The only down-side to the Tesla model is that you can't negotiate. If you are willing to wait you can often screw the dealerships hard and get a real bargain. Wait for the the right time of year, or when a new model is shipping, or when the registration numbers change (if your country does that). >50% discounts off list price are not unheard of.
You know, you can't negotiate on most online sales either too. Do you haggle with Amazon.com when you want something? Or do you just click "Add to cart"?
And yet, Amazon.com is extremely popular.
And right now, Tesla's got a 3 month waiting list. Used Teslas sell for more than retail price. So I'm not exactly sure if waiting would get you anything, other than next year's model.
Plus, dealerships offer the discounts because they have inventory - and inventory not moving is cash that's flying out the door (takes space, depreciates, etc). So by offering discounts they hope to convert inventory to cash (or just meet current cashflow needs - it doesn't have to be for profit - sometimes it's just better to convert it to cash to pay bills).
Direct sales don't usually have inventory - you purchase and they build it. Or they have very little inventory sitting around, enough to cover the period between shipments.
"Not specifically Tesla, but electric cars don't have alot of things that car dealers make money"
Electric cars need tires. Electric cars need brakes. Electric cars will have safety recalls. Electric cars can be in accidents. Electric cars can be broken into.
I don't claim to know much about electric cars, but if it has moving parts it will be need to be serviced at some point.
I don't think you thought your post through.
Yeah, but a lot of cars require maintenance on a regular schedule - say every 3-6 months on average.
Tires? Usually every 5 years. Brakes? Well, depending on how you drive, 2-3 years is achievable. Heck, with an electric, if you do it right, you can minimize brake wear and maximize mileage by taking advantage of regenerative braking.
Accidents? Well, if you're having them every year, perhaps consider taking a refresher course. Plenty of people don't get into accidents more often than once every few decades.
If you go Tesla, they offer a bumper-to-bumper service plan that covers everything except tires (including other consumables like washer fluid, brakes, etc), for $600/year. For a lot of cars, the annual cost of maintenance can be, double, or triple, that. (Except maybe brand new where you usually get a 6 month oil change and then a more thorough service a year later).
Heck, for Tesla, they recommend people come in for a service annually because there is VERY little that needs actual routine maintenance - no oil changes, no air filters, no spark plugs, coolant, timing belt, sensors, exhaust, etc. Well, an electric car does have coolant for the batteries and inverters, but it's usually just a completely sealed system.
Most of the stuff that's done on a regular ICE car service simply doesn't happen on an electric. And dealers know it. Low maintenance indeed.
If someone has penetrated your system so that they have root or admin privileges over all your machine, you shut down immediately. In the physical world, you pull the plug. On Amazon, you immediately tell Amazon to lock things down, disable all passwords and administrative control, and then work back up to fixing things.
But that's so 20th century! I mean, in the 21st century, if you can't do everything yourself without having to deal with another human being, then it's broken! Interacting with other humans is so... icky.
I dont know about other slashdotters, but Millenials like myself cant afford a brand new car, end of discussion. Years of college loans have ruined our credit score and what little we are saving is going directly toward maintaining the vehicle we already unfortunately own. For a bit less than a hundred dollars though, I can get a used car stereo and a wiring kit that lets me play music from a USB stick and over BlueTooth from my phone. If i cant afford that, I can just put my ear buds in.
You don't need a new car to have CarPlay and this. There are CarPlay decks coming out that can be retrofitted into your existing car. I think initially the licensing of CarPlay got that confused, but Pioneer has CarPlay decks available for purchase soon. So besides the integration inside new vehicles, retrofits and upgrades are possible.
And please don't drive with earbuds. Not only is it illegal in most places to drive like that (if you have Bluetooth, just get a regular Bluetooth speaker or something), but it really cuts down your situation awareness.
As for not valuing a car - you are quite correct in that the car is no longer a means to itself (like the computer isn't a means to itself these days), but just a thing. Quite a few car manufacturers are seeing the hurt on that as traditional showy and flashy cars that target the typical group don't sell as well. Instead sales go towards practical cars that are easy on gas, have all the whiz-bang they like, and are generally cheap. And even they don't get used as much since public transport is preferred.
Now we get all the benefits of Blackberry's excellent hardware AND all the apps of Android. They should have had this a year ago!
All the apps Amazon approves, you mean.
There are over 1M apps in the Google Play store, and 200,000 in the Amazon App Store. So you get the subset of apps where the developer got off their ass and decided to run through all the hoops in order to get their app approved (a la Apple) and listed on Amazon's store.
The benefit is you get at the big well known apps since those guys generally deal with every app store (and really, if you gotten past Apple, you should be able to get past Amazon easily). But if there's a niche Android app that's only on the Play store, you're SOL.
I always wonder the same. But probably the answer is Canonical wants its own Linux phone than powerful integration with Android. Should be, in current days, a killer flag: "hey, my Linux distro runs Android apps, and integrates smoothly with Android phones".
Well, the problem is Android.
You see, the current Andorid OHA agreement makes it impossible for an OEM that ships Android phones to ship any other phone that can run Android apps that does not run Android. So if you make an Android phone, you're blocked by Google et. al. from releasing a Firefox OS or Ubuntu phone if they can run Android.
So Mozilla and Canonical know they physically cannot support Android at all, because if they do, the number of people who can sell and release the phone dwindles dramatically. There just aren't that many companies that make pure AOSP phones or non-Android phones.
why don't you instead develop the discipline to think before you shoot with digital?
The problem is digital makes it too easy to NOT do it properly.
It's really like doing arithmetic longhand and using a calculator. Once you start using a calculator, you tend to just use it automatically over the longhand method.
Just like digital makes it easy to get it "good enough" and then you can tweak a few more settings and dial it in via trial-and-error.
I learned photography in a darkroom in the 1980s too. Film and prints/slides are a terrible way to learn photography. You take the photo, then several days later you see the results and how you screwed up. When I went on trips, I had to keep a notebook where I wrote down the exposure settings for every photo I took, and weeks later I would cross-reference the prints with my notebook to figure out what worked and what didn't. The time constant for the feedback loop is too long for any useful learning unless you spend years at it.
It is much better to learn with a digital camera. You take a shot, then instantly see the results. If you notice a flaw after you've downloaded the pics to your computer, you can call up the exposure information and figure out what you did wrong. Feedback is immediate and all your settings are automatically recorded for you to learn from.
Once you've got that down, then you can fool around with old analog photography.
Or learn how to expose properly.
Digital photography is quick, easy and convenient and you don't really learn anything because nothing's on the line. Bad photo? Oh, just take it again.
Film photography though has a real stake. There's a monetary cost to pushing the shutter, and thus you really want to make sure that photo is taken well because not only will you NOT be able to take it again, but taking 3 shots to get 1 properly exposed frame wastes money.
In other words, think first, then do.
It's sort of like programming using punchcards versus a text editor. The former requires discipline because it takes a whole day to see if your code runs, or has a syntax error.
Which means you better be extra careful before you commit.
These days, taking photos, compiling code, is really just a trial an error process. Photo didn't come out right? Fiddle some switches (you don't really have to know what they do) and try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Ditto programming - compiler spits an error? Well, fix the first one, then (because errors cascade so the dependent errors are meaningless) recompile, fix, recompile, repeat.
My physics teacher for grade 12 insistent on pens during tests - first, a pen lets you contest a mark in case it was graded wrong (i.e., a correct answer marked wrong, partial points not assigned, etc). But, you can't have a complete mess, either - it has to be neatly laid out logically. You did have a scratch pad so you can do your mess there and use it to organize your thoughts to lead to the answer, but the test paper done in ink must be neat and tidy with little scratched out (sometimes you do make a mistake).
Think first, then act.
Of course, I only really recommend this where the real risk is actually quite low. So you screwed up the photo, no big deal - you only wasted $5 in materials and time. Oh, and yeah, I learned after burning through half a roll of film, to check the lens cap.
For those really precious moments, digital camera all the way because I can have it snapping continually to lessen the "I missed the money shot" moment. But when learning to take a photo where the stake is only a bad grade or a few bucks? Learn it the old school way. Photographing a wedding? How many digital cameras can you scrounge up and can you have them record every moment?
Most us hate this stuff, but it's the way everything is heading. Much like social networking, it's going to become increasingly difficult to live a "normal" life while abstaining.
So with "just don't use them" off the table, how do we at least make this more secure. My first thought would be to approach it the same way we approach it when wanting to connect two computers we can't trust and provide a limited subset of functionality. Things like well defined IDLs that define a precise message set, and gateways that are trusted which verify that only conformant data passes. In other words, let the nest have a billion sensors, but the only message your infrastructure will allow it to send out is: houseOnFire=.
Obviously completely impractical for even a geek audience. So I'm at a loss.. any other brilliant ideas?
Easy, avoid the Google Protect and Google Thermostat. Sorry, but Google's hiding behind a bunch of shell companies probably in order to hide their true reach. After all, the ads you see are served by "DoubleClick", not Google despite DoubleClick being owned by Google.
Likewise, Google is hiding their home automation and spying behind Nest, because just like Google doesn't want to be known for noisy popups and popunders and malware ads, Google doesn't want people to realize they're invading your home and effectively spying on you. And don't forget the unified Google privacy policy where basically everything Google knows about you can be shared with everything else Google. (And hidden in there is information from DoubleClick and the Nest products you own),
Just like how I wanted a Nest thermostat until the moment Google bought them, or an Oculus Rift until Facebook bought them, I'll simply be shopping elsewhere.
(And a thermostat has a lot of information on you - occupancy, temperature settings, etc. Temperature settings are particularly fun - imagine what kind of stuff Google can sell you if they find you keep the temperature cooler than the average in summer, and warmer than average in winter. And the kind of busybodies who would find particular glee in knowing who are the "anti green".
I'm surprised that spam is still a lucrative business model, and I'm surprised that spam is still relevant enough to garner the attention of researchers.
Why isn't it? I mean, the people who send spam make money. The businesses selling the spammed product don't.
Spammers generally sell their product as a package - say, 1M email addresses for $10 or whatever (generally not selling the list, but the service to email that list). Company needing marketing services buys that and a million emails get sent out. Doesn't matter if 99.99% of them are blocked instantly by filters, they sent 1M emails.
And for the spammer, there are plenty of companies needing "marketing services" so it's basically just selling the same list over and over again.
The act of spamming is disassociated from the marketing - the spammer doesn't care if their customer got a return on their dollar (because there are other people lined up for the same service)
Of course, the other reason to spam is to spread malware, but then again the spammer doesn't care about content. They've already been paid.
It amazes me when companies sell down their good name. It takes a lot of time and money to earn it, and it never brings in as much when you do this. So not too more companies on my "avoid" list. Luckily there is a lot of competition.
When a company pulls this kind of trick, they are dead to me. I don't understand why companies think that they will get away with such actions. It may slip through once but it only takes one time getting caught and then people will start looking back at past hardware releases to see if they did the same thing before. The damage to a company's reputation can be devastating, all to earn some extra profit.. Such a shame.
Both of you are mistaken - in a lot of cases this is simply because production runs are different.
Kingston and PNY are well known brands that buy a lot of excess parts. They build their storage using what stuff they have available. If Samsung overproduced flash chips that Apple can't soak up, they can either idle their factories (expensive), sell the excess on the market (depressing prices), or sell it to a company who does wholesale purchase of excess, like Kingston or PNY.
Option 3 is generally preferred because option 2 can impact contracts (i.e., if Apple sees Samsung is selling the same product for far less than they paid, they're going to demand a refund).
So basically, Kingston and PNY build products based on what they have on hand - perhaps today it's slower flash chips from Toshiba, tomorrow Samsung had an overrun and they can put in super speedy Samsung chips, etc.
While most electronics manufacturers generally try to go for the same parts over and over again (or with few substitutions - e.g., Apple buys hard drives from Seagate and WD (and their acquired companies like Toshiba and HGST), flash from Toshiba and Samsung, etc), there are other companies that build product based on what's on hand.
And heck, it's also one reason why Kingston and PNY product is so damn cheap - because by taking the excess stock and building what's on hand, they get parts at a good discount, but the variability in parts is much greater. Part manufacturers are happy because it means they don't have to dump product on the open market where their customers may demand the discounts as well, and they have someone to absorb overruns.
It's just like the McRib, really. McDonalds brings it back when pork prices are low and there's an excess they can obtain far cheaper than the open market (but they can take it all rather than buy it in small batches).
The downside is, of course, that product variability is high. Perhaps they get a stock of superfast Samsung, decide to use it to launch a new line, then Samsung has better supply management and the source of cheap excess disappears. Then they're now handling excess of a slower chip some other manufacturer has excess.
Heck, you can buy several different seemingly identical products and they'd all be different inside - the only way to guarantee would be to check the batch numbers.
And this applies to their products as well - RAM, SD cards, etc.
Andrew "bunnie" Huang actually did an analysis of this when they were buying SD cards in bulk from Kingston and getting issues. On Micro SD problems. It's a very detailed analysis of what REALLY happens with Kingston. PNY is probably extremely similar in behavior as well.
If you want consistency, you need to go with someone who builds it in, like Sandisk (Toshiba), Lexar, etc. who order parts direct, rather than an aggregator who builds simply based on what they were sold.
It's less a bait and switch, and more of "well, we had these parts today, and when we run out tomorrow we'll use those parts".
Nevermind that you have to go seriously out of your way to find a TV that even has a cablecard slot in it... TV makers are racing to cram more Apps in, ethernet and wifi ports, USB, and all that, but ignore cablecard completely. First world problems...
Well, people want to record, so you can get plenty of DVRs that DO support CableCARD.
In fact, in Canada, where the cable providers run roughshod over their subscribers, they routinely use CableCARD boxes. But they're not supporting it so we don't get half the cool DVRs you have down there - TiVos, cable tuners for PCs etc.
Mostly because the cable companies know they can sell you a box that no one else in Canada can activate (yes, they will refuse to activate a box that was not obtained from them), put really crappy software on it and all that. Heaven forbid that customers get a taste of what a GOOD DVR can do. (Like say, reliably record, not lose the guide data or recording list on a power cycle, have a UI that isn't a confusing jumble of icons, text and requires about 10 different buttons to go "back" depending on which menu you are in ).
Oh yeah, CableCARDs also generally run fairly warm - heatsinks on the slots are not uncommon things.
And recording 6 streams isn't a difficult task that requires a lot of CPU - it's all digital anyways. Most of the heat comes from the tuners and cablecards.
And here I thought the Europeans had a much richer food history than to have actually ever ordered pizza from Domino's.
You're not that far from where pizza was invented, surely you can do better than that.
Technically, a pizza is just a flatbread. And that's in Italian, for the Greek name for flatbread is... pita. (Granted, the bread is actually made with different ingredients, so Italian pizza and Greek pita are not substitutable - but they do refer to flatbread).
It was the Italian immigrants in Chicago that decided to make American pizza based on what bread they had available at the time, resulting in the good ol' American favorite.
All of which are completely different food items. I had real Italian pizza in Italy, and I loved it (fresh made!). But it doesn't mean I can't like American pizza either - both are really quite different. Though, it has ruined my appetite for American "thin crust" pizza - the Italians make it with a dough that's firm, but not rock hard after baking that really makes it nice. (And ignoring the places where it ends up like pizza stuff on a cracker, ugh).
Then again, there are enough American expats and tourists in Europe that the database could be filled up with Americans, Canadians, and other people who grew up with American pizza just missing a taste of home.
Hell, there are McDonalds in Europe as well, but not as many of them. I just figured that it was tourists and expats wanting a taste of home.
That's curious. Almost all of the drive failures I've seen can be attributed to head damage from repeated parking prior to spin-down, whereas all the drives that I've kept spinning continuously have kept working essentially forever. And drives left spun down too long had a tendency to refuse to spin up.
The problem is that there are two ways for the drive to park the heads. (FYI - ALL spinning rust drives these days park the heads on power down). One of them is more violent than the other.
There is the normal ATA spin down command which the OS issues to stop the drive, which causes a nice orderly movement of the heads to the parking area (or unloads the heads). On a drive datasheet, I saw they were rated for about 50,000 cycles of this.
Then there's the emergency poweroff park, which uses the rotational momentum of the platters to provide power to the voice coils that slam the heads against the parking area (basically the power is funnelled straight into the voice coils). It needs to move ASAP as the platters are slowing down and the air cushion that keeps the heads from hitting the platters is dissipating the slower the platters move. So by dumping the back EMF into the voice coil, the heads are forced into the parking area while there's still enough movement to keep the heads away from the platter. This is so much more violent on the heads that a drive can easily be rated for 10,000 cycles of this or so (under "emergency park").
Modern OSes typically send a spindown command prior to shutdown because it allows an orderly flushing of the caches into non-volatile storage, the heads can seek to the parking area in a controlled fashion and then the platters can spin down without worrying that the heads may contact the platters.
You can easily tell which is the case - a normal spindown is very quiet (in a quiet room you can hear it), while an emergency park is heard by a loud clunk from the drive followed by a dying whine.
Of course, there are bugs, and some OSes excessively unload/load the heads that could easily exceed the 50,000 number in the span of months (I think one distribution of Linux suffered from this due to a BIOS-Linux interaction).
As for those complaining about the unusual nature of the test - well, it's stressing the weakest aspect of each storage medium. Reading/writing massive amounts of data doesn't really impact the drive longevity, but mechanical motion does - keeping a drive spinning wears the bearings, while spinning up and down wears the motor, and emergency parks puts extreme stress on the entire mechanical arm. On an SSD, none of those really do anything - but writing massive amounts of data DOES wear it out.
So the tests aren't directly comparable, but they address the weakest part of each storage medium - spinning rust wears mechanically, while SSDs wear electronically.
The other thing SSDs can suffer from is the emergency power off - because to achieve the speed they cache the entire FTL tables in RAM and then lazy-sync it to the storage medium. On power down, they need to flush the dirty changes to media. Some SSDs use capacitor banks to do this, others use journalled writes to allow safe updates.
Either way, FTL table corruption is the #1 reason why SSDs die today - rarely do they actually die from the media actually wearing out. Luckily, a ATA SECURITY_ERASE command fixes that (in most cases) since it reinitializes the tables but generally keeps all the wear indicators as they were. And this happens almost always on powerdown.
I've been waiting for a new Mitsubishi i-MiEV for over two months. Are they peaking because nobody wants them, or because nobody wants to make them?
The i.MIEV is not a hybrid. It's electric. Which has its own sales problems because the powertrain is so simple and robust that it requires very little maintenance, so dealers HATE selling them (they don't make as much profit on new car sales since their margins always get squeezed and someone has to pay the interest on those 0% financing and stuff). Dealers love it when customers come back for service, because service is a high-margin item. High enough they toss in stuff like free oil changes and other cheap things to encourage returning. And do it every 3-6 months, at that.
An EV doesn't have many moving parts - just the motor, gearbox and wheels. Unlike an ICE, you don't need to do much maintenance beyond ensuring the coolant levels are OK, vital fluids (like say, brake fluid) are sufficient, etc. You can easily get away without having service them for 2 years or more. Heck, Tesla offers a "we-cover-everything-but-tires" service for $600 annually (including consumables!), and while cheaper than most vehicle services over the same period, is also optional and doesn't void your warranty if you don't do it.
Hybrids are great for dealers because the ICE requires regular servicing, and the motor couplers (for those where the motor and engine can drive the wheels) introduce more complexity for servicing (more $$$).
The other thing is, well, a lot of hybrids have piss-poor gas mileage that can be obtained with an all-gas vehicle. And some hybrids just plain suck or have poor reviews.
World War 2 dragged the U.S. out of recession. Since then, the military and all the ecosystem surrounding it has become a cornerstone of U.S. economy The modern idea is not to win wars, but to have perpetual war. A reason to pump all that tax money into U.S. arms industries, making some people rich and allowing many others to keep their jobs; workers, engineers, managers, contractors, lobbyists.
Actually, what WWII did was show that deficit spending does help fix the economy. The thing is, the Great Depression was aggravated by the fact the feds decided to slow down spending to keep deficits down, which turns out to be the completely wrong thing. You need to stimulate the economy, and WWII did it through immense deficit spending and bond offerings..
Of course, it helped that the spending was for something sought to be "required" (i.e., we need to fight!) rather than trying to spread out the money. Easier to incur great debt buying tanks and soldiers and all that - it's just a lot less hassle when you're dealing with people who don't want to incur more debt.
Similarly, the war on terror started right after the dot-com crash, again, spending your way out of recession. Then you spend your way out of recession in 2008, and everyone complains, because there's no war to force spending and incur debt.
Of course, the thing is, war after a little while becomes a drain on resources - see the low growth after the dot-com crash as war spending sapped trillions out of the economy.
War is just the easiest way to force deficit spending during recessionary times, otherwise you get tea partiers wanting to spend less causing the recession to deepen.
Because of resolution, tap target size, etc... all issues that were resolved by the time the mini came out. Again, circumstances changed.
Not really, the tap target size IS smaller.
It's just that Apple uses a LOT of touchscreen processing in order to get more accurate use of points.
It's why I've found that the iOS keyboard is far more accurate at typing than the Android one, even though my Android device has a much larger screen (3.5" vs. 4.5"). In Android, hardware is responsible for reporting the touch points which is used verbatim by the OS. I'm fairly certain Apple gets a more advanced sort of data including pressure maps and uncertainty circles to help figure out where a user meant to tap.
Which probably explains why Android NEEDs replacement keyboards - the touch mechanism is bad enough that typing really is hard. Which is good, because we get some great keyboards like Swype and Fleksy which are really handy and faster than tapping (though I personally never could get used to Swype).
Either that or the default Android keyboard is so terrible that even larger tap targets don't help it.
Just saying - Apple could very well make far better use of the touchscreen information available to make smaller tap targets usable.
How do they normally deal with this?... same way fire fighters do... they have little mock up training areas with dummies and the fire fighters play pretend.
how is this VR thing any better then that? and frankly... how can it help but be worse?
I'd say a use is continuous training. Firefighters normally can only do a few real simulated training a year. Using VR, they can do it continually, alongside the real simulations.
I mean, if you're an airport firefighter, you must do a live simulation training once a year minimum, and many do it every 6 months or so (twice a year). Well, alongside that, why not use VR to be able to train 10 more times a year? It doesn't have to replace, just augment.
Though I believe the US Army has found simulations very interesting - for simulating the soldier's physical health as well. If they're on the heavier side of the scale, it gets modelled in the simulations by not moving as fast, less stamina, etc. And then also physically modelled. (I believe one of the soldiers asked why he was so fat in the simulation, to which came one of his squadmates "You ARE fat!")
They have no intrinsic value, similar to tulip bulbs back in the day. Gold has intrinsic value.
A lot of things don't have intrinsic value. A collection of bits on my hard drive is just that, a collection of bits. However, some people feel it has value, they charge 99 cents if it represents a song, say. Or a book, or something else. The representation has no value since my hard drive will always have bits even if it isn't those bits. What those bits mean, though has value to some people.
Tulip bulbs has intrinsic value as well - they do bloom into nice looking (depending on opinion) flowers yearly (why we call them "annuals"). Of course, back int he day, its intrinsic beauty value was way under the monetary value, but a lot of things do that too.
meanwhile in the US we've been enjoying 30+ day return periods from Amazon
Amazon lets people return digital items? Since when?
I mean, you buy a TV show from Amazon, and if you don't want it or watched it, you can return it within 30 days? Ditto games, apps and music (downloadable)?
These aren't physical items here, these are downloadable items. I.e., I can buy a song from iTunes, not download it, and decide a week later I didn't want it and return it for a full refund. Steam, Google Play, etc., ditto.
The articles headline is a bit missleading. In the body of the article you find that even they admit that analog engineering isn't dead or going anywhere. What is changing is the exact skill sets required. If you are doing traditional circuit design on purely analog equipment you are on hard times because people aren't doing as much of that. If on the other hand you have a foot in both the digital and analog world and can do analog design for digital systems there is a shortage and money is really good. So basically the people having problems are the older analog engineers who haven't kept their skills current. I think you could write that same article about just about any technical field where there has been rapid development in the technology. Some folks end up in dead end specialties that simply aren't in demand anymore. Your options there are retrain, change carriers or compete for the ever shrinking number of jobs. I'd argue that the last one is the worst choice unless you are simply close enough to retirement that the other two are simply unviable. Which actually appears to be the case with most of the guys listed in the article.
Granted, few people do all analog designs these days (it's generally easier, faster and cheaper to use a DSP and work in software), but analog design skills are STILL in demand.
Not because of obvious analog nature of the world, but digital electronics, in their push to be faster and lower power, are encountering analog phenomenon.
Many digital interconnects have very strict analog components (e.g., capacitance, termination, etc). Many PCB designs may have analog design aspects (antennas, RF signals). Even a purely digital bus running between CPU and memory? Tons of analog designs trying to keep impedances the same and minimizing crosstalk, etc. etc. etc.
An analog engineer not only can hack it in a purely digital build, but they're often required. It's true they're not building analog circuits, but all the troubles in modern digital high-speed design are all analog effects that are generally well understood by analog engineers. That signal may be taking on 0 and 1.2V at the transmitter, but that signal line is a transmission line at those frequencies, couples with the inner ground planes, bounces off sharp corners and has capacitance and inductance that has to be characterized and worked with.
Anyone who designs analog circuits understands that because it influences their circuits and can form inadvertent filters. And back when digital logic was 0-5V, we simply ignored it because we overdrive the signal lines so we can safely ignore analog effects. But these days, no, you can't, if you want low power and high speed.
It is most likely an RGB display, so its color gamut would be limited to what can be made out of those three wavelengths, and not anywhere close to 94% of "nature's true palette". Seriously, if Apple made that claim about a display, they would be a hundred posts by now mercilessly mocking them.
Yeah, that's been a huge problem. The iPhone 4s has a 99% sRGB display, while the iPhone 5/5s has a 100% sRGB display. And my Dell monitor has a 107% NTSC display.
Color spectra is fun! But given that the "visible spectrum" is a curved area, approximation by a triangle is generally quite hard, especially with 94% coverage.
In fact, given most of the content this thing displays will be sRGB or so, what generally happens Is you get a lot of pop - the colors are oversaturated, etc., which makes the photos look nice, but damn inaccurate because now the color accuracy is off (if it wasn't, you'd get good looking photos, but most of the available palette is wasted).
Be careful here. I've seen these at hamfests being sold by dealers, and the small print is that when you "buy" the scope that does all these wonderful things for $1499 (or whatever price) you're getting a six month license for the software that does all those wonderful things. One morning not too long after you buy your magic device you will turn it on to do something important and it will tell you that your demo license has expired and you need to send more money to Rigol.
Well, the modern day scope is software-upgradable, so you buy what you need and can demo other stuff for 30 days or so (not 6 months).
The upshot is you'll get a scope that'll function as a scope with the specs you bought - like a Rigol 1052E is a 50MHz scope (upgradable to 100MHz I think) with 2 channels. Fancy features like decoders, enhanced triggers, etc., are upgrade items.
Though, I think the Rigol is really only around $500 now - it's original price point is now inhabited by the low end scopes of Agilent and others that give you way more functionality.
And if you wonder what Rigol is, Agilent's low end scopes, before introducing the 2000 series, were OEM'd versions of the Rigol 1052.
But yeah, for that budget, surplus analog scopes with 20+MHz bandwidth from the likes of Tektronix and such can be had for $50. Far better to learn with, less PC fiddling required (I can bet any PC scope you buy, most of the weekend would be consumed with just getting the thing working) and if one needs to stop work, the analog scopes remember their settings when transported.
More popular stations help subsidize the cost of less popular more niche stations. Also, a la carte wouldn't help your bill; the pricing for a la carte would ensure that you are still paying as much or more than you are for bundled tv.
Actually, stations HAVE been moving to a la carte offerings. If you pay attention, a lot of stations which used to put their popular shows on one network and have speciality channels have been shoving their popular shows onto the lesser channels.
This means that the consumer not only gets to hear about the other channels, but it also means if you want to keep watching new episodes, you need to buy BOTH channels. History and Discovery are both guilty of this, forcing new shows onto the other channels.
So instead of being able to buy just one channel, each has adapted so you need to buy 2 or 3 each, thus negating any savings you would've gotten otherwise.
Not to mention that the niche channels now have to appeal to a greater audience, so the general quality level of programming has gone down because what once was a WWII only channel needs to carry content that appeals to the mass audience in order to get subscription money.
This applies especially to the specialized reality shows like Deadliest Catch, Sons of Guns, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, American Restoration, and many others where they start focusing on drama more than the actual topic at hand. Because the general public wants more drama, not just seeing people build/catch/tear down/etc stuff. Heck, series that have tried to stay close to their roots (say, Mythbusters) have gotten VERY little airtime - each "season" is only 4-5 episodes now.
It's why the call for a la carte has deropped - towards more per-program style purchasing rather than per-channel. Which may or may not improve matters as it may allow shows to return to their roots, or they may go greedy and try to dumb it down even more.
I think Amazon is getting arrogant and stupid, and think they own the market and have no competition. My books aren't affected, they're available at Amazon. But they're cheaper from Barnes & Noble, and B&N listed them in their catalog two days before Amazon did (I'm my own publisher, no hatchets are war nerd brothers).
I think it's dumb, B&N will eat their lunch. Want a WB movie or Hatchette book? B&N. And probably a hundred other places.
Amazon DOES own the market. The first place most people go to for a book or movie or any other thing online? Amazon. I know people who rarely spend a dollar outside of Amazon as Amazon has practically everything in one place. (Or if it's not available from Amazon, they send a nasty letter to the manufacturer asking them why it's not on Amazon).
B&N is a poor comparison - they are circling the drain. So they have to lower prices to compete. But few people shop at B&N, and even fewer have ebooks there (I've run across many that are Amazon only, annoyingly).
And with the DoJ putting the smackdown on the Apple Agency model of selling e-books, coupled with Amazon's practical monopoly over ebooks, well, Amazon will soon be the only place. Nook's in trouble, too. When the DoJ as part of the Apple thing hacked up all the contracts, well, Amazon picked up the pieces and benefitted, while everyone else started dying. Other than Nook, there's no real other source of ebooks, and Nook's in trouble.
Basically, Amazon's become the Wal-Mart of the online world.
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You know, you can't negotiate on most online sales either too. Do you haggle with Amazon.com when you want something? Or do you just click "Add to cart"?
And yet, Amazon.com is extremely popular.
And right now, Tesla's got a 3 month waiting list. Used Teslas sell for more than retail price. So I'm not exactly sure if waiting would get you anything, other than next year's model.
Plus, dealerships offer the discounts because they have inventory - and inventory not moving is cash that's flying out the door (takes space, depreciates, etc). So by offering discounts they hope to convert inventory to cash (or just meet current cashflow needs - it doesn't have to be for profit - sometimes it's just better to convert it to cash to pay bills).
Direct sales don't usually have inventory - you purchase and they build it. Or they have very little inventory sitting around, enough to cover the period between shipments.
Yeah, but a lot of cars require maintenance on a regular schedule - say every 3-6 months on average.
Tires? Usually every 5 years.
Brakes? Well, depending on how you drive, 2-3 years is achievable. Heck, with an electric, if you do it right, you can minimize brake wear and maximize mileage by taking advantage of regenerative braking.
Accidents? Well, if you're having them every year, perhaps consider taking a refresher course. Plenty of people don't get into accidents more often than once every few decades.
If you go Tesla, they offer a bumper-to-bumper service plan that covers everything except tires (including other consumables like washer fluid, brakes, etc), for $600/year. For a lot of cars, the annual cost of maintenance can be, double, or triple, that. (Except maybe brand new where you usually get a 6 month oil change and then a more thorough service a year later).
Heck, for Tesla, they recommend people come in for a service annually because there is VERY little that needs actual routine maintenance - no oil changes, no air filters, no spark plugs, coolant, timing belt, sensors, exhaust, etc. Well, an electric car does have coolant for the batteries and inverters, but it's usually just a completely sealed system.
Most of the stuff that's done on a regular ICE car service simply doesn't happen on an electric. And dealers know it. Low maintenance indeed.
But that's so 20th century! I mean, in the 21st century, if you can't do everything yourself without having to deal with another human being, then it's broken! Interacting with other humans is so... icky.
You don't need a new car to have CarPlay and this. There are CarPlay decks coming out that can be retrofitted into your existing car. I think initially the licensing of CarPlay got that confused, but Pioneer has CarPlay decks available for purchase soon. So besides the integration inside new vehicles, retrofits and upgrades are possible.
And please don't drive with earbuds. Not only is it illegal in most places to drive like that (if you have Bluetooth, just get a regular Bluetooth speaker or something), but it really cuts down your situation awareness.
As for not valuing a car - you are quite correct in that the car is no longer a means to itself (like the computer isn't a means to itself these days), but just a thing. Quite a few car manufacturers are seeing the hurt on that as traditional showy and flashy cars that target the typical group don't sell as well. Instead sales go towards practical cars that are easy on gas, have all the whiz-bang they like, and are generally cheap. And even they don't get used as much since public transport is preferred.
All the apps Amazon approves, you mean.
There are over 1M apps in the Google Play store, and 200,000 in the Amazon App Store. So you get the subset of apps where the developer got off their ass and decided to run through all the hoops in order to get their app approved (a la Apple) and listed on Amazon's store.
The benefit is you get at the big well known apps since those guys generally deal with every app store (and really, if you gotten past Apple, you should be able to get past Amazon easily). But if there's a niche Android app that's only on the Play store, you're SOL.
Well, the problem is Android.
You see, the current Andorid OHA agreement makes it impossible for an OEM that ships Android phones to ship any other phone that can run Android apps that does not run Android. So if you make an Android phone, you're blocked by Google et. al. from releasing a Firefox OS or Ubuntu phone if they can run Android.
So Mozilla and Canonical know they physically cannot support Android at all, because if they do, the number of people who can sell and release the phone dwindles dramatically. There just aren't that many companies that make pure AOSP phones or non-Android phones.
The problem is digital makes it too easy to NOT do it properly.
It's really like doing arithmetic longhand and using a calculator. Once you start using a calculator, you tend to just use it automatically over the longhand method.
Just like digital makes it easy to get it "good enough" and then you can tweak a few more settings and dial it in via trial-and-error.
Or, in other words, you just get lazy.
Or learn how to expose properly.
Digital photography is quick, easy and convenient and you don't really learn anything because nothing's on the line. Bad photo? Oh, just take it again.
Film photography though has a real stake. There's a monetary cost to pushing the shutter, and thus you really want to make sure that photo is taken well because not only will you NOT be able to take it again, but taking 3 shots to get 1 properly exposed frame wastes money.
In other words, think first, then do.
It's sort of like programming using punchcards versus a text editor. The former requires discipline because it takes a whole day to see if your code runs, or has a syntax error.
Which means you better be extra careful before you commit.
These days, taking photos, compiling code, is really just a trial an error process. Photo didn't come out right? Fiddle some switches (you don't really have to know what they do) and try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Ditto programming - compiler spits an error? Well, fix the first one, then (because errors cascade so the dependent errors are meaningless) recompile, fix, recompile, repeat.
My physics teacher for grade 12 insistent on pens during tests - first, a pen lets you contest a mark in case it was graded wrong (i.e., a correct answer marked wrong, partial points not assigned, etc). But, you can't have a complete mess, either - it has to be neatly laid out logically. You did have a scratch pad so you can do your mess there and use it to organize your thoughts to lead to the answer, but the test paper done in ink must be neat and tidy with little scratched out (sometimes you do make a mistake).
Think first, then act.
Of course, I only really recommend this where the real risk is actually quite low. So you screwed up the photo, no big deal - you only wasted $5 in materials and time. Oh, and yeah, I learned after burning through half a roll of film, to check the lens cap.
For those really precious moments, digital camera all the way because I can have it snapping continually to lessen the "I missed the money shot" moment. But when learning to take a photo where the stake is only a bad grade or a few bucks? Learn it the old school way. Photographing a wedding? How many digital cameras can you scrounge up and can you have them record every moment?
Easy, avoid the Google Protect and Google Thermostat. Sorry, but Google's hiding behind a bunch of shell companies probably in order to hide their true reach. After all, the ads you see are served by "DoubleClick", not Google despite DoubleClick being owned by Google.
Likewise, Google is hiding their home automation and spying behind Nest, because just like Google doesn't want to be known for noisy popups and popunders and malware ads, Google doesn't want people to realize they're invading your home and effectively spying on you. And don't forget the unified Google privacy policy where basically everything Google knows about you can be shared with everything else Google. (And hidden in there is information from DoubleClick and the Nest products you own),
Just like how I wanted a Nest thermostat until the moment Google bought them, or an Oculus Rift until Facebook bought them, I'll simply be shopping elsewhere.
(And a thermostat has a lot of information on you - occupancy, temperature settings, etc. Temperature settings are particularly fun - imagine what kind of stuff Google can sell you if they find you keep the temperature cooler than the average in summer, and warmer than average in winter. And the kind of busybodies who would find particular glee in knowing who are the "anti green".
Why isn't it? I mean, the people who send spam make money. The businesses selling the spammed product don't.
Spammers generally sell their product as a package - say, 1M email addresses for $10 or whatever (generally not selling the list, but the service to email that list). Company needing marketing services buys that and a million emails get sent out. Doesn't matter if 99.99% of them are blocked instantly by filters, they sent 1M emails.
And for the spammer, there are plenty of companies needing "marketing services" so it's basically just selling the same list over and over again.
The act of spamming is disassociated from the marketing - the spammer doesn't care if their customer got a return on their dollar (because there are other people lined up for the same service)
Of course, the other reason to spam is to spread malware, but then again the spammer doesn't care about content. They've already been paid.
Both of you are mistaken - in a lot of cases this is simply because production runs are different.
Kingston and PNY are well known brands that buy a lot of excess parts. They build their storage using what stuff they have available. If Samsung overproduced flash chips that Apple can't soak up, they can either idle their factories (expensive), sell the excess on the market (depressing prices), or sell it to a company who does wholesale purchase of excess, like Kingston or PNY.
Option 3 is generally preferred because option 2 can impact contracts (i.e., if Apple sees Samsung is selling the same product for far less than they paid, they're going to demand a refund).
So basically, Kingston and PNY build products based on what they have on hand - perhaps today it's slower flash chips from Toshiba, tomorrow Samsung had an overrun and they can put in super speedy Samsung chips, etc.
While most electronics manufacturers generally try to go for the same parts over and over again (or with few substitutions - e.g., Apple buys hard drives from Seagate and WD (and their acquired companies like Toshiba and HGST), flash from Toshiba and Samsung, etc), there are other companies that build product based on what's on hand.
And heck, it's also one reason why Kingston and PNY product is so damn cheap - because by taking the excess stock and building what's on hand, they get parts at a good discount, but the variability in parts is much greater. Part manufacturers are happy because it means they don't have to dump product on the open market where their customers may demand the discounts as well, and they have someone to absorb overruns.
It's just like the McRib, really. McDonalds brings it back when pork prices are low and there's an excess they can obtain far cheaper than the open market (but they can take it all rather than buy it in small batches).
The downside is, of course, that product variability is high. Perhaps they get a stock of superfast Samsung, decide to use it to launch a new line, then Samsung has better supply management and the source of cheap excess disappears. Then they're now handling excess of a slower chip some other manufacturer has excess.
Heck, you can buy several different seemingly identical products and they'd all be different inside - the only way to guarantee would be to check the batch numbers.
And this applies to their products as well - RAM, SD cards, etc.
Andrew "bunnie" Huang actually did an analysis of this when they were buying SD cards in bulk from Kingston and getting issues. On Micro SD problems. It's a very detailed analysis of what REALLY happens with Kingston. PNY is probably extremely similar in behavior as well.
If you want consistency, you need to go with someone who builds it in, like Sandisk (Toshiba), Lexar, etc. who order parts direct, rather than an aggregator who builds simply based on what they were sold.
It's less a bait and switch, and more of "well, we had these parts today, and when we run out tomorrow we'll use those parts".
Well, people want to record, so you can get plenty of DVRs that DO support CableCARD.
In fact, in Canada, where the cable providers run roughshod over their subscribers, they routinely use CableCARD boxes. But they're not supporting it so we don't get half the cool DVRs you have down there - TiVos, cable tuners for PCs etc.
Mostly because the cable companies know they can sell you a box that no one else in Canada can activate (yes, they will refuse to activate a box that was not obtained from them), put really crappy software on it and all that. Heaven forbid that customers get a taste of what a GOOD DVR can do. (Like say, reliably record, not lose the guide data or recording list on a power cycle, have a UI that isn't a confusing jumble of icons, text and requires about 10 different buttons to go "back" depending on which menu you are in ).
Oh yeah, CableCARDs also generally run fairly warm - heatsinks on the slots are not uncommon things.
And recording 6 streams isn't a difficult task that requires a lot of CPU - it's all digital anyways. Most of the heat comes from the tuners and cablecards.
Technically, a pizza is just a flatbread. And that's in Italian, for the Greek name for flatbread is... pita. (Granted, the bread is actually made with different ingredients, so Italian pizza and Greek pita are not substitutable - but they do refer to flatbread).
It was the Italian immigrants in Chicago that decided to make American pizza based on what bread they had available at the time, resulting in the good ol' American favorite.
All of which are completely different food items. I had real Italian pizza in Italy, and I loved it (fresh made!). But it doesn't mean I can't like American pizza either - both are really quite different. Though, it has ruined my appetite for American "thin crust" pizza - the Italians make it with a dough that's firm, but not rock hard after baking that really makes it nice. (And ignoring the places where it ends up like pizza stuff on a cracker, ugh).
Then again, there are enough American expats and tourists in Europe that the database could be filled up with Americans, Canadians, and other people who grew up with American pizza just missing a taste of home.
Hell, there are McDonalds in Europe as well, but not as many of them. I just figured that it was tourists and expats wanting a taste of home.
The problem is that there are two ways for the drive to park the heads. (FYI - ALL spinning rust drives these days park the heads on power down). One of them is more violent than the other.
There is the normal ATA spin down command which the OS issues to stop the drive, which causes a nice orderly movement of the heads to the parking area (or unloads the heads). On a drive datasheet, I saw they were rated for about 50,000 cycles of this.
Then there's the emergency poweroff park, which uses the rotational momentum of the platters to provide power to the voice coils that slam the heads against the parking area (basically the power is funnelled straight into the voice coils). It needs to move ASAP as the platters are slowing down and the air cushion that keeps the heads from hitting the platters is dissipating the slower the platters move. So by dumping the back EMF into the voice coil, the heads are forced into the parking area while there's still enough movement to keep the heads away from the platter. This is so much more violent on the heads that a drive can easily be rated for 10,000 cycles of this or so (under "emergency park").
Modern OSes typically send a spindown command prior to shutdown because it allows an orderly flushing of the caches into non-volatile storage, the heads can seek to the parking area in a controlled fashion and then the platters can spin down without worrying that the heads may contact the platters.
You can easily tell which is the case - a normal spindown is very quiet (in a quiet room you can hear it), while an emergency park is heard by a loud clunk from the drive followed by a dying whine.
Of course, there are bugs, and some OSes excessively unload/load the heads that could easily exceed the 50,000 number in the span of months (I think one distribution of Linux suffered from this due to a BIOS-Linux interaction).
As for those complaining about the unusual nature of the test - well, it's stressing the weakest aspect of each storage medium. Reading/writing massive amounts of data doesn't really impact the drive longevity, but mechanical motion does - keeping a drive spinning wears the bearings, while spinning up and down wears the motor, and emergency parks puts extreme stress on the entire mechanical arm. On an SSD, none of those really do anything - but writing massive amounts of data DOES wear it out.
So the tests aren't directly comparable, but they address the weakest part of each storage medium - spinning rust wears mechanically, while SSDs wear electronically.
The other thing SSDs can suffer from is the emergency power off - because to achieve the speed they cache the entire FTL tables in RAM and then lazy-sync it to the storage medium. On power down, they need to flush the dirty changes to media. Some SSDs use capacitor banks to do this, others use journalled writes to allow safe updates.
Either way, FTL table corruption is the #1 reason why SSDs die today - rarely do they actually die from the media actually wearing out. Luckily, a ATA SECURITY_ERASE command fixes that (in most cases) since it reinitializes the tables but generally keeps all the wear indicators as they were. And this happens almost always on powerdown.
The i.MIEV is not a hybrid. It's electric. Which has its own sales problems because the powertrain is so simple and robust that it requires very little maintenance, so dealers HATE selling them (they don't make as much profit on new car sales since their margins always get squeezed and someone has to pay the interest on those 0% financing and stuff). Dealers love it when customers come back for service, because service is a high-margin item. High enough they toss in stuff like free oil changes and other cheap things to encourage returning. And do it every 3-6 months, at that.
An EV doesn't have many moving parts - just the motor, gearbox and wheels. Unlike an ICE, you don't need to do much maintenance beyond ensuring the coolant levels are OK, vital fluids (like say, brake fluid) are sufficient, etc. You can easily get away without having service them for 2 years or more. Heck, Tesla offers a "we-cover-everything-but-tires" service for $600 annually (including consumables!), and while cheaper than most vehicle services over the same period, is also optional and doesn't void your warranty if you don't do it.
Hybrids are great for dealers because the ICE requires regular servicing, and the motor couplers (for those where the motor and engine can drive the wheels) introduce more complexity for servicing (more $$$).
The other thing is, well, a lot of hybrids have piss-poor gas mileage that can be obtained with an all-gas vehicle. And some hybrids just plain suck or have poor reviews.
Actually, what WWII did was show that deficit spending does help fix the economy. The thing is, the Great Depression was aggravated by the fact the feds decided to slow down spending to keep deficits down, which turns out to be the completely wrong thing. You need to stimulate the economy, and WWII did it through immense deficit spending and bond offerings..
Of course, it helped that the spending was for something sought to be "required" (i.e., we need to fight!) rather than trying to spread out the money. Easier to incur great debt buying tanks and soldiers and all that - it's just a lot less hassle when you're dealing with people who don't want to incur more debt.
Similarly, the war on terror started right after the dot-com crash, again, spending your way out of recession. Then you spend your way out of recession in 2008, and everyone complains, because there's no war to force spending and incur debt.
Of course, the thing is, war after a little while becomes a drain on resources - see the low growth after the dot-com crash as war spending sapped trillions out of the economy.
War is just the easiest way to force deficit spending during recessionary times, otherwise you get tea partiers wanting to spend less causing the recession to deepen.
Not really, the tap target size IS smaller.
It's just that Apple uses a LOT of touchscreen processing in order to get more accurate use of points.
It's why I've found that the iOS keyboard is far more accurate at typing than the Android one, even though my Android device has a much larger screen (3.5" vs. 4.5"). In Android, hardware is responsible for reporting the touch points which is used verbatim by the OS. I'm fairly certain Apple gets a more advanced sort of data including pressure maps and uncertainty circles to help figure out where a user meant to tap.
Which probably explains why Android NEEDs replacement keyboards - the touch mechanism is bad enough that typing really is hard. Which is good, because we get some great keyboards like Swype and Fleksy which are really handy and faster than tapping (though I personally never could get used to Swype).
Either that or the default Android keyboard is so terrible that even larger tap targets don't help it.
Just saying - Apple could very well make far better use of the touchscreen information available to make smaller tap targets usable.
I'd say a use is continuous training. Firefighters normally can only do a few real simulated training a year. Using VR, they can do it continually, alongside the real simulations.
I mean, if you're an airport firefighter, you must do a live simulation training once a year minimum, and many do it every 6 months or so (twice a year). Well, alongside that, why not use VR to be able to train 10 more times a year? It doesn't have to replace, just augment.
Though I believe the US Army has found simulations very interesting - for simulating the soldier's physical health as well. If they're on the heavier side of the scale, it gets modelled in the simulations by not moving as fast, less stamina, etc. And then also physically modelled. (I believe one of the soldiers asked why he was so fat in the simulation, to which came one of his squadmates "You ARE fat!")
A lot of things don't have intrinsic value. A collection of bits on my hard drive is just that, a collection of bits. However, some people feel it has value, they charge 99 cents if it represents a song, say. Or a book, or something else. The representation has no value since my hard drive will always have bits even if it isn't those bits. What those bits mean, though has value to some people.
Tulip bulbs has intrinsic value as well - they do bloom into nice looking (depending on opinion) flowers yearly (why we call them "annuals"). Of course, back int he day, its intrinsic beauty value was way under the monetary value, but a lot of things do that too.
Amazon lets people return digital items? Since when?
I mean, you buy a TV show from Amazon, and if you don't want it or watched it, you can return it within 30 days? Ditto games, apps and music (downloadable)?
These aren't physical items here, these are downloadable items. I.e., I can buy a song from iTunes, not download it, and decide a week later I didn't want it and return it for a full refund. Steam, Google Play, etc., ditto.
Granted, few people do all analog designs these days (it's generally easier, faster and cheaper to use a DSP and work in software), but analog design skills are STILL in demand.
Not because of obvious analog nature of the world, but digital electronics, in their push to be faster and lower power, are encountering analog phenomenon.
Many digital interconnects have very strict analog components (e.g., capacitance, termination, etc). Many PCB designs may have analog design aspects (antennas, RF signals). Even a purely digital bus running between CPU and memory? Tons of analog designs trying to keep impedances the same and minimizing crosstalk, etc. etc. etc.
An analog engineer not only can hack it in a purely digital build, but they're often required. It's true they're not building analog circuits, but all the troubles in modern digital high-speed design are all analog effects that are generally well understood by analog engineers. That signal may be taking on 0 and 1.2V at the transmitter, but that signal line is a transmission line at those frequencies, couples with the inner ground planes, bounces off sharp corners and has capacitance and inductance that has to be characterized and worked with.
Anyone who designs analog circuits understands that because it influences their circuits and can form inadvertent filters. And back when digital logic was 0-5V, we simply ignored it because we overdrive the signal lines so we can safely ignore analog effects. But these days, no, you can't, if you want low power and high speed.
Yeah, that's been a huge problem. The iPhone 4s has a 99% sRGB display, while the iPhone 5/5s has a 100% sRGB display. And my Dell monitor has a 107% NTSC display.
Color spectra is fun! But given that the "visible spectrum" is a curved area, approximation by a triangle is generally quite hard, especially with 94% coverage.
In fact, given most of the content this thing displays will be sRGB or so, what generally happens Is you get a lot of pop - the colors are oversaturated, etc., which makes the photos look nice, but damn inaccurate because now the color accuracy is off (if it wasn't, you'd get good looking photos, but most of the available palette is wasted).
Well, the modern day scope is software-upgradable, so you buy what you need and can demo other stuff for 30 days or so (not 6 months).
The upshot is you'll get a scope that'll function as a scope with the specs you bought - like a Rigol 1052E is a 50MHz scope (upgradable to 100MHz I think) with 2 channels. Fancy features like decoders, enhanced triggers, etc., are upgrade items.
Though, I think the Rigol is really only around $500 now - it's original price point is now inhabited by the low end scopes of Agilent and others that give you way more functionality.
And if you wonder what Rigol is, Agilent's low end scopes, before introducing the 2000 series, were OEM'd versions of the Rigol 1052.
But yeah, for that budget, surplus analog scopes with 20+MHz bandwidth from the likes of Tektronix and such can be had for $50. Far better to learn with, less PC fiddling required (I can bet any PC scope you buy, most of the weekend would be consumed with just getting the thing working) and if one needs to stop work, the analog scopes remember their settings when transported.
Actually, stations HAVE been moving to a la carte offerings. If you pay attention, a lot of stations which used to put their popular shows on one network and have speciality channels have been shoving their popular shows onto the lesser channels.
This means that the consumer not only gets to hear about the other channels, but it also means if you want to keep watching new episodes, you need to buy BOTH channels. History and Discovery are both guilty of this, forcing new shows onto the other channels.
So instead of being able to buy just one channel, each has adapted so you need to buy 2 or 3 each, thus negating any savings you would've gotten otherwise.
Not to mention that the niche channels now have to appeal to a greater audience, so the general quality level of programming has gone down because what once was a WWII only channel needs to carry content that appeals to the mass audience in order to get subscription money.
This applies especially to the specialized reality shows like Deadliest Catch, Sons of Guns, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, American Restoration, and many others where they start focusing on drama more than the actual topic at hand. Because the general public wants more drama, not just seeing people build/catch/tear down/etc stuff. Heck, series that have tried to stay close to their roots (say, Mythbusters) have gotten VERY little airtime - each "season" is only 4-5 episodes now.
It's why the call for a la carte has deropped - towards more per-program style purchasing rather than per-channel. Which may or may not improve matters as it may allow shows to return to their roots, or they may go greedy and try to dumb it down even more.
Amazon DOES own the market. The first place most people go to for a book or movie or any other thing online? Amazon. I know people who rarely spend a dollar outside of Amazon as Amazon has practically everything in one place. (Or if it's not available from Amazon, they send a nasty letter to the manufacturer asking them why it's not on Amazon).
B&N is a poor comparison - they are circling the drain. So they have to lower prices to compete. But few people shop at B&N, and even fewer have ebooks there (I've run across many that are Amazon only, annoyingly).
And with the DoJ putting the smackdown on the Apple Agency model of selling e-books, coupled with Amazon's practical monopoly over ebooks, well, Amazon will soon be the only place. Nook's in trouble, too. When the DoJ as part of the Apple thing hacked up all the contracts, well, Amazon picked up the pieces and benefitted, while everyone else started dying. Other than Nook, there's no real other source of ebooks, and Nook's in trouble.
Basically, Amazon's become the Wal-Mart of the online world.