When the iPhone was released, it didn't have _any_ SDK for writing installed apps, and it stomped all over existing smartphone platforms that did support custom apps, multitasking, clipboard, and sockets -- such as the old Windows Mobile.
When the iPhone was released, it was January of 2007. Have you checked a calendar lately? It's been nearly four years since the iPhone came out. What was competitive then isn't competitive now. Microsoft trying to peddle a "new" mobile OS that's four years behind its competitors is pathetic.
It would be like Microsoft trying to sell the original Xbox against the PS3. Way too little, way too late. Unless they give it away which, given the proliferation of "buy one, get one free" deals, it looks like they're already having to resort to.
Unfortunately, Google is already several steps ahead of them in that game, so lotsa luck, Redmond!
Very quick and responsive, easy to use, looks nice
Sorry, I tried both the Samsung and HTC phones at a big kiosk AT&T setup the day the Win 7 phones were released, and I found both of them to be sluggish terds. Glitches switching from screen to screen, weird freezes, a totally non-intuitive interface with tons of wasted space (a fatal flaw on devices with such tiny screens) which seems to necessitate lots of annoying flipping from screen to screen (prompting more glitches and freezes). It's another UI disaster from Microsoft (although at least I'll give them credit for trying something marginally different).
The phones themselves felt kinda cheap and plasticy, too.
There's no way I'd choose one of these things over an iPhone or an Android phone.
If Win Phone 7 had come out two years ago they might have had time to polish this terd before getting squashed by Google and Apple. As it stands, it's way, way too late. It would be like MS releasing the Xbox to compete with the PS2 three years after the PS2 bowed, instead of around a year after. Apple and Google are probably 6-18 months away from releasing next gen phones that'll blow anything currently on the market out of the water, and Microsoft is just now releasing something that could compete with Apple's product from almost **four years ago**?
Pathetic.
I'd rather buy one of the Palm phones, on the assumption that HP won't let WebOS die anytime soon. At least they're pretty slick (I like the interface and look and feel of WebOS a lot more than I like Android).
In theory this process could be a lot better, since the point is to break the polymers in the waste down into simpler hydrocarbon chains and then burn only those. At least that's my understanding. All the nasty stuff either gets degraded down into simple hydrocarbons and burns (cleanly) or is left behind as solid or liquid residue, which you can then dispose of.
From what I can tell reading the article, it wasn't the EPA that shut them down but the state of Washington's own environmental regulators. It's the EPA that's overruling Washington state's environmental regulators and saying that no, this thing isn't burning the actual waste, so you cannot keep it from operating.
Of course, the problem with this is - neither has Neptune.
The actual definition isn't "cleared it's orbital path". The definition is "clear the neighborhood around their orbits" by collision, capture, gravitational disturbance or establishing orbital resonances. Pluto/Charon has been yanked into an orbital resonance with the much more massive Neptune. While Pluto's orbit occasionally crosses that of Neptune, the dwarf planet never comes closer than 17 AU from the gas giant. In fact, it comes closer to Uranus (11 AU) than it does to Neptune.
Neptune is also vastly more massive than Pluto/Charon. The official definition looks at the mass of the candidate vs. the mass of all other bodies sharing that body's orbital zone. Here too, Pluto is stomped out of contention.
A large number of Kuiper belt objects, like Pluto, posses a 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune. As with the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, Pluto/Charon is part of a population of like-objects, but those objects bear little resemblance to the 8 major planets of the solar system.
If a body were to lose its planetary status, I'd pick Mercury. It doesn't have a noticeable atmosphere, it doesn't have any satellites, it's smaller than two of the moons
It may be smaller than two moons in our solar system, but it's far more massive than any of them. In fact I think it's more than twice as massive as the most massive moon, Ganymede.
Even Mars is only about twice the mass of Mercury.
its orbit is unstable and growing more and more elliptic.
Over a period of billions of years, perhaps. At the moment though, it's perfectly stable.
Then Mars, its moons aren't really moons, but orbiting oddly-shaped asteroids that'll never become spherical. Their presence is proof that it hasn't cleared its own orbit, which is one of the new criteria for being called a planet (and tailor-made to exclude Pluto, I might add).
Huh? Having natural satellites - or even Trojans - regardless of their shape is a characteristic which indicates that body has established at least some degree of orbital dominance. If you have stuff orbiting you then by definition you have orbital dominance over that stuff. Planets have the ability to clear virtually all of the mass from their orbits by collision, capture or gravitational disturbance, or to establish orbital resonances that prevent collisions. Dwarf planets can't manage that feat. It's a pretty simple definition, and one which interestingly enough automatically excludes not only Pluto, but all of the other icy junk we've found out past Neptune, plus all of the asteroids, which nobody has though of as planets for more than a century (although the larger asteroids were once too classified as "planets", until astronomers figured out they were part of a population of objects which had little in common with the other worlds we'd defined as planets).
The problem with calling Pluto a "planet" is that then the term "planet" isn't rendered terribly descriptive. If Pluto is a "planet" so are a bunch of asteroids and a slew of crap spinning around in the dark out past Neptune. A bunch of debris with characteristics which don't remotely resemble even bodies as small as Mercury, let alone worlds like Earth or Jupiter.
It wasn't days later, it was a good amount of time later.
It was days. Apollo led a mission to clear out a minefield so the fleet could take a shortcut.
Which of course points to another bit of stupidity in the original Galactica - how did they manage to travel from solar system to solar system in a matter of days (or even weeks or months) without FTL drive? The "science" of the original Galactica was laughable, just like the plot.
Also the reason that they stopped over on that planet was to get more seed
They stopped to get food, because their supplies were contaminated, and especially to get fuel, which they had little of.
And then a bunch of refugees proceed to prance about Las Vegas in space like Love Boat extras, as if nothing had happened. Ludicrous.
I guess you think that anything that isn't dark and emo is ridiculous
Newsflash - if you're going to tell the tale of a bunch of folks fleeing the destruction of their homeworlds, that tale by nature is going to have to be really, really dark, or else it's going to be ridiculous. If you want something "lighthearted", stick to telling stories about puppies and kittens.
The original series had characters that felt honest and virtuous.
The original series had cardboard cut outs who were honest and virtuous because they had no discernible personalities or motivation whatsoever. The proceedings felt about as realistic as a puppet show, and the performances reflected that fact.
None of which should come as a great surprise, since Larson is also the genius responsible for cheezefests like Manimal and Knight Rider. Which are great if you're 10 I suppose, but I can't imagine an adult stupid enough to sit through one of the things - certainly not twice.
Oh, the original took itself very seriously. Which is what makes it so incredibly hilarious, because it was a steaming pile of crap, even for 1978.
For those who haven't caught the show in 30 years (or ever), the big splashy debut episode - which Universal blew millions on - involves the robotic Cylons launching a sneak attack on the Colonies, after which the ragtag fleet led by the Galactica flees for parts unknown. Literally days later they come across Las Vegas in space and all of the desperate survivors head off for a little gambling and drinking like they'd just stumbled onto the set of the Love Boat or something. Laughable. There's probably a way to handle such a plot development, but Glen Larson sure as hell wasn't capable of doing it. The thing ended up being a cartoon with people.
Actually, that's not entirely fair. Cartoons like Johnny Quest and Spider-Man - made more than a decade earlier - featured far more realistic characters.
I saw the original Galactica again in the mid-'90s for the first time since I was 10, and thought it was one of the stupidest things I'd ever seen. Like a bad episode of Buck Rogers, only filmed in an unlit locker room. Universal may have spent millions, but it didn't show - the sets were no better than Star Trek's had been a decade before.
The only thing it had going for it were ray guns and lots and lots and lots of explosions. And Dirk Benedict, who did the best Han Solo in the world this side of Harrison Ford. The rest of the cast was either totally wooden or ridiculous scenery chewers, although Jane Seymour was a trooper and did what she could with her role, and John Colicos I have to admit chewed scenery very well, even if his character's actions didn't make a lick of sense.
The original Galactica makes Star Trek: Voyager look like Mad Men, and the remake was a massive improvement (but just about anything would be).
While I think it's ridiculous when CEOs are giving hundreds of millions in bonuses or salaries, those are privately-owned companies, and they're free to (over)pay as much as they want to.
Yes. And then their overpaid executards buy off Congress, loot their companies and run them into the ground, wreck the economy and demand trillion dollar bailouts funded by people who actually do productive work.
So no, letting a bunch of obvious crooks and psychopaths steal all they want doesn't actually work in practice. This should hardly come as a great surprise.
This action is favored by the Democrats and the Republicans: remember, TARP was done by a Democrat-controlled Congress under Bush, and then the GM/Chrysler bailout was done by Obama and friends.
The Senate approved the bailout measure on Oct. 1, 2008, on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 25. The House initially rejected the proposal, but under prodding from the White House and leading members of both parties, House members ultimately voted 263 to 171 for the bill, with 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in backing it; 108 Republicans and 63 Democrats voted no.
And I actually don't have a problem with TARP per se - clearly the financial system had been wrecked by 30 years of idiotic laissez-faire policy - the problem I have with it is that the perpetrators of that collapse have all walked free (adding insult to injury, plenty of them have served in both the Bush and Obama administrations), and many of them are still running the same Wall Street firms that precipitated the collapse.
At least with the GM/Chrysler bailout, the executives who ran those companies into the ground were also forced out. Those bailouts also cost a tiny fraction of what we've spent so far bailing out Wall Street (not to mention the multi-trillion dollar impact the collapse of Wall Street's gambling spree has had on the economy as a whole).
When a 'business' murders someone, some individual(s) at the company murdered that someone. Those individual(s) are punished.
Huh? I don't know about murder, but corporations certainly commit what amounts to homicide all the time, and seldom if ever do their executards pay any sort of legal price.
Just look at all the bogus drug testing results big pharma used to have dangerous drugs approved for sale. Celebrex , Bextra, Vioxx - all approved for use on the back of fraudulent research. Assuming the crooks running Pfizer and Merck didn't know all along the research was a fraud, they certainly had the money to validate the results of said research before foisting the drug onto an unsuspecting public (it's not like big pharma is going around begging for money). Vioxx alone is thought to have killed around 60,000 people, which makes Osama Bin Laden look like something of an amateur in comparison.
You kill 60,000 people and see if you get away with it.
Well, maybe you would if you spent the estimated $2 billion on lawyers that Merck spent . . .
And this is the reason why no corporation should be allowed to become so large it can't be drowned in a bathtub. Hundreds of corporations are now literally beyond the reach of the law. Which means they can - and will - do whatever they please. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people running these huge corporations are on the whole no different from the power crazed psychopaths who ran the Soviet Union (into the ground, I might add, which is where our country is headed with these lunatics in charge).
Oh, c'mon! That was a good comeback! "Redundant"? Humorless troll.
Back in the mid-'80s my Junior year English teacher told me a great anecdote about a time she'd volunteered to man the phones at the local PBS station's annual pledge drive. It was a bunch of teachers and former teachers working the phones that night, including one retired octogenarian schoolmarm who looked pretty frail (who wouldn't be worn out after decades in the classroom?).
Anyhow, some smartass called into the station and got routed to this poor elderly lady. He immediately blurted out, "I'd like to donate my cock!" Without missing a beat, the old woman replied, "I'm sorry sir, we don't accept small donations," and hung up the phone.
I've always hoped he got to see on his tee vee which operator delivered that burn.
Old schoolteachers - don't try to pull anything on them, because they've heard it all.
As roman_mir points out, we aren't manufacturing anymore in the US - we're assembling. The notion that manufacturing is still the same percentage of GDP as it was in 1950 is ludicrous on it's face - where is all that manufacturing taking place? Where are all the factories? Even robotic manufacturing requires factories. What few "factories" we have left in the US are mostly final assembly plants, where imported components are assembled into a final product (mostly for large products, like cars and tractors, where shipping the finished goods can be much more expensive than shipping components). That's comparatively low-skill, low-cost labor.
This assembly-based "manufacturing" continues to be a large faction of our GDP simply due to dodgy accounting - a practice all Americans should be quite familiar with after the recent real estate "industry" imploded. To give an obvious example, companies like Ford import most of the components needed to manufacture a new car - something they'll end up selling for $40,000. The components are imported mostly from China or Mexico for something like $5,000. They're assembled in a few days at a plant in Michigan by just a handful of workers, plus some robots and some quality control inspectors. Voila! $35,000 in "manufacturing" has just taken place - the difference between the cost of the imported components and the finished assembled product. Ford executives pocket a ridiculous share of that $35k, and the rest is distributed to shareholders. Workers get a minuscule fraction. As each year passes, fewer and fewer Americans are able to afford those $40,000 cars, as they no longer have good-paying jobs manufacturing the actual components, and Ford's (and GM's, and GE's) market continues to shrink. Lather, rinse, repeat.
They sure haven't been answering to this taxpayer who has been saying for years that it's moronic to end the shuttle program before its replacement is even off the drawing board.
It was moronic to continue the Shuttle program after the Challenger explosion, by which point it was obvious that not only were the Shuttles far more expensive to operate than other manned boosters, but also less reliable. The Shuttle hadn't lived up to any of its promised design goals and should have been killed outright at that point as a complete failure. Instead, we continued to operate the stupid things - at enormous expense - until one of them fried 7 more astronauts. At which point billions more were dumped into the gaping maw of this failed program instead of doing the sensible thing and killing it altogether.
There are no compelling reasons to lob humans into orbit at well over a billion dollars a launch. None. It's a ridiculous waste of money. Given that the private sector seems more than capable of designing and launching man rated boosters itself, NASA should get out of the business of designing rockets and contract that work out, potentially saving tens of billions of dollars in the process. They could then focus on operations, research and unmanned probes, three things they actually seem to do fairly well. We already know they couldn't design a cost-effective rocket if you put a gun to their heads, as the Shuttle, the miserable failure of the various space plane projects, and the ridiculous cost of the Constellation program all make clear.
Of course, getting NASA out of the launch business would cut of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded pork to states like Texas, Florida, Virginia and Alabama, which is the real reason why you're hearing so much squealing about the end of the Shuttle program from political types. It's an expensive white elephant that fleeces most taxpayers, but it also craps a lot of manure on quite a few Congressional districts.
Firstly, there is enough evidence to strongly suggest that humans are affected by higher frequencies
[Citation please]
So far, I've seen one dodgy study from Japan cited. That's not inspiring much confidence.
I also think it's funny that vinyl fans all have a hard on for ultrasonics. Comparing vinyl to a modern digital format is like comparing a Gremlin with a brand new Lexus. Who cares if the Gremlin has leather seats and the Lexus doesn't? The Gremlin is still a pile of shit. One feature of dubious merit at best does not a better format make.
Distortion is not the be all and end all - if digital was so good, nature would be producing all digital sounds.
Wow. Don't even know where to begin with that one. If cars were so good, nature would be growing rubber wheels on cows!
And no, distortion is not the "be all and end all", but if you have two audio formats, and one of them is awash in distortion and the other one isn't, that certainly isn't going to do anything to enhance the fidelity of the format that's drowning in distortion.
Vinyl is still a technical masterpiece
Vinyl was a technical masterpiece 60 years ago. Now, it's as obsolete as AM radio and the 8-track tape.
Which is completely useless, as there isn't the slightest bit of evidence humans can hear ultrasonics.
[Citation needed]
I'm sorry, where's your citation that they can hear ultrasonics? All I've seen so far is a crap article from a Japanese researcher with a funky biamped setup. The setup itself could be responsible for any observed differences in listener reactions. Color me unconvinced.
But most mid grade speakers usually have no problem hitting 25kHz or more +/-3db.
[Citation needed]
And actually, to get that kind of performance you typically have to go up to around $500 a pair for bookshelf speakers. That's *way* beyond "Walmart".
You seem a bit confused about how digital and analog recording work and are ham-handedly mixing all kinds of issues up. What compression? Again, you are talking out of you ass.
And you don't seem to know the first thing about digital or analog recording. Dynamic range compression has been around for an eternity - it is not a new phenomena, and in fact it was required to record a clear audible signal on older phonographs. AM radio had little dynamic range to begin with, and broadcasters routinely and heavily compressed that starting in the early 1960's (if not sooner). It's still necessary if you want to master something for vinyl - vinyl cannot handle the full dynamic range afforded by modern digital or analog tape formats, particularly in the low bass.
Compression is a relatively recent occurrence,or at least in the way it is being applied these days
Google "Phil Spector" and pay careful attention to the "Wall of Sound". Compressing the dynamic range of musical material is as old as dirt, and there are many, many ways to achieve it. The important thing to note about vinyl is that compression isn't just an artistic choice - it's an absolutely essential part of the mastering process. You have to compress the dynamic range of some program material when mastering for vinyl, particularly on an LP, in order to avoid (among other things) having the groove become so shallow the needle pops right out of it (loud low bass pans, for example). There are also issues with where on an LP you can place a loud track with a wide dynamic range (in general, they don't do too well on the inner grooves - you'd need to compress the dynamic range, i.e. reduce their overall volume, and then deal with the extra noise).
You should refrain from commenting on subjects you clearly don't know the first thing about.
What format was available to the consumer in the late 1960's or 1970's that was so much better?
No format was available, as I indicated, although the technology was certainly in place to create one. Actually, RCA had created a cartridge-based tape format in the late '50s that was technically superior to the LP, at least on paper, but they never properly marketed it, refused to release standalone decks (instead hardwiring them to amps and speakers), and took years to get program material to market. By which point the Compact Cassette and the 8-track were both taking off.
Sony's Elcaset in the mid-'70s was a replay of RCA's old large cartridge tape format. Technically superior, didn't take off.
Or are you trying to tell me that 8-track and cassette was better?
8-track was actually superior by most measures to the early Compact Cassette, at least when it worked properly. But several features of the format made it prone to issues as the tapes and players aged (especially head alignment of those moving heads), and in practice most 8-track decks were very poorly put together. By the time Dolby S rolled around in the 1990's though the lowly cassette was clearly superior to the LP. A decent cassette deck featured a flat 20-20kHz frequency response, nearly inaudible wow and flutter, and something like 80dB of dynamic range unmarred by clicks, pops, massive harmonic distortion, feedback, rumble or any of the other crap vinyl has to offer.
absolutely false, the study of Tsutomu Oohashi shows the human brain indeed does respond to ultrasonic and infrasonic content of music
I found the article. It's crap. The ultrasonic content was filtered from the signal using a 170 or 80dB per octave filter. The very method utilized to filter the signal is guaranteed to lead to audible distortions well below 20kHz. They also fed the higher frequency components to separate speakers, but some low frequency signal was going to be leaking through when they activated the high-frequency signal. I don't see any reference to them feeding the low-frequency signal through to the high frequency speakers. I also don't see any reference to them feeding filtered source material through to both the low and high frequency speakers, to see if that's perceived differently. Fail.
I'm not sure why they went with this bizarre biamped setup in the first place, unless it was to deliberately produce bogus results. Why not just filter the program material itself, and feed the results directly to a set of speakers that can handle the full frequency response? As it stands it's impossible to tell if the results they're getting are because of ultrasonics, or because when they engaged their ultrasonics, they also ended up pumping some low frequency signal to an extra pair of amps and tweeters they simultaneously engaged. We already know people perceive high treble as adding an extra sense of space to recordings (even if it's just noise, like tape hiss or the cacophony of clicks and pops on a phonograph record).
You're also ignoring the fact that most speakers can't reproduce ultrasonics, assuming intentional ultrasonics are even present in the signal to begin with, which is a crapshoot at best on most recordings. Especially since the vast majority of microphones used to record audio over the past 75 years don't reliably capture ultrasonics, let alone at levels high enough to be audible.
You wrote that! That's hysterical. When I saw the article about BBS games, that was the very first game I thought of. I've actually searched for it online several times over the years, but couldn't remember the name, or that it was an ST game (although I thought it might be, since I had an ST).
That was an incredibly amusing game. You should totally recreate it on the web (or on Facebook). I used to laugh at the hilarious cast options the game would present you, where you'd end up being forced to cast, say, Danny DeVito as the "young hero", or Jimmy Stewart (there was always some fossil cropping up) as the "evil wizard". I have no idea how the game worked, but sometimes the most oddball casts resulted in boffo box office.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much like real life. I mean, who in 1987, would have thought that John Travolta was gonna become a major box office star? His ship had pretty much sailed you'd have thought. And then Look Who's Talking happened, and that kept him running for 5 years, and then Pulp Fiction made him a superstar.
It is fortunate for the vinyl fans that the distortions introduced by the format are pleasing to the ear.
Pleasant to their ears, maybe. I thought vinyl sounded like absolute shit even when I was a little kid. Clicks, pops, hiss, rumble, wow, flutter and gobs and gobs of annoying harmonic distortion. I could stand to listen to maybe one album at a sitting at halfway decent volume before I got a screeching headache. It was an awful, obsolete format 40 years ago, and I'm amazed it took until the 1980's for the Dutch and Japanese to finally successfully replace it.
That really is a testimony to how completely out-of-it the American consumer electronics industry was by the 1970's.
At around $250 you can get a stylus that will go up to 50kHz.
Which is completely useless, as there isn't the slightest bit of evidence humans can hear ultrasonics. Even if they could, most speakers can't reproduce them (and certainly not with any accuracy), assuming they weren't deliberately filtered out somewhere during the recording and mastering process, as they almost certainly would have been. Any ultrasonic signal loud enough to even potentially be audible could cause all sorts of problems with a host of electronic circuits, tape decks and other devices in the recording / mixing / mastering loop.
Not to mention the fact most of the ultrasonics picked up by any stylus are probably harmonics and noise - all of it pure distortion - much of it caused by the needle ringing like a little bell as it's struck by the walls of the groove. Or they're harmonics and distortion and noise coming from the microphones, preamps, mixing decks, tape decks, equalizers, compressors or the mastering equipment itself. In other words, a bunch of power-robbing crap that only serves to distort the signal below 20kHz that actually is audible to humans.
There are no cases where vinyl "sounds better" due to any properties of the format. The vinyl master may have been better equalized or better compressed, but the format itself is pure unadulterated junk, and has been for 50 years. Vinyl was obsolete by the 1960's, and should have and probably would have been replaced by something better if the American electronics firms of the time weren't being run by halfwits and incompetents. I've always been surprised RCA didn't attempt to roll out their capacitance disk as an audio format first before trying to deploy it as a video format, but it was stuck in development hell for well over a decade and I suppose it's a miracle it ever made it to market at all with that bunch of clowns running the place.
The Dutch and Japanese finally got around to doing something about it by the late 1970's. Well, somebody had to. Vinyl sucks.
Negative. You're assuming that if power use decreases by 10-20%, the cost of power will decrease. It will not. The power company will charge more for less.
That's not true. The cost of power in many places in the US (and elsewhere, I'd imagine) varies during the course of the day depending on demand. So when demand is low power is cheap, but when demand is high (in the sunbelt, on hot sunny days), the price of power skyrockets, sometimes to ten times or more what it costs when demand is low.
Solar cells have the unique property of generating maximum power just at the time when utility rates peak in the sunbelt. So looking at the average cost of power and comparing that to the cost of power generated by a solar cell doesn't begin to tell the whole story. Look at the peak cost of power and see how much of that a solar installation will shave off of your electric bill. And of course, thanks to the network effect, if everyone starts installing these things, the peak cost of electricity across the sunbelt will implode. Either way, consumers win. The power companies could try to jack up the cost a little, but they aren't going to be able to jack it up tenfold.
Also, $200/mo light bill?! Maybe for AC in Phoenix... but that's a lot of lights.:)
We were paying $200 a month in Phoenix to cool a 4 bedroom home 25 years ago. I'd imagine it's substantially more expensive today, especially when you factor in all the electronic, power sucking gizmos in the average home of 2010, from massive HD sets to power-guzzling desktop computers. My Core 2 box and its two LCD monitors consumes about 5 times as much electricity as my old Atari 800XL, 1050 disk drive and Amdek Color I monitor did back when I lived in Phoenix 25 years ago.
Let's assume I can sell you a very very cheap solar cell that runs at 2% efficiency. In this case, you will quickly recoup your investment, but you aren't producing much power. Do you plan to make your roof 5 to 10 times as large?
No, but if they're cheap enough at just 2% efficiency to pay for themselves quickly, it might make sense to cover the sides of buildings with them, as well as parking garages, covered parking spaces, the sides of freeways, etc. So in aggregate you could end up generating just as much power as you might with more expensive, more efficient cells, just by carpeting every exposed surface with them.
However, most cells these days are in the 10% and up efficiency range, and growing more efficient (and cheaper) with each passing year. So your hypothetical seems kinda unlikely.
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When the iPhone was released, it didn't have _any_ SDK for writing installed apps, and it stomped all over existing smartphone platforms that did support custom apps, multitasking, clipboard, and sockets -- such as the old Windows Mobile.
When the iPhone was released, it was January of 2007. Have you checked a calendar lately? It's been nearly four years since the iPhone came out. What was competitive then isn't competitive now. Microsoft trying to peddle a "new" mobile OS that's four years behind its competitors is pathetic.
It would be like Microsoft trying to sell the original Xbox against the PS3. Way too little, way too late. Unless they give it away which, given the proliferation of "buy one, get one free" deals, it looks like they're already having to resort to.
Unfortunately, Google is already several steps ahead of them in that game, so lotsa luck, Redmond!
You don't offer "Buy one, get one free" deals on hardware you can't keep in stock.
Do you see Apple offering such deals? No. Why? Because they truly can't keep their hardware in stock.
This is basic retail. Whenever you see a "Buy one, get one free" deal, you know somebody is sitting on a pile of sh*t they can't sell!
Very quick and responsive, easy to use, looks nice
Sorry, I tried both the Samsung and HTC phones at a big kiosk AT&T setup the day the Win 7 phones were released, and I found both of them to be sluggish terds. Glitches switching from screen to screen, weird freezes, a totally non-intuitive interface with tons of wasted space (a fatal flaw on devices with such tiny screens) which seems to necessitate lots of annoying flipping from screen to screen (prompting more glitches and freezes). It's another UI disaster from Microsoft (although at least I'll give them credit for trying something marginally different).
The phones themselves felt kinda cheap and plasticy, too.
There's no way I'd choose one of these things over an iPhone or an Android phone.
If Win Phone 7 had come out two years ago they might have had time to polish this terd before getting squashed by Google and Apple. As it stands, it's way, way too late. It would be like MS releasing the Xbox to compete with the PS2 three years after the PS2 bowed, instead of around a year after. Apple and Google are probably 6-18 months away from releasing next gen phones that'll blow anything currently on the market out of the water, and Microsoft is just now releasing something that could compete with Apple's product from almost **four years ago**?
Pathetic.
I'd rather buy one of the Palm phones, on the assumption that HP won't let WebOS die anytime soon. At least they're pretty slick (I like the interface and look and feel of WebOS a lot more than I like Android).
In theory this process could be a lot better, since the point is to break the polymers in the waste down into simpler hydrocarbon chains and then burn only those. At least that's my understanding. All the nasty stuff either gets degraded down into simple hydrocarbons and burns (cleanly) or is left behind as solid or liquid residue, which you can then dispose of.
From what I can tell reading the article, it wasn't the EPA that shut them down but the state of Washington's own environmental regulators. It's the EPA that's overruling Washington state's environmental regulators and saying that no, this thing isn't burning the actual waste, so you cannot keep it from operating.
Finally a Windows box capable of running Duke Nukem Forever!
Mercury is more than twice as massive as Ganymede.
Mercury:
Mass - 3.3022 × 1023 kg
(0.055 Earths)
Ganymede:
Mass - 1.4819 × 1023 kg
(0.025 Earths)
Of course, the problem with this is - neither has Neptune.
The actual definition isn't "cleared it's orbital path". The definition is "clear the neighborhood around their orbits" by collision, capture, gravitational disturbance or establishing orbital resonances. Pluto/Charon has been yanked into an orbital resonance with the much more massive Neptune. While Pluto's orbit occasionally crosses that of Neptune, the dwarf planet never comes closer than 17 AU from the gas giant. In fact, it comes closer to Uranus (11 AU) than it does to Neptune.
Neptune is also vastly more massive than Pluto/Charon. The official definition looks at the mass of the candidate vs. the mass of all other bodies sharing that body's orbital zone. Here too, Pluto is stomped out of contention.
A large number of Kuiper belt objects, like Pluto, posses a 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune. As with the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, Pluto/Charon is part of a population of like-objects, but those objects bear little resemblance to the 8 major planets of the solar system.
If a body were to lose its planetary status, I'd pick Mercury. It doesn't have a noticeable atmosphere, it doesn't have any satellites, it's smaller than two of the moons
It may be smaller than two moons in our solar system, but it's far more massive than any of them. In fact I think it's more than twice as massive as the most massive moon, Ganymede.
Even Mars is only about twice the mass of Mercury.
its orbit is unstable and growing more and more elliptic.
Over a period of billions of years, perhaps. At the moment though, it's perfectly stable.
Then Mars, its moons aren't really moons, but orbiting oddly-shaped asteroids that'll never become spherical. Their presence is proof that it hasn't cleared its own orbit, which is one of the new criteria for being called a planet (and tailor-made to exclude Pluto, I might add).
Huh? Having natural satellites - or even Trojans - regardless of their shape is a characteristic which indicates that body has established at least some degree of orbital dominance. If you have stuff orbiting you then by definition you have orbital dominance over that stuff. Planets have the ability to clear virtually all of the mass from their orbits by collision, capture or gravitational disturbance, or to establish orbital resonances that prevent collisions. Dwarf planets can't manage that feat. It's a pretty simple definition, and one which interestingly enough automatically excludes not only Pluto, but all of the other icy junk we've found out past Neptune, plus all of the asteroids, which nobody has though of as planets for more than a century (although the larger asteroids were once too classified as "planets", until astronomers figured out they were part of a population of objects which had little in common with the other worlds we'd defined as planets).
The problem with calling Pluto a "planet" is that then the term "planet" isn't rendered terribly descriptive. If Pluto is a "planet" so are a bunch of asteroids and a slew of crap spinning around in the dark out past Neptune. A bunch of debris with characteristics which don't remotely resemble even bodies as small as Mercury, let alone worlds like Earth or Jupiter.
It wasn't days later, it was a good amount of time later.
It was days. Apollo led a mission to clear out a minefield so the fleet could take a shortcut.
Which of course points to another bit of stupidity in the original Galactica - how did they manage to travel from solar system to solar system in a matter of days (or even weeks or months) without FTL drive? The "science" of the original Galactica was laughable, just like the plot.
Also the reason that they stopped over on that planet was to get more seed
They stopped to get food, because their supplies were contaminated, and especially to get fuel, which they had little of.
And then a bunch of refugees proceed to prance about Las Vegas in space like Love Boat extras, as if nothing had happened. Ludicrous.
I guess you think that anything that isn't dark and emo is ridiculous
Newsflash - if you're going to tell the tale of a bunch of folks fleeing the destruction of their homeworlds, that tale by nature is going to have to be really, really dark, or else it's going to be ridiculous. If you want something "lighthearted", stick to telling stories about puppies and kittens.
The original series had characters that felt honest and virtuous.
The original series had cardboard cut outs who were honest and virtuous because they had no discernible personalities or motivation whatsoever. The proceedings felt about as realistic as a puppet show, and the performances reflected that fact.
None of which should come as a great surprise, since Larson is also the genius responsible for cheezefests like Manimal and Knight Rider. Which are great if you're 10 I suppose, but I can't imagine an adult stupid enough to sit through one of the things - certainly not twice.
Except maybe to laugh AT it.
The remake took itself far too seriously
Oh, the original took itself very seriously. Which is what makes it so incredibly hilarious, because it was a steaming pile of crap, even for 1978.
For those who haven't caught the show in 30 years (or ever), the big splashy debut episode - which Universal blew millions on - involves the robotic Cylons launching a sneak attack on the Colonies, after which the ragtag fleet led by the Galactica flees for parts unknown. Literally days later they come across Las Vegas in space and all of the desperate survivors head off for a little gambling and drinking like they'd just stumbled onto the set of the Love Boat or something. Laughable. There's probably a way to handle such a plot development, but Glen Larson sure as hell wasn't capable of doing it. The thing ended up being a cartoon with people.
Actually, that's not entirely fair. Cartoons like Johnny Quest and Spider-Man - made more than a decade earlier - featured far more realistic characters.
I saw the original Galactica again in the mid-'90s for the first time since I was 10, and thought it was one of the stupidest things I'd ever seen. Like a bad episode of Buck Rogers, only filmed in an unlit locker room. Universal may have spent millions, but it didn't show - the sets were no better than Star Trek's had been a decade before.
The only thing it had going for it were ray guns and lots and lots and lots of explosions. And Dirk Benedict, who did the best Han Solo in the world this side of Harrison Ford. The rest of the cast was either totally wooden or ridiculous scenery chewers, although Jane Seymour was a trooper and did what she could with her role, and John Colicos I have to admit chewed scenery very well, even if his character's actions didn't make a lick of sense.
The original Galactica makes Star Trek: Voyager look like Mad Men, and the remake was a massive improvement (but just about anything would be).
While I think it's ridiculous when CEOs are giving hundreds of millions in bonuses or salaries, those are privately-owned companies, and they're free to (over)pay as much as they want to.
Yes. And then their overpaid executards buy off Congress, loot their companies and run them into the ground, wreck the economy and demand trillion dollar bailouts funded by people who actually do productive work.
So no, letting a bunch of obvious crooks and psychopaths steal all they want doesn't actually work in practice. This should hardly come as a great surprise.
This action is favored by the Democrats and the Republicans: remember, TARP was done by a Democrat-controlled Congress under Bush, and then the GM/Chrysler bailout was done by Obama and friends.
The Senate approved the bailout measure on Oct. 1, 2008, on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 25. The House initially rejected the proposal, but under prodding from the White House and leading members of both parties, House members ultimately voted 263 to 171 for the bill, with 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in backing it; 108 Republicans and 63 Democrats voted no.
And I actually don't have a problem with TARP per se - clearly the financial system had been wrecked by 30 years of idiotic laissez-faire policy - the problem I have with it is that the perpetrators of that collapse have all walked free (adding insult to injury, plenty of them have served in both the Bush and Obama administrations), and many of them are still running the same Wall Street firms that precipitated the collapse.
At least with the GM/Chrysler bailout, the executives who ran those companies into the ground were also forced out. Those bailouts also cost a tiny fraction of what we've spent so far bailing out Wall Street (not to mention the multi-trillion dollar impact the collapse of Wall Street's gambling spree has had on the economy as a whole).
I was just thinking the same thing. I wonder if we'll see a comeback of the gas turbine now that serial hybrids are starting to roll onto the market.
When a 'business' murders someone, some individual(s) at the company murdered that someone. Those individual(s) are punished.
Huh? I don't know about murder, but corporations certainly commit what amounts to homicide all the time, and seldom if ever do their executards pay any sort of legal price.
Just look at all the bogus drug testing results big pharma used to have dangerous drugs approved for sale. Celebrex , Bextra, Vioxx - all approved for use on the back of fraudulent research. Assuming the crooks running Pfizer and Merck didn't know all along the research was a fraud, they certainly had the money to validate the results of said research before foisting the drug onto an unsuspecting public (it's not like big pharma is going around begging for money). Vioxx alone is thought to have killed around 60,000 people, which makes Osama Bin Laden look like something of an amateur in comparison.
You kill 60,000 people and see if you get away with it.
Well, maybe you would if you spent the estimated $2 billion on lawyers that Merck spent . . .
And this is the reason why no corporation should be allowed to become so large it can't be drowned in a bathtub. Hundreds of corporations are now literally beyond the reach of the law. Which means they can - and will - do whatever they please. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The people running these huge corporations are on the whole no different from the power crazed psychopaths who ran the Soviet Union (into the ground, I might add, which is where our country is headed with these lunatics in charge).
Oh, c'mon! That was a good comeback! "Redundant"? Humorless troll.
Back in the mid-'80s my Junior year English teacher told me a great anecdote about a time she'd volunteered to man the phones at the local PBS station's annual pledge drive. It was a bunch of teachers and former teachers working the phones that night, including one retired octogenarian schoolmarm who looked pretty frail (who wouldn't be worn out after decades in the classroom?).
Anyhow, some smartass called into the station and got routed to this poor elderly lady. He immediately blurted out, "I'd like to donate my cock!" Without missing a beat, the old woman replied, "I'm sorry sir, we don't accept small donations," and hung up the phone.
I've always hoped he got to see on his tee vee which operator delivered that burn.
Old schoolteachers - don't try to pull anything on them, because they've heard it all.
As roman_mir points out, we aren't manufacturing anymore in the US - we're assembling. The notion that manufacturing is still the same percentage of GDP as it was in 1950 is ludicrous on it's face - where is all that manufacturing taking place? Where are all the factories? Even robotic manufacturing requires factories. What few "factories" we have left in the US are mostly final assembly plants, where imported components are assembled into a final product (mostly for large products, like cars and tractors, where shipping the finished goods can be much more expensive than shipping components). That's comparatively low-skill, low-cost labor.
This assembly-based "manufacturing" continues to be a large faction of our GDP simply due to dodgy accounting - a practice all Americans should be quite familiar with after the recent real estate "industry" imploded. To give an obvious example, companies like Ford import most of the components needed to manufacture a new car - something they'll end up selling for $40,000. The components are imported mostly from China or Mexico for something like $5,000. They're assembled in a few days at a plant in Michigan by just a handful of workers, plus some robots and some quality control inspectors. Voila! $35,000 in "manufacturing" has just taken place - the difference between the cost of the imported components and the finished assembled product. Ford executives pocket a ridiculous share of that $35k, and the rest is distributed to shareholders. Workers get a minuscule fraction. As each year passes, fewer and fewer Americans are able to afford those $40,000 cars, as they no longer have good-paying jobs manufacturing the actual components, and Ford's (and GM's, and GE's) market continues to shrink. Lather, rinse, repeat.
They sure haven't been answering to this taxpayer who has been saying for years that it's moronic to end the shuttle program before its replacement is even off the drawing board.
It was moronic to continue the Shuttle program after the Challenger explosion, by which point it was obvious that not only were the Shuttles far more expensive to operate than other manned boosters, but also less reliable. The Shuttle hadn't lived up to any of its promised design goals and should have been killed outright at that point as a complete failure. Instead, we continued to operate the stupid things - at enormous expense - until one of them fried 7 more astronauts. At which point billions more were dumped into the gaping maw of this failed program instead of doing the sensible thing and killing it altogether.
There are no compelling reasons to lob humans into orbit at well over a billion dollars a launch. None. It's a ridiculous waste of money. Given that the private sector seems more than capable of designing and launching man rated boosters itself, NASA should get out of the business of designing rockets and contract that work out, potentially saving tens of billions of dollars in the process. They could then focus on operations, research and unmanned probes, three things they actually seem to do fairly well. We already know they couldn't design a cost-effective rocket if you put a gun to their heads, as the Shuttle, the miserable failure of the various space plane projects, and the ridiculous cost of the Constellation program all make clear.
Of course, getting NASA out of the launch business would cut of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded pork to states like Texas, Florida, Virginia and Alabama, which is the real reason why you're hearing so much squealing about the end of the Shuttle program from political types. It's an expensive white elephant that fleeces most taxpayers, but it also craps a lot of manure on quite a few Congressional districts.
Firstly, there is enough evidence to strongly suggest that humans are affected by higher frequencies
[Citation please]
So far, I've seen one dodgy study from Japan cited. That's not inspiring much confidence.
I also think it's funny that vinyl fans all have a hard on for ultrasonics. Comparing vinyl to a modern digital format is like comparing a Gremlin with a brand new Lexus. Who cares if the Gremlin has leather seats and the Lexus doesn't? The Gremlin is still a pile of shit. One feature of dubious merit at best does not a better format make.
Distortion is not the be all and end all - if digital was so good, nature would be producing all digital sounds.
Wow. Don't even know where to begin with that one. If cars were so good, nature would be growing rubber wheels on cows!
And no, distortion is not the "be all and end all", but if you have two audio formats, and one of them is awash in distortion and the other one isn't, that certainly isn't going to do anything to enhance the fidelity of the format that's drowning in distortion.
Vinyl is still a technical masterpiece
Vinyl was a technical masterpiece 60 years ago. Now, it's as obsolete as AM radio and the 8-track tape.
Which is completely useless, as there isn't the slightest bit of evidence humans can hear ultrasonics.
[Citation needed]
I'm sorry, where's your citation that they can hear ultrasonics? All I've seen so far is a crap article from a Japanese researcher with a funky biamped setup. The setup itself could be responsible for any observed differences in listener reactions. Color me unconvinced.
But most mid grade speakers usually have no problem hitting 25kHz or more +/-3db.
[Citation needed]
And actually, to get that kind of performance you typically have to go up to around $500 a pair for bookshelf speakers. That's *way* beyond "Walmart".
You seem a bit confused about how digital and analog recording work and are ham-handedly mixing all kinds of issues up. What compression? Again, you are talking out of you ass.
And you don't seem to know the first thing about digital or analog recording. Dynamic range compression has been around for an eternity - it is not a new phenomena, and in fact it was required to record a clear audible signal on older phonographs. AM radio had little dynamic range to begin with, and broadcasters routinely and heavily compressed that starting in the early 1960's (if not sooner). It's still necessary if you want to master something for vinyl - vinyl cannot handle the full dynamic range afforded by modern digital or analog tape formats, particularly in the low bass.
Compression is a relatively recent occurrence,or at least in the way it is being applied these days
Google "Phil Spector" and pay careful attention to the "Wall of Sound". Compressing the dynamic range of musical material is as old as dirt, and there are many, many ways to achieve it. The important thing to note about vinyl is that compression isn't just an artistic choice - it's an absolutely essential part of the mastering process. You have to compress the dynamic range of some program material when mastering for vinyl, particularly on an LP, in order to avoid (among other things) having the groove become so shallow the needle pops right out of it (loud low bass pans, for example). There are also issues with where on an LP you can place a loud track with a wide dynamic range (in general, they don't do too well on the inner grooves - you'd need to compress the dynamic range, i.e. reduce their overall volume, and then deal with the extra noise).
You should refrain from commenting on subjects you clearly don't know the first thing about.
What format was available to the consumer in the late 1960's or 1970's that was so much better?
No format was available, as I indicated, although the technology was certainly in place to create one. Actually, RCA had created a cartridge-based tape format in the late '50s that was technically superior to the LP, at least on paper, but they never properly marketed it, refused to release standalone decks (instead hardwiring them to amps and speakers), and took years to get program material to market. By which point the Compact Cassette and the 8-track were both taking off.
Sony's Elcaset in the mid-'70s was a replay of RCA's old large cartridge tape format. Technically superior, didn't take off.
Or are you trying to tell me that 8-track and cassette was better?
8-track was actually superior by most measures to the early Compact Cassette, at least when it worked properly. But several features of the format made it prone to issues as the tapes and players aged (especially head alignment of those moving heads), and in practice most 8-track decks were very poorly put together. By the time Dolby S rolled around in the 1990's though the lowly cassette was clearly superior to the LP. A decent cassette deck featured a flat 20-20kHz frequency response, nearly inaudible wow and flutter, and something like 80dB of dynamic range unmarred by clicks, pops, massive harmonic distortion, feedback, rumble or any of the other crap vinyl has to offer.
absolutely false, the study of Tsutomu Oohashi shows the human brain indeed does respond to ultrasonic and infrasonic content of music
I found the article. It's crap. The ultrasonic content was filtered from the signal using a 170 or 80dB per octave filter. The very method utilized to filter the signal is guaranteed to lead to audible distortions well below 20kHz. They also fed the higher frequency components to separate speakers, but some low frequency signal was going to be leaking through when they activated the high-frequency signal. I don't see any reference to them feeding the low-frequency signal through to the high frequency speakers. I also don't see any reference to them feeding filtered source material through to both the low and high frequency speakers, to see if that's perceived differently. Fail.
I'm not sure why they went with this bizarre biamped setup in the first place, unless it was to deliberately produce bogus results. Why not just filter the program material itself, and feed the results directly to a set of speakers that can handle the full frequency response? As it stands it's impossible to tell if the results they're getting are because of ultrasonics, or because when they engaged their ultrasonics, they also ended up pumping some low frequency signal to an extra pair of amps and tweeters they simultaneously engaged. We already know people perceive high treble as adding an extra sense of space to recordings (even if it's just noise, like tape hiss or the cacophony of clicks and pops on a phonograph record).
You're also ignoring the fact that most speakers can't reproduce ultrasonics, assuming intentional ultrasonics are even present in the signal to begin with, which is a crapshoot at best on most recordings. Especially since the vast majority of microphones used to record audio over the past 75 years don't reliably capture ultrasonics, let alone at levels high enough to be audible.
You wrote that! That's hysterical. When I saw the article about BBS games, that was the very first game I thought of. I've actually searched for it online several times over the years, but couldn't remember the name, or that it was an ST game (although I thought it might be, since I had an ST).
That was an incredibly amusing game. You should totally recreate it on the web (or on Facebook). I used to laugh at the hilarious cast options the game would present you, where you'd end up being forced to cast, say, Danny DeVito as the "young hero", or Jimmy Stewart (there was always some fossil cropping up) as the "evil wizard". I have no idea how the game worked, but sometimes the most oddball casts resulted in boffo box office.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much like real life. I mean, who in 1987, would have thought that John Travolta was gonna become a major box office star? His ship had pretty much sailed you'd have thought. And then Look Who's Talking happened, and that kept him running for 5 years, and then Pulp Fiction made him a superstar.
It is fortunate for the vinyl fans that the distortions introduced by the format are pleasing to the ear.
Pleasant to their ears, maybe. I thought vinyl sounded like absolute shit even when I was a little kid. Clicks, pops, hiss, rumble, wow, flutter and gobs and gobs of annoying harmonic distortion. I could stand to listen to maybe one album at a sitting at halfway decent volume before I got a screeching headache. It was an awful, obsolete format 40 years ago, and I'm amazed it took until the 1980's for the Dutch and Japanese to finally successfully replace it.
That really is a testimony to how completely out-of-it the American consumer electronics industry was by the 1970's.
At around $250 you can get a stylus that will go up to 50kHz.
Which is completely useless, as there isn't the slightest bit of evidence humans can hear ultrasonics. Even if they could, most speakers can't reproduce them (and certainly not with any accuracy), assuming they weren't deliberately filtered out somewhere during the recording and mastering process, as they almost certainly would have been. Any ultrasonic signal loud enough to even potentially be audible could cause all sorts of problems with a host of electronic circuits, tape decks and other devices in the recording / mixing / mastering loop.
Not to mention the fact most of the ultrasonics picked up by any stylus are probably harmonics and noise - all of it pure distortion - much of it caused by the needle ringing like a little bell as it's struck by the walls of the groove. Or they're harmonics and distortion and noise coming from the microphones, preamps, mixing decks, tape decks, equalizers, compressors or the mastering equipment itself. In other words, a bunch of power-robbing crap that only serves to distort the signal below 20kHz that actually is audible to humans.
There are no cases where vinyl "sounds better" due to any properties of the format. The vinyl master may have been better equalized or better compressed, but the format itself is pure unadulterated junk, and has been for 50 years. Vinyl was obsolete by the 1960's, and should have and probably would have been replaced by something better if the American electronics firms of the time weren't being run by halfwits and incompetents. I've always been surprised RCA didn't attempt to roll out their capacitance disk as an audio format first before trying to deploy it as a video format, but it was stuck in development hell for well over a decade and I suppose it's a miracle it ever made it to market at all with that bunch of clowns running the place.
The Dutch and Japanese finally got around to doing something about it by the late 1970's. Well, somebody had to. Vinyl sucks.
Negative. You're assuming that if power use decreases by 10-20%, the cost of power will decrease. It will not. The power company will charge more for less.
That's not true. The cost of power in many places in the US (and elsewhere, I'd imagine) varies during the course of the day depending on demand. So when demand is low power is cheap, but when demand is high (in the sunbelt, on hot sunny days), the price of power skyrockets, sometimes to ten times or more what it costs when demand is low.
Solar cells have the unique property of generating maximum power just at the time when utility rates peak in the sunbelt. So looking at the average cost of power and comparing that to the cost of power generated by a solar cell doesn't begin to tell the whole story. Look at the peak cost of power and see how much of that a solar installation will shave off of your electric bill. And of course, thanks to the network effect, if everyone starts installing these things, the peak cost of electricity across the sunbelt will implode. Either way, consumers win. The power companies could try to jack up the cost a little, but they aren't going to be able to jack it up tenfold.
Also, $200/mo light bill?! Maybe for AC in Phoenix... but that's a lot of lights. :)
We were paying $200 a month in Phoenix to cool a 4 bedroom home 25 years ago. I'd imagine it's substantially more expensive today, especially when you factor in all the electronic, power sucking gizmos in the average home of 2010, from massive HD sets to power-guzzling desktop computers. My Core 2 box and its two LCD monitors consumes about 5 times as much electricity as my old Atari 800XL, 1050 disk drive and Amdek Color I monitor did back when I lived in Phoenix 25 years ago.
Let's assume I can sell you a very very cheap solar cell that runs at 2% efficiency. In this case, you will quickly recoup your investment, but you aren't producing much power. Do you plan to make your roof 5 to 10 times as large?
No, but if they're cheap enough at just 2% efficiency to pay for themselves quickly, it might make sense to cover the sides of buildings with them, as well as parking garages, covered parking spaces, the sides of freeways, etc. So in aggregate you could end up generating just as much power as you might with more expensive, more efficient cells, just by carpeting every exposed surface with them.
However, most cells these days are in the 10% and up efficiency range, and growing more efficient (and cheaper) with each passing year. So your hypothetical seems kinda unlikely.