For me, the ultimate sound didn't come from watts or speaker power-handling
Of course speaker watts are irrelevant - but you need to do the math, make the measurements or experience to know that. A good one watt per channel is probably going to suit far more people than one would suspect. You either need inefficient speakers, a large room or both to need sustain more than 1 Wpc. You get a little more headroom with more watts, but it's a losing game, and the amps are usually less efficient. Doubling the watts raises the headroom by about 3 dB.
Um, what? Your whole post reads like a non sequitur. I mean, a few hours a year with a professional finance guy or getting a patent lawyer isn't equivalent to an hour a day and a driver for a car. You probably spend more on your car in a year than you would pay for filing a patent, which according to a friend of the family, that is a patent attorney, most of the cost is searching existing patents to make sure it hasn't already been filed.
I don't understand how your mention of "building systems" is even relevant. It's not that special of an idea. You screw together a few parts, none of those parts are anything you could possibly make on your own.
If it's really easier to make an invention than it is to file its patent, I think a lot of Slashdotters would argue that it's probably not that patentable anyway.
I think Pony Express' main problem was that it was killed by technology. Their claim to fame was speed of getting a message there, but telegraph basically ended that one.
There are a lot of explainations. A couple more are the elite kept getting more and more lead poisoned and eventually couldn't reproduce. Overfarming some areas caused erosion that silted & clogged great harbors - and gave more breeding ground to malaria.
I've never seen a PDA with a screen quality competitive with paper, I really haven't seen one that's comfortably sized for a lot of reading. About a 6" display would be good for reading a book. I think there's something to be said for a good quality passive display, i.e., one that doesn't have to generate its own light to be readable. ePaper is getting pretty good though it's not very common.
Not all mundane and boring jobs are boring and automatable, i.e., there are plenty of "pointless" jobs that do need to be done but can't just be replaced with a machine.
Re:"Destroyed the Music Business?" WTF??! OMG Poni
on
NBC Chief Slamming Apple
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How have they destroyed the music business? Everywhere I go, especially when I ride public transit, I see people listening to iPods.
They haven't destroyed the music business (yet), but there's a lot of ambiguity about what's on those iPods. Less than 4% of the content was sold by iTunes, something like an average of 20 tracks per iPod were sold. We don't know how much of the rest was legally obtained or not. My sister builds her collection by borrowing CDs from the library.
What kills the semantic web idea is that all the millions of individual producers of data don't have any immediate incentive to mark their own data up for the benefit of others.
There may be other issues as well, because the whole idea seems to hinge on correct and honest mark-up. It doesn't sound very resilient anyway. So really, it sounds like it's a project whose main aim at trying to eliminate hard work when it's eventually going to have to be done anyway.
I don't think the user switching licenses later is as big of a problem as you suggest though maybe you mean something else. I don't think a developer would want to make it hard to move from a GPL to commercial license, though maybe want to discourage moving from commercial to GPL. It might be tough if you end up mixing the code from other sources, that's the only thing I can think of, but that's quite problematic anyway. I think the original intent was to allow the developer sell support for the app rather than having to make an open and closed source license setup.
iSupply's numbers are supposed to represent gross margin. The problem is that the denizens of the intarweb incorrectly deduce that it's the net profit when it's not. The numbers they give out are reasonable, the problem is that it's woefully taken out of context. And the fact that they put down four significant figures, that's obviously silly, two is sufficient.
I think even the 64GB SSDs are too expensive and they've been out for a while. The 512s probably aren't made yet with those chips. I think it will become affordable eventually, but I bet that they aren't going to be using these chips, these chips will probably be history by then.
I know iPods will all be flash, but we don't really know if the HDD players will be gone next year. Even if flash has a price of $5/GB next year, the 160GB model would be $800 in flash chips alone. The cost of the memory chips would have be about $1/GB in order for there to be a good drop-in substitute for hard drives in iPods. I think that might be possible two years from now, but the HDDs keep getting larger too.
The seek times of SSDs should make it such that trying to read and write from the storage array at the same time would seem kind of pointless. It also increases the costs. It would probably go the way of FB-DIMM. FB-DIMM is supposed to allow simultaneous reads and writes to different memory cards, but it's too expensive and has other problems limiting its performance. Now, if the controller designer can apply something like that to a hard drive array, then maybe that would be nice. I think it might be possible to do that in software, make it like a software RAID. Maybe JBOD drive concatenation allows this, I don't know.
Capabilities aren't very important if they aren't affordable. So maybe some government contractors can afford those things now, I don't think it would be that interesting to the consumer until SSDs get to a tenth of the cost.
I've seen a lot of articles where the writer says they have to return the review unit too.
Consumer Reports can be a bit odd at times, they've marked down things heavily things that are somewhat minor in my opinion. Sometimes they don't make allowances for the target market, such as marking down a sports car for it's rough ride when that's a sacrifice that needs to be made in order to get better performance.
Even though they don't get their review samples, I've heard of one way that their no-ad system can be subverted. The companies can buy up large blocks of subscriptions, and the magazine can live under the threat of cancellation if their product is reviewed poorly.
I don't think the litigation is intended to make money. I do think it's an odd way of trying to "keep people honest" so that more people don't go out and illegally download or distribute music. I don't think it needs to keep EVERYONE honest. It doesn't work that way. For example, speeding is fined, but that doesn't stop speeders, but enforcing the speed law does keep the average speed down. I've seen this anecdotally in my town, for the short time when the town put the law enforcement on emergency only, average speeds went up. They contract a patrol car, they went back down again.
I think a lot of the people that do download either don't care, don't keep up with the news or are just taking their chances. The chances are good that they are safe unless there is some new way to prosecute or enforce the law. If one in a thousand are targetted, and those people are asked to pay $3000, then the average price the user pays is $3. So I think that goes to reinforce your statement that the nastygrams really aren't much of a revenue stream.
It might go both ways. If a prosecutor knows that you are recording, they might be able to subpoena it and use it against you.
The video and data can be used against you as well, they might demand more data than is actually pertinent to the case and nail you for something else instead.
Unfortunately, this is because well-meaning campaign finance laws got out of hand. There was shady activity that needed to be stopped, but running a parody campaign probably runs afowl of this.
I don't think that's an issue. I think the point was to provide up-to-the-minute data. Getting a constant stream of data that is a minute old vs an hour old can be very beneficial in being able to fight the fires, I think it can make a huge difference.
Comcast's treatment of goes even farther though, they simply terminate the stream. It's one thing to have it slow down or lower priority than other services, but halting or ending transfers is a different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, the ultimate sound didn't come from watts or speaker power-handling
Of course speaker watts are irrelevant - but you need to do the math, make the measurements or experience to know that. A good one watt per channel is probably going to suit far more people than one would suspect. You either need inefficient speakers, a large room or both to need sustain more than 1 Wpc. You get a little more headroom with more watts, but it's a losing game, and the amps are usually less efficient. Doubling the watts raises the headroom by about 3 dB.
Um, what? Your whole post reads like a non sequitur. I mean, a few hours a year with a professional finance guy or getting a patent lawyer isn't equivalent to an hour a day and a driver for a car. You probably spend more on your car in a year than you would pay for filing a patent, which according to a friend of the family, that is a patent attorney, most of the cost is searching existing patents to make sure it hasn't already been filed.
I don't understand how your mention of "building systems" is even relevant. It's not that special of an idea. You screw together a few parts, none of those parts are anything you could possibly make on your own.
If it's really easier to make an invention than it is to file its patent, I think a lot of Slashdotters would argue that it's probably not that patentable anyway.
I think Pony Express' main problem was that it was killed by technology. Their claim to fame was speed of getting a message there, but telegraph basically ended that one.
There are a lot of explainations. A couple more are the elite kept getting more and more lead poisoned and eventually couldn't reproduce. Overfarming some areas caused erosion that silted & clogged great harbors - and gave more breeding ground to malaria.
I will bid $1M to make a Halo flick.
I've never seen a PDA with a screen quality competitive with paper, I really haven't seen one that's comfortably sized for a lot of reading. About a 6" display would be good for reading a book. I think there's something to be said for a good quality passive display, i.e., one that doesn't have to generate its own light to be readable. ePaper is getting pretty good though it's not very common.
Not all mundane and boring jobs are boring and automatable, i.e., there are plenty of "pointless" jobs that do need to be done but can't just be replaced with a machine.
How have they destroyed the music business? Everywhere I go, especially when I ride public transit, I see people listening to iPods.
They haven't destroyed the music business (yet), but there's a lot of ambiguity about what's on those iPods. Less than 4% of the content was sold by iTunes, something like an average of 20 tracks per iPod were sold. We don't know how much of the rest was legally obtained or not. My sister builds her collection by borrowing CDs from the library.
What kills the semantic web idea is that all the millions of individual producers of data don't have any immediate incentive to mark their own data up for the benefit of others.
There may be other issues as well, because the whole idea seems to hinge on correct and honest mark-up. It doesn't sound very resilient anyway. So really, it sounds like it's a project whose main aim at trying to eliminate hard work when it's eventually going to have to be done anyway.
I don't think the user switching licenses later is as big of a problem as you suggest though maybe you mean something else. I don't think a developer would want to make it hard to move from a GPL to commercial license, though maybe want to discourage moving from commercial to GPL. It might be tough if you end up mixing the code from other sources, that's the only thing I can think of, but that's quite problematic anyway. I think the original intent was to allow the developer sell support for the app rather than having to make an open and closed source license setup.
iSupply's numbers are supposed to represent gross margin. The problem is that the denizens of the intarweb incorrectly deduce that it's the net profit when it's not. The numbers they give out are reasonable, the problem is that it's woefully taken out of context. And the fact that they put down four significant figures, that's obviously silly, two is sufficient.
I think even the 64GB SSDs are too expensive and they've been out for a while. The 512s probably aren't made yet with those chips. I think it will become affordable eventually, but I bet that they aren't going to be using these chips, these chips will probably be history by then.
I know iPods will all be flash, but we don't really know if the HDD players will be gone next year. Even if flash has a price of $5/GB next year, the 160GB model would be $800 in flash chips alone. The cost of the memory chips would have be about $1/GB in order for there to be a good drop-in substitute for hard drives in iPods. I think that might be possible two years from now, but the HDDs keep getting larger too.
I'm sorry, it's been a while, I've forgotten.
The seek times of SSDs should make it such that trying to read and write from the storage array at the same time would seem kind of pointless. It also increases the costs. It would probably go the way of FB-DIMM. FB-DIMM is supposed to allow simultaneous reads and writes to different memory cards, but it's too expensive and has other problems limiting its performance. Now, if the controller designer can apply something like that to a hard drive array, then maybe that would be nice. I think it might be possible to do that in software, make it like a software RAID. Maybe JBOD drive concatenation allows this, I don't know.
Capabilities aren't very important if they aren't affordable. So maybe some government contractors can afford those things now, I don't think it would be that interesting to the consumer until SSDs get to a tenth of the cost.
I've seen a lot of articles where the writer says they have to return the review unit too.
Consumer Reports can be a bit odd at times, they've marked down things heavily things that are somewhat minor in my opinion. Sometimes they don't make allowances for the target market, such as marking down a sports car for it's rough ride when that's a sacrifice that needs to be made in order to get better performance.
Even though they don't get their review samples, I've heard of one way that their no-ad system can be subverted. The companies can buy up large blocks of subscriptions, and the magazine can live under the threat of cancellation if their product is reviewed poorly.
I don't think the litigation is intended to make money. I do think it's an odd way of trying to "keep people honest" so that more people don't go out and illegally download or distribute music. I don't think it needs to keep EVERYONE honest. It doesn't work that way. For example, speeding is fined, but that doesn't stop speeders, but enforcing the speed law does keep the average speed down. I've seen this anecdotally in my town, for the short time when the town put the law enforcement on emergency only, average speeds went up. They contract a patrol car, they went back down again.
I think a lot of the people that do download either don't care, don't keep up with the news or are just taking their chances. The chances are good that they are safe unless there is some new way to prosecute or enforce the law. If one in a thousand are targetted, and those people are asked to pay $3000, then the average price the user pays is $3. So I think that goes to reinforce your statement that the nastygrams really aren't much of a revenue stream.
Because we don't consider Americans to be people.
It might go both ways. If a prosecutor knows that you are recording, they might be able to subpoena it and use it against you.
The video and data can be used against you as well, they might demand more data than is actually pertinent to the case and nail you for something else instead.
Unfortunately, this is because well-meaning campaign finance laws got out of hand. There was shady activity that needed to be stopped, but running a parody campaign probably runs afowl of this.
FEMA successfully proved that they don't only care for the rich.
They did? Where and when did they do that?
I don't think that's an issue. I think the point was to provide up-to-the-minute data. Getting a constant stream of data that is a minute old vs an hour old can be very beneficial in being able to fight the fires, I think it can make a huge difference.
That, and to make a net on what they spent so far on the entire XBox division, they have to make another $6B.
Comcast's treatment of goes even farther though, they simply terminate the stream. It's one thing to have it slow down or lower priority than other services, but halting or ending transfers is a different matter.
Talk about obsolete information. Photoshop is no longer "stuck" as a single window or single display app, and it hasn't been for some time now.