Very much depends on how you interpret the "two times quieter". If you interpret it on actual measured power, then you're right, it would equal 3db. However, the ear hears in a roughly log scale anyway, so the point is that decibels are closer to how the ear hears differences (or how the brain interprets them, maybe). That is to say that if a sound has 10 times the power, we hear it as twice as loud. So actually 2 times quieter could well mean half as many db, rather than the actual measure of power of the sound waves in the air.
I can see your point, however at a simple level surely the point is that if you refer to the company as an entity then there is only one of it, however many internal subsections and varied views there are. A flock of geese IS flying, because you're talking about what the flock is doing, not what the individuals are doing, or want to do.
An advantage of the distinction might be in the (admittedly rare) situation where you have a company called something like... "Haircuts". If you said "haircuts are losing value at the moment" then that has the clear implication that you're talking about the value of the practice of having ones hair cut, but if you said "Haircuts is losing value..." then it would be more readily apparent that you were talking about Haircuts Plc or similar.
I think it's only helpful if you are referring to the individual members of the organisation specifically, if you are actually talking about a general company line, or the way a company behaves, then singular makes perfect sense. Really if you want to use a plural take a plural approach to it, "The members of the board at... are..." or similar.
But it jars my British sensibilities when they do that too, which is my point, I was in fact pleased to note that Next has signs up in their shops in the singular.
Actually, the only thing that's been annoying me more recently is the nonsensical phrase "Could care less", which fortunately is rare this side of the pond.
That was a little overly conclusive, you could say it depends on context. Some collective nouns might seem more like descriptions of groups than single entities... so you could argue that that treating as a plural would make some sense. Something else that makes little sense is using a singular collective and then adding a plural pronoun... such as "Microsoft is a big company, they innovate", this is accepted as standard in US english... in British english where plural forms (much as I disagree with them) do happen more often it's fairly common too... and is just an annoying contradiction really, though you could argue that it's a singularesque "they", more along the lines of "Who's that coming in the door? They have green shoes on!"
Nonsense, Microsoft is a singular here in the UK too. "Microsoft are A company" makes not the slightest bit of sense, so logic dictates that it's a singular apart from anything else.
I'm a linux user half the time and I've used it a total of once, and I can't remember what it did then. Admittedly being previously a regular windows person that is likely to blame, otherwise I'm sure I'd have learned.
I don't know. The philips one was designed to be full resolution, but only part of the 40" screen (presumably they simply didn't have the fab sizes necessary to do the full size in one go initially, as epson didn't either as I mentioned). Quite why the res of Epson's screen is so low I really don't know though.
Maybe for the Samsung, I don't know, no reason to assume they'd be cheating. The Philips one is certainly not a mockup though, and I know the Samsung is supposed to be slightly brighter, so its perfectly possible.
Yes, that's built into the plans though. Small devices like mobile phones in the near future, where the lifetimes don't matter so much, and then in the next few years the stability should improve so that larger displays are practical. We'll see if that all goes to plan, but progress on it is looking good to date.
Funnily enough you're not simplifying it a great deal. Clearly it's not easy to actually do, but what they're actually trying to do is effectively just that.
No reason why it couldn't come down in price just like anything else. More importantly though the lifetime of the OLEDs is increasing, it's hoped that by 2008/2009 they'll be good enough to be used in commercial TV sets properly.
Initially small UIs most likely, they already use very small OLED displays on devices afterall, it's just progress to start scaling that up.
Another advantage is that you should be able to make transparent displays with OLEDs, mounted on a sheet of glass, say.
Not quite sure what you mean about 3d though, from that point of view I can't see it being any different from an LCD, unless the display-on-glass concept somehow helps.
That the Epson display is not a single display at all (in that it isn't printed in one process), but a combination of smaller ones, more along the sizes of the Philips and Samsung ones.
I have seen the Philips display and I have to say the quality was good, there is slight horizontal banding where runs of the print head touch, but that's something that can be ironed out. Not quite up to consumer TV standards, maybe, but certainly showing promise.
I have to say I try to make secure passwords, but making a different one for each account gets difficult to remember... so I have 3 or so that fits everything, in levels of security (ie I use one very commonly on web e-mail accounts etc, one on banking that's used nowhere else etc etc).
Passwords in combination with a physical key makes a lot of sense though, you can snoop the connection for the password, say, (or snoop the machine) but you won't get a one time password that way (well, you will, but it won't work next time clearly).
I can understand wanting different passwords for everything, and it's something I've tried in the past... but surely you just find that people just end up having to write them all down? For the same reason that systems that make you change the password every 2 weeks are a waste of time.
Your requirements aren't too harsh though, annoying for people, maybe, but necessarily so, annual changing of passwords is wise, not too often, but makes sure it happens occasionally. I checked my father's computer recently and found a number of viruses on it, knowing he probably has a weak banking password anyway I felt it was a good reason to get him to change it... has he? Of course not.
I suppose there's little incentive to TRY, but once persuaded to try, most people don't seem to go back to IE.
Those that do stick with IE don't seem to do it because it's better (largely, there are exceptions) but because they think it's the internet. When I can be bothered I'll go and delete my father's IE and Outlook icons completely...
And REALLY don't use it on windows on a 500MHz machine whilst coding in VB. Trying to use that remotely slowed me to a crawl, and I felt so sorry for the poor guy having to code on the machine itself!
Hmm, not so sure you have to shadow the power completely, not if you don't rely totally on wind at least. With enough wind farms there should be wind *somewhere*, long distance transfer of power works too of course, inefficient it may be but it's better than running polluting backup power stations.
I see your point though... but there is a limit to the supply of uranium, and problems with disposal, and the coal won't be running much of the time... and cost shouldn't be the deciding issue.
Still, I'll grant you it's something that needs to be thought about.
That and much of the spam I've been getting recently is very simple. Say, two links in an e-mail and that's all (plain text). They're not being picked up as spam by spamassassin any more, it has about 50% accuracy at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Very much depends on how you interpret the "two times quieter". If you interpret it on actual measured power, then you're right, it would equal 3db. However, the ear hears in a roughly log scale anyway, so the point is that decibels are closer to how the ear hears differences (or how the brain interprets them, maybe). That is to say that if a sound has 10 times the power, we hear it as twice as loud. So actually 2 times quieter could well mean half as many db, rather than the actual measure of power of the sound waves in the air.
They say "quarter of" in England? Thanks for informing me... I've never heard it though.... it's certainly not a southern England thing.
"Quarter to" we certainly do though.
I can see your point, however at a simple level surely the point is that if you refer to the company as an entity then there is only one of it, however many internal subsections and varied views there are. A flock of geese IS flying, because you're talking about what the flock is doing, not what the individuals are doing, or want to do.
An advantage of the distinction might be in the (admittedly rare) situation where you have a company called something like... "Haircuts". If you said "haircuts are losing value at the moment" then that has the clear implication that you're talking about the value of the practice of having ones hair cut, but if you said "Haircuts is losing value..." then it would be more readily apparent that you were talking about Haircuts Plc or similar.
I think it's only helpful if you are referring to the individual members of the organisation specifically, if you are actually talking about a general company line, or the way a company behaves, then singular makes perfect sense. Really if you want to use a plural take a plural approach to it, "The members of the board at... are..." or similar.
But it jars my British sensibilities when they do that too, which is my point, I was in fact pleased to note that Next has signs up in their shops in the singular.
Actually, the only thing that's been annoying me more recently is the nonsensical phrase "Could care less", which fortunately is rare this side of the pond.
That was a little overly conclusive, you could say it depends on context. Some collective nouns might seem more like descriptions of groups than single entities... so you could argue that that treating as a plural would make some sense. Something else that makes little sense is using a singular collective and then adding a plural pronoun... such as "Microsoft is a big company, they innovate", this is accepted as standard in US english... in British english where plural forms (much as I disagree with them) do happen more often it's fairly common too... and is just an annoying contradiction really, though you could argue that it's a singularesque "they", more along the lines of "Who's that coming in the door? They have green shoes on!"
Nonsense, Microsoft is a singular here in the UK too. "Microsoft are A company" makes not the slightest bit of sense, so logic dictates that it's a singular apart from anything else.
I'm a linux user half the time and I've used it a total of once, and I can't remember what it did then. Admittedly being previously a regular windows person that is likely to blame, otherwise I'm sure I'd have learned.
I don't know. The philips one was designed to be full resolution, but only part of the 40" screen (presumably they simply didn't have the fab sizes necessary to do the full size in one go initially, as epson didn't either as I mentioned). Quite why the res of Epson's screen is so low I really don't know though.
in here in here...
Maybe for the Samsung, I don't know, no reason to assume they'd be cheating. The Philips one is certainly not a mockup though, and I know the Samsung is supposed to be slightly brighter, so its perfectly possible.
Yes, that's built into the plans though. Small devices like mobile phones in the near future, where the lifetimes don't matter so much, and then in the next few years the stability should improve so that larger displays are practical. We'll see if that all goes to plan, but progress on it is looking good to date.
Funnily enough you're not simplifying it a great deal. Clearly it's not easy to actually do, but what they're actually trying to do is effectively just that.
No reason why it couldn't come down in price just like anything else. More importantly though the lifetime of the OLEDs is increasing, it's hoped that by 2008/2009 they'll be good enough to be used in commercial TV sets properly.
Initially small UIs most likely, they already use very small OLED displays on devices afterall, it's just progress to start scaling that up.
Another advantage is that you should be able to make transparent displays with OLEDs, mounted on a sheet of glass, say.
Not quite sure what you mean about 3d though, from that point of view I can't see it being any different from an LCD, unless the display-on-glass concept somehow helps.
That the Epson display is not a single display at all (in that it isn't printed in one process), but a combination of smaller ones, more along the sizes of the Philips and Samsung ones.
I have seen the Philips display and I have to say the quality was good, there is slight horizontal banding where runs of the print head touch, but that's something that can be ironed out. Not quite up to consumer TV standards, maybe, but certainly showing promise.
I have to say I try to make secure passwords, but making a different one for each account gets difficult to remember... so I have 3 or so that fits everything, in levels of security (ie I use one very commonly on web e-mail accounts etc, one on banking that's used nowhere else etc etc).
Passwords in combination with a physical key makes a lot of sense though, you can snoop the connection for the password, say, (or snoop the machine) but you won't get a one time password that way (well, you will, but it won't work next time clearly).
I can understand wanting different passwords for everything, and it's something I've tried in the past... but surely you just find that people just end up having to write them all down? For the same reason that systems that make you change the password every 2 weeks are a waste of time.
Your requirements aren't too harsh though, annoying for people, maybe, but necessarily so, annual changing of passwords is wise, not too often, but makes sure it happens occasionally. I checked my father's computer recently and found a number of viruses on it, knowing he probably has a weak banking password anyway I felt it was a good reason to get him to change it... has he? Of course not.
Not sure what sites you visited to reach that situation... certainly it's not one we've noticed though.
It has to be said that you must be in no hurry to cope with that. I work with visual studio on a 500MHz box here happily though.
What I was referring to was running Oracle on it as well, however.
I suppose there's little incentive to TRY, but once persuaded to try, most people don't seem to go back to IE.
Those that do stick with IE don't seem to do it because it's better (largely, there are exceptions) but because they think it's the internet. When I can be bothered I'll go and delete my father's IE and Outlook icons completely...
"What's a web browser?"??? God help me!!
And REALLY don't use it on windows on a 500MHz machine whilst coding in VB. Trying to use that remotely slowed me to a crawl, and I felt so sorry for the poor guy having to code on the machine itself!
I heard very differently on uranium supplies, but if you're right I stand corrected on that one.
Hmm, not so sure you have to shadow the power completely, not if you don't rely totally on wind at least. With enough wind farms there should be wind *somewhere*, long distance transfer of power works too of course, inefficient it may be but it's better than running polluting backup power stations.
I see your point though... but there is a limit to the supply of uranium, and problems with disposal, and the coal won't be running much of the time... and cost shouldn't be the deciding issue.
Still, I'll grant you it's something that needs to be thought about.
That and much of the spam I've been getting recently is very simple. Say, two links in an e-mail and that's all (plain text). They're not being picked up as spam by spamassassin any more, it has about 50% accuracy at the moment.
Which doesn't mean a lot...
:)
Never Twice the Same Colo(u)r was what I heard.
Not that it matters