Between IE passing a strict CSS test and 3DRealms planning to release Duke Nukem Forever, I'm wondering what alternate universe I woke up in this morning.
I guess I'd better check Google's top execs for goatees again.
Yes, but tons of people also thought that the Wii was a fad and demand would drop off in the middle of 2007. Factories are damn expensive, and Nintendo didn't want to sink billions into a manufacturing blitz only to have production lines sit idle when the "novelty wore off". They've still dramatically increased production, but they've done so at a more cautious rate.
The Wii is in uncharted waters: More than a year after its release, it's still selling twice as fast as any console in history. It's silly to think that this is all - somehow - part of Nintendo's sinister master plan.
Sony and Nintendo both use Bluetooth controllers. Which is still 2.4GHz, but at least Bluetooth is fairly standardized and easy for other wireless device manufacturers to work around.c
That said, the X360 has been out for over two years now. If this was a major issue I think we'd have heard about it long before now.
People have been able to artificially petrify/permineralize/fossilize things in far less time than that; under the right conditions, especially porous materials (wood, for example) can be "petrified" in a matter of months, weeks, or days. Hard materials take longer than softer ones, but you could definitely have your own working fossils in a relatively short time assuming you provide ideal conditions for permineralization.
Of course, the real world doesn't tend to provide "ideal conditions", but I do know that certain fossilized bones have been dated at between 10 and 50 Ka - like the Hofmeyr skull or the Cuddie Springs finds.
I only use Windows for tech support, the occasional Windows-only utility, and games. All my real work is done under Ubuntu or OS X. I'd take Microsoft up on their offer, if for no other reason than to - ugh - get more familiar with Vista.
Of course, that's assuming that our view of physics, which has changed drastically over the last century, remains constant for the next several billion years.
DRM isn't a reason to choose one format over another. There's no reason Apple couldn't encrypt a Vorbis stream, stick it in an Ogg container, and bam - Ogg, FairPlay style.
On the other hand, Vorbis isn't the best audio codec for portable players. Current decoders use more processing power to decode Vorbis than MPEG derivatives (mp3, aac), so battery life suffers, assuming the low-power processors can handle Vorbis at all.
Since Ogg is hardly commonplace today, making it an industry standard would mean a lot of work for major software and hardware manufacturers to make their products compatible. And they wouldn't even be saving any money on licensing, since they would still have to maintain compatibility with the patented formats.
I'm against software patents in general, and I've encoded quite a bit of my music in Ogg+Vorbis, but it's easy to understand why large companies would be hesitant to adopt a new format when the old ones work as well or better for them.
Actually, the GP was spot on. Africa needs political stability and economic development, not handouts from the west. We pat ourselves on the back for saving lives through food and medical aid, yet all we end up doing is increasing the population beyond the environment's sustainable capacity, condemning more people to suffer, fighting over and wasting the same limited resources.
The reason few in power care about a real solution is that a stone-age economy hardly competes for resources with industrialized nations, and a broken society is easy to exploit. It's easy to see how governments and corporations would rather maintain the status quo, keeping oil and labor cheap, than invest in a new competitive market.
What we really need is World Bank reform; it was created after World War II for the exact purpose of nation-building and reconstruction. Unfortunately, it's swayed into the hands of the increasingly exploitative US government as well as large corporations, and has lost a great deal of credibility worldwide. A revived World Bank system, with more focus on its key objectives and less control by individual nations and big business, could do far more to heal Africa and other poor regions than the band-aids of food and medicine.
We're not going to replace our current energy infrastructure with renewable sources overnight. For now, to paraphrase Franklin, a gigawatt saved is indeed a gigawatt earned.
In fact, *saving* power is better than *producing* power. It pollutes less (heat is a form of pollution) and it costs less (less infrastructure and maintenance).
If energy consumption was dramatically reduced, higher prices would make many renewable sources of energy economically feasible while not costing consumers any more than they pay today. Win/win.
In October 2005, Apple Inc began selling H.264-encoded videos over the Internet through their iTunes Music Store.[11] Initially selling just television series and music videos, they expanded in September 2006 to sell films. On May 30, 2007 Apple announced plans to integrate streaming of YouTube videos into the Apple TV. In a later interview, Apple VP David Moody revealed that all of YouTube's videos are going to be transcoded to H.264 for higher compatibility and quality on the Apple TV. Starting in June, YouTube will be automatically encoding all new uploads with H.264. Their intention is to have the entire video catalog available in H.264 this autumn. Apple's iPhone supports H.264 Baseline Profile, Levels 2.1 and 3, at resolutions up to 480x320 or 640x480 and bitrates up to 1.5 Mbit/s and is capable of playing the YouTube video content.[12]
Adobe will support H264 in its Flash Player [13].
So you're saying that H.264 isn't an industry standard? As opposed to Flash Video?
I guess Apple must have bought out Adobe as well, considering the next Flash Player will use (cough) "Quicktime".
All "golden ear" discussions aside... In case you've been living under a rock, Apple has an 160GB player. The only PMPs with more storage use 2.5" notebook drives and are about four times as large as an iPod. iPods have supported lossless audio for years, which is uncommon among popular media players.
If you happen to like another player that's fine - but don't spout BS. As a wise man once said, it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool that to open it and remove all doubt.
I think it will probably be no different, in the end, than the story of 35mm and digital cameras. The first "real" digital camera was the Kodak DCS-100 released in 1991. It was huge, with a 3.5" 200MB hard drive for storage. It took 1.3MP images. And it cost $13,000. Anyone who compared digital cameras to film cameras during the 1990s would have considered digital cameras overpriced novelties that could never replace a decent 35mm. But technology marched on, and as digital cameras became better and cheaper the convenience of being able to view photos without a trip to the 1-hour developer outweighed the progressively smaller quality and price disparity. Of course, technology then continued to march on, digital cameras have essentially caught up with film versions in quality, features, and price, and now you'd be lucky to find a major retailer that carries a selection of 35mm cameras. Now, underscoring the importance of convenience over quality, many people today are taking photos with their cell phones rather than carrying around a second device.
We're back in the 90s again when it comes to eBooks. They're bulky, poor quality, and expensive compared to real books, but they are more convenient in many ways and have quite a bit of untapped potential. The paperless office may be a long ways off, and quality hardcovers will surely stay with us for centuries more, but in 2018 a printed paperback, manual, or textbook may be no more common than a 35mm camera is today.
1. Convenience. You can do full text searches on every book in an eBook reader, an incredibly useful feature for anyone doing research or just looking up a particular term. 2. Portability. You can carry a thousand books and also grab other content (newspapers, blogs, magazines, journals) in a unit the size of a paperback, which you can throw in a backpack, briefcase, etc. 3. Flexibility. You can download any document off the internet (PDF, DOC, TXT) and take it with you without having loose papers to worry about. Granted, the Kindle isn't well suited to this, but other eBook readers handle many formats natively. 4. Efficiency. It wastes a lot fewer resources to manufacture one eBook reader than to print, assemble, and ship hundreds or even thousands of physical books. 5. Turnaround. You can decide to purchase a new book whenever you like, without going to a store, waiting for a shipment, or printing a huge stack of paper on your laser printer. The Kindle even lets you buy a book from wherever you have mobile phone service, though I don't like their DRM model. 6. Usability. If you have poor eyesight you can adjust font sizes on the fly. If you're not in a position to read print you can play an audiobook.
The Kindle is still a pretty primitive device, but over the next several years, as more content becomes eBook-oriented and eBook readers become more useful (better, color screens, solar/motion charging, touch interface) the paper book will become like the slide rule or the 35mm consumer camera: Still used and appreciated by some but more and more ignored by the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, because he can't possibly get a real girlfriend with a name like that?
I'll vote for whichever candidate gives the railgun-in-every-garage speech.
Between IE passing a strict CSS test and 3DRealms planning to release Duke Nukem Forever, I'm wondering what alternate universe I woke up in this morning.
I guess I'd better check Google's top execs for goatees again.
Oh crap.
"Standards mode" is out-of-the-box, assuming you use a proper doctype in your HTML. More info here.
Yes, but tons of people also thought that the Wii was a fad and demand would drop off in the middle of 2007. Factories are damn expensive, and Nintendo didn't want to sink billions into a manufacturing blitz only to have production lines sit idle when the "novelty wore off". They've still dramatically increased production, but they've done so at a more cautious rate.
The Wii is in uncharted waters: More than a year after its release, it's still selling twice as fast as any console in history. It's silly to think that this is all - somehow - part of Nintendo's sinister master plan.
Sony and Nintendo both use Bluetooth controllers. Which is still 2.4GHz, but at least Bluetooth is fairly standardized and easy for other wireless device manufacturers to work around.c
That said, the X360 has been out for over two years now. If this was a major issue I think we'd have heard about it long before now.
People have been able to artificially petrify/permineralize/fossilize things in far less time than that; under the right conditions, especially porous materials (wood, for example) can be "petrified" in a matter of months, weeks, or days. Hard materials take longer than softer ones, but you could definitely have your own working fossils in a relatively short time assuming you provide ideal conditions for permineralization.
Of course, the real world doesn't tend to provide "ideal conditions", but I do know that certain fossilized bones have been dated at between 10 and 50 Ka - like the Hofmeyr skull or the Cuddie Springs finds.
I only use Windows for tech support, the occasional Windows-only utility, and games. All my real work is done under Ubuntu or OS X. I'd take Microsoft up on their offer, if for no other reason than to - ugh - get more familiar with Vista.
No, that was Mecha-Jesus.
Of course, that's assuming that our view of physics, which has changed drastically over the last century, remains constant for the next several billion years.
DRM isn't a reason to choose one format over another. There's no reason Apple couldn't encrypt a Vorbis stream, stick it in an Ogg container, and bam - Ogg, FairPlay style.
On the other hand, Vorbis isn't the best audio codec for portable players. Current decoders use more processing power to decode Vorbis than MPEG derivatives (mp3, aac), so battery life suffers, assuming the low-power processors can handle Vorbis at all.
Since Ogg is hardly commonplace today, making it an industry standard would mean a lot of work for major software and hardware manufacturers to make their products compatible. And they wouldn't even be saving any money on licensing, since they would still have to maintain compatibility with the patented formats.
I'm against software patents in general, and I've encoded quite a bit of my music in Ogg+Vorbis, but it's easy to understand why large companies would be hesitant to adopt a new format when the old ones work as well or better for them.
Actually, the GP was spot on. Africa needs political stability and economic development, not handouts from the west. We pat ourselves on the back for saving lives through food and medical aid, yet all we end up doing is increasing the population beyond the environment's sustainable capacity, condemning more people to suffer, fighting over and wasting the same limited resources.
The reason few in power care about a real solution is that a stone-age economy hardly competes for resources with industrialized nations, and a broken society is easy to exploit. It's easy to see how governments and corporations would rather maintain the status quo, keeping oil and labor cheap, than invest in a new competitive market.
What we really need is World Bank reform; it was created after World War II for the exact purpose of nation-building and reconstruction. Unfortunately, it's swayed into the hands of the increasingly exploitative US government as well as large corporations, and has lost a great deal of credibility worldwide. A revived World Bank system, with more focus on its key objectives and less control by individual nations and big business, could do far more to heal Africa and other poor regions than the band-aids of food and medicine.
Anyway, what was the topic of this thread again?
It's nice to know I'm not the only one addicted to that theme...
I've got that CD. Agnus Dei is one of my favorite tracks, game soundtrack or otherwise.
My favorite track composed for a videogame is the menu theme from Civ4. If you like African choral music, don't miss it.
I'd have to say Civ4 has the best title theme I've ever heard in a game. The rest of the soundtrack didn't compare, but Chris Tin's bits were fantastic.
For once it's nice to see a site that breaks if you don't use NoScript :)
The problem, though, is how do you get the Delorean on the boosters and keep them there?
Hire these guys.
We're not going to replace our current energy infrastructure with renewable sources overnight. For now, to paraphrase Franklin, a gigawatt saved is indeed a gigawatt earned.
In fact, *saving* power is better than *producing* power. It pollutes less (heat is a form of pollution) and it costs less (less infrastructure and maintenance).
If energy consumption was dramatically reduced, higher prices would make many renewable sources of energy economically feasible while not costing consumers any more than they pay today. Win/win.
From Wikipedia
In October 2005, Apple Inc began selling H.264-encoded videos over the Internet through their iTunes Music Store.[11] Initially selling just television series and music videos, they expanded in September 2006 to sell films. On May 30, 2007 Apple announced plans to integrate streaming of YouTube videos into the Apple TV. In a later interview, Apple VP David Moody revealed that all of YouTube's videos are going to be transcoded to H.264 for higher compatibility and quality on the Apple TV. Starting in June, YouTube will be automatically encoding all new uploads with H.264. Their intention is to have the entire video catalog available in H.264 this autumn. Apple's iPhone supports H.264 Baseline Profile, Levels 2.1 and 3, at resolutions up to 480x320 or 640x480 and bitrates up to 1.5 Mbit/s and is capable of playing the YouTube video content.[12]
Adobe will support H264 in its Flash Player [13].
So you're saying that H.264 isn't an industry standard? As opposed to Flash Video?
I guess Apple must have bought out Adobe as well, considering the next Flash Player will use (cough) "Quicktime".
After that whole dollar thing, I thought we'd never be able to make fun of Canada again.
Blame Canada! Woohoo!
I think they'd better patent this.
All "golden ear" discussions aside... In case you've been living under a rock, Apple has an 160GB player. The only PMPs with more storage use 2.5" notebook drives and are about four times as large as an iPod. iPods have supported lossless audio for years, which is uncommon among popular media players.
If you happen to like another player that's fine - but don't spout BS. As a wise man once said, it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool that to open it and remove all doubt.
I think it will probably be no different, in the end, than the story of 35mm and digital cameras. The first "real" digital camera was the Kodak DCS-100 released in 1991. It was huge, with a 3.5" 200MB hard drive for storage. It took 1.3MP images. And it cost $13,000. Anyone who compared digital cameras to film cameras during the 1990s would have considered digital cameras overpriced novelties that could never replace a decent 35mm. But technology marched on, and as digital cameras became better and cheaper the convenience of being able to view photos without a trip to the 1-hour developer outweighed the progressively smaller quality and price disparity. Of course, technology then continued to march on, digital cameras have essentially caught up with film versions in quality, features, and price, and now you'd be lucky to find a major retailer that carries a selection of 35mm cameras. Now, underscoring the importance of convenience over quality, many people today are taking photos with their cell phones rather than carrying around a second device.
We're back in the 90s again when it comes to eBooks. They're bulky, poor quality, and expensive compared to real books, but they are more convenient in many ways and have quite a bit of untapped potential. The paperless office may be a long ways off, and quality hardcovers will surely stay with us for centuries more, but in 2018 a printed paperback, manual, or textbook may be no more common than a 35mm camera is today.
1. Convenience. You can do full text searches on every book in an eBook reader, an incredibly useful feature for anyone doing research or just looking up a particular term.
2. Portability. You can carry a thousand books and also grab other content (newspapers, blogs, magazines, journals) in a unit the size of a paperback, which you can throw in a backpack, briefcase, etc.
3. Flexibility. You can download any document off the internet (PDF, DOC, TXT) and take it with you without having loose papers to worry about. Granted, the Kindle isn't well suited to this, but other eBook readers handle many formats natively.
4. Efficiency. It wastes a lot fewer resources to manufacture one eBook reader than to print, assemble, and ship hundreds or even thousands of physical books.
5. Turnaround. You can decide to purchase a new book whenever you like, without going to a store, waiting for a shipment, or printing a huge stack of paper on your laser printer. The Kindle even lets you buy a book from wherever you have mobile phone service, though I don't like their DRM model.
6. Usability. If you have poor eyesight you can adjust font sizes on the fly. If you're not in a position to read print you can play an audiobook.
The Kindle is still a pretty primitive device, but over the next several years, as more content becomes eBook-oriented and eBook readers become more useful (better, color screens, solar/motion charging, touch interface) the paper book will become like the slide rule or the 35mm consumer camera: Still used and appreciated by some but more and more ignored by the masses.
So... you're saying that a book has all the advantages of an abacus?