I mentioned this in yesterday's post, and will mention it again here: IE7 ONLY shows up on the Windows Updates if you have installed an alpha or beta of it. If you are still running IE6, it does not force IE7 on you. We tested this here in our IT department after I noticed that my automatic update at home installed it.
IE7 ONLY shows up on the Windows Updates if you have installed an alpha or beta of it. If you are still running IE6, it does not force IE7 on you. We tested this here in our IT department after I noticed that my automatic update at home installed it.
This is the most pathetic article I have ever read. Other than being horribly offended by the language of the article, it read mostly like it was written by some teenage kid on his blog. While I must agree with his game picks, I feel that he was overly harsh in many areas, especially graphics. The Kriss Kross game and the Zelda game made early use of video compression capabilities, and especially with the Kriss Kross game, the idea that you are mixing videos, real-time, on the fly, on hardware the likes of the Sega CD, limited to 64 colors being able to be displayed at one time, was quite a technological marvel. Several of the games he mentioned had sucky graphics not because of poor design, but because of limitations of the NES and the Gameboy color. Actually, from the screenshots he posted of stuff like Bubsy, Kriss Kross, Barensteen Bears, Total Recal, and so forth, the graphics were on par with other games of the same genera on the same platform. Shoot, even ET, with as AWFUL as that game was, had graphics that were on par with other Atari 2600 titles.
While I must admit that all of these games sucked, the reasons given in the article were not good. It looks like games were picked at random, I mean, with the exception of ET, I can think of many other games that should be on this list instead. I would much rather be forced to play Bubsy than that horrible Home Alone game for the SNES, Galaga 13 and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker could be put in the same category as Total Recal, and I cannot believe that not a single Barbie game made the list. And what about those games that were released that were so buggy that they could not be played? Three Dirty Drarfs for the Sega Saturn actually CRASHED on me every time I get to a certain point of the game, which, I have not played it in years, so cannot remember if its the first or second level, but made the game practically worthless. I have played racing games where physics seemed to be a concept the game designers left out, making it perfectly alright to drive through solid objects. How in the world did Aquaman not get on this list?
Once again, I must admit that all these games suck, but if you are going to work for EGM, stop acting like a 14 year old who is having a tempertantherum because he just got grounded.
My university charged a $250 a year "technoloygy fee". The fee was mandnatory. It included internet and basic cable. This was new at the time, but I tried getting digital cable, cable modem, or DSL,and none were allowed at the college. I knew students that moved off-campus soley so they could get dsl. Now, when the university first installed gigabyte to the dorms in 1999, it was fast, at first. Before then, all the univeristy offered students was dialup, and it was through an offcampus provider. As internet usage increased, the number of outgoing lines decreased. People were complaining they could not get a line during peak hours to call home, call the police, or anything else.
Problem was, when they installed ethernet to the dorms, the university did not increase its pipe. As more people started getting on the network, the speed took a hit to where it was slower than dialup.
They eventually installed a couple more pipes. During business hours, speed to the dorms was throttled and speed to the adminsitration buildings and computer labs were unrestricted (from what I was told). To limit traffic, they put like 128k pipe on P2P systems, and like all P2P traffic for the whole university was pushed through that small pipe. As P2P at the time was mainly napster and winmx, and mostly used for mp3s, and as it was still fairly new at the time, I could still get on and get about 10k a file, which truthfully is not too terribly painful for a single mp3. Upside is, with them throttling P2P traffic, I could still browse websites, and got pretty good freakin speeds downloading from Usenet using a pay provider (as a small liberal arts college, the school did not host newsgroups on their servers).
Now, I don't like the ideas of throttling traffic at all, if you are stuck with limited bandwidth, I say throttle bandwidth on certain ports rather than keep everything unthrottled and letting all bandwidth take a hit because someone is trying to download some pirated movie. If they want to download a Linux distro, let them do it in the lab where bandwidth is unthrottled and burn it to CD.
Yeah, students are paying a technology fee, and most likely do not have access to other avenues. But don't block traffic, or stuff like that, just limit bandwidth on certain ports. Certainly do not cap bandwidth. Shoot, I downloaded (legally) Windows Vista Release Canidate 1 the other day, and it was 3.5 gig. I can easily download 10 gig a day in legal downloads (although its usually not that high, I don't have THAT much hard drive space), and think capping is stupid.
And as far as using BitTorrent for Linux distros, yeah, you can, but I find 9 times out of ten I get faster downloads downloading the distros from a sunsite or ftp server at some university.
If someone was to post a comment like this, it would be marked as flamebait. This story has nothing to do with science, technology, or any of the other things slashdot talks about. You might be able to argue relevance with electronic voting hacking or something. Truthfully, people need to stop pulling stories that are two years old out of the trash and trying to rehash them.
I agree. I punch in the friend ID and it tells me there are no songs on the page, even when I am looking at it and its clear the artist has 5 or 6 songs on the page. The MySpace Informant sounds pretty cool, but MySpaceIM already does the same thing.
There are many independant artists on Myspace, many of which do not have a personal website, or if they do, do not have music on their sites. Myspace is an easy way for the independant artists to get recognized, and easily post their songs.
I am pretty sure that I remember reading that the component on HD-DVD supports 1080i unless the content had HDCP on it that disabled high def through the component, and last I heard, no discs that have been released has crippled that response. If you want 1080p though, and full HDCP support, you need the HDMI, but as they are currently not crippling discs (last I heard, things may have changed), and as I am not aware of any sets that support 1080p, I see no reason for upgrading my perfectly good HDTV to support HDMI.
What I don't get is where they said they started coming up with HDTV 40 years ago. I have a problem with this statement. I am not sure what the cameras could "see", but you look back on recordings from that erra, you realize the resolution is not even a full 525 (NTSC) lines. Quadrophonic sound really came out roughly around the early 70s. Digital video compression did not really become a reality until the 80s. Could you imagine the bandwidth needed to transmit an ANALOG picture at 1920x1080? The idea of the concept of HDTV being come up with shortly after the introduction of color TV just sounds a bit farfetched to me.
Okay, I know what a Prime number is, I passed high school. And this number is huge.
My question is, can someone describe to me in SIMPLE terms what a Mersenne prime is?
Do we really do math where we need to discover prime numbers this big? I mean, its like trying to compute pi. I mean, once you take PI out a few decimal places, its as accurate as most people need it. Do we really need super computers that do nothing better with their time than calculate this kind of stuff?
I am sorry if I sound ignorant, but it seems to me that sometimes people just get worked up about stuff that we don't really need. I mean, really, yeah, its cool that we found a prime number this large, but whats the point?
This list is proposterous. They have people like Public relations officer at Nintendo and someone who teaches game design at some university, yet they fail to talk about the most influential people, such as Roberta Williams and other women who were famous for the adventure games from Sierra Online that came out back in the 80s and 90s. Maybe they ment the most infuential people still in games.
I thought eDonkey had long since been dead. I have not seen an ed2k link on the net for quite some time. And I had never used eDonkey for downloading music, and it seems most other people didn't either. Seemed like a popular way to pirate movies a few years back before BitTorrent took off, and was used a lot for porno. I was really the only one I know of that used eDonkey at all, and I think I may have downloaded one thing off of it, some like subbed anime or something.
E-mule is deffinately more pevelant, even if people do not realize it.Doesn't Limewire use eMule client as its backbone?
They were charging 10 bucks for movies I can go down and buy at Walmart on DVD for $7.50. Am I paying the extra $2.50 for a DRM crippled file? And the portables are using Windows DRM, so I guess that means I cannot put it on my 5th generation iPod
I disagree. There are several must have games on the list, including The Sims, FarCry, any of the Need for Speed games, and HalfLife. Alice is also an extraordinary game, and if you have not played it, I suggest going down and digging it out of the used game stash at your local EB Games or Gamestop.
I do have to agree that PC gaming is pretty much dead. I have an Athlon 64 with an NVidia 6600, and still, if I have the choice between PC and console, I usually take the console, despite the fact that the PC is hooked up to the HDTV and games such as Farcry on the tv look way better than the console equivilants. Why do I prefer the console? Its just more convienient. There are only a handful of games I play on the PC, and its because those games just play better on the PC. Of course, they are limited to FPS shooters, The Sims, Alice, and the Harry Potter games (I am also surprised that Sorcerer's Stone was so high, but it was fun, and really made good use of the technology available at the time, considering it was a francise title). Shoot, you look at the games sitting around my computer that I regularly play, and here is all you see: 7th Guest, Harry Potters 1-4, Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup, Alice, The Sims (and all expansion packs), The Sims 2 (and expansion packs), Alice, Duke Nukem 3D, Star Trek: A Final Unity, Sim City 4, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed, Bejeweled 2 and Majhong Towers 2. All other games are for the Playstation. Believe it or not, I had GTA Vice City for the PC, but when I bought the PS2 later, I picked the game up for it, and play it more on the PS2 even though the PC version is supperior in so many ways. Its the whole convienience factor. Yeah, Piracy may play a small percentage in the low number of PC sales, but I think most people are like me, if given the choice, they prefer to play the games on their console.
I am wondering if this browser is a layer on top of another browser. I mean, I launched the program, it properly rendered webpages, and properly used flash 9 without it having to be installed. It is surprisingly fast. While I have not stressed tested the brower yet, so far it has properly displayed everything I have thrown at it. This surprised me, as it is only 264 kb
I agree. Use professional SVHS recorders and players. Don't use consumer grade, they are crap. You may even want to try some Prosumer models. I have had VERY good luck recording with $200 SVHS VCRs recording with one recorder and playing back on another. If you are trying to record on cheap tapes using cheap $40 recorders, yeah, playback from one machine to another is going to look like crap. Use SVHS, export to your destination source via the SVHS cable and output rather than composet or coax, and it should look great.
I disagree with QBASIC. Not for Primary school. You have to understand modules and all that stuff, and that is just too advanced for Primary school kids IMHO. I say good old fashioned basic where you have line numbers. Kids understand that, I learned BASIC in fourth grade, and the simplicity of GOTO 120 is easy for a kid to understand. I was in college, after having fundamentals of programing class, that I understood really how modules worked and therefore, how QBASIC worked.
HTML is cool too, but there are some downsides. First, do not confuse HTML as a programing language, its a Markup language. That is, its simply a text file with a few tags thrown in so a browser will know how to render the page. Also, do you really want kids at six, seven, eight years of age writting their own webpages? I can see angry letters from parents about that. I know that in the US, the child privacy act or whatever its called, will not let children under 13 on many sites. I think this should be taken into account of webpage programing as well, an 8 year old will think "oh, cool, my friends can see this" and will want to put up their address and phone number, without thinking that everyone else in the world can read it as well. Even if the pages inside the school are kept on an internal server, they are still learning how to do this, and can go home and do it. Of course, its probably no different than a 10 year old lying about their age and signing up for myspace, but why encourage it.
Stick to Basic in Primary school, let Intermediate or middle school teach them HTML, and let them learn Pascal and C in High School.
My thumb drive has Microsoft Defender (used to be MS Antispyware), Avast, OpenOffice install files, updates to Microsoft Office XP, 2000 and 2003, WGA hack (even if you have an official copy of windows, its a pain in the ass), and copies of Bejeweled 2 and Majhong Towers (for my use). I also keep video drivers for nVidia and ATI, nForce motherboard drivers, the drivers to my wireless network cards, and Nero (its amazing how many people throw out their Nero CDs). Lastly, I have every single song for the church and several sermons on it. Oh, and also copies of Sunday Plus, as a computer is always breaking and having to go grab a spare computer and load it up for services.
I have an iPod 30 gig. Truth be told, I have maybe 15 gig of music. I have about 8 gig of it on my iPod. What do I do with the other 22 gig? The iPod makes a GREAT portable hard drive, you can load Rockbox on it and play Doom and Bejeweled on it. Oh, and if you have an alternative power source, you can load movies on it (really great for when you are at the laundry mat or airport), but if you do not have the alternative power source, your iPod is dead in 90 minutes.
There ARE cheap iPod knockoffs out there, just do a search on e-bay. You can pick them up out of China for about $40 for a two gig model (last time I looked, prices may vary now).
And there are cheaper alternatives for around $30 where you can get players and go shove a compact flash card in them, and 512 meg mp3 players out there for around $40-$50. Yet everyone wants the iPod. The iPod now seems to be as popular as the portable CD player back in the early 90s. I would hardly say iPod is for those who are early adopters, I bought my first MP3 player back in 2000. Those were early adopters. If you do not think iPod has hit the main stream, just go to any high school.
If the United States was the size of say, the sate of Maryland (as is the United Kingdom), and had a state-run phone company, than yes, you would probably see broadband cheaper and more effective in the United States. The problem is, the United States is bigger than the ENTIRE continent of Europe, you have public phone companies who have legalized monopolies on area (its SBC in this area, used to be Southwestern Bell)and you just have old infastructure in the areas. Most telephone infastructures in Europe have been completely overhauled in the last ten years, or are in the process of being overhauled. Then you have states such as, well, look at Montana. Montana has roughly the same geographical area as the country of Germany, yet a population of under a million people. Plus, most of the state is covered in mountains. Is it economically feasable to run fiber to each and every person in the state of Montana? Problem is, with the exception of New England, your southern states and pacific coast states, the other, oh, 30 states in the United States are sparsly populated, and cover a HUGE geographic area. There are still areas in the United States that do not have cable television service, and are on the old rotary phone system. Could you imagine the cost of running a fiber optic cable 200 miles outside of the city to some little ranch? I am sorry, but I am willing to bet that, unless fiber becomes ridicoulously cheap, there are people in areas of the United States that will NEVER get broadband via a physical wire. Not saying there are not alternatives, but satelite is incredibly expensive. I was looking into it recently for my aunt who lives out in the country. Satelite Internet costs between $600-$800 to buy the equipment, then runs about $80 a month. The other option is broadband through the cell, which is becoming increasingly attractive. Cell phones companies (especially some of the ones such as Verizon and Cingular) have amazingly good coverage (unless you are in the montains), and now offer pc card adapters so you can get broadband through them. While its not dsl speeds, it is faster than dialup (in most cases).
I am sorry, but the problem here is NOT that the US is falling behind in technology to Europe, but that the country is more sparsly populated.
I have a 30 inch Insignia HDTV-CRT that natively supports 1920x1080i, 1280x720p, 480i, 480p, 576i, and so forth. I use the component out on my nVidia video card along with nVidia's nStant Media Player. The TV cost $550 at Best Buy (before Tax), and alows me to view movies from my computer at 1920x1080i. Absolutely beautiful. Use DVD-Region Free to launch nStant Media, and it will upconvert your DVDs to 1080i, looks MUCH better than the progressive scan DVD player I picked up, and does it through the Component, succesfully elemenating the need for HDMI.
Oh, I also have the TV hooked up via component to my dish network hdtv box. Gotta love Discovery HD, and HD NET is going to start showing reruns of Enterprise this fall in HD
What ellse is there to watch on the network? Why, Atlantis, of course. But you are right, Friday nights are going to suck. I am either going to have to finally get a life, or start watching Most Haunted on TLC.
Slashdot Mirror
I mentioned this in yesterday's post, and will mention it again here:
IE7 ONLY shows up on the Windows Updates if you have installed an alpha or beta of it. If you are still running IE6, it does not force IE7 on you. We tested this here in our IT department after I noticed that my automatic update at home installed it.
IE7 ONLY shows up on the Windows Updates if you have installed an alpha or beta of it. If you are still running IE6, it does not force IE7 on you. We tested this here in our IT department after I noticed that my automatic update at home installed it.
This is the most pathetic article I have ever read. Other than being horribly offended by the language of the article, it read mostly like it was written by some teenage kid on his blog. While I must agree with his game picks, I feel that he was overly harsh in many areas, especially graphics. The Kriss Kross game and the Zelda game made early use of video compression capabilities, and especially with the Kriss Kross game, the idea that you are mixing videos, real-time, on the fly, on hardware the likes of the Sega CD, limited to 64 colors being able to be displayed at one time, was quite a technological marvel. Several of the games he mentioned had sucky graphics not because of poor design, but because of limitations of the NES and the Gameboy color. Actually, from the screenshots he posted of stuff like Bubsy, Kriss Kross, Barensteen Bears, Total Recal, and so forth, the graphics were on par with other games of the same genera on the same platform. Shoot, even ET, with as AWFUL as that game was, had graphics that were on par with other Atari 2600 titles.
While I must admit that all of these games sucked, the reasons given in the article were not good. It looks like games were picked at random, I mean, with the exception of ET, I can think of many other games that should be on this list instead. I would much rather be forced to play Bubsy than that horrible Home Alone game for the SNES, Galaga 13 and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker could be put in the same category as Total Recal, and I cannot believe that not a single Barbie game made the list. And what about those games that were released that were so buggy that they could not be played? Three Dirty Drarfs for the Sega Saturn actually CRASHED on me every time I get to a certain point of the game, which, I have not played it in years, so cannot remember if its the first or second level, but made the game practically worthless. I have played racing games where physics seemed to be a concept the game designers left out, making it perfectly alright to drive through solid objects. How in the world did Aquaman not get on this list?
Once again, I must admit that all these games suck, but if you are going to work for EGM, stop acting like a 14 year old who is having a tempertantherum because he just got grounded.
My university charged a $250 a year "technoloygy fee". The fee was mandnatory. It included internet and basic cable. This was new at the time, but I tried getting digital cable, cable modem, or DSL,and none were allowed at the college. I knew students that moved off-campus soley so they could get dsl. Now, when the university first installed gigabyte to the dorms in 1999, it was fast, at first. Before then, all the univeristy offered students was dialup, and it was through an offcampus provider. As internet usage increased, the number of outgoing lines decreased. People were complaining they could not get a line during peak hours to call home, call the police, or anything else.
Problem was, when they installed ethernet to the dorms, the university did not increase its pipe. As more people started getting on the network, the speed took a hit to where it was slower than dialup.
They eventually installed a couple more pipes. During business hours, speed to the dorms was throttled and speed to the adminsitration buildings and computer labs were unrestricted (from what I was told). To limit traffic, they put like 128k pipe on P2P systems, and like all P2P traffic for the whole university was pushed through that small pipe. As P2P at the time was mainly napster and winmx, and mostly used for mp3s, and as it was still fairly new at the time, I could still get on and get about 10k a file, which truthfully is not too terribly painful for a single mp3. Upside is, with them throttling P2P traffic, I could still browse websites, and got pretty good freakin speeds downloading from Usenet using a pay provider (as a small liberal arts college, the school did not host newsgroups on their servers).
Now, I don't like the ideas of throttling traffic at all, if you are stuck with limited bandwidth, I say throttle bandwidth on certain ports rather than keep everything unthrottled and letting all bandwidth take a hit because someone is trying to download some pirated movie. If they want to download a Linux distro, let them do it in the lab where bandwidth is unthrottled and burn it to CD.
Yeah, students are paying a technology fee, and most likely do not have access to other avenues. But don't block traffic, or stuff like that, just limit bandwidth on certain ports. Certainly do not cap bandwidth. Shoot, I downloaded (legally) Windows Vista Release Canidate 1 the other day, and it was 3.5 gig. I can easily download 10 gig a day in legal downloads (although its usually not that high, I don't have THAT much hard drive space), and think capping is stupid.
And as far as using BitTorrent for Linux distros, yeah, you can, but I find 9 times out of ten I get faster downloads downloading the distros from a sunsite or ftp server at some university.
If someone was to post a comment like this, it would be marked as flamebait. This story has nothing to do with science, technology, or any of the other things slashdot talks about. You might be able to argue relevance with electronic voting hacking or something. Truthfully, people need to stop pulling stories that are two years old out of the trash and trying to rehash them.
I agree. I punch in the friend ID and it tells me there are no songs on the page, even when I am looking at it and its clear the artist has 5 or 6 songs on the page. The MySpace Informant sounds pretty cool, but MySpaceIM already does the same thing.
There are many independant artists on Myspace, many of which do not have a personal website, or if they do, do not have music on their sites. Myspace is an easy way for the independant artists to get recognized, and easily post their songs.
I am pretty sure that I remember reading that the component on HD-DVD supports 1080i unless the content had HDCP on it that disabled high def through the component, and last I heard, no discs that have been released has crippled that response. If you want 1080p though, and full HDCP support, you need the HDMI, but as they are currently not crippling discs (last I heard, things may have changed), and as I am not aware of any sets that support 1080p, I see no reason for upgrading my perfectly good HDTV to support HDMI.
What I don't get is where they said they started coming up with HDTV 40 years ago. I have a problem with this statement. I am not sure what the cameras could "see", but you look back on recordings from that erra, you realize the resolution is not even a full 525 (NTSC) lines. Quadrophonic sound really came out roughly around the early 70s. Digital video compression did not really become a reality until the 80s. Could you imagine the bandwidth needed to transmit an ANALOG picture at 1920x1080? The idea of the concept of HDTV being come up with shortly after the introduction of color TV just sounds a bit farfetched to me.
Okay, I know what a Prime number is, I passed high school. And this number is huge.
My question is, can someone describe to me in SIMPLE terms what a Mersenne prime is?
Do we really do math where we need to discover prime numbers this big? I mean, its like trying to compute pi. I mean, once you take PI out a few decimal places, its as accurate as most people need it. Do we really need super computers that do nothing better with their time than calculate this kind of stuff?
I am sorry if I sound ignorant, but it seems to me that sometimes people just get worked up about stuff that we don't really need. I mean, really, yeah, its cool that we found a prime number this large, but whats the point?
This list is proposterous. They have people like Public relations officer at Nintendo and someone who teaches game design at some university, yet they fail to talk about the most influential people, such as Roberta Williams and other women who were famous for the adventure games from Sierra Online that came out back in the 80s and 90s. Maybe they ment the most infuential people still in games.
That's right, I think I was thinking of Sharaza or something
I thought eDonkey had long since been dead. I have not seen an ed2k link on the net for quite some time. And I had never used eDonkey for downloading music, and it seems most other people didn't either. Seemed like a popular way to pirate movies a few years back before BitTorrent took off, and was used a lot for porno. I was really the only one I know of that used eDonkey at all, and I think I may have downloaded one thing off of it, some like subbed anime or something.
E-mule is deffinately more pevelant, even if people do not realize it.Doesn't Limewire use eMule client as its backbone?
Check out http://www.yamipod.com/
AE Wi-Fi radio technical details
* Supports Real Audio, MP3 and Windows Media streams
* Stereo sound from unique twin AE drivers
* Uses 802.11b and 802,11g Wi-Fi connectivity
* Offers 128-bit (max) WEP security
* Supports HTTP protocol
* 'Reply Key' enables future interactive features
* Uses Linux OS Kernel
* Dimensions - 165mm x 123mm x 120mm (HxWxD)
* Weight - 0.916kg (1kg packaged)
Plays Windows Media content on a linux kernel? Does Bill Gates know about this?
Still cool
They were charging 10 bucks for movies I can go down and buy at Walmart on DVD for $7.50. Am I paying the extra $2.50 for a DRM crippled file? And the portables are using Windows DRM, so I guess that means I cannot put it on my 5th generation iPod
I disagree. There are several must have games on the list, including The Sims, FarCry, any of the Need for Speed games, and HalfLife. Alice is also an extraordinary game, and if you have not played it, I suggest going down and digging it out of the used game stash at your local EB Games or Gamestop.
I do have to agree that PC gaming is pretty much dead. I have an Athlon 64 with an NVidia 6600, and still, if I have the choice between PC and console, I usually take the console, despite the fact that the PC is hooked up to the HDTV and games such as Farcry on the tv look way better than the console equivilants. Why do I prefer the console? Its just more convienient. There are only a handful of games I play on the PC, and its because those games just play better on the PC. Of course, they are limited to FPS shooters, The Sims, Alice, and the Harry Potter games (I am also surprised that Sorcerer's Stone was so high, but it was fun, and really made good use of the technology available at the time, considering it was a francise title). Shoot, you look at the games sitting around my computer that I regularly play, and here is all you see: 7th Guest, Harry Potters 1-4, Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup, Alice, The Sims (and all expansion packs), The Sims 2 (and expansion packs), Alice, Duke Nukem 3D, Star Trek: A Final Unity, Sim City 4, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed, Bejeweled 2 and Majhong Towers 2. All other games are for the Playstation. Believe it or not, I had GTA Vice City for the PC, but when I bought the PS2 later, I picked the game up for it, and play it more on the PS2 even though the PC version is supperior in so many ways. Its the whole convienience factor. Yeah, Piracy may play a small percentage in the low number of PC sales, but I think most people are like me, if given the choice, they prefer to play the games on their console.
I am wondering if this browser is a layer on top of another browser. I mean, I launched the program, it properly rendered webpages, and properly used flash 9 without it having to be installed. It is surprisingly fast. While I have not stressed tested the brower yet, so far it has properly displayed everything I have thrown at it. This surprised me, as it is only 264 kb
I agree. Use professional SVHS recorders and players. Don't use consumer grade, they are crap. You may even want to try some Prosumer models. I have had VERY good luck recording with $200 SVHS VCRs recording with one recorder and playing back on another. If you are trying to record on cheap tapes using cheap $40 recorders, yeah, playback from one machine to another is going to look like crap. Use SVHS, export to your destination source via the SVHS cable and output rather than composet or coax, and it should look great.
I disagree with QBASIC. Not for Primary school. You have to understand modules and all that stuff, and that is just too advanced for Primary school kids IMHO. I say good old fashioned basic where you have line numbers. Kids understand that, I learned BASIC in fourth grade, and the simplicity of GOTO 120 is easy for a kid to understand. I was in college, after having fundamentals of programing class, that I understood really how modules worked and therefore, how QBASIC worked.
HTML is cool too, but there are some downsides. First, do not confuse HTML as a programing language, its a Markup language. That is, its simply a text file with a few tags thrown in so a browser will know how to render the page. Also, do you really want kids at six, seven, eight years of age writting their own webpages? I can see angry letters from parents about that. I know that in the US, the child privacy act or whatever its called, will not let children under 13 on many sites. I think this should be taken into account of webpage programing as well, an 8 year old will think "oh, cool, my friends can see this" and will want to put up their address and phone number, without thinking that everyone else in the world can read it as well. Even if the pages inside the school are kept on an internal server, they are still learning how to do this, and can go home and do it. Of course, its probably no different than a 10 year old lying about their age and signing up for myspace, but why encourage it.
Stick to Basic in Primary school, let Intermediate or middle school teach them HTML, and let them learn Pascal and C in High School.
My thumb drive has Microsoft Defender (used to be MS Antispyware), Avast, OpenOffice install files, updates to Microsoft Office XP, 2000 and 2003, WGA hack (even if you have an official copy of windows, its a pain in the ass), and copies of Bejeweled 2 and Majhong Towers (for my use). I also keep video drivers for nVidia and ATI, nForce motherboard drivers, the drivers to my wireless network cards, and Nero (its amazing how many people throw out their Nero CDs). Lastly, I have every single song for the church and several sermons on it. Oh, and also copies of Sunday Plus, as a computer is always breaking and having to go grab a spare computer and load it up for services.
I have an iPod 30 gig. Truth be told, I have maybe 15 gig of music. I have about 8 gig of it on my iPod. What do I do with the other 22 gig? The iPod makes a GREAT portable hard drive, you can load Rockbox on it and play Doom and Bejeweled on it. Oh, and if you have an alternative power source, you can load movies on it (really great for when you are at the laundry mat or airport), but if you do not have the alternative power source, your iPod is dead in 90 minutes.
There ARE cheap iPod knockoffs out there, just do a search on e-bay. You can pick them up out of China for about $40 for a two gig model (last time I looked, prices may vary now).
And there are cheaper alternatives for around $30 where you can get players and go shove a compact flash card in them, and 512 meg mp3 players out there for around $40-$50. Yet everyone wants the iPod. The iPod now seems to be as popular as the portable CD player back in the early 90s. I would hardly say iPod is for those who are early adopters, I bought my first MP3 player back in 2000. Those were early adopters. If you do not think iPod has hit the main stream, just go to any high school.
If the United States was the size of say, the sate of Maryland (as is the United Kingdom), and had a state-run phone company, than yes, you would probably see broadband cheaper and more effective in the United States. The problem is, the United States is bigger than the ENTIRE continent of Europe, you have public phone companies who have legalized monopolies on area (its SBC in this area, used to be Southwestern Bell)and you just have old infastructure in the areas. Most telephone infastructures in Europe have been completely overhauled in the last ten years, or are in the process of being overhauled. Then you have states such as, well, look at Montana. Montana has roughly the same geographical area as the country of Germany, yet a population of under a million people. Plus, most of the state is covered in mountains. Is it economically feasable to run fiber to each and every person in the state of Montana? Problem is, with the exception of New England, your southern states and pacific coast states, the other, oh, 30 states in the United States are sparsly populated, and cover a HUGE geographic area. There are still areas in the United States that do not have cable television service, and are on the old rotary phone system. Could you imagine the cost of running a fiber optic cable 200 miles outside of the city to some little ranch? I am sorry, but I am willing to bet that, unless fiber becomes ridicoulously cheap, there are people in areas of the United States that will NEVER get broadband via a physical wire. Not saying there are not alternatives, but satelite is incredibly expensive. I was looking into it recently for my aunt who lives out in the country. Satelite Internet costs between $600-$800 to buy the equipment, then runs about $80 a month. The other option is broadband through the cell, which is becoming increasingly attractive. Cell phones companies (especially some of the ones such as Verizon and Cingular) have amazingly good coverage (unless you are in the montains), and now offer pc card adapters so you can get broadband through them. While its not dsl speeds, it is faster than dialup (in most cases).
I am sorry, but the problem here is NOT that the US is falling behind in technology to Europe, but that the country is more sparsly populated.
I have a 30 inch Insignia HDTV-CRT that natively supports 1920x1080i, 1280x720p, 480i, 480p, 576i, and so forth. I use the component out on my nVidia video card along with nVidia's nStant Media Player. The TV cost $550 at Best Buy (before Tax), and alows me to view movies from my computer at 1920x1080i. Absolutely beautiful. Use DVD-Region Free to launch nStant Media, and it will upconvert your DVDs to 1080i, looks MUCH better than the progressive scan DVD player I picked up, and does it through the Component, succesfully elemenating the need for HDMI.
Oh, I also have the TV hooked up via component to my dish network hdtv box. Gotta love Discovery HD, and HD NET is going to start showing reruns of Enterprise this fall in HD
What ellse is there to watch on the network? Why, Atlantis, of course. But you are right, Friday nights are going to suck. I am either going to have to finally get a life, or start watching Most Haunted on TLC.