Slashdot Mirror

We call what you just wrote foot in mouth disease.

I have "foot-in-mouth disease"? Let's put that in context. You're the one ridiculous enough to claim that a 30" tube tv and a set of speakers is a home theatre. More on that below, but first ...

you never justified any of the points you made with any citation

... you lied. I've posted plenty of links and quoted the RFCs many times in this thread. It's not my fault if you're too lazy to look. I'm not a maid, and more specificially, I am not YOUR maid. Most clued-in people would look through the thread. Also, I don't see YOU providing citations for your claims that cookies are "the approved way" to maintain state, that getting informed consent would "break interfaces", or that they are risk-free, just arm-waving. Hypocrite. I've pointed out that there are several different mechanisms for maintaining state, and that cookies are only one of them. Any claim that "cookies are the approved way" is an intentional misreading of the RFCs - the RFCs doesn't say they are "the approved way" - just that they can be used that way - AND that when used in any manner they should require INFORMED consent, and that this policy should be enforced at both the server and client, same as the EU is demanding, which is the real issue here. Try to stay on-topic.

One word: context. Learn it. In this case, it means look at the surrounding posts. You know, the "context." I'm not only not your maid, I'm not your secretary either. If you had bothered to look throughout the thread. You'll see I made plenty of references to the RFCs. Also, you're free to search the web. There are plenty of articles on security issues with cookies. Or is your Innert00bs broken?

The only issue here is you being totally tone-deaf in your insistence that cookies are needed, and trying lamely to defend it. They are not. They are also a security issue. And ANY site that doesn't ask for informed consent is broken by design, as per the RFCs. If you have an issue with that, take it up with the IETF. Until you get them to agree to change it, you're wrong and the EU (and I) are right.

Now, moving on, back to "foot-in-mouth" ...

Exhibit A ... from your website: You think a 30" TUBE TV and some speakers is a "home theatre".

I managed to get a floor-model 30" wide screen CRT HDTV for just under $800 (canadian) and then bought the Starchoice HDTV receiver with my remaining budget. Since then I've been greatly enjoying both high definition television offerings from Starchoice and much improved DVD viewing without the severe shrinkage I had to put up with on my old TV to watch widescreen movies (in letterbox). See photos of the TV (very flat tube) as well as my speakers and receiver by clicking the link to the right. A secondary benefit to buying a new TV is being able to connect multiple video sources directly to the TV without using my receiver's video source switching capabilities. That said, I do miss clicking "DVD" on the remote and having it change both video and audio simultaneously. Time to invest in a $250 universal remote? Not anytime soon but we'll see.

You didn't "manage" to get a home theatre. You "managed" to get ripped off. That wasn't even a "home theatre" back at the end of the last century. It certainly wasn't when you bought it less than 4 years ago ... so if anyone suffers from "foot-in-mouth", it's you. There's nothing wrong with having a tube tv. There's some serious "foot-in-mouth" action going on when you call a 30" tube tv a "home theatre."

THIS, a 50" 600hz 1080p native resolut

We call what you just wrote foot in mouth disease.

I have "foot-in-mouth disease"? Let's put that in context. You're the one ridiculous enough to claim that a 30" tube tv and a set of speakers is a home theatre. More on that below, but first ...

you never justified any of the points you made with any citation

... you lied. I've posted plenty of links and quoted the RFCs many times in this thread. It's not my fault if you're too lazy to look. I'm not a maid, and more specificially, I am not YOUR maid. Most clued-in people would look through the thread. Also, I don't see YOU providing citations for your claims that cookies are "the approved way" to maintain state, that getting informed consent would "break interfaces", or that they are risk-free, just arm-waving. Hypocrite. I've pointed out that there are several different mechanisms for maintaining state, and that cookies are only one of them. Any claim that "cookies are the approved way" is an intentional misreading of the RFCs - the RFCs doesn't say they are "the approved way" - just that they can be used that way - AND that when used in any manner they should require INFORMED consent, and that this policy should be enforced at both the server and client, same as the EU is demanding, which is the real issue here. Try to stay on-topic.

One word: context. Learn it. In this case, it means look at the surrounding posts. You know, the "context." I'm not only not your maid, I'm not your secretary either. If you had bothered to look throughout the thread. You'll see I made plenty of references to the RFCs. Also, you're free to search the web. There are plenty of articles on security issues with cookies. Or is your Innert00bs broken?

The only issue here is you being totally tone-deaf in your insistence that cookies are needed, and trying lamely to defend it. They are not. They are also a security issue. And ANY site that doesn't ask for informed consent is broken by design, as per the RFCs. If you have an issue with that, take it up with the IETF. Until you get them to agree to change it, you're wrong and the EU (and I) are right.

Now, moving on, back to "foot-in-mouth" ...

Exhibit A ... from your website: You think a 30" TUBE TV and some speakers is a "home theatre".

I managed to get a floor-model 30" wide screen CRT HDTV for just under $800 (canadian) and then bought the Starchoice HDTV receiver with my remaining budget. Since then I've been greatly enjoying both high definition television offerings from Starchoice and much improved DVD viewing without the severe shrinkage I had to put up with on my old TV to watch widescreen movies (in letterbox). See photos of the TV (very flat tube) as well as my speakers and receiver by clicking the link to the right. A secondary benefit to buying a new TV is being able to connect multiple video sources directly to the TV without using my receiver's video source switching capabilities. That said, I do miss clicking "DVD" on the remote and having it change both video and audio simultaneously. Time to invest in a $250 universal remote? Not anytime soon but we'll see.

You didn't "manage" to get a home theatre. You "managed" to get ripped off. That wasn't even a "home theatre" back at the end of the last century. It certainly wasn't when you bought it less than 4 years ago ... so if anyone suffers from "foot-in-mouth", it's you. There's nothing wrong with having a tube tv. There's some serious "foot-in-mouth" action going on when you call a 30" tube tv a "home theatre."

THIS, a 50" 600hz 1080p native resolut

Your problem is called FSAA and other smoothing techniques. Anti-aliasing is a curse when improperly used. Just look at a few screen shots of Fallout 3 on the PC, 360 and PS3. The PS3 has no FSAA enabled for technical reasons, and distant objects are much easier to see and identify as a result. Sure, there's visible aliasing in specific circumstances, but its not distracting and I'd much rather identify objects than have no jaggies.

As for darkness, buy a CRT or some other screen with true black levels. Plasma and low-priced LCDs can't do low light levels properly, its a pain and it makes these games look washed out and undetailed.

I have a 30" 1080i CRT that I game on and find the visibility of dark textures not to mention the brightness levels much much better than anything I've seen on affordable flat screen technologies to date.

Granted, the new Sony OLED TV looks just as good or better, but at a quarter of the pixel resolution.

Most LCD screens are simply not made for gaming.

You realize you could say the same about, say, Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10?

Of course you could -- that's a minor version change, not a major one. Not understanding the difference can get you confused.

Vista to Windows 7 is a major version update. XP to XP SP2 is a minor version update.

I really should preview more carefully.

That's these algorithms on my blog, at http://blog.mikebabcock.ca/2008/08/make-me-beautiful.html ... not the link above which won't work.

I really should preview more carefully.

That's these algorithms on my blog, at http://blog.mikebabcock.ca/2008/08/make-me-beautiful.html ... not the link above which won't work.

Its a rip-off if the game doesn't come with enough content to be worth the sticker price.

Its not a rip-off if the game DID come with its full bang in content AND more content is made to add on to it later.

See Criterion's Burnout.

That last paragraph proves you don't know what you're talking about.

The PS3 has only 7 of the 8 SPUs enabled to improve yields, it has nothing to do with redundancy. If they required all 8 SPUs to be functional they'd have had lower initial Cell processor yields from the factory, that's all.

The PS3's overall processing power for certain workloads is a lot higher than you make it out to be. You can quit the FUD.

In the who's more evil fight, I'm not convinced Sony's even a minor demon compared to Microsoft.

Get a grip :-)

I have to agree with you and expand a little. I don't think the PC will compete as it is at all, because the console gaming systems are so trimmed down just to what they're for. A console gaming system would suck for doing photoshop or website editing, or music or video editing (EyeCreate doesn't allow editing, no flames please).

Although they're both computing hardware, the PC doesn't compete with gaming consoles any more than it competes with DVD players or telephones. Sure, you can use your PC to watch DVDs and many people do, and you can use it to listen to music, and many do, and you can even use it to make phone calls, and many do, so why do people still buy $30 DVD players, $100 MP3 players and $5-500 cell phones regularly? Because they do their own jobs so well, and often much more efficiently by design.

I have a blog entry I wrote today about this subject as well if you're interested.

Of course you can. The amount of FUD surrounding Blu-Ray is phenomenal. The BD players I know of play DVDs, encrypted or otherwise, BD movies, encrypted or otherwise and even some other file types in some cases.

My Playstation 3 quite happily plays high definition content over my network using its DLNA (UPnP) functionality which for all it knows could be ripped HD-DVD discs.

Speaking of FUD and Sony, the PS3 quite happily rips CDs to its hard drive and then lets you copy them off to memory sticks, etc. if you want. They've also demonstrated a feature whereby a BD movie can be ripped to be played on your PSP on the go (although not without DRM of some kind obviously).

See also Sony vs. Microsoft round 1.

I'm very proud to be Canadian for several reasons, and one of them is our stance on Copyright and fair use. I quiver in fear (as I commented in my blog just yesterday) at the thought of us introducing draconian DMCA-like legislation, but I think in general Canadians really do get it more than our American counterparts.

Most telling is how the ISPs and judges have stood on these issues in the past. A judge in Canada recently compared the use of file sharing software having illegal uses to a photocopier in a library being usable for illegally reproducing entire books. Do you remove photocopiers from libraries just because they could be used for illegal purposes? Exactly.

Lets hope, pray and protest to keep these rights.

Honestly, as a server administrator, I really miss my fully scriptable environment on Linux when I'm dealing with Windows. Yes, I can install software X for backups and software Y for data replication and software Z for something else, but writing a self-updating firewall script in an hour is out of the question on Windows systems.

I'm not saying Windows is unstable or "sucky", I just find it a lot less powerful out of the box.

My (Canadian sold) PS3 is vertical next to my TV in a room with a constant temperature of 22 degrees C (less than half a degree variance all winter during hours I'm at home) approximately 8 feet in front of me when I'm sitting on my couch.

I have a PS2 next to it, which is admittedly quieter, and my Yamaha receiver is entirely passively cooled so it makes no comparative noise. Although I can hear the PS3 if I'm doing nothing with it (or the speakers are muted), its never loud enough to hear noticeably over a movie or gaming session for me, even at low volumes. This is of course subjective. I'll post an actual SPL meter reading when I get one on my personal home theatre page though in the near future.

I own an upscaling DVD player already. It outputs 720p or 1080i and does a very good job of making up data from the original source. That said, the original source still doesn't have 720 progressive lines of resolution, its still 480. The original data source is what matters here, a lot more than what the DVD player does to it. Would you rather have your DVD player invent lines that it thinks should be there, or get a transfer from the original film that has the real lines that actually existed? In the case of a forest of trees, the leaves will look correct instead of blurred. In the case of a face, pores, shavings and the wetness of the eye become apparent (in HD resolutions).

Upscaling DVD players are not an alternative to HD movie transfers, they're just a nice way to make your existing low resolution DVDs look better on your new high resolution TV.

Do you have any idea how much PBS I've watched since having an HDTV for a year now? PBS in HD can be a truly beautiful experience. The stories were always informative I suppose, but from cooking shows to tours of aquariums to scenic vistas in nature or travel shows, HDTV really maximizes what they're trying to do with TV.

As for regular content, almost every show I watch is in HD these days (scroll to the very bottom for the list). I don't watch many shows just for their being in HD, but going from 1080i back down to 480i on a wide CRT is quite the unappealing adjustment, visually.

Those audiophiles won't download the music until it comes in dts or SACD format. I can hear the difference between CDs and SACDs ... can you?

Yamaha produces some very high quality (low total harmonic distortion) receivers for reasonable money ($200 or so at J&R online actually) that will be severely better to normal peoples' ears than whatever they have now. You don't need to be an audiophile, you just need to know one who understands your budget and you'll be set.

Even on my modest system, I can definately hear a difference between FLAC and MP3, and definately between a well recorded CD and a mediocre one. The sound quality difference between a good CD and the dts soundtrack on some movies is immediately apparent to even casual listeners who've come over to watch a movie or two.

The problem isn't how many audiophiles there are, the problem is how few people have a sound system/headphones as good as their tastes. Many people I know settle for terrible speaker systems/earbuds because they don't realize "pretty damn good" is available for not too much cash. If people can't hear the difference with the equipment they have, they won't care about purchasing higher quality audio.

I ripped all my music to FLAC with tags and use Amarok as my music app on my PC. When I want MP3 or OGG versions of my music (for a portable device or when I burnt my "best of" DVD of MP3s for use in the livingroom), I use the TransKode script in Amarok to convert them on the fly (which copies the tags over as well).

My friends ask me all the time "how I do that" in racing games, when I pass them smoothly in a corner or somesuch. Its because I hold those nice analogue sticks half-up, instead of full-up, or maybe 73% up. Using both analogue sticks for steering + throttle/brakes gives much better control in everything from Burnout to Toca.

http://mikebabcock.ca/gaming

Forget what HD output? Component video cables provide equal (or better) quality output to HDMI (especially to those of us with CRT HDTV sets). HDMI is only barely interesting for newer resolutions and encryption (ugh) and its ability to carry audio as well (which no HiFi geek or audiophile wants anyway).

I'm currently using (and plan to continue using) component video cables to my TV and coax digital audio cables to my receiver for the near future. When I buy a new receiver with DTS Master audio support, I'll be going to new audio cables. If and when LCD or Plasma TVs look as good at variable resolutions as my CRT, I might use HDMI for video only.

Yes yes, I know, in a few years, some discs might be encoded so that I need HDCP to play them on my TV at all. For the reasonable future, it would seem that movie companies care more about sales figures though and won't be setting that bit.

I'm with you -- I don't mind that my Yamaha receiver requires space above it for cooling (see pictures), but please, please would people try to stick to sane form factors for A/V gear? I know its neat to have little cubes here and little top-loading thingies there, but they are very inefficient to lay out.

That's why I'd rather they build it into a nice ATX desktop-like case like this one from Antec, which IMHO would be perfect.

I've moved my 30" widescreen CRT exactly once since buying it a year ago -- and that was from my car into my livingroom.

I was quite able to carry it by myself (although it is a little wide to get through doors easily by yourself) and had a friend help me for simplicity's sake.

I have no desire whatsoever for an LCD or Plasma TV -- I'd buy a good DLP projector if I really wanted a larger screen. The resolution and brightness on my HD CRT is beautiful and at less than $800 canadian, who can argue?

Canada has had a similar private-copy exemption for a long time (since the early 80's) to what the UK is basically saying now.

I can borrow a CD off you and rip it for my own enjoyment then give you back the CD, but you may not dupe the CD and give me the dupe (basically, IANAL).

What I've been listening to

My NVidia 5200FX is feeling old now, although it still plays most of my games very well. I'll probably buy NVidia's top AGP video card in the near future instead of upgrading my entire machine to PCI-e. Gotta love the upgrade grind.

http://mikebabcock.ca/mypc

... and that's the rub; this is a router. Surely in most cases its getting DNS information from an ISP by DHCP on behalf of its clients.

It could, you know, use that information to resolve pool.ntp.org properly.

PS, being a good netizen, I run a public NTP server that is listed on north-america.pool.ntp.org as well as ca.pool.ntp.org (being in Canada and all). I also have all my internal LAN clients query from that server, instead of the outside.

My public ntpd service is using very little memory (let me check; RSS: 4076, TRS: 433) and the bandwidth usage is not very high either.

I'm with you.

I find DVDs don't look anywhere near as nice since I upgraded my home theatre system to include an HDTV. I now watch HD shows like CSI which look absolutely astoundingly beautiful then I put in a DVD and find its grainy. Upconverted or not, there's a huge resolution difference between the two.

I'd posit that most people who can't see the difference either don't have true HD HDTV sets or need glasses (really). If you find road signs fuzzy on the side of the road, you shouldn't bother with HD.

I run dual screens at 1152x864 each and I'm hoping to be able to afford the video card to run NWN2 and Oblivion each at good speeds.

Probably a post-Christmas bonus purchase.

My PC as it is now.

I saw the same thing ... "woah, ugly!" when I looked at the pictures.

I wouldn't want that on my desk, or under it for that matter.

If you want pretty, check out Zalman's stuff, like the fan I use in my PC.

Agreed. I play software-decoded HD content on my PC all the time, no problems (Athlon XP 2500+).

I'm not sure what filters people are using that eat so much CPU, but if its worth a few hundred dollars to you, go ahead and buy that shiny new system.

I just had to reboot today myself, bought another half gig of RAM for my PC and didn't feel like finding out what happens if you hot-plug it on a non hot-ram motherboard.

Just for the sake of sharing, I'm running an Antec Sonata with its included (not available seperately) 380W PSU with an AMD Barton 2500+ and 5 drives (3 IDE, 7200 RPM and 2 SATA, 7200 RPM).

pictures of hardware

... most of the screens at our local Galaxy Cinemas actually don't sound as good as my home theatre receiver + speakers. I don't have anything special, but I've tuned it properly, its a small room and its well balanced comparatively.

There are 2 big screens in town that are actually big enough and sound good enough (THX certified, etc.) to be worth paying for, but you have to show up for the biggest movie that week to see it on those screens.

I sleep in the same room as my computer (and my wife, to you losers out there who want to make rude comments) ... having *no* lights on it would be very nice.

First thing I did with my new Antec Sonata was disconnect the front blue lights. Not that I don't like sleeping in a room that is illuminated like a porn set, its just a little distracting for actual sleep.

A nice "lights off" switch would be a good hack, come to think of it ... on an activity timer, so after not using the PC for 15 minutes or so, all the lights go out, including power, making it nice and dark.

You need to read up on your fluid dynamics; several of your statements indicate that you don't understand how air *behaves* nor why that movement creates noise (the issue in question).

My case fans are both 12cm but my CPU fan is also well over 9cm (I suggest following the links). The direction the air moves from the CPU fan is *key* in the air movement through the case.

Although the rear case fan is pulling quite a bit of air, its doing so quietly because of its large size and low RPMs with low resistance. It pulls that air primarily from the high-pressure area that would be created between it and the CPU fan were the case fan not there. The high-pressure is created by the CPU fan's lack of sides -- the air moving outward, not downward. The CPU fan pulls air from above it, as would the rear case fan, if it didn't already have a supply of air from beside the CPU fan.

All fans are adjusted by hand to speed ranges where noise is well below ambient levels at 35 degrees celcius.

The power supply fan, unlike ATX recommendations, does not suck air in from beside the CPU fan to allow for more intelligent airflow -- it pulls it in directly from the airholes in the sides of the case between it and the DVD drive. It also receives air from the front fan which draws in a higher level of air than would normally be evacuated by the case -- this makes sure intake air comes through the front air filter and baffles instead of being sucked through other cracks and spaces.

For reference, my CPU rarely hits 50 degrees (when playing games) and it is overclocked slightly. Full references on whats in my computer were in the link I provided.

Have you ever looked inside a Dell ATX box?

Dell makes some very quiet workstation/PC boxes with ATX formfactors. Key is the temperature-sensitive fans, ducting, fanless CPU heatsink and baffling on the bezel to muffle noise out the front of the machine.

Check out Silent PC's review or the Google cache. The versions we buy are slightly different than the one pictured there, but its a good article nonetheless.

My home computer is also a very quiet ATX box, using an Antec Sonata case, etc.