How do you deal with the replacement bulbs on the 7205? We burn (no pun intended) though projector bulbs at work like paper plates. That gets quite expensive... and these spend most of the time off, unlike the high use a entertainment system would get.
Wouldn't it suck if you were in the middle of watching the Super Bowl with 40 friends when the bulb burnt out?
Actually I haven't lost a bulb yet. Only have about 800 hours on it though. At the moment it's a "deal with it when it happens" thing -- if the bulb lasts another few years, I might just get another projector when it finally dies.
Do you have adequate ventilation for your projectors at work? These things are supposed to last 3,000 hours. Mine is in a sealed hush box with two 120mm fans providing ventilation through ducts to the equipment closet, so it stays relatively cool.
.."efficiency" isn't about cheap. I just find it funny that people spend so much energy thinking about where else they can shove some more A/V equipment, rather than think about broader aesthetics.
So, save the unfounded socioeconomic bluster.
Bluster? All I did was guess that you spend your money roughly how I do: on fun stuff. Unless I am seriously mistaken, you are the one criticizing other peoples' spending habits, not me.
If you think the Stewart screens are a rip off, but you still want something with a higher gain than white paint, check out Screen Goo. Judging from the DIY slant of rest of your post, I think it would be right up your alley.
I had actually checked into Screen Goo, but a friend of mine said he had tried it and that it difficult to apply properly. I decided to go with ordinary white paint and use Screen Goo if I needed higher gain, and fortunately the white paint was perfect.
That's still excellent advice to any DIY'ers out there who need a gain higher than 1, though.
The integrated house always comes down to "lots of televisions, audio and remote controls."
I always wonder why people don't shoot for hi-tech that is truly integrated, mostly hidden and mostly about efficiency, not bling. Say, smart, zoned HVAC, super-efficient insulation and windows (say, even the LCD dimmable variety)--and to that effect, just a general attention to using advanced materials, design and techniques in the construction of the building itself, not just more gizmos in a standard sheetrocked McMansion.
There are very good reasons for this:
1) This house was already finished when I bought it. I had no say over the construction techniques used to build it. 2) My house, as with most high-end homes, already has multi-zone HVAC (three in my case) and good insulation. 3) Spending $50,000 to reduce my electric bill by $50/mo doesn't seem like a fair trade compared to spending $50,000 to make my life more pleasant and enjoyable. 4) What makes you think that the technology isn't truly integrated and mostly hidden? When we have parties (which is often), we can fire up music in every room of the house with a push of the button. I personally think that's a fantastic use of technology. 5) What's wrong with wanting to have nice TVs instead of crappy ones?
So, if you want to spend your money differently than I chose to spend mine, great, good for you. For some reason, though, I'm willing to bet that your current place of residence doesn't include any of those efficiency upgrades you mention, and that whatever portion of your paycheck you can spare instead gets spent on fun stuff, just as mine does.
For me, it's not about the money per se but what I actually get for it. My theater cost me about $70,000, which certainly isn't super-high-end, but I expect it was enough to have gotten most installers' ears to perk up.
But because I did it myself and carefully selected components with overall value in mind, I have a theater which (as far as I'm concerned) blows away a lot of $250,000 theaters. Not all of them, certainly, but a lot of them. I used a cheap-ass DVD player because that's all you need, a pretty good but not stellar projector because I expected to throw it away in a few years when better models come out, and absolutely amazing speakers because they are a mature technology which can already reproduce sounds better than my hearing can distinguish them and I mean to hang on to them for life. And no screen at all, because with a nice flat wall, a completely light-controlled room, and a bright projector, a screen provides literally no advantage (it's plenty bright with a gain of 1.0, so increasing gain would merely serve to produce hotspotting).
Again, truly no offense meant by my earlier comment.
Considering that the first things I did when I moved into my house were to build a movie theater in the attic and wire the whole house for audio, video, and Internet, I'm definitely in your target market;-).
Here are the things I would love to have but am too lazy to have actually gotten around to:
The ability to wirelessly stream TV from any of my DVRs to any of my laptops.
Ringing the doorbell should automatically pause any television, movies, or music playing and bring up the front (or side) door-cam
Similarly, video and audio should pause when the phone rings.
Be able to use any device in my house as the source for my whole-house audio-video system (currently only the devices in my living room system can function as sources).
I want a security system that allows me to check the status of my house (hopefully including seeing pictures) from an internet connection. I travel a lot, and it would make me feel better to be able to see that everything is okay.
And some general comments:
After playing around with a bunch of universal remotes, I can categorically state that the Home Theater Master MX-850 (Aeros) is my favorite. I have played with a bunch of high-end touchscreens like Crestrons, and actually have a HTM MX-3000 for my theater, but I find that the "wow!" factor is offset by the day-to-day reality that hard-buttoned remotes are easier to live with.
I don't give a rats' ass about having video screens hidden. I paid a lot of money for my plasma screens, and I'm perfectly okay with having people able to see them. However, while I don't want to hide them, I am perfectly okay with disguising them. I would love to have my main plasma framed so that it looked like a painting on the wall, and I think the ones that look like mirrors when they are off are awesome as well.
I do like to have video in unusual places. I have a high-def TV mounted over the master bathtub which can receive audio and video from the whole-house network. We don't use it very often, but it's great for escaping from reality for a little while. Similarly, I would like to eventually have a weatherproof TV mounted next to my hot tub.
I guess basically the bottom line is that I want to be able to get my video and audio from any device to any device easily. I am unfortunately very busy, and really don't have a lot of time to watch TV or movies -- so being able to fire up a recorded copy "The Simpsons" on my laptop (without the bother of downloading a torrent or ripping a DVD) would make it easier for me to enjoy those few minutes I do have.
Now, that said, I have no intention of actually work with a company like yours. I mean no offense, but in my experience, installation companies like to choose absolutely ridiculously expensive equipment and spend far too much time trying to maximize their profits. The simple fact is that in many cases white paint (cost: $20) provides a projection surface superior to even the much-vaunted Stewart Firehawk (cost: $thousands), and yet I don't think there is a theater company in the world that would actually admit that.
My screen (160" with an Infocus 7205) is white paint. Sherwin Williams Ultrapaint, to be precise. It looks like a real screen, because I have the projection surface framed off with duvetyne tape and the rest of the wall painted dark blue, and I have had very knowledgeable people comment that it's the best image they have ever seen. And it's just white paint. Similarly, my DVD player cost me $50. The output is completely and utterly indistinguishable from a $1500 Denon (and yes, we have run blind tests -- nobody could tell the difference). So I'm very jaded about the home theater industry in general.
Nintendo made the controller available to game studios so they could start thinking about how to use it to develop games. Given that the controller is (by far) the most important change in Revolution, it's also the most important thing for studios to come to grips with.
"Oh, and it's also five times as powerful as the GameCube" is also important, but not necessarily something that studios need to experience firsthand at this particular stage of the game. That will come when the hardware is ready. At this point Nintendo is (quite sensibly) concentrating on getting the controller right, because if that doesn't fly, the whole concept is shot.
He is truly a gaming legend. I still remember an easter egg in... what was it, Ultima III? A townsperson that said "Hi, I'm Richard Garriott. I made this game."
So you don't think this could be a problem? How about it bacteria / fungi evolve the ability to break down PVC, which is used for plumbing systems? Good luck keeping the interior of your house's water pipes dry and well-lit.
Maybe it will never happen. I certainly hope not. But if you think it won't cause major problems, you are deluding yourself.
*Sigh*. You know, when you start laughing out loud at mathematical formulas, some sort of line has been crossed. The Line of Ultimate Geekiness, perhaps. I must reluctantly admit to being on the wrong side of that line.
This actually scares me. What happens to modern society when bacteria, fungus, and other assorted critters evolve the ability to break down plastics? There is no particular reason this can't happen, as plastics would make an extremely high-energy organic food source.
Imagine if your laptop computer started growing mold like an old loaf of bread. Now take a look around your house, office, or wherever and imagine if every single plastic item in existence did. Maybe it won't ever happen -- I certainly hope not -- but this is a worrying first step. Are we too confident in the permanence of our plastic items?
I started out with Java, and wasn't too impressed. After all, what could I do with it? Spend hours building widgets to do things didn't capture my interest, so about 60 hours into the language, I backed out.
This doesn't even make sense. Java is a general-purpose programming language -- you can write absolutely anything in it. Client software, server software, command-line tools, graphical tools, compilers, games, anything. What do widgets have to do with things?
I know I'm going to get bashed for this, but I really think Java is a great first language. It has far more regularity, all of its behaviors (even error conditions) are rigorously defined, which makes debugging easier, and it has a great user interface library in the form of Swing.
No, that's not what happens. Laws say what happens, theories say why and/or how it happens. Laws don't try to explain behaviour, they just state it. Hence the laws of thermodynamics are laws, while the theory of relativity is a theory and always will be.
Nonsense. The difference between a law and a theory is that laws are short and easily explained, while theories are more involved and take longer to explain.
That's it. It has nothing to do with what they do or don't explain, just with how many words and equations they use to do so. Don't believe me? By all means, Google for it to verify that I'm correct -- and mods, please don't mod people Informative without first checking to see that they actually know what they are talking about!
And for organisms encased in rocks to travel between planets seems to be commonplace and easy; it would be amazing indeed if it didn't happen.
Then prepare to be amazed, because it's virtually certain that it didn't happen. The fact that all life on earth is based on the exact same biochemistry is itself enough to prove common descent -- i.e. that all life on earth descended from a single common ancestor.
It's important to note that even if you assume that all life in the universe is "life as we know it" (DNA-based, citric acid cycle, and all that) we still know that all life on earth descended from a single ancestor, because there are a tremendous number of potential variables which would distinguish alien life.
For example, there is a code which maps codons (sequences of three nucleic acids) to amino acids, from which proteins are constructed. This code is arbitrary, and even life with identical overall biochemistry to ours could have a completely different mapping from nucleic acids to amino acids. But when we look at life on earth we find that essentially every species has the exact same code, and the handful that don't still have what is obviously just a slight variation on the universal code -- one or two mappings are different, but the rest is the same.
The conclusion from this (and a tremendous amount of similar data) is that life on earth has a single source. Period. We do not have organisms that originated on multiple different planets, or we would be able to tell them apart because their biochemistries would be different (again, even if 'life as we know it' is the only possibility, there are enough variables that the odds of two unrelated organisms looking like they evolved on the same planet are essentially zero).
Obviously, there is no way to tell if the source of life on earth was terrestrial or extraterrestrial, but "terrestrial" is definitely the more logical conclusion. We know that the earth can support life, whereas we do not know of any other location in the universe that can, and it's doubtful that any terrestrial organisms could have survived the traumatic journey between the stars.
Just to back this up, I have had wicked problems playing World of Warcraft with my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. It mostly worked, despite near-constant graphical glitches, but every now and then my video card would simply freak out to the point that nothing on the screen was intelligible and I was forced to reboot. I would try every single driver upgrade; some made the problem better, some worse. It seemed fairly random, and only ever affected World of Warcraft.
I just bought a new machine with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Rock-solid stable, no problems of any kind, not to mention the fact that I was able to pump up the quality settings all the way to max (at 1900x1200 resolution) and still maintain 60fps. I'm sticking with nVidia from now on.
It seems as though one of the key reasons for this is that Britannica is willing to take a position on many issues, such as "Bostonians are incorrigible jaywalkers," while this would violate Wikipedia NPOV and would probably be replaced with a table of jaywalking prevalence in major American cities.
And you know what? The table of jaywalking prevalence would be a hell of a lot more useful. They wouldn't just be taking an unsupported stand, but rather showing where they drew their conclusion from and allowing me to make my own judgments.
Wikipedia focuses on NPOV for a very good reason. It's perfectly okay to talk about Bostonians jaywalking more than anybody else as long as you cite evidence supporting it and make it a simple statement of fact rather than an antagonistic assertion.
Upconverting is just an ordinary interpolated scale. An upconverting DVD player can output a signal at 720p or 1080i instead of 480i or 480p.
No, of course it doesn't add any more information, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't look better due to reduced pixelation. In the extreme case, consider comparing an image that has been scaled up using nearest neighbor vs. one scaled using bicubic interpolation.
Of course, most high-definition display devices will themselves upconvert a low-resolution input signal to their native resolution, and most of them will do a better job than nearest neighbor. So there's only a win if the DVD player does a better job with the scaling than the TV or projector would have. Of course, the odds are in the DVD player's favor, because it has access to the original binary data on the disc and does not have to work with an already-decoded signal. In general these players do in fact do a better job scaling than projectors do.
I don't personally think it matters much until you get to giant screens. On my 160" screen, I use an upconverting player. The image is definitely improved, but only slightly. On all of my other TVs, I don't bother with it as there isn't much of a difference.
I disagree that making the female characters extremely beautiful, big breasted, and scantily clad only appeals to men. Just look at your nearest MMORPG if you want proof. Every single real life female that I know who plays MMORPG's *always* selects the super-beautiful heroine girl. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule but you will be hard pressed to find a real life female who's playing a dwarf in World of Warcraft for example.
Funny you should say that. I play WoW with my wife and a female friend. My wife plays a troll and a gnome, and my friend plays a dwarf. So, of the three female characters I'm personally familiar with, none of them are sexy.
I had to go look it up. According to urbandictionary, a lifehack is "A tool or technique that makes some aspect of one's life easier or more efficient."
Stupid, stupid word, and I'm glad it's not in the dictionary.
The thing that I think is really funny about IQ tests is that they correlate well to academic ability, but seem to be unrelated to the real-world success of the individuals tested. If they don't relate to ones actual ability to be a productive member of society, it's hard to argue that they're meaningful.
Fortunately, in the real world people are actually doing research on this and not just speculating.
Research shows that intelligence plays an important role in many valued life outcomes. In addition to academic success, intelligence correlates with job performance (see below), socioeconomic advancement (e.g., level of education, occupation, and income), and "social pathology" (e.g., adult criminality, poverty, unemployment, dependence on welfare, children outside of marriage). Recent work has demonstrated links between intelligence and health, longevity, and functional literacy....
General intelligence (in the literature typically called "cognitive ability") is the best predictor of job performance by the standard measure, validity. (emphasis mine)
There are some great charts relating IQ to things such as welfare dependence (31% of under-75 IQs, 0% of over-125 IQs) and being incarcerated (7% of under-75 IQs, 0% of over-125 IQs). Pick a statistic relating to "life success" and you'll find it to be positively correlated with IQ.
The XBox 360 is the first system in a long time that has completely and utterly failed to arouse my interest.
Ooooh! Marginally improved graphics and mediocre games! How could I not want one??
I'm sure I'll end up getting one eventually when the price drops and better games are available, but at the moment I can barely muster the energy for a "meh". And that's remarkable considering that I'm a high-def freak -- in an age when most people don't have one high-def display, I have five. The XBox 360 is the first high-def console, and I find myself not giving a rat's ass, because I would rather have fun games than high-def any day.
Conversely, I am quivering with excitement about the Revolution. We haven't seen anything about the games yet, but it's Nintendo -- they will be stellar. I really don't have any doubt about that.
So, on launch day, when everyone else is unpacking their shiny new XBox 360s, I will fire up the ol' NES with The Legend of Zelda, and remind myself that the sheep have forgotten what fun is.
I have a high-end theater in my home, with an Infocus 7205 projecting onto a 160" scren (that's over thirteen feet diagonal).
During the installation, I very carefully compared component video quality against DVI video quality using a high-end DVD player. With good component cables and proper calibration, no one in my family (myself included) was able to tell the difference between the two.
My theater is about the most demanding environment you can find, with a very large screen, completely dark room, and a thirty foot cable run from the equipment closet to the projector. My wife is a professional digital photographer, and as a result both of us are very sensitive to image quality. And even while carefully scrutinizing the screen we couldn't tell the slightest difference.
Now, I confess that ended up using DVI over component for the main DVD hookup. But it's purely practical -- my DVD player won't output an upscaled signal over component, and the image is better if the DVD player does the upscaling rather than the projector. (The DVI vs. component test had to be done at 480p for that reason). Also, I have been able to tell the difference when using crappy component cables (but crappy DVI cables are even worse).
Slashdot Mirror
How do you deal with the replacement bulbs on the 7205? We burn (no pun intended) though projector bulbs at work like paper plates. That gets quite expensive... and these spend most of the time off, unlike the high use a entertainment system would get.
Wouldn't it suck if you were in the middle of watching the Super Bowl with 40 friends when the bulb burnt out?
Actually I haven't lost a bulb yet. Only have about 800 hours on it though. At the moment it's a "deal with it when it happens" thing -- if the bulb lasts another few years, I might just get another projector when it finally dies.
Do you have adequate ventilation for your projectors at work? These things are supposed to last 3,000 hours. Mine is in a sealed hush box with two 120mm fans providing ventilation through ducts to the equipment closet, so it stays relatively cool.
.."efficiency" isn't about cheap. I just find it funny that people spend so much energy thinking about where else they can shove some more A/V equipment, rather than think about broader aesthetics.
So, save the unfounded socioeconomic bluster.
Bluster? All I did was guess that you spend your money roughly how I do: on fun stuff. Unless I am seriously mistaken, you are the one criticizing other peoples' spending habits, not me.
If you think the Stewart screens are a rip off, but you still want something with a higher gain than white paint, check out Screen Goo. Judging from the DIY slant of rest of your post, I think it would be right up your alley.
I had actually checked into Screen Goo, but a friend of mine said he had tried it and that it difficult to apply properly. I decided to go with ordinary white paint and use Screen Goo if I needed higher gain, and fortunately the white paint was perfect.
That's still excellent advice to any DIY'ers out there who need a gain higher than 1, though.
The integrated house always comes down to "lots of televisions, audio and remote controls."
I always wonder why people don't shoot for hi-tech that is truly integrated, mostly hidden and mostly about efficiency, not bling. Say, smart, zoned HVAC, super-efficient insulation and windows (say, even the LCD dimmable variety)--and to that effect, just a general attention to using advanced materials, design and techniques in the construction of the building itself, not just more gizmos in a standard sheetrocked McMansion.
There are very good reasons for this:
1) This house was already finished when I bought it. I had no say over the construction techniques used to build it.
2) My house, as with most high-end homes, already has multi-zone HVAC (three in my case) and good insulation.
3) Spending $50,000 to reduce my electric bill by $50/mo doesn't seem like a fair trade compared to spending $50,000 to make my life more pleasant and enjoyable.
4) What makes you think that the technology isn't truly integrated and mostly hidden? When we have parties (which is often), we can fire up music in every room of the house with a push of the button. I personally think that's a fantastic use of technology.
5) What's wrong with wanting to have nice TVs instead of crappy ones?
So, if you want to spend your money differently than I chose to spend mine, great, good for you. For some reason, though, I'm willing to bet that your current place of residence doesn't include any of those efficiency upgrades you mention, and that whatever portion of your paycheck you can spare instead gets spent on fun stuff, just as mine does.
For me, it's not about the money per se but what I actually get for it. My theater cost me about $70,000, which certainly isn't super-high-end, but I expect it was enough to have gotten most installers' ears to perk up.
But because I did it myself and carefully selected components with overall value in mind, I have a theater which (as far as I'm concerned) blows away a lot of $250,000 theaters. Not all of them, certainly, but a lot of them. I used a cheap-ass DVD player because that's all you need, a pretty good but not stellar projector because I expected to throw it away in a few years when better models come out, and absolutely amazing speakers because they are a mature technology which can already reproduce sounds better than my hearing can distinguish them and I mean to hang on to them for life. And no screen at all, because with a nice flat wall, a completely light-controlled room, and a bright projector, a screen provides literally no advantage (it's plenty bright with a gain of 1.0, so increasing gain would merely serve to produce hotspotting).
Again, truly no offense meant by my earlier comment.
Considering that the first things I did when I moved into my house were to build a movie theater in the attic and wire the whole house for audio, video, and Internet, I'm definitely in your target market ;-).
Here are the things I would love to have but am too lazy to have actually gotten around to:
The ability to wirelessly stream TV from any of my DVRs to any of my laptops.
Ringing the doorbell should automatically pause any television, movies, or music playing and bring up the front (or side) door-cam
Similarly, video and audio should pause when the phone rings.
Be able to use any device in my house as the source for my whole-house audio-video system (currently only the devices in my living room system can function as sources).
I want a security system that allows me to check the status of my house (hopefully including seeing pictures) from an internet connection. I travel a lot, and it would make me feel better to be able to see that everything is okay.
And some general comments:
After playing around with a bunch of universal remotes, I can categorically state that the Home Theater Master MX-850 (Aeros) is my favorite. I have played with a bunch of high-end touchscreens like Crestrons, and actually have a HTM MX-3000 for my theater, but I find that the "wow!" factor is offset by the day-to-day reality that hard-buttoned remotes are easier to live with.
I don't give a rats' ass about having video screens hidden. I paid a lot of money for my plasma screens, and I'm perfectly okay with having people able to see them. However, while I don't want to hide them, I am perfectly okay with disguising them. I would love to have my main plasma framed so that it looked like a painting on the wall, and I think the ones that look like mirrors when they are off are awesome as well.
I do like to have video in unusual places. I have a high-def TV mounted over the master bathtub which can receive audio and video from the whole-house network. We don't use it very often, but it's great for escaping from reality for a little while. Similarly, I would like to eventually have a weatherproof TV mounted next to my hot tub.
I guess basically the bottom line is that I want to be able to get my video and audio from any device to any device easily. I am unfortunately very busy, and really don't have a lot of time to watch TV or movies -- so being able to fire up a recorded copy "The Simpsons" on my laptop (without the bother of downloading a torrent or ripping a DVD) would make it easier for me to enjoy those few minutes I do have.
Now, that said, I have no intention of actually work with a company like yours. I mean no offense, but in my experience, installation companies like to choose absolutely ridiculously expensive equipment and spend far too much time trying to maximize their profits. The simple fact is that in many cases white paint (cost: $20) provides a projection surface superior to even the much-vaunted Stewart Firehawk (cost: $thousands), and yet I don't think there is a theater company in the world that would actually admit that.
My screen (160" with an Infocus 7205) is white paint. Sherwin Williams Ultrapaint, to be precise. It looks like a real screen, because I have the projection surface framed off with duvetyne tape and the rest of the wall painted dark blue, and I have had very knowledgeable people comment that it's the best image they have ever seen. And it's just white paint. Similarly, my DVD player cost me $50. The output is completely and utterly indistinguishable from a $1500 Denon (and yes, we have run blind tests -- nobody could tell the difference). So I'm very jaded about the home theater industry in general.
Nintendo made the controller available to game studios so they could start thinking about how to use it to develop games. Given that the controller is (by far) the most important change in Revolution, it's also the most important thing for studios to come to grips with.
"Oh, and it's also five times as powerful as the GameCube" is also important, but not necessarily something that studios need to experience firsthand at this particular stage of the game. That will come when the hardware is ready. At this point Nintendo is (quite sensibly) concentrating on getting the controller right, because if that doesn't fly, the whole concept is shot.
He is truly a gaming legend. I still remember an easter egg in... what was it, Ultima III? A townsperson that said "Hi, I'm Richard Garriott. I made this game."
I always thought that was a classy easter egg.
So you don't think this could be a problem? How about it bacteria / fungi evolve the ability to break down PVC, which is used for plumbing systems? Good luck keeping the interior of your house's water pipes dry and well-lit.
Maybe it will never happen. I certainly hope not. But if you think it won't cause major problems, you are deluding yourself.
[-(friend^2)]^(1/2)
*Sigh*. You know, when you start laughing out loud at mathematical formulas, some sort of line has been crossed. The Line of Ultimate Geekiness, perhaps. I must reluctantly admit to being on the wrong side of that line.
This actually scares me. What happens to modern society when bacteria, fungus, and other assorted critters evolve the ability to break down plastics? There is no particular reason this can't happen, as plastics would make an extremely high-energy organic food source.
Imagine if your laptop computer started growing mold like an old loaf of bread. Now take a look around your house, office, or wherever and imagine if every single plastic item in existence did. Maybe it won't ever happen -- I certainly hope not -- but this is a worrying first step. Are we too confident in the permanence of our plastic items?
I started out with Java, and wasn't too impressed. After all, what could I do with it? Spend hours building widgets to do things didn't capture my interest, so about 60 hours into the language, I backed out.
This doesn't even make sense. Java is a general-purpose programming language -- you can write absolutely anything in it. Client software, server software, command-line tools, graphical tools, compilers, games, anything. What do widgets have to do with things?
I know I'm going to get bashed for this, but I really think Java is a great first language. It has far more regularity, all of its behaviors (even error conditions) are rigorously defined, which makes debugging easier, and it has a great user interface library in the form of Swing.
No, that's not what happens. Laws say what happens, theories say why and/or how it happens. Laws don't try to explain behaviour, they just state it. Hence the laws of thermodynamics are laws, while the theory of relativity is a theory and always will be.
Nonsense. The difference between a law and a theory is that laws are short and easily explained, while theories are more involved and take longer to explain.
That's it. It has nothing to do with what they do or don't explain, just with how many words and equations they use to do so. Don't believe me? By all means, Google for it to verify that I'm correct -- and mods, please don't mod people Informative without first checking to see that they actually know what they are talking about!
And for organisms encased in rocks to travel between planets seems to be commonplace and easy; it would be amazing indeed if it didn't happen.
Then prepare to be amazed, because it's virtually certain that it didn't happen. The fact that all life on earth is based on the exact same biochemistry is itself enough to prove common descent -- i.e. that all life on earth descended from a single common ancestor.
It's important to note that even if you assume that all life in the universe is "life as we know it" (DNA-based, citric acid cycle, and all that) we still know that all life on earth descended from a single ancestor, because there are a tremendous number of potential variables which would distinguish alien life.
For example, there is a code which maps codons (sequences of three nucleic acids) to amino acids, from which proteins are constructed. This code is arbitrary, and even life with identical overall biochemistry to ours could have a completely different mapping from nucleic acids to amino acids. But when we look at life on earth we find that essentially every species has the exact same code, and the handful that don't still have what is obviously just a slight variation on the universal code -- one or two mappings are different, but the rest is the same.
The conclusion from this (and a tremendous amount of similar data) is that life on earth has a single source. Period. We do not have organisms that originated on multiple different planets, or we would be able to tell them apart because their biochemistries would be different (again, even if 'life as we know it' is the only possibility, there are enough variables that the odds of two unrelated organisms looking like they evolved on the same planet are essentially zero).
Obviously, there is no way to tell if the source of life on earth was terrestrial or extraterrestrial, but "terrestrial" is definitely the more logical conclusion. We know that the earth can support life, whereas we do not know of any other location in the universe that can, and it's doubtful that any terrestrial organisms could have survived the traumatic journey between the stars.
Just to back this up, I have had wicked problems playing World of Warcraft with my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. It mostly worked, despite near-constant graphical glitches, but every now and then my video card would simply freak out to the point that nothing on the screen was intelligible and I was forced to reboot. I would try every single driver upgrade; some made the problem better, some worse. It seemed fairly random, and only ever affected World of Warcraft.
I just bought a new machine with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Rock-solid stable, no problems of any kind, not to mention the fact that I was able to pump up the quality settings all the way to max (at 1900x1200 resolution) and still maintain 60fps. I'm sticking with nVidia from now on.
THE BIGGER-THAN-TV MOVIE Most digital still cameras today can also capture video big enough to fill a standard TV screen (640 by 480 pixels)
er no, PAL is 720x576, NTSC is similar
Sure, if by "similar" you mean 640x480, which is exactly what the author claimed.
It seems as though one of the key reasons for this is that Britannica is willing to take a position on many issues, such as "Bostonians are incorrigible jaywalkers," while this would violate Wikipedia NPOV and would probably be replaced with a table of jaywalking prevalence in major American cities.
And you know what? The table of jaywalking prevalence would be a hell of a lot more useful. They wouldn't just be taking an unsupported stand, but rather showing where they drew their conclusion from and allowing me to make my own judgments.
Wikipedia focuses on NPOV for a very good reason. It's perfectly okay to talk about Bostonians jaywalking more than anybody else as long as you cite evidence supporting it and make it a simple statement of fact rather than an antagonistic assertion.
This should be insanely obvious to anybody.
These were adult chimpanzees, yes? And comparing them to young humans?
I'm sure if you compared young chimpanzees with young humans the results might be different.
The chimp in the pictures is obviously not an adult, so I would assume the comparison is fair.
Upconverting is just an ordinary interpolated scale. An upconverting DVD player can output a signal at 720p or 1080i instead of 480i or 480p.
No, of course it doesn't add any more information, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't look better due to reduced pixelation. In the extreme case, consider comparing an image that has been scaled up using nearest neighbor vs. one scaled using bicubic interpolation.
Of course, most high-definition display devices will themselves upconvert a low-resolution input signal to their native resolution, and most of them will do a better job than nearest neighbor. So there's only a win if the DVD player does a better job with the scaling than the TV or projector would have. Of course, the odds are in the DVD player's favor, because it has access to the original binary data on the disc and does not have to work with an already-decoded signal. In general these players do in fact do a better job scaling than projectors do.
I don't personally think it matters much until you get to giant screens. On my 160" screen, I use an upconverting player. The image is definitely improved, but only slightly. On all of my other TVs, I don't bother with it as there isn't much of a difference.
I disagree that making the female characters extremely beautiful, big breasted, and scantily clad only appeals to men. Just look at your nearest MMORPG if you want proof. Every single real life female that I know who plays MMORPG's *always* selects the super-beautiful heroine girl. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule but you will be hard pressed to find a real life female who's playing a dwarf in World of Warcraft for example.
Funny you should say that. I play WoW with my wife and a female friend. My wife plays a troll and a gnome, and my friend plays a dwarf. So, of the three female characters I'm personally familiar with, none of them are sexy.
I had to go look it up. According to urbandictionary, a lifehack is "A tool or technique that makes some aspect of one's life easier or more efficient."
Stupid, stupid word, and I'm glad it's not in the dictionary.
The thing that I think is really funny about IQ tests is that they correlate well to academic ability, but seem to be unrelated to the real-world success of the individuals tested. If they don't relate to ones actual ability to be a productive member of society, it's hard to argue that they're meaningful.
t :
...
Fortunately, in the real world people are actually doing research on this and not just speculating.
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotien
Research shows that intelligence plays an important role in many valued life outcomes. In addition to academic success, intelligence correlates with job performance (see below), socioeconomic advancement (e.g., level of education, occupation, and income), and "social pathology" (e.g., adult criminality, poverty, unemployment, dependence on welfare, children outside of marriage). Recent work has demonstrated links between intelligence and health, longevity, and functional literacy.
General intelligence (in the literature typically called "cognitive ability") is the best predictor of job performance by the standard measure, validity. (emphasis mine)
There are some great charts relating IQ to things such as welfare dependence (31% of under-75 IQs, 0% of over-125 IQs) and being incarcerated (7% of under-75 IQs, 0% of over-125 IQs). Pick a statistic relating to "life success" and you'll find it to be positively correlated with IQ.
The XBox 360 is the first system in a long time that has completely and utterly failed to arouse my interest.
Ooooh! Marginally improved graphics and mediocre games! How could I not want one??
I'm sure I'll end up getting one eventually when the price drops and better games are available, but at the moment I can barely muster the energy for a "meh". And that's remarkable considering that I'm a high-def freak -- in an age when most people don't have one high-def display, I have five. The XBox 360 is the first high-def console, and I find myself not giving a rat's ass, because I would rather have fun games than high-def any day.
Conversely, I am quivering with excitement about the Revolution. We haven't seen anything about the games yet, but it's Nintendo -- they will be stellar. I really don't have any doubt about that.
So, on launch day, when everyone else is unpacking their shiny new XBox 360s, I will fire up the ol' NES with The Legend of Zelda, and remind myself that the sheep have forgotten what fun is.
I have a high-end theater in my home, with an Infocus 7205 projecting onto a 160" scren (that's over thirteen feet diagonal).
During the installation, I very carefully compared component video quality against DVI video quality using a high-end DVD player. With good component cables and proper calibration, no one in my family (myself included) was able to tell the difference between the two.
My theater is about the most demanding environment you can find, with a very large screen, completely dark room, and a thirty foot cable run from the equipment closet to the projector. My wife is a professional digital photographer, and as a result both of us are very sensitive to image quality. And even while carefully scrutinizing the screen we couldn't tell the slightest difference.
Now, I confess that ended up using DVI over component for the main DVD hookup. But it's purely practical -- my DVD player won't output an upscaled signal over component, and the image is better if the DVD player does the upscaling rather than the projector. (The DVI vs. component test had to be done at 480p for that reason). Also, I have been able to tell the difference when using crappy component cables (but crappy DVI cables are even worse).