This just came up a couple days ago with some friends. Are there any windows laptops that can drive 4 4K external monitors?
I know the surface book can run two 4K external monitors, but only at 30hz each. I would be interested to know of any machines that can run more than two 4K external monitors (or run 2 5k monitors).
I'd love to see how this handles Shakespeare. Or Joyce, for that matter. Also, it would be really cool if you could translate to idiomatic metaphors that make sense in the target language.
with raid 5 you lose a percentage of the disks you use (like ~25% if you use 4 disks).
You're right about the amount for 4 disks, but the general answer to how much you lose in RAID5 is "one disk". The percentages change with the number of disks involved in the array. So in a 3 drive array (the minimum for RAID5), you lose one disk; 1/3 = 33%. For a 10 drive array, you still lose 1 disk, but 1/10 is only 10%, so the efficiency is better the more drives you use.
Atheists rule out the possibility of a god. Agnostics don't. Agnostics are sure they do not believe in god while leaving the possibility open. Atheists deny the possibility of god. You are an agnostic.
I've had this conversation more than a few times with people over the years and I believe that your idea of what atheist means is wrong.
I believe an atheist is someone who believes that there is no god, while an agnostic is someone who believes that it is impossible to say definitively one way or the other whether there is a god and therefore doesn't believe in a god (or the non-existence of god).
Your point about
To believe something exists, you need proof it exists. To believe something doesn't exists, you need proof it doesn't exist. To not believe something exists, you just need to not have proof it exists.
is way off the mark. You absolutely do not need proof to believe, you only need faith. Belief plus evidence equals knowing, which is different again.
I think that in your elephant example, your non-belief makes you an elephant-bathtub-agnostic. You don't know of the elephants existence or non-existence, but you choose not to believe with the expectation that you may be proven wrong by further evidence.
To sum up, atheism is the belief in non-existence of god, just as theism is the belief in the existence of god. Agnosticism is the lack of belief in god. And you sir are an agnostic in my estimation.
It seems that if this platform is coupled with a laser weapon there would be effectively no limit to the amount of destruction that could be rained down on one's enemies while this drone is airborne.
Imagine a high-flying drone that circles over an area for months at a time, sniping strategic targets with a laser at will.
>>>It's about constant exposure to low frequencies
Low electrical frequencies would have far less harm than the high electrical frequencies coming out of your TV and computer and LCD and CFL bulb and car's alternator and nearby FM radio tower and Wifi modem and.....
Why do you think that? Do you have any kind of proof that points to higher frequency background EM radiation being more harmful than low frequency? Or is that just an assumption on your part?
I'll be the first to say I don't know and I admit I'm curious. My initial thinking would lead me to believe that certain resonant frequencies would be the most harmful and that those frequencies could be found up and down the spectrum.
I know several high IQ people with DUIs on their record. Base attributes are supposed to be what the attribute is BEFORE modifiers are taken into account. Any decision or actions made when affected by a modifying state (19 vodka redbulls) would not affect your base attribute after the effect wears off (sleep off the hangover).
High WIS means not getting drunk in the first place.
Well, ok, maybe they noodle around with fantasies about what the future will hold, but that is not part of their marketing or development plans.
Generally, they are thinking in the 3-6 year out space. In other words, the next major version. Version Next+1 is not on their radar. Now when I say that, I would like to make two caveats before people start tagging me troll: 1) Current Version for MS internal is Next Version for everyone else. 2) a lot of bug fixes and features have been pushed back to Version Next+1, so in that sense it's on their radar, but no one is doing any serious critical thinking about how that version will shape up by the time it's ready to ship, until that version becomes "Next".
If MS REALLY thought "decades out", Win95 would have had built-in network security to protect users against the evils of the internet.
When my parents were divorced in '82, my mom got custody of my sister and myself and the divorce agreement stated that an amount of child support would be paid, per child, to the parent the child was living with. In the case that one child was living with each parent, no support would be paid. Support would continue until the children reach age 18 or finish 4 years of college.
Both my sister and I lived with my mother for several years, while she tried unsuccessfully to get my dad to pay child support. In '85, my sister went to live with my dad. Everyone had moved to a different state, we were in Oregon when the divorce happened, and now my mom and I were in Washington, and dad and sis were in California. My mom tried to enlist the state's help (Washington) in collecting back child support from dad. When we went in to the office, the caseworker assigned to help her kept asking weird questions about why she was not paying support to my dad. It turns out that the state of California had contacted the state of Washington about my sister and the state of Washington started garnishing my mom's wages. This was while I was living with my mom and still in high school, so the support for each child should have been offset.
So, by trying to get the state to help her collect back support owed to her, my mom got garnished by the state for support that she did not owe. It took 3 months to get them to stop, and the whole time, the caseworker assigned to help my mom seemed to be on my dad's side. Talk about bureaucratic screw-ups...
The whole child-support issue was eventually cleared up in '93 after my sister reached age 18. My mom went back to Oregon and filed for summary judgment on the debt owed to her, rolling up all the pluses and minuses and interest into one lump sum that he was ordered to make $100/month payments on. He paid for about 3 years, then stopped.
Currently he owes something around $26k on the judgment. Anyone know a lawyer in the state of Hawai'i willing to take on a collection case?
When I worked at M$, (in MSN, which releases WAY faster than any of the other divisions) getting a fix checked in to a bug I wrote usually took a week or more. Testing after that took anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple weeks. The process of rolling a new build into the production environment usually only took a few hours after the build passed QA, but was often scheduled for a few days in the future.
The only way I would agree with your average 48 hour assessment is if all you're talking about is how long it takes the developer to fix a bug in their code. And that's after the bug has been found, isolated, documented, and some poor tester has gone blue in the face arguing with devs and PMs that this is a SERIOUS bug and NEEDS TO BE FIXED RIGHT NOW until they actually assign it as a priority task to the specific developer involved.
Again, my experience is with MSN division. One of the properties I worked on shipped 14 releases in 22 months. A lot of times, bug fixes were put in to "version current+2"* because of the tight schedule of dev/test/release we were running.
* version current+2 meaning that if we're currently running v1.0 on our servers and developing v2.0, a newly reported (non-critical) bug would be scheduled to be fixed in v3.0
I gave up on PDAs when my last Newton died four years ago. I had made a firm decision not to buy a device that had less features than my Messagepad 2100. At the time, nothing else did handwriting recognition anywhere close to what I could do on the Newton, and as I look around today I still don't see anything. I could log in to work while on the BART using a Ricochet modem, and for general note-taking (and note-sharing with the built-in IR port) there has never been anything easier. Mixing formatted text with handwriting with hand-drawn shapes and vector drawings on the same page? Tell me where I can buy that today in a PDA size.
I cried when they took them off the market. I hoped it would be a temporary thing. I prayed they were shelving it only to bring it back even more insanely awesomer. I lost hope, gave in to Danger, and now rarely even dream of PDAs anymore.
I'm still waiting for something as feature rich as the Newton. Palm never appealed to me because I didn't want to learn Graffiti; I'd gotten spoiled on handwriting recognition that recognized my handwriting. Tablets are too big.
The only thing I've owned since that's PDA-like was a SideKick II phone/device. While that was cool for reading email and light websurfing, I viewed it more as a phone-plus rather than a PDA, and it is not nearly as open of a platform. After going through 3 of them in a year (2 under warranty, 1 my bad), I went back to a 'normal' cheap-o cell phone.
I've played around with Treos, Windows Mobile devices, and blackberries, but none of these really enraptured me like the first time I played with a Newton. It fits the form factor of a small paper notepad. You can write on it. You can draw on it. You can record or playback sound. You can look up a phone number in your address book, hold your phone up, and have the Newton dial the number. You can even turn it into a cell phone with a PCMCIA GSM phone card.
I can't believe this technology has been dead for almost a decade now. Please bring it back. Please.
You may be thinking about markup, or gross margins. That is only the sales price of the item minus the cost of the item, without factoring in overhead. Payroll, taxes, business rent, utilities, advertising, etc. are ignored for the purpose of computing gross profit.
Profit margin is different for different industries. For instance, the average net margin for furniture manufacturers is approximately 8%, while average retail grocery chains have net margins that are a bit shy of 2.5%. The difference here is that while a sofa delivers a better margin than a can of soup, the inventory in a grocery store will turn over much faster than furniture, thus allowing the capital investment to not be tied up as long in inventory.
Check out http://www.hussmanfunds.com/rsi/profitmargins.htm to see a graph of the average of the top 500 companies' profit margins for the last 50 years. Most of the graph is in the 5.5% to 7.5% range.
Microsoft, OTOH, has huge profit margins. Software companies in general can have large margins because the per-piece cost of their product is so low that they can make serious bank once they've sold enough copies to offset the development costs.
A quick glance at a financials webpage shows MS with a 27.5% net margin. Compare to Google at 27.5%, or to GM at 0.8%.
And a final nod back to your quote of 50-60% margins: MSFT shows 79.1% Gross margin, which even you must admit is really really high. (unless you are too)
I agree completely with your point about not messing with file management.
I started using iTunes on Windows as jukebox software while working at Microsoft. Previous to that, I'd been using Winamp while at work to listen to the 80Gigs or so of music that I had on my work computer.
Here's why I switched:
First, my listening preference at the time was what I like to call 'Gong Show Radio', where Winamp would run in random mode on a playlist of all my music. If a song came up that I didn't like or wasn't in the mood for, I'd click next. The hassle with using Winamp was that I had to remake my 'everything' list whenever I added music to my collection. I had to use a ripping program to rip my cds, then put them logically in my file system, then add them to my Winamp playlist. ITunes does all that itself. In fact, when adding several discs at once to my collection, there's a setting that allows me to have a cd ripped on insertion, then eject when done. That meant I could rip my music on my computer without even thinking about it, just swap cds when I noticed the drive tray open.
Next, making playlists in iTunes is drag-and-drop. Making playlists in winamp was a PITA.
I don't burn cds of my music very often, but when I have, I've appreciated the simplicity of iTunes. It's even easier than Nero to put together a disc the way you want. You want mp3 disc? data disc? AIFF disc? Time gap between tracks? no problem.
Some people here have complained that iTunes wants to organize their files in a different way than they would do it themselves. I have never found this to be a problem, because regardless of how the songs are stored on the HD, the interface for accessing them in iTunes is the same. And unlike Winamp*, I'm able to view and sort my music based on album, artist, genre, song title, or whatever other data column I care to.
The only bitch I have about iTunes is that it wouldn't help me put music onto my 20GB Zen mp3 player. The device came with its own proprietary software that was kludgy to use, and after a month or so, I stopped updating my mp3 player, and a year later got an iPod. Updating songs on it from iTunes is insanely easy, my only bitch is that it takes so long to sync. Since then, my zen has just been collecting dust. (please note that I did not purchase either mp3 player, both were gifts.)
Again, these are the reasons I switched to iTunes as a digital jukebox. There are other perquisites that have been released in iTunes updates since then, like automatically downloading podcasts, video support, and netradio. I don't know of any other product that is as easy to use that has as much functionality. Please advise if you know of any.
*Please note that my switch occurred around 4 years ago, and Winamp may have changed since then. The features and faults I describe may be out-of-date, but I don't really care as I have software that works great and I haven't looked back. I still have an open mind, but I haven't heard anyone screaming about how $foo software makes a much better jukebox than iTunes, and at this point the software would have to be significantly better to make me switch.
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I know the surface book can run two 4K external monitors, but only at 30hz each. I would be interested to know of any machines that can run more than two 4K external monitors (or run 2 5k monitors).
Actually, only 99 parts. He doesn't specify how many parts in the whole, so you can't just assume that equals 99%.
Of course. Close enough counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear ordnance.
And dancing...
I'd love to see how this handles Shakespeare. Or Joyce, for that matter. Also, it would be really cool if you could translate to idiomatic metaphors that make sense in the target language.
If only they had this system in the 25th century...
Temba, his arms wide.
with raid 5 you lose a percentage of the disks you use (like ~25% if you use 4 disks).
You're right about the amount for 4 disks, but the general answer to how much you lose in RAID5 is "one disk". The percentages change with the number of disks involved in the array. So in a 3 drive array (the minimum for RAID5), you lose one disk; 1/3 = 33%. For a 10 drive array, you still lose 1 disk, but 1/10 is only 10%, so the efficiency is better the more drives you use.
Atheists rule out the possibility of a god. Agnostics don't. Agnostics are sure they do not believe in god while leaving the possibility open. Atheists deny the possibility of god. You are an agnostic.
I've had this conversation more than a few times with people over the years and I believe that your idea of what atheist means is wrong.
I believe an atheist is someone who believes that there is no god, while an agnostic is someone who believes that it is impossible to say definitively one way or the other whether there is a god and therefore doesn't believe in a god (or the non-existence of god).
Your point about
To believe something exists, you need proof it exists. To believe something doesn't exists, you need proof it doesn't exist. To not believe something exists, you just need to not have proof it exists.
is way off the mark. You absolutely do not need proof to believe, you only need faith. Belief plus evidence equals knowing, which is different again.
I think that in your elephant example, your non-belief makes you an elephant-bathtub-agnostic. You don't know of the elephants existence or non-existence, but you choose not to believe with the expectation that you may be proven wrong by further evidence.
To sum up, atheism is the belief in non-existence of god, just as theism is the belief in the existence of god. Agnosticism is the lack of belief in god. And you sir are an agnostic in my estimation.
It seems that if this platform is coupled with a laser weapon there would be effectively no limit to the amount of destruction that could be rained down on one's enemies while this drone is airborne.
Imagine a high-flying drone that circles over an area for months at a time, sniping strategic targets with a laser at will.
Now imagine a whole fleet of them.
>>>It's about constant exposure to low frequencies
Low electrical frequencies would have far less harm than the high electrical frequencies coming out of your TV and computer and LCD and CFL bulb and car's alternator and nearby FM radio tower and Wifi modem and.....
Why do you think that? Do you have any kind of proof that points to higher frequency background EM radiation being more harmful than low frequency? Or is that just an assumption on your part?
I'll be the first to say I don't know and I admit I'm curious. My initial thinking would lead me to believe that certain resonant frequencies would be the most harmful and that those frequencies could be found up and down the spectrum.
I'm pretty sure that's a tilde (~) and not a hyphen (-). If reading out loud, replace the tilde with the word 'approximately'.
I know several high IQ people with DUIs on their record. Base attributes are supposed to be what the attribute is BEFORE modifiers are taken into account. Any decision or actions made when affected by a modifying state (19 vodka redbulls) would not affect your base attribute after the effect wears off (sleep off the hangover).
High WIS means not getting drunk in the first place.
Actually, 'resistance is useless' is correct if you're Vogon or Dalek.
It's only futile if you're Borg.
...oh wait... now I get your point.
So if they stop a hurricane in China, does that mean a butterfly here will stop flapping its wings?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iYBmAVuBns
In Soviet Russia, threshold crosses YOU!!
I've spotted Wii play on "Weeds" a couple times now. Funny, haven't seen any playstations on tv...
Was that wry humor that I'm not getting? Or just a very dumb comment?
Well, ok, maybe they noodle around with fantasies about what the future will hold, but that is not part of their marketing or development plans.
Generally, they are thinking in the 3-6 year out space. In other words, the next major version. Version Next+1 is not on their radar. Now when I say that, I would like to make two caveats before people start tagging me troll: 1) Current Version for MS internal is Next Version for everyone else. 2) a lot of bug fixes and features have been pushed back to Version Next+1, so in that sense it's on their radar, but no one is doing any serious critical thinking about how that version will shape up by the time it's ready to ship, until that version becomes "Next".
If MS REALLY thought "decades out", Win95 would have had built-in network security to protect users against the evils of the internet.
Both my sister and I lived with my mother for several years, while she tried unsuccessfully to get my dad to pay child support. In '85, my sister went to live with my dad. Everyone had moved to a different state, we were in Oregon when the divorce happened, and now my mom and I were in Washington, and dad and sis were in California. My mom tried to enlist the state's help (Washington) in collecting back child support from dad. When we went in to the office, the caseworker assigned to help her kept asking weird questions about why she was not paying support to my dad. It turns out that the state of California had contacted the state of Washington about my sister and the state of Washington started garnishing my mom's wages. This was while I was living with my mom and still in high school, so the support for each child should have been offset.
So, by trying to get the state to help her collect back support owed to her, my mom got garnished by the state for support that she did not owe. It took 3 months to get them to stop, and the whole time, the caseworker assigned to help my mom seemed to be on my dad's side. Talk about bureaucratic screw-ups...
The whole child-support issue was eventually cleared up in '93 after my sister reached age 18. My mom went back to Oregon and filed for summary judgment on the debt owed to her, rolling up all the pluses and minuses and interest into one lump sum that he was ordered to make $100/month payments on. He paid for about 3 years, then stopped.
Currently he owes something around $26k on the judgment. Anyone know a lawyer in the state of Hawai'i willing to take on a collection case?
Where do you get this info?
When I worked at M$, (in MSN, which releases WAY faster than any of the other divisions) getting a fix checked in to a bug I wrote usually took a week or more. Testing after that took anywhere from 5 minutes to a couple weeks. The process of rolling a new build into the production environment usually only took a few hours after the build passed QA, but was often scheduled for a few days in the future.
The only way I would agree with your average 48 hour assessment is if all you're talking about is how long it takes the developer to fix a bug in their code. And that's after the bug has been found, isolated, documented, and some poor tester has gone blue in the face arguing with devs and PMs that this is a SERIOUS bug and NEEDS TO BE FIXED RIGHT NOW until they actually assign it as a priority task to the specific developer involved.
Again, my experience is with MSN division. One of the properties I worked on shipped 14 releases in 22 months. A lot of times, bug fixes were put in to "version current+2"* because of the tight schedule of dev/test/release we were running.
* version current+2 meaning that if we're currently running v1.0 on our servers and developing v2.0, a newly reported (non-critical) bug would be scheduled to be fixed in v3.0
I cried when they took them off the market. I hoped it would be a temporary thing. I prayed they were shelving it only to bring it back even more insanely awesomer. I lost hope, gave in to Danger, and now rarely even dream of PDAs anymore.
I'm still waiting for something as feature rich as the Newton. Palm never appealed to me because I didn't want to learn Graffiti; I'd gotten spoiled on handwriting recognition that recognized my handwriting. Tablets are too big.
The only thing I've owned since that's PDA-like was a SideKick II phone/device. While that was cool for reading email and light websurfing, I viewed it more as a phone-plus rather than a PDA, and it is not nearly as open of a platform. After going through 3 of them in a year (2 under warranty, 1 my bad), I went back to a 'normal' cheap-o cell phone.
I've played around with Treos, Windows Mobile devices, and blackberries, but none of these really enraptured me like the first time I played with a Newton. It fits the form factor of a small paper notepad. You can write on it. You can draw on it. You can record or playback sound. You can look up a phone number in your address book, hold your phone up, and have the Newton dial the number. You can even turn it into a cell phone with a PCMCIA GSM phone card.
I can't believe this technology has been dead for almost a decade now. Please bring it back. Please.
...or something better...
thanks.
You may be thinking about markup, or gross margins. That is only the sales price of the item minus the cost of the item, without factoring in overhead. Payroll, taxes, business rent, utilities, advertising, etc. are ignored for the purpose of computing gross profit.
Profit margin is different for different industries. For instance, the average net margin for furniture manufacturers is approximately 8%, while average retail grocery chains have net margins that are a bit shy of 2.5%. The difference here is that while a sofa delivers a better margin than a can of soup, the inventory in a grocery store will turn over much faster than furniture, thus allowing the capital investment to not be tied up as long in inventory.
Check out http://www.hussmanfunds.com/rsi/profitmargins.htm to see a graph of the average of the top 500 companies' profit margins for the last 50 years. Most of the graph is in the 5.5% to 7.5% range.
Microsoft, OTOH, has huge profit margins. Software companies in general can have large margins because the per-piece cost of their product is so low that they can make serious bank once they've sold enough copies to offset the development costs.
A quick glance at a financials webpage shows MS with a 27.5% net margin. Compare to Google at 27.5%, or to GM at 0.8%.
And a final nod back to your quote of 50-60% margins: MSFT shows 79.1% Gross margin, which even you must admit is really really high. (unless you are too)
I started using iTunes on Windows as jukebox software while working at Microsoft. Previous to that, I'd been using Winamp while at work to listen to the 80Gigs or so of music that I had on my work computer.
Here's why I switched:
First, my listening preference at the time was what I like to call 'Gong Show Radio', where Winamp would run in random mode on a playlist of all my music. If a song came up that I didn't like or wasn't in the mood for, I'd click next. The hassle with using Winamp was that I had to remake my 'everything' list whenever I added music to my collection. I had to use a ripping program to rip my cds, then put them logically in my file system, then add them to my Winamp playlist. ITunes does all that itself. In fact, when adding several discs at once to my collection, there's a setting that allows me to have a cd ripped on insertion, then eject when done. That meant I could rip my music on my computer without even thinking about it, just swap cds when I noticed the drive tray open.
Next, making playlists in iTunes is drag-and-drop. Making playlists in winamp was a PITA.
I don't burn cds of my music very often, but when I have, I've appreciated the simplicity of iTunes. It's even easier than Nero to put together a disc the way you want. You want mp3 disc? data disc? AIFF disc? Time gap between tracks? no problem.
Some people here have complained that iTunes wants to organize their files in a different way than they would do it themselves. I have never found this to be a problem, because regardless of how the songs are stored on the HD, the interface for accessing them in iTunes is the same. And unlike Winamp*, I'm able to view and sort my music based on album, artist, genre, song title, or whatever other data column I care to.
The only bitch I have about iTunes is that it wouldn't help me put music onto my 20GB Zen mp3 player. The device came with its own proprietary software that was kludgy to use, and after a month or so, I stopped updating my mp3 player, and a year later got an iPod. Updating songs on it from iTunes is insanely easy, my only bitch is that it takes so long to sync. Since then, my zen has just been collecting dust. (please note that I did not purchase either mp3 player, both were gifts.)
Again, these are the reasons I switched to iTunes as a digital jukebox. There are other perquisites that have been released in iTunes updates since then, like automatically downloading podcasts, video support, and netradio. I don't know of any other product that is as easy to use that has as much functionality. Please advise if you know of any.
*Please note that my switch occurred around 4 years ago, and Winamp may have changed since then. The features and faults I describe may be out-of-date, but I don't really care as I have software that works great and I haven't looked back. I still have an open mind, but I haven't heard anyone screaming about how $foo software makes a much better jukebox than iTunes, and at this point the software would have to be significantly better to make me switch.