There are plenty of 1600x1200 resolution LCDs out there. Take a look at the 20-21" models out there. Though it won't be quite like your Thinkpad (I would really like to see someone make a 15" 1600x1200 desktop monitor, but I don't think it is going to happen).
Also, there isn't much of a point to the 19" LCDs, being that they have the same resolution as the 17" LCDs, just larger pixels.
Perhaps you've already been through all of this, but are you sure it's not the monitor so much as the ambient lighting in the room (or lack thereof)? This can be especially bad in office environments as the flourescent lights in the ceiling can flicker and get highly annoying. You might experiment with turning lights on or off, and moving them around. I even have placed a small light fixture placed behind my LCD monitor (a 60W equilivent compact flourescent, though you might have better luck with a standard incandescent fixture).
If you have a "small summer place" on Cape Cod, you are most certainly not middle class.
Or you bought it back in the 1970's when it was relatively cheap, and while you may now be a millionaire on paper, it doesn't really affect your lifestyle (well, unless you sell it).
Just to hazard a guess, but maybe because the N64 runs at a higher resolution than the DS? With that said, with the cost of memory nowadays, why not put the extra 4MB in?
There's nothing dishonest about using a perfectly valid prefix in the way that it should be used.
It was completely dishonest back in the 1980's when they started doing it to make their drives look larger, back when 1MB was 2^20 bytes everywhere. It's really amazing how people will stand up for what was (and still is) a totally sleazy marketing move by the harddrive manufacturers.
Your prefixes of "hard drive manufacturer" and "real" are unnecessary.
Those prefixes have historical context, being that it was the harddrive manufacturers who first decided to spec their harddrives in "marketing MB" that redefines 1MB as 10^6 bytes instead of the accepted 2^20 bytes, and using the resulting confusion to make people think their drives were larger than they really were. And as far as I can tell, they are still the only hardware manufaucters to do so. RAM and flash memory manufacturers still define 1MB as 2^20, and 1GB as 2^30. Hence the reason why the harddrive manufacturers still put little disclaimers on the package stating that 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes.
I'm not so sure about that. I have 760GB of storage in the box next to me (300GB x 2, 160GB x 1), and believe me - I'm not having any problems filling it up with compressed file formats.
Of course, with drives so large, people could choose to store their stuff in uncompressed formats and still have plenty of room to do it with.
As the "owner" of 1.85 TiB of MP3s, let me state for the record that this collection does not include "Classic Rock", Rap, Hip-Hop, Electronica, Prog, Krautrock, Pop, (Much) Classical, Country, Gospel, or Audiobooks.
I take it you like jazz, new age, folk music, and bluegrass?
Why don't you read what he said? To sum it up: If you want reliability and don't mind it being underpowered, get an IBM. Toshibas overall seem to be pretty decent, you just have to tweak the Windows install a bit. If you like to take chances, get a Lenovo which is an unknown, or an HP/Compaq which seem to be mostly solid but do have isolated issues. If you really like to take chances, try an Acer which probably will give you problems but you might get lucky. Avoid Dell because they quality isn't great, and the support sucks. Avoid Sony because they are underpowered and overpriced, the Sony nameplate doesn't mean anything anymore. If you are in the market for a used PII-era laptop, you might consider a Dell.
Basically, I would agree with what he said. If I was in the market for a laptop, I would take a good look at Lenovo to see if they are maintaining the same level of quality as IBM did (indications I have seen so far is that they are okay, but not really worth the "Thinkpad tax" that IBM got away with). Failing that, I would probably take a look at Toshiba, then HP/Compaq. I wouldn't even bother with Dell/Acer/Sony.
Probably for many of the same reasons that music stores like iTunes doing so well despite the same content being traded over P2P for free. Convience, gaurenteed level of quality, speed, less hassle, and the desire to support the people who... uh... make the content. Online porn is proof that you can still make lots of money without oppressive DRM, suing your fanbase, and bribing the government. The RIAA/MPAA really should take notice.
Now assuming Big Oil is greedy (a safe assumption), which do you think they would rather have? $1200 or $11300?
Myth refuted. Please move along.
The problem with that is you are assuming that people are smart and will act in their best interests. That they will do their research, and buy the best product after evaluating all the options. Some people certainly will, but most people tend to only pay attention to upfront costs, and ignore things like total cost of ownership. These people are going to see two simular cars in terms of size, performance, and options, and one of them is $9,000 cheaper - and they are going to buy the cheaper car. With that said though, gas prices and fuel economy have been getting a lot of press, and enough people would buy the BigOil car that it would easily be a huge hit.
The only problem is I'm pretty certain that the famed 100MPG carburetor is just an urban legend.
Clicking around Dell's website shows that the Dimension line starts at $299 with the Dimension 1100 and it includes a CRT monitor. Dell has been shipping $300 PCs for quite a while now.
Only when a call is actually being made. Meanwhile, there are a great deal more people who are constantly playing music in their cars. Worse, a good deal of those are fiddling with their iPod or changing the station. LOTS of accidents happen this way.
So what? You're argument is a fallacy. Sure, car audio is a distraction for people (I would argue much less so), but that doesn't mean cell phones aren't a distraction too.
So why to people want multibutton trackpads? Is it just inertia--the resistance of people to changing ingrained habits, even awkward and possibly harmful ones? Is there anybody who started out using a Mac style trackpad (one button with modifier keys) who actually prefers a two-button pad?
It might have something to do with all of those other OSes out there where having atleast a two button mouse/trackpad is a requirement to actually using OS effectively.
So what would you do if you wanted a dual core 64 bit laptop?
You can buy a gamer laptop today that has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 in it. Sure, it'll be huge and have a battery life measured in minutes, but it is a dual core 64bit laptop.
There's been a lot on the news lately on people being distracted by navigation systems while driving. As these things can see if you're moving or not, they could be made in such a way that they don't accept input while driving.
Actually, it's pretty common now for navigation systems to restrict what the user can do, unless it senses that the car is in park or the parking brake is set. On the other hand, they don't completely lock you out, which leaves many drivers plenty to hang themselves with.
The thing with a cell phone is that it distracts you continously for minutes at a time. While drinking coffee or messing with the stereo is certainly not the safest thing to do while driving, it only takes a few seconds to take that sip or press that button. Furthermore, you can do those things at your leisure. Most people don't take a drink of coffee while making a turn, or fiddle with the stereo while trying to merge. However, the cell phone drivers are still yapping away while they try to merge into traffic, make that turn, change lanes, etc. Driving while talking on the cell phone is easily the most common cause of dangerous driving that I see, and should be banned.
The only problem with second video cards in Windows is that you only get acceleration on your primary screen. Which sucks for games that want to do anything fancy on the second screen, and also means you can't run your Winamp visualizations on that second monitor. I haven't really found a good solution to this yet - you can make the side monitor your "primary" and drag all your icons and stuff over to the front monitor. However, this just creates a new set of problems.
Get a flat panel monitor with a VGA and a DVI input. Then hook both the inputs into a dual head video card. Then mirror the outputs so they are the same. Then switch between the inputs on the monitor - the difference is very obvious, no matter how good the monitor and the video card are - you'll be able to tell the difference between the DVI and VGA inputs at a glance.
Of course, if all you use are CRTs, then the VGA output is just fine, as CRTs are analog devices (though I do have a 21" IBM monster that has a DVI input, though I can't tell the difference between the DVI and VGA on that CRT)
It really amazes me how many computers with flatpanel monitors still ship with just VGA. I would think that all digital would be cheaper than a digital to analog converter on the video card, along with an analog to digital converter in the monitor, but I might be wrong.
I dislike the Windows key mostly for the reason that by adding it, the key reduces the size the CTRL/ALT keys and the spacebar. It is located in a place that makes it very to accidently press, and the result of that is the focus is now shifted to the start menu. Any Windows gamer can tell you that this is extremely annoying, and I many many gamers who have either seeked out keyboards without the Windows key (the Model M is pretty popular here), installed some software utility to disable the key, or simply took a screwdriver and pried the damn thing off.
Like others have mentioned, the Windows key is handy at times for the shortcuts. I rather like the approach a Toshiba laptop I have took - they placed the Windows key on the top right of the keyboard so it's not in the way, but still usable for the shortcuts (true, this makes most shortcuts a two handed operation, but on a laptop this really isn't an issue for me). That almost makes up for the fact that they eliminated the right CRTL key. On my desktop, I just live without (I use a Model M).
By the way, what's the with the other Microsoft key - the "right click" one that's usually between the right Windows key and the right CRTL key? That's a useless key if I've ever seen one.
How did Microsoft financially benefit from Internet Explorer's dominance? IE is and always has been a free product. More relevant to this topic
Back in the day, Netscape was developing web applications. This was kind of scary for Microsoft, as this shifted the focus away from the operating system and to the browser. Back then, Netscape ran on almost everything (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, OS/2, etc), and if in the future the user did all their work under web applicatons, then suddenly the underlying OS would become less important. Why spring for a Windows license to run Netscape when you could download Linux for free?
So Microsoft's response was Internet Explorer. At first it seemed that Microsoft was going with the Netscape route of supporting multiple platforms, but they quickly killed off everything but IE for Windows (Except for the Mac version, which lingered on quite a bit longer before finally getting axed). From there they made their browser not quite standards compliant (but close enough to get people to switch to it), and created ActiveX. They then integrated all of this into Windows and their respective server software. This made it easy for people to create Web applications and content that only worked properly under Internet Explorer for Windows, and many of these ended up being made - particularly for company intranets. At first, this seemed great for companies that basically ran Windows everywhere, but it also locked them into Microsoft's software. This is likely one of the reasons why Windows is still so dominant on the desktop, and is also one of the main reasons why in the bizarro-land of slashdot circa April, 2006, Mac users are so excited about running Windows on their Apple machines.
Of course, the threat of Web applications is coming around again, with open standards like XML threating to make your choice of OS less revelevent, and even your choice of browser unimportant (so long as it supports the open standards). I'm not sure what Microsoft has in store for this round (if anything), as IE7 seems to be too little, too late - and the popularity of Linux and OSX growing.
So in conclusion, Internet Explorer wasn't so much about crushing Netscape Navigator, as it was about crushing Web applications that could run everywhere.
You don't need to break RSA - just replace the DLL that handles RSA with one that does nothing. Remember the PC is compromised - so the virus/spyware maker can do that and I think they have done it in the past.
If the PC is already compromised, then why bother with poisoned DNS servers and trying to defeat Microsoft's encryption? Just have the computer go to wherever you want it to and have it download whatever you need.
I'm really sick of people attacking IE. Sure, IE has always introduced alot of proprietary features, but the black fact is when IE6 came out back in 2001 it was the most powerful browser in existance on the Windows platform. If not for Firefox extensions or Opera's recent offerings it would, IMHO, still be so...sorry tabbed interfaces just don't cut it from a technical standpoint for me.
While it is true that back in 2001, Netscape/Mozilla was still struggling to compete with IE, back in 2001 I was using Opera 5, which in my opinion is still a better browser than IE6 currently is.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of 1600x1200 resolution LCDs out there. Take a look at the 20-21" models out there. Though it won't be quite like your Thinkpad (I would really like to see someone make a 15" 1600x1200 desktop monitor, but I don't think it is going to happen).
Also, there isn't much of a point to the 19" LCDs, being that they have the same resolution as the 17" LCDs, just larger pixels.
Perhaps you've already been through all of this, but are you sure it's not the monitor so much as the ambient lighting in the room (or lack thereof)? This can be especially bad in office environments as the flourescent lights in the ceiling can flicker and get highly annoying. You might experiment with turning lights on or off, and moving them around. I even have placed a small light fixture placed behind my LCD monitor (a 60W equilivent compact flourescent, though you might have better luck with a standard incandescent fixture).
it doesn't surprise me that everybody thinks Bush is the only president to mispronounce nuclear.
When did anyone say that?
If you have a "small summer place" on Cape Cod, you are most certainly not middle class.
Or you bought it back in the 1970's when it was relatively cheap, and while you may now be a millionaire on paper, it doesn't really affect your lifestyle (well, unless you sell it).
Just to hazard a guess, but maybe because the N64 runs at a higher resolution than the DS? With that said, with the cost of memory nowadays, why not put the extra 4MB in?
There's nothing dishonest about using a perfectly valid prefix in the way that it should be used.
It was completely dishonest back in the 1980's when they started doing it to make their drives look larger, back when 1MB was 2^20 bytes everywhere. It's really amazing how people will stand up for what was (and still is) a totally sleazy marketing move by the harddrive manufacturers.
Your prefixes of "hard drive manufacturer" and "real" are unnecessary.
Those prefixes have historical context, being that it was the harddrive manufacturers who first decided to spec their harddrives in "marketing MB" that redefines 1MB as 10^6 bytes instead of the accepted 2^20 bytes, and using the resulting confusion to make people think their drives were larger than they really were. And as far as I can tell, they are still the only hardware manufaucters to do so. RAM and flash memory manufacturers still define 1MB as 2^20, and 1GB as 2^30. Hence the reason why the harddrive manufacturers still put little disclaimers on the package stating that 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes.
I'm not so sure about that. I have 760GB of storage in the box next to me (300GB x 2, 160GB x 1), and believe me - I'm not having any problems filling it up with compressed file formats.
Of course, with drives so large, people could choose to store their stuff in uncompressed formats and still have plenty of room to do it with.
As the "owner" of 1.85 TiB of MP3s, let me state for the record that this collection does not include "Classic Rock", Rap, Hip-Hop, Electronica, Prog, Krautrock, Pop, (Much) Classical, Country, Gospel, or Audiobooks.
I take it you like jazz, new age, folk music, and bluegrass?
Why don't you read what he said? To sum it up: If you want reliability and don't mind it being underpowered, get an IBM. Toshibas overall seem to be pretty decent, you just have to tweak the Windows install a bit. If you like to take chances, get a Lenovo which is an unknown, or an HP/Compaq which seem to be mostly solid but do have isolated issues. If you really like to take chances, try an Acer which probably will give you problems but you might get lucky. Avoid Dell because they quality isn't great, and the support sucks. Avoid Sony because they are underpowered and overpriced, the Sony nameplate doesn't mean anything anymore. If you are in the market for a used PII-era laptop, you might consider a Dell.
Basically, I would agree with what he said. If I was in the market for a laptop, I would take a good look at Lenovo to see if they are maintaining the same level of quality as IBM did (indications I have seen so far is that they are okay, but not really worth the "Thinkpad tax" that IBM got away with). Failing that, I would probably take a look at Toshiba, then HP/Compaq. I wouldn't even bother with Dell/Acer/Sony.
Probably for many of the same reasons that music stores like iTunes doing so well despite the same content being traded over P2P for free. Convience, gaurenteed level of quality, speed, less hassle, and the desire to support the people who... uh... make the content. Online porn is proof that you can still make lots of money without oppressive DRM, suing your fanbase, and bribing the government. The RIAA/MPAA really should take notice.
Now assuming Big Oil is greedy (a safe assumption), which do you think they would rather have? $1200 or $11300?
Myth refuted. Please move along.
The problem with that is you are assuming that people are smart and will act in their best interests. That they will do their research, and buy the best product after evaluating all the options. Some people certainly will, but most people tend to only pay attention to upfront costs, and ignore things like total cost of ownership. These people are going to see two simular cars in terms of size, performance, and options, and one of them is $9,000 cheaper - and they are going to buy the cheaper car. With that said though, gas prices and fuel economy have been getting a lot of press, and enough people would buy the BigOil car that it would easily be a huge hit.
The only problem is I'm pretty certain that the famed 100MPG carburetor is just an urban legend.
Clicking around Dell's website shows that the Dimension line starts at $299 with the Dimension 1100 and it includes a CRT monitor. Dell has been shipping $300 PCs for quite a while now.
Only when a call is actually being made. Meanwhile, there are a great deal more people who are constantly playing music in their cars. Worse, a good deal of those are fiddling with their iPod or changing the station. LOTS of accidents happen this way.
So what? You're argument is a fallacy. Sure, car audio is a distraction for people (I would argue much less so), but that doesn't mean cell phones aren't a distraction too.
For identical equipment, by how much?
Who case about identical equipment when all the office drones need are basic Dells that cost $300 each to run MS Office and Outlook?
So why to people want multibutton trackpads? Is it just inertia--the resistance of people to changing ingrained habits, even awkward and possibly harmful ones? Is there anybody who started out using a Mac style trackpad (one button with modifier keys) who actually prefers a two-button pad?
It might have something to do with all of those other OSes out there where having atleast a two button mouse/trackpad is a requirement to actually using OS effectively.
So what would you do if you wanted a dual core 64 bit laptop?
You can buy a gamer laptop today that has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 in it. Sure, it'll be huge and have a battery life measured in minutes, but it is a dual core 64bit laptop.
There's been a lot on the news lately on people being distracted by navigation systems while driving. As these things can see if you're moving or not, they could be made in such a way that they don't accept input while driving.
Actually, it's pretty common now for navigation systems to restrict what the user can do, unless it senses that the car is in park or the parking brake is set. On the other hand, they don't completely lock you out, which leaves many drivers plenty to hang themselves with.
The thing with a cell phone is that it distracts you continously for minutes at a time. While drinking coffee or messing with the stereo is certainly not the safest thing to do while driving, it only takes a few seconds to take that sip or press that button. Furthermore, you can do those things at your leisure. Most people don't take a drink of coffee while making a turn, or fiddle with the stereo while trying to merge. However, the cell phone drivers are still yapping away while they try to merge into traffic, make that turn, change lanes, etc. Driving while talking on the cell phone is easily the most common cause of dangerous driving that I see, and should be banned.
The only problem with second video cards in Windows is that you only get acceleration on your primary screen. Which sucks for games that want to do anything fancy on the second screen, and also means you can't run your Winamp visualizations on that second monitor. I haven't really found a good solution to this yet - you can make the side monitor your "primary" and drag all your icons and stuff over to the front monitor. However, this just creates a new set of problems.
Get a flat panel monitor with a VGA and a DVI input. Then hook both the inputs into a dual head video card. Then mirror the outputs so they are the same. Then switch between the inputs on the monitor - the difference is very obvious, no matter how good the monitor and the video card are - you'll be able to tell the difference between the DVI and VGA inputs at a glance.
Of course, if all you use are CRTs, then the VGA output is just fine, as CRTs are analog devices (though I do have a 21" IBM monster that has a DVI input, though I can't tell the difference between the DVI and VGA on that CRT)
It really amazes me how many computers with flatpanel monitors still ship with just VGA. I would think that all digital would be cheaper than a digital to analog converter on the video card, along with an analog to digital converter in the monitor, but I might be wrong.
I dislike the Windows key mostly for the reason that by adding it, the key reduces the size the CTRL/ALT keys and the spacebar. It is located in a place that makes it very to accidently press, and the result of that is the focus is now shifted to the start menu. Any Windows gamer can tell you that this is extremely annoying, and I many many gamers who have either seeked out keyboards without the Windows key (the Model M is pretty popular here), installed some software utility to disable the key, or simply took a screwdriver and pried the damn thing off.
Like others have mentioned, the Windows key is handy at times for the shortcuts. I rather like the approach a Toshiba laptop I have took - they placed the Windows key on the top right of the keyboard so it's not in the way, but still usable for the shortcuts (true, this makes most shortcuts a two handed operation, but on a laptop this really isn't an issue for me). That almost makes up for the fact that they eliminated the right CRTL key. On my desktop, I just live without (I use a Model M).
By the way, what's the with the other Microsoft key - the "right click" one that's usually between the right Windows key and the right CRTL key? That's a useless key if I've ever seen one.
How did Microsoft financially benefit from Internet Explorer's dominance? IE is and always has been a free product. More relevant to this topic
Back in the day, Netscape was developing web applications. This was kind of scary for Microsoft, as this shifted the focus away from the operating system and to the browser. Back then, Netscape ran on almost everything (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, OS/2, etc), and if in the future the user did all their work under web applicatons, then suddenly the underlying OS would become less important. Why spring for a Windows license to run Netscape when you could download Linux for free?
So Microsoft's response was Internet Explorer. At first it seemed that Microsoft was going with the Netscape route of supporting multiple platforms, but they quickly killed off everything but IE for Windows (Except for the Mac version, which lingered on quite a bit longer before finally getting axed). From there they made their browser not quite standards compliant (but close enough to get people to switch to it), and created ActiveX. They then integrated all of this into Windows and their respective server software. This made it easy for people to create Web applications and content that only worked properly under Internet Explorer for Windows, and many of these ended up being made - particularly for company intranets. At first, this seemed great for companies that basically ran Windows everywhere, but it also locked them into Microsoft's software. This is likely one of the reasons why Windows is still so dominant on the desktop, and is also one of the main reasons why in the bizarro-land of slashdot circa April, 2006, Mac users are so excited about running Windows on their Apple machines.
Of course, the threat of Web applications is coming around again, with open standards like XML threating to make your choice of OS less revelevent, and even your choice of browser unimportant (so long as it supports the open standards). I'm not sure what Microsoft has in store for this round (if anything), as IE7 seems to be too little, too late - and the popularity of Linux and OSX growing.
So in conclusion, Internet Explorer wasn't so much about crushing Netscape Navigator, as it was about crushing Web applications that could run everywhere.
You don't need to break RSA - just replace the DLL that handles RSA with one that does nothing. Remember the PC is compromised - so the virus/spyware maker can do that and I think they have done it in the past.
If the PC is already compromised, then why bother with poisoned DNS servers and trying to defeat Microsoft's encryption? Just have the computer go to wherever you want it to and have it download whatever you need.
I'm really sick of people attacking IE. Sure, IE has always introduced alot of proprietary features, but the black fact is when IE6 came out back in 2001 it was the most powerful browser in existance on the Windows platform. If not for Firefox extensions or Opera's recent offerings it would, IMHO, still be so...sorry tabbed interfaces just don't cut it from a technical standpoint for me.
While it is true that back in 2001, Netscape/Mozilla was still struggling to compete with IE, back in 2001 I was using Opera 5, which in my opinion is still a better browser than IE6 currently is.