Yes, you do have to click and click and swipe. If I want to modify the URL in my address bar right now, I click once, it selects everything. Then I have to click again to turn off the "everything highlighted" and get to just a cursor in the field. Then I have to click and swipe again. THREE clicks and a swipe to highlight part of a string. With IE it's click, click/swipe. The problem is not so much that it's one more click, it's that it's different from every other app on the platform.
Also I swear sometimes Mozilla acts differently, though I can't reproduce it.
What about people who drive 15 MPH over the speed limit and believe in statistics? You know that over the course of a lifetime doing that, you're statistically going to be killing some fractional person, say it's 0.1 persons. That means between you and 10 other people driving like you for a lifetime, you've killed some innocent person.
If the cause and effect is more blurred, such as in this case, is that still evil? I'm talking about people who should know better, who are intelligent enough to know that they're not killing numbers, the 0.000001 person they kill by driving fast TODAY is a real person, today just may or may not be their day for it to kill 1.0 people.
IOW, is it evil to kill in easily avoidable ways, simply out of negligence, to gain some small personal gain (getting to lunch 3 minutes sooner)?
I have an IDE and a SCSI CDROM drive and a SCSI PCI controller and cables, heat-sealed in a plastic bag, in a box in my basement, so that in 20 years, if off-the-shelf computers can't read the CDs anymore, I can still deal with it. I'm betting that I'll still be able to find a machine with a PCI slot or a SCSI or IDE controller. I guess for another $100 or so I could also drop in a USB (or Firewire) to IDE adaptor case to give me more chances.
If you're worried about being able to read a format, spend $100 and take some precautions.
The "point" is that CD-R drives have become a commodity, and they're trying to stand out. Two years ago, I bought CD-R drives largely on brand, for the most part sticking with Yamaha and Plextor. It used to make a difference; I had cheap drives die on me after only a few hundred burns, whereas Plextor and Yamaha drives typically make it into the 10,000's.
However, for the last year or so, (at least, in my experience) a drive is a drive; they all work just fine and there's not much reason to get more than a $70 CompUSA-branded Sanyo or something. Yamaha and other higher-end manufacturers have had to cut prices drastically to remain competitive.
There are better and faster media being developed, but they're in the lab. When it comes time to develop a standard in the industry to utilize those media, I'm sure Yamaha will be at the table. In the mean time, they have to make money selling the product that's coming out the door now.
Having a drive that does something cool like this sets it apart and might make people spend an extra $20 for a Yamaha drive.
When officers pursued O. J. Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles eight years ago, a covey of police and television news helicopters tracked him with stabilized cameras hanging at the sides in their distinctive ball-shaped pods.
Not exactly new. Sure, it's better, more refined. Hell, I saw a Discovery Channel special that featured these cameras several years ago. They're used on the "cop" shows all the time.
Geez, I built a security system for my room with a relay, a buzzer, a battery and a couple of hunks of bare wire when I was 10 years old. I should write it up, maybe I can get on/.
The skilled trades unions that build houses will be petitioning the government for a royalty on each home that is sold in the used market.
"Our craftsmen put their heart and soul into creating these homes, it's only fair that each person that enjoys the product of that labor pays their fair share" said an industry spokesperson.
BTW, what I do most is video encoding, mainly VCD and SVCD using TMPGEnc. For that application, the Athlon XP 1700+ (running at 1.47 GHz) absolutely BLOWS AWAY the P4 running at 1.6 GHz. I mean, it's a LOT faster, and the P4 has more RAM and everything so it has no excuse. AMD might finish a job in 2.5 hours and the P4 would take well over 3 hours to do the same job. Don't ask me about game performance, hell, I don't even have Solitare loaded.
Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time... I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place. Your car (ANY car) will burst into flames if you remove the gas line from the engine and point it at the exhaust manifold while it's running with the engine hot. Same situation; something that's NEVER going to happen in real life, unless the thing was put together wrong in the first place.
While I agree that there have been some horrible chipsets for AMD CPUs, there are also some good ones. Most chipsets are pretty decent these days. The last couple of AMD based machines that I built, with Asus mainboards (K7V266E) have been rock solid, doing even video capture with a BT848 card (a good acid test of a mainboard) for hours on end without any problems. Some Intel based mainboards can't do as well. When switching to an unknown mainboard, I go with a manufacturer I know to build good stuff, and make sure I beat the hell out of the mainboard before my return policy time runs out.
I currently have two Intel P4 machines; my laptop (Inspiron 8200) and my machine at work. I would rather have gotten an AMD chip in both cases, but on the laptop, I was shopping for features and had to get an Intel processor based machine to get the other features that I wanted, and with the work machine, I took what they gave me.
Having two AMD machines at home, a Tbird 1400 and an Athlon XP 1700+, I'm seriously underimpressed by the P4 performance. As far as I can tell, the only reason to buy Intel anymore is out of pure inertia; they bring nothing to the table.
I'm sure there's something I don't understand about this, but... Sure they could move their servers offshore. But they still have to have a business located somewhere. If you have an office or employees in a country, you (or at least the portion of the company that those employees work for) need to follow the law in that country. Moving the server to Sealand doesn't mean that your office in New Jersey can't be issued a summons. Even if you incorporate offshore and have your employees telecommute, you need to have at least bank routing to get them their paychecks. The government can impound those accounts. Sealand only seems to me to be a good place for individuals to host info pages, not to run a business out of.
Wal-Mart and most small printers with digital-equipped printers have now surpassed the online places for price. Also convenience; I dump the photos I want onto an old 32MB CF card, drop it off on the way to work, and pick up my prints at lunch. I'm paying 30 cents, less for large quantities. Wal-Mart is 26 cents but you never know what idiot is going to be running the printer.
I buy Office Depot premium glossy paper, which I like very much. At full retail, it's $45 per 100 sheets, but it's often on sale for $25. With refilled carts, I can print a full 8.5 x 11 for about 35 cents. I can fit THREE 4 x 6's on there.
Sure, if I bought HP paper at 80 cents a sheet, and used OEM carts, it'd cost me well over $1 per sheet.
I do still go to Wal-Mart or the local photo lab for archival prints though. The inkjet is just for proofs, or if I need a print right away, or for stuff to thumbtack to my wall at work.
I personally use www.inksupply.com - they have been very good for me. The cool thing is that they have full, detailed instructions on their site. Check out the instructions beforehand and decide if it's something you want to do; some carts are a complete pain to refill, not worth the hassle.
Maybe so, but I'm at 2+ years on this printer, and I'm on about my 30th refill. With the HP, I only got 3 refills per cart, then I had to replace. So by now I would have replaced the cart 10 times. So how does this work out?
HP printer: $250 10 new carts: $200 20 refills: $50 total: $500
Epson printer: $130 30 refills: $75 Total: $205
It seems to me that if my printer failed COMPLETELY, TOMORROW, I could buy a new one and still be WAY ahead.
Add to that the fact that the photo quality of the Epson is (IMHO) far superior. (Don't argue, I said IMHO and that's not going to change).
That's funny. I've got some output in front of me right now, and I can rub it HARD and it doesn't smudge. Maybe you should try something other than HP. Yeah, when I was using an HP printer, the slightest dampness and the ink would just dissolve.
My Epson 870, printing photos on glossy photo paper; I can put these prints UNDER RUNNING WATER AND RUB HARD WITH A THUMB and no smudge. If I keep it up for more than about 30 seconds, eventually the print will lighten up a bit, but I think that's a bit ridiculous.
Buy an Epson instead of an HP, and the cartridge won't wear out, either. The Epson heads are separate and designed to last. The HP is integral and designed to fail.
Not as funny as you may think; I actually found a printer the other day that was on sale for cheaper than the two ink cartridges that came packaged in it (about $32 for the printer, I think, it was an Apollo (hp)). Since I had bought one of the printers for my mom (she prints something like 50 pages a year), I thought about buying one just to get the spare cartridges out of the box.
Before I buy a new inkjet, I check the online refill suppliers and make sure that they're reasonably easy to refill. I just don't buy printers that are not easy to refill.
I made an exception for the Epson 870 photo printer, but only after someone figured out how to refill it at all (originally it was not possible, but someone figured out how to cheat). It was good enough to put up with a little bit of hassle in filling the carts (it still only takes about 10 minutes)
The new carts for this printer are about $20 each. However, for $50 I bought enough ink to refill them dozens of times. Just be sure to get a specific formulation for your printer, not one of these Wal-Mart "universal" ink refilling kits.
To dispel some myths before they come up:
I have been refilling for 3 years now, both HP and Epson, probably 30 to 40 cartridge refills, and NOT ONE INSTANCE of a clogged head or anything.
Some people say the ink quality isn't the same. They're right; the aftermarket stuff is BETTER. I have a few dozen photos hanging on the wall behind me printed on the Epson 870. They have all faded in the sunlight a bit, but the ones printed with original Epson ink have faded A LOT more. Another complaint is possible color inaccuracies. I don't know, they look OK to me but I don't have "pantone eyes."
Also, they can't "void your warranty" for using aftermarket inks. Requiring people to buy their ink products for their printers is called "product tying" and is AFAIK an illegal monopolistic practice.
Yes, the quality is better with an inkjet. However, one thing to keep in mind is that most people don't care. I certainly don't. I print stuff out only for temporary use, then throw it out. Why they heck should I care if the text isn't razor sharp? It's still pretty darn nice looking.
The ability to print nice color CDROM labels, plus the ability to print photos on demand, makes an inkjet the only way to go for me. Yes, it costs $40 or so for a pair of new cartridges for my Epson. But I only ever bought one pair, then I refill them. It takes about 10 minutes and costs about $3 to fill both of them.
Oh for God's sake. Are you being intentionally obtuse? The CD player was just an example of a piece of equipment that the music industry is used to being able to control because it's hard for people to build them on the kitchen table. This is the kind of thinking they're exhibiting.
"If we make all the manufacturers build compliant devices the world will be compliant." Not true for devices like A to D converters, which are very easy to build. Hell, I built a low resolution one that was fast enough to do 16 level 64 x 64 video grabs for about $5 in 2 hours once, from plans on the net. The whole thing fit in a D25 shell and the software was about 1000 bytes.
If they ever do get all these laws in place, it might be a good thing; it could signal the beginning of a more widespread resurgence of electronics tinkering at home.
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Yes, you do have to click and click and swipe. If I want to modify the URL in my address bar right now, I click once, it selects everything. Then I have to click again to turn off the "everything highlighted" and get to just a cursor in the field. Then I have to click and swipe again. THREE clicks and a swipe to highlight part of a string. With IE it's click, click/swipe. The problem is not so much that it's one more click, it's that it's different from every other app on the platform.
Also I swear sometimes Mozilla acts differently, though I can't reproduce it.
What about people who drive 15 MPH over the speed limit and believe in statistics? You know that over the course of a lifetime doing that, you're statistically going to be killing some fractional person, say it's 0.1 persons. That means between you and 10 other people driving like you for a lifetime, you've killed some innocent person.
If the cause and effect is more blurred, such as in this case, is that still evil? I'm talking about people who should know better, who are intelligent enough to know that they're not killing numbers, the 0.000001 person they kill by driving fast TODAY is a real person, today just may or may not be their day for it to kill 1.0 people.
IOW, is it evil to kill in easily avoidable ways, simply out of negligence, to gain some small personal gain (getting to lunch 3 minutes sooner)?
I have an IDE and a SCSI CDROM drive and a SCSI PCI controller and cables, heat-sealed in a plastic bag, in a box in my basement, so that in 20 years, if off-the-shelf computers can't read the CDs anymore, I can still deal with it. I'm betting that I'll still be able to find a machine with a PCI slot or a SCSI or IDE controller. I guess for another $100 or so I could also drop in a USB (or Firewire) to IDE adaptor case to give me more chances.
If you're worried about being able to read a format, spend $100 and take some precautions.
The "point" is that CD-R drives have become a commodity, and they're trying to stand out. Two years ago, I bought CD-R drives largely on brand, for the most part sticking with Yamaha and Plextor. It used to make a difference; I had cheap drives die on me after only a few hundred burns, whereas Plextor and Yamaha drives typically make it into the 10,000's.
However, for the last year or so, (at least, in my experience) a drive is a drive; they all work just fine and there's not much reason to get more than a $70 CompUSA-branded Sanyo or something. Yamaha and other higher-end manufacturers have had to cut prices drastically to remain competitive.
There are better and faster media being developed, but they're in the lab. When it comes time to develop a standard in the industry to utilize those media, I'm sure Yamaha will be at the table. In the mean time, they have to make money selling the product that's coming out the door now.
Having a drive that does something cool like this sets it apart and might make people spend an extra $20 for a Yamaha drive.
Whups, sorry then.
Not exactly new. Sure, it's better, more refined. Hell, I saw a Discovery Channel special that featured these cameras several years ago. They're used on the "cop" shows all the time.
Geez, I built a security system for my room with a relay, a buzzer, a battery and a couple of hunks of bare wire when I was 10 years old. I should write it up, maybe I can get on /.
The skilled trades unions that build houses will be petitioning the government for a royalty on each home that is sold in the used market.
"Our craftsmen put their heart and soul into creating these homes, it's only fair that each person that enjoys the product of that labor pays their fair share" said an industry spokesperson.
Sheesh.
BTW, what I do most is video encoding, mainly VCD and SVCD using TMPGEnc. For that application, the Athlon XP 1700+ (running at 1.47 GHz) absolutely BLOWS AWAY the P4 running at 1.6 GHz. I mean, it's a LOT faster, and the P4 has more RAM and everything so it has no excuse. AMD might finish a job in 2.5 hours and the P4 would take well over 3 hours to do the same job.
Don't ask me about game performance, hell, I don't even have Solitare loaded.
Yeah, I remove the heatsink from my machine while it's running all the time...
I saw the video too, and while it's amusing, I fail to see how this could even happen. The heatsinks on AMD CPUs is on so hard you need to work at it to get it off. Anybody who has one "accidentally" fall off didn't put it on right in the first place.
Your car (ANY car) will burst into flames if you remove the gas line from the engine and point it at the exhaust manifold while it's running with the engine hot. Same situation; something that's NEVER going to happen in real life, unless the thing was put together wrong in the first place.
While I agree that there have been some horrible chipsets for AMD CPUs, there are also some good ones. Most chipsets are pretty decent these days. The last couple of AMD based machines that I built, with Asus mainboards (K7V266E) have been rock solid, doing even video capture with a BT848 card (a good acid test of a mainboard) for hours on end without any problems. Some Intel based mainboards can't do as well.
When switching to an unknown mainboard, I go with a manufacturer I know to build good stuff, and make sure I beat the hell out of the mainboard before my return policy time runs out.
I currently have two Intel P4 machines; my laptop (Inspiron 8200) and my machine at work. I would rather have gotten an AMD chip in both cases, but on the laptop, I was shopping for features and had to get an Intel processor based machine to get the other features that I wanted, and with the work machine, I took what they gave me.
Having two AMD machines at home, a Tbird 1400 and an Athlon XP 1700+, I'm seriously underimpressed by the P4 performance. As far as I can tell, the only reason to buy Intel anymore is out of pure inertia; they bring nothing to the table.
I'm sure there's something I don't understand about this, but...
Sure they could move their servers offshore. But they still have to have a business located somewhere. If you have an office or employees in a country, you (or at least the portion of the company that those employees work for) need to follow the law in that country. Moving the server to Sealand doesn't mean that your office in New Jersey can't be issued a summons. Even if you incorporate offshore and have your employees telecommute, you need to have at least bank routing to get them their paychecks. The government can impound those accounts.
Sealand only seems to me to be a good place for individuals to host info pages, not to run a business out of.
Wal-Mart and most small printers with digital-equipped printers have now surpassed the online places for price. Also convenience; I dump the photos I want onto an old 32MB CF card, drop it off on the way to work, and pick up my prints at lunch. I'm paying 30 cents, less for large quantities. Wal-Mart is 26 cents but you never know what idiot is going to be running the printer.
I buy Office Depot premium glossy paper, which I like very much. At full retail, it's $45 per 100 sheets, but it's often on sale for $25. With refilled carts, I can print a full 8.5 x 11 for about 35 cents. I can fit THREE 4 x 6's on there.
Sure, if I bought HP paper at 80 cents a sheet, and used OEM carts, it'd cost me well over $1 per sheet.
I do still go to Wal-Mart or the local photo lab for archival prints though. The inkjet is just for proofs, or if I need a print right away, or for stuff to thumbtack to my wall at work.
I personally use www.inksupply.com - they have been very good for me.
The cool thing is that they have full, detailed instructions on their site. Check out the instructions beforehand and decide if it's something you want to do; some carts are a complete pain to refill, not worth the hassle.
Maybe so, but I'm at 2+ years on this printer, and I'm on about my 30th refill. With the HP, I only got 3 refills per cart, then I had to replace. So by now I would have replaced the cart 10 times. So how does this work out?
HP printer: $250
10 new carts: $200
20 refills: $50
total: $500
Epson printer: $130
30 refills: $75
Total: $205
It seems to me that if my printer failed COMPLETELY, TOMORROW, I could buy a new one and still be WAY ahead.
Add to that the fact that the photo quality of the Epson is (IMHO) far superior. (Don't argue, I said IMHO and that's not going to change).
That's funny. I've got some output in front of me right now, and I can rub it HARD and it doesn't smudge. Maybe you should try something other than HP. Yeah, when I was using an HP printer, the slightest dampness and the ink would just dissolve.
My Epson 870, printing photos on glossy photo paper; I can put these prints UNDER RUNNING WATER AND RUB HARD WITH A THUMB and no smudge. If I keep it up for more than about 30 seconds, eventually the print will lighten up a bit, but I think that's a bit ridiculous.
Dude, I didn't say "I can get razor sharp text" I said I didn't care that it wasn't.
Buy an Epson instead of an HP, and the cartridge won't wear out, either. The Epson heads are separate and designed to last. The HP is integral and designed to fail.
Not as funny as you may think; I actually found a printer the other day that was on sale for cheaper than the two ink cartridges that came packaged in it (about $32 for the printer, I think, it was an Apollo (hp)). Since I had bought one of the printers for my mom (she prints something like 50 pages a year), I thought about buying one just to get the spare cartridges out of the box.
Before I buy a new inkjet, I check the online refill suppliers and make sure that they're reasonably easy to refill. I just don't buy printers that are not easy to refill.
I made an exception for the Epson 870 photo printer, but only after someone figured out how to refill it at all (originally it was not possible, but someone figured out how to cheat). It was good enough to put up with a little bit of hassle in filling the carts (it still only takes about 10 minutes)
The new carts for this printer are about $20 each. However, for $50 I bought enough ink to refill them dozens of times. Just be sure to get a specific formulation for your printer, not one of these Wal-Mart "universal" ink refilling kits.
To dispel some myths before they come up:
I have been refilling for 3 years now, both HP and Epson, probably 30 to 40 cartridge refills, and NOT ONE INSTANCE of a clogged head or anything.
Some people say the ink quality isn't the same. They're right; the aftermarket stuff is BETTER. I have a few dozen photos hanging on the wall behind me printed on the Epson 870. They have all faded in the sunlight a bit, but the ones printed with original Epson ink have faded A LOT more. Another complaint is possible color inaccuracies. I don't know, they look OK to me but I don't have "pantone eyes."
Also, they can't "void your warranty" for using aftermarket inks. Requiring people to buy their ink products for their printers is called "product tying" and is AFAIK an illegal monopolistic practice.
Yes, the quality is better with an inkjet. However, one thing to keep in mind is that most people don't care. I certainly don't. I print stuff out only for temporary use, then throw it out. Why they heck should I care if the text isn't razor sharp? It's still pretty darn nice looking.
The ability to print nice color CDROM labels, plus the ability to print photos on demand, makes an inkjet the only way to go for me.
Yes, it costs $40 or so for a pair of new cartridges for my Epson. But I only ever bought one pair, then I refill them. It takes about 10 minutes and costs about $3 to fill both of them.
Oh for God's sake. Are you being intentionally obtuse? The CD player was just an example of a piece of equipment that the music industry is used to being able to control because it's hard for people to build them on the kitchen table. This is the kind of thinking they're exhibiting.
"If we make all the manufacturers build compliant devices the world will be compliant." Not true for devices like A to D converters, which are very easy to build. Hell, I built a low resolution one that was fast enough to do 16 level 64 x 64 video grabs for about $5 in 2 hours once, from plans on the net. The whole thing fit in a D25 shell and the software was about 1000 bytes.
If they ever do get all these laws in place, it might be a good thing; it could signal the beginning of a more widespread resurgence of electronics tinkering at home.