Posts by Steve Knox

Re: It's ok...

Inspur won't care. They don't want to export these servers to the US or elsewhere. China's a big enough market for them, for now at least.

Yes and no.

There is a significant difference between digital delivery of artistic content and physical delivery which breaks the model under which this flattening of value worked and worked well for decades.

Go into any brick-and-mortar music store, and count the number of each album or single on sale. In a true flattened-value world, there would be exactly the same number of each stocked, and people would buy exactly the same number of each. Instead what you see is that the store stocks more of the songs that it believes will sell, and people buy more of certain songs than others, so there is inconsistency in the quantities left in stock. When popular albums sell out,the store will buy more of those, whereas when unpopular albums sit for too long, they end up in the discount bin. So the store's stock space becomes the scarcity that arbitrates the market.

But there's no real scarcity in digital storage. Online purveyors of artistic content need keep only one copy of each item, because it's copied rather than removed when sold. They can use sales records to determine the popularity of a song, but lack of scarcity and remnants of the flattened-value mode mean they generally don't use this to change the price. Price difference online becomes primarily a reflection of the novelty of the content.

It's this lack of scarcity which leads some people to believe that IP is valueless. But the value of intellectual property has never really been in its scarcity*; that was simply a convenient model. The value of intellectual property is in its knock-on effect, whether that's a song's ability to produce an emotional reaction or a game's ability to entertain, or a financial program's ability to produce usable forecasts. Those, unfortunately, are much harder to measure and materialize in a market.

*In fact, the surest way to keep intellectual property scarce is also the surest way to minimize its value: tell no-one.

Re: Time Warner Cable

Not here, they don't. They also won't tell you their baseline prices. Those are two of the several reasons they're no longer my ISP.

In This Way

1. Netcraft hasn't even bothered mentioning them since 2003:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/30/php_growing_surprisingly_strongly_on_windows.html

2. According to w3techs "the" server-side scripting of the late 90s now powers just over 1% of dynamic sites:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

and

3. That's in steady decline:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-coldfusion/all/all

Re: what about OEM?

I don't think so -- AFAIK, there was never a special deal on the OEM version. But you might want to double-check pricing from your source. NewEgg has Win8 for $100 but Win8 Pro for $140. Those prices are at par with their prices for OEM Win7 Home Premium and Win7 Pro, respectively.

Re: Untranslating the translation

I think you might be reading too much into a simple statement

Welcome to The Register.

Re: "...damped by gravity..." ???

If gravity can damp the strings, a guitar would sound different when held vertically.

It does. But given the high tension and the notoriously weak effect of gravity here, you'd need more than "perfect" pitch to be able to hear the difference.

Re: needs shake-up in own apps

or maybe the watch will be portrait only mode.

or just square.

Re: If they do

@GoatJam: 2003 is 15 years past the date range you expressed in your original "point".

My point is that from the late 80s (your date range) through at least the mid 90s, the most common vertical resolutions were significantly less than what ultrabooks offer, and that even into the 2000s, over half of the systems out there were still at 800x600 or less.

I will agree that by 2000, 768 lines was a common vertical resolution, and so it would be reasonable to expect a premium device to have more lines if a) vertical resolution above 768 lines was still a primary factor, and b) there were no other significant premium factors.

But the premium factors for an ultrabook are, in an order somewhat resembling the apparent priority of the market:

1) portability (i.e, thinness and lightness)

2) long battery life

3) performance (incorporating both processor and storage performance)

4) display resolution

So while you may not consider an ultrabook with 768 lines of vertical resolution "premium", enough people* involved in the market do. As for ultrabooks with greater than 768 lines, try (in order of quick web search):

Acer S7 1080p

Dell XPS 12 Ultrabook

ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A

* and by "enough people", I mean at least the vendors. Definitely their marketing departments, at least.