Let's say you were to look at my house - you'd find most machines have IE.
What it wouldn't tell you is none of us use IE. The first thing my son did with his new Mac mini, for example, was download Firefox, Adblock, and NoScript and train the latter two in how to permit his fave gaming and flash sites to work properly.
My WinXP laptop, has IE. But, other than downloading patches to the extremely buggy Microsoft OS, I don't use it unless I'm forced to. I normally use Firefox or Opera.
So, my household could be counted as 100 percent IE. But, like most MSFT statistics, that would be an inaccurate measure. In fact, it should be counted as 100 percent Other Than IE.
not to mention, with hospitals being semi-crowded and having lots of people willing and able to not wash their hands between patients passing diseases on...
You won't be saying that when you're in line to re-buy the Star Wars trilogy, the Matrix trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Blade trilogy, etc.
I don't own DVDs of those right now. Thus, it would be difficult for me to "re-buy" them.
Anyway, I can watch Blade on SciFi starting this month. It's now a TV series.
I should point out that repeated insecticide exposure has a strong correlation with Alzheimer's disease, so it's not like being a farm worker is all wonderful.
I used to bale hay, make shingles and shakes (the wood kind), limb trees, and such things when I was 13.
We should also consider that one of the major disease problems nowadays is just the overuse of antibiotics, both in farm animals (feed, shots) and in home use, which actually, from a medical perspective, helps create drug-resistant and antibiotic-resistant diseases.
Better to just wash your hands with normal soap and water, quite frankly.
As you point out, lack of exposure at an earlier age makes on more susceptible to later infections.
And various additives in the food and water supply, especially hormones, can trigger immune difficulties later in life, especially for women and girls.
1. Cost in the more than $2000 range, up to $5000. 2. Adopted in developing countries, where power is much more unstable or harder to get - easier to recharge this from solar cells or power that's only on a few hours a day. 3. Reminds me of the old "luggable" portables one hated having to lug around, especially give the 20 lb weights. 4. Might be good for someone off the grid, with a portable high-speed connection (satellite dish or long-range WiFi?) 5. Might also be good for someone who is retired and moves infrequently (snowbirds).
I agree, why bother paying out the nose for Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and HDTV, if by instead just waiting two or three years we can watch the same exact movie, on sale for $9.99, on a $100 player (either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, most of us really don't care) on our $150 60" HDTV?
Think of all the game titles you could buy with that money!
What does HDTV appealing to opera lovers have to do with the Blu-Ray release of a shitty Andrew Lloyd Weber musical?
I'm basing this on Wall Street Journal articles on: HDTV, the movie you seem to despise, and the fact that a large number of the fans of said movie are: a. women and/or b. opera fans.
Noone said you had to like the movie. You asked why it was chosen. And I responded with the obvious marketing reasons why it was chosen.
Personally, I would have chosen the Ring Cycle myself, but I'm not involved in this.
Whoever's greenlighting chick films like "50 first dates" and "Phantom of the Opera" for testdriving a new medium needs a new job, preferably selling hot dogs on a street corner, to get an idea of what a market actually asks for.
Well, I actually watched Phantom of the Opera at the movies on the big screen, and I think that they're aiming for the Opera and Cinema buffs with that one - a lot of early HDTV adopters are into opera for some reason, have the sound systems to appreciate it, and might want to get it in a higher resolution format.
It won a number of awards for cinematography, with good reason.
Plus, the blood, burns, and mask are just plain cool.
I agree, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are severely underwhelming, for some reason.
This is quite surprising to me - I was one of the first people to buy an Apple II+, bought one of the first RCA VCR models (all my friends said buy Beta, but I was working shift...)
It's just that, as my son showed me this past week, the only thing that really seems to matter is Net speed. To explain, he had an iMac that I gave him when he was 7 - he's now 15 - and we had crammed RAM in but we finally couldn't upgrade any more, and things weren't working. So, we went and bought him a Mac mini.
First thing he said, after a friend helped him set up Firefox and Adblock and NoScript was... "It's not any faster!".
I said, look all the images resolve faster, the graphics on your new flatscreen Samsung panel are at higher res, but in the end, we're still using the same speed of cable modem, and the only thing that would change that would be if we went to Gigapop Internet.
Same thing with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD - just no need for them. Most people don't have 1080p HDTVs that are 50 inches or bigger. Most games won't need them. None of the fun ones that he wants to play will.
So, the revolution in data storage (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) dies with a whimper, because there's nothing behind the Mask.
when I found out Kate Beckinsale's latest, that Underworld sequel, was in Blu-Ray, but I don't have an HDTV, and am waiting a few years, so I'll just hold out until the prices drop below $100.
Which, as any student of marketing and sales will tell you, they will.
I have to say, though, I'm severely underimpressed by the Blu-Ray marketing campaign.
We all know that in a given town, there is usually a monopoly or oligopoly of cable and DSL providers. Even cell phone coverage varies, but most people don't use their cell provider for broadband, using DSL or cable, so by definition we don't have a perfect model and we can't use that economic model. We instead must use a pricing model based on few participants (sellers) who have high barriers of entry, regulation, and large fixed costs with little variability in rate pricing plans for consumers - you can't pay a different rate at different times of day for cable/DSL, you can't switch providers without significant cost (usually involves up to three months, costs more than $200 to disconnect and get a new connection), you can't observe actual prices (until you get the service you don't even realize the actual taxes you pay - which is fairly substantial - from muncipal/county/state/federal), and it's pretty darned confusing for consumers.
Thus, we must assume an imperfect market and pricing must by definition be based on a monopoly or oligopoly that maximizes their own personal returns at the cost of the consumer.
In other words, it's way more expensive than it would be if there was a true market. By quite a bit.
good points, but actually, we can either have a sharp demand/supply curve, or a flat one, or a moderately sloped one.
in some markets, we may find that the desires of the buyers are the most significant in determing the price of the service (broadband, considering different flavors/brands/speeds).
in other markets, we may find that the lack of competition amongst competitors (places where the same large corporation owns the cable, wireless, and DSL services or reaches a colluding anti-competitive market agreement in our under-regulated market) means that the price is determined by the sellers and their most efficient return on investment (an example being renters where most apartment buildings are owned by the same conglomerate or are dorm rooms owned by a specific college).
and then other markets may be inbetween these two extremes.
Assuming there isn't a monopoly or oligopoly in our current environment will lead one to inaccurately assume perfect competition, with easy barrier of entry (they may only permit one cable provider or provide barriers to cell towers or land lines for DSL), perfect information (knowing what the current and future rates are and consumers having easy access to information to determine the actual true cost (both teaser rate and lock-in rate and cost/length of service contract and installation/disconnect fees)), and perfect liquidity of capital with sufficient equivalent capital for all consumers.
Such a perfect world (the latter case) doesn't exist anywhere I've seen. Thus, we need to use a better economic model, assuming imperfect information for competitors (no published rates), sticky prices (regulator sets levels), imperfect information for consumers (only teaser rates seen and fine print obscuring full cost so what you think is $15 is really $200 when you install), and high barriers to entry (restrictions on building, long permit schedules, long wait times for new installations, lack of supply for materials to install, shortage of contractors to install, etc).
In other words, you're both right. And you're both wrong.
remember, if you get two or more economists in a room, you'll get a number of different answers equal to the number of economists in the room...
For example, where I live in Fremont (in Seattle), there are tons of public wireless 10b/g connections. Thus, for the first three months that I had my laptop, my broadband service was free. I could use it on campus at the UW, at SCCC, in the University District, in many coffee shops, and in a number of other neighborhoods.
Our city council is seriously proposing to wire all public buildings to provide free cable broadband across the board in every public building, in addition to wireless services.
I notice we're comparing cable modem (usually 1-4 or 1-8 and sometimes 1-10 Mbps) and DSL (comes in 128k, 256k, 512k, 1Mbps, up to usually 2Mbps).
But in other nations, like say South Korea, you can get Gigapop internet, which runs at speeds up to 100 Mbps, and you can get it for about $15 a month or cheaper. Because such nations invested in broadband for everyone, realizing that doing so dropped the costs across the board, and gave them a competitive advantage.
So, from that perspective, it's not a question of: Should DSL cost $15 a month, it's a question of: Shouldn't we get Gigapop internet for other advanced nations for $15 a month.
And, from that perspective, doesn't this show that economies of scale, efficient government, and standardization can provide lower cost high-speed internet service if we focus on the real problem - which is that, we're way way behind in the USA and a few other nations, and need to wake up and smell the Internet2 darned fast.
Good point. But I think a lot of us actually looked at the gaming lists for the different consoles. I did. What I saw was that the Wii has a lot of really fun games, in multiple areas of gaming, that I want to play, and that it was kind of spare for the PS3 and 360, unless I was a sports geek (hint - get a 360) or needed Blu-Ray (hint - get a PS3).
So, I'm down for a Wii right now. In fact, I like it so much, I bought the company! - literally, today I bought 500 shares of NTDOY.PK (Nintendo ADR shares), after having sold off 400 Microsoft shares at the market peak (before the crash).
Call me a fool if you will, but my guts rarely wrong about these things. And over the years I've learned to listen to my gut.
Interesting, but my ex was a griefer in Sims
on
Gamers Don't Want Grief
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
When they did the beta-test of Sims Online, my ex was a griefer - she used to go around killing off Sims, starting fights, and that kind of thing - mostly because IRL she never did any of that, and she wanted to test the limits.
She got quite good at it too, to the point where many would just give her what she wanted in hopes she'd go away.
I think that, if it were like the death experience in Sims - where you just die, but people can mourn over you and you just have to win a fiddle contest with the Grim Reaper or pay him $100 to become alive again - it wouldn't be such a deal. Or if objects were the same as in Animal Crossing, where you can go into someone else's house all you want, you can play with their toys, and open their drawers, but you can't take anything away.
In such worlds where death or destruction becomes less of an issue, griefers are just annoying little boys and girls with butterfly nets that keep wacking you on the head.
1. Order PS3 for Sony fanboys from UK. 2. Sell it on eBay after launch while artificial shortage exists. 3. Use profits to buy Wii. 4. Put rest into Nintendo shares. 5. Retire to sunny Bermuda.
Ah, you admit that: a. it crashes, b. it's related to the video card.
A wise person would still realize that, when running multiple apps (I sometimes have up to ten going, including scripts, databases, spreadsheets, email, and other background events) and with multiple desktray icons (which all tend to reside and some may kick off downloads), with multiple screens, that my recommendation would make better sense.
Sure, you can run it with 128mb vRAM. Sure, you can run it with 512mb RAM.
But if you're going to use it like many of us do, you should just bite the bullet and get 2 GB RAM or more and realize 512mb vRAM might not be sufficient.
You might have no problem with things crashing, but in many of my former jobs, if it crashed, people might die or scientific discoveries might not get found (some things run for weeks on end).
Well, from what I've heard, the 1 GB RAM requirement is more of a minimum - if you'll be using a number of apps at the same time, you will be forced to up that to 2 GB RAM. In addition, the 512 MB video RAM is apparently a bare minimum as well. I would suggest 1024 vRAM.
no, I'm just giving you the textbook definition - in fact, I got it from a book I checked out of the UW Library stacks, copyright 2006, specifically on Global Climate Change, by a respected author.
It's a bit dry reading for many people, much of it is about how the core drills in Antartica didn't work, how the Greenland drilling started off as a German expedition and how people died during later followups, and things like lakebed sediments and iceberg fallout on the seabed in various locations.
Slashdot Mirror
And the downloads on my 1200 baud modem are really slow.
Are you sure this is a better version?
It depends on how you measure that, really.
Let's say you were to look at my house - you'd find most machines have IE.
What it wouldn't tell you is none of us use IE. The first thing my son did with his new Mac mini, for example, was download Firefox, Adblock, and NoScript and train the latter two in how to permit his fave gaming and flash sites to work properly.
My WinXP laptop, has IE. But, other than downloading patches to the extremely buggy Microsoft OS, I don't use it unless I'm forced to. I normally use Firefox or Opera.
So, my household could be counted as 100 percent IE. But, like most MSFT statistics, that would be an inaccurate measure. In fact, it should be counted as 100 percent Other Than IE.
Phantom of the Opera does NOT appeal to Opera fans.
I must disagree. I know of three opera fans, two from Germany and one from Seattle, who all liked the Phantom of the Opera.
In marketing magazines for the film community, opera and classical music fans were identified as the most likely purchasers of Phantom of the Opera.
Just because you don't like it, but like opera, doesn't mean that other people who like opera also dislike the movie Phantom of the Opera.
not to mention, with hospitals being semi-crowded and having lots of people willing and able to not wash their hands between patients passing diseases on ...
You won't be saying that when you're in line to re-buy the Star Wars trilogy, the Matrix trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Blade trilogy, etc.
I don't own DVDs of those right now. Thus, it would be difficult for me to "re-buy" them.
Anyway, I can watch Blade on SciFi starting this month. It's now a TV series.
I should point out that repeated insecticide exposure has a strong correlation with Alzheimer's disease, so it's not like being a farm worker is all wonderful.
I used to bale hay, make shingles and shakes (the wood kind), limb trees, and such things when I was 13.
We should also consider that one of the major disease problems nowadays is just the overuse of antibiotics, both in farm animals (feed, shots) and in home use, which actually, from a medical perspective, helps create drug-resistant and antibiotic-resistant diseases.
Better to just wash your hands with normal soap and water, quite frankly.
As you point out, lack of exposure at an earlier age makes on more susceptible to later infections.
And various additives in the food and water supply, especially hormones, can trigger immune difficulties later in life, especially for women and girls.
1. Cost in the more than $2000 range, up to $5000.
2. Adopted in developing countries, where power is much more unstable or harder to get - easier to recharge this from solar cells or power that's only on a few hours a day.
3. Reminds me of the old "luggable" portables one hated having to lug around, especially give the 20 lb weights.
4. Might be good for someone off the grid, with a portable high-speed connection (satellite dish or long-range WiFi?)
5. Might also be good for someone who is retired and moves infrequently (snowbirds).
I agree, why bother paying out the nose for Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and HDTV, if by instead just waiting two or three years we can watch the same exact movie, on sale for $9.99, on a $100 player (either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, most of us really don't care) on our $150 60" HDTV?
Think of all the game titles you could buy with that money!
What does HDTV appealing to opera lovers have to do with the Blu-Ray release of a shitty Andrew Lloyd Weber musical?
I'm basing this on Wall Street Journal articles on: HDTV, the movie you seem to despise, and the fact that a large number of the fans of said movie are: a. women and/or b. opera fans.
Noone said you had to like the movie. You asked why it was chosen. And I responded with the obvious marketing reasons why it was chosen.
Personally, I would have chosen the Ring Cycle myself, but I'm not involved in this.
Whoever's greenlighting chick films like "50 first dates" and "Phantom of the Opera" for testdriving a new medium needs a new job, preferably selling hot dogs on a street corner, to get an idea of what a market actually asks for.
Well, I actually watched Phantom of the Opera at the movies on the big screen, and I think that they're aiming for the Opera and Cinema buffs with that one - a lot of early HDTV adopters are into opera for some reason, have the sound systems to appreciate it, and might want to get it in a higher resolution format.
It won a number of awards for cinematography, with good reason.
Plus, the blood, burns, and mask are just plain cool.
I agree, both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are severely underwhelming, for some reason.
...)
... "It's not any faster!".
This is quite surprising to me - I was one of the first people to buy an Apple II+, bought one of the first RCA VCR models (all my friends said buy Beta, but I was working shift
It's just that, as my son showed me this past week, the only thing that really seems to matter is Net speed. To explain, he had an iMac that I gave him when he was 7 - he's now 15 - and we had crammed RAM in but we finally couldn't upgrade any more, and things weren't working. So, we went and bought him a Mac mini.
First thing he said, after a friend helped him set up Firefox and Adblock and NoScript was
I said, look all the images resolve faster, the graphics on your new flatscreen Samsung panel are at higher res, but in the end, we're still using the same speed of cable modem, and the only thing that would change that would be if we went to Gigapop Internet.
Same thing with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD - just no need for them. Most people don't have 1080p HDTVs that are 50 inches or bigger. Most games won't need them. None of the fun ones that he wants to play will.
So, the revolution in data storage (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) dies with a whimper, because there's nothing behind the Mask.
when I found out Kate Beckinsale's latest, that Underworld sequel, was in Blu-Ray, but I don't have an HDTV, and am waiting a few years, so I'll just hold out until the prices drop below $100.
Which, as any student of marketing and sales will tell you, they will.
I have to say, though, I'm severely underimpressed by the Blu-Ray marketing campaign.
fight them on the lilypads, we shall never surrrender!
I suggest we call on our French allies in NATO to assist Australia. Especially one of their cooking battalions.
Seriously, though, this is why plopping down species willy nilly thinking they will "solve" a "pest" problem is almost always a biological disaster.
Ah, but Oregon is the same size as:
Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia - combined.
You were saying?
We all know that in a given town, there is usually a monopoly or oligopoly of cable and DSL providers. Even cell phone coverage varies, but most people don't use their cell provider for broadband, using DSL or cable, so by definition we don't have a perfect model and we can't use that economic model. We instead must use a pricing model based on few participants (sellers) who have high barriers of entry, regulation, and large fixed costs with little variability in rate pricing plans for consumers - you can't pay a different rate at different times of day for cable/DSL, you can't switch providers without significant cost (usually involves up to three months, costs more than $200 to disconnect and get a new connection), you can't observe actual prices (until you get the service you don't even realize the actual taxes you pay - which is fairly substantial - from muncipal/county/state/federal), and it's pretty darned confusing for consumers.
Thus, we must assume an imperfect market and pricing must by definition be based on a monopoly or oligopoly that maximizes their own personal returns at the cost of the consumer.
In other words, it's way more expensive than it would be if there was a true market. By quite a bit.
good points, but actually, we can either have a sharp demand/supply curve, or a flat one, or a moderately sloped one.
...
in some markets, we may find that the desires of the buyers are the most significant in determing the price of the service (broadband, considering different flavors/brands/speeds).
in other markets, we may find that the lack of competition amongst competitors (places where the same large corporation owns the cable, wireless, and DSL services or reaches a colluding anti-competitive market agreement in our under-regulated market) means that the price is determined by the sellers and their most efficient return on investment (an example being renters where most apartment buildings are owned by the same conglomerate or are dorm rooms owned by a specific college).
and then other markets may be inbetween these two extremes.
Assuming there isn't a monopoly or oligopoly in our current environment will lead one to inaccurately assume perfect competition, with easy barrier of entry (they may only permit one cable provider or provide barriers to cell towers or land lines for DSL), perfect information (knowing what the current and future rates are and consumers having easy access to information to determine the actual true cost (both teaser rate and lock-in rate and cost/length of service contract and installation/disconnect fees)), and perfect liquidity of capital with sufficient equivalent capital for all consumers.
Such a perfect world (the latter case) doesn't exist anywhere I've seen. Thus, we need to use a better economic model, assuming imperfect information for competitors (no published rates), sticky prices (regulator sets levels), imperfect information for consumers (only teaser rates seen and fine print obscuring full cost so what you think is $15 is really $200 when you install), and high barriers to entry (restrictions on building, long permit schedules, long wait times for new installations, lack of supply for materials to install, shortage of contractors to install, etc).
In other words, you're both right. And you're both wrong.
remember, if you get two or more economists in a room, you'll get a number of different answers equal to the number of economists in the room
(grin)
For example, where I live in Fremont (in Seattle), there are tons of public wireless 10b/g connections. Thus, for the first three months that I had my laptop, my broadband service was free. I could use it on campus at the UW, at SCCC, in the University District, in many coffee shops, and in a number of other neighborhoods.
Our city council is seriously proposing to wire all public buildings to provide free cable broadband across the board in every public building, in addition to wireless services.
After all, why should we pay for the Net?
I notice we're comparing cable modem (usually 1-4 or 1-8 and sometimes 1-10 Mbps) and DSL (comes in 128k, 256k, 512k, 1Mbps, up to usually 2Mbps).
But in other nations, like say South Korea, you can get Gigapop internet, which runs at speeds up to 100 Mbps, and you can get it for about $15 a month or cheaper. Because such nations invested in broadband for everyone, realizing that doing so dropped the costs across the board, and gave them a competitive advantage.
So, from that perspective, it's not a question of: Should DSL cost $15 a month, it's a question of: Shouldn't we get Gigapop internet for other advanced nations for $15 a month.
And, from that perspective, doesn't this show that economies of scale, efficient government, and standardization can provide lower cost high-speed internet service if we focus on the real problem - which is that, we're way way behind in the USA and a few other nations, and need to wake up and smell the Internet2 darned fast.
Good point. But I think a lot of us actually looked at the gaming lists for the different consoles. I did. What I saw was that the Wii has a lot of really fun games, in multiple areas of gaming, that I want to play, and that it was kind of spare for the PS3 and 360, unless I was a sports geek (hint - get a 360) or needed Blu-Ray (hint - get a PS3).
So, I'm down for a Wii right now. In fact, I like it so much, I bought the company! - literally, today I bought 500 shares of NTDOY.PK (Nintendo ADR shares), after having sold off 400 Microsoft shares at the market peak (before the crash).
Call me a fool if you will, but my guts rarely wrong about these things. And over the years I've learned to listen to my gut.
When they did the beta-test of Sims Online, my ex was a griefer - she used to go around killing off Sims, starting fights, and that kind of thing - mostly because IRL she never did any of that, and she wanted to test the limits.
She got quite good at it too, to the point where many would just give her what she wanted in hopes she'd go away.
I think that, if it were like the death experience in Sims - where you just die, but people can mourn over you and you just have to win a fiddle contest with the Grim Reaper or pay him $100 to become alive again - it wouldn't be such a deal. Or if objects were the same as in Animal Crossing, where you can go into someone else's house all you want, you can play with their toys, and open their drawers, but you can't take anything away.
In such worlds where death or destruction becomes less of an issue, griefers are just annoying little boys and girls with butterfly nets that keep wacking you on the head.
1. Order PS3 for Sony fanboys from UK.
2. Sell it on eBay after launch while artificial shortage exists.
3. Use profits to buy Wii.
4. Put rest into Nintendo shares.
5. Retire to sunny Bermuda.
Ah, you admit that: a. it crashes, b. it's related to the video card.
A wise person would still realize that, when running multiple apps (I sometimes have up to ten going, including scripts, databases, spreadsheets, email, and other background events) and with multiple desktray icons (which all tend to reside and some may kick off downloads), with multiple screens, that my recommendation would make better sense.
Sure, you can run it with 128mb vRAM. Sure, you can run it with 512mb RAM.
But if you're going to use it like many of us do, you should just bite the bullet and get 2 GB RAM or more and realize 512mb vRAM might not be sufficient.
You might have no problem with things crashing, but in many of my former jobs, if it crashed, people might die or scientific discoveries might not get found (some things run for weeks on end).
Well, from what I've heard, the 1 GB RAM requirement is more of a minimum - if you'll be using a number of apps at the same time, you will be forced to up that to 2 GB RAM. In addition, the 512 MB video RAM is apparently a bare minimum as well. I would suggest 1024 vRAM.
by sending the full headers and links to spoof@paypal.com
no, I'm just giving you the textbook definition - in fact, I got it from a book I checked out of the UW Library stacks, copyright 2006, specifically on Global Climate Change, by a respected author.
It's a bit dry reading for many people, much of it is about how the core drills in Antartica didn't work, how the Greenland drilling started off as a German expedition and how people died during later followups, and things like lakebed sediments and iceberg fallout on the seabed in various locations.