I see people have been criticising the price of these keyboards. This is reality and £133 does not seem unduly exorbitant, if anything it strikes me as quite cheap.
Sure it is several times the cost of an el cheapo naff commodity keyboard but this is a specialised piece of equipment, not mass market tat. You can spend a reasonable sum of money of good quality mainstream keyboards - many 'standard' Cherry keyboards are around the £50 mark and the Happy Hacking keyboard costs the best part of £200. That one is only slightly specialised compared to this medical-grade unit.
The thing I don't like about large billing increments is that it means you are charged much more for very brief calls. A large percentage of my calls are to mobiles that ring a few times and then go through to voicemail. The minute I hear that "Your call has been forwarded..." recording I hang up - I wanted to talk to a person, not leave a message.
But of course, the second you are transferred billing starts. I don't see why I should be expected to pay a disproportionate amount for a service I didn't want to reach in the first place.
It seems to me that if there was any truth at all to these rumours of aliens at Roswell the present US administration would have no reason at all to cover it up. It could easily be used to create the impression of a clear and real enemy in the popular consciousness in the same manner that Islamic fundamentalists have been used post 9/11.
That would provide a more convincing excuse to ramp up routine monitoring of individuals and trample civil liberties than the "war against terrorism" arguments currently being used.
A lot of the performance penalty of decimal calculations can be removed (albeit only by a constant factor) simply by choosing a larger base of the form 10^n with no loss of decimal precision but reducing the number of digits in each number and therefore reducing number of explicit carries required. For example 1,235,263,352.054 343 32 can be expressed exactly in base 100 as a list of ints:
1, 235, 263, 352, <point>, 54, 352, 320
the point item is indicated here for clarity - you may not wish to include it in the actual list. If you do, an unused value that fits into the underlying representation (eg 1023 here) does the job nicely.
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4 posts • joined Wednesday 20th September 2006 21:59 GMT
Price is not out of the way
I see people have been criticising the price of these keyboards. This is reality and £133 does not seem unduly exorbitant, if anything it strikes me as quite cheap.
Sure it is several times the cost of an el cheapo naff commodity keyboard but this is a specialised piece of equipment, not mass market tat. You can spend a reasonable sum of money of good quality mainstream keyboards - many 'standard' Cherry keyboards are around the £50 mark and the Happy Hacking keyboard costs the best part of £200. That one is only slightly specialised compared to this medical-grade unit.
Just a way of charging for nothing in particular
The thing I don't like about large billing increments is that it means you are charged much more for very brief calls. A large percentage of my calls are to mobiles that ring a few times and then go through to voicemail. The minute I hear that "Your call has been forwarded..." recording I hang up - I wanted to talk to a person, not leave a message.
But of course, the second you are transferred billing starts. I don't see why I should be expected to pay a disproportionate amount for a service I didn't want to reach in the first place.
What would be the motivation for a cover up?
It seems to me that if there was any truth at all to these rumours of aliens at Roswell the present US administration would have no reason at all to cover it up. It could easily be used to create the impression of a clear and real enemy in the popular consciousness in the same manner that Islamic fundamentalists have been used post 9/11.
That would provide a more convincing excuse to ramp up routine monitoring of individuals and trample civil liberties than the "war against terrorism" arguments currently being used.
Use a bigger base
A lot of the performance penalty of decimal calculations can be removed (albeit only by a constant factor) simply by choosing a larger base of the form 10^n with no loss of decimal precision but reducing the number of digits in each number and therefore reducing number of explicit carries required. For example 1,235,263,352.054 343 32 can be expressed exactly in base 100 as a list of ints:
1, 235, 263, 352, <point>, 54, 352, 320
the point item is indicated here for clarity - you may not wish to include it in the actual list. If you do, an unused value that fits into the underlying representation (eg 1023 here) does the job nicely.