It's more than just the 30 cents worth of plastic, it's all the logistics involved in producing two separate discs -- so you're effectively doubling that supply chain -- and packing them together, keeping them straight (don't want to put two copies of disc 1 in there, don't want to ship any with just one disc, etc.) -- not to mention adding additional weight to each package that has to be taken into account during shipping and transport.
I'll bet that the cost of manufacturing a 2-disc set is significantly higher than producing a single-sided one; personally, I'd rather screw the artwork on the discs and save the money. They're just buckets for bits anyway.
Really a thin client is not the way to go. A frontend PC, connected to a big cluster or renderfarm, is.
You set up and preview all the changes that you want, at some low resolution, on the workstation, and then send it off to the farm for all the work that doesn't need to be done in absolutely real time.
This sort of architecture gets used with animation, but I could see it being used for video editing as well (and it sort of is with some of Apple's high-end products if I understand them -- they have some way of using "compute nodes" to do the heavy lifting for some desktop apps). You could do your frame-by-frame editing and produce your EDL while working on a low-res version of the content, say 480p which any decent desktop can handle easily, and then ship it off to a backend system to apply those same changes to the 1080p files. It's not quite as easy to do it with 2D graphics, but you could still preview at low resolutions and then if you thought it might be interesting, dump each change into a queue to be processed offline; you could line up any number of versions and have each one rendered and parallel and then go through and look at them when they're done, and pick which is the keeper and discard the rest. That would let the user keep working on their local machine without tying it up.
Thin clients just aren't "snappy" enough for most people; every system I've used, including VNC and Citrix and SunFire and some proprietary systems, introduces lag -- acceptable for a POS system, maybe, but not something I'd want to use if I was doing intense creative work under a lot of stress, trying to beat a deadline. Every tenth of a second that a menu takes to drop when clicked is one more thing that's going to be aggravating. But there's no sense in doing anything that can be batch-processed on the user's local machine -- dedicate their box solely to interacting with them.
It has an ADF scanner, and the included software will create searchable PDFs (it OCR's the document and embeds the text into the PDF's metadata).
Re-he-heeally...? Wow, I have an HP also, and I've never gotten it to do that. Maybe their Mac software isn't nearly that cool. As far as I can tell, either I can produce an OCRed text file, with or without formatting, or I can produce a raster file. The "Image and Text" scan option, output to a PDF option, at least in my few tests, seems to just produce a PDF file that contains the OCRed text (complete with errors), without the raster data at all. (The "Image" option to a PDF file, on the other hand, created just the raster; I can't seem to get both in order to produce a searchable file.)
Did you have to do anything special to get that to work?
So...? York Color Labs will do 16x20 for $6 and 20x30 for $8, plus a buck-fifty S&H per order, and you get to not have a $1200 large-format photo printer sitting around.
At best, you're talking about a really niche market for machines like the Epson 3800 and its bigger brethren; you have to be very obsessed with quality and control (to not want to send your stuff to an inexpensive lab like York) and do a huge amount of work in very large formats (to make it uneconomical to just send it to a prolab for the occasional large print).
For anything smaller than that, like 12x18s, you'd be much better off going to a local place with a Frontier 500-series and having them do it. It's getting to the point where every drug store in the world has one of those, and as long as they're dumping Bottle A and Bottle B into the right amounts of water, there's not a whole lot left up to human error (particularly if you go to any of the ones where someone's produced a color profile for the printer).
I've been taking pictures and consider myself a respectable amateur photographer and a bit of a gear-head, but the idea of paying $1200 in order to run off the occasional 17x25 seems a bit ridiculous. I could see a good minilab keeping something like that around (and charging $25-50 per print, probably), but that's right up there with having an Imacon or drum scanner at home, because you think you might need it some day. I've only ever printed anything bigger than 12" (on its shortest dimension) once, and that was a 24x36 poster print which I had done by mail anyway. I just don't see the draw.
Yeah, I've known people with similar experiences; actually I had an acquaintance who only managed to get a hysterectomy by telling everyone involved that she was a lesbian, and cutting her hair short and wearing masculine clothes. Without doing that, she couldn't get any doctor to take her at her word that she didn't want to get pregnant. But by claiming to be and looking like a stereotypical lesbian, she found some progressive clinic that would do it. Truly bizarre, but I've been led to believe that such things are pretty typical/widespread, either because most physicians are inherently very biased about women, or they're afraid somehow of being sued later (I think the latter is the excuse used for the former).
What I generally recommend to my customers (I work at an OEM/retail) is that they get a nice little multi function, usually canon or epson (they are the best of the bad lot, meaning ink jet printers) and get a hp or Fuji/Xerox basic laser too, the laser printer will pay for itself in in an about 6-12 mths:)
The only good thing about inkjet multifunction machines is that they're probably the cheapest way to get an automatic-document-feeder scanner. Since they're selling the machine at or close to a loss, hoping to make it up on ink, you can go out, buy one, and then never print a single page on it and just use the scanner functionality.
Compared to the cost of a standalone ADF scanner, there's no contest -- "real" ADFs are out of the price range of most home users, but for under $100 you can get one built into a MFP that basically does the same stuff. Probably a little slower, but the key functions are there -- drop in a stack of paper and it scans.
Sometimes you can even get them for free, if you find someone who's throwing one away because the print heads are jammed.
If they're printing photos at home then they must be made of money anyway.
It's quite a bit cheaper to just go down to Wal-Mart/Costco/Sam's Club with a camera card or USB stick and have the run off on a lightjet. And you get real photos (actually on photo paper, if their chemicals are okay 100-year archive life) instead of ink prints. Or wait a few days and have one of the many submit-electronically/receive-by-mail print houses do it; they're the 21st century equivalent of the old mail-in color labs.
I guess if they can't easily get out and about then they're stuck with ink, but for the vast majority of people I don't see home photo printing as a particularly economical endeavor. It's one of those things that is a lot easier and cheaper (not to mention better quality) when it's scaled up. Unless there's some real need to product photos right the hell now, like take-home photos at a party or event, it just seems like a waste.
I had a similar issue, back when I had a POS (and I don't mean "point of sale," either) Lexmark inkjet. I only really used it about once every few months, and about one in three times I'd go to use it, it would be clogged. I ended up using most of my ink printing "de-clogging" test pages, and I was burning through ink -- both OEM and remans -- at a rate that could have bought me a pile of new printers.
Eventually I got myself an inexpensive laser (Samsung ML-1740, but there are better/cheaper ones out there now) and I've never, ever looked back. For occasional or low-volume printing it's just no contest. The toner doesn't go bad, it doesn't draw much power at idle, and it's at least as fast as my old Lexmark (feels much faster, particularly on multipage documents). It even does envelopes and sheet labels just fine (it has a "through and through" mode where it doesn't spit out on top, so it doesn't bend the labels and make them peel off).
I recouped the cost of the laser printer and the toner cartridge (factor in a toner cart with the printer purchase since they give you underloaded "starter" carts when you buy it new) probably within a year to 18 months, certainly under two years.
While that would let you make a nuclear plant simulate the pollution profile of a coal-burning one, I don't think that most people would say that's a good idea. The fact that we allow coal plants to do that isn't good, and it's really not an admission that those levels of pollutants in the air and in the groundwater/everywhere are even OK -- who knows what the stuff they're releasing is doing, and we probably won't know for a while. Basically, most everyone is just sticking their fingers in the ears about it, because they know there's not really any better alternative -- or rather, the alternative is there, but they're not ready to accept it yet.
Anyway, if you look at modern pollution controls on coal plants, you'll find that they take the opposite approach anyway; they don't try to make the mercury they produce more diffuse, they try to trap it (well, probably not the Hg, but other stuff) so that it can be disposed of in less-lethal ways. Most pollution controls are like this, with the exception of catyltic converters that perform chemical changes on the waste stream. But most plants, whether power generating or chemical producing or anything else, concentrate their waste products, so that they can be taken to central repositories and stored (relatively) safely.
In fact, if you look at what goes into a hazardous waste dump, since of a lot of it is toxic just in its elemental form -- mercury is mercury today, tomorrow, and 10,000 years from now -- you actually have more severe problems than you do with nuclear waste, because there's no time limit on it. It's there, ready to contaminate the groundwater, until you recycle it somehow.
Well, yeah, the limiting case is absurd, but thankfully it's not possible (you'd run out of genetic diversity and all turn into slobbering retards before you got down to zero people).
I'm not thinking on that scale, so talking about the limiting cases is reductio ad absurdem; I'm thinking about keeping the population somewhere near where it currently is (300M or so?) and slowly coasting it down, while innovating to maintain net real GDP at its current level.
There's obviously some limit where you wouldn't be able to reduce the population any further while maintaining output, and you'd compromise per-capita GDP as a result, but I think it's quite a ways down. Historically, labor shortages are good for innovation, while labor surpluses quash new ideas and new thinking (because then, rather than having that invention be a benefit and its inventor lauded, it just takes jobs away from workers who need them and the inventor gets the pitchfork-and-hammer-handle act).
We can always watch Japan, or some of the other declining-population countries that are resistant to immigration, as a bellwether for when that limit starts to get close. But if you look at historical examples, like right after the plague went through Europe, the labor shortage was a blessing in disguise, because it allowed a lot of innovation to take place that had been held back by lack of demand.
(Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I don't buy the argument put forth by proponents of increased unskilled-labor immigration, that those workers only take jobs that "Americans won't do" or other nonsense; setting aside the fact that people will literally swim in feces if you pay them enough, this argument ignores the beneficial effects of a labor shortage on other sectors of the economy.)
Yes, I got the 503 "Service Not Available" error on the personal page (~/Username) also. Maybe they're doing work on the database or something, and don't want the extra load...? When I saw that, I was actually a little surprised that comments were working at all.
There is quite a bit of truth to this. The difference between "nuclear fuel" and "nuclear waste" is mostly economic or political.
There's a lot of fissionable material left in most modern nuclear "waste" (fuel rods removed from reactors) which isn't recovered for political reasons (Carter banned reprocessing in the U.S. because he thought it would encourage weapons production elsewhere). That stuff would even be economical to reprocess, according to most analyses that I've read.
Beyond that, once you've fissioned the U-235 out, you still have a lot of unstable, naturally decaying (and thus energy-producing) isotopes. At this point, most plans just call for burying the stuff, but there's no reason if you're doing a lot of post-reaction-processing, that you couldn't separate it out and use the more fast-decaying stuff for "nuclear batteries" (the Soviets did a lot of this, and used reprocessed waste, I believe, to produce the fuel for their RTGs, which powered remote lighthouses and other applications -- in the U.S. we've really only used them on spacecraft). Most of those short-lived isotopes, concentrated enough, will produce heat, and heat is energy; it's just a question of economics whether it's worth doing anything with.
To be honest, as much as I think nuclear power is a great energy source, there's a part of me that really wonders if it's a good idea to push the idea right now. If we don't reprocess the "waste," then we're just throwing fissionable uranium (U-235) away. In some ways, it might be better if we just waited -- wait until oil and natural gas has increased in price to the point where it's really starting to cause major problems, and until people are really ready to accept the full nuclear fuel cycle, with all its benefits and hazards. I think at some point, we're going to look back at our early "burner" reactors (because the design concept for most currently-operating U.S. power reactors is similar to a coal plant -- they take in U-235, 'burn' it, and spit out waste for disposal; the fact that the 'burning' is nuclear rather than chemical hardly matters) as a criminal waste of precious fissionable uranium. We should be using every ounce of U-235 to breed plutonium, and then reprocessing its waste products until there's nothing left that produces even a few degrees of heat (well, nothing that produces more heat when concentrated, over its lifespan, than it takes to extract).
I think until we really start to see the end of oil, and realize what a vast resource we've squandered, we're not ready to tap into another non-renewable one -- properly managed, nuclear energy could last a long, long time; squandered, it could barely keep us running as long as fossil fuels have.
the U.S. DOE and the USGS says there is only trace amounts of these elements in burnt coal, much like other rock of the same type.
And who do you think is paying them to say that, eh?
I'll give you a guess -- who's the best friend of the oil industry? (The answer isn't the nuclear industry)
You've probably seen their commercials on TV; they run these saccharine spots with too-cute, ethnically-diverse kids playing in a field, ostensibly in the shadow of their friendly local...coal-burning power plant.
Seems to me that building some sort of (as you call it) Planet of the Apes style signage over a single dump somewhere, is a hell of a lot better than dealing with thousands or millions of tons of toxic heavy metals all over the place, deposited by coal burning plants, or the destruction of inland fisheries and forests due to acid rain, or the possibility of serious longterm consequences if we really are causing global warming somehow.
I'd much rather take all the best engineers in the U.S., and throw them at one tractable problem -- "how do we keep this stuff safe for a long time?" -- then the myriad issues that we get from just dumping toxins into the atmosphere to blow away, and not be thought about until they start to cause a real problem.
If you want to live the kind of lives that we have today, and moreover, if you want to maintain the upward march of standards-of-living (and if you don't, that's fine, but realize you're in a tiny, tiny, basically insignificant minority), then there are going to have to be tradeoffs. There's no free lunch where energy and thermodynamics are concerned. You want the lights to go on, the juice has to come from somewhere. Either you burn coal and poison everyone, or you cover every flat surface with solar panels (and deal with the pollution that their production entails, not to mention the problems just associated with deploying them, if you could ever make enough), or wind generators on every hilltop and kill birds (and again, you probably couldn't build enough anyway), or you dam every lake and river for hydro power (incredibly, almost unbelievably, polluting, due to deoxygenation), or you build nuclear plants and deal with the waste. Pick your favorites, but I don't think we can do it, long-term, without nuclear plants -- a lot of them -- and we're going to have to deal with the problems eventually. Might as well start thinking about it now.
I disagree that you need to constantly expand your population to stay competitive. Historically, that's been true, but that's really driven by the number of manual-labor jobs that were around.
If you can decrease your population while maintaining or increasing economic output, then you can continue to increase real per-capita GDP, and continue to raise living standards, which is what pretty much everyone wants. People don't care that much about per-capita GDP per se, what they want is to know that their standard of living is going up and up, relative to their parents, or 20 years ago, etc.
I think the long-term solution in the U.S. isn't to "encourage" people to have children -- people who really want to have children are going to have them regardless of the outside incentives you provide, and the people with that level of commitment are really the only ones you want having kids in the first place; it's not healthy for society to encourage people to pop out a few so they can collect a cheque from the government each week -- the solution is to stabilize the population at or slightly below the replacement rate, and make sure we're innovating enough to keep per-capita GDP on an upward march. Immigration policies should be tailored to only bring in the best and brightest, and predominantly from countries where there is a culture and history of secularism and democracy (because importing a lot of people who think that a non-secular government is just grand is going to cause some serious social problems here, like serious KKK-type problems).
The growth that has driven the U.S. throughout the 19th and 20th century just isn't sustainable, politically or ecologically. We need to stop trying to expand, and start looking to consolidate our gains; we're going to have to make some pretty severe choices, because we're not going to be able to play the Social Security shell game anymore (because S.S. relies on there being a bigger pool of workers down the road to pay you back what's being taken from you now, to give to people whose benefits are due today; without expansion it collapses). Fixing some of the things that were put together in the early part of last century, without much thought for their long-term sustainability, is going to be painful. But the sooner we fix -- and by "fix," I mean "dismantle," at least in their current form -- them, the better.
Of course, if you look at where this goes, you end up with a relatively small U.S. population controlling a huge amount of the world's wealth and resources. But that's kind of the point: if every couple has only one child, and puts behind that child the combined resources of two people, they have a lot more going for them than a child in a society where each couple has three, four, or eight children. In the very long run, it might be militarily unsustainable for the U.S. to stay on top with a very small population, but I think you'd be talking about many generations -- terrorism might become a real problem, since being a nation of 'golden children' isn't going to help our image any, but we'd still have a planet-annihilating nuclear arsenal squirreled away; it would really just mean the end of aggressive "force projection" and foreign adventuring.
If women want freedom and equal rights, then they have to grow up. Equality does not mean self-entitlement, and liberation cannot be just a convenient excuse for unbridled narcissism. Men and women should be equal partners in this world, but such a lofty goal can only be achieved if women start acting like equal partners -- that is, giving instead of constantly demanding and taking.
Although I don't necessary agree with many of your premises, nor your conclusion, I do agree with that particular statement (well, not the generalization that all women today are necessarily "constantly demanding and taking," and I think the tone is a bit strident -- did you just get out of a bad divorce or something?).
I think the people who get screwed worse than just about anyone, under our current system, are the women who really want to compete on a level playing field; either they get hobbled, or they get tossed crutches they don't need and don't want (and which cause them to be discriminated against).
An easy example of this is with child-care policies at work. Some workplaces have very biased policies surrounding parenting; they have maternity leave without any corresponding paternity or adoption leave, etc. What this does is make women, in general, much less attractive employees to lower and middle management. If you're taking on someone into a management or competitive career track (think junior partners in big law firms), who are you going to pick: the male employee, who's going to work his ass off, and then work his ass off some more, or the female employee, who's going to work her ass off, but then quite possibly go take six or nine months off to have a kid, and then only want to come back on a reduced schedule? It's a no-brainer, and this is why there's a culture of discrimination in many of those workplaces.
The people who this really hurts, though, are the women who aren't interested in having children, and aren't going to ever exercise their maternity leave, and are going to work the same 60-hour weeks for as many years as their male counterpart would, and not expect any quarter on account of sex. They really get hosed, because they get discriminated against without any good reason, due the cultural stereotype that all women want to be nurturing mother-figures, when there are definitely women out there who have zero interest in it.
I've met a lot of aggressive, careerist women in my life, and a whole lot of them are pretty bitter that they always get pigeonholed in the "so when are you going to get pregnant?" box. Conversely, I've met a few men who are pretty clearly looking to be primary caregivers and bitter about the flack they get for asking for child-care and leave, or for not being as aggressively career-oriented as others around them. So it cuts both ways.
I think there are really two fair solutions: you can make all policies gender-neutral, and encourage male employees to take the same sort of leave, when they're adopting or their partner is pregnant, that a female employee would take for a pregnancy, so that in hiring or placing people, managers can't just assume that "male employee = no leave" and "female employee = leave" (although if you have more female employees taking leave, then you'll still have discrimination). Or, you pick some sort of well-known, performance-based metric to do your advancement/firing based on, tell people they can take as much leave as they want, whenever they want, but if their performance suffers too badly, they'll get canned, and let the pieces fall where they may. Since I think the latter plan is probably illegal in the U.S. and other "pro-family" countries, I think we're stuck with the former.
You don't know that's true. Intel would raise prices as far as it wouldn't decrease sales.
True. However, if they were the only one producing x86 chips, since the demand for them is so high, and the cost for a new competitor to enter into the market (setting up fabs, withstanding the resources Intel would use to try and kill them) would be so great, they could drive up prices significantly and most people would just have to bend over and take it in the wallet.
If they rose prices too high, a competitor could undercut them.
This isn't some nice macro-101 magic-widget-factory; the barriers to entry in the desktop microprocessor market are huge. You're talking about resources only possessed by huge multinational corporations and governments in order to do it, not only the fabrication, but also the research. IBM might be able to compete, and maybe Siemens, Fujitsu, and some of the other big tech-oriented conglomerates, but it's a pretty short list. Everyone else could be squashed or bought. With that high a barrier to entry, Intel could increase prices quite a lot before it would become attractive for someone else to step in and compete against them, particularly if the world had just watched AMD -- an established competitor with billions in resources and millions of man-years of experience -- go down in flames.
If they did anything illegal, the government would go after them.
So... did you have a headache when you woke up from that 14 year coma? Let me fill you in on how MSFT vs the DOJ went: they made it to the next major election cycle, and then the winner pulled the plug on the whole case and let them off with a slap on the wrist. They haven't bothered going after a big tech company again, and they probably never will.
Politicians are dirt fucking cheap to buy; for the amount Intel probably spends on hors d'oeuvres at its shareholder meetings, they could bribe--I mean, lobby--a few key senators and bury anything that was remotely threatening. And they'd have the capital to do it, too, because they'd be making money hand over fist (which would mean that all the investment bankers and other Wall Street types living on their droppings would be right with them, undermining any efforts to slow down the gravy train). By the time the Madison Avenue PR people got done, Intel would be patriots -- marketing good, solid American technology, preserving our lead against the great {Asian|European|whatever} horde.
You can buy, either from the Post Office or from numerous other information retailers, huge databases that cross-reference street addresses, ZIP codes, and ZIP+4s.
The information is built in to many other programs, too; if you type a street address into Google Maps, for instance, it will pop out the address in USPS standard format, which includes the ZIP+4. I assume that you could run the information in the reverse direction too, if you had access to the database. (There's no way on Google Maps to type in a ZIP+4 and get all the street addresses there, but it would be trivial to do if you had the data available.)
At the local levels, I'm sure that the Post Office probably has maps that show exactly where the ZIP and ZIP+4s fall "on the ground," I can personally attest to having seen the ZIP ones, but I don't know about maps of the +4 extensions (it might be that they're so granular that they don't bother to map them, the sorting systems and human letter carriers just know how they're associated to addresses).
The address lists that you can purchase for the purposes of sending out mass mailings would probably have most of the information you'd want; you might not even need to go directly to the USPS.
Only the naive think such a distinction exists - the only difference is who is doing the watching.
I think it's you who needs to do a little reading on what exactly constitutes stalking. It's a crime of harassment, which induces a fearful response in the person being stalked. Following someone around on CCTV cameras would not necessarily be stalking, in and of itself; if you started sending photos from those cameras to the person, so that they knew you were watching them and were thus fearful, then it would be.
If you don't include the fearful/harassment part of "stalking," then you broaden the definition so much that it becomes a meaningless term.
Well, if you're not violating your license terms, every time you replace a machine with a new one, you are giving Microsoft a certain amount of cash.
Your VLK doesn't let you put Windows onto bare, unlicensed hardware. Go read the terms if you don't believe me, but this has been beaten to death a lot. MS only sells "upgrade" volume licenses, which let you put your preferred version of Windows onto OEM hardware that's already stickered and has a Windows license. (And lets you do it without ever putting in per-machine serials, at least for XP; I don't understand Vista's authentication and don't care.)
If you go and get a bunch of generic cases, mobos, processors, and other stuff, and start installing your VLK copies of Windows on them, you're in violation, because the hardware doesn't have that "base" license on it already. This is why you don't see big companies just going out and assembling their own PCs: you need to go to an OEM and get machines that have Windows licenses on them, so you can use your VLK upgrade. (Or, I assume, pay some sort of additional per-machine surcharge, or buy retail copies of an older version to get the licenses so you can upgrade.)
There's no such thing as a blanket site-license for Windows. You're always paying per-machine, somehow; it's just usually built in to the cost of the hardware. It's certainly a lot less revenue for MS than if you stayed on the upgrade treadmill and took everyone up to Vista, and then in 5 years rinse and repeat to upgrade to Windows 2012 or whatever, but they're still milking you indirectly.
Why would this work any better than just having two distinct passwords, a regular one and a "distress" one?
I've often thought that they should do something like this for ATMs. You should have another PIN code that you can enter, which will work just like your regular one, but will also trigger an immediate silent alarm and mark the machine's video record that something was amiss.
Or on a computer, you have two passwords, one that's the real login, and another that causes the computer to open to a fake main screen, display dummy data, and silently start deleting the real stuff every time it has an opportunity to access the disk. It could also try to transmit some sort of a distress message, although that's harder to do on a computer where you have to assume that it can be disconnected from the outside world pretty trivially.
Yeah, my Samsung came with a starter cartridge like that, but the 'real' cartridge -- the one reportedly good for at least 3k pages -- didn't cost more than a brand-name ink refill for my old piece of shit Lexmark IJ. I'd have to go back and figure out exactly what I paid, but it was definitely under $50, purchased online.
So I agree you should factor the cost of a new toner into the purchase of any of those inexpensive printers, but since you get so many more pages out of a single toner cartridge, it's not quite the "razors and blades" business model that they've been doing with ink; or at least it's at a much, much slower rate.
Fifty bucks every few years (I rarely do more than a thousand pages a year, and probably not even close to that, a few hundred usually) is nothing compared to what I used to spend on ink (mostly because the damn cartridges would dry up and I'd have to replace them before they were spent whenever I wanted to print something). I was getting a new cartridge every six - nine months or so with the Lexmark.
Good to know. Personally I have two PVR-150s (they were selling them for 40% off at the local CompUSA as part of the store-closing sale) and they work very well under Knoppmyth. I've heard mixed things about the '350 (dual tuner); for analog SDTV I think the 150s are really the way to go.
There's something, the details of which escape me, that's a caveat about some models of x50 cards shipped by Hauppauge. For some reason I think there are a few models of card that are like PVR-x50 Pro, or have some extra designator tacked onto the x50 part, which really aren't "x50" cards internally. Maybe you have one of those?
There seem to be people using the PVR-250 with Knoppmyth R5, which just makes me wonder if somehow your card is slightly different from theirs.
True, as a company, giving them $100 is giving them $100 (or $20, or whatever, I don't know exactly how much they get per copy from Dell).
However, if they spend a billion dollars developing Windows Vista, and then they only sell $800M worth of Vista-related crap, because everyone else is still buying XP (because Vista sucks that badly), then they've effectively 'lost' $200M on Vista, because it didn't generate as much in profit as it took to develop. It's not lost in the same sense of the money you blew on blackjack in Vegas is 'lost,' but it shows that Vista was a very, very bad investment, and it'll probably make them not meet their projections to their investors.
It doesn't really hurt them as much as make them look like a bunch of idiots.
Let's go back to the ink efficient days of the DeskJet 400C and fuck these contract based service packages.
Why don't you just buy a laser printer?
I can't believe anyone with a clue is still using ink-based printers, with lasers being the price they are now. You can get a fairly inexpensive Samsung or maybe even an HP laser printer for $100 - 150, sometimes on sale for under 100, and with a full toner cartridge get thousands of pages out of it.
They're so far superior to ink-based printers that I just don't understand why anyone wouldn't use them. The only thing they don't do, or that you have to pay a significant amount extra for, is color. But really, for the occasional color print you can keep one of those more-expensive-than-liquid-gold ink printers around if you really need it. Or pay the $250 or $300 to get a color laser (and probably step up to something that'll do duplexing).
Inkjet printers need to die, as a technology. The only niche market they deserve to keep is for photo printing for the terminally impatient and un-quality-conscious folks who can't or don't want to drive down to their local CVS/WalMart and use a lightjet.
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It's more than just the 30 cents worth of plastic, it's all the logistics involved in producing two separate discs -- so you're effectively doubling that supply chain -- and packing them together, keeping them straight (don't want to put two copies of disc 1 in there, don't want to ship any with just one disc, etc.) -- not to mention adding additional weight to each package that has to be taken into account during shipping and transport.
I'll bet that the cost of manufacturing a 2-disc set is significantly higher than producing a single-sided one; personally, I'd rather screw the artwork on the discs and save the money. They're just buckets for bits anyway.
Really a thin client is not the way to go. A frontend PC, connected to a big cluster or renderfarm, is.
You set up and preview all the changes that you want, at some low resolution, on the workstation, and then send it off to the farm for all the work that doesn't need to be done in absolutely real time.
This sort of architecture gets used with animation, but I could see it being used for video editing as well (and it sort of is with some of Apple's high-end products if I understand them -- they have some way of using "compute nodes" to do the heavy lifting for some desktop apps). You could do your frame-by-frame editing and produce your EDL while working on a low-res version of the content, say 480p which any decent desktop can handle easily, and then ship it off to a backend system to apply those same changes to the 1080p files. It's not quite as easy to do it with 2D graphics, but you could still preview at low resolutions and then if you thought it might be interesting, dump each change into a queue to be processed offline; you could line up any number of versions and have each one rendered and parallel and then go through and look at them when they're done, and pick which is the keeper and discard the rest. That would let the user keep working on their local machine without tying it up.
Thin clients just aren't "snappy" enough for most people; every system I've used, including VNC and Citrix and SunFire and some proprietary systems, introduces lag -- acceptable for a POS system, maybe, but not something I'd want to use if I was doing intense creative work under a lot of stress, trying to beat a deadline. Every tenth of a second that a menu takes to drop when clicked is one more thing that's going to be aggravating. But there's no sense in doing anything that can be batch-processed on the user's local machine -- dedicate their box solely to interacting with them.
It has an ADF scanner, and the included software will create searchable PDFs (it OCR's the document and embeds the text into the PDF's metadata).
Re-he-heeally...? Wow, I have an HP also, and I've never gotten it to do that. Maybe their Mac software isn't nearly that cool. As far as I can tell, either I can produce an OCRed text file, with or without formatting, or I can produce a raster file. The "Image and Text" scan option, output to a PDF option, at least in my few tests, seems to just produce a PDF file that contains the OCRed text (complete with errors), without the raster data at all. (The "Image" option to a PDF file, on the other hand, created just the raster; I can't seem to get both in order to produce a searchable file.)
Did you have to do anything special to get that to work?
So...? York Color Labs will do 16x20 for $6 and 20x30 for $8, plus a buck-fifty S&H per order, and you get to not have a $1200 large-format photo printer sitting around.
At best, you're talking about a really niche market for machines like the Epson 3800 and its bigger brethren; you have to be very obsessed with quality and control (to not want to send your stuff to an inexpensive lab like York) and do a huge amount of work in very large formats (to make it uneconomical to just send it to a prolab for the occasional large print).
For anything smaller than that, like 12x18s, you'd be much better off going to a local place with a Frontier 500-series and having them do it. It's getting to the point where every drug store in the world has one of those, and as long as they're dumping Bottle A and Bottle B into the right amounts of water, there's not a whole lot left up to human error (particularly if you go to any of the ones where someone's produced a color profile for the printer).
I've been taking pictures and consider myself a respectable amateur photographer and a bit of a gear-head, but the idea of paying $1200 in order to run off the occasional 17x25 seems a bit ridiculous. I could see a good minilab keeping something like that around (and charging $25-50 per print, probably), but that's right up there with having an Imacon or drum scanner at home, because you think you might need it some day. I've only ever printed anything bigger than 12" (on its shortest dimension) once, and that was a 24x36 poster print which I had done by mail anyway. I just don't see the draw.
Yeah, I've known people with similar experiences; actually I had an acquaintance who only managed to get a hysterectomy by telling everyone involved that she was a lesbian, and cutting her hair short and wearing masculine clothes. Without doing that, she couldn't get any doctor to take her at her word that she didn't want to get pregnant. But by claiming to be and looking like a stereotypical lesbian, she found some progressive clinic that would do it. Truly bizarre, but I've been led to believe that such things are pretty typical/widespread, either because most physicians are inherently very biased about women, or they're afraid somehow of being sued later (I think the latter is the excuse used for the former).
What I generally recommend to my customers (I work at an OEM/retail) is that they get a nice little multi function, usually canon or epson (they are the best of the bad lot, meaning ink jet printers) and get a hp or Fuji/Xerox basic laser too, the laser printer will pay for itself in in an about 6-12 mths :)
The only good thing about inkjet multifunction machines is that they're probably the cheapest way to get an automatic-document-feeder scanner. Since they're selling the machine at or close to a loss, hoping to make it up on ink, you can go out, buy one, and then never print a single page on it and just use the scanner functionality.
Compared to the cost of a standalone ADF scanner, there's no contest -- "real" ADFs are out of the price range of most home users, but for under $100 you can get one built into a MFP that basically does the same stuff. Probably a little slower, but the key functions are there -- drop in a stack of paper and it scans.
Sometimes you can even get them for free, if you find someone who's throwing one away because the print heads are jammed.
If they're printing photos at home then they must be made of money anyway.
It's quite a bit cheaper to just go down to Wal-Mart/Costco/Sam's Club with a camera card or USB stick and have the run off on a lightjet. And you get real photos (actually on photo paper, if their chemicals are okay 100-year archive life) instead of ink prints. Or wait a few days and have one of the many submit-electronically/receive-by-mail print houses do it; they're the 21st century equivalent of the old mail-in color labs.
I guess if they can't easily get out and about then they're stuck with ink, but for the vast majority of people I don't see home photo printing as a particularly economical endeavor. It's one of those things that is a lot easier and cheaper (not to mention better quality) when it's scaled up. Unless there's some real need to product photos right the hell now, like take-home photos at a party or event, it just seems like a waste.
I had a similar issue, back when I had a POS (and I don't mean "point of sale," either) Lexmark inkjet. I only really used it about once every few months, and about one in three times I'd go to use it, it would be clogged. I ended up using most of my ink printing "de-clogging" test pages, and I was burning through ink -- both OEM and remans -- at a rate that could have bought me a pile of new printers.
Eventually I got myself an inexpensive laser (Samsung ML-1740, but there are better/cheaper ones out there now) and I've never, ever looked back. For occasional or low-volume printing it's just no contest. The toner doesn't go bad, it doesn't draw much power at idle, and it's at least as fast as my old Lexmark (feels much faster, particularly on multipage documents). It even does envelopes and sheet labels just fine (it has a "through and through" mode where it doesn't spit out on top, so it doesn't bend the labels and make them peel off).
I recouped the cost of the laser printer and the toner cartridge (factor in a toner cart with the printer purchase since they give you underloaded "starter" carts when you buy it new) probably within a year to 18 months, certainly under two years.
While that would let you make a nuclear plant simulate the pollution profile of a coal-burning one, I don't think that most people would say that's a good idea. The fact that we allow coal plants to do that isn't good, and it's really not an admission that those levels of pollutants in the air and in the groundwater/everywhere are even OK -- who knows what the stuff they're releasing is doing, and we probably won't know for a while. Basically, most everyone is just sticking their fingers in the ears about it, because they know there's not really any better alternative -- or rather, the alternative is there, but they're not ready to accept it yet.
Anyway, if you look at modern pollution controls on coal plants, you'll find that they take the opposite approach anyway; they don't try to make the mercury they produce more diffuse, they try to trap it (well, probably not the Hg, but other stuff) so that it can be disposed of in less-lethal ways. Most pollution controls are like this, with the exception of catyltic converters that perform chemical changes on the waste stream. But most plants, whether power generating or chemical producing or anything else, concentrate their waste products, so that they can be taken to central repositories and stored (relatively) safely.
In fact, if you look at what goes into a hazardous waste dump, since of a lot of it is toxic just in its elemental form -- mercury is mercury today, tomorrow, and 10,000 years from now -- you actually have more severe problems than you do with nuclear waste, because there's no time limit on it. It's there, ready to contaminate the groundwater, until you recycle it somehow.
Well, yeah, the limiting case is absurd, but thankfully it's not possible (you'd run out of genetic diversity and all turn into slobbering retards before you got down to zero people).
I'm not thinking on that scale, so talking about the limiting cases is reductio ad absurdem; I'm thinking about keeping the population somewhere near where it currently is (300M or so?) and slowly coasting it down, while innovating to maintain net real GDP at its current level.
There's obviously some limit where you wouldn't be able to reduce the population any further while maintaining output, and you'd compromise per-capita GDP as a result, but I think it's quite a ways down. Historically, labor shortages are good for innovation, while labor surpluses quash new ideas and new thinking (because then, rather than having that invention be a benefit and its inventor lauded, it just takes jobs away from workers who need them and the inventor gets the pitchfork-and-hammer-handle act).
We can always watch Japan, or some of the other declining-population countries that are resistant to immigration, as a bellwether for when that limit starts to get close. But if you look at historical examples, like right after the plague went through Europe, the labor shortage was a blessing in disguise, because it allowed a lot of innovation to take place that had been held back by lack of demand.
(Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I don't buy the argument put forth by proponents of increased unskilled-labor immigration, that those workers only take jobs that "Americans won't do" or other nonsense; setting aside the fact that people will literally swim in feces if you pay them enough, this argument ignores the beneficial effects of a labor shortage on other sectors of the economy.)
Yes, I got the 503 "Service Not Available" error on the personal page (~/Username) also. Maybe they're doing work on the database or something, and don't want the extra load...? When I saw that, I was actually a little surprised that comments were working at all.
There is quite a bit of truth to this. The difference between "nuclear fuel" and "nuclear waste" is mostly economic or political.
There's a lot of fissionable material left in most modern nuclear "waste" (fuel rods removed from reactors) which isn't recovered for political reasons (Carter banned reprocessing in the U.S. because he thought it would encourage weapons production elsewhere). That stuff would even be economical to reprocess, according to most analyses that I've read.
Beyond that, once you've fissioned the U-235 out, you still have a lot of unstable, naturally decaying (and thus energy-producing) isotopes. At this point, most plans just call for burying the stuff, but there's no reason if you're doing a lot of post-reaction-processing, that you couldn't separate it out and use the more fast-decaying stuff for "nuclear batteries" (the Soviets did a lot of this, and used reprocessed waste, I believe, to produce the fuel for their RTGs, which powered remote lighthouses and other applications -- in the U.S. we've really only used them on spacecraft). Most of those short-lived isotopes, concentrated enough, will produce heat, and heat is energy; it's just a question of economics whether it's worth doing anything with.
To be honest, as much as I think nuclear power is a great energy source, there's a part of me that really wonders if it's a good idea to push the idea right now. If we don't reprocess the "waste," then we're just throwing fissionable uranium (U-235) away. In some ways, it might be better if we just waited -- wait until oil and natural gas has increased in price to the point where it's really starting to cause major problems, and until people are really ready to accept the full nuclear fuel cycle, with all its benefits and hazards. I think at some point, we're going to look back at our early "burner" reactors (because the design concept for most currently-operating U.S. power reactors is similar to a coal plant -- they take in U-235, 'burn' it, and spit out waste for disposal; the fact that the 'burning' is nuclear rather than chemical hardly matters) as a criminal waste of precious fissionable uranium. We should be using every ounce of U-235 to breed plutonium, and then reprocessing its waste products until there's nothing left that produces even a few degrees of heat (well, nothing that produces more heat when concentrated, over its lifespan, than it takes to extract).
I think until we really start to see the end of oil, and realize what a vast resource we've squandered, we're not ready to tap into another non-renewable one -- properly managed, nuclear energy could last a long, long time; squandered, it could barely keep us running as long as fossil fuels have.
the U.S. DOE and the USGS says there is only trace amounts of these elements in burnt coal, much like other rock of the same type.
And who do you think is paying them to say that, eh?
I'll give you a guess -- who's the best friend of the oil industry? (The answer isn't the nuclear industry)
You've probably seen their commercials on TV; they run these saccharine spots with too-cute, ethnically-diverse kids playing in a field, ostensibly in the shadow of their friendly local...coal-burning power plant.
Seems to me that building some sort of (as you call it) Planet of the Apes style signage over a single dump somewhere, is a hell of a lot better than dealing with thousands or millions of tons of toxic heavy metals all over the place, deposited by coal burning plants, or the destruction of inland fisheries and forests due to acid rain, or the possibility of serious longterm consequences if we really are causing global warming somehow.
I'd much rather take all the best engineers in the U.S., and throw them at one tractable problem -- "how do we keep this stuff safe for a long time?" -- then the myriad issues that we get from just dumping toxins into the atmosphere to blow away, and not be thought about until they start to cause a real problem.
If you want to live the kind of lives that we have today, and moreover, if you want to maintain the upward march of standards-of-living (and if you don't, that's fine, but realize you're in a tiny, tiny, basically insignificant minority), then there are going to have to be tradeoffs. There's no free lunch where energy and thermodynamics are concerned. You want the lights to go on, the juice has to come from somewhere. Either you burn coal and poison everyone, or you cover every flat surface with solar panels (and deal with the pollution that their production entails, not to mention the problems just associated with deploying them, if you could ever make enough), or wind generators on every hilltop and kill birds (and again, you probably couldn't build enough anyway), or you dam every lake and river for hydro power (incredibly, almost unbelievably, polluting, due to deoxygenation), or you build nuclear plants and deal with the waste. Pick your favorites, but I don't think we can do it, long-term, without nuclear plants -- a lot of them -- and we're going to have to deal with the problems eventually. Might as well start thinking about it now.
I disagree that you need to constantly expand your population to stay competitive. Historically, that's been true, but that's really driven by the number of manual-labor jobs that were around.
If you can decrease your population while maintaining or increasing economic output, then you can continue to increase real per-capita GDP, and continue to raise living standards, which is what pretty much everyone wants. People don't care that much about per-capita GDP per se, what they want is to know that their standard of living is going up and up, relative to their parents, or 20 years ago, etc.
I think the long-term solution in the U.S. isn't to "encourage" people to have children -- people who really want to have children are going to have them regardless of the outside incentives you provide, and the people with that level of commitment are really the only ones you want having kids in the first place; it's not healthy for society to encourage people to pop out a few so they can collect a cheque from the government each week -- the solution is to stabilize the population at or slightly below the replacement rate, and make sure we're innovating enough to keep per-capita GDP on an upward march. Immigration policies should be tailored to only bring in the best and brightest, and predominantly from countries where there is a culture and history of secularism and democracy (because importing a lot of people who think that a non-secular government is just grand is going to cause some serious social problems here, like serious KKK-type problems).
The growth that has driven the U.S. throughout the 19th and 20th century just isn't sustainable, politically or ecologically. We need to stop trying to expand, and start looking to consolidate our gains; we're going to have to make some pretty severe choices, because we're not going to be able to play the Social Security shell game anymore (because S.S. relies on there being a bigger pool of workers down the road to pay you back what's being taken from you now, to give to people whose benefits are due today; without expansion it collapses). Fixing some of the things that were put together in the early part of last century, without much thought for their long-term sustainability, is going to be painful. But the sooner we fix -- and by "fix," I mean "dismantle," at least in their current form -- them, the better.
Of course, if you look at where this goes, you end up with a relatively small U.S. population controlling a huge amount of the world's wealth and resources. But that's kind of the point: if every couple has only one child, and puts behind that child the combined resources of two people, they have a lot more going for them than a child in a society where each couple has three, four, or eight children. In the very long run, it might be militarily unsustainable for the U.S. to stay on top with a very small population, but I think you'd be talking about many generations -- terrorism might become a real problem, since being a nation of 'golden children' isn't going to help our image any, but we'd still have a planet-annihilating nuclear arsenal squirreled away; it would really just mean the end of aggressive "force projection" and foreign adventuring.
If women want freedom and equal rights, then they have to grow up. Equality does not mean self-entitlement, and liberation cannot be just a convenient excuse for unbridled narcissism. Men and women should be equal partners in this world, but such a lofty goal can only be achieved if women start acting like equal partners -- that is, giving instead of constantly demanding and taking.
Although I don't necessary agree with many of your premises, nor your conclusion, I do agree with that particular statement (well, not the generalization that all women today are necessarily "constantly demanding and taking," and I think the tone is a bit strident -- did you just get out of a bad divorce or something?).
I think the people who get screwed worse than just about anyone, under our current system, are the women who really want to compete on a level playing field; either they get hobbled, or they get tossed crutches they don't need and don't want (and which cause them to be discriminated against).
An easy example of this is with child-care policies at work. Some workplaces have very biased policies surrounding parenting; they have maternity leave without any corresponding paternity or adoption leave, etc. What this does is make women, in general, much less attractive employees to lower and middle management. If you're taking on someone into a management or competitive career track (think junior partners in big law firms), who are you going to pick: the male employee, who's going to work his ass off, and then work his ass off some more, or the female employee, who's going to work her ass off, but then quite possibly go take six or nine months off to have a kid, and then only want to come back on a reduced schedule? It's a no-brainer, and this is why there's a culture of discrimination in many of those workplaces.
The people who this really hurts, though, are the women who aren't interested in having children, and aren't going to ever exercise their maternity leave, and are going to work the same 60-hour weeks for as many years as their male counterpart would, and not expect any quarter on account of sex. They really get hosed, because they get discriminated against without any good reason, due the cultural stereotype that all women want to be nurturing mother-figures, when there are definitely women out there who have zero interest in it.
I've met a lot of aggressive, careerist women in my life, and a whole lot of them are pretty bitter that they always get pigeonholed in the "so when are you going to get pregnant?" box. Conversely, I've met a few men who are pretty clearly looking to be primary caregivers and bitter about the flack they get for asking for child-care and leave, or for not being as aggressively career-oriented as others around them. So it cuts both ways.
I think there are really two fair solutions: you can make all policies gender-neutral, and encourage male employees to take the same sort of leave, when they're adopting or their partner is pregnant, that a female employee would take for a pregnancy, so that in hiring or placing people, managers can't just assume that "male employee = no leave" and "female employee = leave" (although if you have more female employees taking leave, then you'll still have discrimination). Or, you pick some sort of well-known, performance-based metric to do your advancement/firing based on, tell people they can take as much leave as they want, whenever they want, but if their performance suffers too badly, they'll get canned, and let the pieces fall where they may. Since I think the latter plan is probably illegal in the U.S. and other "pro-family" countries, I think we're stuck with the former.
You don't know that's true. Intel would raise prices as far as it wouldn't decrease sales.
... did you have a headache when you woke up from that 14 year coma? Let me fill you in on how MSFT vs the DOJ went: they made it to the next major election cycle, and then the winner pulled the plug on the whole case and let them off with a slap on the wrist. They haven't bothered going after a big tech company again, and they probably never will.
True. However, if they were the only one producing x86 chips, since the demand for them is so high, and the cost for a new competitor to enter into the market (setting up fabs, withstanding the resources Intel would use to try and kill them) would be so great, they could drive up prices significantly and most people would just have to bend over and take it in the wallet.
If they rose prices too high, a competitor could undercut them.
This isn't some nice macro-101 magic-widget-factory; the barriers to entry in the desktop microprocessor market are huge. You're talking about resources only possessed by huge multinational corporations and governments in order to do it, not only the fabrication, but also the research. IBM might be able to compete, and maybe Siemens, Fujitsu, and some of the other big tech-oriented conglomerates, but it's a pretty short list. Everyone else could be squashed or bought. With that high a barrier to entry, Intel could increase prices quite a lot before it would become attractive for someone else to step in and compete against them, particularly if the world had just watched AMD -- an established competitor with billions in resources and millions of man-years of experience -- go down in flames.
If they did anything illegal, the government would go after them.
So
Politicians are dirt fucking cheap to buy; for the amount Intel probably spends on hors d'oeuvres at its shareholder meetings, they could bribe--I mean, lobby--a few key senators and bury anything that was remotely threatening. And they'd have the capital to do it, too, because they'd be making money hand over fist (which would mean that all the investment bankers and other Wall Street types living on their droppings would be right with them, undermining any efforts to slow down the gravy train). By the time the Madison Avenue PR people got done, Intel would be patriots -- marketing good, solid American technology, preserving our lead against the great {Asian|European|whatever} horde.
You can buy, either from the Post Office or from numerous other information retailers, huge databases that cross-reference street addresses, ZIP codes, and ZIP+4s.
The information is built in to many other programs, too; if you type a street address into Google Maps, for instance, it will pop out the address in USPS standard format, which includes the ZIP+4. I assume that you could run the information in the reverse direction too, if you had access to the database. (There's no way on Google Maps to type in a ZIP+4 and get all the street addresses there, but it would be trivial to do if you had the data available.)
At the local levels, I'm sure that the Post Office probably has maps that show exactly where the ZIP and ZIP+4s fall "on the ground," I can personally attest to having seen the ZIP ones, but I don't know about maps of the +4 extensions (it might be that they're so granular that they don't bother to map them, the sorting systems and human letter carriers just know how they're associated to addresses).
The address lists that you can purchase for the purposes of sending out mass mailings would probably have most of the information you'd want; you might not even need to go directly to the USPS.
Only the naive think such a distinction exists - the only difference is who is doing the watching.
I think it's you who needs to do a little reading on what exactly constitutes stalking. It's a crime of harassment, which induces a fearful response in the person being stalked. Following someone around on CCTV cameras would not necessarily be stalking, in and of itself; if you started sending photos from those cameras to the person, so that they knew you were watching them and were thus fearful, then it would be.
If you don't include the fearful/harassment part of "stalking," then you broaden the definition so much that it becomes a meaningless term.
Well, if you're not violating your license terms, every time you replace a machine with a new one, you are giving Microsoft a certain amount of cash.
Your VLK doesn't let you put Windows onto bare, unlicensed hardware. Go read the terms if you don't believe me, but this has been beaten to death a lot. MS only sells "upgrade" volume licenses, which let you put your preferred version of Windows onto OEM hardware that's already stickered and has a Windows license. (And lets you do it without ever putting in per-machine serials, at least for XP; I don't understand Vista's authentication and don't care.)
If you go and get a bunch of generic cases, mobos, processors, and other stuff, and start installing your VLK copies of Windows on them, you're in violation, because the hardware doesn't have that "base" license on it already. This is why you don't see big companies just going out and assembling their own PCs: you need to go to an OEM and get machines that have Windows licenses on them, so you can use your VLK upgrade. (Or, I assume, pay some sort of additional per-machine surcharge, or buy retail copies of an older version to get the licenses so you can upgrade.)
There's no such thing as a blanket site-license for Windows. You're always paying per-machine, somehow; it's just usually built in to the cost of the hardware. It's certainly a lot less revenue for MS than if you stayed on the upgrade treadmill and took everyone up to Vista, and then in 5 years rinse and repeat to upgrade to Windows 2012 or whatever, but they're still milking you indirectly.
Why would this work any better than just having two distinct passwords, a regular one and a "distress" one?
I've often thought that they should do something like this for ATMs. You should have another PIN code that you can enter, which will work just like your regular one, but will also trigger an immediate silent alarm and mark the machine's video record that something was amiss.
Or on a computer, you have two passwords, one that's the real login, and another that causes the computer to open to a fake main screen, display dummy data, and silently start deleting the real stuff every time it has an opportunity to access the disk. It could also try to transmit some sort of a distress message, although that's harder to do on a computer where you have to assume that it can be disconnected from the outside world pretty trivially.
Yeah, my Samsung came with a starter cartridge like that, but the 'real' cartridge -- the one reportedly good for at least 3k pages -- didn't cost more than a brand-name ink refill for my old piece of shit Lexmark IJ. I'd have to go back and figure out exactly what I paid, but it was definitely under $50, purchased online.
So I agree you should factor the cost of a new toner into the purchase of any of those inexpensive printers, but since you get so many more pages out of a single toner cartridge, it's not quite the "razors and blades" business model that they've been doing with ink; or at least it's at a much, much slower rate.
Fifty bucks every few years (I rarely do more than a thousand pages a year, and probably not even close to that, a few hundred usually) is nothing compared to what I used to spend on ink (mostly because the damn cartridges would dry up and I'd have to replace them before they were spent whenever I wanted to print something). I was getting a new cartridge every six - nine months or so with the Lexmark.
Good to know. Personally I have two PVR-150s (they were selling them for 40% off at the local CompUSA as part of the store-closing sale) and they work very well under Knoppmyth. I've heard mixed things about the '350 (dual tuner); for analog SDTV I think the 150s are really the way to go.
There's something, the details of which escape me, that's a caveat about some models of x50 cards shipped by Hauppauge. For some reason I think there are a few models of card that are like PVR-x50 Pro, or have some extra designator tacked onto the x50 part, which really aren't "x50" cards internally. Maybe you have one of those?
There seem to be people using the PVR-250 with Knoppmyth R5, which just makes me wonder if somehow your card is slightly different from theirs.
True, as a company, giving them $100 is giving them $100 (or $20, or whatever, I don't know exactly how much they get per copy from Dell).
However, if they spend a billion dollars developing Windows Vista, and then they only sell $800M worth of Vista-related crap, because everyone else is still buying XP (because Vista sucks that badly), then they've effectively 'lost' $200M on Vista, because it didn't generate as much in profit as it took to develop. It's not lost in the same sense of the money you blew on blackjack in Vegas is 'lost,' but it shows that Vista was a very, very bad investment, and it'll probably make them not meet their projections to their investors.
It doesn't really hurt them as much as make them look like a bunch of idiots.
Let's go back to the ink efficient days of the DeskJet 400C and fuck these contract based service packages.
Why don't you just buy a laser printer?
I can't believe anyone with a clue is still using ink-based printers, with lasers being the price they are now. You can get a fairly inexpensive Samsung or maybe even an HP laser printer for $100 - 150, sometimes on sale for under 100, and with a full toner cartridge get thousands of pages out of it.
They're so far superior to ink-based printers that I just don't understand why anyone wouldn't use them. The only thing they don't do, or that you have to pay a significant amount extra for, is color. But really, for the occasional color print you can keep one of those more-expensive-than-liquid-gold ink printers around if you really need it. Or pay the $250 or $300 to get a color laser (and probably step up to something that'll do duplexing).
Inkjet printers need to die, as a technology. The only niche market they deserve to keep is for photo printing for the terminally impatient and un-quality-conscious folks who can't or don't want to drive down to their local CVS/WalMart and use a lightjet.