Well, part of Star Wars is that at the time, nothing like it had been seen before. Nowadays, it has to compete in a crowded field with a bunch of movies that try to be like Star Wars, but at the time it was a very fresh and genre-defining movie. That the quality of the special effects were top-notch for the time didn't hurt either.
Actually, it's worse than that. Many cheap LCD screens are 18-bit, and use dithering to fake the displaying of 24-bit color. At least your analog CRT from 1995 can do the full 24-bit color, even if the computer couldn't drive it at that color depth.
Optical drives are still useful for watching movies, which I do use it for as my computer monitors are better than my TV. Also useful for ripping said movies, and ripping CDs. Also used for burning CDs to listen to in my car has a CD player. Sometimes used for booting live CDs to do things like imaging hard drives and installing OSes. I don't use it a lot in my desktop, but I would miss it if it was gone. At $20 for a DVD burner, why not have one? I don't plan on buying Blu-ray though - a waste of money as far as I'm concerned. My laptop has an optical drive, thought in that case I'm kind of indifferent as to whether or not its eventual replacement will have an optical drive.
There were, and maybe still are flights that go from Dallas to Australia. From there you could go pretty anywhere you wanted in Asia. Still would be a hassle though.
Well, if that's the case, then all they really did was apply the term "bricked" to the wrong thing. The car may not be bricked, but if the battery is damaged beyond feasible repair then you could say the battery pack was bricked.
Some of those old phones had a battery pack that would take normal AA batteries. This meant you could power them with standard non-rechargeable alkaline cells. While this wasn't a very good solution for a phone you used regularly, it was a pretty good solution for a phone kept around for emergencies because the battery would still work after sitting for a long time. That's also the only way I would believe that a phone that was sitting for 20 years might still have a charge, but even for alkaline 20 years is pushing it.
Saturn started off as a way for GM to recapture the small and economical markets which they were losing to the Japanese car companies. The big problem with small and economical cars in GM's world is that small and economical cars had to be crap on purpose, because if they were any good GM feared that they would start to eat into their more profitable product lines like Buick. Saturn did away with this philosophy, and set out to build some quality small cars. The results were actually pretty decent. They were never quite as good as the Japanese makers, but they were cheaper and overall pretty solid vehicles. However, by about 2002 this philosophy had gone out the window and was replaced by the standard GM thinking. As such Saturn was turned into a bunch of crappy rebadged Chevys and Pontiacs with different sheet metal (err plastic paneling) and that was pretty much the end of Saturn.
I find that after 8 yrs or so, the incremental cost of maintaining an old car, plus the difference in safety and quality in a new car shrinks to the point where holding it longer than that becomes an ideological decision more than a financial one.
How so? Once the car is paid off it's going to take a lot of expensive repairs to equal the payments on a new car. And nowadays, and eight-year old car that has been reasonably maintained is generally still a reliable vehicle so the repair bills won't be that high. Safety systems haven't advanced that much in the last 8 years (my '99 model has side air bags, for example), and the quality angle is debatable (I think the interiors in a lot of newer cars are pretty flimsy compared to just a few years ago). Yes, eventually you do reach a point where the entire car is just worn out and things really start to go seriously wrong. 25 years ago that point probably was at about the 8-year mark, but we're well past that nowadays.
Chances are the whole car, wires and all, will be fed into a giant shredder. They usually shred the car into chunks, sort out the stuff that sticks to magnets (i.e. steel), then shred the rest into smaller pieces, then use various techniques like eddy current separation to separate out the aluminum, copper, and other metals like brass. What's left like the plastics, glass, rubber, foam, etc. is usually landfilled. It's generally not worth the trouble to manually disassemble a car to pull out all the plastics and wiring harnesses, unless it's to resell them again as parts.
Volkswagens in my mind are down there with Dodge in terms of reliability. Their cars are shoddily built and fall apart in a few years. They are fun to drive though.
Odysseys are probably expensive because despite its many flaws, it's the best minivan out there. The real problem seems to be that no one can build a decent minivan. I think the fatal flaw for most models is that the manufacturers think that they can take the drive train out of a mid-sized car, and drop the larger and heavier minivan body on top of it and not have problems like transmissions failing prematurely. Either that or it's a conspiracy to get everyone to buy more profitable SUVs.
It's not just a name, he's the brother of one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history. His chances of getting elected are right around zero.
And who do you suggest someone should vote for? Romney? Gingrich? Paul? Unless the Republicans pull a rabbit out of their hat, they're not going to beat Obama, and that has nothing to do with Obama being a good president.
It would be more correct to say that more than two parties is not a stable situation. It's entirely possible for an outsider party to gain dominance, but since three parties isn't stable either the outsider will soon fade away or will end up taking the place of one of the two dominant parties. This is what happened in Canada.
Actually, it could be a problem. Escape velocities for planets and larger moons is on the order of km/s. No gun I'm aware of can fire bullets that fast (at least using chemical propellants), which means any bullet you fire would go into orbit unless it was to strike something or enter the planet's atmosphere (if it has one). The weight of the bullet won't matter in a vacuum, and assuming nothing imparts a force onto the bullet its orbit will cross the orbit of wherever it was fired which means any bullets that miss their target could be a threat to the ship that fired them.
They are cheaper than that, there are several models under $100 now. Note that you'll either need at least one monitor with DisplayPort or one of the pricier active DisplayPort to DVI/HDMI/VGA/whatever adapters.
The only thing I can find not to like is that the stand sticks out in front of the display (to stop it from falling over forward since it's so thin, not a problem with an 85 lb 20" deep CRT) so I can't put my keyboard as close to the screen as I like it.
Assuming that your screen has the standard VESA mounting holes on the back as any decent one will (except Apple), you can buy a monitor stand and mount the monitor to the back of your desk. Monoprice has them about as cheap as you'll find anywhere, and that'll reclaim the desk space under the monitor for you.
I've had problems with AMD boards ranging the entire spectrum of quality. It's not the board manufacturer, it's the available chipsets for AMD. Few chipsets can match Intel for quality and stability, not even AMD's own chipsets. VIA's chipsets were horrible. nVidia did manage a few good ones, but even most of theirs were still junk.
That about mirrors my experience. I've built plenty of AMD systems, generally using high quality parts and name-brand motherboards. They almost all have had various little quirks and things that weren't quite right about them. In comparison, Intel-based systems always seemed to work better, even the low-end Celeron systems running Intel's budget chipsets. The only notable exception for AMD is the nForce2 chipset for Socket A, which gave me years of reliable service (disappointingly, nVidia's later chipsets weren't nearly as good).
AMD's SATA and RAID implementation seems particularly buggy, where disk drives occasionally won't be detected for some reason when the computer is started/restarted, or will suddenly drop for no reason when the computer is running, which will either crash the computer (for a boot drive), annoy you and force you to reboot to get the drive back (for a secondary drive), or if the drive is part of an array make you have to rebuild the RAID. I've seen this on multiple AMD systems all running good quality boards (mostly Gigabyte, but some Asus thrown in). My last straw was when my AMD 790GX system corrupted it's RAID array, twice, in one weekend. I was so pissed that I drove to Microcenter and built my first Intel build, ever (this is after using AMD since the K6 days). I couldn't be happier with the stability and performance of the system. I even kept my AMD graphics card (which I did give serious thought about replacing), and the drivers have yet to BSOD Windows, whereas they would BSOD my old computer about once per week, which goes to show that even AMD's own graphics cards seem to work better on Intel's chipsets.
Granted, perhaps the hardware itself is fine - AMD's rather bloated chipset driver packages tend to make wonder a bit, but in any case I don't recommend AMD anymore.
They might have been referring to inkjets, some of which have an annoying tendency to make black by mixing the color inks together instead of using the black cartridge.
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Well, part of Star Wars is that at the time, nothing like it had been seen before. Nowadays, it has to compete in a crowded field with a bunch of movies that try to be like Star Wars, but at the time it was a very fresh and genre-defining movie. That the quality of the special effects were top-notch for the time didn't hurt either.
Actually, it's worse than that. Many cheap LCD screens are 18-bit, and use dithering to fake the displaying of 24-bit color. At least your analog CRT from 1995 can do the full 24-bit color, even if the computer couldn't drive it at that color depth.
Optical drives are still useful for watching movies, which I do use it for as my computer monitors are better than my TV. Also useful for ripping said movies, and ripping CDs. Also used for burning CDs to listen to in my car has a CD player. Sometimes used for booting live CDs to do things like imaging hard drives and installing OSes. I don't use it a lot in my desktop, but I would miss it if it was gone. At $20 for a DVD burner, why not have one? I don't plan on buying Blu-ray though - a waste of money as far as I'm concerned. My laptop has an optical drive, thought in that case I'm kind of indifferent as to whether or not its eventual replacement will have an optical drive.
If you do this, make sure your belt buckle or whatever won't scratch the screen. The glass screens are pretty durable, but you can still damage one.
"Apple? I would have never thought that Apple Computers would still exist in 2012."
"They don't. Apple is now a phone and gadget company."
There were, and maybe still are flights that go from Dallas to Australia. From there you could go pretty anywhere you wanted in Asia. Still would be a hassle though.
Well, if that's the case, then all they really did was apply the term "bricked" to the wrong thing. The car may not be bricked, but if the battery is damaged beyond feasible repair then you could say the battery pack was bricked.
Some of those old phones had a battery pack that would take normal AA batteries. This meant you could power them with standard non-rechargeable alkaline cells. While this wasn't a very good solution for a phone you used regularly, it was a pretty good solution for a phone kept around for emergencies because the battery would still work after sitting for a long time. That's also the only way I would believe that a phone that was sitting for 20 years might still have a charge, but even for alkaline 20 years is pushing it.
Saturn started off as a way for GM to recapture the small and economical markets which they were losing to the Japanese car companies. The big problem with small and economical cars in GM's world is that small and economical cars had to be crap on purpose, because if they were any good GM feared that they would start to eat into their more profitable product lines like Buick. Saturn did away with this philosophy, and set out to build some quality small cars. The results were actually pretty decent. They were never quite as good as the Japanese makers, but they were cheaper and overall pretty solid vehicles. However, by about 2002 this philosophy had gone out the window and was replaced by the standard GM thinking. As such Saturn was turned into a bunch of crappy rebadged Chevys and Pontiacs with different sheet metal (err plastic paneling) and that was pretty much the end of Saturn.
How so? Once the car is paid off it's going to take a lot of expensive repairs to equal the payments on a new car. And nowadays, and eight-year old car that has been reasonably maintained is generally still a reliable vehicle so the repair bills won't be that high. Safety systems haven't advanced that much in the last 8 years (my '99 model has side air bags, for example), and the quality angle is debatable (I think the interiors in a lot of newer cars are pretty flimsy compared to just a few years ago). Yes, eventually you do reach a point where the entire car is just worn out and things really start to go seriously wrong. 25 years ago that point probably was at about the 8-year mark, but we're well past that nowadays.
Chances are the whole car, wires and all, will be fed into a giant shredder. They usually shred the car into chunks, sort out the stuff that sticks to magnets (i.e. steel), then shred the rest into smaller pieces, then use various techniques like eddy current separation to separate out the aluminum, copper, and other metals like brass. What's left like the plastics, glass, rubber, foam, etc. is usually landfilled. It's generally not worth the trouble to manually disassemble a car to pull out all the plastics and wiring harnesses, unless it's to resell them again as parts.
Volkswagens in my mind are down there with Dodge in terms of reliability. Their cars are shoddily built and fall apart in a few years. They are fun to drive though.
Odysseys are probably expensive because despite its many flaws, it's the best minivan out there. The real problem seems to be that no one can build a decent minivan. I think the fatal flaw for most models is that the manufacturers think that they can take the drive train out of a mid-sized car, and drop the larger and heavier minivan body on top of it and not have problems like transmissions failing prematurely. Either that or it's a conspiracy to get everyone to buy more profitable SUVs.
It's not just a name, he's the brother of one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history. His chances of getting elected are right around zero.
And who do you suggest someone should vote for? Romney? Gingrich? Paul? Unless the Republicans pull a rabbit out of their hat, they're not going to beat Obama, and that has nothing to do with Obama being a good president.
It would be more correct to say that more than two parties is not a stable situation. It's entirely possible for an outsider party to gain dominance, but since three parties isn't stable either the outsider will soon fade away or will end up taking the place of one of the two dominant parties. This is what happened in Canada.
Actually, it could be a problem. Escape velocities for planets and larger moons is on the order of km/s. No gun I'm aware of can fire bullets that fast (at least using chemical propellants), which means any bullet you fire would go into orbit unless it was to strike something or enter the planet's atmosphere (if it has one). The weight of the bullet won't matter in a vacuum, and assuming nothing imparts a force onto the bullet its orbit will cross the orbit of wherever it was fired which means any bullets that miss their target could be a threat to the ship that fired them.
They are cheaper than that, there are several models under $100 now. Note that you'll either need at least one monitor with DisplayPort or one of the pricier active DisplayPort to DVI/HDMI/VGA/whatever adapters.
The only problem with that is most (all?) OSes can't properly handle the subpixel font rendering for a rotated display.
Assuming that your screen has the standard VESA mounting holes on the back as any decent one will (except Apple), you can buy a monitor stand and mount the monitor to the back of your desk. Monoprice has them about as cheap as you'll find anywhere, and that'll reclaim the desk space under the monitor for you.
I've had problems with AMD boards ranging the entire spectrum of quality. It's not the board manufacturer, it's the available chipsets for AMD. Few chipsets can match Intel for quality and stability, not even AMD's own chipsets. VIA's chipsets were horrible. nVidia did manage a few good ones, but even most of theirs were still junk.
That about mirrors my experience. I've built plenty of AMD systems, generally using high quality parts and name-brand motherboards. They almost all have had various little quirks and things that weren't quite right about them. In comparison, Intel-based systems always seemed to work better, even the low-end Celeron systems running Intel's budget chipsets. The only notable exception for AMD is the nForce2 chipset for Socket A, which gave me years of reliable service (disappointingly, nVidia's later chipsets weren't nearly as good).
AMD's SATA and RAID implementation seems particularly buggy, where disk drives occasionally won't be detected for some reason when the computer is started/restarted, or will suddenly drop for no reason when the computer is running, which will either crash the computer (for a boot drive), annoy you and force you to reboot to get the drive back (for a secondary drive), or if the drive is part of an array make you have to rebuild the RAID. I've seen this on multiple AMD systems all running good quality boards (mostly Gigabyte, but some Asus thrown in). My last straw was when my AMD 790GX system corrupted it's RAID array, twice, in one weekend. I was so pissed that I drove to Microcenter and built my first Intel build, ever (this is after using AMD since the K6 days). I couldn't be happier with the stability and performance of the system. I even kept my AMD graphics card (which I did give serious thought about replacing), and the drivers have yet to BSOD Windows, whereas they would BSOD my old computer about once per week, which goes to show that even AMD's own graphics cards seem to work better on Intel's chipsets.
Granted, perhaps the hardware itself is fine - AMD's rather bloated chipset driver packages tend to make wonder a bit, but in any case I don't recommend AMD anymore.
Just don't do something stupid like print out your tax return forms on your used printer and mail them to the IRS.
They might have been referring to inkjets, some of which have an annoying tendency to make black by mixing the color inks together instead of using the black cartridge.
Hey genius, we're not wishing for CRT's to come back, just for modern monitors to have at least similar capabilities of those sold a decade ago.