Like the parent poster I also bought a Sony Grand Wega Rear Pro (in my case the 42" model), I have been very happy with my purchase.
When comparing diffent screens I found was that unless I wanted to spend at least double the price of the Wega there wasn't any real increase in picture quality by going to plasma or LCD and even at double the cost the quality wasn't THAT much better IMHO.
I also found that most plasmas and LCD's looked really poor on SD interlaced content, as the parent poster mentioned SD (especially cable/sat) content looks good on the Wega. Most dealers will either show HD content or progressive scan DVD's, when evaluating screens put on the crappiest interlaced content you can find as that is what you're likely to be watching a good deal of the time.
As far as general picture quality goes, CRT's can offer better picture quality and if you were looking at 32" screens this could be an option. Thing to remember is that no one makes good CRT's anymore. The good CRT's I saw had been sitting on a showroom floor for over 12 months and were also more expensive then the 42" Wega. IMHO, the greater emersive effect of a larger screen is well worth the slight drop in quality.
I was worried about viewing angle and brightness on the Wega but found that the viewing angle doesn't even come close to being a problem in my lounge room and the brightless level is fine (I don't even have curtains). Ironically my wife complained at first that the Wega was too bright when the lights were out.
Bad points... The blank level are not black enough for me, this appears to be a problem on all LCD's that I looked at (even the really expensive ones). The screen is somewhat susceptible to lip sync errors, by this I mean that there is about a 1 frame video delay on the Wega (which is not noticable) but if there is another 1 frame video delay upsteam from the broadcaster then you might notice it. The lip sync thing can irritate me (I work in broadcasting so I'm pretty fussy) but my wife can never tell.
MySQL was faster (slightly faster on reading, waaaaaay faster on writing)
The default install of PostgreSQL is paranoid about writing data to disk, basically as soon a you do an insert it is written, there is no buffering by the OS which means if your server crashes you don't lose data.
MySQL on the other hand lets the OS buffer the data before writing, this is much more efficient but dangerous (depending on your application).
If you are willing to sacrifice data integrity for performance (if you use MySQL you obviously don't care about data integrity), PostgreSQL can also be configured to allow OS to buffer disk writes with a one line config file change, fsync=false.
With fsync=false PostgreSQL should be at least as fast as MySQL.
I've bought very few CD's in the last couple of years (note: I'm a 56k'er so I don't use file sharing). I have however ripped my 300+ CD collection to mp3's.
2 weeks ago I bought Norah Jones as an impulse purchase, after listening to it once I proceeded to rip it and found that it was "Copy Controlled(tm)". The cover had a logo indicating this but I didn't see it when I was in the store. By using a different CDROM drive in another PC I was able to rip it no problems. That however, is not the point.
After spending $30AUD I've got better things to do with my time than fsck around with DRM.
In the same purchase I also bought the new (un-copy controlled) Aimee Mann album, guess who's going to be getting my money in the future and who won't?
umm... the poster is using Gentoo, a distro where EVERYTHING is compiled from source, it's not meant to be as friendly as MacOS or Windows, it's meant for power users who want to try to get the absolute most out of their system.
If you don't want to spend hours tweaking your OS then Gentoo is not for you.
For the record I only recently upgraded from a k6-2 300 and never had any problems playing mp3's.
A choice quote: Contrary to appearances, bilateral FTAs don't rate as micro reform because, as any textbook will tell you, they're more likely to be "trade diverting" than "trade enhancing".
Australia's copyright terms seem quite reasonable, if a little inconsitent. The following come from http://www.caslon.com.au/durationprofile1.htm
- Literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, copyright lasts for the life of the "author" plus 50 years
- A photograph taken after 1 May 1969 is protected for 50 years from the end of the year of first publication.
- Films & multimedia works made after 1 May 1969 are protected for 50 years from the end of the year of first publication.
- Sound recordings made before 1 May 1969 are protected for 50 years from the 'making' of the recording.
- Radio and television broadcasts are protected for 50 years from the end of the year in which the first broadcast took place
- Musical, theatrical and other performances. The period of protection is usually 20 years, but sometimes 50 years, from the end of the year in which the performance occurred.
I think there is a big misconception about how good MPEG-2 can actually be.While it's true that lots of cable companies have artifacts in their streams, they are probably using crappy encoders.
I've seen domo's of Thomsons DBE encoders' that have been optimised for low bitrate, they were pretty darn good at ~1-1.5Mbs, not fantastic for sports but ok for movies/news/sitcoms etc. Even the normal DBE's with the "SuperEncoder" board blow away a most of the competition.
The point is that MPEG-2 still has a way to go before the format is maxed out. MPEG-2 is cheap to decode and there are a lot of STB's out there that arn't going to be replaced any time soon.
I understand 7.3 will do replication natively so keep your eye out for it.
Postgres is no Oracle/DB2/MSSQL killer yet but it is gaining momentum, it's already quite feature rich and has a lot of the ground work done for Enterprise features that will appear in upcomming releases.
Intel has a vested interest in fair use and will (to some extent) push this interest.
A hardware protected DRM world will not be as profitable as the free-for-all PC world has been. The reason for this is DRM devices by their very nature are either not hackable or difficult to hack.
When you look at the history of PC's it's the hackers/gamers/whatever's that have pushed the architecture far far beyone what anyone envisioned, PC's were originally meant to be a stepping stone to IBM's big iron.
A DCMA DRM world will hamper the growth of a company based on selling commodity general purpose technology.
Yeah but how does that give them a much stronger policy regarding Free Software than Red Hat who have also always made their tools GPL and AFAIK distribute no non-free software at all?
If you read the article you would have seen that the studios are leading the charge. The MPAA was a political force before the RIAA was.
You do have a point that Hollywood is concerned that people can see movies for free, this does not mean that they are not concerned that people can make and distribute their own movies.
Music is a lot closer to this, already you can record professional sounding music in a home studio where the entire equipment cost is significantly less than a major label artist will spend renting a studio.
For example, the Australian band Machine Gun Felatio's latest album was recored at home, Front End Loader's latest effort was self funded and recorded in small/cheap studios.
The two albums above have received high rotation on the national radio station Triple J. They both sound as good technically (heaps better musically) as any major label release I've heard lately.
Another reason for not rushing out to buy a catchy song you heard on the radio is because the radio stations will play it so many times your head will pound.
The machine was running Mandrake Linux, kernel 2.4.18-24mdk, and identified itself as running at 797.7 MHz with 256k of cache. ... And here's a comparison, openssl 0.9.6b (as shipped with Redhat 7.3) running on a 400 MHz
Sorry, you're human mind isn't capable of doing that error free. This isn't a 'homework' scenario, it's a PHD.
Respectfully disagree, 552 episodes is not that many, especially when you cut out all the ones that deal solely interpersonal issues between characters. There are books about major events in the timeline and it is the screwing with major events that pisses ordinary fans off. Glossing over some obscure event from an earlier series is fine if it will greatly enhance the current one.
The Ferengi episode is a great example, it added nothing the story of Enterprise but took too much licence with the timeline (they recorded the Ferengi on security cameras for gods sake). The episode on it's own was quite good but but even my girlfreind (only a casual fan) found the blantant timeline flouting annoying.
I have been enjoying Enterprise, far more than I thought I would but if they need to resort to screwing with the established universe in first season I have my doubts about it's staying power.
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Like the parent poster I also bought a Sony Grand Wega Rear Pro (in my case the 42" model), I have been very happy with my purchase.
When comparing diffent screens I found was that unless I wanted to spend at least double the price of the Wega there wasn't any real increase in picture quality by going to plasma or LCD and even at double the cost the quality wasn't THAT much better IMHO.
I also found that most plasmas and LCD's looked really poor on SD interlaced content, as the parent poster mentioned SD (especially cable/sat) content looks good on the Wega. Most dealers will either show HD content or progressive scan DVD's, when evaluating screens put on the crappiest interlaced content you can find as that is what you're likely to be watching a good deal of the time.
As far as general picture quality goes, CRT's can offer better picture quality and if you were looking at 32" screens this could be an option. Thing to remember is that no one makes good CRT's anymore. The good CRT's I saw had been sitting on a showroom floor for over 12 months and were also more expensive then the 42" Wega. IMHO, the greater emersive effect of a larger screen is well worth the slight drop in quality.
I was worried about viewing angle and brightness on the Wega but found that the viewing angle doesn't even come close to being a problem in my lounge room and the brightless level is fine (I don't even have curtains). Ironically my wife complained at first that the Wega was too bright when the lights were out.
Bad points...
The blank level are not black enough for me, this appears to be a problem on all LCD's that I looked at (even the really expensive ones). The screen is somewhat susceptible to lip sync errors, by this I mean that there is about a 1 frame video delay on the Wega (which is not noticable) but if there is another 1 frame video delay upsteam from the broadcaster then you might notice it. The lip sync thing can irritate me (I work in broadcasting so I'm pretty fussy) but my wife can never tell.
MySQL was faster (slightly faster on reading, waaaaaay faster on writing)
The default install of PostgreSQL is paranoid about writing data to disk, basically as soon a you do an insert it is written, there is no buffering by the OS which means if your server crashes you don't lose data.
MySQL on the other hand lets the OS buffer the data before writing, this is much more efficient but dangerous (depending on your application).
If you are willing to sacrifice data integrity for performance (if you use MySQL you obviously don't care about data integrity), PostgreSQL can also be configured to allow OS to buffer disk writes with a one line config file change, fsync=false.
With fsync=false PostgreSQL should be at least as fast as MySQL.
I've bought very few CD's in the last couple of years (note: I'm a 56k'er so I don't use file sharing). I have however ripped my 300+ CD collection to mp3's.
2 weeks ago I bought Norah Jones as an impulse purchase, after listening to it once I proceeded to rip it and found that it was "Copy Controlled(tm)". The cover had a logo indicating this but I didn't see it when I was in the store. By using a different CDROM drive in another PC I was able to rip it no problems. That however, is not the point.
After spending $30AUD I've got better things to do with my time than fsck around with DRM.
In the same purchase I also bought the new (un-copy controlled) Aimee Mann album, guess who's going to be getting my money in the future and who won't?
umm... the poster is using Gentoo, a distro where EVERYTHING is compiled from source, it's not meant to be as friendly as MacOS or Windows, it's meant for power users who want to try to get the absolute most out of their system.
If you don't want to spend hours tweaking your OS then Gentoo is not for you.
For the record I only recently upgraded from a k6-2 300 and never had any problems playing mp3's.
An opinon peice from Ross Gittens (a noteable economic commentator) titled Free-trade agreement is Howard's ticking bomb does not look kindly apon this agreement.
A choice quote: Contrary to appearances, bilateral FTAs don't rate as micro reform because, as any textbook will tell you, they're more likely to be "trade diverting" than "trade enhancing".
Check out this article from the Sydney Morning Herald, Piracy not the burning issue in CD sales slide: ARIA
I amazes me the lengths the Howard government will go to in order to suck up to the US.
Another thing to add is the advance in fibre terminating gear, bandwidth increases even faster than Moores Law predicts for transistors.
Every new fibre that's lit up has the capacity of serveral fibres using the previous generation equipment.
IIRC, long haul DWDM does 400Gb per fibre.
Waterworld spent hundreds of millions and it was just an OK (not to mention unprofitable) movie.
Actually after going through the rental, pay-tv, and free to air tv treadmill, Waterworld did make a small ammount of money.
No need to apologise, your rant fitted in with the Australian education system quite well.
The issue is that government contractors should be forced to license the software to the government under the GPL.
Actually the issue is that if your government contracts to have some code developed the GPL should be an allowable licence.
Australia's copyright terms seem quite reasonable, if a little inconsitent. The following come from http://www.caslon.com.au/durationprofile1.htm
- Literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, copyright lasts for the life of the "author" plus 50 years
- A photograph taken after 1 May 1969 is protected for 50 years from the end of the year of first publication.
- Films & multimedia works made after 1 May 1969 are protected for 50 years from the end of the year of first publication.
- Sound recordings made before 1 May 1969 are protected for 50 years from the 'making' of the recording.
- Radio and television broadcasts are protected for 50 years from the end of the year in which the first broadcast took place
- Musical, theatrical and other performances. The period of protection is usually 20 years, but sometimes 50 years, from the end of the year in which the performance occurred.
-
I think there is a big misconception about how good MPEG-2 can actually be.While it's true that lots of cable companies have artifacts in their streams, they are probably using crappy encoders.
I've seen domo's of Thomsons DBE encoders' that have been optimised for low bitrate, they were pretty darn good at ~1-1.5Mbs, not fantastic for sports but ok for movies/news/sitcoms etc. Even the normal DBE's with the "SuperEncoder" board blow away a most of the competition.
The point is that MPEG-2 still has a way to go before the format is maxed out. MPEG-2 is cheap to decode and there are a lot of STB's out there that arn't going to be replaced any time soon.
I think the poster is talking about standing on the shoulders of giants. There's nothing wrong with that, look at Linux.
try here
I understand 7.3 will do replication natively so keep your eye out for it.
Postgres is no Oracle/DB2/MSSQL killer yet but it is gaining momentum, it's already quite feature rich and has a lot of the ground work done for Enterprise features that will appear in upcomming releases.
Intel has a vested interest in fair use and will (to some extent) push this interest.
A hardware protected DRM world will not be as profitable as the free-for-all PC world has been. The reason for this is DRM devices by their very nature are either not hackable or difficult to hack.
When you look at the history of PC's it's the hackers/gamers/whatever's that have pushed the architecture far far beyone what anyone envisioned, PC's were originally meant to be a stepping stone to IBM's big iron.
A DCMA DRM world will hamper the growth of a company based on selling commodity general purpose technology.
I prefer to think of it as by forgetting the licence fee they are able to provide a better product for less money.
Yeah but how does that give them a much stronger policy regarding Free Software than Red Hat who have also always made their tools GPL and AFAIK distribute no non-free software at all?
If you read the article you would have seen that the studios are leading the charge. The MPAA was a political force before the RIAA was.
You do have a point that Hollywood is concerned that people can see movies for free, this does not mean that they are not concerned that people can make and distribute their own movies.
Music is a lot closer to this, already you can record professional sounding music in a home studio where the entire equipment cost is significantly less than a major label artist will spend renting a studio.
For example, the Australian band Machine Gun Felatio's latest album was recored at home, Front End Loader's latest effort was self funded and recorded in small/cheap studios.
The two albums above have received high rotation on the national radio station Triple J. They both sound as good technically (heaps better musically) as any major label release I've heard lately.
Examples please? I've been using Redhat since 5.2 and have never experienced anything like that.
All the config files are are in resonable enough locations, all you have to do is edit them and restart the relevant daemons.
Not here.
We had UnixWare on EMC boxen, it sucked so much we took the migration path to Linux as soon as it was offered.
Haven't looked back.
Another reason for not rushing out to buy a catchy song you heard on the radio is because the radio stations will play it so many times your head will pound.
And here's a comparison, openssl 0.9.6b (as shipped with Redhat 7.3) running on a 400 MHz
What was that about lies, damned lies and...
Sorry, you're human mind isn't capable of doing that error free. This isn't a 'homework' scenario, it's a PHD.
Respectfully disagree, 552 episodes is not that many, especially when you cut out all the ones that deal solely interpersonal issues between characters. There are books about major events in the timeline and it is the screwing with major events that pisses ordinary fans off. Glossing over some obscure event from an earlier series is fine if it will greatly enhance the current one.
The Ferengi episode is a great example, it added nothing the story of Enterprise but took too much licence with the timeline (they recorded the Ferengi on security cameras for gods sake). The episode on it's own was quite good but but even my girlfreind (only a casual fan) found the blantant timeline flouting annoying.
I have been enjoying Enterprise, far more than I thought I would but if they need to resort to screwing with the established universe in first season I have my doubts about it's staying power.
If transactions are all that's holding you back you really need to checkout PostgreSQL.
Nowhere near as many fanboys as MySQL but it has transactions and a whole lot more.
IE took your market share? Adapt or die!
I believe they did.