Also - Apple doesn't dictate a price. If so they could charge $2000 for it. Except at $2000 they would probably make less profit selling fewer phones.
Well yes... but they do, in a way, dictate the price. They make their own decision how much of a potential market they are willing to sacrifice to price it at a higher level, and price it accordingly. It is the actual market demand at whatever price they offer it that determines how much of it will really sell, but you can be sure that if Apple figured they could make more money in the short term off of iPhone sales by having a $2k retail price on it, they would totally do that.
Of course, but if the company observes that they can make more money on the bottom line by charging more, even if it means losing some sales to people that won't pay the difference, there's no reason that a profit-seeking company isn't going to do that unless they are being guided by altruism.
The *only* reason a profit-seeking company has to ever try and make its products more affordable is if they feel that their profits would actually go up as a result. If you have already have a massive audience that is ready to buy virtually anything you put out at almost any price, you don't have much incentive to try and price your products to draw people away from the competition, or else you market your products as so far outside of the league of your competition that there is no reason to expect them to be similarly priced.
Markups like this, in all kinds of industries, are not uncommon, and quite frankly, are to be expected.
It is foolish to expect that a provider of a product will sell a product in retail for as low as they can and still make what they think will be a respectable profit when they can make far more by selling it for the most that they can that people are still willing to buy it for.
Is Apple being greedy? Of course they are... but it's their product, and they have absolutely every right to dictate how much they want the end user to pay for it.
That's because analog can actually represent all possible values in a range, instead of only discrete approximations. It is not necessarily perfect (subject to imperfections in the physical manufacturing process), but it's going to be orders of magnitude more representative of an originally analog signal than any feasible digital reconstruction.
Anyone can observe the effects of being tired from lack of sleep upon their thought processes *FIRST HAND* by, you know, not sleeping.
That we can now apparently scientifically confirm as a fact something that human beings have known about themselves since probably about as long as humans have been around is not something I'd expect to be particularly revolutionary.
If you've already blockaded all physical access to the ports by putting the physical computer behind either a locked panel or door, then policy 2 is superfluous, and only liable to inconvenience people who would otherwise be legitimately authorized to make changes to the system's configuration, and although reversible, is subjectively not significantly better than the aforementioned suggestion of blocking up the ports with glue.
I would think that secure environments would keep the case of a computer behind a locked panel, and not generally allow physical access to it at all. This also has the bonus of being a much more reversible state if or when authorized system administrators need to actually use the port for some purpose.
I'm not saying it's perfect... I'm only saying that the shape of the groove in vinyl physically corresponds to the actual shape of the input signal sound waves, and is thus a more accurate representation of the sound than digital could ever hope to be without moving into the many millions or possibly even billions of samples per second, as you bring the wavelength of the audio down to the size of individual molecules.
I did not allege that digital quality at a sufficiently high enough frequency would not be adequate for all intents and purposes... only that the information density is much lower.
Sure... except that this study didn't actually discover exactly *why* the physiological changes cause impairment, it only discovered exactly what those physiological changes are, and rightly concluded that they are responsible for the impairment that one experiences due to lack of sleep. That's isomorphically identical to the plainly obvious fact that people don't think as well when they are tired, and people get tired from a lack of sleep in the first place.
My point was not to appear to be boastful about how allegedly brilliant I was when I was a child... my point was that I it is evident enough that even a six-year old child could understand this concept entirely well. They might not know all of the science or the details behind exactly how the synaptic nerves in the brain communicate, but the fact that a lack of sleep impairs mental function is something that anyone is going to be able to easily witness, and experience firsthand for themselves, enabling them to know it as well as they ever really need to.
Analog systems can, for all practical purposes, always reproduce analog information, such as sound, more accurately than digital reproduction, assuming that the analog system has a suitable input and output range with respect to the information being recorded.
To represent analog data from sound *entirely* accurately via digital mechanisms, you actually need digital sampling frequencies on the order of hundreds of millions or possibly even billions of hertz. With analog storage of audio in a vinyl record, you get the storage requirements essentially for free by virtue of the physical shapes of the representation of that information which is accurate down to levels that can only be seen with an electron microscope. You suggest that the physical representation of digital data is irrelevant, but it can be entirely relevant when the amount of data that you are wanting to represent will not fit into a usable volume of space because of the physical limitations imposed. You would need no less than several dozen modern high capacity hard drives to faithfully contain all of the audio analog data of even a single side of a vinyl LP as accurately as the LP itself has represented it.
Digital data is far more immune to noise than analog data in communications, which is why is often preferred for many purposes. At the lowest level, however, even digital data is represented by lower level analog systems going all the way down to the molecular level, but the digital system typically has enough redundancy with respect to the underlying analog systems to be able to detect and correct errors that are in the stream in real time. Seriously, this is stuff you'd learn in an entry-level data communications course.
I didn't suggest I did prove it... I suggested, rather, that it didn't need to be proven because it was practically tautologically obvious. Try to stay awake more than a certain number of consecutive hours, and your thought processes get impaired... This has been happening to people for as long as there have been people, and one would have to be nothing short of clueless to think that somehow a more "clinical observation" of the tendency would make this more of a recognized fact than it previously was, or that it ever needed such additional validation.
I'm wondering if the people who come up with this stuff are thinking that if they say something sufficiently mind-numbingly obvious, that everyone's brain will still be too numb to realize that what they are saying has actually been common knowledge for generations.
Obviously the groove that is cut into vinyl cannot be any higher in fidelity than the quality of the original input signal, but any noise and losses in fidelity on the input signal itself, as well as any distortion that might be introduced by the amplifier on output would be no better in a digital reproduction of the audio signal. On a well fabricated record, it could be a faithful representation of the original input signal accurate down to levels where the deviations from true accuracy could only be seen with an electron microscope, and even then, it's still going to be a real analog signal, having a smooth gradient of values anywhere along its input range, while at that same magnification level on a digital medium, all you are going to get is either an on or off state.
Vinyl isn't. The ridges and valleys in the grooves have the same physical shape as the vibrations as the vibrations produced in the air when the record is played. The amplifier used might introduce distorition, but theoretically, you can't get any better at recording audio than direct recreation of the vibrations that are perceived as audio in the first place.
To suggest that vinyl only approximates original sound is like saying that sound itself is just an approximation of sound because it involves moving molecules in the air that are not infinitely small, which have to approximate whatever vibrations were produced initially.
The best of both worlds is not a big deal when neither of the worlds is really any better than an alternative in one of the categories.
NVidia trounces both on graphics. Not to mention far more capable Linux support than either has (even if NVidia's offering is not open source, it's still pretty damn sweet).
The most significant advantage that cassettes ever had over vinyl records was increased amount of portability. It is completely obsoleted by portable media players today. There are those who would suggest that vinyl has not been similarly obsoleted because they would suggest that it offers a superior sound quality to digital sound reproduction by virtue of it being analog, and not having to digitally reconstruct what is only a (high frequency) approximation of the original sound, and it is alleged that the differences can still be perceived by some, even if not necessarily on a conscious level.
How is it wrong for noon to be the point where the sun is highest in the sky?
Bear in mind that the entire point of timekeeping approximates the sun's position in the sky. Otherwise you might as well suggest that everyone switch to UTC, and abolish timezones completely. As has been pointed out elsewhere by comments in this story, that would be an even bigger headache than DST is.
Schools can change their start time so the little children don't have to walk in the scary darkness.
So suddenly, loads of parents end up having to adjust *their* schedules to compensate, so that they don't end up needing to leave their kids alone at home for as much as an hour before school. Via a ripple effect, your proposal would actually end up affecting a majority of adults, causing most people to have to work later in the day and completely negating the extra hour of daylight that you supposedly got in the afternoon.
What is so awful about noon being the time when the sun is the highest in the sky year 'round?
That doesn't work well in higher latitudes, because then you end up with schoolchildren walking to school in the morning while it is still almost pitch black outside through most of December and January. The hour right before sunrise is often both the darkest and coldest period of the night.
Unless you propose that children start and finish school an hour later than they currently do, which could would be an even bigger clusterfuck than DST as tens of millions of adults, via a ripple effect, end up having to adjust their schedules to compensate, forcing them to work later as well, and negating the extra hour of daylight that they might otherwise have had in the evening.
"Standard" time year around makes the most sense. Noon, logically, is when the sun *should* be at its highest in the sky, but on DST, the sun is at that position at 1PM through the summer months.
I never suggested tapping into it wouldn't slow it down... but such a slowdown would likely be all but imperceptible on any scale that wasn't measured in orders of many tens of billions of years.
My point was that it *IS* perpetual for all practical purposes. By the time it might run out, there wouldn't be anyone left in the universe to even observe what had happened.
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Well yes... but they do, in a way, dictate the price. They make their own decision how much of a potential market they are willing to sacrifice to price it at a higher level, and price it accordingly. It is the actual market demand at whatever price they offer it that determines how much of it will really sell, but you can be sure that if Apple figured they could make more money in the short term off of iPhone sales by having a $2k retail price on it, they would totally do that.
The *only* reason a profit-seeking company has to ever try and make its products more affordable is if they feel that their profits would actually go up as a result. If you have already have a massive audience that is ready to buy virtually anything you put out at almost any price, you don't have much incentive to try and price your products to draw people away from the competition, or else you market your products as so far outside of the league of your competition that there is no reason to expect them to be similarly priced.
That was, in fact, exactly what I was saying.
Markups like this, in all kinds of industries, are not uncommon, and quite frankly, are to be expected.
It is foolish to expect that a provider of a product will sell a product in retail for as low as they can and still make what they think will be a respectable profit when they can make far more by selling it for the most that they can that people are still willing to buy it for.
Is Apple being greedy? Of course they are... but it's their product, and they have absolutely every right to dictate how much they want the end user to pay for it.
That's because analog can actually represent all possible values in a range, instead of only discrete approximations. It is not necessarily perfect (subject to imperfections in the physical manufacturing process), but it's going to be orders of magnitude more representative of an originally analog signal than any feasible digital reconstruction.
Not at all... which is kind of my point.
Anyone can observe the effects of being tired from lack of sleep upon their thought processes *FIRST HAND* by, you know, not sleeping.
That we can now apparently scientifically confirm as a fact something that human beings have known about themselves since probably about as long as humans have been around is not something I'd expect to be particularly revolutionary.
If you've already blockaded all physical access to the ports by putting the physical computer behind either a locked panel or door, then policy 2 is superfluous, and only liable to inconvenience people who would otherwise be legitimately authorized to make changes to the system's configuration, and although reversible, is subjectively not significantly better than the aforementioned suggestion of blocking up the ports with glue.
I would think that secure environments would keep the case of a computer behind a locked panel, and not generally allow physical access to it at all. This also has the bonus of being a much more reversible state if or when authorized system administrators need to actually use the port for some purpose.
138 MeV is only about 2*10^-11 joules of energy.
For comparison, a typical AA battery has about 13,000 joules of energy when bought off the shelf.
I'm not saying it's perfect... I'm only saying that the shape of the groove in vinyl physically corresponds to the actual shape of the input signal sound waves, and is thus a more accurate representation of the sound than digital could ever hope to be without moving into the many millions or possibly even billions of samples per second, as you bring the wavelength of the audio down to the size of individual molecules.
I did not allege that digital quality at a sufficiently high enough frequency would not be adequate for all intents and purposes... only that the information density is much lower.
Sure... except that this study didn't actually discover exactly *why* the physiological changes cause impairment, it only discovered exactly what those physiological changes are, and rightly concluded that they are responsible for the impairment that one experiences due to lack of sleep. That's isomorphically identical to the plainly obvious fact that people don't think as well when they are tired, and people get tired from a lack of sleep in the first place.
My point was not to appear to be boastful about how allegedly brilliant I was when I was a child... my point was that I it is evident enough that even a six-year old child could understand this concept entirely well. They might not know all of the science or the details behind exactly how the synaptic nerves in the brain communicate, but the fact that a lack of sleep impairs mental function is something that anyone is going to be able to easily witness, and experience firsthand for themselves, enabling them to know it as well as they ever really need to.
Analog systems can, for all practical purposes, always reproduce analog information, such as sound, more accurately than digital reproduction, assuming that the analog system has a suitable input and output range with respect to the information being recorded.
To represent analog data from sound *entirely* accurately via digital mechanisms, you actually need digital sampling frequencies on the order of hundreds of millions or possibly even billions of hertz. With analog storage of audio in a vinyl record, you get the storage requirements essentially for free by virtue of the physical shapes of the representation of that information which is accurate down to levels that can only be seen with an electron microscope. You suggest that the physical representation of digital data is irrelevant, but it can be entirely relevant when the amount of data that you are wanting to represent will not fit into a usable volume of space because of the physical limitations imposed. You would need no less than several dozen modern high capacity hard drives to faithfully contain all of the audio analog data of even a single side of a vinyl LP as accurately as the LP itself has represented it.
Digital data is far more immune to noise than analog data in communications, which is why is often preferred for many purposes. At the lowest level, however, even digital data is represented by lower level analog systems going all the way down to the molecular level, but the digital system typically has enough redundancy with respect to the underlying analog systems to be able to detect and correct errors that are in the stream in real time. Seriously, this is stuff you'd learn in an entry-level data communications course.
In related news, water is wet.
For fuck sake, I knew that when I was, like, six.
I'm wondering if the people who come up with this stuff are thinking that if they say something sufficiently mind-numbingly obvious, that everyone's brain will still be too numb to realize that what they are saying has actually been common knowledge for generations.
Obviously the groove that is cut into vinyl cannot be any higher in fidelity than the quality of the original input signal, but any noise and losses in fidelity on the input signal itself, as well as any distortion that might be introduced by the amplifier on output would be no better in a digital reproduction of the audio signal. On a well fabricated record, it could be a faithful representation of the original input signal accurate down to levels where the deviations from true accuracy could only be seen with an electron microscope, and even then, it's still going to be a real analog signal, having a smooth gradient of values anywhere along its input range, while at that same magnification level on a digital medium, all you are going to get is either an on or off state.
To suggest that vinyl only approximates original sound is like saying that sound itself is just an approximation of sound because it involves moving molecules in the air that are not infinitely small, which have to approximate whatever vibrations were produced initially.
The best of both worlds is not a big deal when neither of the worlds is really any better than an alternative in one of the categories.
NVidia trounces both on graphics. Not to mention far more capable Linux support than either has (even if NVidia's offering is not open source, it's still pretty damn sweet).
The most significant advantage that cassettes ever had over vinyl records was increased amount of portability. It is completely obsoleted by portable media players today. There are those who would suggest that vinyl has not been similarly obsoleted because they would suggest that it offers a superior sound quality to digital sound reproduction by virtue of it being analog, and not having to digitally reconstruct what is only a (high frequency) approximation of the original sound, and it is alleged that the differences can still be perceived by some, even if not necessarily on a conscious level.
Bear in mind that the entire point of timekeeping approximates the sun's position in the sky. Otherwise you might as well suggest that everyone switch to UTC, and abolish timezones completely. As has been pointed out elsewhere by comments in this story, that would be an even bigger headache than DST is.
Actually, what he is saying is that it is actually a matter of living north of about the 45th parallel.
So suddenly, loads of parents end up having to adjust *their* schedules to compensate, so that they don't end up needing to leave their kids alone at home for as much as an hour before school. Via a ripple effect, your proposal would actually end up affecting a majority of adults, causing most people to have to work later in the day and completely negating the extra hour of daylight that you supposedly got in the afternoon.
What is so awful about noon being the time when the sun is the highest in the sky year 'round?
That doesn't work well in higher latitudes, because then you end up with schoolchildren walking to school in the morning while it is still almost pitch black outside through most of December and January. The hour right before sunrise is often both the darkest and coldest period of the night.
Unless you propose that children start and finish school an hour later than they currently do, which could would be an even bigger clusterfuck than DST as tens of millions of adults, via a ripple effect, end up having to adjust their schedules to compensate, forcing them to work later as well, and negating the extra hour of daylight that they might otherwise have had in the evening.
"Standard" time year around makes the most sense. Noon, logically, is when the sun *should* be at its highest in the sky, but on DST, the sun is at that position at 1PM through the summer months.
I never suggested tapping into it wouldn't slow it down... but such a slowdown would likely be all but imperceptible on any scale that wasn't measured in orders of many tens of billions of years.
My point was that it *IS* perpetual for all practical purposes. By the time it might run out, there wouldn't be anyone left in the universe to even observe what had happened.