How often does your company buy new printer paper? Do you use fountain pens and ink wells, or cheap ballpoint pens that you throw out every three months?
If OLED displays really will be so much cheaper, maybe it's time to start thinking of displays as a disposable resource.
Some of the challenges OLEDs have to face: * Ensuring competitive refresh rates, contrast ratios, black levels and overall performance
Why on earth would black levels be an issue for an LED display? I thought that was a problem unique to LCDs, due to their backlighting. Furthermore, I was under the impression that refresh rates for today's LED displays already surpass LCDs; that high refresh rates are a feature of the technology. Is the reporter full of it, or am I misunderstanding something?
The only times that a company can get away with this is if it is either a monopoly or sells addictive products. This is why the government can jack up the prices of cigerettes cia taxes.
Actually, state governments have found that demand for cigarettes is quite elastic. The new cigarette taxes (well, several years old now) have produced vastly less revenue than anticipated, because consumption of cigarettes has dropped whererever the taxes have been instituted.
To be fair, some people say that that's just because the people are now buying their cigarettes from other sources such as Indian reservations which are exempt from the tax.
"Blocking off an entire country" is meaningless in this context. You make it sound as if no one in Spain can send e-mail now; that's completely untrue. What has been blacklisted is e-mail originating from Spain's national ISP: that won't affect the Yahoo Mail, or hotmail, or GMail, or any other mail service accounts of people in Spain. Only the accounts provided by Telefonica De Espana, or companies that rely on them for hosting, will be blocked.
This is far less extreme than say, a spam filter that automatically flags email originating from hotmail and aol addresses as spam.
It's well-known that he built subtle flaws into many of his designs. It was a common practice of inventors before patents were created: he alone knew the "mistakes" he had introduced, and could easily fix them, but anyone else who stole his notes would spend a long time making something that would never run.
(One example is the mechanical lion he built for the king of Spain. If you build it exactly as described in his design, it is impossible for it to move: its gears turn against each other. Yet DaVinci did build it, and it worked.)
Interesting. I remember back in '96, when my friend's cool laser mouse needed a mirror mousepad. As far as I understand, optical mice work by bouncing a light beam off of a surface to illuminate it, and checking many times a second to see if the marks on the desk shift. So, I don't think it's the fact that your desk is shiny that messes up the mouse, but maybe if the paint job is very good there aren't enough irregularities for your mouse to tell one patch of desk from another. Either that, or maybe your optical mouse just isn't very good.:)
The whole idea of using tabletop RPG rules for video games is silly. Tabletop RPGS are designed in every way around the fact that the you can only generate random numbers by rolling dice, and human beings have to resolve everything: what made Rolemaster (or "Rollmaster" as we called it) intolerably slow in person would be completely invisible in a video game.
Tabletop RPGs today go out of their way to avoid rolling too many dice and looking up results on too many tables (things that are trivial for a computer). What makes games in person fun (aside from, you know, playing with other people) is the ability of the GM to improvise, which is essentially an AI-complete program. Thus, you end up with dungeon-crawls like "Temple of Elemental Evil," where the player's choices can be limited to the extent that it's possible to plan for most of them. (Or, you get a game like Neverwinter Nights, where - despite goods scripting - you bump against the artificiality of the world at every turn.)
Unfortunately, the article chooses to talk about AI bugs, scroll menu bugs, and other things that are entirely unrelated to the choice of the D&D ruleset.
Let me be the first to say...
on
Google's Next Steps
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Are these people crazy?
Speculation: in the next few months, Google will abolish world hunger and buy everyone a pony. Google is search engine, not the second coming of Christ.
This isn't about a free lunch: it's about removing inefficiencies from the system. Just like I have a duty to buy the cheaper of two identical products, and a duty to sell my labor for the highest price I can, I have a duty to steal a commodity that I cannot purchase at a reasonable price.
To pay too much for an item is to cheat all my fellow consumers. To accept too small a wage is to cheat all my fellow laborers. To fail to steal from the RIAA is to cheat both my fellow consumers and the RIAA itself: the fact that piracy exists to this extent is proof that they could make more money by selling their product for less. If I failed to demonstrate this to them, I would be doing them a disservice.
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In a price-fixed environment where demand is elastic, demand will seek a better deal anywhere it can be had.
That has nothing to do with the price elasticity of demand or price-fixing. Rational consumers will always choose the "better deal," period.
How often does your company buy new printer paper? Do you use fountain pens and ink wells, or cheap ballpoint pens that you throw out every three months?
If OLED displays really will be so much cheaper, maybe it's time to start thinking of displays as a disposable resource.
Some of the challenges OLEDs have to face:
* Ensuring competitive refresh rates, contrast ratios, black levels and overall performance
Why on earth would black levels be an issue for an LED display? I thought that was a problem unique to LCDs, due to their backlighting. Furthermore, I was under the impression that refresh rates for today's LED displays already surpass LCDs; that high refresh rates are a feature of the technology. Is the reporter full of it, or am I misunderstanding something?
I have a feeling the Asgard are going to be rather pissed at us...
You mean the Aesir. Asgard is where the Aesir lived.
I still find EQ to be the least boring of all of them
Never played City of Heroes, I take it?
The only times that a company can get away with this is if it is either a monopoly or sells addictive products. This is why the government can jack up the prices of cigerettes cia taxes.
Actually, state governments have found that demand for cigarettes is quite elastic. The new cigarette taxes (well, several years old now) have produced vastly less revenue than anticipated, because consumption of cigarettes has dropped whererever the taxes have been instituted.
To be fair, some people say that that's just because the people are now buying their cigarettes from other sources such as Indian reservations which are exempt from the tax.
You can work the world on 6 meters during certain parts of the sun spot cycle with very little power.
No matter how many times I re-read that, it still doesn't make sense to me.
for most of us our parents wouldn't have a clue what we were really doing...
I think you misjudge the average Slashdot reader's age.
With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about.
He is confident... "King Kong is covered in hair," he said, "we could be animating that."
Is it just me, or does that sound more desperate than confident?
I don't think you're being fair. Pandora Tomorrow is a fine name, compared to what they could have chosen.
4. Gimp sucks compared to Photoshop.
Ah, come on now. I'm as friendly to OS as anyone else, but you're just fooling yourself on this one.
The website is in English.
$5 for 500 megabytes. Now this is more like it.
Ah, pico. Now _there's_ a real man's text editor!
You can run JOE on any UNIX.
In a world without the Internet, you'd have had half a point.
If you think that it will be possible to run Doom 3 with 256 megabytes of RAM, I have a bridge in Thailand to sell you.
"Blocking off an entire country" is meaningless in this context. You make it sound as if no one in Spain can send e-mail now; that's completely untrue. What has been blacklisted is e-mail originating from Spain's national ISP: that won't affect the Yahoo Mail, or hotmail, or GMail, or any other mail service accounts of people in Spain. Only the accounts provided by Telefonica De Espana, or companies that rely on them for hosting, will be blocked.
This is far less extreme than say, a spam filter that automatically flags email originating from hotmail and aol addresses as spam.
I don't see this as unreasonable at all. It's not like e-mail service knows national boundaries.
I think the ones who will be shocked by this are the ones who misunderstand and say, "Now no one in Spain can send e-mail!"
Sigh.
It's well-known that he built subtle flaws into many of his designs. It was a common practice of inventors before patents were created: he alone knew the "mistakes" he had introduced, and could easily fix them, but anyone else who stole his notes would spend a long time making something that would never run.
(One example is the mechanical lion he built for the king of Spain. If you build it exactly as described in his design, it is impossible for it to move: its gears turn against each other. Yet DaVinci did build it, and it worked.)
Ripping is making an electronic copy of something. The software system described doesn't address that at all.
Interesting. I remember back in '96, when my friend's cool laser mouse needed a mirror mousepad. As far as I understand, optical mice work by bouncing a light beam off of a surface to illuminate it, and checking many times a second to see if the marks on the desk shift. So, I don't think it's the fact that your desk is shiny that messes up the mouse, but maybe if the paint job is very good there aren't enough irregularities for your mouse to tell one patch of desk from another. Either that, or maybe your optical mouse just isn't very good. :)
The whole idea of using tabletop RPG rules for video games is silly. Tabletop RPGS are designed in every way around the fact that the you can only generate random numbers by rolling dice, and human beings have to resolve everything: what made Rolemaster (or "Rollmaster" as we called it) intolerably slow in person would be completely invisible in a video game.
Tabletop RPGs today go out of their way to avoid rolling too many dice and looking up results on too many tables (things that are trivial for a computer). What makes games in person fun (aside from, you know, playing with other people) is the ability of the GM to improvise, which is essentially an AI-complete program. Thus, you end up with dungeon-crawls like "Temple of Elemental Evil," where the player's choices can be limited to the extent that it's possible to plan for most of them. (Or, you get a game like Neverwinter Nights, where - despite goods scripting - you bump against the artificiality of the world at every turn.)
Unfortunately, the article chooses to talk about AI bugs, scroll menu bugs, and other things that are entirely unrelated to the choice of the D&D ruleset.
Are these people crazy?
Speculation: in the next few months, Google will abolish world hunger and buy everyone a pony. Google is search engine, not the second coming of Christ.
You can call economics "stupid" if you want.
This isn't about a free lunch: it's about removing inefficiencies from the system. Just like I have a duty to buy the cheaper of two identical products, and a duty to sell my labor for the highest price I can, I have a duty to steal a commodity that I cannot purchase at a reasonable price.
To pay too much for an item is to cheat all my fellow consumers. To accept too small a wage is to cheat all my fellow laborers. To fail to steal from the RIAA is to cheat both my fellow consumers and the RIAA itself: the fact that piracy exists to this extent is proof that they could make more money by selling their product for less. If I failed to demonstrate this to them, I would be doing them a disservice.
Is it mercenary? Is it amoral? It's economics.