If they're selling access to the strip for $10, how about a CD for $15? I've tried some web-based comics (User Friendly and Chopping Block), and while they're okay to read on a day-to-day basis, the lag waiting for image after image to load if you wanted to read a month or year's worth at a sitting would be annoying.
>You like the casio colour screen? I always thought >it looked far too washed out. Each to his own, I >suppose
I just like that they tried something new. Not a huge breakthrough, but it's a clever idea. What I really like, as mentioned, was the low price. The Casio 9850 seemed to sell for about USD 65-70 when the TI-92 was USD 90.
Why exactly are you arguing about RPN or algebraic calculators in this, and seemingly every, other thread.
I have two comments on the subject:
-RPN does seem convinent for certain tasks, but algebraic notation is convinent on graphical calculators because you can write up an intricate calculation in a familiar form, making proofing easy.
-If I want RPN, what are my choices anyway? HP or HP? I happen to like Casios-- they're dirt-cheap (often 2/3 the price of the analogous TI) and have some clever features (colour!)
Actually, that's why we should use exponential functions.
We want works to go public domain.
If the renewal is a flat fee ($20/year), it can be easily ignored, even on an unprofitable work (borrow the $20 from the profits of another work), but most certainly on a profitable one.
If the renewal is exponential, no matter how much you're getting off of the work, it's unlikely you're making enough to keep up with the fee growth indefinitely. The only choice is to give the work up.
What I'd like to see is different classes of term length that are based on the half-life of the content type. In most cases, computer software, for example, has lost its marketability after 5-10 years. A novel might last 20. A reference book might even be useful for 50, unless it's a rapidly-evolving field, where it gets discredited in 5. There must be a way to accomodate these reality.
> The solution is to have a card which can 'contain' >cash cards from different providers. Then you could >have a single card which holds data for all of your >cash cards, and you wouldn't be locked in to a >single supplier like Visa/MC.
Doesn't solve the basic problem. I'll give you $8 in the public transit account, $6 in the prepaid video rentals account, and $10 in the gambling machine payout voucher account. Now buy something costing $20.
Hmm... a stored value card for mass-transit fares. Brilliant. They were doing it in Washington, D. C. in 1999, probably earlier. The card was disposable, thick paper, and had a black (presumably magnetic) stripe, and they printed the remaining value ON the card when the reader spat the card out. Very helpful.
Most technology-related problem would be solved if the house was designed as a structural framework with panels that bolt on for interior and exterior walls. This would make the home easy to "open" for upgrades and maintenence.
I've somewhat had my fill of the Arizona State University scrapyard (mostly half-dissected x86 boxes and old printers). Where else is good? I'd like a place where they let you dissassemble the machines and just buy what you want (I really don't need the 486/33 mainboard if all I want is the case to modify)
There is a difference between:
A store that can keep records of what inventory is lost, and indeed, will likely repurchase the inventory. Moreover, the store itself is the one who is the legitimate loser here.
and
A government body expected to dole out the skimmed riches to media concerns whose numbers are pulled so freshly out of their serial outputs that you can smell them, and who haven't had a particularly good history of distributing funds to those who were the actual victims of the 'theft'.
I really want to like *BSD. The daemon is cute, and the heritage is impressive, as is NetBSD's compatibility commitment. The problem is that the rest isn't good. When I tried FreeBSD (3.3), I noted
-Kernel configuration is clunky, and looks like it hasn't changed much from the original guys in Berkley.
-The TV tuner support is inferior to GNU/Linux's. I liked xawtv too much to switch (apparently now it works, but it didn't then).
-The installer is a joke. Apparently you slice up the hard disc (with weird Minix-style subpartitions), start running, then go back to the installer to slap on the packages you're missing.
-It also took forever to pick up my CD reader on boot. A pain for a desktop that's power-cycled twice or more daily.
This just opens up another problem. How do you ensure the system-- especially a P2P system-- is reporting accurately? How hard would it be for a node to mistakenly swap the billing records for something requiring 5 minutes of CPU time, with, say, a free-content song requiring no payback, or alternatively, something the producers demand 6 hours of CPU time for?
How does it handle refunds (these files were bad, 32k bitrate, not what I expected?)
Finally, I can't see this system working unless people can develop an overdraft-- download the songs, then pay for them. Nobody's going to wait 3 hours between downloads to pay them off one at a time. Of course, if you allow an overdraft, then they close the account and leave the firm holding the bag.
-Before the income tax was allowed, much of the US government's revenue came from tarrifs.
-Industries could be nationalised, ran profitably, and the profits skimmed to fund the government. Imagine what could be done with a nationalised airline, freight railroad, utility, or oil company.
-Why not play the game the DPRK seems to have started... shake down other countries for 'protection.' I can see it now: "Excuse me, Mr. Blair... I would hate to see an invasion coming around, but your last cheque for $200 billion bounced."
> I don't picture the executives saying literally, >'Let's counter fair use', but what they do say is, >'How can we make more money off of our content'? >And in some cases, they come up with the idea that >making it difficult or illegal to engage in fair >use activities might make someone buy an extra copy, etc.
The problem is that the two messages are somewhat intertwined. The market is near-- or perhaps even at-- the saturation level for content at current prices and conditions. If people wanted more $18.99 CDs, with the standard CD behaviour, they'd buy them.
In order to increase sales, they could: 1) Decrease prices, reaching new markets 2) Increase quality, possibly enticing some new purchasers and old purchasers alike or 3) Create an artificial demand through technically or legally crippling the product, so people have to come back when the disc is scratched and dies, or they want a copy in the car they don't need to worry about melting in the summer heat.
They've chosen 3).
Actually, if you pull out another level of abstraction, the problem comes from a constant demand for *growth*, not mere profitability, from shareholders. This is fundamentally a broken system because no business can expand indefinitely . The content industry is reasonably profitable. Enjoy it, shareholders, and shut your pieholes!
>But whining about cost and "it's not a workstation" >just shows how amazingly ignorant you are.
I'm whining because it's becoming an absurd situation.
1. Video cards are obsolescing faster than any other part of the system. An Athlon 1200 is still adequate for most uses, but had I bought a video card the day I bought the CPU, it would be worthless today.
2. The price of a "reasonable" gaming card is rising faster than inflation. Voodoo Graphics cards were ~USD 150-200 when they were current. Have prices doubled across the board since then to justify doubled video card prices? Increased complexity isn't my problem-- I don't care how elaborate the card is, because I'm not paying for "56 million transistors @ x.xx each"... I'm paying for "Decent performance in modern games."
3. When you do this upgrade, it provides only a narrowly focused benefit. Non-gaming video card benefit has diminished to insignificance, and from what I understand, the few apps that could exploit the benefits (rendering apps) often aren't compatible. If I throw in a 9800 in lieu of a Voodoo 3, I won't get much more from productivity apps, because framebuffers and capabilities long ago expanded enough to swallow any resolution/colour depth/refresh rate a consumer-priced monitor is apt to support.
My thoughts exactly. Sounds like it could be a viable C3 competitor-- cheap and cool-running, and Linux-friendly, with the added benefit of being able to slap "64-bit" on the label.
>and things will be just fine with a $150 video card
$150?! 'Just fine?' Sheesh... we talk of the 'Microsoft tax', when it's getting to the point where you have to pay a 'nVidia or ATi tax' to use the computer for amusement purposes. We're talking about graphics cards that cost as much as entire systems... and not fancy workstation cards, cards designed for games!
Let's chain down the game developers and make them use $40 SiS305 cards, or better yet, $20 second-hand Matrox G400s and Voodoo3s.
"Runs for 5 hours" under what circumstances and configuration? I'll be downright impressed if they can get five hours out of a desktop PIV running full-blast, and running those drives full-time and the 802.11 won't help.
I'd be impressed if the 'smart' battery/fuel cell realy was. My "10% low battery alarm" means anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes on a 2:30 or so charge life.
> Well it IS stealing. There was an implied and >unspoken common agreement between broadcasters and >the greater society in general that in return for >your free TV programs you had to endure commercials >to fund their development and production. Sure no >one actually signed any legal documents that >clearly spelled out such a contract but it was so >prevelant for so long that no one would even >question it.
The problem is, to be frank, we're changing and what we're being offered is changing.
We're changing in that our attention spans are getting shorter and we're more easily jaded. We don't want to see a boring advert the 50th time just because we're impressed that we can get *any* signal in our 7 inch Philco TV.
The advertisements we're being shown are changing too... can you imagine the 1950s family seeing one of those Pepsi commercials with the half-nude dancers, or looking confusedly at the advertisements that really don't explain their product well (prescription drugs are the worst of this, but IBM is pretty annoying about it too-- although theirs are funnier lately)?
Finally, if we're tuning out, that means the advertisers are doing it wrong. It's that simple. Amuse us, and we watch. Keep changing it and we'll come back. And, most importantly, annoy us and we will leave or attempt to block the adverts.
Colleges are ahead of the curve regarding wireless. GNU/Linux is nasty to prepare wireless on. This comes from experience. I had to pull the packets to my Thinkpad by hand!
Really valuable for a college environment would be a completely idiot-proofed wireless network setup utility. This utility or package should:
-Have all the driver modules compiled, and the configuration files kept up to date about different manufacturers' model identifications.
-Have a convinent popup tool, ideally triggered at the card-insertion time, and iconifying shortly after, that provides helpful stats and diagnostics. How hard would it be to convert 700 lines of iwconfig, ifconfig, and driver messages to:
"Discovered SSID "foo"." "No IP number available after 20 seconds. Respawning DHCPCD." (to make up for some setups that seem to make DHCP have a fit if you pop the card and suspend, then pick up later." "DHCP results: IP number is 127.0.0.43" "Current situation: Signal/noise = 54/40. 353 bad sends, 107 bad recieves"
It may depend on board design. I had a PCChips M560TG, where the ATX supply it was being used with had reliability issues. (This was like the second or third PSU the machine was on, because this was before Athlon days and people assumed that the no-name, made-in-Kampuchea 250W supply was adequate for an overclocked K6/233) I tested this hypothesis by using this huge old full-AT supply (this being the brief period of Baby-AT boards with both types of connector) from a well-made 386. It was plugged in off by one, and it didn't boot IIRC, but it did survive the incident and lasted until retirement.
Possibly you can salvage the screen from an old colour laptop. I note that the Toshiba T1950CT has a TFT screen at about 8.5" diagonal, 640x480, and the Dual Group DC-4000 was available with a similarly dimensioned screen. Some later subnotebooks (Toshiba 610CT?) might also be a good bet. Caveat: Some of these have a screen unit that's much bigger than the viewable area, so fit may be an issue.
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If they're selling access to the strip for $10, how about a CD for $15? I've tried some web-based comics (User Friendly and Chopping Block), and while they're okay to read on a day-to-day basis, the lag waiting for image after image to load if you wanted to read a month or year's worth at a sitting would be annoying.
>You like the casio colour screen? I always thought >it looked far too washed out. Each to his own, I >suppose
I just like that they tried something new. Not a huge breakthrough, but it's a clever idea. What I really like, as mentioned, was the low price. The Casio 9850 seemed to sell for about USD 65-70 when the TI-92 was USD 90.
May I ask a really stupid question:
Why exactly are you arguing about RPN or algebraic calculators in this, and seemingly every, other thread.
I have two comments on the subject:
-RPN does seem convinent for certain tasks, but algebraic notation is convinent on graphical calculators because you can write up an intricate calculation in a familiar form, making proofing easy.
-If I want RPN, what are my choices anyway? HP or HP? I happen to like Casios-- they're dirt-cheap (often 2/3 the price of the analogous TI) and have some clever features (colour!)
Actually, that's why we should use exponential functions.
We want works to go public domain.
If the renewal is a flat fee ($20/year), it can be easily ignored, even on an unprofitable work (borrow the $20 from the profits of another work), but most certainly on a profitable one.
If the renewal is exponential, no matter how much you're getting off of the work, it's unlikely you're making enough to keep up with the fee growth indefinitely. The only choice is to give the work up.
What I'd like to see is different classes of term length that are based on the half-life of the content type. In most cases, computer software, for example, has lost its marketability after 5-10 years. A novel might last 20. A reference book might even be useful for 50, unless it's a rapidly-evolving field, where it gets discredited in 5. There must be a way to accomodate these reality.
> The solution is to have a card which can 'contain' >cash cards from different providers. Then you could >have a single card which holds data for all of your >cash cards, and you wouldn't be locked in to a >single supplier like Visa/MC.
Doesn't solve the basic problem. I'll give you $8 in the public transit account, $6 in the prepaid video rentals account, and $10 in the gambling machine payout voucher account. Now buy something costing $20.
Hmm... a stored value card for mass-transit fares. Brilliant. They were doing it in Washington, D. C. in 1999, probably earlier. The card was disposable, thick paper, and had a black (presumably magnetic) stripe, and they printed the remaining value ON the card when the reader spat the card out. Very helpful.
Most technology-related problem would be solved if the house was designed as a structural framework with panels that bolt on for interior and exterior walls. This would make the home easy to "open" for upgrades and maintenence.
I've somewhat had my fill of the Arizona State University scrapyard (mostly half-dissected x86 boxes and old printers). Where else is good? I'd like a place where they let you dissassemble the machines and just buy what you want (I really don't need the 486/33 mainboard if all I want is the case to modify)
There is a difference between: A store that can keep records of what inventory is lost, and indeed, will likely repurchase the inventory. Moreover, the store itself is the one who is the legitimate loser here. and A government body expected to dole out the skimmed riches to media concerns whose numbers are pulled so freshly out of their serial outputs that you can smell them, and who haven't had a particularly good history of distributing funds to those who were the actual victims of the 'theft'.
I always anticipated a huge detour on the road to the Borg.
:)
Essentially take today's case modders, add tomorrow's biological enhancement technology. You'll see a seriously destructive conflict between
1. The non-modified and modified (moral purity arguments)
and
2. Different groups of modified people.
I fully anticipate using a new reptilian form as a justification to throw pathetic human ethics out the door and get revenge on various things.
>Did I mention that we'll also control the >weather, the tides, the animals and everything else?
Don't be daft. We'll be flying at 7 times c, and our dogs will still be sniffing our crotch implants.
I really want to like *BSD. The daemon is cute, and the heritage is impressive, as is NetBSD's compatibility commitment. The problem is that the rest isn't good. When I tried FreeBSD (3.3), I noted
-Kernel configuration is clunky, and looks like it hasn't changed much from the original guys in Berkley.
-The TV tuner support is inferior to GNU/Linux's. I liked xawtv too much to switch (apparently now it works, but it didn't then).
-The installer is a joke. Apparently you slice up the hard disc (with weird Minix-style subpartitions), start running, then go back to the installer to slap on the packages you're missing.
-It also took forever to pick up my CD reader on boot. A pain for a desktop that's power-cycled twice or more daily.
This just opens up another problem. How do you ensure the system-- especially a P2P system-- is reporting accurately? How hard would it be for a node to mistakenly swap the billing records for something requiring 5 minutes of CPU time, with, say, a free-content song requiring no payback, or alternatively, something the producers demand 6 hours of CPU time for?
How does it handle refunds (these files were bad, 32k bitrate, not what I expected?)
Finally, I can't see this system working unless people can develop an overdraft-- download the songs, then pay for them. Nobody's going to wait 3 hours between downloads to pay them off one at a time. Of course, if you allow an overdraft, then they close the account and leave the firm holding the bag.
Why not look to alternative revenue sources?
-Before the income tax was allowed, much of the US government's revenue came from tarrifs.
-Industries could be nationalised, ran profitably, and the profits skimmed to fund the government. Imagine what could be done with a nationalised airline, freight railroad, utility, or oil company.
-Why not play the game the DPRK seems to have started... shake down other countries for 'protection.' I can see it now: "Excuse me, Mr. Blair... I would hate to see an invasion coming around, but your last cheque for $200 billion bounced."
> I don't picture the executives saying literally, >'Let's counter fair use', but what they do say is, >'How can we make more money off of our content'? >And in some cases, they come up with the idea that >making it difficult or illegal to engage in fair >use activities might make someone buy an extra copy, etc.
The problem is that the two messages are somewhat intertwined. The market is near-- or perhaps even at-- the saturation level for content at current prices and conditions. If people wanted more $18.99 CDs, with the standard CD behaviour, they'd buy them.
In order to increase sales, they could:
1) Decrease prices, reaching new markets
2) Increase quality, possibly enticing some new purchasers and old purchasers alike
or
3) Create an artificial demand through technically or legally crippling the product, so people have to come back when the disc is scratched and dies, or they want a copy in the car they don't need to worry about melting in the summer heat.
They've chosen 3).
Actually, if you pull out another level of abstraction, the problem comes from a constant demand for *growth*, not mere profitability, from shareholders. This is fundamentally a broken system because no business can expand indefinitely . The content industry is reasonably profitable. Enjoy it, shareholders, and shut your pieholes!
You'd be amazed. The local university had parents in a fit when the new 'honour student' dorms didn't have the promised Ethernet connections.
>But whining about cost and "it's not a workstation" >just shows how amazingly ignorant you are.
I'm whining because it's becoming an absurd situation.
1. Video cards are obsolescing faster than any other part of the system. An Athlon 1200 is still adequate for most uses, but had I bought a video card the day I bought the CPU, it would be worthless today.
2. The price of a "reasonable" gaming card is rising faster than inflation. Voodoo Graphics cards were ~USD 150-200 when they were current. Have prices doubled across the board since then to justify doubled video card prices? Increased complexity isn't my problem-- I don't care how elaborate the card is, because I'm not paying for "56 million transistors @ x.xx each"... I'm paying for "Decent performance in modern games."
3. When you do this upgrade, it provides only a narrowly focused benefit. Non-gaming video card benefit has diminished to insignificance, and from what I understand, the few apps that could exploit the benefits (rendering apps) often aren't compatible. If I throw in a 9800 in lieu of a Voodoo 3, I won't get much more from productivity apps, because framebuffers and capabilities long ago expanded enough to swallow any resolution/colour depth/refresh rate a consumer-priced monitor is apt to support.
My thoughts exactly. Sounds like it could be a viable C3 competitor-- cheap and cool-running, and Linux-friendly, with the added benefit of being able to slap "64-bit" on the label.
I'll try any architecture once....
>and things will be just fine with a $150 video card
$150?! 'Just fine?' Sheesh... we talk of the 'Microsoft tax', when it's getting to the point where you have to pay a 'nVidia or ATi tax' to use the computer for amusement purposes. We're talking about graphics cards that cost as much as entire systems... and not fancy workstation cards, cards designed for games!
Let's chain down the game developers and make them use $40 SiS305 cards, or better yet, $20 second-hand Matrox G400s and Voodoo3s.
"Runs for 5 hours" under what circumstances and configuration? I'll be downright impressed if they can get five hours out of a desktop PIV running full-blast, and running those drives full-time and the 802.11 won't help. I'd be impressed if the 'smart' battery/fuel cell realy was. My "10% low battery alarm" means anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes on a 2:30 or so charge life.
Don't they have an EU flag-- something like a ring of 12 white stars on blue?
> Well it IS stealing. There was an implied and >unspoken common agreement between broadcasters and >the greater society in general that in return for >your free TV programs you had to endure commercials >to fund their development and production. Sure no >one actually signed any legal documents that >clearly spelled out such a contract but it was so >prevelant for so long that no one would even >question it.
The problem is, to be frank, we're changing and what we're being offered is changing.
We're changing in that our attention spans are getting shorter and we're more easily jaded. We don't want to see a boring advert the 50th time just because we're impressed that we can get *any* signal in our 7 inch Philco TV.
The advertisements we're being shown are changing too... can you imagine the 1950s family seeing one of those Pepsi commercials with the half-nude dancers, or looking confusedly at the advertisements that really don't explain their product well (prescription drugs are the worst of this, but IBM is pretty annoying about it too-- although theirs are funnier lately)?
Finally, if we're tuning out, that means the advertisers are doing it wrong. It's that simple. Amuse us, and we watch. Keep changing it and we'll come back. And, most importantly, annoy us and we will leave or attempt to block the adverts.
Raging Cow? Do I sense this won't sell too well in the UK?
Colleges are ahead of the curve regarding wireless. GNU/Linux is nasty to prepare wireless on. This comes from experience. I had to pull the packets to my Thinkpad by hand!
Really valuable for a college environment would be a completely idiot-proofed wireless network setup utility. This utility or package should:
-Have all the driver modules compiled, and the configuration files kept up to date about different manufacturers' model identifications.
-Have a convinent popup tool, ideally triggered at the card-insertion time, and iconifying shortly after, that provides helpful stats and diagnostics. How hard would it be to convert 700 lines of iwconfig, ifconfig, and driver messages to:
"Discovered SSID "foo"."
"No IP number available after 20 seconds. Respawning DHCPCD." (to make up for some setups that seem to make DHCP have a fit if you pop the card and suspend, then pick up later."
"DHCP results: IP number is 127.0.0.43"
"Current situation: Signal/noise = 54/40. 353 bad sends, 107 bad recieves"
It may depend on board design. I had a PCChips M560TG, where the ATX supply it was being used with had reliability issues. (This was like the second or third PSU the machine was on, because this was before Athlon days and people assumed that the no-name, made-in-Kampuchea 250W supply was adequate for an overclocked K6/233) I tested this hypothesis by using this huge old full-AT supply (this being the brief period of Baby-AT boards with both types of connector) from a well-made 386. It was plugged in off by one, and it didn't boot IIRC, but it did survive the incident and lasted until retirement.
Possibly you can salvage the screen from an old colour laptop. I note that the Toshiba T1950CT has a TFT screen at about 8.5" diagonal, 640x480, and the Dual Group DC-4000 was available with a similarly dimensioned screen. Some later subnotebooks (Toshiba 610CT?) might also be a good bet. Caveat: Some of these have a screen unit that's much bigger than the viewable area, so fit may be an issue.