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Comment Re:I live in Washington state (Score 3, Insightful) 58

Sure, you don't want to pay full sticker price, because that's the sucker price. You have to waste a day of your life haggling with the dealer so that he can charge different prices to different customers. If you buy straight from the manufacturer under a no-haggle system, they have to offer the same price to everybody. So it's likely to be quite a lot less than the sticker price of a dealership-sold car. The manufacturer still wants to segment the market and milk more money out of less price-sensitive customers, but they have to do it by selling more luxurious trim levels.

Comment Re:USB 2? (Score 1) 31

I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

Comment Re:8k is nice for computers though (Score 1) 138

Yes, I saw crisp text on my 1024x768 LCD display a quarter century ago. But you missed the next part of the sentence, "even at small sizes". As text gets smaller you reach a point where it is no longer clear. On an 8k display even the smallest sizes are pin sharp. They are a bit fuzzy on 4k (as I use at work) and would be headache-inducing mush if you tried to show such tiny text on a 1920x1080 display.

Back in the day there were hand-created bitmap fonts for crisp display at small sizes. Nowadays, for better or worse almost every application uses outline fonts, which look a bit jaggy if rendered without anti-aliasing ("font smoothing") and a bit fuzzy with it. Only on a very high DPI display is this completely unnoticeable. My laptop is 4k and I am very happy with it, but to make best use of a 32 inch screen a higher pixel density is better.

Comment Re:It should be 8K (Score 4, Insightful) 138

You're an outlier. Top 0.1% vision. Or better.

I've got very good vision. Diopt 0.0 in both eyes. Due to my age I will be needing reading glasses within a couple of years but for now I can still read fine without them.

For me, the difference between HD and 4K is visible but small. I can't resolve individual pixels on 4K at any reasonable distance.

Since most people will have worse vision than us, 4K will be beyond their limit. 8K is only adding cost without adding quality.

Comment 8k is nice for computers though (Score 2) 138

I'm posting this from my home PC with Dell's 8k monitor. It's nice to see completely crisp text, even at small sizes, and certainly a noticeable quality improvement from 4k. But that's because I am sitting a few inches away. I recently bought a new television, and while I was tempted to pick up a cheap used 8k model, in practice it would make no difference when viewing it from the sofa.

Even Dell seems to have retreated from 8k, however. Their newer top-end monitor has a roughly 6k horizontal resolution.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 5, Interesting) 82

It's better for you.

It's not better for a lot of businesses. The collaboration features of openoffice are sub-par. That alone excludes openoffice from most shortlists. Many businesses nowadays rely on Sharepoint. Only Google comes close to this.

Excel is by far the best in connecting to external database resources. By far the best in pivot tables. Both are extensively used for financial reporting.

Not saying Excel is perfect. But there simply is no serious competition.

Comment Mining+power (Score 1) 25

I guess the logical next step is to capture the heat output as hot water, concentrate the heat somehow (or heat the water a bit more) and use steam to drive a turbine producing electricity. Ye cannae break the laws of physics, but it should be possible for a datacentre to recoup at least part of its electricity costs this way? Essentially a steam-driven power station where the heating element is a bank of GPUs with water running over them.

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