"if his neighbor has gone out and purchase the latest GE Solar System, I might consider it."
Exactly what the point I was trying to make was =) You MIGHT consider it. And I MIGHT consider it too, but I doubt I'd pay a $30K premium on a house with one. If it was 10K more, maybe. But that guy will never see an even half return on it, and it would probably make selling the home more difficult unless you found a buyer that was interested in it.
Likely, the home would sell for around the same as any other home in the area. If it was "thrown in free" - didn't affect the base price of the home - I'd definately pick this one.
Pretty sure that goes for proper insulation, good Windows, etc. And not too many homes hit that $1000 mark, even if they get all new upgrades.
This isn't the same. This is a power generation system. It's GOING to turn some people off. People looking to buy a home may not want to pay an extra thirty thousand dollars for this. I know I wouldn't - I'd buy the house next door WITHOUT it, and then decide on my own if I wanted to add something like this.
Yea, no more complex than the most complex video game system ever created, or the most difficult to produce and expensive flat-panel TV technology.
No problem.
It doesn't matter how nice it looks or anything. It's about the fact that it's a $30,000 system and a lot of people aren't going to be willing to pay more for something that might cost them big dollars to repair if it breaks. They just want to use the power grid and they're happy with that.
If I were looking to purchase a house, I know I wouldn't spend $30K more for a house for this thing, and I might even be turned off from it because I wouldn't want to deal with it. And that's the point.
Certainly the 30K investment would NOT translate to $30K in the value of your home. Your home's value would probably go up the $30K regardless of the power thing.
It would also take a very special kind of buyer to pay any significantly higher price because of it. You'd be severely limiting your potential buyer base.
But, if the price of the home was basically on par with others in the area, you'd probably have an advantage.
It's like swimming pools. They don't necessarily add any value to the home, and they attract only people that WANT a pool. A lot of people don't want a pool, as I suspect a lot of people wouldn't want all that extra complexity that a supplemental power generation system could introduce.
Only spend the money if you KNOW you will stay there long enough for this to pay for itself for YOU.
Well, I didn't use the word Dickwad. Although, c'mon. Most of the posers that claim they don't watch TV because it's all garbage are either: A) Lying, B) Too poor to buy cable, or C) Ignorant.
I did make a broad stroke argument against YouTube, and no, not everything on there is garbage. Just mostly anything you'll find by browsing YouTube itself. There's a lot of stuff on there that's not bad but you'll only find it via Google. And pretty much the longest clips are around 8 minutes, not exactly TV class entertainment if you have to keep finding something new every 5-10 minutes.
There's already almost very easy ways to watch YouTube on a TV just as easily as Television broadcasts, but it's not about the ease of use, it's about the content. While I already submit that most TV, if you look at all 24 hours and all the stations, has a lot of garbage; there's quite a bit of decent programming available.
Until a YouTube or something like it comes close to the production and writing quality of the good shows on TV, it'll never replace TV. Not to mention the fact that YouTube videos are very low resolution and we're all moving towards HDTV and surround sound..
Again, you're making the assumption that people WANT to always be involved in an interactive form of communication all the time.
The Internet is obviously important, and computers are already at least as "powerful" as a medium for communication.
I just don't see why both can't continue to co-exist. At the end of the day, I want to relax, sit comfortably on the couch, and watch some TV before I go to bed. I don't want to crouch in front of a computer screen all the time, and I don't want an interactive experience on my TV. I want to watch something entertaining and then go to bed.
The Internet, Computers, and Interactive communication will never replace the TV as a form of nighttime entertainment. Not until something like the Holodeck becomes a reality. It'll get bigger, more detailed, and shit, maybe 3D will become practical. But it will remain a 1-way form of communication.
Yea.. and you don't own a TV, right? You're so trendy and hip that I think I'm going to puke.
And don't even try to tell me that things like YouTube make TV unnecessary, because if you think TV is shit, it's much, much worse on YouTube. I think I drop an IQ point every time I hit that site.
I agree completely. TV has gone through a lot of changes, and I think that some of the best changes have been in the last six or seven years.
Prime Time shows, many of them at least, are now heavily serialized. Gone are the glory days of the sitcom; and thank goodness. Sitcoms are okay in small doses (ie Seinfeld) but they are becoming increasingly rare.
If you look at television as a whole, considering all 24 hours of service times all of the channels, then yea, there's usually nothing good on TV. But, there's some really great shows out there and the good ones keep getting better.
The idea that we're all wasting "Wikipedias" by watching TV is a misnomer. It assumes that if we weren't watching TV, we'd be studying the encyclopedia or other meaningful tasks. I watch TV at night for the exact opposite reason. I WANT to relax, sip on a glass of soda or wine, watch some TV, and go to bed.
Strict punishments usually don't deter people, because nobody thinks they'll ever get caught. The California "3 strikes for life in prison" hasn't really stopped major crime there, and that's a pretty damned serious law.
Besides, what is a US law going to do to deter a guy in China or Nigeria or somewhere else out of jurisdiction?
Plus, I don't feel as though spammers deserve to be sodomized in prison for sending spam e-mail. (Well, you probably won't go to a maximum security federal prison for it anyways, but still.) I think monetary fines and community service is more appropriate. I mean, it's not like they killed someone..
I mean, by your standard, if I ask someone for your e-mail address and send you an e-mail to further this discussion, I'd face jail time.
I hate spam as much as the next guy; well, maybe even more since I have to run a bunch of mail servers. I just refuse to fall into the mindset that the more annoying (but otherwise non-violent) offenses should be punishable by death.
Spamming nets almost zero income. Unfortunately, they use illegal methods of spamming - spyware, viruses, open relays, etc - and it costs them nothing to blast out 500,000 e-mails or post 10,000 messages on forums. If they make $3 for a 500 thousand e-mail run, they'll just run 40 of those a day and make themselves $120 a day. It costs them nothing, so why not?
They're already doing illegal things, so more laws wouldn't help any. They'd just break those too.
So even though - under normal rational - there's no prospects, even $3 is enough for someone to flood the Internet with bullshit. And because of that, there's no possible way to approach the problem by educating users to NOT click spam links.
Thanks to Emulation, available for the NES for at least 10 years, a lot of people who played it can still enjoy it - on their phones, xboxes, PC's, PDA's, and practically anything else.
Yea I know, it's hard to defend a people that bailed out the world only 60 or so years ago, that is the center of world business, has a culture that most of the world loves, and has more individual freedoms than nearly anywhere else.
We're a bunch of assholes, I guess. After all, it's just too easy to lump 300 million people into one group and hate us all. Right?
You're shamefully ignorant of the world around you.
But the small size of the Eee is enough that you COULD use it for more things than you'd use a normal notebook PC for. The thing is very small and you can carry it around with no effort. I can see how that opens up doors to use it for more things - including keeping shopping lists, comparison prices, etc all on the Eee and use it while shopping.
Well, no, only majority stockholders are involved in any tangible way in the operation of the business. Anyone with 1 stock is a "shareholder."
Their performance is not always how much money they make. In the long run, perhaps. But many times, businesses aren't profitable for a myriad of reasons and somehow not everyone gets fired. Well, you can't fire a shareholder, but you get the point.
It's not ALWAYS about the bottom line. Corporations aren't ALWAYS out to make a quick buck. You see it in big business more than small corporations (anyone can create a corporation for a few hundred bucks) but it's not the absolute rule.
Sometimes (as may be the case here) even though the short-term might get Yahoo shareholders a quick buck by selling out, it may be possible to make more money in the long term by staying as-is. And maybe some people just don't want to sell to Microsoft and watch the business go to crap.
Running a business isn't just a numbers game. It involves real people selling a service or product to real people. If it were just numbers, every business would simply be called a casino that didn't offer the customer anything.
There's a difference between public information ala "seeing someone's groceries" and keeping track of all grocery purchases in the last 10 years and making it available via an online search mechanism.
Personally, I don't care if someone sees that I like Frosted Flakes, but I am uncomfortable with that very same information being stored in a database for god knows what reason in the future.
It's not the information, it's how it's stored and made available that's the problem.
The original soundblaster wasn't an Adlib with digital tacked on. It was a digital sound card with the same chip as the Adlib for producing FM synthesis effects and music, plus a game port. It was an important card in the industry.
I preferred the SB Pro over the SB16. I feel as though it was a better quality part; while the SB16 was able to produce better quality PCM, it was also significantly cheaper for creative labs to produce. The SB16 was practically unshielded and the sound quality was crap compared to the PAS16 or the GUS (I owned both. The PAS16 + GUS Max made for an awesome combination.) Incidentally, the PAS16 and GUS had better SB Pro support than the SB16.
The AWE32 was a decent card. It had RAM slots for loading soundfonts, and finally brought wavetable synthesis to the SoundBlaster line. It was better shielded and produced better sound. It was probably creative's most.. well, creative card.
I still have my original SB Live in my main workstation. It has the LiveDrive attached. It's a nice card and produces good sound when connected via SPDIF. I never had a problem with bluescreens or corruption. Maybe only VERY early SB Lives had that problem?
Because Creative Labs so thoroughly dominated the market, and the fact that cheap audio chips that produce "good enough" sound are included in all machines, people that want decent sound from their machines are fairly screwed. There's no market for it. Our only option is to use a pro sound card for $$ or an external sound box like something you can get from DigiDesign.
Hmm, it seems like you have never used more for audio hardware than a Sound Blaster and a Microphone.
Your 0db machine would be hard pressed to handle 8 channel audio at 24-bit resolution from a Digi 002, which is extremely common hardware for a small home-based studio.
Give it a shot. Build your 0db low power fanless machine with flash memory, and see how fun it is to do anything audio besides listen to MP3's.
Ohh, I don't know. If you could say "Computer, show me the 10 most endangered species on the list" and then "Computer, show more detail on the white bengal tiger" then I'd use the keyboard a hell of a lot less.
But I agree, right NOW, they keyboard is a lot faster. Sometimes I can even type faster than I can say something.
That would be great if people actually purchased insurance without being told to. You can't tell me that the public at large is responsible enough to do it on their own.
Yea, it sucks, but yea, people are selfish and irresponsible. And if only 1% of the country had insurance (and even that number is probably high if it wasn't the law) can you imagine how expensive it would be?
I've been into a bunch of accidents, and none of them were my fault. I swear to fucking god, my last car was a magnet for people not paying attention.
So, while I've had to be an active participant in my repairs to make sure they were done right, the other drivers' insurance always covered the repairs under my terms and without much hassle.
Perhaps if I'd been a more serious accident that incurred high medical bills, it might have been another story. But, repairing my last car wasn't cheap and with the 5 times I've been hit, all of the nearly $20,000 in total repairs was paid.
So, yea, insurance is too expensive and sometimes they give you shit, but it's important because you simply can't trust the other people out there on the road. While I'm not very big into socialized anything, int he case of insurance I just can't agree. I can't imagine how shitty of an experience those 5 accidents would have been if insurance wasn't required for all those people.
It doesn't take a big studio to put a computer in the next room, whatever that room might be. A closet, even. If you're doing it from home, chances are pretty f'ing good you have more than one room. A few extension cables and you're good.
Does being poor also make you stupid?
Re:In the future nobody touches anything
on
Meet the Laptop of 2015
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As much as people keep going on about their iPhones, you need tactile feedback to type at any speed, and to do it without looking. These screens might work okay for an occasional use notebook but not as a general purpose business machine.
Not only do normal keyboards provide an excellent method of interfacing with a computer, they also cushion the fingers as you type so you don't experience pain and pressure by tapping away at a hard surface all day.
It looks pretty as a rendered image, but functionally I'd never own a computer for regular use that didn't have a normal keyboard - unless you could speak to the computer as you would in Star Trek land.
Slashdot Mirror
"if his neighbor has gone out and purchase the latest GE Solar System, I might consider it."
Exactly what the point I was trying to make was =) You MIGHT consider it. And I MIGHT consider it too, but I doubt I'd pay a $30K premium on a house with one. If it was 10K more, maybe. But that guy will never see an even half return on it, and it would probably make selling the home more difficult unless you found a buyer that was interested in it.
Likely, the home would sell for around the same as any other home in the area. If it was "thrown in free" - didn't affect the base price of the home - I'd definately pick this one.
Pretty sure that goes for proper insulation, good Windows, etc. And not too many homes hit that $1000 mark, even if they get all new upgrades.
This isn't the same. This is a power generation system. It's GOING to turn some people off. People looking to buy a home may not want to pay an extra thirty thousand dollars for this. I know I wouldn't - I'd buy the house next door WITHOUT it, and then decide on my own if I wanted to add something like this.
Yea, no more complex than the most complex video game system ever created, or the most difficult to produce and expensive flat-panel TV technology.
No problem.
It doesn't matter how nice it looks or anything. It's about the fact that it's a $30,000 system and a lot of people aren't going to be willing to pay more for something that might cost them big dollars to repair if it breaks. They just want to use the power grid and they're happy with that.
If I were looking to purchase a house, I know I wouldn't spend $30K more for a house for this thing, and I might even be turned off from it because I wouldn't want to deal with it. And that's the point.
Certainly the 30K investment would NOT translate to $30K in the value of your home. Your home's value would probably go up the $30K regardless of the power thing.
It would also take a very special kind of buyer to pay any significantly higher price because of it. You'd be severely limiting your potential buyer base.
But, if the price of the home was basically on par with others in the area, you'd probably have an advantage.
It's like swimming pools. They don't necessarily add any value to the home, and they attract only people that WANT a pool. A lot of people don't want a pool, as I suspect a lot of people wouldn't want all that extra complexity that a supplemental power generation system could introduce.
Only spend the money if you KNOW you will stay there long enough for this to pay for itself for YOU.
Well, I didn't use the word Dickwad. Although, c'mon. Most of the posers that claim they don't watch TV because it's all garbage are either: A) Lying, B) Too poor to buy cable, or C) Ignorant.
I did make a broad stroke argument against YouTube, and no, not everything on there is garbage. Just mostly anything you'll find by browsing YouTube itself. There's a lot of stuff on there that's not bad but you'll only find it via Google. And pretty much the longest clips are around 8 minutes, not exactly TV class entertainment if you have to keep finding something new every 5-10 minutes.
There's already almost very easy ways to watch YouTube on a TV just as easily as Television broadcasts, but it's not about the ease of use, it's about the content. While I already submit that most TV, if you look at all 24 hours and all the stations, has a lot of garbage; there's quite a bit of decent programming available.
Until a YouTube or something like it comes close to the production and writing quality of the good shows on TV, it'll never replace TV. Not to mention the fact that YouTube videos are very low resolution and we're all moving towards HDTV and surround sound..
Again, you're making the assumption that people WANT to always be involved in an interactive form of communication all the time.
The Internet is obviously important, and computers are already at least as "powerful" as a medium for communication.
I just don't see why both can't continue to co-exist. At the end of the day, I want to relax, sit comfortably on the couch, and watch some TV before I go to bed. I don't want to crouch in front of a computer screen all the time, and I don't want an interactive experience on my TV. I want to watch something entertaining and then go to bed.
The Internet, Computers, and Interactive communication will never replace the TV as a form of nighttime entertainment. Not until something like the Holodeck becomes a reality. It'll get bigger, more detailed, and shit, maybe 3D will become practical. But it will remain a 1-way form of communication.
Yea.. and you don't own a TV, right? You're so trendy and hip that I think I'm going to puke.
And don't even try to tell me that things like YouTube make TV unnecessary, because if you think TV is shit, it's much, much worse on YouTube. I think I drop an IQ point every time I hit that site.
I agree completely. TV has gone through a lot of changes, and I think that some of the best changes have been in the last six or seven years.
Prime Time shows, many of them at least, are now heavily serialized. Gone are the glory days of the sitcom; and thank goodness. Sitcoms are okay in small doses (ie Seinfeld) but they are becoming increasingly rare.
If you look at television as a whole, considering all 24 hours of service times all of the channels, then yea, there's usually nothing good on TV. But, there's some really great shows out there and the good ones keep getting better.
The idea that we're all wasting "Wikipedias" by watching TV is a misnomer. It assumes that if we weren't watching TV, we'd be studying the encyclopedia or other meaningful tasks. I watch TV at night for the exact opposite reason. I WANT to relax, sip on a glass of soda or wine, watch some TV, and go to bed.
Strict punishments usually don't deter people, because nobody thinks they'll ever get caught. The California "3 strikes for life in prison" hasn't really stopped major crime there, and that's a pretty damned serious law.
Besides, what is a US law going to do to deter a guy in China or Nigeria or somewhere else out of jurisdiction?
Plus, I don't feel as though spammers deserve to be sodomized in prison for sending spam e-mail. (Well, you probably won't go to a maximum security federal prison for it anyways, but still.) I think monetary fines and community service is more appropriate. I mean, it's not like they killed someone..
I mean, by your standard, if I ask someone for your e-mail address and send you an e-mail to further this discussion, I'd face jail time.
I hate spam as much as the next guy; well, maybe even more since I have to run a bunch of mail servers. I just refuse to fall into the mindset that the more annoying (but otherwise non-violent) offenses should be punishable by death.
There's hardly any prospects for them now.
Spamming nets almost zero income. Unfortunately, they use illegal methods of spamming - spyware, viruses, open relays, etc - and it costs them nothing to blast out 500,000 e-mails or post 10,000 messages on forums. If they make $3 for a 500 thousand e-mail run, they'll just run 40 of those a day and make themselves $120 a day. It costs them nothing, so why not?
They're already doing illegal things, so more laws wouldn't help any. They'd just break those too.
So even though - under normal rational - there's no prospects, even $3 is enough for someone to flood the Internet with bullshit. And because of that, there's no possible way to approach the problem by educating users to NOT click spam links.
Thanks to Emulation, available for the NES for at least 10 years, a lot of people who played it can still enjoy it - on their phones, xboxes, PC's, PDA's, and practically anything else.
Yea I know, it's hard to defend a people that bailed out the world only 60 or so years ago, that is the center of world business, has a culture that most of the world loves, and has more individual freedoms than nearly anywhere else.
We're a bunch of assholes, I guess. After all, it's just too easy to lump 300 million people into one group and hate us all. Right?
You're shamefully ignorant of the world around you.
But the small size of the Eee is enough that you COULD use it for more things than you'd use a normal notebook PC for. The thing is very small and you can carry it around with no effort. I can see how that opens up doors to use it for more things - including keeping shopping lists, comparison prices, etc all on the Eee and use it while shopping.
Not only would a 300GB hard drive make the unit larger and reduce battery time significantly, it would also double the cost of the unit.
For something like the Eee, I think flash is entirely appropriate, and 20GB is a good bunch of storage for a small machine like this.
If you need the 300GB, you could get a USB powered external disk and plug it in to watch your seasons on the go.
Not every product is going to be perfect for everyone, and your claim of trading 512MB RAM for a huge ass hard disk doesn't jive with this product.
Well, no, only majority stockholders are involved in any tangible way in the operation of the business. Anyone with 1 stock is a "shareholder."
Their performance is not always how much money they make. In the long run, perhaps. But many times, businesses aren't profitable for a myriad of reasons and somehow not everyone gets fired. Well, you can't fire a shareholder, but you get the point.
It's not ALWAYS about the bottom line. Corporations aren't ALWAYS out to make a quick buck. You see it in big business more than small corporations (anyone can create a corporation for a few hundred bucks) but it's not the absolute rule.
Sometimes (as may be the case here) even though the short-term might get Yahoo shareholders a quick buck by selling out, it may be possible to make more money in the long term by staying as-is. And maybe some people just don't want to sell to Microsoft and watch the business go to crap.
Running a business isn't just a numbers game. It involves real people selling a service or product to real people. If it were just numbers, every business would simply be called a casino that didn't offer the customer anything.
There's a difference between public information ala "seeing someone's groceries" and keeping track of all grocery purchases in the last 10 years and making it available via an online search mechanism.
Personally, I don't care if someone sees that I like Frosted Flakes, but I am uncomfortable with that very same information being stored in a database for god knows what reason in the future.
It's not the information, it's how it's stored and made available that's the problem.
The original soundblaster wasn't an Adlib with digital tacked on. It was a digital sound card with the same chip as the Adlib for producing FM synthesis effects and music, plus a game port. It was an important card in the industry.
.. well, creative card.
I preferred the SB Pro over the SB16. I feel as though it was a better quality part; while the SB16 was able to produce better quality PCM, it was also significantly cheaper for creative labs to produce. The SB16 was practically unshielded and the sound quality was crap compared to the PAS16 or the GUS (I owned both. The PAS16 + GUS Max made for an awesome combination.) Incidentally, the PAS16 and GUS had better SB Pro support than the SB16.
The AWE32 was a decent card. It had RAM slots for loading soundfonts, and finally brought wavetable synthesis to the SoundBlaster line. It was better shielded and produced better sound. It was probably creative's most
I still have my original SB Live in my main workstation. It has the LiveDrive attached. It's a nice card and produces good sound when connected via SPDIF. I never had a problem with bluescreens or corruption. Maybe only VERY early SB Lives had that problem?
Because Creative Labs so thoroughly dominated the market, and the fact that cheap audio chips that produce "good enough" sound are included in all machines, people that want decent sound from their machines are fairly screwed. There's no market for it. Our only option is to use a pro sound card for $$ or an external sound box like something you can get from DigiDesign.
"Whether society will allow it or not, computer forensics geeks will play pivotal roles in the prevalence of justice."
If society won't allow something, it wouldn't play a pivotal role.
Hmm, it seems like you have never used more for audio hardware than a Sound Blaster and a Microphone.
Your 0db machine would be hard pressed to handle 8 channel audio at 24-bit resolution from a Digi 002, which is extremely common hardware for a small home-based studio.
Give it a shot. Build your 0db low power fanless machine with flash memory, and see how fun it is to do anything audio besides listen to MP3's.
He didn't say CARBON, he said Carbon NANOTUBES. Last I checked, life on earth isn't based on Carbon Nanotubes.
Get a life.
Ohh, I don't know. If you could say "Computer, show me the 10 most endangered species on the list" and then "Computer, show more detail on the white bengal tiger" then I'd use the keyboard a hell of a lot less.
But I agree, right NOW, they keyboard is a lot faster. Sometimes I can even type faster than I can say something.
That would be great if people actually purchased insurance without being told to. You can't tell me that the public at large is responsible enough to do it on their own.
Yea, it sucks, but yea, people are selfish and irresponsible. And if only 1% of the country had insurance (and even that number is probably high if it wasn't the law) can you imagine how expensive it would be?
I just can't follow you on this one.
I've been into a bunch of accidents, and none of them were my fault. I swear to fucking god, my last car was a magnet for people not paying attention.
So, while I've had to be an active participant in my repairs to make sure they were done right, the other drivers' insurance always covered the repairs under my terms and without much hassle.
Perhaps if I'd been a more serious accident that incurred high medical bills, it might have been another story. But, repairing my last car wasn't cheap and with the 5 times I've been hit, all of the nearly $20,000 in total repairs was paid.
So, yea, insurance is too expensive and sometimes they give you shit, but it's important because you simply can't trust the other people out there on the road. While I'm not very big into socialized anything, int he case of insurance I just can't agree. I can't imagine how shitty of an experience those 5 accidents would have been if insurance wasn't required for all those people.
It doesn't take a big studio to put a computer in the next room, whatever that room might be. A closet, even. If you're doing it from home, chances are pretty f'ing good you have more than one room. A few extension cables and you're good.
Does being poor also make you stupid?
As much as people keep going on about their iPhones, you need tactile feedback to type at any speed, and to do it without looking. These screens might work okay for an occasional use notebook but not as a general purpose business machine.
Not only do normal keyboards provide an excellent method of interfacing with a computer, they also cushion the fingers as you type so you don't experience pain and pressure by tapping away at a hard surface all day.
It looks pretty as a rendered image, but functionally I'd never own a computer for regular use that didn't have a normal keyboard - unless you could speak to the computer as you would in Star Trek land.