First, I wouldn't be so bold as to say that paying for everything is THE problem with health insurance. If you break down the costs, there are several factors that make us more expensive than other countries. First is the percentage going to doctors is much higher than in other countries - our physicians are paid very well. Partly this is due to unnecessary procedures, part of it is high malpractice insurance passed on, and part is just high fees. If you cut out the unnecessary procedures you will start eliminating this cost.
The next problem is the administrative cost of the private health insurers. They are not more efficient than the government (Medicare costs 1/5-1/3 the amount to run as private insurers). Why is this? The private insurers are trying to maximize profit, not minimize cost. They've created a behemoth of red tape and paperwork designed to deny more claims and make up for the cost of the system with more denied claims. It works for their purpose, but it is driving our costs through the roof. The government can be very efficient and Medicare is a good example. The thought that the government is always inefficient is a fallacy.
The problem with health care is that it is different from other insurance. You don't need a car, vacation, computer, etc. to survive, but you sure need your body. Hospitals are required to help anyone, regardless of ability to pay. In some way or another they are going to have to cover the costs for those people. They can either charge everyone else more at the point of service or everyone can pay more to the government in taxes to subsidize them. Either way, we all end up paying for it. The problem for low income people is that they really don't make enough to afford health care. So do you want to just let them die? That won't happen, and if we want to fix the problem for good we will need to provide coverage for those that cannot afford it. In the end, paying the hospital for treating these people will uncover the real costs so they can be controlled better than burying them in the treatment of the rest of us will.
There are many systems in the western world that are not socialized - take Switzerland for example. Private insurers provide coverage and everyone is required to buy insurance, the poor are subsidized. The insurers cannot profit from basic insurance, but must provide basic insurance in order to have the right to provide supplemental insurance (I think ~30% have this). The incentives in the system are set up to let the capitalist motive push for efficiency since they cannot profit from the basic care. Watch the Frontline documentary "Sick Around the World" to get a better idea of how other countries operate and how our system can transform into one of them. The socialized systems are too far from what we have now and the Swiss system would be a much better fit for our political climate.
Nearly all of the non-news shows (WWDTM, APHC, etc.) are liberal, but NPR works very hard to report the news plainly and unbiased. Listen to Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Marketplace. These shows represent some of the most unbiased reporting outside of the BBC. The human interest stories are more likely to appeal to liberals since they usually have to do with people in tough situations, but they report both sides and try to do it fairly.
I think that one reason NPR doesn't have any conservative shows is that the conservative commentators seem to generally want to outrage their audience. Also, I don't think they could do the "NPR voice." I do hope that an intellectual conservative voice does come to NPR to provide balance, but it will probably be a while until this happens.
I live in Jacksonville, FL and learned a lot about the deep-harbored hate that some here have. A friend (white woman) was waving a sign from a sidewalk yesterday with 2 other Obama supporters (a black woman and another white woman). More than once, cars yelled the n-word at them. Others flipped them off and yelled other obscenities. Now I don't know if they were yelling about Obama (most likely) or about the black woman in the group, but either way it is deeply disturbing. I noticed that my neighbor's Obama sign was missing, then noticed that there were not any in our area of town. My friend told me that she saw at least three instances of white males in pickup trucks removing Obama signs or putting McCain signs directly in front or behind them.
Jacksonville is at the edge of the south, but it still has some remnants from the south of old. Areas of town are mostly not integrated and when they start to become so, they usually just swap races. The predominantly white area that declined started getting more black residents and then the "white flight" began. One largely black area started undergoing "gentrification" and many blacks are leaving.
We have a long way to go yet in the south.
There's not a problem with a company deciding to set prices differently by country, but I don't want to see any restrictions on bringing in a Chinese version of software either. They should be allowed the freedom to set prices and we should be allowed the freedom of buying from wherever we would like. Now if MS decides to make the Chinese version unable to run fully in English (or differentiate it in some other way making it less attractive to non Chinese customers), that would be their choice as well. I just want to make sure my country's judicial, law enforcement, and taxation systems aren't used to enforce some artificial purchasing restrictions.
I had a remote sensing professor at the University of Arizona that frequently took road trips with his students out to remote areas in Nevada to calibrate imaging sensors. For this, the absolute flatness isn't as important as the high reflectance of the dry lake beds they use. Here is more info.
All but one person I know with an HDTV stretches their 4:3 content to fit the entire screen. It drives me nuts because nothing looks right. I wonder if this method would produce more natural looking images that fill the screen with 4:3 content. If so these guys could make a fortune licensing to the HDTV manufacturers!
Ever notice how high speed internet connections are always sold as "up to" so-and-so speed? That doesn't mean anything to me - I want to know the lowest it can go and the typical up/down speeds. I'm just glad my salary isn't an "up to".
The only solution I can see is to limit the spending by politicians - during campaigns or otherwise. We can regulate the politicians a lot better than we can regulate every single corporation and wealthy individual. Remember in high school when they limited the amount you could spend on your ASB presidency campaign? This made it so that money was not a factor in campaigning and anyone had a chance. Also, the $25 or so limit was all that was needed to run a decent campaign. All candidates had the same opportunity to get the attention of the voters and they were then judged on their merits (mostly popularity!).
Now let's think about how this would work for the presidential election. First of all, the limit would be much higher than most people could afford and fundraising would be needed. This is OK - it serves a purpose to allow candidates who are popular but without money to compete with those that already have money. A reasonable spending limit would be set (including travel, advertising, etc.) that is attainable through reasonable fundraising. This now makes the campaigns think a lot more strategically about how they spend their money and levels the playing field. If Giuliani, Clinton, Obama, etc have already raised more than the limit, then they can now focus their efforts on engaging voters, however they need to make sure they budget themselves until the election is closer. Candidates need to be smart and frugal about how they spend their limited funds.
In leveling the playing field, non corporate-backed candidates stand a real chance of being elected and can have their voice heard. It also gets people to realize that they aren't throwing their money away if they sponsor a lesser-known candidate with enough support to raise near or more than the spending limit. If supporters of a candidate like Ron Paul realize that they can get him to be on same spending level as the big hitters, they are more likely to donate to the campaign.
For non-campaigning politicians, a yearly spending limit would also help decrease the influence of lobbyists. If senator X has enough in his/her war chest that they cannot possibly spend it on all on reelection campaigns and yearly expenses, the impact to them of new money from a lobbyist is greatly reduced. It doesn't stop the influence of lobbyists, but does reduce it for the politicians with the most money. It also lets them spend less time fundraising and more time working!
While I think this idea would transform US politics in the best interest of the people, it would probably never fly because none of the people currently in power or poised to be in power would benefit from it. It would empower the lower classes too much and force candidates to rely on their credentials and actions, not slick media campaigns. Not to mention that advertisers, who control the media (as the major source of funding), wouldn't stand for this plan and could use their power to sway public opinion against it.
I agree - there are many other avenues to purchase your music, as pointed out in this thread, and if people don't like the price at iTunes, they'll go somewhere else. Pricing is something done by the person selling, and if the consumers don't like it they won't buy as much (or at all). The interesting dynamic with selling digital files is that their total cost is virtually the same whether they sell 100 or 1,000,000 tracks. When selling a mass manufactured physical product, typically the more you make at once, the cheaper the cost per item. However, the amount you manufacture at once will likely depend on the demand for your product (since holding inventory costs money) and the price you set for the product must take this all into account. In this case, the record labels are simply trying to maximize revenues by looking at their expected price/demand.
As someone who buys used CDs often, I wonder a couple of things. First, is there going to be a used music market in 15 years? Are you allowed to sell DRM-free digital music files? How could they police it to make sure you didn't keep a copy? Do record companies think that this possible destruction of the used music market increases or decreases the value of digital music to them? If they'd like to dismantle the used market, they can drop the price on digital tracks so that physical media is left in the dust and in the future there won't be any left to sell secondhand.
You missed the point - he said that musicians and listeners will be fine but didn't make any mention of labels. People like to make and listen to music and that won't change. As distribution gets more efficient, a major job of the labels is no longer needed. Technology is also making word of mouth an efficient marketing method, which replaces another job of the labels. It's already been pointed out that the final piece, recording/mastering/pressing, can be done cheaply without the labels and with decent results. RIAA is not an organization of musicians, it is a middleman organization. They are not the talent, they simply find talent and deliver it to consumers. I agree with the GP that the real producers and the consumers will be fine, but there is no guarantee that record labels will be needed. People will always consume music and musicians will always get compensated for it in some way or another.
Vector Marketing, which sells Cutco knives, has been recruiting college students for years. They sell knives by having people do in-home demonstrations, but who wants to let a salesperson in their house? What if instead of letting a salesperson in you were helping out your friend/neighbor's college student put themselves through school? Also they claim you "get paid no matter what" so that you can try to convince them when setting up the appointment that you're not a salesperson. Its a pretty evil system and seems to work well. Since nobody would actually want to sell knives in people's houses, they use very tricky wording to get the students in there. Check out this site which is their student recruitment site. From reading the site, what do you think the job is? This use of college students isn't a new trick by any means, but it seems to be an effective one.
The iris is much easier to "see" with a camera than the retina (have you ever seen a fundus camera?). How many of your friends' irises have you seen? Now how about retinas? The iris is plenty unique, however, to use for ID.
Everybody loves to hear about failures so they can complain, but would we have heard about this if it was a success? I'm not saying that its a good use of money and resources (its not) but if this thing actually worked, would it have made the main page on Slashdot?
The TI-89 is about the most useful device I've seen for most levels of math. It can do symbolic expressions well and won't be stumped in this department until late undergrad or graduate level work. It integrates, derives, and finds limits all symbolically or numerically. Plus its portable and you can use it on most tests (I used mine on the AP tests for Calc and Physics). I've had mine since sophomore year in HS and am now a senior in college If I lost it, I'd replace it instantly.
As for the use pen and paper argument, I agree that these concepts need to be learned first without aid. Once learned, however, having a calculator to check your answers and do the dirty work for you allows you to do more complex problems correctly. TI-89s also do pretty print, so you can see if you got all of your parentheses right when doing long equations.
What I can't seem to find are the dispersion characteristics of this material. Dispersion is the change in index of refraction with wavelength and is the reason prisms work. In a lens, dispersion causes different colors to focus at different points. This is the cause of chromatic aberrations, or purple fringing, in a camera and can be mostly compensated for in the design, but this material could be difficult to match up a glass to that would compensate.
I completely agree with parent. I've purchased several albums from Magnatune and have been completely satisfied (ogg, flac, wav, mp3, and aac!). For iTunes users (maybe other players too, but I don't know), its easy to add their high quality "preview" tracks' m3u files (which are full length) to your library and listen to the albums whenever you want. If you end us listening to something a lot, buy it and make an actual full quality CD from it that you can bring to your car, etc. I don't know of any other store that lets you do that.
While the Google Toolbar is what makes IE useable, I don't think its better than having a builtin search bar like in Firefox. IE has a terribly inefficient interface, wasting entire vertical sections for a few buttons and for the address bar. Most people leave the Google bar below it all and make it even worse, so the interface is even more cluttered. While its neat to check out the pagerank of certain pages, its not something I want to do for every page I'm on. Also, I don't think Google Toolbar can make up for not having tabbed browsing, that is a major setback to me using IE.
Agreed. I work in support for a ~400 user system of mostly Windows users. All that are on 2000/XP have limited rights and can't install anything. We don't get spyware on those computers, but occassionaly we have to respond to a call from a 98 user who just installed Gator. If our users need anything we just go and install it for them, keeps us safe because we only install things we're licensed for as well as spyware-free.
You're right, and he also didn't even talk about the quality of the lenses. The aberrations in a 3 element, tiny zoom lens system will be much greater than in a 5+ element good sized SLR lens. This means that the geometrical spot size (which ideally would be a point, but with finite lenses would be the point spread function) will be samller on the SLR lenses. Since the 'pixel size' on the SLR will also be bigger, its much more likely there that spots will not overlap pixels. The next issue is the MTF (modulation transfer function) of the optical system. Having less aberrations, the 35 mm lens will be able to resolve higher spatial frequencies (closer together objects). While the author of this article is making a good point that megapixels are not all there is to a camera's quality, he doesn't seem fully qualified to explain why.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Right now I'm looking at some 7.5"x10" pictures that I printed on my HP 932C (~$100 or less) from my 2 MP Canon S330 Elph and they look nearly perfect compared to some 8"x10" 35 mm pictures I have (probably not from the best film, but still 35mm). The megapixel myth is powerful in marketing, but in reality 2 MP is enough for most home users. I know a guy who runs a photography studio and when he shoots digital he has a older 2MP Nikon DSLR. His shots are perfect (way better than my Elph) and when printed are amazingly sharp, although he only prints up to 5"x7". Unless you're printing something bigger than 8"x10", most people only need 2 MP as long as the quality is good.
I have an ibook G3 and had it fixed 3 times for logic boards and a cd burning problem. When the 4th problem came (another logic board), they actually said that replacing it was their recommendation. I got my new ibook shipped quickly and haven't had any problem with it.
--Ryan
I had a music class (gened) and used Finale Notepad in classic mode for notation. To say the least, it sucked. While the timing was OK, when playing a song the sound was behind the cursor (on my PC it was perfect). Also, when I booted into OS9, the timing of the song would be terrible and fluctuating. I didn't understand why it would do that on my ibook, but I grew to dislike all but the PC version of Finale Notepad. I really hope the OSX version doesn't have any playback problems because that made it really frustrating.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I wouldn't be so bold as to say that paying for everything is THE problem with health insurance. If you break down the costs, there are several factors that make us more expensive than other countries. First is the percentage going to doctors is much higher than in other countries - our physicians are paid very well. Partly this is due to unnecessary procedures, part of it is high malpractice insurance passed on, and part is just high fees. If you cut out the unnecessary procedures you will start eliminating this cost.
The next problem is the administrative cost of the private health insurers. They are not more efficient than the government (Medicare costs 1/5-1/3 the amount to run as private insurers). Why is this? The private insurers are trying to maximize profit, not minimize cost. They've created a behemoth of red tape and paperwork designed to deny more claims and make up for the cost of the system with more denied claims. It works for their purpose, but it is driving our costs through the roof. The government can be very efficient and Medicare is a good example. The thought that the government is always inefficient is a fallacy.
The problem with health care is that it is different from other insurance. You don't need a car, vacation, computer, etc. to survive, but you sure need your body. Hospitals are required to help anyone, regardless of ability to pay. In some way or another they are going to have to cover the costs for those people. They can either charge everyone else more at the point of service or everyone can pay more to the government in taxes to subsidize them. Either way, we all end up paying for it. The problem for low income people is that they really don't make enough to afford health care. So do you want to just let them die? That won't happen, and if we want to fix the problem for good we will need to provide coverage for those that cannot afford it. In the end, paying the hospital for treating these people will uncover the real costs so they can be controlled better than burying them in the treatment of the rest of us will.
There are many systems in the western world that are not socialized - take Switzerland for example. Private insurers provide coverage and everyone is required to buy insurance, the poor are subsidized. The insurers cannot profit from basic insurance, but must provide basic insurance in order to have the right to provide supplemental insurance (I think ~30% have this). The incentives in the system are set up to let the capitalist motive push for efficiency since they cannot profit from the basic care. Watch the Frontline documentary "Sick Around the World" to get a better idea of how other countries operate and how our system can transform into one of them. The socialized systems are too far from what we have now and the Swiss system would be a much better fit for our political climate.
Nearly all of the non-news shows (WWDTM, APHC, etc.) are liberal, but NPR works very hard to report the news plainly and unbiased. Listen to Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Marketplace. These shows represent some of the most unbiased reporting outside of the BBC. The human interest stories are more likely to appeal to liberals since they usually have to do with people in tough situations, but they report both sides and try to do it fairly.
I think that one reason NPR doesn't have any conservative shows is that the conservative commentators seem to generally want to outrage their audience. Also, I don't think they could do the "NPR voice." I do hope that an intellectual conservative voice does come to NPR to provide balance, but it will probably be a while until this happens.
I live in Jacksonville, FL and learned a lot about the deep-harbored hate that some here have. A friend (white woman) was waving a sign from a sidewalk yesterday with 2 other Obama supporters (a black woman and another white woman). More than once, cars yelled the n-word at them. Others flipped them off and yelled other obscenities. Now I don't know if they were yelling about Obama (most likely) or about the black woman in the group, but either way it is deeply disturbing. I noticed that my neighbor's Obama sign was missing, then noticed that there were not any in our area of town. My friend told me that she saw at least three instances of white males in pickup trucks removing Obama signs or putting McCain signs directly in front or behind them.
Jacksonville is at the edge of the south, but it still has some remnants from the south of old. Areas of town are mostly not integrated and when they start to become so, they usually just swap races. The predominantly white area that declined started getting more black residents and then the "white flight" began. One largely black area started undergoing "gentrification" and many blacks are leaving.
We have a long way to go yet in the south.
There's not a problem with a company deciding to set prices differently by country, but I don't want to see any restrictions on bringing in a Chinese version of software either. They should be allowed the freedom to set prices and we should be allowed the freedom of buying from wherever we would like. Now if MS decides to make the Chinese version unable to run fully in English (or differentiate it in some other way making it less attractive to non Chinese customers), that would be their choice as well. I just want to make sure my country's judicial, law enforcement, and taxation systems aren't used to enforce some artificial purchasing restrictions.
I had a remote sensing professor at the University of Arizona that frequently took road trips with his students out to remote areas in Nevada to calibrate imaging sensors. For this, the absolute flatness isn't as important as the high reflectance of the dry lake beds they use. Here is more info.
All but one person I know with an HDTV stretches their 4:3 content to fit the entire screen. It drives me nuts because nothing looks right. I wonder if this method would produce more natural looking images that fill the screen with 4:3 content. If so these guys could make a fortune licensing to the HDTV manufacturers!
Ever notice how high speed internet connections are always sold as "up to" so-and-so speed? That doesn't mean anything to me - I want to know the lowest it can go and the typical up/down speeds. I'm just glad my salary isn't an "up to".
The only solution I can see is to limit the spending by politicians - during campaigns or otherwise. We can regulate the politicians a lot better than we can regulate every single corporation and wealthy individual. Remember in high school when they limited the amount you could spend on your ASB presidency campaign? This made it so that money was not a factor in campaigning and anyone had a chance. Also, the $25 or so limit was all that was needed to run a decent campaign. All candidates had the same opportunity to get the attention of the voters and they were then judged on their merits (mostly popularity!).
Now let's think about how this would work for the presidential election. First of all, the limit would be much higher than most people could afford and fundraising would be needed. This is OK - it serves a purpose to allow candidates who are popular but without money to compete with those that already have money. A reasonable spending limit would be set (including travel, advertising, etc.) that is attainable through reasonable fundraising. This now makes the campaigns think a lot more strategically about how they spend their money and levels the playing field. If Giuliani, Clinton, Obama, etc have already raised more than the limit, then they can now focus their efforts on engaging voters, however they need to make sure they budget themselves until the election is closer. Candidates need to be smart and frugal about how they spend their limited funds.
In leveling the playing field, non corporate-backed candidates stand a real chance of being elected and can have their voice heard. It also gets people to realize that they aren't throwing their money away if they sponsor a lesser-known candidate with enough support to raise near or more than the spending limit. If supporters of a candidate like Ron Paul realize that they can get him to be on same spending level as the big hitters, they are more likely to donate to the campaign.
For non-campaigning politicians, a yearly spending limit would also help decrease the influence of lobbyists. If senator X has enough in his/her war chest that they cannot possibly spend it on all on reelection campaigns and yearly expenses, the impact to them of new money from a lobbyist is greatly reduced. It doesn't stop the influence of lobbyists, but does reduce it for the politicians with the most money. It also lets them spend less time fundraising and more time working!
While I think this idea would transform US politics in the best interest of the people, it would probably never fly because none of the people currently in power or poised to be in power would benefit from it. It would empower the lower classes too much and force candidates to rely on their credentials and actions, not slick media campaigns. Not to mention that advertisers, who control the media (as the major source of funding), wouldn't stand for this plan and could use their power to sway public opinion against it.
I agree - there are many other avenues to purchase your music, as pointed out in this thread, and if people don't like the price at iTunes, they'll go somewhere else. Pricing is something done by the person selling, and if the consumers don't like it they won't buy as much (or at all). The interesting dynamic with selling digital files is that their total cost is virtually the same whether they sell 100 or 1,000,000 tracks. When selling a mass manufactured physical product, typically the more you make at once, the cheaper the cost per item. However, the amount you manufacture at once will likely depend on the demand for your product (since holding inventory costs money) and the price you set for the product must take this all into account. In this case, the record labels are simply trying to maximize revenues by looking at their expected price/demand.
As someone who buys used CDs often, I wonder a couple of things. First, is there going to be a used music market in 15 years? Are you allowed to sell DRM-free digital music files? How could they police it to make sure you didn't keep a copy? Do record companies think that this possible destruction of the used music market increases or decreases the value of digital music to them? If they'd like to dismantle the used market, they can drop the price on digital tracks so that physical media is left in the dust and in the future there won't be any left to sell secondhand.
You missed the point - he said that musicians and listeners will be fine but didn't make any mention of labels. People like to make and listen to music and that won't change. As distribution gets more efficient, a major job of the labels is no longer needed. Technology is also making word of mouth an efficient marketing method, which replaces another job of the labels. It's already been pointed out that the final piece, recording/mastering/pressing, can be done cheaply without the labels and with decent results. RIAA is not an organization of musicians, it is a middleman organization. They are not the talent, they simply find talent and deliver it to consumers. I agree with the GP that the real producers and the consumers will be fine, but there is no guarantee that record labels will be needed. People will always consume music and musicians will always get compensated for it in some way or another.
Vector Marketing, which sells Cutco knives, has been recruiting college students for years. They sell knives by having people do in-home demonstrations, but who wants to let a salesperson in their house? What if instead of letting a salesperson in you were helping out your friend/neighbor's college student put themselves through school? Also they claim you "get paid no matter what" so that you can try to convince them when setting up the appointment that you're not a salesperson. Its a pretty evil system and seems to work well. Since nobody would actually want to sell knives in people's houses, they use very tricky wording to get the students in there. Check out this site which is their student recruitment site. From reading the site, what do you think the job is? This use of college students isn't a new trick by any means, but it seems to be an effective one.
The iris is much easier to "see" with a camera than the retina (have you ever seen a fundus camera?). How many of your friends' irises have you seen? Now how about retinas? The iris is plenty unique, however, to use for ID.
Everyone should know this!
2 others that I've used that give mp3 formatted songs are emusic.com and magnatune.com
Everybody loves to hear about failures so they can complain, but would we have heard about this if it was a success? I'm not saying that its a good use of money and resources (its not) but if this thing actually worked, would it have made the main page on Slashdot?
The TI-89 is about the most useful device I've seen for most levels of math. It can do symbolic expressions well and won't be stumped in this department until late undergrad or graduate level work. It integrates, derives, and finds limits all symbolically or numerically. Plus its portable and you can use it on most tests (I used mine on the AP tests for Calc and Physics). I've had mine since sophomore year in HS and am now a senior in college If I lost it, I'd replace it instantly. As for the use pen and paper argument, I agree that these concepts need to be learned first without aid. Once learned, however, having a calculator to check your answers and do the dirty work for you allows you to do more complex problems correctly. TI-89s also do pretty print, so you can see if you got all of your parentheses right when doing long equations.
What I can't seem to find are the dispersion characteristics of this material. Dispersion is the change in index of refraction with wavelength and is the reason prisms work. In a lens, dispersion causes different colors to focus at different points. This is the cause of chromatic aberrations, or purple fringing, in a camera and can be mostly compensated for in the design, but this material could be difficult to match up a glass to that would compensate.
I completely agree with parent. I've purchased several albums from Magnatune and have been completely satisfied (ogg, flac, wav, mp3, and aac!). For iTunes users (maybe other players too, but I don't know), its easy to add their high quality "preview" tracks' m3u files (which are full length) to your library and listen to the albums whenever you want. If you end us listening to something a lot, buy it and make an actual full quality CD from it that you can bring to your car, etc. I don't know of any other store that lets you do that.
While the Google Toolbar is what makes IE useable, I don't think its better than having a builtin search bar like in Firefox. IE has a terribly inefficient interface, wasting entire vertical sections for a few buttons and for the address bar. Most people leave the Google bar below it all and make it even worse, so the interface is even more cluttered. While its neat to check out the pagerank of certain pages, its not something I want to do for every page I'm on. Also, I don't think Google Toolbar can make up for not having tabbed browsing, that is a major setback to me using IE.
Agreed. I work in support for a ~400 user system of mostly Windows users. All that are on 2000/XP have limited rights and can't install anything. We don't get spyware on those computers, but occassionaly we have to respond to a call from a 98 user who just installed Gator. If our users need anything we just go and install it for them, keeps us safe because we only install things we're licensed for as well as spyware-free.
dcresource.com has great reviews and I tend to like their page layout more than most other sites.
You're right, and he also didn't even talk about the quality of the lenses. The aberrations in a 3 element, tiny zoom lens system will be much greater than in a 5+ element good sized SLR lens. This means that the geometrical spot size (which ideally would be a point, but with finite lenses would be the point spread function) will be samller on the SLR lenses. Since the 'pixel size' on the SLR will also be bigger, its much more likely there that spots will not overlap pixels. The next issue is the MTF (modulation transfer function) of the optical system. Having less aberrations, the 35 mm lens will be able to resolve higher spatial frequencies (closer together objects). While the author of this article is making a good point that megapixels are not all there is to a camera's quality, he doesn't seem fully qualified to explain why.
Right now I'm looking at some 7.5"x10" pictures that I printed on my HP 932C (~$100 or less) from my 2 MP Canon S330 Elph and they look nearly perfect compared to some 8"x10" 35 mm pictures I have (probably not from the best film, but still 35mm). The megapixel myth is powerful in marketing, but in reality 2 MP is enough for most home users. I know a guy who runs a photography studio and when he shoots digital he has a older 2MP Nikon DSLR. His shots are perfect (way better than my Elph) and when printed are amazingly sharp, although he only prints up to 5"x7". Unless you're printing something bigger than 8"x10", most people only need 2 MP as long as the quality is good.
I have an ibook G3 and had it fixed 3 times for logic boards and a cd burning problem. When the 4th problem came (another logic board), they actually said that replacing it was their recommendation. I got my new ibook shipped quickly and haven't had any problem with it. --Ryan
I had a music class (gened) and used Finale Notepad in classic mode for notation. To say the least, it sucked. While the timing was OK, when playing a song the sound was behind the cursor (on my PC it was perfect). Also, when I booted into OS9, the timing of the song would be terrible and fluctuating. I didn't understand why it would do that on my ibook, but I grew to dislike all but the PC version of Finale Notepad. I really hope the OSX version doesn't have any playback problems because that made it really frustrating.