Certainly the universe was created. I mean, it's here, isn't it? Individuals may disagree about whether it was created by a natural process or some supernatural Creator, but can't we at least agree that it was created, period? So, no need to put "created" in quotes.
Apple doesn't sell "-est" machines. Not the fastest, not the thinnest, not the lightest, not the most durable, not the most reliable, not the longest battery life, not the cheapest -- they're not really the best at anything.
Apple sells the "lightest value laptop" -- according to none other than PC Magazine!
Only one label sells Britney Spears CDs and they can charge whatever they want becaue nobody else is going to compete directly against them.
No company, not even a pure monopoly, can charge "whatever they want." If the price of a Britney CD was set at $10 billion, no one, probably not even Bill Gates, would buy one, and the label would realize $0 profit. To increase their profit above $0, they would have to lower the price.
EA will support games on all PC platforms featuring NVIDIA hardware
My Mac is a PC that features NVIDIA hardware... can I look forward to lots of EA games for it?
Re:Laptop screens selling at a loss?
on
LCD Price Fixing?
·
· Score: 1
Strangely though, the ghosting was unnoticeable with movies, but here another annoyance came up: in a dark room, playing a dark movie (e.g. Alien), the supposedly black bars on the top and at the bottom of the screen are annoyingly bright, so bright that it's really distracting.
You are describing poor contrast ratio. Yes, an LCD will give you really bright brights, but it will never give you truly black blacks. A good LCD has a contrast ratio of 400:1, but a good CRT will give you 700:1.
people in say, Arizona, who put in swimming pools even though the US has water shortages are indeed being greedy
Don't rely on the masses developing a sense of selflessness in order to conserve resources. If water is really so scarce, public utilities should raise the price of water. Scare resources will never be allocated efficiently until that scarcity is reflected in the price.
When it costs $10,000 to fill a swimming pool with water, the vast majority of people will think twice before installing a pool.
Note that this large increase in the price of water need not reduce our overall standard of living. The extra revenue earned by public utilities would in turn allow state and local governments to reduce sales taxes, such that the net impact on low-income familes is zero (or even positive).
Contrary to what the skeptics said, the thruster actually works! Now to measure the actual thrust and Isp, and see if it confirms the theory which says there will be orders of magnitude improvements over conventional chemical propulsion.
tc wrote, even if both of the Mac owners buy your game you'll never recover your costs
Enough snide unsubstantiated remarks. If you'd done your homework, you'd find some facts like this quote from MacSoft's Peter Tamte: As many of you know, we were ecstatic about the success of Duke Nukem 3D for Macintosh. Duke was profitable for us on its first day of sales, and it caused many retailers to tell us how pleased they were by its performance. The initial success of Duke Nukem not only proved to the country's biggest retailers that the Mac games market is healthy, it also proved to them that there is a huge base of people just waiting to spend money in their stores for great new Mac products.
Well, here's more good news. As outstanding as the sales of Duke were during its first two weeks of sales, retailers are reporting that Civilization II has sold 73% more units during its first two weeks of sales than Duke did. Wow!
That's right: the cost of porting Duke Nukem 3D to the Mac was recovered in the first day's worth of sales. Other houses like iD and Blizzard continue to faithfully develop for Mac; not for their health, but because it's profitable.
With a CRT running at a refresh rate of 72Hz, no matter how many frames your video card can draw per second, you're only going to see 72 frames per second; having a video card that can draw 90 frames a second on the simple scenes only means that you can lose 18 fps due to scene complexity before you see any frame rate loss. With an iMoD display, if your video card can render 90 frames per second, you would be able to see all of them. On the other hand, since the display updates would be matched to the video card's frame rate, degradation of your frame rate due to scene complexity would be immediately visible (subject to the response of the human eye).
Say your video card can normally do 150 fps, but complex scenes slow it down to 40 fps. And one of these iMoD displays faithfully renders these frame rate (unlike a CRT). I doubt that the human eye could perceive this 110 fps slowdown.
I base this on the fact that NTSC television runs at only 30 fps, and nobody complains that NTSC video is too "jerky." I suspect you get fast-diminishing returns when you raise the frame rate above 30.
Does anybody want to take issue with me and claim that they could tell the difference between 40 and 150 fps?
In the annual Consumer Reports auto issue, the reliability of dozens of model is tabulated graphically. Above-average reliability is signified with a red symbol, and below-average with a black symbol.
Just a glance at these tables is incredibly telling. The pages for Toyota and Honda models are a sea of red ink. The pages for Chrysler, GM, and Ford models are an expanse of overwhelmingly black ink.
And it's been that way ever since I started reading Consumer Reports (c. 1979). You often hear apologist Americans saying "well, Detroit had some quality problems back in the '80s, but now they have completely caught up to the Japanese automakers." Yeah, and I have some swampland in Kamchatka for sale.
A viola is a flower or a musical instrument. The expression which means "behold!" is voila. It comes from a French expression literally meaning "look there!" In French it is spelled with a grave accent over the A, as voilà, but when it was adopted into English, it lost its accent. Such barbarous misspellings as "vwala" are even worse, caused by the reluctance of English speakers to believe that OI can represent the sound "wah," as it usually does in French.
IIRC, we lost comm after only 30-60 days, and the stated reason was that the batteries had failed.
Said batteries were recharged each day by solar panels; thus each Martian day (approx. 25 hours long) represented one charge/discharge cycle.
Now, the cheap NiCd batteries I can buy at Rat Shack are good for at least 500 charge/discharge cycles. You'd think the expensive units NASA buys would last even longer.
I'm sure the conspiracy-minded could come up with a few explanations... : )
An extra 50watts, used 24 hours per day, increases a power bill about $30 per year. Takes a long time to make up for $1000 difference in system price at $30 per year.
Well, suppose you're on the fence about whether to buy an LCD iMac or a CRT Wintel, and you intend to get 5 years' use out of your next computer. Seeing that the iMac will save me $150 worth of electricty would certainly get me off the fence!
you run the heater less in winter too, so it is possible that you will balance this out.
Yes, the heat put out by your computer slightly reduces the load on your home furnace. If you heat your home with electricity, the computer's power usage is a wash during the heating season.
But if you heat your home with gas, oil, or coal, it's a really bad idea to run some computers with the expectation of reducing your heating bill. Gas, oil, and coal usually cost much less per BTU than electricity.
It might be a selling point for more people than just you, if people were made aware of it. Show a side-by-side comparison of how many dollars' worth of electricity will be consumed over the next five years by an iMac and by a typical Wintel system.
Show another comparison where the savings are even more dramatic if the Wintel system is connected to a CRT (as opposed to the iMac's LCD).
Show a third comparison where 30 such computers are used in an office in Phoenix (where the air conditioning is always running), and the thermal output of the Wintel machines drastically increases the operating costs of the HVAC system.
Here's a question for you chipheads. Most of you already know the following:
The Pentium Pro [and all subsequent processors in the Pentium family] takes CISC x86 instructions and converts them into internal RISC micro-ops. The conversion is designed to help avoid some of the limitations inherent in the x86 instruction set, such as irregular instruction encoding and register-to-memory arithmetic operations. The micro-ops are then passed into an out-of-order execution engine that determines whether instructions are ready for execution; if not, they are shuffled around to prevent pipeline stalls.
There are drawbacks in using the RISC approach. The first is that converting instructions takes time, even if calculated in nano or micro seconds. As a result, the Pentium Pro inevitably takes a performance hit when processing instructions...
Did Intel leave a door open, to feed micro-ops directly to the RISC core, bypassing the x86-to-micro-op translator? If so, here's Apple's chance to make OS X-on-x86 leapfrog Windows' performance. Windows has to go through that translator to maintain compatibility with pre-Pentium Pro CPUs. Apple has no such required baggage.
All that's required is developing a compiler that cranks out micro-ops instead of x86 instructions. Shouldn't be too hard, as Pentium chips themselves can make the conversion in nanoseconds.
(Disclaimer: Naked Mole Rat Reports are usually hilarious. But for the first time, on Sept. 14 there was a "guest columnist," who wrote a lame parody of those Nigerian spam messages.)
Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them.
Actually, while this shows Henry to be a generous soul, it is not a sound business strategy to pay workers more than you have to in order to retain them.
Yes, his workers could afford to buy the product, and their high standard of living had a ripple effect on the local economy -- but I would guess outside of a 20-mile radius of a Ford plant, there was no measureable effect.
But he was marketing his cars to the entire nation, not just to the 1% of Americans who lived within 20 miles of his plants. And if he wanted the other 99% to be able to afford his cars, the best strategy would have been to pare production costs to the bone -- yes, including labor costs. This also would have been the best strategy for increasing the standard of living of the other 99%.
By praising the way Ford workers were treated at the expense of Americans in general, you, sir, are sticking up for a special interest group. There's far too much of that going on these days.
P2P networks have significant non-infringing uses, regardless of whether some users choose to pirate movies. For that reason alone they should be allowed to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly the universe was created. I mean, it's here, isn't it? Individuals may disagree about whether it was created by a natural process or some supernatural Creator, but can't we at least agree that it was created, period? So, no need to put "created" in quotes.
Apple doesn't sell "-est" machines. Not the fastest, not the thinnest, not the lightest, not the most durable, not the most reliable, not the longest battery life, not the cheapest -- they're not really the best at anything.
Apple sells the "lightest value laptop" -- according to none other than PC Magazine!
And of course they sell the "lightest full-featured notebook that burns DVDs."
And the "best looking" notebook, according to The Register.
And the "world's lightest full-featured notebook."
And the biggest display on a laptop.
Hmm... I've found quite a few "-est" attributes.
Only one label sells Britney Spears CDs and they can charge whatever they want becaue nobody else is going to compete directly against them.
No company, not even a pure monopoly, can charge "whatever they want." If the price of a Britney CD was set at $10 billion, no one, probably not even Bill Gates, would buy one, and the label would realize $0 profit. To increase their profit above $0, they would have to lower the price.
even if they are getting more money I am losing less
That's the wonderful thing about advances in technology. It's not a zeo-sum game; everybody wins.
I thought UK speed limits were in kilometers per hour.
EA will support games on all PC platforms featuring NVIDIA hardware
My Mac is a PC that features NVIDIA hardware... can I look forward to lots of EA games for it?
Strangely though, the ghosting was unnoticeable with movies, but here another annoyance came up: in a dark room, playing a dark movie (e.g. Alien), the supposedly black bars on the top and at the bottom of the screen are annoyingly bright, so bright that it's really distracting.
You are describing poor contrast ratio. Yes, an LCD will give you really bright brights, but it will never give you truly black blacks. A good LCD has a contrast ratio of 400:1, but a good CRT will give you 700:1.
Hopefully OLED screens will improve upon this.
people in say, Arizona, who put in swimming pools even though the US has water shortages are indeed being greedy
Don't rely on the masses developing a sense of selflessness in order to conserve resources. If water is really so scarce, public utilities should raise the price of water. Scare resources will never be allocated efficiently until that scarcity is reflected in the price.
When it costs $10,000 to fill a swimming pool with water, the vast majority of people will think twice before installing a pool.
Note that this large increase in the price of water need not reduce our overall standard of living. The extra revenue earned by public utilities would in turn allow state and local governments to reduce sales taxes, such that the net impact on low-income familes is zero (or even positive).
http://engineering.eng.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.htm l
Contrary to what the skeptics said, the thruster actually works! Now to measure the actual thrust and Isp, and see if it confirms the theory which says there will be orders of magnitude improvements over conventional chemical propulsion.
tc wrote,
even if both of the Mac owners buy your game you'll never recover your costs
Enough snide unsubstantiated remarks. If you'd done your homework, you'd find some facts like this quote from MacSoft's Peter Tamte:
As many of you know, we were ecstatic about the success of Duke Nukem 3D for Macintosh. Duke was profitable for us on its first day of sales, and it caused many retailers to tell us how pleased they were by its performance. The initial success of Duke Nukem not only proved to the country's biggest retailers that the Mac games market is healthy, it also proved to them that there is a huge base of people just waiting to spend money in their stores for great new Mac products.
Well, here's more good news. As outstanding as the sales of Duke were during its first two weeks of sales, retailers are reporting that Civilization II has sold 73% more units during its first two weeks of sales than Duke did. Wow!
That's right: the cost of porting Duke Nukem 3D to the Mac was recovered in the first day's worth of sales. Other houses like iD and Blizzard continue to faithfully develop for Mac; not for their health, but because it's profitable.
A PowerMac 8500 will run OS X. Just download this way-cool OS X installation aid, XPostFacto!
Why in the world would you build a solar power sat from materials that are conventionally launched from Earth at $10,000 / kg?
Build them from lunar materials instead. The much shallower gravity well would bring your costs down to, at most, $100 / kg.
With a CRT running at a refresh rate of 72Hz, no matter how many frames your video card can draw per second, you're only going to see 72 frames per second; having a video card that can draw 90 frames a second on the simple scenes only means that you can lose 18 fps due to scene complexity before you see any frame rate loss. With an iMoD display, if your video card can render 90 frames per second, you would be able to see all of them. On the other hand, since the display updates would be matched to the video card's frame rate, degradation of your frame rate due to scene complexity would be immediately visible (subject to the response of the human eye).
Say your video card can normally do 150 fps, but complex scenes slow it down to 40 fps. And one of these iMoD displays faithfully renders these frame rate (unlike a CRT). I doubt that the human eye could perceive this 110 fps slowdown.
I base this on the fact that NTSC television runs at only 30 fps, and nobody complains that NTSC video is too "jerky." I suspect you get fast-diminishing returns when you raise the frame rate above 30.
Does anybody want to take issue with me and claim that they could tell the difference between 40 and 150 fps?
In the annual Consumer Reports auto issue, the reliability of dozens of model is tabulated graphically. Above-average reliability is signified with a red symbol, and below-average with a black symbol.
Just a glance at these tables is incredibly telling. The pages for Toyota and Honda models are a sea of red ink. The pages for Chrysler, GM, and Ford models are an expanse of overwhelmingly black ink.
And it's been that way ever since I started reading Consumer Reports (c. 1979). You often hear apologist Americans saying "well, Detroit had some quality problems back in the '80s, but now they have completely caught up to the Japanese automakers." Yeah, and I have some swampland in Kamchatka for sale.
-- "GPS," a non-apologist American
Apple is on the Open Group's list of platform vendors that support the single UNIX specification.
A viola is a flower or a musical instrument. The expression which means "behold!" is voila. It comes from a French expression literally meaning "look there!" In French it is spelled with a grave accent over the A, as voilà, but when it was adopted into English, it lost its accent. Such barbarous misspellings as "vwala" are even worse, caused by the reluctance of English speakers to believe that OI can represent the sound "wah," as it usually does in French.
(Credit: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/voila.html)
Yur emailed voicemails could be compressed much more tightly if they were in MP3 or OGG rather than .wav format, right?
IIRC, we lost comm after only 30-60 days, and the stated reason was that the batteries had failed.
Said batteries were recharged each day by solar panels; thus each Martian day (approx. 25 hours long) represented one charge/discharge cycle.
Now, the cheap NiCd batteries I can buy at Rat Shack are good for at least 500 charge/discharge cycles. You'd think the expensive units NASA buys would last even longer.
I'm sure the conspiracy-minded could come up with a few explanations... : )
An extra 50watts, used 24 hours per day, increases a power bill about $30 per year. Takes a long time to make up for $1000 difference in system price at $30 per year.
Well, suppose you're on the fence about whether to buy an LCD iMac or a CRT Wintel, and you intend to get 5 years' use out of your next computer. Seeing that the iMac will save me $150 worth of electricty would certainly get me off the fence!
you run the heater less in winter too, so it is possible that you will balance this out.
Yes, the heat put out by your computer slightly reduces the load on your home furnace. If you heat your home with electricity, the computer's power usage is a wash during the heating season.
But if you heat your home with gas, oil, or coal, it's a really bad idea to run some computers with the expectation of reducing your heating bill. Gas, oil, and coal usually cost much less per BTU than electricity.
It might be a selling point for more people than just you, if people were made aware of it. Show a side-by-side comparison of how many dollars' worth of electricity will be consumed over the next five years by an iMac and by a typical Wintel system.
Show another comparison where the savings are even more dramatic if the Wintel system is connected to a CRT (as opposed to the iMac's LCD).
Show a third comparison where 30 such computers are used in an office in Phoenix (where the air conditioning is always running), and the thermal output of the Wintel machines drastically increases the operating costs of the HVAC system.
Here's a question for you chipheads. Most of you already know the following:
The Pentium Pro [and all subsequent processors in the Pentium family] takes CISC x86 instructions and converts them into internal RISC micro-ops. The conversion is designed to help avoid some of the limitations inherent in the x86 instruction set, such as irregular instruction encoding and register-to-memory arithmetic operations. The micro-ops are then passed into an out-of-order execution engine that determines whether instructions are ready for execution; if not, they are shuffled around to prevent pipeline stalls.
There are drawbacks in using the RISC approach. The first is that converting instructions takes time, even if calculated in nano or micro seconds. As a result, the Pentium Pro inevitably takes a performance hit when processing instructions...
Did Intel leave a door open, to feed micro-ops directly to the RISC core, bypassing the x86-to-micro-op translator? If so, here's Apple's chance to make OS X-on-x86 leapfrog Windows' performance. Windows has to go through that translator to maintain compatibility with pre-Pentium Pro CPUs. Apple has no such required baggage.
All that's required is developing a compiler that cranks out micro-ops instead of x86 instructions. Shouldn't be too hard, as Pentium chips themselves can make the conversion in nanoseconds.
See macedition.com/nmr/nmr_20020914.php
(Disclaimer: Naked Mole Rat Reports are usually hilarious. But for the first time, on Sept. 14 there was a "guest columnist," who wrote a lame parody of those Nigerian spam messages.)
Henry Ford was a prime SOB, but one thing he did right was pay his workers $5/day (a high wage at the time), realizing that he'd never sell enough Model A's unless his workers could afford them.
Actually, while this shows Henry to be a generous soul, it is not a sound business strategy to pay workers more than you have to in order to retain them.
Yes, his workers could afford to buy the product, and their high standard of living had a ripple effect on the local economy -- but I would guess outside of a 20-mile radius of a Ford plant, there was no measureable effect.
But he was marketing his cars to the entire nation, not just to the 1% of Americans who lived within 20 miles of his plants. And if he wanted the other 99% to be able to afford his cars, the best strategy would have been to pare production costs to the bone -- yes, including labor costs. This also would have been the best strategy for increasing the standard of living of the other 99%.
By praising the way Ford workers were treated at the expense of Americans in general, you, sir, are sticking up for a special interest group. There's far too much of that going on these days.
the group will open for the first time the sealed sarcophagus of a man identified by hieroglyphics as Ny Swt Wsrt
P2P networks have significant non-infringing uses, regardless of whether some users choose to pirate movies. For that reason alone they should be allowed to exist.