Sounds like something Microsoft dreamed up because they have no real good uses for Surface and the Super Bowl gets lots of press. They are probably "donating" a ton of money and/or equipment to use Surface.
Considering Fannie and Freddie's part in the mortguage/financial meltdown currently in session. Maybe wiping it out for a spell wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Truing to prove your sig?:-)
Many lenders only offer mortgages because they know there is an organization like Fannie Mae who will or at least could buy their mortgages. That would pretty much end mortgage lending in the US, or at least make it much, much more expensive. The democrats would never let this happen, since it would disproportionately affect their voting base.
You're smoking crack. LEDs can be dimmed just fine, by varying the current going through them. How do you think they control the brightness in LED-backlit LCD displays.
While you can dim them that way, they are very picky and inefficient. PWM is much, much more efficient and allows for nearly 1-100% dimming range easily. Getting such accuracy with current is very hard, since it's nonlinear. Most LCD backlighting is done via PWM, there are tons of tiny chips to do this efficiently, for phones too. It's just too easy and cheap not to use PWM these days.
Nice we can link to something in their domain to further add to the DNS traffic! Maybe someone could find a link to download some huge file from their servers, too!
We used to regularly benchmark Oracle on the same hardware running Linux and then Windows Server. Linux always won. Not by a huge margin, more like 15%, but saving money and getting better performance is win-win!
Although humans differ from one another in about 0.1% base pairs for a total of 3 million, the number of difference that describe human variability may be vastly smaller than this. First you discard non-coding DNA which gets you done to 30,000.
Except that when our differences are so small, the non-coding regions are even more important. They control what genes are active and to what degree. That's nearly as important as the genes themselves.
Genes are only part of the puzzle. You need to know what to do with them, and non-coding regions provide some of that along with the cellular machinery.
Scientists used to call them "junk" DNA where junk == "I can't figure it out". Why would cells spend all that energy maintaining something useless? Not very likely.
It's so long since I used tungsten bulbs that I don't remember how often I had to replace those, but one every 3 months (out of 10 or so bulbs) sounds about right.
I've been in my house 2.5 years with the builders' grade incandescent bulbs in the recessed lights and vanity lights. I've replaced like 2 out of at least 25 in that time. All my CFL's died after a little over a year. And, despite claims to the contrary, still take forever to reach full brightness (GE bulbs purchased just a few months ago.)
My biggest beef is the "three way" CFLs that rarely work right, and have significantly lower light output (read the labeling, less light output.) CFLs are over-marketed and not quite ready to replace incandescent bulbs, IMHO. I wish they were, because I love the savings in summer from not heating up the room I'm paying to cooling.
I suspect it's easy to make uniform mono-chromatic light, but people want white LEDs which have phosphor to convert part of the blue to yellow. That needs to be uniform and likely complicates matters. Notice that most LED flash lights have a bluish center, even the pricey Maglites suffer from this. A good halogen bulb is still much more uniform, which makes it more useful when trying to find things in the dark (no patterns imprinted on the scene from your light.)
I got good results by drilling a hole in a ping pong ball and sticking an LED just in it up to the flange on the bottom of the LED. It was quite uniform for colored and/or RGB LEDs. Not so much for white.
Except that LEDs largely operate on average current (so they don't burn out), so by only using half of the cycle, you can up the current and still achieve the same average brightness, as far as the human eye is concerned. This is often used when multiplexing matrix displays. You can get the same brightness while having it on for a fraction of time.
They aren't exactly using the best LEDs, either. A decent LED could put out 10 times the light output that the Christmas lights I have can do, but it comes down to cost, I'm sure.
So there's never been an artist with an album that was consistently good? REALLY?
There have been plenty, just much fewer recently. I generally only purchase CDs where 75% or so of the songs are good. That used to be 2-3 per week, now it's like 2 per month.
Heck, it used to be that if I liked one CD from an artist, then I'd almost be assured to like their next one. Now, it seems, the labels push them to "grow" artistically, which generally means they start to diverge from what everyone liked about them.
From what I've observed over the years, OSS works great on the server/enterprise side, where there is significant money to be made in support services. On the other hand, end-users don't buy support contracts, leaving almost no money to be made there to pay developers, so closed source wins.
Or that making a highly usable product requires much, much more effort and is generally not considered to be fun. (And thus requires people to be paid to do it.) This is the reason that I think Linux et al have thrived in the server area. IT folks who set up servers care more about getting the job done that having a nice interface. This is also why Linux on the desktop continues to be just out of reach. (That and people already know Windows and have no desire to learn anything.)
Apple makes software that is very easy to use for anyone, and that is why they are a "powerhouse". They have to in order to get people over the mental barrier to using something new, and even then they are still tiny in desktops.
I think this is why it's taken so long to get a viable MS Office clone. Nothing it does is complicated or hard. It's all just really, really boring development that people only really work on if they are paid. It's over 90% GUI and a tiny part actual computer science.
On the other hand, with more Open Source software there many more points to innovate. And very few packages can be used without some customization. So customers would need an expert anyway - and if they buy expert services they would also be inclined to pay a somewhat smaller fee for a commodity addon.
While that seems to make sense, reading messages posted to mailing lists and web sites, it appears that people who are trying to use FOSS aren't even programmers at all, and make it painfully obvious that they have no idea what the are doing.
Then we have the companies that produce software using FOSS, and don't contribute back, which I think is much more common that believed.
What may happen, is that FOSS may increase the demand for short-term contract programming. Need someone to integrate three packages with a thin integration layer? HIre someone for 20 hours and done. No one on staff. I've seen a lot of interest by people in India asking basic questions about software, and have dealt with some companies who outsourced their development to India, where they used FOSS to complete the task.
And it probably never will, which makes it all seem so pointless. I watch most of what little TV I watch in HD, and I'm just not interested in a DVR without HD capability. My cable boxes have HDMI and component. While it may be possible to get digitize the component video, why bother when the box is $10/mo and a box with DVR is $14/mo and I can record two shows simultaneously? Granted, it would be great if Verizon dumped their incredibly lame DVR software for Myth, but I just can't see that happening...
So what you're saying is Greenspan made the same mistake Marx did and forgot that the one immutable fact when dealing with humans is that they are greedy?
Not to mention lazy, selfish and not in possession of the perfect knowledge economists so often like to claim the markets operate with. Fact is, only a few have the knowledge and they use it to get rich, i.e. business leaders and Wall Street bankers. They knew they were in trouble, but voted themselves huge bonuses because they had the knowledge others didn't: the good times were about to end.
When I read the CEO's statement on their web site, it looked to me like they're just reorganizing. Then again, a re-org usually happens before a full shutdown too.
They are "reorganizing" in the same sense that a dead person is "metabolically challenged."
That reminds me of when I went to CC to get a VGA cable. Nothing fancy, but I needed one to connect my laptop to my TV's VGA port. They only one they had was $40. I was amazed, and walked right out the store and haven't been back since.
Best Buy isn't really much better, as I went there next and didn't find the situation particularly different. I ended up waiting until Monday and someone at work just gave me one.
I continue to laugh at both of their no-name HDMI cables for $100+. Give me a break. Other than the electronics, everything else they had was significantly over priced. (And the electronics were just overpriced.)
Another example, we needed a wall-mount bracket for our new 40" LCD TV. They wanted some $300 for one. I picked up a much better one for $99 at Costco.
A good candidate for a "andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag.
That's what I found at CompUSA. No real deals. They were selling really, really old stuff at MSRP at the time, when newer and better stuff was for sale elsewhere for less. It was rather pathetic, but people were lined up 5 deep to get some piece of marked up crap for 15% off when one could get the same product for less at Amazon.com even including 2-day shipping.
I'm not even going to bother with the CC liquidation sale.
Their poor stocking of sale items was the last nail in the coffin for me. Every time I went there looking for some DVD for PS3 game on sale, it was always sold out. "We only got 3 in" they'd tell me or something lame. Whatever.
However, there sales were generally better than Best Buy and they offered more percent-off coupons (i.e. they offered SOME.) Everything I bought there was with a 10% of coupon while on sale, which was nice while it lasted.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like something Microsoft dreamed up because they have no real good uses for Surface and the Super Bowl gets lots of press. They are probably "donating" a ton of money and/or equipment to use Surface.
More like, "Windows has detected a new audience member. You must reboot in order for this change to take effect."
Considering Fannie and Freddie's part in the mortguage/financial meltdown currently in session. Maybe wiping it out for a spell wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Truing to prove your sig? :-)
Many lenders only offer mortgages because they know there is an organization like Fannie Mae who will or at least could buy their mortgages. That would pretty much end mortgage lending in the US, or at least make it much, much more expensive. The democrats would never let this happen, since it would disproportionately affect their voting base.
You're smoking crack. LEDs can be dimmed just fine, by varying the current going through them. How do you think they control the brightness in LED-backlit LCD displays.
While you can dim them that way, they are very picky and inefficient. PWM is much, much more efficient and allows for nearly 1-100% dimming range easily. Getting such accuracy with current is very hard, since it's nonlinear. Most LCD backlighting is done via PWM, there are tons of tiny chips to do this efficiently, for phones too. It's just too easy and cheap not to use PWM these days.
You'd have to be the king to know for sure...
Nice we can link to something in their domain to further add to the DNS traffic! Maybe someone could find a link to download some huge file from their servers, too!
We used to regularly benchmark Oracle on the same hardware running Linux and then Windows Server. Linux always won. Not by a huge margin, more like 15%, but saving money and getting better performance is win-win!
Although humans differ from one another in about 0.1% base pairs for a total of 3 million, the number of difference that describe human variability may be vastly smaller than this. First you discard non-coding DNA which gets you done to 30,000.
Except that when our differences are so small, the non-coding regions are even more important. They control what genes are active and to what degree. That's nearly as important as the genes themselves.
Genes are only part of the puzzle. You need to know what to do with them, and non-coding regions provide some of that along with the cellular machinery.
Scientists used to call them "junk" DNA where junk == "I can't figure it out". Why would cells spend all that energy maintaining something useless? Not very likely.
It's so long since I used tungsten bulbs that I don't remember how often I had to replace those, but one every 3 months (out of 10 or so bulbs) sounds about right.
I've been in my house 2.5 years with the builders' grade incandescent bulbs in the recessed lights and vanity lights. I've replaced like 2 out of at least 25 in that time. All my CFL's died after a little over a year. And, despite claims to the contrary, still take forever to reach full brightness (GE bulbs purchased just a few months ago.)
My biggest beef is the "three way" CFLs that rarely work right, and have significantly lower light output (read the labeling, less light output.) CFLs are over-marketed and not quite ready to replace incandescent bulbs, IMHO. I wish they were, because I love the savings in summer from not heating up the room I'm paying to cooling.
I suspect it's easy to make uniform mono-chromatic light, but people want white LEDs which have phosphor to convert part of the blue to yellow. That needs to be uniform and likely complicates matters. Notice that most LED flash lights have a bluish center, even the pricey Maglites suffer from this. A good halogen bulb is still much more uniform, which makes it more useful when trying to find things in the dark (no patterns imprinted on the scene from your light.)
I got good results by drilling a hole in a ping pong ball and sticking an LED just in it up to the flange on the bottom of the LED. It was quite uniform for colored and/or RGB LEDs. Not so much for white.
Except that LEDs largely operate on average current (so they don't burn out), so by only using half of the cycle, you can up the current and still achieve the same average brightness, as far as the human eye is concerned. This is often used when multiplexing matrix displays. You can get the same brightness while having it on for a fraction of time.
They aren't exactly using the best LEDs, either. A decent LED could put out 10 times the light output that the Christmas lights I have can do, but it comes down to cost, I'm sure.
Debit cards work can as credit cards, so its difficult to tell how much of any companies sales were due to credit.
It's easy for a company to tell that, since such information is broken out on their credit card summaries. Debit cards cost the merchant less.
That couldn't possibly be true. Surely, Yahoo is holding out for $10B, given their track record.
Perhaps they are waiting for a government bailout?
No, three movements.
Like after eating too much high fiber ceral?
So there's never been an artist with an album that was consistently good? REALLY?
There have been plenty, just much fewer recently. I generally only purchase CDs where 75% or so of the songs are good. That used to be 2-3 per week, now it's like 2 per month.
Heck, it used to be that if I liked one CD from an artist, then I'd almost be assured to like their next one. Now, it seems, the labels push them to "grow" artistically, which generally means they start to diverge from what everyone liked about them.
I read that you should consider the internal resistance of the battery, which as I recall, was rather high in those coin-size batteries.
From what I've observed over the years, OSS works great on the server/enterprise side, where there is significant money to be made in support services. On the other hand, end-users don't buy support contracts, leaving almost no money to be made there to pay developers, so closed source wins.
Or that making a highly usable product requires much, much more effort and is generally not considered to be fun. (And thus requires people to be paid to do it.) This is the reason that I think Linux et al have thrived in the server area. IT folks who set up servers care more about getting the job done that having a nice interface. This is also why Linux on the desktop continues to be just out of reach. (That and people already know Windows and have no desire to learn anything.)
Apple makes software that is very easy to use for anyone, and that is why they are a "powerhouse". They have to in order to get people over the mental barrier to using something new, and even then they are still tiny in desktops.
I think this is why it's taken so long to get a viable MS Office clone. Nothing it does is complicated or hard. It's all just really, really boring development that people only really work on if they are paid. It's over 90% GUI and a tiny part actual computer science.
On the other hand, with more Open Source software there many more points to innovate. And very few packages can be used without some customization. So customers would need an expert anyway - and if they buy expert services they would also be inclined to pay a somewhat smaller fee for a commodity addon.
While that seems to make sense, reading messages posted to mailing lists and web sites, it appears that people who are trying to use FOSS aren't even programmers at all, and make it painfully obvious that they have no idea what the are doing.
Then we have the companies that produce software using FOSS, and don't contribute back, which I think is much more common that believed.
What may happen, is that FOSS may increase the demand for short-term contract programming. Need someone to integrate three packages with a thin integration layer? HIre someone for 20 hours and done. No one on staff. I've seen a lot of interest by people in India asking basic questions about software, and have dealt with some companies who outsourced their development to India, where they used FOSS to complete the task.
And it probably never will, which makes it all seem so pointless. I watch most of what little TV I watch in HD, and I'm just not interested in a DVR without HD capability. My cable boxes have HDMI and component. While it may be possible to get digitize the component video, why bother when the box is $10/mo and a box with DVR is $14/mo and I can record two shows simultaneously? Granted, it would be great if Verizon dumped their incredibly lame DVR software for Myth, but I just can't see that happening...
So what you're saying is Greenspan made the same mistake Marx did and forgot that the one immutable fact when dealing with humans is that they are greedy?
Not to mention lazy, selfish and not in possession of the perfect knowledge economists so often like to claim the markets operate with. Fact is, only a few have the knowledge and they use it to get rich, i.e. business leaders and Wall Street bankers. They knew they were in trouble, but voted themselves huge bonuses because they had the knowledge others didn't: the good times were about to end.
I think you'll find that most of the really old bridges were riveted, not welded. Riveting isn't nearly as hard as welding 2 inch thick steel.
When I read the CEO's statement on their web site, it looked to me like they're just reorganizing. Then again, a re-org usually happens before a full shutdown too.
They are "reorganizing" in the same sense that a dead person is "metabolically challenged."
That reminds me of when I went to CC to get a VGA cable. Nothing fancy, but I needed one to connect my laptop to my TV's VGA port. They only one they had was $40. I was amazed, and walked right out the store and haven't been back since.
Best Buy isn't really much better, as I went there next and didn't find the situation particularly different. I ended up waiting until Monday and someone at work just gave me one.
I continue to laugh at both of their no-name HDMI cables for $100+. Give me a break. Other than the electronics, everything else they had was significantly over priced. (And the electronics were just overpriced.)
Another example, we needed a wall-mount bracket for our new 40" LCD TV. They wanted some $300 for one. I picked up a much better one for $99 at Costco.
A good candidate for a "andnothingofvaluewaslost" tag.
That's what I found at CompUSA. No real deals. They were selling really, really old stuff at MSRP at the time, when newer and better stuff was for sale elsewhere for less. It was rather pathetic, but people were lined up 5 deep to get some piece of marked up crap for 15% off when one could get the same product for less at Amazon.com even including 2-day shipping.
I'm not even going to bother with the CC liquidation sale.
Their poor stocking of sale items was the last nail in the coffin for me. Every time I went there looking for some DVD for PS3 game on sale, it was always sold out. "We only got 3 in" they'd tell me or something lame. Whatever.
However, there sales were generally better than Best Buy and they offered more percent-off coupons (i.e. they offered SOME.) Everything I bought there was with a 10% of coupon while on sale, which was nice while it lasted.