I don't know about Apple specifically, but some manufacturers have contracts that dictate a lowest advertised price.
In fact, one classic advantage of the big retailers is that they are able to negotiate exceptions. That screws smaller stores, because even if they can match the price they aren't allowed to advertise it.
This has been going on for a long time, you should hear my grandfathers stories about selling boats in the 60s.
At least the fact that Apple isn't making any exceptions is a little more honest, but it doesn't really help any of us.
The latest netrcaft survey lists the following numbers:
Apache: 67.41
Microsoft: 23.46
Unfortunately there's no OS breakdown.
But anyways swissmonkey admits to working for MS. You have to expect him to quote the in house "motivational" stats.
You could film it with real people and without rewriting the script
Of course then the actors would start complainging about how much screen time they're getting, they would have to start doing Boomhauer-centric episodes to keep some of the actors happy, and Luanne would have left the show to pursue her movie carreer.
And people are shocked by the popularity of reality TV.
Also keep in mind that if they used real actors Bobby would be done highschool by now (or at least close to.. I don't know his exact age).
A standard movie is about 96 minutes, at 3:12 the theaters can just schedule it into two normal slots, at 4 hours they have to rearange everything.
Also most people have trouble sitting through a 4 hour movie with out an intermission. Plus people who go to see a movie at 8:15 don't want to be leaving at 12:30 (after all you can't forget about the trailers and car comercials).
Actually Diet Coke isn't just Coke with aspratame, it's a different cola altogether. In fact, after it was introduced the managers were so impressed with the results from the tast tests they decided to try it with sugar (ie corn syrup).
That led to the new Coke. And the rest is history.
Actually almost anyone can keep track of 52 cards with practice. But casinos know about this and ususally play with 4-6 decks (and they reshuffle about half way through).
The fact that people can still card count there is pretty impressive.
And if you're outside the US you're pretty much screwed. The new generation of Tivo/Replay units claim to have no functionality without the service, and service is only availiable in the US and the UK (for Tivo only).
Everything above 100 fps is just gravy. Hell, you don't even need anyhting over your refresh rate to make games run silky-smooth...
The FPS in the corner of the screen (or your timedemo score) is an average FPS over several frames. Just because it's over your refresh rate now doesn't mean it won't drop below in the heat of the battle. And if a frame takes longer then 1/60th or so of a second then you can see a stutter.
Besides, in 8 months your machine will be barley meeting the minimum requirements to play anything new.
When I watch TV shows, almost every computer has an LCD display.
Well there's a reason for that. The flicker from the screen refresh on a CRT causes huge problems for 24fps film. Look at a local news cast sometime... they often do stories with computers in the background (mind you they are using tape... it's worse with film).
They actually have special monitors with hardware to synchronise the refresh with the film. It's not cheap.
If your bored one day take a video cam and point it at your monitor. Then change the refresh rate. Impress your friends with your knowledge of interference patterns.
You don't need a DOS disk, just bring up a command prompt in windows, and type 'fdisk/mbr'.
Editing the boot sector doesn't require a reboot since the system isn't using it while it's running.
Also it's safer doing it this way, since a DOS disk would screw up windows NT booting (and thus 2000 and XP). However the worst thing typing it while windows is running would do is give you an error message (likely some notice about that being an obsolete command).
Plus, they probably didn't change the command at all.
If you want to order a cappuccino for you and your friend, would you tell the waiter that you'd like two cappuccini? It's the correct plural in Italian.
When we use a foreign word we usually still use the English plurals. It's like that in most languages (The french use 'le cameraman' and 'les cameramans').
So my point is that arguing about the correct latin use is meaningless, unless we are speaking latin.
What I find interesting is that so many players want to have no NPCs. Look at all the player run shards, they all seem to take pride in the fact that everything is run without NPCs.
Of course, the economy on them makes no sense since gold doesn't have any intrinsic value anymore. It isn't worth the time of the people who work on their smith skills to bother asking for money for basic weapons and armour. In fact the entire system degrades into bartering/begging since no one accepts gold (and naturally because of that no one wants gold).
I'm sure you could write an economics paper on the subject.
I think you're missing an obvious point - countries that speak english will naturally have better english language literature. It's very difficult to compare something written in Mandarin Chinesse to literature produced in the US in English.
If language wasn't a barrier then I would expect you to see many more Asian students taking MBAs.
The limitations of 16bit colour are very visible on gradients. Try drawing a large black to white gradient in 16bit colour (and don't save it a a jpeg, compression will ruin this). You'll be able to distincly see a bands of redish grey and greenish gray, since in 16 bit mode we only have 32 proper shades of gray.
Also your statment about how man colours the eye can see is deceptive... The human eye works much closer to an Hue-Saturation-Brightness method then an RGB method. Some colours that are very close on the RGB scale are very easy for us to distinguish. Other colours are very hard.
Try viewing the colour cooser in PhotoShop in 16bit colour. Or a well compressed video with a lot of umm.. fleshtones. In each case you'll be able to see banding (harsh lines on gradients) on various areas.
That won't work because almost all video encoding schemes encode a keyframe fully at given intervals, then they update the parts of the screen that have changed for the next frame.
For example, frame 1 is encoded but do get frame 4 you would need to apply 3 diff frames. Therefore machine 2 wouldn't be able to do anything with frame 2 without frame 1.
Anyways the bus problems just limit how many channels can be encoded at one time. It is possible to encode a single channel on one system. It is also much simpler to divide up the channels than to divide up the frames.
I notice that a GeForce 3 class video card is conspicuously absent from your numbers. As is a DVD-Rom drive. And I suspect that the X-Box's unified memory architecture requires faster, more expensive RAM then you're using.
Yup. That's a known issue -- any car with a passenger-side airbag documents it clearly. Any person whose child is killed due to it therefore has noone to blame but themselves.
Dead babies are almost always a sign of a design flaw. There should be switches to dissable airbags because they can kill children and short people. Of course regulators don't trust the average driver to be able to make that decision, because it's easier to write off the deaths that do happen.
Even if you were going to waste 70 megs of ram on uncompressed cd audio, it would still be faster to load a 6 meg file and decompress it in ram. But it's better to just play the file normally, since ogg won't slow down a GHz cpu. And the ram is needed to load textures and maps.
One of the major proponenets of ID is a chemist, who feels that the systems that cells use to communicate are irreducibly complex. For instance, most mechanical devices won't work if there is one piece missing (which is why we never see animals with tank treads).
Naturally the idea has it's problems, but it's an interesting concept.
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I don't know about Apple specifically, but some manufacturers have contracts that dictate a lowest advertised price.
In fact, one classic advantage of the big retailers is that they are able to negotiate exceptions. That screws smaller stores, because even if they can match the price they aren't allowed to advertise it.
This has been going on for a long time, you should hear my grandfathers stories about selling boats in the 60s.
At least the fact that Apple isn't making any exceptions is a little more honest, but it doesn't really help any of us.
The latest netrcaft survey lists the following numbers:
Unfortunately there's no OS breakdown. But anyways swissmonkey admits to working for MS. You have to expect him to quote the in house "motivational" stats.
You could film it with real people and without rewriting the script
Of course then the actors would start complainging about how much screen time they're getting, they would have to start doing Boomhauer-centric episodes to keep some of the actors happy, and Luanne would have left the show to pursue her movie carreer.
And people are shocked by the popularity of reality TV.
Also keep in mind that if they used real actors Bobby would be done highschool by now (or at least close to.. I don't know his exact age).
A standard movie is about 96 minutes, at 3:12 the theaters can just schedule it into two normal slots, at 4 hours they have to rearange everything.
Also most people have trouble sitting through a 4 hour movie with out an intermission. Plus people who go to see a movie at 8:15 don't want to be leaving at 12:30 (after all you can't forget about the trailers and car comercials).
Actually Diet Coke isn't just Coke with aspratame, it's a different cola altogether. In fact, after it was introduced the managers were so impressed with the results from the tast tests they decided to try it with sugar (ie corn syrup).
That led to the new Coke. And the rest is history.
Actually almost anyone can keep track of 52 cards with practice. But casinos know about this and ususally play with 4-6 decks (and they reshuffle about half way through).
The fact that people can still card count there is pretty impressive.
Actually since 98 or so all canadian pennies have been electroplated zinc.
I've had 5 automobile accidents
Years of using a vehicle where the gas operates in a 1 bit on/off fasion don't exactly prepare you for real driving.
Older drivers don't apreciate just how nice analog gas and steering are.
In Canada anyways, they cost more in materials than they're actually worth
That's not true any more. Around 1997 or so they switched from making copper pennies to using electroplated zinc.
You can easily tell when they switched once you know what your looking for.
And if you're outside the US you're pretty much screwed. The new generation of Tivo/Replay units claim to have no functionality without the service, and service is only availiable in the US and the UK (for Tivo only).
So this is a usefull topic for many of us.
Everything above 100 fps is just gravy. Hell, you don't even need anyhting over your refresh rate to make games run silky-smooth...
The FPS in the corner of the screen (or your timedemo score) is an average FPS over several frames. Just because it's over your refresh rate now doesn't mean it won't drop below in the heat of the battle. And if a frame takes longer then 1/60th or so of a second then you can see a stutter.
Besides, in 8 months your machine will be barley meeting the minimum requirements to play anything new.
Remember, Doom 3 is coming.
pre-mix might be a short form for pre-mixed... but then to look at people defend the X client/server naming, who's to say what makes sense.
When I watch TV shows, almost every computer has an LCD display.
Well there's a reason for that. The flicker from the screen refresh on a CRT causes huge problems for 24fps film. Look at a local news cast sometime... they often do stories with computers in the background (mind you they are using tape... it's worse with film).
They actually have special monitors with hardware to synchronise the refresh with the film. It's not cheap.
If your bored one day take a video cam and point it at your monitor. Then change the refresh rate. Impress your friends with your knowledge of interference patterns.
For most users I think xyzzy is just a little dated.
You don't need a DOS disk, just bring up a command prompt in windows, and type 'fdisk /mbr'.
Editing the boot sector doesn't require a reboot since the system isn't using it while it's running.
Also it's safer doing it this way, since a DOS disk would screw up windows NT booting (and thus 2000 and XP). However the worst thing typing it while windows is running would do is give you an error message (likely some notice about that being an obsolete command).
Plus, they probably didn't change the command at all.
Of course there's a larger issue here...
If you want to order a cappuccino for you and your friend, would you tell the waiter that you'd like two cappuccini? It's the correct plural in Italian.
When we use a foreign word we usually still use the English plurals. It's like that in most languages (The french use 'le cameraman' and 'les cameramans').
So my point is that arguing about the correct latin use is meaningless, unless we are speaking latin.
What I find interesting is that so many players want to have no NPCs. Look at all the player run shards, they all seem to take pride in the fact that everything is run without NPCs.
Of course, the economy on them makes no sense since gold doesn't have any intrinsic value anymore. It isn't worth the time of the people who work on their smith skills to bother asking for money for basic weapons and armour. In fact the entire system degrades into bartering/begging since no one accepts gold (and naturally because of that no one wants gold).
I'm sure you could write an economics paper on the subject.
Maybe if you're french. In english there are simply two alternate spellings since we don't use masculine and feminine rules.
I think you're missing an obvious point - countries that speak english will naturally have better english language literature. It's very difficult to compare something written in Mandarin Chinesse to literature produced in the US in English.
If language wasn't a barrier then I would expect you to see many more Asian students taking MBAs.
The limitations of 16bit colour are very visible on gradients. Try drawing a large black to white gradient in 16bit colour (and don't save it a a jpeg, compression will ruin this). You'll be able to distincly see a bands of redish grey and greenish gray, since in 16 bit mode we only have 32 proper shades of gray.
Also your statment about how man colours the eye can see is deceptive... The human eye works much closer to an Hue-Saturation-Brightness method then an RGB method. Some colours that are very close on the RGB scale are very easy for us to distinguish. Other colours are very hard.
Try viewing the colour cooser in PhotoShop in 16bit colour. Or a well compressed video with a lot of umm.. fleshtones. In each case you'll be able to see banding (harsh lines on gradients) on various areas.
That won't work because almost all video encoding schemes encode a keyframe fully at given intervals, then they update the parts of the screen that have changed for the next frame.
For example, frame 1 is encoded but do get frame 4 you would need to apply 3 diff frames. Therefore machine 2 wouldn't be able to do anything with frame 2 without frame 1.
Anyways the bus problems just limit how many channels can be encoded at one time. It is possible to encode a single channel on one system. It is also much simpler to divide up the channels than to divide up the frames.
I notice that a GeForce 3 class video card is conspicuously absent from your numbers. As is a DVD-Rom drive. And I suspect that the X-Box's unified memory architecture requires faster, more expensive RAM then you're using.
Yup. That's a known issue -- any car with a passenger-side airbag documents it clearly. Any person whose child is killed due to it therefore has noone to blame but themselves.
Dead babies are almost always a sign of a design flaw. There should be switches to dissable airbags because they can kill children and short people. Of course regulators don't trust the average driver to be able to make that decision, because it's easier to write off the deaths that do happen.
Even if you were going to waste 70 megs of ram on uncompressed cd audio, it would still be faster to load a 6 meg file and decompress it in ram.
But it's better to just play the file normally, since ogg won't slow down a GHz cpu. And the ram is needed to load textures and maps.
One of the major proponenets of ID is a chemist, who feels that the systems that cells use to communicate are irreducibly complex. For instance, most mechanical devices won't work if there is one piece missing (which is why we never see animals with tank treads).
Naturally the idea has it's problems, but it's an interesting concept.