Ok, so this is probably apocryphal, but I was sent this a while ago:
A question in a physics degree examination at the University of Copenhagen ran thus:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One student replied: "You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. He appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.
"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.
"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 pi sqrroot (l / g).
"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up.
"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.
But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."
The student was Niels Bohr.
A great example of how there are always different ways of looking at a problem, from one of the greatest scientists ever (allegedly).
There's a big difference between high power transmissions and those used in mobile phones. I certainly wouldn't dispute that standing around electricity substations for any length of time is not fantastically good for your health, but the power we're talking about is orders of magnitude greater. Plus, they are scary places - I don't like the feeling that one false move gets you zapped.
I would disagree with the comment that "smoking was once known as safe". Smoking was known to be dangerous in the thirties [my father grew up in Lithuania and even there, in 1935, cigarettes were called "Cancer sticks"], it's just that people chose to ignore medical advice, and the cigarette companies chose not to advertise that their product was dangerous. They then lied that low tar cigarettes were safer, which they weren't - and they knew it - which was one of the cornerstones of the lawsuits against them. Companies are generally getting better at checking for risks, due to the public relations nightmare that awaits should evidence appear that shows them to be at fault (see Fast Food Nation for more details). Many have reduced the radiation output of phones due to public health concerns in Europe. It's just not on to give your customers cancer without at least warning them first.
The biggest risks mobile phone users face are not from radiation (which as many posters have said, isn't anywhere near high power enough to cause any significant effect) but from inappropriate use - whilst driving being the main one here. UK research recently showed that using a mobile whilst driving was twice as dangerous as driving after 6 pints of beer.
Also, mobile user risk getting their heads kicked in by irate commuters whilst shouting "HELLO? YES, I'M ON THE TRAIN. NO, IT'S RUBBISH. YES OF COURSE I LOVE YOU HONEY. I SAID OF COURSE I LOVE YOU HONEY" etc.
Saying all that, we live in a capitalist society, so if you want the companies to research more, demand it. We are the ones with the power here, we should all use it more. Without us they will all go bust.
Yes, they do. In the mail it states that "most executives took a 15% cut, in addition to the 3.8%". This is fair enough, but my socialist Commie European side tells me they should take far more than a 15% cut.
It's like the guy at Time Warner who forced through the merger with AOL (see earlier/. story). Despite seeing through the most disastrous merger in history and losing hundreds of billions of market cap, he's going into semi retirement with a $1m a year "consulting" contract. He should be forced into destitution - how many people's lives has this guy ruined? How many people's savings have been wiped out?
I'd certainly say that what I take to be "true" is not necessarily what the layman takes to be "true". It's simply not possible to work as a scientist if one considers current laws to be flawed. What are currently held as being laws are exactly the ones that we know work close to 100% - the laws of thermodynamics and Newtonian motion. I would never say that current theories of gravitation are "laws" (as I said in an earlier posting), because they don't work close enough to 100% for the scientific community to accept them as laws.
But again, I totally agree with half of what you say, regarding the certain people's attitude toward scientific theories. It drives me up the wall when I hear things like "But no-one's ever seen a monkey evolve into a human, therefore Darwin must be wrong!" (check out the earlier post about OS X being the OS of the Devil for morer on this).
And did you turn to Astrophysics after the bass-playing gig fell through?;-)
Laws are statements that are held to be true and inviolable, within certain constraints, such as the velocity/scale ones I mentioned earlier.
The laws of thermodynamics are taken to be laws because so many experiments have been done that support it, that it's 99.999999999% certain. Saying that you cannot "logically assert with 100% confidence that it cannot happen" may indeed be logical but it adds nothing to a debate about whether a law holds true or not. It would be scientific to say "I assert this cannot happen because...". This is how science moves forward, not by arguing about logic.
Saying that, I do of course agree that it's always worth looking for faults in "laws", because you never know what you might find. You just need a good reason to do so...
Once a hypothesis has some experimental grounding, it becomes a theory. Once that theory has been proven it becomes a law.
Newton's laws of motion are laws because they are true, at least at normal scales and velocities. Once you get to the microscopic scale, or within 0.1c (10% speed of light) they become inaccurate. This is when quantum physics (which is still theory) and relativity (again, still theory) take over.
Both quantum physics and relativity have enough descrepancies to not be widely regarded as laws. Nothwithstanding the fact that they are mutually exclusive (they do not work together).
They are interesting because they provide proof (or disproof) of basic quantum theory. Neutrinos are produced by the sun during the fusion of Hydrogen. The amount predicted by the equations is three times what is observed. Therefore either something happens to the neutrinos on the way, or the theory is wrong.
It's called science. You make a hypothesis, and you try and prove it by experimentation. Simple really.
With the sort of attitude shown here, Einstein would never have bothered looking at discrepancies in Newton's laws of motion and gravitation, and there would be no theories of relativity. Heisenberg/Bohr/Planck (and all the others) would never have looked at discrepancies in black body radiation etc and quantum theory would never have been thought of. And then I wouldn't be writing this, because semiconductors would never have been discovered.
Just because there's no immediate application in a particular field doesn't make it important. Stop thinking of that great big $ sign.
Years ago I was working for a company that did computerised music systems for bars (hey Beckers!). We wanted to stand out from our competitors so we decided to try and use PC's with black cases rather than beige (which after a year in a smoky bar, tend to get nicotine stained).
The only people who did black cases then were Fujitsu, and they charged an extra ~$300 per monitor. And they blew up after a year. So what did we do? Yep....some masking tape and newspaper over the screen and then we sprayed them black - and charged our customers extra! Nice to see the rest of the world finally catching up!
I agree. Something strange I've noticed is that people who had Spectrums always had ST's, and those with C64's always had Amigas. I guess that we thought the C64 sucked so badly that we couldn't face buying an Amiga.
But this is rapidly veering off topic.
As far as I recall, the XBox runs a cut down version of XP, which is of the NT family. In other words, it's not based on DOS. Although NT has a DOS emulator (NTVDM & wowexec), it's not exactly perfect.
And anyway, why is everyone bitching about this? Microsoft are out there to make money, and they know that they have to sell Xbox's at a loss in order to make a larger profit on software licencing. This is the console business. I don't see anyone on/. moaning about Sony or Nintendo doing exactly the same. How many times has the PS2 had its price cut? Will there be such a fuss when Nintendo cut the price on the GameCube?
Plus, for all the people who are talking about Linux being "a proper OS" - how many games are available on it? I dislike Windows OS's for many things, but for games support, and general ease of use for the less, ahem, able members of the computer using population, Windows fits the bill (pun not intended). All these "My OS is better than yours" arguments sound rather like the old "My Amiga is better than your Atari ST" and the classic "My C64 is better than your Spectrum".
For the record, my Spectrum was better than your C64. Now that's started a flame war (at least, for all the British posters to/.)...
Unfortunately, basic chemistry doesn't allow us to easily filter out the crap we've already shoved into the air. We have to stop pumping out the rubbish first. This is where the Kyoto protocol came in. It wasn't any kind of final solution, more the first step. For example, Britain had huge problems with SO2 thanks to the burning of poor quality coal. After many years of smog and deaths from lung disease, the burning of coal was banned domestically, and only allowed commercially in power stations. Lo and behold, deaths from lung disease plummeted.
Just because China may, in ten/twenty/a hundred years, produce more CO2 than the US, doesn't mean that the US should throw a useful treaty out of the window. It's shortsighted, and dangerous in the message it sent out. Mind you, given that Dubya made his money in the oil business and is primarily funded by oil companies, what do you expect?
But yes, alternative energy sources are the way to go, but don't hold your breath for a viable solar solution.
That's an interesting logical statement - "Humankind was "industrious" enough to create the problem, and thus we can fix it too."
Kind of like saying "I cut your head off, so I can put it back on again!". Doesn't work that way, I'm afraid. What gets put into the atmosphere is not necessarily easy to take out again. Never heard of diffusion?
The US has by far the largest per capita CO2 emission, China doesn't even come into it. The US has astonishingly high energy usage which could be massively reduced by some simple efficiency savings. Like driving cars that get more than 10 miles to the gallon. Like using more efficent power plants, a/c units, central heating systems, and the like - just like most of the EU have been using for years.
Fossil fuels will be with us for a while (~100 years). However, with the apparent increase in global temperatures it is simply not known what will happen to the climate - it may not necessarily warm globally. Indeed, if the Gulf stream fails (as some studies seem to be indicating) it's goodbye to nice warm Northern Europe and hello big ice sheets...
Windows has to be rebooted not because of the type of memory used, but the way it handles it. You could have the quickest, most efficient memory around and Windows would still make a pigs ear of dealing with it. Unix boxes use exactly the same type of memory as PC's but the kernel is rather better at managing it... Still, this memory would be great in a little Network Walkman - better than the 64Mb in my one!
Re:Are these stars stable?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 1
Black holes become black holes pretty rapidly, I believe, during the collapse of an ultra-massive star. A massive star will collapse to a neutron star because gravity overcomes the strong force (I think). An ultra-massive star collapses further, to a singularity ie a black hole.
There must be an intermediate step in which the gravitational force is large enough to cause the quarks to become unbonded, but not large enough to collapse entirely.
I'm not entirely sure how stable neutron stars are, but I suspect they would be around for a while...
I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet, but one cosmologist has said that the observed properties could quite easily be a "hotspot" on a normal neutron star, and not a whole new entity. The sole reason for the "quark star" result is that it is much hotter than a neutron star should be, and smaller. However, a hot spot on a normal star would be hotter and smaller than expected but not a whole new entity.
MSFT did not "just have luck" in the OS market. Sure it had some luck, in buying the tiny company that had written the forerunner of MS-DOS, but it also made some excellent business moves (killing OS/2, buying plenty of small companies and assimilating them) and used some rather underhand business practices (er....IE....).
And let's not forget something. Since Windows 95 (version 2) you've been able to put a CD into pretty much any PC of a decent enough spec and install Windows with very few problems. And no messing around with config files, bizarre commands (rsh? What the hell's that mean?) etc. They have generally made life easy for Harry Homeowner. It's only recently that Linux distros have even come close to that kind of functionality. Sure, I know that MS OS's fundamentally suck, but they are damn easy to use. I work with highly intelligent people who aren't all that good on computers, and I praise the Lord every day that they aren't on Macs or Unix/Linux.
Let's not forget something here - consoles are all about the games available. PS2 started off pretty poor (the only good game was SSX), but had no competetion. Once Grand Theft Auto 3, GT3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, it became a "must buy" console, so anyone in the marketplace would rather get a console with 3 world beater games for less than the XBox with 1 world beater game. Why pay more for a console that might have some decent games in one year time, and not even have a native DVD player?
And GTA3 is one of the best games ever (along with Civ2 and Elite...and Mazogs....)
What's the difference between what Amazon are doing, and what many car sales firms are doing (other than the cost, of course...).
Plenty of car firms sell nearly new cars right next to the brand new ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so this is probably apocryphal, but I was sent this a while ago:
A question in a physics degree examination at the University of Copenhagen
ran thus:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One student replied:
"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the
barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the
string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the
building."
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was
failed immediately. He appealed on the grounds that his answer was
indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to
decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but
did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem
it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to
provide a verbal answer which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the
basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence,
forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running
out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant
answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to
hurry up the student replied as follows:
"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper,
drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground.
The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g
x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.
"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer,
then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure
the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter
of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.
"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short
piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at
ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked
out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 pi sqrroot
(l / g).
"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier
to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer
lengths, then add them up.
"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you
could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the
skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into
feet to give the height of the building.
But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind
and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on
the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I
will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."
The student was Niels Bohr.
A great example of how there are always different ways of looking at a problem, from one of the greatest scientists ever (allegedly).
There's a big difference between high power transmissions and those used in mobile phones. I certainly wouldn't dispute that standing around electricity substations for any length of time is not fantastically good for your health, but the power we're talking about is orders of magnitude greater. Plus, they are scary places - I don't like the feeling that one false move gets you zapped.
I would disagree with the comment that "smoking was once known as safe". Smoking was known to be dangerous in the thirties [my father grew up in Lithuania and even there, in 1935, cigarettes were called "Cancer sticks"], it's just that people chose to ignore medical advice, and the cigarette companies chose not to advertise that their product was dangerous. They then lied that low tar cigarettes were safer, which they weren't - and they knew it - which was one of the cornerstones of the lawsuits against them. Companies are generally getting better at checking for risks, due to the public relations nightmare that awaits should evidence appear that shows them to be at fault (see Fast Food Nation for more details). Many have reduced the radiation output of phones due to public health concerns in Europe. It's just not on to give your customers cancer without at least warning them first.
The biggest risks mobile phone users face are not from radiation (which as many posters have said, isn't anywhere near high power enough to cause any significant effect) but from inappropriate use - whilst driving being the main one here. UK research recently showed that using a mobile whilst driving was twice as dangerous as driving after 6 pints of beer.
Also, mobile user risk getting their heads kicked in by irate commuters whilst shouting "HELLO? YES, I'M ON THE TRAIN. NO, IT'S RUBBISH. YES OF COURSE I LOVE YOU HONEY. I SAID OF COURSE I LOVE YOU HONEY" etc.
Saying all that, we live in a capitalist society, so if you want the companies to research more, demand it. We are the ones with the power here, we should all use it more. Without us they will all go bust.
soapbox -off.
Yes, they do. In the mail it states that "most executives took a 15% cut, in addition to the 3.8%". This is fair enough, but my socialist Commie European side tells me they should take far more than a 15% cut.
/. story). Despite seeing through the most disastrous merger in history and losing hundreds of billions of market cap, he's going into semi retirement with a $1m a year "consulting" contract. He should be forced into destitution - how many people's lives has this guy ruined? How many people's savings have been wiped out?
It's like the guy at Time Warner who forced through the merger with AOL (see earlier
I'd certainly say that what I take to be "true" is not necessarily what the layman takes to be "true". It's simply not possible to work as a scientist if one considers current laws to be flawed. What are currently held as being laws are exactly the ones that we know work close to 100% - the laws of thermodynamics and Newtonian motion. I would never say that current theories of gravitation are "laws" (as I said in an earlier posting), because they don't work close enough to 100% for the scientific community to accept them as laws.
;-)
But again, I totally agree with half of what you say, regarding the certain people's attitude toward scientific theories. It drives me up the wall when I hear things like "But no-one's ever seen a monkey evolve into a human, therefore Darwin must be wrong!" (check out the earlier post about OS X being the OS of the Devil for morer on this).
And did you turn to Astrophysics after the bass-playing gig fell through?
Laws are statements that are held to be true and inviolable, within certain constraints, such as the velocity/scale ones I mentioned earlier.
The laws of thermodynamics are taken to be laws because so many experiments have been done that support it, that it's 99.999999999% certain. Saying that you cannot "logically assert with 100% confidence that it cannot happen" may indeed be logical but it adds nothing to a debate about whether a law holds true or not. It would be scientific to say "I assert this cannot happen because...". This is how science moves forward, not by arguing about logic.
Saying that, I do of course agree that it's always worth looking for faults in "laws", because you never know what you might find. You just need a good reason to do so...
Yes, but not conclusively. It's in the BBC article. Besides, there's nothing wrong with double checking!
Once a hypothesis has some experimental grounding, it becomes a theory. Once that theory has been proven it becomes a law.
Newton's laws of motion are laws because they are true, at least at normal scales and velocities. Once you get to the microscopic scale, or within 0.1c (10% speed of light) they become inaccurate. This is when quantum physics (which is still theory) and relativity (again, still theory) take over.
Both quantum physics and relativity have enough descrepancies to not be widely regarded as laws. Nothwithstanding the fact that they are mutually exclusive (they do not work together).
They are interesting because they provide proof (or disproof) of basic quantum theory. Neutrinos are produced by the sun during the fusion of Hydrogen. The amount predicted by the equations is three times what is observed. Therefore either something happens to the neutrinos on the way, or the theory is wrong.
It's called science. You make a hypothesis, and you try and prove it by experimentation. Simple really.
With the sort of attitude shown here, Einstein would never have bothered looking at discrepancies in Newton's laws of motion and gravitation, and there would be no theories of relativity. Heisenberg/Bohr/Planck (and all the others) would never have looked at discrepancies in black body radiation etc and quantum theory would never have been thought of. And then I wouldn't be writing this, because semiconductors would never have been discovered.
Just because there's no immediate application in a particular field doesn't make it important. Stop thinking of that great big $ sign.
Years ago I was working for a company that did computerised music systems for bars (hey Beckers!). We wanted to stand out from our competitors so we decided to try and use PC's with black cases rather than beige (which after a year in a smoky bar, tend to get nicotine stained).
The only people who did black cases then were Fujitsu, and they charged an extra ~$300 per monitor. And they blew up after a year. So what did we do? Yep....some masking tape and newspaper over the screen and then we sprayed them black - and charged our customers extra! Nice to see the rest of the world finally catching up!
I agree. Something strange I've noticed is that people who had Spectrums always had ST's, and those with C64's always had Amigas. I guess that we thought the C64 sucked so badly that we couldn't face buying an Amiga. But this is rapidly veering off topic.
As far as I recall, the XBox runs a cut down version of XP, which is of the NT family. In other words, it's not based on DOS. Although NT has a DOS emulator (NTVDM & wowexec), it's not exactly perfect.
/. moaning about Sony or Nintendo doing exactly the same. How many times has the PS2 had its price cut? Will there be such a fuss when Nintendo cut the price on the GameCube?
/.)...
And anyway, why is everyone bitching about this? Microsoft are out there to make money, and they know that they have to sell Xbox's at a loss in order to make a larger profit on software licencing. This is the console business. I don't see anyone on
Plus, for all the people who are talking about Linux being "a proper OS" - how many games are available on it? I dislike Windows OS's for many things, but for games support, and general ease of use for the less, ahem, able members of the computer using population, Windows fits the bill (pun not intended). All these "My OS is better than yours" arguments sound rather like the old "My Amiga is better than your Atari ST" and the classic "My C64 is better than your Spectrum".
For the record, my Spectrum was better than your C64. Now that's started a flame war (at least, for all the British posters to
Unfortunately, basic chemistry doesn't allow us to easily filter out the crap we've already shoved into the air. We have to stop pumping out the rubbish first. This is where the Kyoto protocol came in. It wasn't any kind of final solution, more the first step. For example, Britain had huge problems with SO2 thanks to the burning of poor quality coal. After many years of smog and deaths from lung disease, the burning of coal was banned domestically, and only allowed commercially in power stations. Lo and behold, deaths from lung disease plummeted.
Just because China may, in ten/twenty/a hundred years, produce more CO2 than the US, doesn't mean that the US should throw a useful treaty out of the window. It's shortsighted, and dangerous in the message it sent out. Mind you, given that Dubya made his money in the oil business and is primarily funded by oil companies, what do you expect?
But yes, alternative energy sources are the way to go, but don't hold your breath for a viable solar solution.
That's an interesting logical statement - "Humankind was "industrious" enough to create the problem, and thus we can fix it too."
Kind of like saying "I cut your head off, so I can put it back on again!". Doesn't work that way, I'm afraid. What gets put into the atmosphere is not necessarily easy to take out again. Never heard of diffusion?
The US has by far the largest per capita CO2 emission, China doesn't even come into it. The US has astonishingly high energy usage which could be massively reduced by some simple efficiency savings. Like driving cars that get more than 10 miles to the gallon. Like using more efficent power plants, a/c units, central heating systems, and the like - just like most of the EU have been using for years.
Fossil fuels will be with us for a while (~100 years). However, with the apparent increase in global temperatures it is simply not known what will happen to the climate - it may not necessarily warm globally. Indeed, if the Gulf stream fails (as some studies seem to be indicating) it's goodbye to nice warm Northern Europe and hello big ice sheets...
Windows has to be rebooted not because of the type of memory used, but the way it handles it. You could have the quickest, most efficient memory around and Windows would still make a pigs ear of dealing with it.
Unix boxes use exactly the same type of memory as PC's but the kernel is rather better at managing it...
Still, this memory would be great in a little Network Walkman - better than the 64Mb in my one!
Black holes become black holes pretty rapidly, I believe, during the collapse of an ultra-massive star. A massive star will collapse to a neutron star because gravity overcomes the strong force (I think). An ultra-massive star collapses further, to a singularity ie a black hole.
There must be an intermediate step in which the gravitational force is large enough to cause the quarks to become unbonded, but not large enough to collapse entirely.
I'm not entirely sure how stable neutron stars are, but I suspect they would be around for a while...
I don't think anyone has mentioned it yet, but one cosmologist has said that the observed properties could quite easily be a "hotspot" on a normal neutron star, and not a whole new entity. The sole reason for the "quark star" result is that it is much hotter than a neutron star should be, and smaller. However, a hot spot on a normal star would be hotter and smaller than expected but not a whole new entity.
MSFT did not "just have luck" in the OS market. Sure it had some luck, in buying the tiny company that had written the forerunner of MS-DOS, but it also made some excellent business moves (killing OS/2, buying plenty of small companies and assimilating them) and used some rather underhand business practices (er....IE....).
And let's not forget something. Since Windows 95 (version 2) you've been able to put a CD into pretty much any PC of a decent enough spec and install Windows with very few problems. And no messing around with config files, bizarre commands (rsh? What the hell's that mean?) etc. They have generally made life easy for Harry Homeowner. It's only recently that Linux distros have even come close to that kind of functionality. Sure, I know that MS OS's fundamentally suck, but they are damn easy to use. I work with highly intelligent people who aren't all that good on computers, and I praise the Lord every day that they aren't on Macs or Unix/Linux.
And I LIKE Unix....
Let's not forget something here - consoles are all about the games available. PS2 started off pretty poor (the only good game was SSX), but had no competetion. Once Grand Theft Auto 3, GT3 and Metal Gear Solid 2 came out, it became a "must buy" console, so anyone in the marketplace would rather get a console with 3 world beater games for less than the XBox with 1 world beater game. Why pay more for a console that might have some decent games in one year time, and not even have a native DVD player?
And GTA3 is one of the best games ever (along with Civ2 and Elite...and Mazogs....)
What's the difference between what Amazon are doing, and what many car sales firms are doing (other than the cost, of course...). Plenty of car firms sell nearly new cars right next to the brand new ones.