With any reasonably modern video capture system (even the converters built into cheap consumenr DV cams), the weakest link in the chain is going to the be VHS deck. Being analogue, VHS decks are not all equal, they wear out, and they need to be kept well maintained and have the heads cleaned. To get the best results, I'd spend more time finding and maintaining a good, well built VHS deck that hasn't been used for years with no cleaning regime, and less time trying to post-process the recordings.
Getting the tracking right makes a huge difference to VHS quality, don't assume that tracking is a 'set and forget' operation since they objective is not to get the tracking 'right' but to match the probably inaccurate tracking that the particular VHS tape you are working with at any given time was recorded with. Make sure you have manual tracking control, and make sure you use it!
Some VHS decks offer a 'sharpness' control, which can do anything from blurring the image horizontally to adding nasty artifacts similar to those you get from overuse of Photoshop's "Sharpen edges" filter. I've found that manually messing with this to suit each tape can be useful, as you can balance letting through more noise against the artifacts that digital compression of noisy video suffers from.
20" down from $699 to $599 23" down from $999 to $899 30" down from $1,999 to $1,799
If anyone from Apple is listening, I'm sitting here looking at the Apple UK web site and seeing no 8-cores and a $3,060.39 price tag (at today's exchange rate) on the 30" Cinema display. I guess you don't want my order today?
No sign of 8-core machines in the UK Apple Store. Just a glitch or are we going to have to wait a bit longer over here? Lets hope Apple doesn't make us wait as long for their 8-core machine as Sony did for theirs (the PS3).
No sign of the expected Cinema Displays with iSight built in either. Apple discontinued their add-on iSight camera back in December, so MacPro users have no official way of using iChat's video capabilities without using a 3rd party webcam or trawling eBay for an old unit.
You could make a sellable car that does 50mpg by taking my Smart Roadster and adding some lead ballast to waste a bit of petrol. It's rated at 65.7 mpg (imperial gallons) which is 54.7 miles per US gallon.
One of the quirks of British law is that if someone accepts a payment "in full and final settlement" then that's the end of the matter. I suggest posting Corbis (not their law firm) a cheque for $800 (but in UK pounds) with an accompanying letter stating what it's for and including the magic phrase "in full and final settlement". If the cheque is cashed, send the lawyers a photocopy of the letter, and tell them your offer of $800 in full and final settlement was accepted and the matter is now closed. If not, it's only cost you the price of an envelope and some stamps.
Next time, why not use iStockphoto (disclaimer: I sell images there so I'm biased). Their system is to charge a few dollars for images at the comping stage, but this includes the rights to use the images in web pages, so you can't end up in this situation.
"...the list of games that really use four cores is approximately zero."
That's the most interesting part of the article for me. Apart from 3-D rendering and folding@home, they are really pushed to find any real-world reason for having 4 cores.
Maybe they should have waited for Adobe's CS3 when heavy Photoshop tasks should provide nice real-world benchmark, and perhaps Apple will finally give us that long-awaited an 8-core Macintosh to put up against high-end Vista machines.
Shortly after the "well, after a 25% packaging deduction, minus tax, as a percentage of the wholesale price, after returns, shrinkage and overstock, minus proptional copies and production expenses, hire of session lawyers to overdub documents, and advertising/video expenses etc.... our lawyers have failed to recoup and don't actually get paid anything" card, if the way they treat artists is anything to go by.
A Wii is £179.97 at Tescos, and comes with a bundled game (Wii Sports). Add £194.97 for a Xbox 360 core system and you get a number that may appear to you to be £484.99, but those of us with more of a grip on reality can see is actually £374.94
At the moment, it's a Ford with Mercedes price tag. Maybe Sony should simply abandon the failed machine and start making the PS3 they originally promised, with 4 fully operational Cell chips, rather than the 7/8ths of a Cell (minus another 1/8th for DRM) the PS3 currently has.
The current PS3 is simply too little, too late (it's still not launched yet here in Britain!) and too pricey. The British price for a PS3 without game is more than the price of a Wii with game + a core Xbox 360 with a game put together.
"I'm speaking from personal experience of a positive result and your speaking of probably your personal experience"
No, you're speaking from personal experience, I'm speaking about the serious, credible, peer-reviewed scientific study that the article is about.
Have you tried setting up a control group to compare your martial arts students to, and measuring how much exercise they get? If you have, and have published results that disagree with the study in the article, then I'd be glad to carry on this debate. Of course if you'd rather carry on making ad hominem attacks on me just because I have read and understood the article and am taking the time to explain it to you...
While "participation in sports" and excercise is a clearly good thing, the interesting thing this research shows is that teaching sports in school does not actually increase the amount of exercise children get. It shows that if you cut in-school sporting activity, children will naturally compensate by being more active out of school, and vice-versa.
This totally debunks your so called "logical conclusion" that a sports "regimine" is beneficial to these children. As you would know if you read and understood the article, it seems that if you teach your fat lethargic kid sports in school, that kid will simply become more lethargic out of school to compensate.
The logical concluion of this is actually that the "habit of lethargy" out of school is the fault of sports teaching, and when that child leaves school and is no longer forced to do sports they will end up fatter and unhealthier because the sports training has removed their natural propensity to exercise.
How you managed to both draw the exact opposite conclusion and get the currency wrong if indeed you had read the article is beyond me.
There were no 'wasted dollars' here, and that's not just because it's a British study not an American one. The Early Bird study referred to was on children with a mean age of 4.9 years, so calling BS while referring to "wrestling" and "bodybuilding" is hardly worth an 'insightful' mod!
The study discovered that children who don't participate in organised sport do the same amount of exercise through unorganised 'play' as those who do.
Basically, it seems that if you force a child to play soccer for an hour at school, they will probably slump infront of the TV for the rest of the afternoon, but if you make them slump at a desk in class for that hour, they will probably go and play soccer of their own accord after schoool.
The difference between this idea and simply mixing ethanol into the petrol is that the ethanol is injected first, so it vapourises, cooling the compression chamber down, in a similar way to a water injection intercooler. Quite how they arrive at a huge power gain from this isn't adequately explained though, and they do seem to ignore the difficulties of strengthening an engine enough to cope with triple the power, and a few thousand freeze/thaw cycles per second, and the extra weight that's going to add.
Getting a lot of power from a small engine isn't very difficult, the Brabus tuned version of my Smart Roadster (review here) gets over 100bhp from a sub 0.7 l engine, and my less tuned 80bhp version give me about 60 mpg (and thats using our smaller british gallons!). The downside is you don't get lots of torque, which is why you'll only find this engine in a light sporty car, not an SUV.
I spent a while blundering round the icann site trying to find out which characters they were going to support, and all I foud out is that they never use 10 words to say something when 1000 would do. No wonder they never get anything done!
Has anyone found a list of the new characters they are planning to allow? There are loads of ASCII ones currently banned, and I'd like to know if would allow a backdoor to registering some english domains that I might want, such as Andy_R.com
Well, my coment was only intended to point out that the British price is ridiculously high. If you want the actual comparable British street prices, including local taxes, here they are:
PS3 £425 ($821, launches March 23rd, no game) Wii £180 ($347, includes Wii sports game) 360 £190 ($367, no game)
So the PS3 without a game costs more over here than a wii with a game, a 360, and a 360 game put together. But of course it will eventually get an advert-supported second life clone, so that's all right then? I think not.
No, it's abusing a monopoly that is illegal. From the Sherman act article you point to: 'According to Senator George Hoar, an author of the bill, any company which "got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could" would not be in violation of the act."'
If it was illegal to simply be a monopoly, then that would give rise to all sorts of absurd situations. Apple would have to bribe other buinesses to set up rivals to iTunes, nobody could make anything patented (because a patent is a monopoly) and if there were 5 widget makers in the country, and 4 went bust the other one would automatically become a criminal!
He's actually 121 dollars too low, if you take the UK launch price of 425 GBP ($821 at today's exchange rate).
I really think they have given up on Europe, they might as well not launch at all at that price, and the only game I was really looking forward to (Gran Turismo 5) is now a 2008 release BEFORE the huge wait for a PAL version.
Thanks for that. As a player of another MMOG, I'm surprised to see the review place such emphasis on something that exposes the game mechanics, especially as I viewed WoW as a gem that put a lot of emphasis on being an immersive experience.
In Runescape (my game of choice) it's rarely obvious that 'instancing' is happening, and it's only done to prevent people cheating while doing quests. Certain items used in quests are untradeable, for the same reason, but that's about the only circumstance in Runescape where the player comes across anything that blatantly breaks the believability of the world for reasons of preserving the game mechanics. I suppose you could view the 100 or so severs as 'instances' of the entire world, but that never really infringes on gameplay, and it's easy to switch servers to be on the same one as your friends.
It's $500 with a 2 year contract. Until we know what's IN that contract, it's ridiculous to make any purchasing decision. If it's $500 for unlimited calls and data then more than 1% will want it, if it's $5/min + $5/kB then nodody will.
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With any reasonably modern video capture system (even the converters built into cheap consumenr DV cams), the weakest link in the chain is going to the be VHS deck. Being analogue, VHS decks are not all equal, they wear out, and they need to be kept well maintained and have the heads cleaned. To get the best results, I'd spend more time finding and maintaining a good, well built VHS deck that hasn't been used for years with no cleaning regime, and less time trying to post-process the recordings.
Getting the tracking right makes a huge difference to VHS quality, don't assume that tracking is a 'set and forget' operation since they objective is not to get the tracking 'right' but to match the probably inaccurate tracking that the particular VHS tape you are working with at any given time was recorded with. Make sure you have manual tracking control, and make sure you use it!
Some VHS decks offer a 'sharpness' control, which can do anything from blurring the image horizontally to adding nasty artifacts similar to those you get from overuse of Photoshop's "Sharpen edges" filter. I've found that manually messing with this to suit each tape can be useful, as you can balance letting through more noise against the artifacts that digital compression of noisy video suffers from.
20" down from $699 to $599
23" down from $999 to $899
30" down from $1,999 to $1,799
If anyone from Apple is listening, I'm sitting here looking at the Apple UK web site and seeing no 8-cores and a $3,060.39 price tag (at today's exchange rate) on the 30" Cinema display. I guess you don't want my order today?
No sign of 8-core machines in the UK Apple Store. Just a glitch or are we going to have to wait a bit longer over here? Lets hope Apple doesn't make us wait as long for their 8-core machine as Sony did for theirs (the PS3).
No sign of the expected Cinema Displays with iSight built in either. Apple discontinued their add-on iSight camera back in December, so MacPro users have no official way of using iChat's video capabilities without using a 3rd party webcam or trawling eBay for an old unit.
As long as Adobe Creative Suite 3 takes advantage (which it ought to), these will sell like hot cakes to designers.
You could make a sellable car that does 50mpg by taking my Smart Roadster and adding some lead ballast to waste a bit of petrol. It's rated at 65.7 mpg (imperial gallons) which is 54.7 miles per US gallon.
One of the quirks of British law is that if someone accepts a payment "in full and final settlement" then that's the end of the matter. I suggest posting Corbis (not their law firm) a cheque for $800 (but in UK pounds) with an accompanying letter stating what it's for and including the magic phrase "in full and final settlement". If the cheque is cashed, send the lawyers a photocopy of the letter, and tell them your offer of $800 in full and final settlement was accepted and the matter is now closed. If not, it's only cost you the price of an envelope and some stamps.
Next time, why not use iStockphoto (disclaimer: I sell images there so I'm biased). Their system is to charge a few dollars for images at the comping stage, but this includes the rights to use the images in web pages, so you can't end up in this situation.
"...the list of games that really use four cores is approximately zero."
That's the most interesting part of the article for me. Apart from 3-D rendering and folding@home, they are really pushed to find any real-world reason for having 4 cores.
Maybe they should have waited for Adobe's CS3 when heavy Photoshop tasks should provide nice real-world benchmark, and perhaps Apple will finally give us that long-awaited an 8-core Macintosh to put up against high-end Vista machines.
Shortly after the "well, after a 25% packaging deduction, minus tax, as a percentage of the wholesale price, after returns, shrinkage and overstock, minus proptional copies and production expenses, hire of session lawyers to overdub documents, and advertising/video expenses etc. ... our lawyers have failed to recoup and don't actually get paid anything" card, if the way they treat artists is anything to go by.
Wiis are still in short supply here, but that hardly invalidates the comparison to the PS3, which isn't even on sale here yet.
A Wii is £179.97 at Tescos, and comes with a bundled game (Wii Sports). Add £194.97 for a Xbox 360 core system and you get a number that may appear to you to be £484.99, but those of us with more of a grip on reality can see is actually £374.94
At the moment, it's a Ford with Mercedes price tag. Maybe Sony should simply abandon the failed machine and start making the PS3 they originally promised, with 4 fully operational Cell chips, rather than the 7/8ths of a Cell (minus another 1/8th for DRM) the PS3 currently has.
The current PS3 is simply too little, too late (it's still not launched yet here in Britain!) and too pricey. The British price for a PS3 without game is more than the price of a Wii with game + a core Xbox 360 with a game put together.
"I'm speaking from personal experience of a positive result and your speaking of probably your personal experience"
No, you're speaking from personal experience, I'm speaking about the serious, credible, peer-reviewed scientific study that the article is about.
Have you tried setting up a control group to compare your martial arts students to, and measuring how much exercise they get? If you have, and have published results that disagree with the study in the article, then I'd be glad to carry on this debate. Of course if you'd rather carry on making ad hominem attacks on me just because I have read and understood the article and am taking the time to explain it to you...
While "participation in sports" and excercise is a clearly good thing, the interesting thing this research shows is that teaching sports in school does not actually increase the amount of exercise children get. It shows that if you cut in-school sporting activity, children will naturally compensate by being more active out of school, and vice-versa.
This totally debunks your so called "logical conclusion" that a sports "regimine" is beneficial to these children. As you would know if you read and understood the article, it seems that if you teach your fat lethargic kid sports in school, that kid will simply become more lethargic out of school to compensate.
The logical concluion of this is actually that the "habit of lethargy" out of school is the fault of sports teaching, and when that child leaves school and is no longer forced to do sports they will end up fatter and unhealthier because the sports training has removed their natural propensity to exercise.
How you managed to both draw the exact opposite conclusion and get the currency wrong if indeed you had read the article is beyond me.
There were no 'wasted dollars' here, and that's not just because it's a British study not an American one. The Early Bird study referred to was on children with a mean age of 4.9 years, so calling BS while referring to "wrestling" and "bodybuilding" is hardly worth an 'insightful' mod!
The study discovered that children who don't participate in organised sport do the same amount of exercise through unorganised 'play' as those who do.
Basically, it seems that if you force a child to play soccer for an hour at school, they will probably slump infront of the TV for the rest of the afternoon, but if you make them slump at a desk in class for that hour, they will probably go and play soccer of their own accord after schoool.
The difference between this idea and simply mixing ethanol into the petrol is that the ethanol is injected first, so it vapourises, cooling the compression chamber down, in a similar way to a water injection intercooler. Quite how they arrive at a huge power gain from this isn't adequately explained though, and they do seem to ignore the difficulties of strengthening an engine enough to cope with triple the power, and a few thousand freeze/thaw cycles per second, and the extra weight that's going to add.
Getting a lot of power from a small engine isn't very difficult, the Brabus tuned version of my Smart Roadster (review here) gets over 100bhp from a sub 0.7 l engine, and my less tuned 80bhp version give me about 60 mpg (and thats using our smaller british gallons!). The downside is you don't get lots of torque, which is why you'll only find this engine in a light sporty car, not an SUV.
I spent a while blundering round the icann site trying to find out which characters they were going to support, and all I foud out is that they never use 10 words to say something when 1000 would do. No wonder they never get anything done!
Has anyone found a list of the new characters they are planning to allow? There are loads of ASCII ones currently banned, and I'd like to know if would allow a backdoor to registering some english domains that I might want, such as Andy_R.com
"Since when was IBM responsible for SCO's profits?"
Since the day SCO's business plan switched from 'sell stuff' to 'pretend we own patents on IBM's stuff'.
Well, my coment was only intended to point out that the British price is ridiculously high. If you want the actual comparable British street prices, including local taxes, here they are:
PS3 £425 ($821, launches March 23rd, no game)
Wii £180 ($347, includes Wii sports game)
360 £190 ($367, no game)
So the PS3 without a game costs more over here than a wii with a game, a 360, and a 360 game put together. But of course it will eventually get an advert-supported second life clone, so that's all right then? I think not.
No, it's abusing a monopoly that is illegal. From the Sherman act article you point to: 'According to Senator George Hoar, an author of the bill, any company which "got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could" would not be in violation of the act."'
If it was illegal to simply be a monopoly, then that would give rise to all sorts of absurd situations. Apple would have to bribe other buinesses to set up rivals to iTunes, nobody could make anything patented (because a patent is a monopoly) and if there were 5 widget makers in the country, and 4 went bust the other one would automatically become a criminal!
He's actually 121 dollars too low, if you take the UK launch price of 425 GBP ($821 at today's exchange rate).
I really think they have given up on Europe, they might as well not launch at all at that price, and the only game I was really looking forward to (Gran Turismo 5) is now a 2008 release BEFORE the huge wait for a PAL version.
Google: Simple compatible web pages that do what customers want, not evil, everything is beta.
MS: Messy incompatible monolithic apps, scofflaws, ship the alpha version if the deadline arrives.
Yes, it's a wake up call, but I can't see any signs of MS actually waking up and learning anything from Google's succeess.
Thanks for that. As a player of another MMOG, I'm surprised to see the review place such emphasis on something that exposes the game mechanics, especially as I viewed WoW as a gem that put a lot of emphasis on being an immersive experience.
In Runescape (my game of choice) it's rarely obvious that 'instancing' is happening, and it's only done to prevent people cheating while doing quests. Certain items used in quests are untradeable, for the same reason, but that's about the only circumstance in Runescape where the player comes across anything that blatantly breaks the believability of the world for reasons of preserving the game mechanics. I suppose you could view the 100 or so severs as 'instances' of the entire world, but that never really infringes on gameplay, and it's easy to switch servers to be on the same one as your friends.
It's $500 with a 2 year contract. Until we know what's IN that contract, it's ridiculous to make any purchasing decision. If it's $500 for unlimited calls and data then more than 1% will want it, if it's $5/min + $5/kB then nodody will.
As a non-WoW player (I do play Runescape though) this made very little sense to me. Can someone explain what an 'instance' is?
I'm equally baffled by the reviewer saying "players must wade through a lot of content." isn't content rather than grind what everyone wants?