You won't notice them in a typical windows/office setup unless you check for them, since you won't be displaying much black on the screen.
If you tell me you bought 35 Dell monitors with no stuck pixels, I just plain won't believe you. It means you didn't check very hard. They may not be as common as my bad luck would show, but they're definatly common enough that in 82,575,360 sub-pixels, you're bound to have at least one that doesn't work properly.
I've bought 4 LCD panels in the last two months. Two from Dell, One from Hyundai, and one from Acer, and all of them have had either dead, or stuck pixels. Each time the manufacturer (reluctantly) replaced the display, but they were there. My wife couldn't see them at all until I shoed her through a jewelers loupe... Of course once you know where they are, they seem to stand out.
Dell doesn't have a "no dead pixels" policy, but if you mention that you're going to return the monitor to their "LCD support center" (I.E. Some cheap warm bodies on the other end of a long phone line to india) they'll replace your display... Just don't be surprised if the one you get is worse. They consider up to 5 dead or stuck pixels "acceptable".
On high resolution displays, stuck sub-pixels are really small. They're hard to see. If you have bought 12 displays and haven't noticed a stuck pixel, chances are you haven't looked hard enough. You almost certainly have at least one. (Or you're incredibly lucky.)
Check out some dead pixel test patterns and see if you missed something. You have to use all of the patterns. They may all look grey when you load them up, but they really are made up of different colors and will test every sub-pixel on your display.
This should be handled through an intelligent court system. Judges aren't machines, they're able to think and reason. They have more remedies at their disposal than debt cancelation. When presented with a filer that has a perfectly servicable degree and working capabilites, they could order temporary debt relief, or debt restructuring instead of cancelation. Taking protection away from honest people isn't the only possible be the solution for abuse of the bankrupcy system.
Wow, you have no clue what you're talking about. Do you think that "personal loans" are a magic low-interest option for everyone? In fact, most personal unsecured loans have a HIGHER interest rate than most credit cards, because it is in cash.
Except I'm not talking about getting a loan in cash. There's more than one kind of loan, many of which are given, not in cash, but for a particular expense. There's no magic in that. Plus when you go through that process, the lender is likely to help you structure your debt in such a way that you avoid bankruptcy in the first place.
Have you ever gone through a credit card debt consolidation process? If you've never seen how it works, you don't have any business telling somebody else they have no clue what they're talking about.
If credit card debt couldn't be canceled with bankruptcy, the card companies wouldn't be able to get away with charging those high rates. Right now they get away with it because companies with lower rates won't issue a card to people with lower credit ratings. If the risk to the companies were reduced, the fierce competition in the credit card market would cause lower-rate cards to force the higher rate cards out of the market.
That wouldn't, however, solve the problem of cards being issued to people who weren't credit worthy. There would have to be some other method of solving that problem.
Because, as it turns out, most credit card debt related bankruptices are not due to Joe Q Public buying a $10,000 plasma TV and stuff and then just filing. It turns out half are due to life-threatening medical expenses (cancer, coronary, etc). The new legislation just creates a sort of indentured servitude to the medical industry. They can charge whatever they want (you do want to live right?) and then even if you declare bankruptcy you cant escape.
Ok, so what if we were more specific than just saying "Credit Card" debt, or exclude credit card debt in general, but make exceptions if you can prove you got that debt in a particular way?
You shouldn't have to do that though. There are loans that people can get for these types of things that aren't through a credit card. If you can get a credit card with a $10,000 limit, you probably can get a personal loan from a bank for $10,000 (though they may require you to cancel that credit card as part of the approval). The difference is that you can use a credit card to buy *anything*. There's no accountablity. When you look at somebody's bottom line you don't know if that credit card debt was due to them acting irresponsibly or not... Though, if you ask me, putting medical expenses on a high interest rate credit line like a credit card instead of applying for a personal loan is irresponsible.
They can charge whatever they want (you do want to live right?)
Part of that is due to the fact that a majority of people are insulated from knowing what they (their government/insurance company) is charged for their healthcare. There is no societal backpressure on prices because most people don't feel the actual costs. It would be interesting to see what would happen if people had to sign off on a fee disclosure form when they visited a doctor, even if it was being direct-billed to an insurance company. I'd like to think that most people would start asking why when they saw some of the outrageous prices.
Now they want to do the same with other kinds of consumer debt. Bastards.
Bankruptcy law is supposed to protect society, not individuals. Why should somebody have the right to run up credit card debt and get a way out later on? How does that benefit society?
If your debt was incured in a manner that would, had your investment payed off, have had a net societal benefit, it should be dischargeable. Otherwise you should have to suck it up and keep paying until you keel over dead. Want to start a business? Build a home? Have a child or two? That's fine. If it doesn't work out and you haven't done anything shady, you should be protected. Want to buy a big screen TV, an xbox, and a bunch of takeout pizza on your Visa card when you don't have a job? Tough.
It is unfortunate that student loan debt is excluded. That's exactly the kind of financial risk that the government should be encouraging people to take, not discouraging. They should take that law and swap the words "student loan" for "credit card."
To request the modern O/S to dismount the drive and eject the media, if possible?
There are already buttons for that on the screen. Why do you need another one? There also aren't any OSs I can think of that work that way. (Windows doesn't).
I actually like those old CDROM drives...
CD-ROM drives are read only. They don't count. There's no data loss penalty from ejecting whenever. There are also plenty of macs with normal sized eject button on the CD drive. Every mac I own has one.
Also find it annoying to have to dismount USB drives before pulling them out.
You would also probably find it annoying if your flash drive was as slow as it would be if your OS didn't use the write caching that makes the unmount required. If not, just turn it off (mount in sync mode, or whatever your OS of choice calls it) and you won't have to worry about pulling the drive unless you care about a particular write that happens to be in progress. You'll wear out your flash more quickly from the redundant writes though.
There are something like 6 mobile phone companies [...] It is very cheap to make calls in Hong Kong, free SMS, voicemail, call forwarding. Free calls within the network for designated numbers (Girl Friend to BF for instance) - and most crucially - you pay to both make AND receive calls on your mobile phone. [...] land lines do NOT pay a toll to call a mobile.
That's pretty much how it is in the US now too.
The main reason people don't buy their phones at retail in the US is because most cell networks in the US use incompatable technology. This is the *real* reason that phone tech has lagged behind in the US. We're mostly caught up with the rest of the world at this point though.
Shipping a machine without a feature in order to "force" them to use another feature is an example of high-handed "morality" being handed down from on high.
Except that's not what happened. Users of the older technology were supported through an inexpensive adapter. It wasn't the users who were forced to upgrade, it was the makers of perhipherals that were forced to upgrade.
It is not even true: at the time the iMac came out, many Intel PCs had USB ports built in, and more were adding them all the time.
While this is true, devices that used these ports weren't being developed. While USB was a potential boon to customers, manufacturers had no incentive to upgrade their existing products.
[...] some department head who somehow thinks it is immoral to [...]
Immoral? Give me a break. There are only two possible reasons that Apple would have made the decision that they did: It saved money, and/or they thought it would improve the user experience. Apple has never cut corners in the manufacture of their products just to save a few bucks, so you'd have a hard time convincing me that the first of those reasons was the only one. Looking at what USB turned into after the iMac came out makes it a hard sell that their decision didn't ultimately lead to a better user experience than what would have been otherwise. Most of all, however, I'm sure morality didn't have anything to do with it.
A CD is a poor replacement for a floppy because of the slow speed of burning.
A 2X CD-R drive burns at 300kB/s. That's a full floppy disk worth in 4 seconds. Good luck finding a (non-USB) floppy drive that can fill a disk in under 30 seconds. CD-R drives have *always* been faster than floppies. Since you can boot off of them too, the moment blanks became cheaper than floppies, CD-Rs were a superior solution. The only thing anybody has needed a floppy disk for in the last 5 years is to read data off of pre-existing disks.
[...] Either way, these design decisions are not in the interests of the users. [...] Shouldn't the decision to replace a printer be made because the old one is broken, or the new one has a nice photo feature you want?
Once again, it's not the *users* who were forced to upgrade. It was the *manufacturers*. Users needed only to buy an adapter. The design decisions *were* in the interests of the users becuase it forced manufactures to make products using the newer, better technology available instead of continuing to pump out the older technology. Hell, Microsoft didn't even bother to properly support USB in Windows until the explosion of USB devices caused by the release of the iMac occured. Sure the ports were there, but did you ever try plugging something into one of them under Windows 95, or Windows 98 before the USB patch was released?
To be fair though, unlike with phone service, you always have competition for television programming in the form of satelite. All comcast can do about satelite TV is make obnoxious ads and lie to their customers about how terrible and expensive it is.
Since it's actually cheaper and (in my experience) more reliable, I'm surprised they've never been sued over those ads.
This is true now, but not when the iMac came out. Back then, it was missing something that was needed.
Taking the ports away a few years down the road when few miss them is not a bad idea. Shipping computers without ports or devices that most users need (and have had up to that point) and somehow saying that this loss is a good thing is a bad idea.
Something has to drive the technology forward. What Apple did spurred the creation of the USB device market; a market that was invented by intel, but was failing to catch on because it wasn't "better enough" compared to the legacy ports. Had they not done it, perhaps the parallel port would still be "needed".
Apple also ditched the floppy drive with the iMac and replaced it with a recordable CD drive. You don't hear anybody complaining about that anymore. (Come to think of it, other than in this one thread you don't hear anybody complaining about the lack of a parallel port except in this one thread either...)
The guy appeared to be complaining that the iMac was a step backwards in that you had to buy a dongle to do what the previous Macs did without extra hardware and hassle.
That is absolutely untrue. You could still hook up a printer with no dongle. It just had to be a modern printer.
What do you think the utilization percentage of parallel ports is these days? There are over 400 computers in the building I'm in right now, and not a single one of them has something connected to the parallel port. Considering apple printers didn't use the parallel port before this, the percentage would be even less on macs. Not putting a parallel port on the iMac was a good thing. If only PC manufacturers would figure it out...
No way would Dell or Gateway get away with Apple's "We are forcing you to use only USB for your own good"...
Are you actually arguing that it is a good thing that Apple makes it harder for users to use other printers?
Yes.
If they make a million computers and have to pay a buck a port... It's unlikely that many users would ever use the port. New printers use the port they included.
Typical PC makers still build in these ports.
So what?
Plus, I think you'd be surprised how many PCs are legacy port free these days.
Can you imagine the screaming, fuming, pissing match that would have commenced if IBM has designed their PC to only function with IBM Brand printers??
Oh please.
Apple didn't design their computers to function only with Apple branded printers. You're stretching things more than just a bit. All they did was choose not to build in an obsolete port. Apple printers used ADB ports, and they didn't put one of those on the iMac either.
Do you think that computer makers should continue to support every port they ever had on their machines? After a few decades we would end up with hundreds of ports on the back.
The fact of the matter is that your complaint that you had to buy a USB to parallel adapter to use an old printer on your iMac is a stupid complaint.
You can't multitask with video like you can with text. Unless somebody can figure out how to carry on several independant conversations at once using video, text will continue to be king.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I would have loved to have one of those in, say, 1990. Maybe I would have left the basement more often.
Yeah, yeah... ShoWed. I mistyped and left out the 'W'.
That's assuming 1024x768 resolution, BTW....
What about pixels that are stuck 'on'?
You won't notice them in a typical windows/office setup unless you check for them, since you won't be displaying much black on the screen.
If you tell me you bought 35 Dell monitors with no stuck pixels, I just plain won't believe you. It means you didn't check very hard. They may not be as common as my bad luck would show, but they're definatly common enough that in 82,575,360 sub-pixels, you're bound to have at least one that doesn't work properly.
So, I'm not sure where you get that "Dell doesn't have a "no dead pixels" policy" statement from...
Perhaps they have a different policy for small business customers than for home customers.
It would explain the seemingly nonsencical insistance of classifying every customer before letting you in to their website past the homepage.
Not an option really on laptops...
In general I do. I've got two 21" CRTs on my desk. But I don't want a 15" CRT in my Acer laptop, for example...
You're lucky.
I've bought 4 LCD panels in the last two months. Two from Dell, One from Hyundai, and one from Acer, and all of them have had either dead, or stuck pixels. Each time the manufacturer (reluctantly) replaced the display, but they were there. My wife couldn't see them at all until I shoed her through a jewelers loupe... Of course once you know where they are, they seem to stand out.
Dell doesn't have a "no dead pixels" policy, but if you mention that you're going to return the monitor to their "LCD support center" (I.E. Some cheap warm bodies on the other end of a long phone line to india) they'll replace your display... Just don't be surprised if the one you get is worse. They consider up to 5 dead or stuck pixels "acceptable".
On high resolution displays, stuck sub-pixels are really small. They're hard to see. If you have bought 12 displays and haven't noticed a stuck pixel, chances are you haven't looked hard enough. You almost certainly have at least one. (Or you're incredibly lucky.)
Check out some dead pixel test patterns and see if you missed something. You have to use all of the patterns. They may all look grey when you load them up, but they really are made up of different colors and will test every sub-pixel on your display.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144160&thresho ld=1&commentsort=3&tid=123&mode=thread&pid=1208201 7#12082586
This should be handled through an intelligent court system. Judges aren't machines, they're able to think and reason. They have more remedies at their disposal than debt cancelation. When presented with a filer that has a perfectly servicable degree and working capabilites, they could order temporary debt relief, or debt restructuring instead of cancelation. Taking protection away from honest people isn't the only possible be the solution for abuse of the bankrupcy system.
Wow, you have no clue what you're talking about. Do you think that "personal loans" are a magic low-interest option for everyone? In fact, most personal unsecured loans have a HIGHER interest rate than most credit cards, because it is in
cash.
Except I'm not talking about getting a loan in cash. There's more than one kind of loan, many of which are given, not in cash, but for a particular expense. There's no magic in that. Plus when you go through that process, the lender is likely to help you structure your debt in such a way that you avoid bankruptcy in the first place.
Have you ever gone through a credit card debt consolidation process? If you've never seen how it works, you don't have any business telling somebody else they have no clue what they're talking about.
If credit card debt couldn't be canceled with bankruptcy, the card companies wouldn't be able to get away with charging those high rates. Right now they get away with it because companies with lower rates won't issue a card to people with lower credit ratings. If the risk to the companies were reduced, the fierce competition in the credit card market would cause lower-rate cards to force the higher rate cards out of the market.
That wouldn't, however, solve the problem of cards being issued to people who weren't credit worthy. There would have to be some other method of solving that problem.
Because, as it turns out, most credit card debt related bankruptices are not due to Joe Q Public buying a $10,000 plasma TV and stuff and then just filing. It turns out half are due to life-threatening medical expenses (cancer, coronary, etc). The new legislation just creates a sort of indentured servitude to the medical industry. They can charge whatever they want (you do want to live right?) and then even if you declare bankruptcy you cant escape.
Ok, so what if we were more specific than just saying "Credit Card" debt, or exclude credit card debt in general, but make exceptions if you can prove you got that debt in a particular way?
You shouldn't have to do that though. There are loans that people can get for these types of things that aren't through a credit card. If you can get a credit card with a $10,000 limit, you probably can get a personal loan from a bank for $10,000 (though they may require you to cancel that credit card as part of the approval). The difference is that you can use a credit card to buy *anything*. There's no accountablity. When you look at somebody's bottom line you don't know if that credit card debt was due to them acting irresponsibly or not... Though, if you ask me, putting medical expenses on a high interest rate credit line like a credit card instead of applying for a personal loan is irresponsible.
They can charge whatever they want (you do want to live right?)
Part of that is due to the fact that a majority of people are insulated from knowing what they (their government/insurance company) is charged for their healthcare. There is no societal backpressure on prices because most people don't feel the actual costs. It would be interesting to see what would happen if people had to sign off on a fee disclosure form when they visited a doctor, even if it was being direct-billed to an insurance company. I'd like to think that most people would start asking why when they saw some of the outrageous prices.
Now they want to do the same with other kinds of consumer debt. Bastards.
Bankruptcy law is supposed to protect society, not individuals. Why should somebody have the right to run up credit card debt and get a way out later on? How does that benefit society?
If your debt was incured in a manner that would, had your investment payed off, have had a net societal benefit, it should be dischargeable. Otherwise you should have to suck it up and keep paying until you keel over dead. Want to start a business? Build a home? Have a child or two? That's fine. If it doesn't work out and you haven't done anything shady, you should be protected. Want to buy a big screen TV, an xbox, and a bunch of takeout pizza on your Visa card when you don't have a job? Tough.
It is unfortunate that student loan debt is excluded. That's exactly the kind of financial risk that the government should be encouraging people to take, not discouraging. They should take that law and swap the words "student loan" for "credit card."
So are you trying to say that President Bush has anything whatsoever to do with who our next president will be?
So, you don't like him. That's poor justification for accepting somebody else who is bad, though perhaps in a lesser way from some perspective.
Interestingly, taking it out of context doesn't change the meaning any.
Clearly, you can't be trusted with your money... Or your Grand Theft Auto sequels I guess.
I wonder who's track she want's America to get back on. Not any track I want to be heading down, that's for sure.
I quick google search on this shows that this is intended to repeal tax cuts, and has nothing to do with ethics.
I find it interesting that you think the amount we are taxed has nothing to do with ethics.
The quote in context means exactly what you'd expect it to mean out of context, just that by "things" she means your money.
To request the modern O/S to dismount the drive and eject the media, if possible?
There are already buttons for that on the screen. Why do you need another one? There also aren't any OSs I can think of that work that way. (Windows doesn't).
I actually like those old CDROM drives...
CD-ROM drives are read only. They don't count. There's no data loss penalty from ejecting whenever. There are also plenty of macs with normal sized eject button on the CD drive. Every mac I own has one.
Also find it annoying to have to dismount USB drives before pulling them out.
You would also probably find it annoying if your flash drive was as slow as it would be if your OS didn't use the write caching that makes the unmount required. If not, just turn it off (mount in sync mode, or whatever your OS of choice calls it) and you won't have to worry about pulling the drive unless you care about a particular write that happens to be in progress. You'll wear out your flash more quickly from the redundant writes though.
There are something like 6 mobile phone companies [...] It is very cheap to make calls in Hong Kong, free SMS, voicemail, call forwarding. Free calls within the network for designated numbers (Girl Friend to BF for instance) - and most crucially - you pay to both make AND receive calls on your mobile phone. [...] land lines do NOT pay a toll to call a mobile.
That's pretty much how it is in the US now too.
The main reason people don't buy their phones at retail in the US is because most cell networks in the US use incompatable technology. This is the *real* reason that phone tech has lagged behind in the US. We're mostly caught up with the rest of the world at this point though.
Shipping a machine without a feature in order to "force" them to use another feature is an example of high-handed "morality" being handed down from on high.
Except that's not what happened. Users of the older technology were supported through an inexpensive adapter. It wasn't the users who were forced to upgrade, it was the makers of perhipherals that were forced to upgrade.
It is not even true: at the time the iMac came out, many Intel PCs had USB ports built in, and more were adding them all the time.
While this is true, devices that used these ports weren't being developed. While USB was a potential boon to customers, manufacturers had no incentive to upgrade their existing products.
[...] some department head who somehow thinks it is immoral to [...]
Immoral? Give me a break. There are only two possible reasons that Apple would have made the decision that they did: It saved money, and/or they thought it would improve the user experience. Apple has never cut corners in the manufacture of their products just to save a few bucks, so you'd have a hard time convincing me that the first of those reasons was the only one. Looking at what USB turned into after the iMac came out makes it a hard sell that their decision didn't ultimately lead to a better user experience than what would have been otherwise. Most of all, however, I'm sure morality didn't have anything to do with it.
A CD is a poor replacement for a floppy because of the slow speed of burning.
A 2X CD-R drive burns at 300kB/s. That's a full floppy disk worth in 4 seconds. Good luck finding a (non-USB) floppy drive that can fill a disk in under 30 seconds. CD-R drives have *always* been faster than floppies. Since you can boot off of them too, the moment blanks became cheaper than floppies, CD-Rs were a superior solution. The only thing anybody has needed a floppy disk for in the last 5 years is to read data off of pre-existing disks.
[...] Either way, these design decisions are not in the interests of the users. [...] Shouldn't the decision to replace a printer be made because the old one is broken, or the new one has a nice photo feature you want?
Once again, it's not the *users* who were forced to upgrade. It was the *manufacturers*. Users needed only to buy an adapter. The design decisions *were* in the interests of the users becuase it forced manufactures to make products using the newer, better technology available instead of continuing to pump out the older technology. Hell, Microsoft didn't even bother to properly support USB in Windows until the explosion of USB devices caused by the release of the iMac occured. Sure the ports were there, but did you ever try plugging something into one of them under Windows 95, or Windows 98 before the USB patch was released?
To be fair though, unlike with phone service, you always have competition for television programming in the form of satelite. All comcast can do about satelite TV is make obnoxious ads and lie to their customers about how terrible and expensive it is.
Since it's actually cheaper and (in my experience) more reliable, I'm surprised they've never been sued over those ads.
This is true now, but not when the iMac came out. Back then, it was missing something that was needed.
Taking the ports away a few years down the road when few miss them is not a bad idea. Shipping computers without ports or devices that most users need (and have had up to that point) and somehow saying that this loss is a good thing is a bad idea.
Something has to drive the technology forward. What Apple did spurred the creation of the USB device market; a market that was invented by intel, but was failing to catch on because it wasn't "better enough" compared to the legacy ports. Had they not done it, perhaps the parallel port would still be "needed".
Apple also ditched the floppy drive with the iMac and replaced it with a recordable CD drive. You don't hear anybody complaining about that anymore. (Come to think of it, other than in this one thread you don't hear anybody complaining about the lack of a parallel port except in this one thread either...)
The guy appeared to be complaining that the iMac was a step backwards in that you had to buy a dongle to do what the previous Macs did without extra hardware and hassle.
That is absolutely untrue. You could still hook up a printer with no dongle. It just had to be a modern printer.
What do you think the utilization percentage of parallel ports is these days? There are over 400 computers in the building I'm in right now, and not a single one of them has something connected to the parallel port. Considering apple printers didn't use the parallel port before this, the percentage would be even less on macs. Not putting a parallel port on the iMac was a good thing. If only PC manufacturers would figure it out...
No way would Dell or Gateway get away with Apple's "We are forcing you to use only USB for your own good"...
Oh really?
Are you actually arguing that it is a good thing that Apple makes it harder for users to use other printers?
Yes.
If they make a million computers and have to pay a buck a port... It's unlikely that many users would ever use the port. New printers use the port they included.
Typical PC makers still build in these ports.
So what?
Plus, I think you'd be surprised how many PCs are legacy port free these days.
Can you imagine the screaming, fuming, pissing match that would have commenced if IBM has designed their PC to only function with IBM Brand printers??
Oh please.
Apple didn't design their computers to function only with Apple branded printers. You're stretching things more than just a bit. All they did was choose not to build in an obsolete port. Apple printers used ADB ports, and they didn't put one of those on the iMac either.
Do you think that computer makers should continue to support every port they ever had on their machines? After a few decades we would end up with hundreds of ports on the back.
The fact of the matter is that your complaint that you had to buy a USB to parallel adapter to use an old printer on your iMac is a stupid complaint.
I doubt it.
You can't multitask with video like you can with text. Unless somebody can figure out how to carry on several independant conversations at once using video, text will continue to be king.