and similar form factors. The iPod mini is $249. All the other 1.5GB-4GB mini players are selling for $199 or less. The only edge Apple has now is design, UI, and integration with iTunes.
Cell phones work fine for voice, but they don't work for dialup Internet (well they do, but it's slow and expensive). As long as you have some option for Internet access, the cell phone is a much better deal than a landline.
If the ILECS want to hold on to their monopoly on POTS phones, they'll just monopolize themselves into irrelevance. A POTS phone is useful, but it's not the necessity it used to be. Wireless phone plans are cheap enough to use as an only phone. For broadband, cable is the only viable alternative for most people, but there'll be more on the way. Qwest is unbundling DSL from phone service. FTTH, powerline, and community wireless are all possibilities.
I already shop there. The auto parts business is pretty competitive so all the major chains are pretty close in price except for the loss leader sale items. What makes the difference is location and quality of the staff. The Autozone near me has pretty knowledgeable and helpful staff, maybe as good as NAPA. The Kragen ranks a little lower and the Pep Boys is way lower. This is just my experience from the stores near me, so YMMV, except that Pep Boys service sucks in a lot of the stores I've seen.
Coin and bill collectors might disagree with you there. So if I own a 1900 Silver Dollar, it's not my property? By your logic the Treasury can reclaim any rare coins by buying it back at face value.
If the money's in the bank, then the Feds already know how much you have. The IRS gets a 1099 for every interest bearing account. Divide by the likely interest rate and they'll have a ballpark figure for the average balance. For a non-interest bearing account, your records are just a subpoena away, which is a pretty minor obstacle these days, but at least they can't data mine your finances they way they can with 1099's.
Cash is YOUR property until you spend it. If you want to destroy it and lose all cash value, it's your right. Still, the Treasury will replace any damaged bills that have at least half the bill remaining.
"I currently have to pay SBC $15 a month for a voice line that I have absolutely no use for"
Ha, you're lucky to pay only $15 a month. After taxes and fees my $18 a month landline was $29. That was for unmetered local calls with no features and no long distance. I paid $.10 a minute if I called more than 12 miles away which was just about everybody except my dialup ISP. Add another $3 if I had long distance on the line even if I never used it. Cable from Adelphia is overpriced too, but at $58 a month it's only $30 more and it beats the hell out of dialup. Got a cellphone with free night and weekend minutes and free long distance, and I'm all set.
You can pay $30/month for unlimited which works at all T-Mobile hotspots like at Starbucks and Borders. Some local cafes have free wifi for customers too.
An 8086 topped out at about 10Mhz and contained 29,000 transistors. How many of them were you planning to put on a die? 10x10? That's 2.9 million transistors which is about the same number as a Pentium MMX. Assuming perfect scaling and no overhead for interconnecting those mini 8086 cores, 100x10Mhz is 1 Ghz, but you won't get close to that in real life, so you probably won't be far off from the 233Mhz top speed of the P-MMX. I'm not even going to guess what it takes to interconnect those 8086 cores and build a memory controller to keep them fed with data.
I think what you're really suggesting is a neural net processor. It should be good at doing human like tasks like pattern recognition, but practical applications of neural nets are few and far between.
Napster partnered with Samsung to make a portable music player that works with their files. It sells for $100 less than the 20GB Ipod but doesn't have nearly the cool factor or popularity.
Re:Or, this can IMPROVE your car
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
OK, my example of a 100hp gain is a little exagerrated, but the article did say 70 lbft more torque from just a chip in the VW TDI engine. You can get a little more power from ignition advance and fuel mixture in a naturally aspirated engine, but the only way to get a lot more power from software only is to raise the turbo boost, at least until you hit the limits of detonation and cooling. There's a few engines that are underclocked by the factory and can be easily uncorked by a chip, but they're the exception. One of them is the VW 1.8 turbo engine. They made 150hp, 180hp and 225hp versions of that engine.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
I think the gentlemen's agreement is closer to 280hp, and sometimes they'll just advertise 280hp even if it actually makes a lot more. The Skyline GTR was famous for having stronger horses than the other 280hp supercars. And as you say there's also no shortage of aftermarket tuners if that's not enough.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Just like with overclocking CPUs there's two failure modes here:
Engine go boom now. Kind of like having a loose heatsink on an Athlon. The only way to get 100 more hp from just software is if you have a turbo engine with an electronic wastegate. You could tell the computer to crank up the boost without beefing up other parts of the engine, but that's a recipe for a french fried engine.
Accelerated mechanical wear. Kind of like electromigration on an overclocked CPU. Metal fatigue and mechanical wear are gradual processes, and drivetrain parts are designed with a lot of headroom so it won't break right away when you up the power. However, even with a stock engine, parts can wear out very fast if you drive foot to the floor all the time. One big problem is CV joints on a powerful front drive car. Take it easy in first gear where the torque multiplication is the greatest, and your car will thank you.
The most inefficient part of ethanol is the energy needed to distill it. It's much more than the energy needed to refine crude oil into lighter oils like diesel and gasoline. Instead turning corn into ethanol, what's the economics of burning corn oil or some other vegetable oil in a biodiesel (I don't think corn is the cheapest one)?
I did some rough calculations for the hell of it. You can buy 35 lbs of soybean oil for $18 wholesale from Costco. That's about 18L or about $1 per liter. That's a lot more expensive than gas in the US, but not much more expensive than gas in Japan or Europe. That's food grade oil. Inedible oil for biodiesel fuel should be cheaper.
I agree. Not a good value for the money. I priced out the same config for their closest non-gaming laptop, the Inspiron 8600, and it's $2500 after mail in rebate. It has the same screen. The CPU is a Pentium M 1.7 instead of the P4 3.4 (only a little slower and much more practical for battery life). The video chip is a Radeon Mobility 9600 instead of the Radeon Mobility 9700. The Gig of RAM and 7200rpm hard drive are pricey options. You could save $500 by going to 512MB and 5400rpm. Still, if you had to have better gaming performance than the Pentium M 1.7 + Radeon 9600 and damn the battery life, the XPS is the only way to go from Dell. Not my money.
No, it's the same codebase. Big parts of it are rewritten for every release and new parts are written from scratch to support new features, but a lot of it is the same. How else do you explain that most of the security bugs affect every Windows NT version from 4.0 to Server 2003? They were rewritten from scratch with the same mistakes?
This is an interesting place to computerize customer service. You'd think the last bastion of personal service would be your friendly neighborhood Beverly Hills Prada store. I suppose this helps them cater to the "do you know who I am?" customer when they're shopping at Prada in another town.
Last year, Groening told the Hollywood Reporter that South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut was the only movie based on a TV show that wasn't "horrible."
The South Park is the benchmark that they're shooting for in this movie. It's just MHO, but Beavis and Butthead Do America was also based on a TV cartoon and didn't suck. Not as good as South Park, but still good.
The older Palms aren't powerful enough for multimedia, but they're surprisingly useful if you happen to find the right apps. Things like Pocket Quicken to organize your finances, IP subnet calculators, offline web browsers like Avantgo and Plucker (I prefer Plucker myself, it's Free and Avantgo needs registration). You can read ebooks too, but the 160x160 screen is hard on the eyes. The PocketPCs and newer Palms have at least a 320x240 screen. Of course ebooks can mean a lot of different things, like novels to read on a long plane ride, reference books, or Linux HOWTOs. $50 to $80 for one of these is still a non-trivial amount for a starving student, but it's in the realm of affordability.
It's not so much that T1 is a superior technology compared to DSL. DSL can do high upload speeds too. It's that T1 is sold as a business service. So you'll get things like static IPs, no restrictions on hosting servers, dedicated bandwidth to the Internet backbone (or at least shared with fewer users). Back in the olden days, T1s could be sold with charges based on bandwidth usage, but that's very rare now. It's one flat rate, maybe $700/mo, even if it's maxed out all day long.
Re:please tell me where you're finding $100 flight
on
WiFi Free-For-All
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· Score: 1
Short hop flights on Southwest are under $100. They can't jack the price up too much or people will just drive the 5 or 6 hours.
This article is all about projectors. Just about all of them use LCD or DLP to create the picture. The other technologies in the article are also used for projectors. LCOS is new and not in wide use. CRTs are old school and weren't just used for screens. CRT projection TVs have been around since the 70s.
Just to give you some idea of how high our boat is, the US with about 5% of the world population consumes about 1/4 of the world's oil production. If you spread the wealth around without taking into account all boats rising, we'd all be living in third world squalor. If somehow everybody caught up to us overnight economically, it would be an environmental disaster, at least until the oil runs out which might be in 10 years instead of 100.
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Apple had the market all to itself for years because all the other hard drive players used bigger and heavier 2.5" laptop drives. Those days are over. Dell, Iriver, and Rio all have lower priced players built with the same kind of drives and similar form factors. The iPod mini is $249. All the other 1.5GB-4GB mini players are selling for $199 or less. The only edge Apple has now is design, UI, and integration with iTunes.
Cell phones work fine for voice, but they don't work for dialup Internet (well they do, but it's slow and expensive). As long as you have some option for Internet access, the cell phone is a much better deal than a landline.
If the ILECS want to hold on to their monopoly on POTS phones, they'll just monopolize themselves into irrelevance. A POTS phone is useful, but it's not the necessity it used to be. Wireless phone plans are cheap enough to use as an only phone. For broadband, cable is the only viable alternative for most people, but there'll be more on the way. Qwest is unbundling DSL from phone service. FTTH, powerline, and community wireless are all possibilities.
I already shop there. The auto parts business is pretty competitive so all the major chains are pretty close in price except for the loss leader sale items. What makes the difference is location and quality of the staff. The Autozone near me has pretty knowledgeable and helpful staff, maybe as good as NAPA. The Kragen ranks a little lower and the Pep Boys is way lower. This is just my experience from the stores near me, so YMMV, except that Pep Boys service sucks in a lot of the stores I've seen.
Coin and bill collectors might disagree with you there. So if I own a 1900 Silver Dollar, it's not my property? By your logic the Treasury can reclaim any rare coins by buying it back at face value.
If the money's in the bank, then the Feds already know how much you have. The IRS gets a 1099 for every interest bearing account. Divide by the likely interest rate and they'll have a ballpark figure for the average balance. For a non-interest bearing account, your records are just a subpoena away, which is a pretty minor obstacle these days, but at least they can't data mine your finances they way they can with 1099's.
Cash is YOUR property until you spend it. If you want to destroy it and lose all cash value, it's your right. Still, the Treasury will replace any damaged bills that have at least half the bill remaining.
"I currently have to pay SBC $15 a month for a voice line that I have absolutely no use for"
Ha, you're lucky to pay only $15 a month. After taxes and fees my $18 a month landline was $29. That was for unmetered local calls with no features and no long distance. I paid $.10 a minute if I called more than 12 miles away which was just about everybody except my dialup ISP. Add another $3 if I had long distance on the line even if I never used it. Cable from Adelphia is overpriced too, but at $58 a month it's only $30 more and it beats the hell out of dialup. Got a cellphone with free night and weekend minutes and free long distance, and I'm all set.
You can pay $30/month for unlimited which works at all T-Mobile hotspots like at Starbucks and Borders. Some local cafes have free wifi for customers too.
An 8086 topped out at about 10Mhz and contained 29,000 transistors. How many of them were you planning to put on a die? 10x10? That's 2.9 million transistors which is about the same number as a Pentium MMX. Assuming perfect scaling and no overhead for interconnecting those mini 8086 cores, 100x10Mhz is 1 Ghz, but you won't get close to that in real life, so you probably won't be far off from the 233Mhz top speed of the P-MMX. I'm not even going to guess what it takes to interconnect those 8086 cores and build a memory controller to keep them fed with data.
I think what you're really suggesting is a neural net processor. It should be good at doing human like tasks like pattern recognition, but practical applications of neural nets are few and far between.
Napster partnered with Samsung to make a portable music player that works with their files. It sells for $100 less than the 20GB Ipod but doesn't have nearly the cool factor or popularity.
OK, my example of a 100hp gain is a little exagerrated, but the article did say 70 lbft more torque from just a chip in the VW TDI engine. You can get a little more power from ignition advance and fuel mixture in a naturally aspirated engine, but the only way to get a lot more power from software only is to raise the turbo boost, at least until you hit the limits of detonation and cooling. There's a few engines that are underclocked by the factory and can be easily uncorked by a chip, but they're the exception. One of them is the VW 1.8 turbo engine. They made 150hp, 180hp and 225hp versions of that engine.
I think the gentlemen's agreement is closer to 280hp, and sometimes they'll just advertise 280hp even if it actually makes a lot more. The Skyline GTR was famous for having stronger horses than the other 280hp supercars. And as you say there's also no shortage of aftermarket tuners if that's not enough.
Just like with overclocking CPUs there's two failure modes here:
Engine go boom now. Kind of like having a loose heatsink on an Athlon. The only way to get 100 more hp from just software is if you have a turbo engine with an electronic wastegate. You could tell the computer to crank up the boost without beefing up other parts of the engine, but that's a recipe for a french fried engine.
Accelerated mechanical wear. Kind of like electromigration on an overclocked CPU. Metal fatigue and mechanical wear are gradual processes, and drivetrain parts are designed with a lot of headroom so it won't break right away when you up the power. However, even with a stock engine, parts can wear out very fast if you drive foot to the floor all the time. One big problem is CV joints on a powerful front drive car. Take it easy in first gear where the torque multiplication is the greatest, and your car will thank you.
The most inefficient part of ethanol is the energy needed to distill it. It's much more than the energy needed to refine crude oil into lighter oils like diesel and gasoline. Instead turning corn into ethanol, what's the economics of burning corn oil or some other vegetable oil in a biodiesel (I don't think corn is the cheapest one)?
I did some rough calculations for the hell of it. You can buy 35 lbs of soybean oil for $18 wholesale from Costco. That's about 18L or about $1 per liter. That's a lot more expensive than gas in the US, but not much more expensive than gas in Japan or Europe. That's food grade oil. Inedible oil for biodiesel fuel should be cheaper.
I agree. Not a good value for the money. I priced out the same config for their closest non-gaming laptop, the Inspiron 8600, and it's $2500 after mail in rebate. It has the same screen. The CPU is a Pentium M 1.7 instead of the P4 3.4 (only a little slower and much more practical for battery life). The video chip is a Radeon Mobility 9600 instead of the Radeon Mobility 9700. The Gig of RAM and 7200rpm hard drive are pricey options. You could save $500 by going to 512MB and 5400rpm. Still, if you had to have better gaming performance than the Pentium M 1.7 + Radeon 9600 and damn the battery life, the XPS is the only way to go from Dell. Not my money.
No, it's the same codebase. Big parts of it are rewritten for every release and new parts are written from scratch to support new features, but a lot of it is the same. How else do you explain that most of the security bugs affect every Windows NT version from 4.0 to Server 2003? They were rewritten from scratch with the same mistakes?
This is an interesting place to computerize customer service. You'd think the last bastion of personal service would be your friendly neighborhood Beverly Hills Prada store. I suppose this helps them cater to the "do you know who I am?" customer when they're shopping at Prada in another town.
See Groening's quote from the article:
Last year, Groening told the Hollywood Reporter that South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut was the only movie based on a TV show that wasn't "horrible."
The South Park is the benchmark that they're shooting for in this movie. It's just MHO, but Beavis and Butthead Do America was also based on a TV cartoon and didn't suck. Not as good as South Park, but still good.
The older Palms aren't powerful enough for multimedia, but they're surprisingly useful if you happen to find the right apps. Things like Pocket Quicken to organize your finances, IP subnet calculators, offline web browsers like Avantgo and Plucker (I prefer Plucker myself, it's Free and Avantgo needs registration). You can read ebooks too, but the 160x160 screen is hard on the eyes. The PocketPCs and newer Palms have at least a 320x240 screen. Of course ebooks can mean a lot of different things, like novels to read on a long plane ride, reference books, or Linux HOWTOs. $50 to $80 for one of these is still a non-trivial amount for a starving student, but it's in the realm of affordability.
It's not so much that T1 is a superior technology compared to DSL. DSL can do high upload speeds too. It's that T1 is sold as a business service. So you'll get things like static IPs, no restrictions on hosting servers, dedicated bandwidth to the Internet backbone (or at least shared with fewer users). Back in the olden days, T1s could be sold with charges based on bandwidth usage, but that's very rare now. It's one flat rate, maybe $700/mo, even if it's maxed out all day long.
Short hop flights on Southwest are under $100. They can't jack the price up too much or people will just drive the 5 or 6 hours.
This article is all about projectors. Just about all of them use LCD or DLP to create the picture. The other technologies in the article are also used for projectors. LCOS is new and not in wide use. CRTs are old school and weren't just used for screens. CRT projection TVs have been around since the 70s.
Just to give you some idea of how high our boat is, the US with about 5% of the world population consumes about 1/4 of the world's oil production. If you spread the wealth around without taking into account all boats rising, we'd all be living in third world squalor. If somehow everybody caught up to us overnight economically, it would be an environmental disaster, at least until the oil runs out which might be in 10 years instead of 100.
Can't add a TV tuner to an Xbox. It'll play games and videos, but no way to record.