Once they understand that DRM will constrict everything they do like "hey man, that machine you got if you get a movie and you don't have the right monitor, the movie will look like shit...you have to buy a pre-approved monitor yo which costs more yo"
The thing is, most average PC users won't upgrade to longhorn until they buy a new computer which will come with a new monitor. So the majority of people won't ever even notice.
do these designers have any background at all in ergonomics or computer peripherals? Sure, it's pretty, but my god, it makes my hands hurt just looking at it....
For less expensive keyboards I satisfied and content with ripping out the Microsoft menu keys (though it's landed me in hot water at work a couple of times)
That's because you're equating intel with the pentium 4, which even Intel is trying to distance itself from and has admitted they are not going to continue working on. And while it's true that Itaniums tend to run hot, the new chips are much better than the reputation the older itaniums have earned.
Unfortunately, in the Real World (TM) it doesn't work anything like that. Everything these kids do is owned by their schools, who will quite happily patent it and spin off a company to sell it if they see any actual potential to make real money off of it. If not, then at least they get some good advertising for their school by participating.
1) Less finger movement for typical English sentences. This is easily verifiable, and not questioned AFAIK.
It's easily verifiable that there is less finger movement. It's not so easily verifiable that this makes any significant impact on typing speed or reduction in RSI.
2) The keycaps on typical keyboards don't match the letter assignment, so you aren't tempted to look a the keys.
That's rather silly- by that logic you would get the same benefit from buying a dvorak keyboard and typing with a qwerty layout.
3) It is supported by modern operating systems and can be used with readily available keyboards.
That's not really a benefit. That's merely an enabler. QWERTY is also supported by modern operating systems and can also be used with readily available keyboards. All this does is put Dvorak on equal footing with other keyboard models, by removing what used to be a barrier to Dvorak adoption.
Yes it is, which I imagine is one of the reasons Europe tends to have smaller cars, more diesels, and better public transportation than the U.S.
however, if saving money on fuel is the only deciding factor, it's probably still not worth getting a hybrid over a non-hybrid at current prices. Assuming it still costs about $5000 more to buy a Prius than a similar Corolla, paying European prices for gas instead of American prices for gas would only mean that you would make that $5000 back in fuel savings after 117,000 miles driven instead of 285,000 miles driven (even using rather optimistic fuel economy figures for the Prius) In other words, you might make that money back in the lifetime of the car if you never have to pay to replace the batteries. This is disregarding any tax incentives for buyinig a hybrid vehicle.
The numbers I used for those calculations, in case anyone is interested in double checking the math: Prius fuel economy: 50 mpg Corolla fuel conomy: 38 mpg American price of gas: $2.25 European price of gas: $5.50
Where do you live that you got a $3000 tax rebate for buying a Prius? That's pretty nice. I looked up all of the information when I bought the Corolla and I would have qualified for a $1500 tax deduction, which is nothing to sneeze at, but probably would have made a difference of less than $500 in how much Federal taxes I paid last year.
I did just learn from a link in another response to my post that the IRS reinstated the original $2000 tax deduction for Priuses bought in 2004 or 2005. That makes the car slightly more appealing from a tax incentive standpoint, but not much.
It sounds like you've gotten slightly better than average gas mileage with your Prius from what I've heard. I certainly agree that the Prius gets better gas mileage than a Corolla, but I'm not so sure it's "much" better. The reports I've read tend to put the real world fuel efficiency of the Prius around 44-46 miles per gallon. I typically get about 36-38 in my Corolla. That's about 20% better, which is good, but nowhere near the 100% improvement the OP claimed for a comparable car, and not really enough to justify (to me at least) buying a much more expensive car with an unproven drivetrain. A new Corolla will quite likely make well past 150,000 miles without any major repairs. How long will a Prius last?
You just reinforced my point. That document is talking about the clean fuel deduction, not the tax credit for alternative fuel vehicles. There is a huge difference between a $2000 tax deduction and a $2000 tax credit. The Prius is not an alternative fuel vehicle because 100% of it's power still comes from the gasoline engine.
But no one wants a brick design anymore... VZ only offers one lame Nokia and like 3,000 gray flip phones.
Funny- when I signed up for Cingular, I had the opposite problem. They offered so many different Nokia and Sony/Ericsson brick phones, I was starting to wonder if anyone still made any decent flip phones. I ended up with a Sony/Ericsson, and hated every second of it. I'm now back to a decent (if quite minimalist) Samsung flip phone.
I don't understand why Verizon is still CDMA. I can't believe I have to re-enter my phone numbers everytime.
Because they spent millions of dollars building a CDMA network? Besides, the US GSM carriers have destroyed virtually every theoretical advantage of a GSM phone.
Oops. Strike that. I didn't notice which city you were talking about until after I posted. I have no idea what the tax rules regarding hybrid vehicles are in Canada- I only know that I've heard enough people here in the U.S. talk about getting a tax credit for buying an alternative fuel vehicle that it's become almost a habit of pointing out to them that hybrids don't qualify as an alternative fuel vehicle.
When my wife and I were looking to get a new car, we wanted to get a Prius, but the 2004's hadn't even been out for a few months yet, and every dealer we called told us there was a 6 month to a year waiting list.
So we bought a Corolla instead. It costs virtually the same to fill up the tank, it gets close to the same highway gas mileage (in fact it probably would get the same if it had the same low rolling resistance tires) and cost it us about $5,000 less than a comparably equipped Prius (minus sunroof) even if we could get our hands on one. And we'll never have to worry about replacing the batteries.
Also, the tax rebate is rapidly going down towards zero. And it's not a rebate, only a deduction. A lot of people got away with claiming the credit because the ruling was poorly worded early on, but in more recent years tax forms they added a line specifically stating that hybrid vehicles do not quilify for the tax credit.
Our Corolla is approaching 20,000 miles now, and I did the math a little while back and figured out that we would still be a very long way from making back the difference in price between the two cars in fuel savings. Of course, the amount of city driving we do is virtually negligible as neither my wife or I drive to work most days.
For something like a New York taxi cab, I think a hybrid car makes a lot of sense (although if New York cabbies drive anything like Chicago cabbies, I don't think that any available hybrid is going to have nearly enough power to meet the demands of the job), but I suspect very few ordinary drivers put on enough city miles to really save a lot of money by getting a Prius if you compare it to an equivalent non-hybrid vehicle.
and they seem to have only a brushing acquaintance with that European phone maker, Nokia.
Nokia stopped making CDMA phones almost entirely back around 1998, when the majority of their CDMA phones were so bad that Sprint stopped carrying them entirely, and the other CDMA services could barely give them away for free (back before it became common for providers to give out new phones for free with extended service contracts)
I was on Sprint back around 99-2000, and I actually had frieds who switched to other carriers so that they could get that stupid little Nokia phone that was all over the place. I'm on a GSM carrier now, but from my experience with their phones so far, I would be hesitant to ever buy a Nokia phone anyway, even when they are available.
I was a little confused reading that link at first, but I've come to the conclusion that you must have read about a different metaphor than i did. I remember reading some time ago about the metaphor of the "Bazaar" and the author made a lot of good points even if he did come across as something of an egomaniac. You (or the author of the blog if it is not you) apparently read about the "bizzare development model" which apparently is a model where everyone does whatever they want and there is no coordination or teamwork among contributors. And you're right- that does sound quite bizarre, and usually does result in dead projects.
Conventional wisdom was if either Intel or AMD was going to have chips in Macs, it would be AMD for many reason(64-bit chips, collaboration on HyperTransport, image of the most powerful CPUs, etc)
I was under the impression that a big part of Apple's switch away from IBM was due to recurring supply problems in getting enough G3/G4/G5 chips to meet demand. If that really is the case, why would they go and switch to a new vendor that is notorious for supply shortages in their high end offerings, regardless of any technological superiority. I doubt AMD really ever had a chance at that deal, regardless of any tactics Intel may have used.
Anyone know a Playstation owner will spend at least ten times what the console cost on other things
Maybe some playstation owners do. I doubt I've spent even the cost of the console since I bought it. I paid for one extra controller and a memory card, and I have about a half dozen games, only one of which cost me more than $20. I know quite a few other playstation owners who are the same way. One of my best friends has a PS2 that only gets used for the three Grand Theft Auto games. Everything else he plays on XBox or on his computer.
If Sony really does take a $150 dollar loss on each console, and makes $10 per game sold in licensing fees, how many games does the average customer have to buy for them to even break even? How many guys like me and my friend does it take to make that proposition highly improbable?
Ink cartridges and razor blades are consumables. They will run out in a fixed amount of time, and people will have to purchase more if they want to continue using the product. Games don't ever run out, so Sony gets no dependable recurring revenue stream from their loss leader.
While I mostly agree with you, there is onething I would like to clarify.
AJAX is just a simplified way of doing it, just like every programmer in the world creates their own little libraries of routines for handling db connections and the like. AJAX doesn't do anything new, it just repackages it for those who never heard of it.
AJAX is merely an acronym that descibes an abstract idea (that, as you say, has been around for years) it doesn't repackage anything, and it doesn't simplify anything. every programmer still has to write their own 'AJAX engine' because there is no standard one yet. In other words, AJAX doesn't really do anything at all except give people a fancy new buzzword to throw around.
I think XML, like Java before it, was starting to die out and people started to realize that they could no longer get anything they wanted by throwing the word XML (or Java) into the description, so everybody was starting to look for the new magic word that would make their projects look that much cooler. The fact that the X in AJAX stands for XML (in theory, although almost never in practice) is a bit of a bonus, feedig off whatever residual magic the word XML still might wield.
Ah !!.. I learned all about this when I was 14.. damn, I hated school for being so tough..
you learned about helicopters in school when you were 14? i hated school because they never taught anything interesting and instead made me spend all of my time doing work for no other purpose than to keep me busy.
the blade is moving "backwards through the air" relative to the blade. the blade is facing the opposite direction of the helicopter, so while it has a forward velocity in the direction the helicopter is moving, at lower speeds the retreating blade would be moving in the opposite direction that the helicopter is. hence, the blade is moving backwards through the air compared to how it would normally be moving, and what is normally the trailing edge of the blade is acting as the leading edge.
the description was poorly worded, though, and confused me for some time too before i figured out what they actually meant.
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Once they understand that DRM will constrict everything they do like "hey man, that machine you got if you get a movie and you don't have the right monitor, the movie will look like shit...you have to buy a pre-approved monitor yo which costs more yo"
The thing is, most average PC users won't upgrade to longhorn until they buy a new computer which will come with a new monitor. So the majority of people won't ever even notice.
do these designers have any background at all in ergonomics or computer peripherals? Sure, it's pretty, but my god, it makes my hands hurt just looking at it....
For less expensive keyboards I satisfied and content with ripping out the Microsoft menu keys (though it's landed me in hot water at work a couple of times)
How on earth do you live without your META key?
It contains as much interesting material as any other blog I've ever seen.
Good lord. Ialways thought "Aunt Tillie" was a dumb expression. Who in the world came up with "Grandma Bootsie"?
That's because you're equating intel with the pentium 4, which even Intel is trying to distance itself from and has admitted they are not going to continue working on. And while it's true that Itaniums tend to run hot, the new chips are much better than the reputation the older itaniums have earned.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
I think the 'other' in that statement is superfluous...
Unfortunately, in the Real World (TM) it doesn't work anything like that. Everything these kids do is owned by their schools, who will quite happily patent it and spin off a company to sell it if they see any actual potential to make real money off of it. If not, then at least they get some good advertising for their school by participating.
1) Less finger movement for typical English sentences. This is easily verifiable, and not questioned AFAIK.
It's easily verifiable that there is less finger movement. It's not so easily verifiable that this makes any significant impact on typing speed or reduction in RSI.
2) The keycaps on typical keyboards don't match the letter assignment, so you aren't tempted to look a the keys.
That's rather silly- by that logic you would get the same benefit from buying a dvorak keyboard and typing with a qwerty layout.
3) It is supported by modern operating systems and can be used with readily available keyboards.
That's not really a benefit. That's merely an enabler. QWERTY is also supported by modern operating systems and can also be used with readily available keyboards. All this does is put Dvorak on equal footing with other keyboard models, by removing what used to be a barrier to Dvorak adoption.
Yes it is, which I imagine is one of the reasons Europe tends to have smaller cars, more diesels, and better public transportation than the U.S.
however, if saving money on fuel is the only deciding factor, it's probably still not worth getting a hybrid over a non-hybrid at current prices. Assuming it still costs about $5000 more to buy a Prius than a similar Corolla, paying European prices for gas instead of American prices for gas would only mean that you would make that $5000 back in fuel savings after 117,000 miles driven instead of 285,000 miles driven (even using rather optimistic fuel economy figures for the Prius) In other words, you might make that money back in the lifetime of the car if you never have to pay to replace the batteries. This is disregarding any tax incentives for buyinig a hybrid vehicle.
The numbers I used for those calculations, in case anyone is interested in double checking the math:
Prius fuel economy: 50 mpg
Corolla fuel conomy: 38 mpg
American price of gas: $2.25
European price of gas: $5.50
Where do you live that you got a $3000 tax rebate for buying a Prius? That's pretty nice. I looked up all of the information when I bought the Corolla and I would have qualified for a $1500 tax deduction, which is nothing to sneeze at, but probably would have made a difference of less than $500 in how much Federal taxes I paid last year.
I did just learn from a link in another response to my post that the IRS reinstated the original $2000 tax deduction for Priuses bought in 2004 or 2005. That makes the car slightly more appealing from a tax incentive standpoint, but not much.
It sounds like you've gotten slightly better than average gas mileage with your Prius from what I've heard. I certainly agree that the Prius gets better gas mileage than a Corolla, but I'm not so sure it's "much" better. The reports I've read tend to put the real world fuel efficiency of the Prius around 44-46 miles per gallon. I typically get about 36-38 in my Corolla. That's about 20% better, which is good, but nowhere near the 100% improvement the OP claimed for a comparable car, and not really enough to justify (to me at least) buying a much more expensive car with an unproven drivetrain. A new Corolla will quite likely make well past 150,000 miles without any major repairs. How long will a Prius last?
You just reinforced my point. That document is talking about the clean fuel deduction, not the tax credit for alternative fuel vehicles. There is a huge difference between a $2000 tax deduction and a $2000 tax credit. The Prius is not an alternative fuel vehicle because 100% of it's power still comes from the gasoline engine.
But no one wants a brick design anymore... VZ only offers one lame Nokia and like 3,000 gray flip phones.
Funny- when I signed up for Cingular, I had the opposite problem. They offered so many different Nokia and Sony/Ericsson brick phones, I was starting to wonder if anyone still made any decent flip phones. I ended up with a Sony/Ericsson, and hated every second of it. I'm now back to a decent (if quite minimalist) Samsung flip phone.
I don't understand why Verizon is still CDMA. I can't believe I have to re-enter my phone numbers everytime.
Because they spent millions of dollars building a CDMA network? Besides, the US GSM carriers have destroyed virtually every theoretical advantage of a GSM phone.
And it's not a rebate, only a deduction.
Oops. Strike that. I didn't notice which city you were talking about until after I posted. I have no idea what the tax rules regarding hybrid vehicles are in Canada- I only know that I've heard enough people here in the U.S. talk about getting a tax credit for buying an alternative fuel vehicle that it's become almost a habit of pointing out to them that hybrids don't qualify as an alternative fuel vehicle.
When my wife and I were looking to get a new car, we wanted to get a Prius, but the 2004's hadn't even been out for a few months yet, and every dealer we called told us there was a 6 month to a year waiting list.
So we bought a Corolla instead. It costs virtually the same to fill up the tank, it gets close to the same highway gas mileage (in fact it probably would get the same if it had the same low rolling resistance tires) and cost it us about $5,000 less than a comparably equipped Prius (minus sunroof) even if we could get our hands on one. And we'll never have to worry about replacing the batteries.
Also, the tax rebate is rapidly going down towards zero. And it's not a rebate, only a deduction. A lot of people got away with claiming the credit because the ruling was poorly worded early on, but in more recent years tax forms they added a line specifically stating that hybrid vehicles do not quilify for the tax credit.
Our Corolla is approaching 20,000 miles now, and I did the math a little while back and figured out that we would still be a very long way from making back the difference in price between the two cars in fuel savings. Of course, the amount of city driving we do is virtually negligible as neither my wife or I drive to work most days.
For something like a New York taxi cab, I think a hybrid car makes a lot of sense (although if New York cabbies drive anything like Chicago cabbies, I don't think that any available hybrid is going to have nearly enough power to meet the demands of the job), but I suspect very few ordinary drivers put on enough city miles to really save a lot of money by getting a Prius if you compare it to an equivalent non-hybrid vehicle.
and they seem to have only a brushing acquaintance with that European phone maker, Nokia.
Nokia stopped making CDMA phones almost entirely back around 1998, when the majority of their CDMA phones were so bad that Sprint stopped carrying them entirely, and the other CDMA services could barely give them away for free (back before it became common for providers to give out new phones for free with extended service contracts)
I was on Sprint back around 99-2000, and I actually had frieds who switched to other carriers so that they could get that stupid little Nokia phone that was all over the place. I'm on a GSM carrier now, but from my experience with their phones so far, I would be hesitant to ever buy a Nokia phone anyway, even when they are available.
How about if i'm just buying a new TV and want to weight in my choice the environmental track record of the manufacturer?
Or am buying clothing and want to know if the manufacturer uses child labour?
Or am buying financial services and want to know how does that company treat it's employees?
When sitting on the store one rarelly has internet access or the time to trail through the information even if said access is available.
Yeah, because it would be so difficult to do your research before you went to the store..
IMHO his questions are constantly trying to sucker ESR into saying something stupid
Even more stupid than usual, you mean?
I was a little confused reading that link at first, but I've come to the conclusion that you must have read about a different metaphor than i did. I remember reading some time ago about the metaphor of the "Bazaar" and the author made a lot of good points even if he did come across as something of an egomaniac. You (or the author of the blog if it is not you) apparently read about the "bizzare development model" which apparently is a model where everyone does whatever they want and there is no coordination or teamwork among contributors. And you're right- that does sound quite bizarre, and usually does result in dead projects.
Yeah, but those are fish that actually taste good. Have you ever tried eating catfish?
Conventional wisdom was if either Intel or AMD was going to have chips in Macs, it would be AMD for many reason(64-bit chips, collaboration on HyperTransport, image of the most powerful CPUs, etc)
I was under the impression that a big part of Apple's switch away from IBM was due to recurring supply problems in getting enough G3/G4/G5 chips to meet demand. If that really is the case, why would they go and switch to a new vendor that is notorious for supply shortages in their high end offerings, regardless of any technological superiority. I doubt AMD really ever had a chance at that deal, regardless of any tactics Intel may have used.
Anyone know a Playstation owner will spend at least ten times what the console cost on other things
Maybe some playstation owners do. I doubt I've spent even the cost of the console since I bought it. I paid for one extra controller and a memory card, and I have about a half dozen games, only one of which cost me more than $20. I know quite a few other playstation owners who are the same way. One of my best friends has a PS2 that only gets used for the three Grand Theft Auto games. Everything else he plays on XBox or on his computer.
If Sony really does take a $150 dollar loss on each console, and makes $10 per game sold in licensing fees, how many games does the average customer have to buy for them to even break even? How many guys like me and my friend does it take to make that proposition highly improbable?
Ink cartridges and razor blades are consumables. They will run out in a fixed amount of time, and people will have to purchase more if they want to continue using the product. Games don't ever run out, so Sony gets no dependable recurring revenue stream from their loss leader.
While I mostly agree with you, there is onething I would like to clarify.
AJAX is just a simplified way of doing it, just like every programmer in the world creates their own little libraries of routines for handling db connections and the like. AJAX doesn't do anything new, it just repackages it for those who never heard of it.
AJAX is merely an acronym that descibes an abstract idea (that, as you say, has been around for years) it doesn't repackage anything, and it doesn't simplify anything. every programmer still has to write their own 'AJAX engine' because there is no standard one yet. In other words, AJAX doesn't really do anything at all except give people a fancy new buzzword to throw around.
I think XML, like Java before it, was starting to die out and people started to realize that they could no longer get anything they wanted by throwing the word XML (or Java) into the description, so everybody was starting to look for the new magic word that would make their projects look that much cooler. The fact that the X in AJAX stands for XML (in theory, although almost never in practice) is a bit of a bonus, feedig off whatever residual magic the word XML still might wield.
Ah !! .. I learned all about this when I was 14 .. damn, I hated school for being so tough..
you learned about helicopters in school when you were 14? i hated school because they never taught anything interesting and instead made me spend all of my time doing work for no other purpose than to keep me busy.
the blade is moving "backwards through the air" relative to the blade. the blade is facing the opposite direction of the helicopter, so while it has a forward velocity in the direction the helicopter is moving, at lower speeds the retreating blade would be moving in the opposite direction that the helicopter is. hence, the blade is moving backwards through the air compared to how it would normally be moving, and what is normally the trailing edge of the blade is acting as the leading edge.
the description was poorly worded, though, and confused me for some time too before i figured out what they actually meant.