just a side note-- the ipod ships with a plug-in unit that recharges it anywhere, no firewire required.
I know, I own one
now you may say, well, then i have lug the plug around-- but the battery lasts 10 hours+ and chances are that if you are away from home for that long anyway you probably have to lug some other stuff around with you so the plug won't be such a drag.
Ever thought you topped off a battery and found out later that you didn't? Ever look at the 2 of 4 bars on the iPod and thought that would get you an hour of use? Ever get insominia and spend 8 hours trying to walk it off to have the iPod give up? Ever delay a much needed job just to give the iPod a little juice (that's a small complaint -- unless you are my dog, then it's a rather major one)
That's all happened to me. That doesn't make the iPod crap, I really do like it, it is a modest argument for AA batteries in devices where that matches the power needs.
Better yet would be AA NiMH's with a built in charger. In a pinch you can use normal AA's, for normal use you can just plug it in whenver you get a chance. Totally better. Unless you forget you put Ak AA's in and try to charge, and end up with fire or leaking acid or whatever Ak AA's do when you try to charge them up. That part would suck a lot.
I have no idea what the worldwide sales of Apple-branded LCDs are, but it cannot be even 10% of the worldwide production of LCDs for PC laptops and other non-Mac specific products.
I can't imagine them selling as many laptop LCDs as all the PC venders put together (from their sales numbers last year they may have beat any single PC laptop vender though). However I think they may have sold more desktop LCDs, and that does matter since they are different from laptop ones. They tend to be bigger (15" is small for a desktop large for a laptop, 17" is good for a desktop, have never seen it on a laptop, won't bring up 22"...), and have a wider angle of view. They also suck more power, and I assume are built a fair bit differently.
It probably doesn't hurt the overall trend towards LCDs that Apple quit selling glass tubes, as I'm sure they were a notable OEM of big glass tubes. But display manufacturers and vendors have been pushing LCDs for some time -- cheaper to store and ship, and the manufacturing process has got to be overall easier than huge hunks of glass vacuums
I'm not so sure, the LCDs still seem more costly, esp. as size goes up.
Apple probably deserves kudos for "going LCD", but I don't think they deserve credit for inventing the desktop LCD market.
Naw, they did it because staying competitive with CRTs was too costly. There is more margin in LCD panels. I don't think they deserve anything for switching to LCDs except being bought by people that think LCDs are what they want.
Compact Flash seems to be the most available format, with lots of storage space and low cost.
The fact is that all Palm devices and the new 3800 iPaqs have built-in connector for the SD card standard. I think the PDA market will pump the SD card standard to the top of the market. My next MP3 player (well okay my first mp3 player:) must have an SD slot so that I can load it up from my PDA. Or maybe my PDA itself will be the MP3 players
The digital camera market seems to sell a lot more memory cards then the PDA market (I know of some PDA users with no external memory, and many with but one card...the digital camera owners seem to have at a bare minimum the card that came with the camera plus one other, many have 4 or 5 extra cards). SM/SD seems mostly dead in the digital camera market, the only recent cameras with it are things like the E20 that also have CF slots, I assume because Oly use to be on the SmartMedia bandwagon and doesn't want to piss off it's past buyers.
The competition seems to be Sony and the MemoryStick vs. everyone else and Compact Flash. I wouldn't count Sony out as they sell lots of cameras, but Nikon plus Canon plus Oly plus Kodak plus...
I would bet on CF, in fact I guess having two cameras that use it and 4 CF cards (plus the microdrive when Canon ships it as part of my rebate), I guess I have.:-)
The other downside of the iPod is the hard disk, which is (relatively speaking) a fragile medium
Those little drives can take a lot of abuse, look at what notebook drives go through, or the IBM microdrives. Read this month's American Photographer to see how much abuse one of those can take, or just look at the camera on the front cover and realize the microdrive lived through it.
The CF-based players are completely solid-state
Er, except for the microdrives they just talked about in the review. Not that you need to use them, not when 256M CF cards are under $100.
The iPod could be better, but I also dont see the point of carrying around 65 million mp3's
The point is that you can have a big pile of your music (maybe "all" of it) on the thing, and you don't have to think about what you want to listen to this morning before you go running. Plus if you change your mind about being in a Jazz mood and decide Techno or the Blues is right for you half way through your run it is more likely to be in a 5G collection then a 256M collection.
That may not be with twice the price (or maybe just an extra $100 depending on how much CF you buy vs. how much you had sitting around from digital cameras) to everyone, but it is to some folks. (I'll leave out the FireWire, since you can load a CF card mighty fast with a PCMCIA sled, or a $100 FireWire adaptor; and the battery life may be better on an iPod, but getting two AA's is frequently simpler then finding some place with a FireWire plug to top off...)
Both of these points are true, but for high volume items which don't depreciate rapidly this tends to be a rather small savings.
Inventory size won't matter as much in that case, but rent still will. I doubt office furnature depreciates as much, but storing 5000 desks will cost a lot less in ohio then in the greater DC area.
A person at a checkout counter isn't going to be paid very much, and isn't going to be spending any more time than someone packing boxes.
Except checkout people get payed even when nobody is browsing (watch a store front sometime, traffice ebbs and flows). In a retail store you need to keep lines down during peak demand, and that may mean paying three people even though most of the hour 0 to 1 of them are busy, and only for 5 min or so are all three busy. Or if not over an hour, over a 4 hour shift at least. Mail order deals with a whole day's orders much more uniformly.
I expect time spent in a wherehouse pulling items isn't as bad as you would think since they tend not to search as much as normal people (at least not in a well run wharehouse).
I do admit that having a self checkout asile may change that a bit though. So long as you don't need expensave tags on each item.
The internet is a bit more efficient than catalogue sales, but it's by no means at a point where it can replace brick and mortar shopping.
For most items I agree. Especally for items you can try out and test in a store, but not on line. For impulse items. For really bulky items. For frequently bought items. For all those things a retail store has real advantages that a mail order (or Internet) store can't really compete well with.
On the other hand a Internet store can provide much more complete access to the specs on complex items. Other then testing the feal of a DVD player I think Internet shopping wouks much better for that because the people at the stores are clueless and they can never locate the manuals.
Plus there is the price thing. I admit I live in a fairly high price area, but Internet prices on many many many things is lower then local store prices. Mail order prices are lower as well. Selection tends to be better as well. I expect in less populated areas the price advantage may shrink, but the selection advantage would grow. In really less populated areas the price advantage would rise again (too few people to support many stores, less compatation...). However I just made all that up -- what I really know is the bits about "around here". Around here it is cheaper to buy clothes form Land's End then the local Men's clothing store. Around here it is cheaper to buy CD's online then from Tower. Around here it is cheaper to buy books from wherever www.bestbuybooks.com says then B&N or Borders.
I doubt it will ever be cheaper to get a tomato, loaf of bread, or pork roast online though.
Not exactly what I meant, but it's a start. What I really want is to be able to access the inventories right on the shelves of the store, in real time.
I'm pretty sure that when you select a local store the Circuit City web site shows inventory for both the local and online store.
What would be beautiful is if there were one physical store where I could pick-up my products from multiple different online stores. Combine the efficiencies of the brick and mortar stores with the efficiencies of the online stores. The only problem is that brick and mortar stores will lose all their profits as soon as people start comparison shopping. In a truly efficient market, middlemen don't make money.
Exactly, this will never happen unless there is a way for the middlemen to make a profit. It might happen if the online guys were the middlemen, and given your location what they are really telling you is where to go to get the stuff you asked for (minimum number of miles, minimum number of stores), and they got a small cut of the price from the retailers. Making them more like an advertisment. However the tendency for them to stear you towards places with higher kickbacks will mess that up. Plus it requires better inventory reporting then many stores have, and more information being exposed then many stores like to give potential competitors. So I think while there might be a little money in it, there is too little.
P.S. I'm not sure middlemen make less in an efficent market then anyone else -- in an efficent market all margins drop to zero. In the real world stock brokers make real money, and so do movie distribution houses. So that's the real movatitor. Plus all market sectors start pretty inefficently, so there may be money in something untill too many people get into it...
That difference in price between Circuit City and online retailers; it's not due to inefficiencies with brick and mortar stores, it's pure profit.
I doubt it. There are lots of factors. Even two retail stores can have radically diffrent prices and not have profit margins that are all that diffrent. One may do a better job of inventory control, keeping employe loss to a minimum, and picking the right items to stock, advertise and hype. Oh, and better chosen store locations.
The price differences between Circuit City and price watch retiler number 8 is a vast sea of complexity, and I doubt either of us knows even half the story.
Why is this? Shipping. It makes a lot more sense to ship 1000 items to the store and have individuals pick them up than it does to have 1000 items shipped to 800 different locations in 900 different packages.
Maybe, but retail stores have to pay rent in more expansive areas then mail order stores do. Retail stores have to keep inventory local, mail order stores can choose to not stock items until ordered, after all people buying from them are already signing up for a multi day wait for shipping, what is a few more days?
Mail order can get by with fewer employees per customer. Plus they can locate those people in areas with lower pay scale.
Mail order has be around longer then the Internet (really, Sears use to do it before the turn of the century), and while it doesn't serve all markets, it does work for many. Ordering off the Internet isn't worse then mail ordering via a catalogue (except for getting exact color matches), and is in many ways a bit better.
Once real-world stores start having online shopping and real-world pick-up, the prices will fall again
I think a lot of stores do this. Circuit City is the only one I bought from. Filled out my order on line, got prices, put in the order, got the confirmation number, and picked up the order locally (mostly stuff with great rebates, like 100 CD-Rs for $2 after rebate). The stuff was in the same queue you use for in-store ordered items that they bring from the warehouse.
More likely they simply aren't aware that the product is available for less, brand new.
Also, many sellers are no longer individuals or hobbyists, but professional middle men. I personally know of people who buy in bulk at Fry's and then move the merchandies on EBay, once again, for a profit. This trend has taken the fun out of web auctions and has turned it into a volume operation
I have a hard time calling this a scam.
If I walk up to you, hold up a book you want and say "how much do you want for this", and sell it at that price, it is really hard to call it a scam.
A scam is if they take the money and run off with it. Or if they ship you something else. Lie about the condition. Invent extra bidders to run up the price. Or somehow charge you more after the bidding closes. Those are scams.
Selling you the exact product offered at the exact price someone says they will pay isn't a scam.
Even if some moron picks a price that is way high.
Think about it this way, Circuit City has lower prices on some items the Best Buy does, does that mean Circuit City is running a scam on you? Random pricewatch dealer number 6 has better prices then both Circuit City and Best Buy...are Circuit City and Best Buy both running scams? (for the moment, ignore the extended warentees).
It ain't a scam unless you misrepresent the item for sale, don't transfer it, or take more then the agreed on amount.
Once in a while you can get good deals on eBay, as in cheaper then retail, and cheaper the half.com. The "trick" is just to not bid higher then you can get it elsewhere. Well the other part of the trick is that you really will very seldom get anything this way. So far I have gotten a a bookshelf full of books and a few videos (about photography, which seem to be out of "print").
I have bid on a lot of things where the price just goes way too high, like a used EF75-300mm IS lens that went for $470. KEH.com sold it used for $415 with a return policy and all, B&H sold it new for (I think) $450. Of corse it turns out the lens sucks (all of them, not just mine) and I should have bought the 100-500L IS for $1500 or so:-)
The real moral? Photography is an expensive hobby.
(P.S. ofoto.com does digital prints at 30% of the cost of local stores, so there are clearly bargains left)
(b) the competition is also out of business (they couldn't compete and make a profit). At this point, the only place the consumer can buy from is the MegaCorps that were able to afford to compete at a loss for a long time. Now the MegaCorp can raise its prices as much as it likes, since it has no surviving competition.
That depends stongly on the barrier to entry for the busness. If it is high like designing a CPU, then yes a monopoly can exist for quite some time (esp. if there are complex patents involved). For selling the same kind of stuff online you would in a local shop, the barrier is quite low.
As long as someone thinks there is enough of a chance to make money to risk a $100,000 or so you can build an online store (or far less, depending). Or someone that has a real store front may do an online version for far far less.
I don't think we are in danger of a monopoly on online camera, book, CD, and other random crap stores.
Re:Backing store vs Double buffering
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· Score: 2
No, backing store is different than double buffering.
That's what I just said, plus I said people frequently use the two terms interchangabley. I did mean to imply that it is wrong but common.
Backing store sounded like a good idea when most overlapping windows were assummed to be pop-up menus.
I don't think that was ever assumed, and save-unders can be used for pop-ups anyway.
If the underlying area is drawn to, X is supposed to forget the backing store,
It can forget it, or it can render into the backing store (I don't think any X servers do that, but they could). It can also choose to put back the unchanged version, but it does have to send an expose event.
It is also possible and useful to double-buffer only the visible portion of the window, this is what OpenGL and probably DirectX and all other 3D systems do because the offscreen area is the same size as the screen, but you lose the ability to move or composite transparent windows without redrawing.
You also have to support redrawing the exposed areas (I don't recall transparency on the NeXT, but it double buffered to save apps the trouble of implmenting redraws).
I'm curious, anyone have any experience with the other x86-based X systems? I know there are a couple of non-free ones, but I've never had the chance to see any of them. How do they measure up?
I used Metro Link X's server, it supported acceleration for cards XFree86 didn't at the time. Other then that it was about the same as a slightly older XFree, because I think it *was* a slightly older XFree with new module loading bits (since donated back) and accelerated support for a few extra cards (some of which were donated back).
It also had a problem where it made the clock run slow on some machines which really sucked because once your clock was more then 5min out of whack Kerb4 stopped working. So some of us switched XFree. Their support channel took months and months to deliver a fix. So nothing makes me want to run out and do it again (except maybe if I got stuck with the wrong video card).
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR
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· Score: 3, Interesting
for one, they don't have mouse events, they just read from the mouse file (which is multiplexed over the network).
I like a lot of things aobut Plan9, and eight-and-a-half (the windowing system). However I do want to point out one disadvantage of how they handle mouse events. If all you care about is "has the mouse moved into/out of this box" you still have to use a ton of bandwidth to track the mouse. In X11 if you make that box a sub-window you can ask for enter/leave events and not consume 56+Kbits watching the user twiddle the mouse around.
Other then that eight-and-a-half rules. I really like that the same devices it offers to client apps are the ones that appear on the bare machine so (a) you can run a window app full screen without the other stuff, and (b) you can run eight-and-a-half inside eight-and-a-half without doing anything special like you need to with XonX or the like.
Plus Plan9 is cool, so I am compelled to like everything about it:-)
Yeah, but they do require that the monitors send back sizing info (via DPMS, or USB), and they still pretty much only support a tiny handful of video cards. Plus Apple gets to choose all the new cards. That does make life simpler for the people who write Quartz...of corse having to support all the extra stuff that Quartz does, and doing it with fewer people, that makes it a bit harder too.
Quartz is just a fancy name for Display Postscript, also an idea from the NeXT, and also part of the GnuSTEP project
For what it's worth, I don't recall the NeXT doing transparency (it did do anti-aliased text though). That may be the only real addition made to the rendering model in the transition to Quartz, or at least the only big one...
Unless you count OpenGL, I'm not sure if that is strictly speaking part of Quartz, or just another thing you can get to from Cocoa/Carbon...
XRender is nice, but basically only GTK+, Qt, and a few straight X apps support it
Well Qt (incl KDE), GTK+, and GNUStep basically cover all the X apps that don't suck anyway:-)
Besides everything has to start somewhere. This may not be a solved problem, but it's on the way.
Re:Moving away from X
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· Score: 3, Informative
i see, so there's no capability for X itself to render the fonts to the screen, it has to pass the bitmaps back to the client and then the client has to pass the bitmaps back to the server?
Actually there is, as long as you don't want to rotate the text or anything like that. However there is a font server that the X server normally uses to get fonts, that only supports bitmaps. That could be fixed without impacting too many apps.
There is an X extension to do antialsiased text, in part to get sub-pixel addressing, and in part (I assume) to avoid finding some long dead application that would break... (like something that relies on XOR to erase things, or...)
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware
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The X model is to provide high-level graphics primitives to the application, which then submits them to the server which can turn them into whichever low-level calls are most efficient on the hardware in question.
Er, high-level X isn't. It directly exposes the framebuffers color model for example. PostScript and OpenGL are high level, X11 is pretty much just a framebuffer. That's not to say it didn't get some things right. It also was invented on way way way slower machines, ones where Display PostScript would have sucked huge...in other words machines slower then today's Palm Pilot...
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware
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If I interpret the email correctly, backing is referring to double-buffering.
Similar, but different. Backing is when the windowing system stores the image elsewhere when another window overlaps it. X11 uses it to speed redraw on window move/resize/delete. Other windowing systems do as well (Mac OS X does it for all windows while X lets apps request it, and may or may not do it...OSX also uses it for implementing transparency).
People do tend to use the terms interchangeably though...
That's nothing more than a cheap trick used by designs that can't render widgets quickly enough. In a game, double buffering is useful because because any tearing is really annoying. That's not so on a desktop
Sure it is. It isn't a huge problem, but it is a problem. I made a small custom widget for w3juke's play bar, and it rendered quickly enough. The real problem was the flashing and tearing. It renders slower with the double buffering, but it looks much better.
That's not so on a desktop. BeOS, for example, can render widgets fast enough on much more ancient machines and it does't have double-buffering
If it doesn't buffer, and it avoids flashing and tearing it may only run rendering requests during VBI (well that avoids tearing, not always flashing). Many old video games did that, but that does waste a lot of time on drawing bound apps.
Re:MS Windows vs. X, same hardware
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· Score: 2
I'm not for destroying extensibility. Instead, I would love to see a system where objects are installed onto the server, maybe even at run-time off the web if an application needs it. Even better, a system where a developer can extend an existing control to add new functionality or build a new control off of generic objects.
The downside is installing code that would normally be in the toolkit into X11 makes X11 itself less stable rather then the toolkit using program. Also because the X server runs as root on many platforms (to get direct access to the hardware) you can have some real security issues. It might be possible to work around those though.
I would rather have an application be unstable then the X server. If one is testing a new version of the GTK toolkit it would be nice to be able to debug using a nice GUI debugger without getting a second machine to do it from. More importantly if a toolkit is a little flaky I would rather it bring down one application then the whole session, that would make Unix systems seem seriously unstable for desktop use.
Just use the extensions. But these aren't transparent to the programmer
And a whole new Window system would be transparent? Neither a new windowing system nor a new rendering model are transparent, either need changes to at least the toolkit, and maybe the application. Look at Mac OSX, a Carbon program is basically a OS9 program (or older), but the Carbon library basically reimplments the older rendering system on top of a new model while at the same time Cocoa exposes this new model more directly.
If you wanted, for example, AA fonts in an older application you'd have to rewrite it to make use of them.
I assume that would be true for an application that rides directly on top of Xlib like xtank, but if you have one built on a toolkit you can change just the toolkit and get AA fonts to work for all the apps. I believe this has been done for Qt (and thus all KDE apps). There is no reason you couldn't do it for QTK+ and other toolkits as well.
Furthermore, why isn't window management a part of the X server? Look at all the resources that go into the writing of window managers. There are scores of window managers, and they all really do the same thing.
Really? So fvwm2 is a tiled windows manager? And uwm does virtual desktops?
I remember when the first virtual desktops showed up, it was a lot simpler to put that into a single window manager then to get it into X11 itself...of corse I expect it would have been simpler to put it into X11 then the other 50 windows managers that came after...
There are window managers that don't use the overlapping windows approach, they place and resize windows so they don't overlap. Some of the overlapping window managers do better automatic placement then others.
Window management should be something that Just Happens.
And the having window managers be programs someone can pick and choose breaks this how? I have written a lot of X11 programs, and modified countless more. None were aware that window management didn't "just happen", well except for twm and fvwm2, but that's because they were window managers. As a user of X11 I expect the window management to happen.
All of the other things that includes such as menus and docks are outside of the scope of window management.
Really? In OSX the dock interacts with the window manager, it needs to know if the dock is in autohide mode or not, which edge it is on, and how big it is. Otherwise the WM could put windows over it and make life hard for the user by mistake.
There are a lot of nice things about being able to change window managers, I don't think we would have nice ones today if they had been so hard to change.
There are also bad things, the big bad thing is anybody who sits down at my Unix machine and attempts to use my X11 setup has to figure out how my window manager is set up. What do they press to restack things? How do they unhide a window? That isn't all the fault of X11 having user choosable window managers, the guy in the next office over uses fvwm2, and so do I. My setup is extreamly different from his, so much so that he has to ask how to use it.
This seldom happens with other windowing systems. One OS X box is pretty much like the others. Plus people seem to have a better grasp on how to make it work without being told. The downside is it's harder to get virtual desktops to work (of corse I don't use virtual desktops on X11 anymore anyway), it is harder to decide the autoplacment sucks and to put in a new one. It is harder to decide you need to do a windowshade like thing and do it. Changing just about everything is a lot harder.
In short, X is too low level and it needs a lot of things built in that are now floating around as extensions and outside applications
I do agree that X is too low level, directly exposing the framebuffer's color model has always pissed me off, it made xtank's drawing code at least five times larger. I don't think the extensions need to be moved into the core, that won't really make it better. Making the presence of some "extensions" mandatory will though. It will let programs start relying on them to be there.
Even without that though some programs will anyway, it will be too hard not too, and if the "major platforms" all have them (with "Linux" probably being enough platforms in and of itself) a lot of things will just assume it works anyway.
Re:Moving away from X
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· Score: 5, Informative
Should the Unix/Linux world move away from X? Redesign a graphical layer from the ground up, supporting antialiasing, transparency
There are people working on adding a new rendering model that does antialiasing and sub-pixel addressing. "People" being mostly Keith Packard.
enhanced programming environment
There is no reason you can't do that to X, in fact if you compare things like xlib to Gtk--, or Xt to Qt there has been huge progress. Oh, and there is GNUStep too, which is mostly like NeXTStep which is what OS X is based on...
and a new, well defined and examined user interface?
That is the hard part. In part because backwards compatibility works against you.
This would be going the Mac OS X route
I think OS X has a lot going for it, but the biggest thing really is that the apps do mostly work alike, which is rather unlike X11. I know I'm partly at fault since the X11 apps I worked on (xtank and w3juke) are not much alike:-)
The fact is that there's no incentive to produce a $50 paint program because your target market is too busy pirating Photoshop. For simlar reasons, there's no real incentive for anyone to get the gimp working properly (natively) on Windows/Mac.
Really? Because there is a pretty good Windows port of the GIMP, a fair number of people working on the OSX version (it works under X11), and a lot of bad under $100 Windows Photo Paint programs (don't know about under $50). I assume the photo paint programs mostly survive because digital camera componies want to bundle something, and PhotoShop LE is too costly for some of them.
P.S. I think PhotoShop Elements is also about $100, I forget exactly what it leaves out, but lack of Actions makes it worthless to me.
Almost any piece of software with a business market will COMPLETELY IGNORE the broke average Joe. You tell me one person who is willing to pay $600 for a copy of Photoshop, who is not doing it for business work
A lot of people that pay over $2000 for a camera, and more then that on lenses will buy PhotoShop. They don't tend to pay full retail since those cameras tend to come with PhotoShop LE and Adobe offers LE owners a discount on an upgrade to the full version.
A surprising number of people spend that kind of money on cameras and never sell the pictures (or don't really intend to...or don't plan on getting all of the original cost back...or...). Is $600 a lot to pay for a CD? Sure, but $1800 is a lot to pay for glass:-)
(What glass costs $1800? The Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS does...and it isn't just pros that own it, the 100-400L is a similar price, and there are a lot of far more expensive lenses)
Why spend $200 on something like that? It's ridiculous, especially when something like The GIMP is free. If a powerful program like the GIMP is free, shouldn't Photoshop be closer to it?
One may be fully justified in paying $200+ for PhotoShop because there are canned actions out there for it that I (don't think) exist for the GIMP right now. For example there are a lot of good sharpening tools for the EOS-D30's CMOS produced images. There are lots of noise reducing actions (and plugins) for different cameras which have different kinds of noise. There are stair-step enlargers. Lots of stuff. None of which couldn't be done in the GIMP, but most of it isn't.
PhotoShop is as much an application environment as an editing application.
Slashdot Mirror
I know, I own one
Ever thought you topped off a battery and found out later that you didn't? Ever look at the 2 of 4 bars on the iPod and thought that would get you an hour of use? Ever get insominia and spend 8 hours trying to walk it off to have the iPod give up? Ever delay a much needed job just to give the iPod a little juice (that's a small complaint -- unless you are my dog, then it's a rather major one)
That's all happened to me. That doesn't make the iPod crap, I really do like it, it is a modest argument for AA batteries in devices where that matches the power needs.
Better yet would be AA NiMH's with a built in charger. In a pinch you can use normal AA's, for normal use you can just plug it in whenver you get a chance. Totally better. Unless you forget you put Ak AA's in and try to charge, and end up with fire or leaking acid or whatever Ak AA's do when you try to charge them up. That part would suck a lot.
I can't imagine them selling as many laptop LCDs as all the PC venders put together (from their sales numbers last year they may have beat any single PC laptop vender though). However I think they may have sold more desktop LCDs, and that does matter since they are different from laptop ones. They tend to be bigger (15" is small for a desktop large for a laptop, 17" is good for a desktop, have never seen it on a laptop, won't bring up 22"...), and have a wider angle of view. They also suck more power, and I assume are built a fair bit differently.
I'm not so sure, the LCDs still seem more costly, esp. as size goes up.
Naw, they did it because staying competitive with CRTs was too costly. There is more margin in LCD panels. I don't think they deserve anything for switching to LCDs except being bought by people that think LCDs are what they want.
The digital camera market seems to sell a lot more memory cards then the PDA market (I know of some PDA users with no external memory, and many with but one card...the digital camera owners seem to have at a bare minimum the card that came with the camera plus one other, many have 4 or 5 extra cards). SM/SD seems mostly dead in the digital camera market, the only recent cameras with it are things like the E20 that also have CF slots, I assume because Oly use to be on the SmartMedia bandwagon and doesn't want to piss off it's past buyers.
The competition seems to be Sony and the MemoryStick vs. everyone else and Compact Flash. I wouldn't count Sony out as they sell lots of cameras, but Nikon plus Canon plus Oly plus Kodak plus...
I would bet on CF, in fact I guess having two cameras that use it and 4 CF cards (plus the microdrive when Canon ships it as part of my rebate), I guess I have. :-)
Those little drives can take a lot of abuse, look at what notebook drives go through, or the IBM microdrives. Read this month's American Photographer to see how much abuse one of those can take, or just look at the camera on the front cover and realize the microdrive lived through it.
Er, except for the microdrives they just talked about in the review. Not that you need to use them, not when 256M CF cards are under $100.
The point is that you can have a big pile of your music (maybe "all" of it) on the thing, and you don't have to think about what you want to listen to this morning before you go running. Plus if you change your mind about being in a Jazz mood and decide Techno or the Blues is right for you half way through your run it is more likely to be in a 5G collection then a 256M collection.
That may not be with twice the price (or maybe just an extra $100 depending on how much CF you buy vs. how much you had sitting around from digital cameras) to everyone, but it is to some folks. (I'll leave out the FireWire, since you can load a CF card mighty fast with a PCMCIA sled, or a $100 FireWire adaptor; and the battery life may be better on an iPod, but getting two AA's is frequently simpler then finding some place with a FireWire plug to top off...)
Inventory size won't matter as much in that case, but rent still will. I doubt office furnature depreciates as much, but storing 5000 desks will cost a lot less in ohio then in the greater DC area.
Except checkout people get payed even when nobody is browsing (watch a store front sometime, traffice ebbs and flows). In a retail store you need to keep lines down during peak demand, and that may mean paying three people even though most of the hour 0 to 1 of them are busy, and only for 5 min or so are all three busy. Or if not over an hour, over a 4 hour shift at least. Mail order deals with a whole day's orders much more uniformly.
I expect time spent in a wherehouse pulling items isn't as bad as you would think since they tend not to search as much as normal people (at least not in a well run wharehouse).
I do admit that having a self checkout asile may change that a bit though. So long as you don't need expensave tags on each item.
For most items I agree. Especally for items you can try out and test in a store, but not on line. For impulse items. For really bulky items. For frequently bought items. For all those things a retail store has real advantages that a mail order (or Internet) store can't really compete well with.
On the other hand a Internet store can provide much more complete access to the specs on complex items. Other then testing the feal of a DVD player I think Internet shopping wouks much better for that because the people at the stores are clueless and they can never locate the manuals.
Plus there is the price thing. I admit I live in a fairly high price area, but Internet prices on many many many things is lower then local store prices. Mail order prices are lower as well. Selection tends to be better as well. I expect in less populated areas the price advantage may shrink, but the selection advantage would grow. In really less populated areas the price advantage would rise again (too few people to support many stores, less compatation...). However I just made all that up -- what I really know is the bits about "around here". Around here it is cheaper to buy clothes form Land's End then the local Men's clothing store. Around here it is cheaper to buy CD's online then from Tower. Around here it is cheaper to buy books from wherever www.bestbuybooks.com says then B&N or Borders.
I doubt it will ever be cheaper to get a tomato, loaf of bread, or pork roast online though.
I'm pretty sure that when you select a local store the Circuit City web site shows inventory for both the local and online store.
Exactly, this will never happen unless there is a way for the middlemen to make a profit. It might happen if the online guys were the middlemen, and given your location what they are really telling you is where to go to get the stuff you asked for (minimum number of miles, minimum number of stores), and they got a small cut of the price from the retailers. Making them more like an advertisment. However the tendency for them to stear you towards places with higher kickbacks will mess that up. Plus it requires better inventory reporting then many stores have, and more information being exposed then many stores like to give potential competitors. So I think while there might be a little money in it, there is too little.
P.S. I'm not sure middlemen make less in an efficent market then anyone else -- in an efficent market all margins drop to zero. In the real world stock brokers make real money, and so do movie distribution houses. So that's the real movatitor. Plus all market sectors start pretty inefficently, so there may be money in something untill too many people get into it...
I doubt it. There are lots of factors. Even two retail stores can have radically diffrent prices and not have profit margins that are all that diffrent. One may do a better job of inventory control, keeping employe loss to a minimum, and picking the right items to stock, advertise and hype. Oh, and better chosen store locations.
The price differences between Circuit City and price watch retiler number 8 is a vast sea of complexity, and I doubt either of us knows even half the story.
Maybe, but retail stores have to pay rent in more expansive areas then mail order stores do. Retail stores have to keep inventory local, mail order stores can choose to not stock items until ordered, after all people buying from them are already signing up for a multi day wait for shipping, what is a few more days?
Mail order can get by with fewer employees per customer. Plus they can locate those people in areas with lower pay scale.
Mail order has be around longer then the Internet (really, Sears use to do it before the turn of the century), and while it doesn't serve all markets, it does work for many. Ordering off the Internet isn't worse then mail ordering via a catalogue (except for getting exact color matches), and is in many ways a bit better.
I think a lot of stores do this. Circuit City is the only one I bought from. Filled out my order on line, got prices, put in the order, got the confirmation number, and picked up the order locally (mostly stuff with great rebates, like 100 CD-Rs for $2 after rebate). The stuff was in the same queue you use for in-store ordered items that they bring from the warehouse.
I have a hard time calling this a scam.
If I walk up to you, hold up a book you want and say "how much do you want for this", and sell it at that price, it is really hard to call it a scam.
A scam is if they take the money and run off with it. Or if they ship you something else. Lie about the condition. Invent extra bidders to run up the price. Or somehow charge you more after the bidding closes. Those are scams.
Selling you the exact product offered at the exact price someone says they will pay isn't a scam.
Even if some moron picks a price that is way high.
Think about it this way, Circuit City has lower prices on some items the Best Buy does, does that mean Circuit City is running a scam on you? Random pricewatch dealer number 6 has better prices then both Circuit City and Best Buy...are Circuit City and Best Buy both running scams? (for the moment, ignore the extended warentees).
It ain't a scam unless you misrepresent the item for sale, don't transfer it, or take more then the agreed on amount.
Once in a while you can get good deals on eBay, as in cheaper then retail, and cheaper the half.com. The "trick" is just to not bid higher then you can get it elsewhere. Well the other part of the trick is that you really will very seldom get anything this way. So far I have gotten a a bookshelf full of books and a few videos (about photography, which seem to be out of "print").
I have bid on a lot of things where the price just goes way too high, like a used EF75-300mm IS lens that went for $470. KEH.com sold it used for $415 with a return policy and all, B&H sold it new for (I think) $450. Of corse it turns out the lens sucks (all of them, not just mine) and I should have bought the 100-500L IS for $1500 or so :-)
The real moral? Photography is an expensive hobby.
(P.S. ofoto.com does digital prints at 30% of the cost of local stores, so there are clearly bargains left)
That depends stongly on the barrier to entry for the busness. If it is high like designing a CPU, then yes a monopoly can exist for quite some time (esp. if there are complex patents involved). For selling the same kind of stuff online you would in a local shop, the barrier is quite low.
As long as someone thinks there is enough of a chance to make money to risk a $100,000 or so you can build an online store (or far less, depending). Or someone that has a real store front may do an online version for far far less.
I don't think we are in danger of a monopoly on online camera, book, CD, and other random crap stores.
That's what I just said, plus I said people frequently use the two terms interchangabley. I did mean to imply that it is wrong but common.
I don't think that was ever assumed, and save-unders can be used for pop-ups anyway.
It can forget it, or it can render into the backing store (I don't think any X servers do that, but they could). It can also choose to put back the unchanged version, but it does have to send an expose event.
You also have to support redrawing the exposed areas (I don't recall transparency on the NeXT, but it double buffered to save apps the trouble of implmenting redraws).
I used Metro Link X's server, it supported acceleration for cards XFree86 didn't at the time. Other then that it was about the same as a slightly older XFree, because I think it *was* a slightly older XFree with new module loading bits (since donated back) and accelerated support for a few extra cards (some of which were donated back).
It also had a problem where it made the clock run slow on some machines which really sucked because once your clock was more then 5min out of whack Kerb4 stopped working. So some of us switched XFree. Their support channel took months and months to deliver a fix. So nothing makes me want to run out and do it again (except maybe if I got stuck with the wrong video card).
I like a lot of things aobut Plan9, and eight-and-a-half (the windowing system). However I do want to point out one disadvantage of how they handle mouse events. If all you care about is "has the mouse moved into/out of this box" you still have to use a ton of bandwidth to track the mouse. In X11 if you make that box a sub-window you can ask for enter/leave events and not consume 56+Kbits watching the user twiddle the mouse around.
Other then that eight-and-a-half rules. I really like that the same devices it offers to client apps are the ones that appear on the bare machine so (a) you can run a window app full screen without the other stuff, and (b) you can run eight-and-a-half inside eight-and-a-half without doing anything special like you need to with XonX or the like.
Plus Plan9 is cool, so I am compelled to like everything about it :-)
Yeah, but they do require that the monitors send back sizing info (via DPMS, or USB), and they still pretty much only support a tiny handful of video cards. Plus Apple gets to choose all the new cards. That does make life simpler for the people who write Quartz...of corse having to support all the extra stuff that Quartz does, and doing it with fewer people, that makes it a bit harder too.
For what it's worth, I don't recall the NeXT doing transparency (it did do anti-aliased text though). That may be the only real addition made to the rendering model in the transition to Quartz, or at least the only big one...
Unless you count OpenGL, I'm not sure if that is strictly speaking part of Quartz, or just another thing you can get to from Cocoa/Carbon...
Well Qt (incl KDE), GTK+, and GNUStep basically cover all the X apps that don't suck anyway :-)
Besides everything has to start somewhere. This may not be a solved problem, but it's on the way.
Actually there is, as long as you don't want to rotate the text or anything like that. However there is a font server that the X server normally uses to get fonts, that only supports bitmaps. That could be fixed without impacting too many apps.
There is an X extension to do antialsiased text, in part to get sub-pixel addressing, and in part (I assume) to avoid finding some long dead application that would break... (like something that relies on XOR to erase things, or...)
Er, high-level X isn't. It directly exposes the framebuffers color model for example. PostScript and OpenGL are high level, X11 is pretty much just a framebuffer. That's not to say it didn't get some things right. It also was invented on way way way slower machines, ones where Display PostScript would have sucked huge...in other words machines slower then today's Palm Pilot...
Similar, but different. Backing is when the windowing system stores the image elsewhere when another window overlaps it. X11 uses it to speed redraw on window move/resize/delete. Other windowing systems do as well (Mac OS X does it for all windows while X lets apps request it, and may or may not do it...OSX also uses it for implementing transparency).
People do tend to use the terms interchangeably though...
Sure it is. It isn't a huge problem, but it is a problem. I made a small custom widget for w3juke's play bar, and it rendered quickly enough. The real problem was the flashing and tearing. It renders slower with the double buffering, but it looks much better.
If it doesn't buffer, and it avoids flashing and tearing it may only run rendering requests during VBI (well that avoids tearing, not always flashing). Many old video games did that, but that does waste a lot of time on drawing bound apps.
The downside is installing code that would normally be in the toolkit into X11 makes X11 itself less stable rather then the toolkit using program. Also because the X server runs as root on many platforms (to get direct access to the hardware) you can have some real security issues. It might be possible to work around those though.
I would rather have an application be unstable then the X server. If one is testing a new version of the GTK toolkit it would be nice to be able to debug using a nice GUI debugger without getting a second machine to do it from. More importantly if a toolkit is a little flaky I would rather it bring down one application then the whole session, that would make Unix systems seem seriously unstable for desktop use.
And a whole new Window system would be transparent? Neither a new windowing system nor a new rendering model are transparent, either need changes to at least the toolkit, and maybe the application. Look at Mac OSX, a Carbon program is basically a OS9 program (or older), but the Carbon library basically reimplments the older rendering system on top of a new model while at the same time Cocoa exposes this new model more directly.
I assume that would be true for an application that rides directly on top of Xlib like xtank, but if you have one built on a toolkit you can change just the toolkit and get AA fonts to work for all the apps. I believe this has been done for Qt (and thus all KDE apps). There is no reason you couldn't do it for QTK+ and other toolkits as well.
Really? So fvwm2 is a tiled windows manager? And uwm does virtual desktops?
I remember when the first virtual desktops showed up, it was a lot simpler to put that into a single window manager then to get it into X11 itself...of corse I expect it would have been simpler to put it into X11 then the other 50 windows managers that came after...
There are window managers that don't use the overlapping windows approach, they place and resize windows so they don't overlap. Some of the overlapping window managers do better automatic placement then others.
And the having window managers be programs someone can pick and choose breaks this how? I have written a lot of X11 programs, and modified countless more. None were aware that window management didn't "just happen", well except for twm and fvwm2, but that's because they were window managers. As a user of X11 I expect the window management to happen.
Really? In OSX the dock interacts with the window manager, it needs to know if the dock is in autohide mode or not, which edge it is on, and how big it is. Otherwise the WM could put windows over it and make life hard for the user by mistake.
There are a lot of nice things about being able to change window managers, I don't think we would have nice ones today if they had been so hard to change.
There are also bad things, the big bad thing is anybody who sits down at my Unix machine and attempts to use my X11 setup has to figure out how my window manager is set up. What do they press to restack things? How do they unhide a window? That isn't all the fault of X11 having user choosable window managers, the guy in the next office over uses fvwm2, and so do I. My setup is extreamly different from his, so much so that he has to ask how to use it.
This seldom happens with other windowing systems. One OS X box is pretty much like the others. Plus people seem to have a better grasp on how to make it work without being told. The downside is it's harder to get virtual desktops to work (of corse I don't use virtual desktops on X11 anymore anyway), it is harder to decide the autoplacment sucks and to put in a new one. It is harder to decide you need to do a windowshade like thing and do it. Changing just about everything is a lot harder.
I do agree that X is too low level, directly exposing the framebuffer's color model has always pissed me off, it made xtank's drawing code at least five times larger. I don't think the extensions need to be moved into the core, that won't really make it better. Making the presence of some "extensions" mandatory will though. It will let programs start relying on them to be there.
Even without that though some programs will anyway, it will be too hard not too, and if the "major platforms" all have them (with "Linux" probably being enough platforms in and of itself) a lot of things will just assume it works anyway.
There are people working on adding a new rendering model that does antialiasing and sub-pixel addressing. "People" being mostly Keith Packard.
There is no reason you can't do that to X, in fact if you compare things like xlib to Gtk--, or Xt to Qt there has been huge progress. Oh, and there is GNUStep too, which is mostly like NeXTStep which is what OS X is based on...
That is the hard part. In part because backwards compatibility works against you.
I think OS X has a lot going for it, but the biggest thing really is that the apps do mostly work alike, which is rather unlike X11. I know I'm partly at fault since the X11 apps I worked on (xtank and w3juke) are not much alike :-)
Really? Because there is a pretty good Windows port of the GIMP, a fair number of people working on the OSX version (it works under X11), and a lot of bad under $100 Windows Photo Paint programs (don't know about under $50). I assume the photo paint programs mostly survive because digital camera componies want to bundle something, and PhotoShop LE is too costly for some of them.
P.S. I think PhotoShop Elements is also about $100, I forget exactly what it leaves out, but lack of Actions makes it worthless to me.
A lot of people that pay over $2000 for a camera, and more then that on lenses will buy PhotoShop. They don't tend to pay full retail since those cameras tend to come with PhotoShop LE and Adobe offers LE owners a discount on an upgrade to the full version.
A surprising number of people spend that kind of money on cameras and never sell the pictures (or don't really intend to...or don't plan on getting all of the original cost back...or...). Is $600 a lot to pay for a CD? Sure, but $1800 is a lot to pay for glass :-)
(What glass costs $1800? The Canon EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS does...and it isn't just pros that own it, the 100-400L is a similar price, and there are a lot of far more expensive lenses)
One may be fully justified in paying $200+ for PhotoShop because there are canned actions out there for it that I (don't think) exist for the GIMP right now. For example there are a lot of good sharpening tools for the EOS-D30's CMOS produced images. There are lots of noise reducing actions (and plugins) for different cameras which have different kinds of noise. There are stair-step enlargers. Lots of stuff. None of which couldn't be done in the GIMP, but most of it isn't.
PhotoShop is as much an application environment as an editing application.