Salespeople in many industries are very knowledgable, and are actually capable of listening to your needs and making informed, educated choices to guide you to the right purchase. The primary problem with electronics, however, is that many of the shops they visited pay their employees close to minimum wage, possibly with a marginal commission enticement.
I think that is a big problem for nearly any retail store, not just ones that sell electronics. Electronic products are generally more complex than others, so that compounds the problem.
It's not in the store's best interest to educate people on what things do, very often people won't "get it". For example, my dad keeps harping on the speed of his computer, somehow thinking that he needs a faster computer when it is the internet service that is the weakest link. I'm not very far from yelling at him the next time he complains, because his computer is fine and I don't want him to spend $600 and complain that it was wasted.
I would imagine that those drives are being continually accessed. Besides, any time a drive is powered down, you get a very slight chance that it won't start back up again. That is why drives have a rated number of start-stop cycles. In a RAID, it's not that big of a deal, but it is still more expensive than the minor cost savings you might get from powering the drive down only to start it up again in a few minutes. For home use, I can see it being worthwhile as the drive might not be used except a few hours a day, though say, torrenting directly to the drive is going to prevent a drive sleep.
This is one reason I would like AMD to get serious about making chipsets, although that might give them added incentive to do a Broadcom and make their own chips to be a non-standard implementation just to be evil.
Most of the problems I get with a computer are with those that use chipsets of a different brand as the processor, generally the low end ones though, because I've had very good experiences with a system that had a Serverworks brand chipset.
Those panels are removable. Among other things, they are there to reduce the psychological affect of adjacent colors of surrounding objects possibly distorting the percieved colors.
LCD tech can easily have better sharpness than CRT. There used to be LCD panels that could display 200dpi, the IBM T221 and there was a Viewsonic too, with a 3840x2400 native panel. Some laptops are available in something like 1920x1200 in a 15" display. I have not seen a CRT that can display that resolution, the phosphor dot pitch simply isn't there.
Clear type doesn't sacrifice sharpness unless it is improperly set. I hate Cleartype because it turns the edges of text into a rainbow, so I just turn it off.
I am in the same boat. There is no way to sufficiently dim the backlight for me. Unfortunately, there are too many wankers that look at the rated brightness as a good thing, and a lower rated brightness as a bad thing. Screens are already way too bright. There is no way to sufficiently dim a flourescent backlight, maybe with LED backlights the story will change, though I think there may be a flicker issue if they don't is a high enough of a switching frequency, another issue I see with monitors. LCD panels themselves may be stable, but the backlights still might flicker at 60Hz.
These may be the same dolts that look at the watt rating of a sound system and automatically make quality assumptions based only on that number and not on other considerations when in reality, they might only be running their sound system at less than 1W per channel because most speakers are incredibly efficient.
Back to monitors, I am considering buying neutral density filters to put between the backlight and the panel. That is likely to void warranties but might be more comfortable.
The thing you need to understand is that most buyers don't understand concerns about color accuracy, if it looks better to their untrained eye, then the picture quality must be better. If they see an image that looks vibrant, they will chose that over an image that is accurate. This is especially the case with TVs. Many monitors and TVs are set at 9300K or higher because phosphors (in both CRTs and LCD backlights) are more efficient at the blue end of the spectrum, and thus, brighter. So a display that is blue-heavy will look brighter on the retail floor.
Another thing that applies more to TVs is that there is a thing called edge enhancement that makes things seem sharper, but will actually reduce image detail. The people that don't know the difference will generally prefer the set with more edge enhancement because of the psychological affect that it has.
The fact that these two issues plague the TV world is the reason I am not surprised that a monitor maker would use something that exaggerates colors a bit.
Thank you, John. C. Dvorak. I'd like to know what you are smoking so the rest of us can get some.
I don't think it looks like every other monitor, in fact, I haven't seen any other monitor that has a stand that looks like that. The machined metal look on the stand is the thing that I almost never see.
The OS, or at least the OS API seems to be the one rendering text, stock buttons and such, and there is no way to take a linear unit of measurement to make an object of a certain size and expect it to be the same on all computers, 1cm on one screen is.75 on another. I would like a 12 point font to show up as a smooth font on a higher DPI display, but what that does is screw up a lot of dialogue boxes. I think Vista supports this. Whether IE7 would support it is a different issue, it will only if there is a demand for it.
Keep in mind that was the old Supreme Court, before two Bush cronies were affirmed, so the ruling on the same thing might not get the same ruling now. Also, generally, people that oppose a given ruling try again and again to get it reversed, changing their tactics slightly every time in the hope that something sticks. This is a given, no matter what agenda or political affiliation there is.
Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
The linked article said that there were no photographs of actual children. Just drawings.
Another issue with your claims is that the power needed to operate a CMOS digital circuit goes up not linearly but by the square. A circuit that operates at 20GHz would consume about 100x the power as the same circuit that operates at 2GHz. I'm not aware of any commercial digital IC that can operate at 20GHz anyway.
Heh, in that vein you could add a dual Opteron single-board computer into one of the expansion slots...
I'm not certain of the cost of the T1 systems, but I would think that if FPU is important, you'd rather just go for a dual-dual-core server. The T1 systems are compatible with more memory though, 32GB for the T1000 vs 16GB for what I've seen in the AMD dual processor workstations.
That problem had been solved for Alpha computers around 1992. I was able to choose from any standard PCI video card, though driver support in the OS was a different issue. There may be some patent issues though, so the approach might need to be different.
...Web 2.0 is a buzzword itself. I've seen an article that showed that many of the "Web 2.0" technologies are largely older technologies that have been renamed and rehyped, this time around, they took hold.
It is called copyright infringement for a reason, in part, because it is the truth and the simplest way to accurately explain it. Stealing and piracy are simply a more provocative ways to say it, and that is why it is used, it isn't necessarily supposed to be the most accurate way.
Stealing can be defined as depriving the rightful owner of the use of an object. It might also be defined as taking something which you do not have the right to have, such as a copy that wasn't legally distributed or legally duplicated.
I don't see why people think they should have the right to redistribute music and the right to have infringing copies. It's a luxury item, not some intrinsic right. There are plenty of good independent musicians that give away some of their music, so there is plenty of non-infringing music to be had. I don't think you are losing anything by respecting the copyright.
Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.
I'm sorry, but what? Like the movie studios, "Pirates" only care about their bottom line, but the key difference is that they don't have to fund the making of the movie, they just duplicate someone else's product, which costs nothing to do. It's a bottom-feeding type product and shouldn't be supported. If it is worth watching, then the people that funded and made that video should get compensation for the work. If you have disagreements with the original makers, then don't watch it at all, there is little justification to do that, it only adds ammunition to their claim that piracy is hurting them.
I don't really want to hassle with changing what's on there when I get bored of the selection.
You don't have to. I have my iTunes auto-rotate tracks on my 4GB nano. It's not obvious, but what you can do is sync the unit to one or more smart playlists. The smart playlists are set to randomly select a certain number of tracks that have been played less than "X" number of times. Right now, my "X" is "1". Once it has been played, it is removed and another track replaces it. With this scheme, I think I can do very well with a 1GB nano.
I've seen product tear-downs that showed the current nano had two flash chips in the 4GB version, one in the 2GB version. Some might have two 1GB chips if it was more cost-effective. So an 8GB nano would have two two 4GB chips. Of course, bare flash chips are rated in bits, not bytes, so the chips might be 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb for the respective sizes.
It might be more realistic to expect to see a 6GB version (1x 4GB and 1x 2GB chip) and the 4 and 2 GB models pushed down in price $50 each.
I think it is likely the fault of the RIAA members that the "artists" are interchangeable, so I don't see why they should be getting $10 for the $0.60 that they give to the band. I wouldn't be surprised if the songwriters get paid out of that $0.60 too. Sound engineering is costly but I doubt that accounts for much of a CD. I wonder how much of that money goes for payola and how much goes towards the lawyers.
The artists seem to be wising up as the RIAA isn't managing to sign as many bands as they have before.
I too don't see how concert pricing has anything to do CD purchases. Anyone willing to pay $100+ per person for a few hours of entertainment probably already has all the CDs (and DVDs). The musician doesn't get much of the profit out of a given CD sale anyway, a few dollars at best, so $100 vs. $103 (realistically $100 vs. $101 or less).
Other merchandising doesn't count for this argument unless you can "share" it by P2P.
I do have a few Xeon-based workstations that are "side cooling" or whatever, their ages are something like 4-5 years now, the systems were designed to work with chips running up to 2.8GHz. It's ducted too, so the air goes straight out the case, and the entire system is surprisingly quiet. It doesn't have fancy liquid cooling, heat pipes or anything special other than an ordinary aluminum heat sink and a fan.
Come to think of it, I have an old Alpha that uses side cooling, draws in fresh air from the front, that was made in 1997. I guess the "enthusiast" market is just behind the times.
I think a bigger question is whether they have a business model and whether it is sustainable. With some of these companies the VC are funding, I just don't see the sustainability. I think YouTube got money recently, but I doubt YouTube will be worth anything once the money is gone.
It's probably not about TVs but set top boxes, I think Philips can or does make some. The end user doesn't always choose set top boxes, the video service does. I think Comcast might be arrogant enough to use this.
They can also try to licence it out, big companies often make cross-licencing arrangements to get the technology they want.
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Salespeople in many industries are very knowledgable, and are actually capable of listening to your needs and making informed, educated choices to guide you to the right purchase. The primary problem with electronics, however, is that many of the shops they visited pay their employees close to minimum wage, possibly with a marginal commission enticement.
I think that is a big problem for nearly any retail store, not just ones that sell electronics. Electronic products are generally more complex than others, so that compounds the problem.
It's not in the store's best interest to educate people on what things do, very often people won't "get it". For example, my dad keeps harping on the speed of his computer, somehow thinking that he needs a faster computer when it is the internet service that is the weakest link. I'm not very far from yelling at him the next time he complains, because his computer is fine and I don't want him to spend $600 and complain that it was wasted.
I would imagine that those drives are being continually accessed. Besides, any time a drive is powered down, you get a very slight chance that it won't start back up again. That is why drives have a rated number of start-stop cycles. In a RAID, it's not that big of a deal, but it is still more expensive than the minor cost savings you might get from powering the drive down only to start it up again in a few minutes. For home use, I can see it being worthwhile as the drive might not be used except a few hours a day, though say, torrenting directly to the drive is going to prevent a drive sleep.
This is one reason I would like AMD to get serious about making chipsets, although that might give them added incentive to do a Broadcom and make their own chips to be a non-standard implementation just to be evil.
Most of the problems I get with a computer are with those that use chipsets of a different brand as the processor, generally the low end ones though, because I've had very good experiences with a system that had a Serverworks brand chipset.
I would suggest that you not buy this:
5 3
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=107
Those panels are removable. Among other things, they are there to reduce the psychological affect of adjacent colors of surrounding objects possibly distorting the percieved colors.
LCD tech can easily have better sharpness than CRT. There used to be LCD panels that could display 200dpi, the IBM T221 and there was a Viewsonic too, with a 3840x2400 native panel. Some laptops are available in something like 1920x1200 in a 15" display. I have not seen a CRT that can display that resolution, the phosphor dot pitch simply isn't there.
Clear type doesn't sacrifice sharpness unless it is improperly set. I hate Cleartype because it turns the edges of text into a rainbow, so I just turn it off.
I am in the same boat. There is no way to sufficiently dim the backlight for me. Unfortunately, there are too many wankers that look at the rated brightness as a good thing, and a lower rated brightness as a bad thing. Screens are already way too bright. There is no way to sufficiently dim a flourescent backlight, maybe with LED backlights the story will change, though I think there may be a flicker issue if they don't is a high enough of a switching frequency, another issue I see with monitors. LCD panels themselves may be stable, but the backlights still might flicker at 60Hz.
These may be the same dolts that look at the watt rating of a sound system and automatically make quality assumptions based only on that number and not on other considerations when in reality, they might only be running their sound system at less than 1W per channel because most speakers are incredibly efficient.
Back to monitors, I am considering buying neutral density filters to put between the backlight and the panel. That is likely to void warranties but might be more comfortable.
I will try to explain it.
The thing you need to understand is that most buyers don't understand concerns about color accuracy, if it looks better to their untrained eye, then the picture quality must be better. If they see an image that looks vibrant, they will chose that over an image that is accurate. This is especially the case with TVs. Many monitors and TVs are set at 9300K or higher because phosphors (in both CRTs and LCD backlights) are more efficient at the blue end of the spectrum, and thus, brighter. So a display that is blue-heavy will look brighter on the retail floor.
Another thing that applies more to TVs is that there is a thing called edge enhancement that makes things seem sharper, but will actually reduce image detail. The people that don't know the difference will generally prefer the set with more edge enhancement because of the psychological affect that it has.
The fact that these two issues plague the TV world is the reason I am not surprised that a monitor maker would use something that exaggerates colors a bit.
Thank you, John. C. Dvorak. I'd like to know what you are smoking so the rest of us can get some.
I don't think it looks like every other monitor, in fact, I haven't seen any other monitor that has a stand that looks like that. The machined metal look on the stand is the thing that I almost never see.
The OS, or at least the OS API seems to be the one rendering text, stock buttons and such, and there is no way to take a linear unit of measurement to make an object of a certain size and expect it to be the same on all computers, 1cm on one screen is .75 on another. I would like a 12 point font to show up as a smooth font on a higher DPI display, but what that does is screw up a lot of dialogue boxes. I think Vista supports this. Whether IE7 would support it is a different issue, it will only if there is a demand for it.
Keep in mind that was the old Supreme Court, before two Bush cronies were affirmed, so the ruling on the same thing might not get the same ruling now. Also, generally, people that oppose a given ruling try again and again to get it reversed, changing their tactics slightly every time in the hope that something sticks. This is a given, no matter what agenda or political affiliation there is.
Actually, if I remember correctly, Mr. Whorely also possessed *actual* child pornography. However, the non-photographic artwork that he possessed weighed heavily upon his sentence.
The linked article said that there were no photographs of actual children. Just drawings.
Another issue with your claims is that the power needed to operate a CMOS digital circuit goes up not linearly but by the square. A circuit that operates at 20GHz would consume about 100x the power as the same circuit that operates at 2GHz. I'm not aware of any commercial digital IC that can operate at 20GHz anyway.
Heh, in that vein you could add a dual Opteron single-board computer into one of the expansion slots...
I'm not certain of the cost of the T1 systems, but I would think that if FPU is important, you'd rather just go for a dual-dual-core server. The T1 systems are compatible with more memory though, 32GB for the T1000 vs 16GB for what I've seen in the AMD dual processor workstations.
That problem had been solved for Alpha computers around 1992. I was able to choose from any standard PCI video card, though driver support in the OS was a different issue. There may be some patent issues though, so the approach might need to be different.
...Web 2.0 is a buzzword itself. I've seen an article that showed that many of the "Web 2.0" technologies are largely older technologies that have been renamed and rehyped, this time around, they took hold.
It is called copyright infringement for a reason, in part, because it is the truth and the simplest way to accurately explain it. Stealing and piracy are simply a more provocative ways to say it, and that is why it is used, it isn't necessarily supposed to be the most accurate way.
Stealing can be defined as depriving the rightful owner of the use of an object. It might also be defined as taking something which you do not have the right to have, such as a copy that wasn't legally distributed or legally duplicated.
I don't see why people think they should have the right to redistribute music and the right to have infringing copies. It's a luxury item, not some intrinsic right. There are plenty of good independent musicians that give away some of their music, so there is plenty of non-infringing music to be had. I don't think you are losing anything by respecting the copyright.
Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.
I'm sorry, but what? Like the movie studios, "Pirates" only care about their bottom line, but the key difference is that they don't have to fund the making of the movie, they just duplicate someone else's product, which costs nothing to do. It's a bottom-feeding type product and shouldn't be supported. If it is worth watching, then the people that funded and made that video should get compensation for the work. If you have disagreements with the original makers, then don't watch it at all, there is little justification to do that, it only adds ammunition to their claim that piracy is hurting them.
I don't really want to hassle with changing what's on there when I get bored of the selection.
You don't have to. I have my iTunes auto-rotate tracks on my 4GB nano. It's not obvious, but what you can do is sync the unit to one or more smart playlists. The smart playlists are set to randomly select a certain number of tracks that have been played less than "X" number of times. Right now, my "X" is "1". Once it has been played, it is removed and another track replaces it. With this scheme, I think I can do very well with a 1GB nano.
I've seen product tear-downs that showed the current nano had two flash chips in the 4GB version, one in the 2GB version. Some might have two 1GB chips if it was more cost-effective. So an 8GB nano would have two two 4GB chips. Of course, bare flash chips are rated in bits, not bytes, so the chips might be 8Gb, 16Gb and 32Gb for the respective sizes.
It might be more realistic to expect to see a 6GB version (1x 4GB and 1x 2GB chip) and the 4 and 2 GB models pushed down in price $50 each.
I think it is likely the fault of the RIAA members that the "artists" are interchangeable, so I don't see why they should be getting $10 for the $0.60 that they give to the band. I wouldn't be surprised if the songwriters get paid out of that $0.60 too. Sound engineering is costly but I doubt that accounts for much of a CD. I wonder how much of that money goes for payola and how much goes towards the lawyers.
The artists seem to be wising up as the RIAA isn't managing to sign as many bands as they have before.
I too don't see how concert pricing has anything to do CD purchases. Anyone willing to pay $100+ per person for a few hours of entertainment probably already has all the CDs (and DVDs). The musician doesn't get much of the profit out of a given CD sale anyway, a few dollars at best, so $100 vs. $103 (realistically $100 vs. $101 or less).
Other merchandising doesn't count for this argument unless you can "share" it by P2P.
The argument is flawed at best.
I do have a few Xeon-based workstations that are "side cooling" or whatever, their ages are something like 4-5 years now, the systems were designed to work with chips running up to 2.8GHz. It's ducted too, so the air goes straight out the case, and the entire system is surprisingly quiet. It doesn't have fancy liquid cooling, heat pipes or anything special other than an ordinary aluminum heat sink and a fan.
Come to think of it, I have an old Alpha that uses side cooling, draws in fresh air from the front, that was made in 1997. I guess the "enthusiast" market is just behind the times.
I think a bigger question is whether they have a business model and whether it is sustainable. With some of these companies the VC are funding, I just don't see the sustainability. I think YouTube got money recently, but I doubt YouTube will be worth anything once the money is gone.
To save hundreds of dollars by not getting a virus in the first place. But that doesn't help Dell's bottom line much.
It's probably not about TVs but set top boxes, I think Philips can or does make some. The end user doesn't always choose set top boxes, the video service does. I think Comcast might be arrogant enough to use this.
They can also try to licence it out, big companies often make cross-licencing arrangements to get the technology they want.