Assuming the executable is on the vendor's computer:
I realize that the/. summaries and to a lesser extent Adobe have done a poor job at conveying this information, but that assumption isn't right.
This isn't really "creative suite in the cloud" so much as "subscription-based creative suite with some cloud storage you can use if you want." You still download the programs and install them locally, and they check in each month (according to comments in a previous story).
I don't really want to say that this is a good thing; that's for each person to decide. But it does invalidate almost all of your statements, which I will now attempt to correct in the name of reducing FUD:
The software only has to be compiled for one architecture - no more Windows/Mac/Linux versions The user has no installation problems - conflicts with drivers, antivirus, &c The code can be optimized to the execution machine Not sure what versions will be available; I'd assume Mac and Windows. But they are native programs, not running in the browser. (Not sure why you say that last one is an advantage for the vendor...)
The code cannot be pirated Slightly ironically, the way Adobe is doing probably won't mean much here.
If the company goes out of business or closes the server, you lose your work You can still store information locally.
You need to be internet connected to the internet for it to work You need a reasonably fast internet connection for it to work You need a reasonably reliable internet connection for it to work You only need a connection once a month for activation purposes.
The company gets to mine your activities for targeted advertizing Unlikely. At least, it won't be significantly easier than it is now, since it's a local app.
if the corner thing is even a part of fitts's law.
It sort of is. The way I would describe Fitt's law very informally is "bigger stuff (and closer stuff) is easier to hit." At that level it's pretty obvious, but it's nice to have a name for even obvious things. Corners and edges come into play because in some sense they are infinitely large: if you're at the corner of the screen with the mouse and keep moving, you'll still be at the corner of the screen. Infinitely large stuff are big, so are easier to hit.
I'll agree that you'll often see "because of Fitt's law" as an abbreviation to the above, however.
...you can hibernate and resume many times, but eventually you have to do a full reboot. I expect this will happen with Windows 8 as well...
You "have to" do a restart once a month for patch Tuesday anyway; I didn't have any problems with Win7 hibernating and resuming every couple of days for a length of time around that long. (My AMD video driver crashes or fails to resume frequently on Win8 so I can't say the same thing there.)
Another site said that choosing a "restart" instead of just shut down discards the fast startup hiberfile (I didn't verify this, but it certainly sounds like the thing to do), so I'd expect that restarts following an update would do the same thing. (They'd pretty much have to...)
Obviously that doesn't help with your group policies, and at the same time you could get around them simply by leaving your computer on anyway.
I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
So my timings follow. I have Windows installed to an SSD, and this is running on a Core 2 Q6600.
I started the timer when I pressed the power button, let it boot, logged in and went to desktop as quickly as I could, started Chrome (via a taskbar pin), and went to slashdot.org. The first time I did it I used the settings I just have on naturally (with "fast startup"), then I turned off fast startup, shut down the computer, and measured the next boot. I was a bad experimentalist and only tried each one once.
The time with fast startup on was about 48 seconds, and the time with fast startup off was about 56 seconds. Subjectively I think I may have taken a couple seconds longer the first time, so fast startup seems to give me a 15-20% improvement in that measurement (probably closer to the low end).
That's not the whole story though. My computer POSTs fairly slowly; it was between 21 and 23 seconds from power button until Windows got to even start. If I further estimate that it took 5 seconds to log in and stuff (subjectively, neither configuration seemed to take longer at this step; that 5 seconds is a it low) and I subtract 27 seconds off of those times, then fast startup improved the Windows boot time from 29 seconds to 21 seconds -- that's a drop of almost 1/3. On an EFI system, you would see more absolute benefit as the POST time would be lower.
Of course, YMMV. In particular, I'm not sure how I would expect the time to differ on an HDD.
...Fitt's law doesn't apply to touchscreens. In fact, hitting edges and corners is harder on a touchscreen.
What? Yes it does. Do you think Fitt's law was invented for mice? It predates mice. From Wikipedia: "Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device"
You have a point about the corners, but not Fitt's law.
I'm not saying it never happens; there were a few/. articles on OpenShot (video editing program that I might have actually contributed to if it was several months from now) for instance. But considering the oodles of OSS programs out there, I'm a little surprised there haven't been more.
I was really glad Win7 (or was it Vista) got that feature, and it's pretty nonsense that it is lost in Win8. It's like they think "search" is a nasty word (because of Google?) or something. Incredibly obtuse and head-in-the-sand view.
Just to clarify, it's still there, just slightly more obnoxious to get to. In both Windows 7 and 8, when you press the Windows key and start typing, it begins a search. In Windows 7, it searches three scopes: the start menu, the control panel, and "files" (whatever that means, I don't use it). You'd get something like this.
In Windows 8, all three scopes are still searched, but they appear separately. You have to explicitly click "settings" to see the results in the control panel, for example, or start your search with Win-W instead of just Win. You'd see something like this (the apps/settings/files "tabs" are off to the right).
Often I'm using it to find windows components like Device Manager, and it requires additional mouse clicks and movements to get there.
Just in case you are unaware:
That was one of my complaints too (well, still is, but much less so, as no mouse is required). Then someone pointed out that you can use Win-W (instead of just Win) to open the search screen already set to "settings". So what in Windows 7 was "win", "environment variables", "enter", is now "win-w", "environment variables", "enter".
A devious change that literally no one noticed at the time because the taste was no different.
You've got a number of other responses saying so, but this is bull. I am prepared to accept that it may taste the same to some people, but I accidentally carried out about the blindest taste test imaginable, and the difference between the two to me is like night and day.
I drink relatively little soda as I'm not really much of a fan, but several years ago I was in Norway and for some reason decided to order a Coke while at a restaurant. And it actually tasted good! I commented on it, and that's when someone I was with pointed out the sugar/HFCS difference.
So not only did I not know which I was getting, I didn't even know there was a difference or "controversy" over it, nor did I know I was participating in an accidental taste test!
kubuntu, you don't know what you're missing.... It notifies you there are patches, you click, and go on about your work, no reboots needed.
Hah, yeah right.
I run Ubuntu, and while I haven't done a formal study (it'd go on over too long a timespan), my informal impression is that I get a reboot-required update from Ubuntu with a similar frequency as I do on Windows.
(Actually, my subjective impression is that it's more frequent on Ubuntu than on Windows, but I think that this may be a false impression due to a measurement and psychological bias having to do with how frequently I think about updates with both.)
because with the Linux box, I hit the poser switch, pour a cup of coffee, and it's running just like it had never been shut off, all apps and docs that were open reopened and no password needed; it enters teh password itself
Huh, interestingly my Windows box does that too; I just have to click on "hibernate" instead of "shut down" when I turn it off. (You may counter that your Linux box is doing a clean boot, in which case I'm very skeptical that it would restore the amount of state which I would want.)
(Well, at least it used to. Then my video card died and I got an Radeon, and now it bluescreens on boot maybe 40% of the time. I don't know for sure because I changed multiple variables at once, but I'm guessing that's AMD's fault instead of MS's.)
That is the most praise you will typically hear about windows 8: you can basically ignore all their new features.
Yeah, that's about it for me. (I've got it on my home desktop.) I find a lot of the hooplah about metro to be overblown, and in some sense I almost don't even notice it virtually all the time. (In Windows 7 when I wanted to start a program, I pressed Win, typed what I wanted, hit enter. In Windows 8, I press Win, type what I want, hit enter. In Windows 7, I used alt-tab to switch windows. In Windows 8, I use alt-tab to switch windows. (Alt-tab works reasonably naturally even with metro programs in my experience.)) The biggest problems for me have been relatively minor annoyances as opposed to some showstopper or something that required a lot of adjustment. But at the same time... I don't really see anything compelling in the upgrade, at least for desktop use. (I did it because I needed to do a new Windows installation anyway (dead HDD) and decided to try it out.)
The idea is that it will be faster to load from hibernation than it would be to do a full cold boot. I'm pretty sure that this isn't true, especially as RAM sizes in modern PCs increase. I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
I've actually got Windows 8 installed at home, so maybe I'll give it a try and see. I'll report in tonight.
However, I'm not particularly skeptical, at least not for the reason you describe. First, it doesn't have to load the entirety of RAM. Second, Windows's resume-from-hibernate has always been quite fast IMO. I've compared a few configurations across both Windows 7 and Linux, and to go from a computer which is actually physically off to being on and usable, Windows resuming from hibernate was the fastest by a significant margin. I'm not totally sure that my tests were appropriate to draw a conclusion about fast boot on or off*, but they are at least cause for hope.
(* My tests would have measured the span from turning on the computer until I could get to some fixed web page in a browser. It's quite possible that the hibernated version already had the browser open.)
Hey, I think that's a great idea. I'm surprised there haven't been more "we'll beef up this OSS project if you pay us" Kickstarter projects. (Or maybe I just haven't seen them, which is totally possible.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not down on using OSS software when appropriate; you just have to be realistic about what it supports and the cost/benefit. And saying "just implement the stuff you're missing" is not even remotely a solution, and probably turns more people off of the movement than helps.
IMHO the UI for Aperture is better than Lightroom (not that it doesn't have its flaws, I'm just talking about the general workflow).
Just out of curiosity (I don't have a Mac so I couldn't run Aperture even if I wanted), what do you like better about it? I'm a (light, hobbyist) Lightroom user, and while I don't like everything about it, it's one of the few pieces of software that I use that I actually like using.
The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
There are so many problems with your argument, but I'll just go with this one: The graphic designers aren't demanding that the Gimp devs implement those things. They are just not using the Gimp, and sometimes saying why they aren't using the Gimp.
It's equally as ridiculous to expect graphic designers to go and implement stuff in the Gimp just so that it brings it up to par with tools that already exist. If people do, that's great! But even for people who already know how to program, time is money... and there's basically no way that the time spent implementing those features will provide enough benefit to the implementer to make it worthwhile vs buying a copy of Photoshop.
The variance is higher, sure, but over time you'll make out (at least if you fit the insurer's risk model well enough). You don't get to average over lots of different people, but you at least get to average over different devices. If this year you buy a laptop and next year you buy a phone and a tablet and the year after you get a Kindle, you'll probably do OK over the life of those four products.
Insurance is all about expectation vs variance. (Well, and how much you think you line up to the risk model.) You said "the math only works in large enough numbers for the statistics to average out", but that's only true in a sense: larger numbers won't change the expectation, just the variance. For something like health insurance, where if you need $500,000 of surgery there's almost certainly no way you can afford it, the variance wins out and you should get insurance. For something like a $500 phone, for a lot of people probably the expectation wins out.
The idea which I replied to and thought was clever was not really addressing whether insurance makes sense or not in my mind. It was more like if you already decided that you want to side with the expectation and not buy insurance, you could set aside that dedicated "account" for replacements and the amount to put into it is prefigured.
If you can afford to pay for a replacement, pay yourself the insurance premium. The insurance company has already done the work for you to analyze the risk and come up with an insurance premium number.
What puzzles me, or rather amuses me is how many of the people believing in this nonsense are happy to operate their DVD players and/or GPS...ignoring that those items are based on the same physical laws we determine the age of earth with.
Wait, are you telling me that we've estimated the age of the Earth by asking tiny little gnomes? Learn something new every day!
I got a Dell 19" Trinitron from one employer in 2000. That was sweet, although it had those two strange horizontal lines,
That was true of all Trinitron monitors. Here is what Wikipedia says about them:
Even small changes in the alignment of the grille over the phosphors can cause the coloring to shift. Since the wires are thin, small bumps can cause the wires to shift alignment if they are not held in place. Monitors using this technology have one or more thin tungsten wires running horizontally across the grille to prevent this. Screens 15" and below have one wire located about two thirds of the way down the screen, while monitors greater than 15" have 2 wires at the one-third and two-thirds positions. These wires are less apparent or completely obscured on standard definition sets due to larger scan lines of the video being displayed. On computer monitors, where the lines are much closer together, the wires are often visible. This is a minor drawback of the Trinitron standard which is not shared by shadow mask CRTs.
The only real benefit that I can think of for 16:9 over 16:10 is no letterboxing
What I really like about wide screen is that it makes it a lot more helpful to have two windows open side by side, e.g. code and a command prompt or code and documentation. You can do that with 4:3 if you have enough horizontal pixels, but my feeling is that narrower than about 1600 things start to go downhill quickly. (I am usually pretty comfortable with my 1680-wide display.)
E.g., the monitor I'm writing this on (sort of -- more in a sec) is 1680x1050 (granted, this is 16:10), or 1.764 megapixels. A 4:3 display with the same number of pixels would be 1534x1150. If I had to choose between those two resolutions, I'd actually rather have the 1680 widescreen.
Sadly I have to admit that it really seems like Apple was the company that pushed forward into higher density displays for smaller devices.
Maybe they did it more successfully, and I'll also definitely grant them the Macbook Retina. But IMO they were late to the high-res game in the smartphone market. By the time the iPhone 4 was released in June 2010 with it's 326ppi screen, there were multiple phones with reasonably high resolution on the market. I have a Nokia N900, released in Nov 2009 with a 267ppi (800x480) screen; one of my friends actually bought one of the Neo Freerunners, released in July 2008 (almost 2 years before the iPhone's retina display) with a 286ppi 480x640 screen. And those are just the two I know about. (Disclaimer: my friend's opinion was that the Freerunner actually didn't make a very good phone; it seemed like more of an experiment with their open hardware design than anything.)
Yes, the iPhone 4's display is a little higher resolution than those, but compared to the 3GS's 163ppi, they get you most of the way to the retina.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming the executable is on the vendor's computer:
I realize that the /. summaries and to a lesser extent Adobe have done a poor job at conveying this information, but that assumption isn't right.
This isn't really "creative suite in the cloud" so much as "subscription-based creative suite with some cloud storage you can use if you want." You still download the programs and install them locally, and they check in each month (according to comments in a previous story).
I don't really want to say that this is a good thing; that's for each person to decide. But it does invalidate almost all of your statements, which I will now attempt to correct in the name of reducing FUD:
The software only has to be compiled for one architecture - no more Windows/Mac/Linux versions
The user has no installation problems - conflicts with drivers, antivirus, &c
The code can be optimized to the execution machine
Not sure what versions will be available; I'd assume Mac and Windows. But they are native programs, not running in the browser. (Not sure why you say that last one is an advantage for the vendor...)
The code cannot be pirated
Slightly ironically, the way Adobe is doing probably won't mean much here.
If the company goes out of business or closes the server, you lose your work
You can still store information locally.
You need to be internet connected to the internet for it to work
You need a reasonably fast internet connection for it to work
You need a reasonably reliable internet connection for it to work
You only need a connection once a month for activation purposes.
The company gets to mine your activities for targeted advertizing
Unlikely. At least, it won't be significantly easier than it is now, since it's a local app.
if the corner thing is even a part of fitts's law.
It sort of is. The way I would describe Fitt's law very informally is "bigger stuff (and closer stuff) is easier to hit." At that level it's pretty obvious, but it's nice to have a name for even obvious things. Corners and edges come into play because in some sense they are infinitely large: if you're at the corner of the screen with the mouse and keep moving, you'll still be at the corner of the screen. Infinitely large stuff are big, so are easier to hit.
I'll agree that you'll often see "because of Fitt's law" as an abbreviation to the above, however.
...you can hibernate and resume many times, but eventually you have to do a full reboot. I expect this will happen with Windows 8 as well...
You "have to" do a restart once a month for patch Tuesday anyway; I didn't have any problems with Win7 hibernating and resuming every couple of days for a length of time around that long. (My AMD video driver crashes or fails to resume frequently on Win8 so I can't say the same thing there.)
Another site said that choosing a "restart" instead of just shut down discards the fast startup hiberfile (I didn't verify this, but it certainly sounds like the thing to do), so I'd expect that restarts following an update would do the same thing. (They'd pretty much have to...)
Obviously that doesn't help with your group policies, and at the same time you could get around them simply by leaving your computer on anyway.
I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
So my timings follow. I have Windows installed to an SSD, and this is running on a Core 2 Q6600.
I started the timer when I pressed the power button, let it boot, logged in and went to desktop as quickly as I could, started Chrome (via a taskbar pin), and went to slashdot.org. The first time I did it I used the settings I just have on naturally (with "fast startup"), then I turned off fast startup, shut down the computer, and measured the next boot. I was a bad experimentalist and only tried each one once.
The time with fast startup on was about 48 seconds, and the time with fast startup off was about 56 seconds. Subjectively I think I may have taken a couple seconds longer the first time, so fast startup seems to give me a 15-20% improvement in that measurement (probably closer to the low end).
That's not the whole story though. My computer POSTs fairly slowly; it was between 21 and 23 seconds from power button until Windows got to even start. If I further estimate that it took 5 seconds to log in and stuff (subjectively, neither configuration seemed to take longer at this step; that 5 seconds is a it low) and I subtract 27 seconds off of those times, then fast startup improved the Windows boot time from 29 seconds to 21 seconds -- that's a drop of almost 1/3. On an EFI system, you would see more absolute benefit as the POST time would be lower.
Of course, YMMV. In particular, I'm not sure how I would expect the time to differ on an HDD.
Sorry, I guess you said you wanted chrome on the right side of the screen.
Why can't I have a small word window open, and chrome on the right of the screen, and skype snuggled in the corner.
Yeah, I know. I want to do this all the time, but I just can't any more! Windows 8 sucks!
What? Yes it does. Do you think Fitt's law was invented for mice? It predates mice. From Wikipedia: "Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device"
You have a point about the corners, but not Fitt's law.
I'm not saying it never happens; there were a few /. articles on OpenShot (video editing program that I might have actually contributed to if it was several months from now) for instance. But considering the oodles of OSS programs out there, I'm a little surprised there haven't been more.
(it costs nothing to have a new computer dual-boot)
It costs time to set up, time to switch between the OSes, and hard drive space to support "redundant" stuff.
I dual boot so I'm not down on the idea really, but at the same time I don't actually switch OSes very often. It's not for everyone.
I was really glad Win7 (or was it Vista) got that feature, and it's pretty nonsense that it is lost in Win8. It's like they think "search" is a nasty word (because of Google?) or something. Incredibly obtuse and head-in-the-sand view.
Just to clarify, it's still there, just slightly more obnoxious to get to. In both Windows 7 and 8, when you press the Windows key and start typing, it begins a search. In Windows 7, it searches three scopes: the start menu, the control panel, and "files" (whatever that means, I don't use it). You'd get something like this.
In Windows 8, all three scopes are still searched, but they appear separately. You have to explicitly click "settings" to see the results in the control panel, for example, or start your search with Win-W instead of just Win. You'd see something like this (the apps/settings/files "tabs" are off to the right).
Often I'm using it to find windows components like Device Manager, and it requires additional mouse clicks and movements to get there.
Just in case you are unaware:
That was one of my complaints too (well, still is, but much less so, as no mouse is required). Then someone pointed out that you can use Win-W (instead of just Win) to open the search screen already set to "settings". So what in Windows 7 was "win", "environment variables", "enter", is now "win-w", "environment variables", "enter".
A devious change that literally no one noticed at the time because the taste was no different.
You've got a number of other responses saying so, but this is bull. I am prepared to accept that it may taste the same to some people, but I accidentally carried out about the blindest taste test imaginable, and the difference between the two to me is like night and day.
I drink relatively little soda as I'm not really much of a fan, but several years ago I was in Norway and for some reason decided to order a Coke while at a restaurant. And it actually tasted good! I commented on it, and that's when someone I was with pointed out the sugar/HFCS difference.
So not only did I not know which I was getting, I didn't even know there was a difference or "controversy" over it, nor did I know I was participating in an accidental taste test!
kubuntu, you don't know what you're missing.... It notifies you there are patches, you click, and go on about your work, no reboots needed.
Hah, yeah right.
I run Ubuntu, and while I haven't done a formal study (it'd go on over too long a timespan), my informal impression is that I get a reboot-required update from Ubuntu with a similar frequency as I do on Windows.
(Actually, my subjective impression is that it's more frequent on Ubuntu than on Windows, but I think that this may be a false impression due to a measurement and psychological bias having to do with how frequently I think about updates with both.)
because with the Linux box, I hit the poser switch, pour a cup of coffee, and it's running just like it had never been shut off, all apps and docs that were open reopened and no password needed; it enters teh password itself
Huh, interestingly my Windows box does that too; I just have to click on "hibernate" instead of "shut down" when I turn it off. (You may counter that your Linux box is doing a clean boot, in which case I'm very skeptical that it would restore the amount of state which I would want.)
(Well, at least it used to. Then my video card died and I got an Radeon, and now it bluescreens on boot maybe 40% of the time. I don't know for sure because I changed multiple variables at once, but I'm guessing that's AMD's fault instead of MS's.)
That is the most praise you will typically hear about windows 8: you can basically ignore all their new features.
Yeah, that's about it for me. (I've got it on my home desktop.) I find a lot of the hooplah about metro to be overblown, and in some sense I almost don't even notice it virtually all the time. (In Windows 7 when I wanted to start a program, I pressed Win, typed what I wanted, hit enter. In Windows 8, I press Win, type what I want, hit enter. In Windows 7, I used alt-tab to switch windows. In Windows 8, I use alt-tab to switch windows. (Alt-tab works reasonably naturally even with metro programs in my experience.)) The biggest problems for me have been relatively minor annoyances as opposed to some showstopper or something that required a lot of adjustment. But at the same time... I don't really see anything compelling in the upgrade, at least for desktop use. (I did it because I needed to do a new Windows installation anyway (dead HDD) and decided to try it out.)
The idea is that it will be faster to load from hibernation than it would be to do a full cold boot. I'm pretty sure that this isn't true, especially as RAM sizes in modern PCs increase. I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.
I've actually got Windows 8 installed at home, so maybe I'll give it a try and see. I'll report in tonight.
However, I'm not particularly skeptical, at least not for the reason you describe. First, it doesn't have to load the entirety of RAM. Second, Windows's resume-from-hibernate has always been quite fast IMO. I've compared a few configurations across both Windows 7 and Linux, and to go from a computer which is actually physically off to being on and usable, Windows resuming from hibernate was the fastest by a significant margin. I'm not totally sure that my tests were appropriate to draw a conclusion about fast boot on or off*, but they are at least cause for hope.
(* My tests would have measured the span from turning on the computer until I could get to some fixed web page in a browser. It's quite possible that the hibernated version already had the browser open.)
Hey, I think that's a great idea. I'm surprised there haven't been more "we'll beef up this OSS project if you pay us" Kickstarter projects. (Or maybe I just haven't seen them, which is totally possible.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not down on using OSS software when appropriate; you just have to be realistic about what it supports and the cost/benefit. And saying "just implement the stuff you're missing" is not even remotely a solution, and probably turns more people off of the movement than helps.
IMHO the UI for Aperture is better than Lightroom (not that it doesn't have its flaws, I'm just talking about the general workflow).
Just out of curiosity (I don't have a Mac so I couldn't run Aperture even if I wanted), what do you like better about it? I'm a (light, hobbyist) Lightroom user, and while I don't like everything about it, it's one of the few pieces of software that I use that I actually like using.
The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
There are so many problems with your argument, but I'll just go with this one: The graphic designers aren't demanding that the Gimp devs implement those things. They are just not using the Gimp, and sometimes saying why they aren't using the Gimp.
It's equally as ridiculous to expect graphic designers to go and implement stuff in the Gimp just so that it brings it up to par with tools that already exist. If people do, that's great! But even for people who already know how to program, time is money... and there's basically no way that the time spent implementing those features will provide enough benefit to the implementer to make it worthwhile vs buying a copy of Photoshop.
The variance is higher, sure, but over time you'll make out (at least if you fit the insurer's risk model well enough). You don't get to average over lots of different people, but you at least get to average over different devices. If this year you buy a laptop and next year you buy a phone and a tablet and the year after you get a Kindle, you'll probably do OK over the life of those four products.
Insurance is all about expectation vs variance. (Well, and how much you think you line up to the risk model.) You said "the math only works in large enough numbers for the statistics to average out", but that's only true in a sense: larger numbers won't change the expectation, just the variance. For something like health insurance, where if you need $500,000 of surgery there's almost certainly no way you can afford it, the variance wins out and you should get insurance. For something like a $500 phone, for a lot of people probably the expectation wins out.
The idea which I replied to and thought was clever was not really addressing whether insurance makes sense or not in my mind. It was more like if you already decided that you want to side with the expectation and not buy insurance, you could set aside that dedicated "account" for replacements and the amount to put into it is prefigured.
If you can afford to pay for a replacement, pay yourself the insurance premium. The insurance company has already done the work for you to analyze the risk and come up with an insurance premium number.
Hah. That's a neat idea I hadn't thought of.
What puzzles me, or rather amuses me is how many of the people believing in this nonsense are happy to operate their DVD players and/or GPS ...ignoring that those items are based on the same physical laws we determine the age of earth with.
Wait, are you telling me that we've estimated the age of the Earth by asking tiny little gnomes? Learn something new every day!
I got a Dell 19" Trinitron from one employer in 2000. That was sweet, although it had those two strange horizontal lines,
That was true of all Trinitron monitors. Here is what Wikipedia says about them:
Even small changes in the alignment of the grille over the phosphors can cause the coloring to shift. Since the wires are thin, small bumps can cause the wires to shift alignment if they are not held in place. Monitors using this technology have one or more thin tungsten wires running horizontally across the grille to prevent this. Screens 15" and below have one wire located about two thirds of the way down the screen, while monitors greater than 15" have 2 wires at the one-third and two-thirds positions. These wires are less apparent or completely obscured on standard definition sets due to larger scan lines of the video being displayed. On computer monitors, where the lines are much closer together, the wires are often visible. This is a minor drawback of the Trinitron standard which is not shared by shadow mask CRTs.
Oh look at my wonderful reading comprehension skills. You're comparing 16:9 to 16:10, not widescreen to 4:3.
Carry on, and ignore what I said completely. :-)
The only real benefit that I can think of for 16:9 over 16:10 is no letterboxing
What I really like about wide screen is that it makes it a lot more helpful to have two windows open side by side, e.g. code and a command prompt or code and documentation. You can do that with 4:3 if you have enough horizontal pixels, but my feeling is that narrower than about 1600 things start to go downhill quickly. (I am usually pretty comfortable with my 1680-wide display.)
E.g., the monitor I'm writing this on (sort of -- more in a sec) is 1680x1050 (granted, this is 16:10), or 1.764 megapixels. A 4:3 display with the same number of pixels would be 1534x1150. If I had to choose between those two resolutions, I'd actually rather have the 1680 widescreen.
Sadly I have to admit that it really seems like Apple was the company that pushed forward into higher density displays for smaller devices.
Maybe they did it more successfully, and I'll also definitely grant them the Macbook Retina. But IMO they were late to the high-res game in the smartphone market. By the time the iPhone 4 was released in June 2010 with it's 326ppi screen, there were multiple phones with reasonably high resolution on the market. I have a Nokia N900, released in Nov 2009 with a 267ppi (800x480) screen; one of my friends actually bought one of the Neo Freerunners, released in July 2008 (almost 2 years before the iPhone's retina display) with a 286ppi 480x640 screen. And those are just the two I know about. (Disclaimer: my friend's opinion was that the Freerunner actually didn't make a very good phone; it seemed like more of an experiment with their open hardware design than anything.)
Yes, the iPhone 4's display is a little higher resolution than those, but compared to the 3GS's 163ppi, they get you most of the way to the retina.