Only you can't buy it from US. They don't want to spend 20x movie budget on Paramount attack lawyer's fees. So even if they make NTSC DVD, you can't buy it:-)
CD-DRM is the most useless and ill-aimed DRM ever, as it TRULY only punishes those users who are too uninformed to know better. ANYONE with moderate PC knowledge can get around it.
Which is about 10% or so of the PC/Windows users who'd like to use the cupholder for something since they heard you can listen to music at work..!
Sorry, but I must reply again. You claim that DDT is breeding resistant mosquitos, and therefore its use against malaria is unwise. According to that line of "reasoning," we should also stop using antibiotics because they are breeding resistant bacteria. Brilliant! I urge you to decline antibiotics the next time you get a serious infection.
In case you're heard of fun bacteria breeding in hospitals which laugh off usual broad-spectrum antibiotics, you'd know already that would have been a great idea 20 years ago. Now it's a bit late. Ditto for "antibacterial" soaps etc. They're great at breeding resistant bacteria strains.
The trick would have been not to stop using antibiotics, but to use them in moderation. But, as I said, bit late now. Problem has sort of solved itself because most popular broad-spectrum antibiotics are being rendered useless and the rest are hopefully being used in a more sensible manner. Not to mention hospital bacterias require fun antibiotic treatments that seriously screw up your symbiotic bacteria as a side effect.
I would agree that he may be looking at the larger picture. But he's still being generous - you can't fault him for that. Paul Allen spent $200 million on a yacht that has two helicopters. It costs him $20 million a year to keep the thing and he's never on it. Gates has given $20 billion to fight aids and now this to malaria. Of the two, who would you fault as the selfish bastard?
Bill Gates. This is Slashdot, Brother.
It's literally impossible for Bill to do something constructive without/. crowd crowing him as being a monster. At least he's doing hell of a lot more good than, say, Big Pharma or Wal-Mart.
Ok, a bit overstated, but I'm serious. Of all the pictures you take, how many actually _need_ to be printed? I'd say those few you want to hang on a wall, or put in a frame. For most people that is a precious few photographs per year; if nothing else, the amount of wall space and kindly relatives to foist the prints off to is very limited.
Actually a valid argument why home printing isn't that expensive at the end of the day. Since your 80-shot CF card probably contains 5-10 photos worth printing and putting into album the costs vs commercial printing become more vague..
Plus I've adjusted my screen and my printer just the way I like it (AdobeRGB etcetera) and to send prints to a commercial printer I'd still have to crop them and convert them to sRGB and maybe adjust them to their ICC profile and..
All in all, labour involved in printing 1 photo (cropping, white balance adjustments, sharpening, shadow/highlight adjustments..) are so great it's a bit misleading to count straight cents per print consumables. Of course if you print and pray it's a different story.
Do you remember where all this neo-copyright bullshit started? Do you remember what corporations lobbied the EU to pass this legislation?
Leastways this will hopefully shoot to neck the stupid smug superiority/inferiority complex we have about americans. Of course we're smarter. Of course Yankees pass stupid laws. Of course we'd anything as insane as DMCA couldn't happen over here. Except it did.
Now here's to wonder whether my modded Xbox and PS2 already make me a criminal. Or if it just happens the next time I rip an Xbox game into the HDD for easier access..
Yeah. You should demand your money back from the guys. I mean, it's just money-grabbing of them to provide slightly inferior version for the cheapskates.
Re:Talking out both sides of out mouths.
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Maybe they could make everyone happy by dropping their half-assed small apps and supporting some FOSS apps in Windows by default. It would be awesome to install Windows 2000 or XP and have the option to install GIMP, VLC, Crimson Editor, a better console, and a decent FTP client preloaded. OpenOffice would be nice too, but since MS-Office is big business, I could understand that being left out.
You know, if they did that, everyone would hate Microsoft for cashing in on the voluntary work of OSS guys..
And here I was thinking Germans had several remote-controlled MGs in their panzers toward the end of the war.. And in STuG-IV etc and not in some exotic limited manufacturing vehicles too.
Then again, they had periscopes for tank commander too. Something US army adopted with.. Oh, M1A2. Nobody said they can't recognize a good idea when they see one!
In fact, us old farts remember Microsoft plugging upgrades from OS/2 Warp to Dos 6.22!!
I kid you not. They really marketed it that way. Goebbels would be proud.
All things being equal, most any things being marketed at the time WRT NT 3.5x and Windows 95 was utter and complete festering crap.
There's one gigantic advantage to using NT, thought. It can really, truly kill a process 99.5% of the time, no matter if the app is FUBARred or not. With OS/2 reboot was necessary from time to time since you had too many hung apps kicking around which you couldn't kill no matter what. Yes, I had all those fancy-schmancy "kill" drivers installed, none worked. If the app wouldn't/couldn't process it's exit list, it was there for good.
Another huge downside was that a single misbehaving app could freeze the user interface. Yeah, every app would still RUN, but you couldn't do anything!
There was eventually patch/kludge to help this a bit but on NT this never was a problem.
For the record, I skipped the dos-based windows series (95, 98, ME) and jumped on happy bill wagon when they came up with W2k. Finally they made an os that didn't, basically, suck.
But, really, all of those fan and water and air-conditioning based cooling options are just really good ways to make your office or computer area really friggin' loud.
And that's where you're dead wrong. The annoying high pitched whine from the ancient Radeon9700 was finally strangled by replacing CPU and GPU fans by a watercooling kit. Really big drop in fan noise. In fact the power supply fan came to completely dominate the PC hum, water pump or that 12cm radiator fan are undetectable.
I quess I should buy a "silent" PSU but of course in the world of web reviews, every damned hairdryer is "silent" if the reviewer gets 2 half-price movie tickets with the test unit.
I can recommend Bigwater kit without reserve WRT noise, thought.
The thing in the article that pegged my bullshit detector is the 'audible difference' in capacitors. I design high frequency pulse amplifiers, and at subnanosecond risetimes, capacitors act pretty awful. but in the audio range, there is no way to hear the difference in a good quality capacitor.
ESR is a real issue, thought. You do get a nice switching spike every time the SMPS charges the output capacitor which is directly affected by capacitor ESR. However, it's also directly affected by PCB layout, which ties closely with ground loop management. Good capacitor on so-so layout won't help.
Yes it does, when the current direction is reversed, as for example, in a SMPS circuit. You get this nice reverse recovery current which can produce a nice spike. Gets worse when the power output gets bigger. And the spike is often in RF territory, which can bite you in the ass in the EMC testing stage.
A Schottky barrier diode has no stored charge, and therefore does not snap off like a normal juntion diode.
In fact Schottky diodes are fairly crappy capacitance-wise.
There's a trend for using SMPS as an amplifier. You can modulate the SMPS output by manipulating the feedback loop.
It's true switching noise exists, however by common mode filtering and proper ground loop management it can become reasonable, at least for normal people. Not for people who go on to put rope caulk on clock crystals..
Pros: Huge power output compared to same weight/size traditional amplifier.
Cons: Very difficult to get right, even for consumer grade quality.
Oh, and if you cannot pass EMI test with SMPS, you're crap if you're a circuit designer:-)
Actually it doesn't. Unless you have a nice FFT software to go with it to analyze various parasitic noise peaks etc. And you're performing the measurement in a Faraday cage.
There is a trend toward SMPS-style amplifier in fact. Switchmode power supply can create a variable waveform by manipulating the feedback loop.
Obvious benefits are that you can generate true 300W output power on ridiculously small box, which doesn't even necessarily get hot. Downside is that SMPS noise exists and it has nasty tendency to fold into audio frenquencies in the DSP/DA/AD stages.
One things this guy didn't touch is common mode filtering for the PSU. Probably because that's actually integral to the layout design and it's not on sale by "acclaimed" audio snake oil salesmen. Common mode choke on SMPS output will in fact improve noise situation dramatically if implemented properly with controlled ground loops.
I can see why you can get improvement with replacing caps with lower-impedance ESR. However, unless the PCB layout is good, this is useless and waste of money. And for replacing the SMPS output cap size? Assuming the design is stable mucking around with the output cap value can make it unstable which will give you perhaps a nice sine wave in your operating voltage! (oscillation) Of course, with 1:2 adjustment it shouldn't make a huge difference if the SMPS has a decent phase margin but many do not. But if you replace a 100uF with 1000uF..
As a guy who designs SMPS for living, I call bullshit.
No reasonable SMPS feedback loop exists that goes up to 1MHz. In fact things work usually quite fine on 2-5kHz range, assuming you have a current-controlled design. Voltage controlled designs need more bandwith to deliver worse results, but these also rarely go beyond more than 50kHz or so.
At the base level, you cannot approach switching frequency without suffering. Old rule of thumb used to be 1/5th of the switching frequency but with modern SMPS capable of 1MHz operation it would become 200kHz which is, to put it mildly, problematic.
You're asking for a lot of trouble (instability) for little or nonexistent gain on step load response. Output capacitor and the chip-level bypass caps are responsible for smoothing out digital spikes, it's not a job for the feedback loop which is responsible for keeping the output voltage level steady on a given load level.
Have a real life anecdote about this. Uncle of mine, a hunter with great many years of experience made a hole in a ceiling.
He always, always checked visually by pulling back the bolt that the breech was empty. And then he shot with the empty gun at the ceiling. Only this one time the bullet was not properly seated in the breech so he didn't see it when he pulled the bolt back. So he made a hole in the ceiling.
Moral of the story, this guy had 2-tier safety procedure and when step 1 failed, step 2 still stopped him from shooting his pet poodle while cleaning an "unloaded" gun.
It's the same as spam: virtually zero-cost advertising. For every millon that ignores the ad you might have one or two willing to check it out; they can afford to bother people since it costs nothing to place the ad.
Actually, popups cost money. It takes actual nice server(farm) to serve all those annoying bloody blinky ads. Plus the bandwith, which is not free either. So unlike SPAM, popups actually cost money to the advertisers.
There's one huge benefit to NT as opposed to OS/2.
You simply never could kill an app reliably which crashed in OS/2. Yes, I did try all the fancy device driver add ons that were supposed to fix the issue.. And had pretty much zero results.
Simply, if the app couldn't process it's exit list, you were stuck with it. Never had such problem with NT or any varieties.
Slashdot Mirror
Only you can't buy it from US. They don't want to spend 20x movie budget on Paramount attack lawyer's fees. So even if they make NTSC DVD, you can't buy it :-)
CD-DRM is the most useless and ill-aimed DRM ever, as it TRULY only punishes those users who are too uninformed to know better. ANYONE with moderate PC knowledge can get around it.
Which is about 10% or so of the PC/Windows users who'd like to use the cupholder for something since they heard you can listen to music at work..!
Sorry, but I must reply again. You claim that DDT is breeding resistant mosquitos, and therefore its use against malaria is unwise. According to that line of "reasoning," we should also stop using antibiotics because they are breeding resistant bacteria. Brilliant! I urge you to decline antibiotics the next time you get a serious infection.
In case you're heard of fun bacteria breeding in hospitals which laugh off usual broad-spectrum antibiotics, you'd know already that would have been a great idea 20 years ago. Now it's a bit late. Ditto for "antibacterial" soaps etc. They're great at breeding resistant bacteria strains.
The trick would have been not to stop using antibiotics, but to use them in moderation. But, as I said, bit late now. Problem has sort of solved itself because most popular broad-spectrum antibiotics are being rendered useless and the rest are hopefully being used in a more sensible manner. Not to mention hospital bacterias require fun antibiotic treatments that seriously screw up your symbiotic bacteria as a side effect.
I would agree that he may be looking at the larger picture. But he's still being generous - you can't fault him for that. Paul Allen spent $200 million on a yacht that has two helicopters. It costs him $20 million a year to keep the thing and he's never on it. Gates has given $20 billion to fight aids and now this to malaria. Of the two, who would you fault as the selfish bastard?
/. crowd crowing him as being a monster. At least he's doing hell of a lot more good than, say, Big Pharma or Wal-Mart.
Bill Gates. This is Slashdot, Brother.
It's literally impossible for Bill to do something constructive without
Ok, a bit overstated, but I'm serious. Of all the pictures you take, how many actually _need_ to be printed? I'd say those few you want to hang on a wall, or put in a frame. For most people that is a precious few photographs per year; if nothing else, the amount of wall space and kindly relatives to foist the prints off to is very limited.
Actually a valid argument why home printing isn't that expensive at the end of the day. Since your 80-shot CF card probably contains 5-10 photos worth printing and putting into album the costs vs commercial printing become more vague..
Plus I've adjusted my screen and my printer just the way I like it (AdobeRGB etcetera) and to send prints to a commercial printer I'd still have to crop them and convert them to sRGB and maybe adjust them to their ICC profile and..
All in all, labour involved in printing 1 photo (cropping, white balance adjustments, sharpening, shadow/highlight adjustments..) are so great it's a bit misleading to count straight cents per print consumables. Of course if you print and pray it's a different story.
Do you remember where all this neo-copyright bullshit started? Do you remember what corporations lobbied the EU to pass this legislation?
Leastways this will hopefully shoot to neck the stupid smug superiority/inferiority complex we have about americans. Of course we're smarter. Of course Yankees pass stupid laws. Of course we'd anything as insane as DMCA couldn't happen over here. Except it did.
Now here's to wonder whether my modded Xbox and PS2 already make me a criminal. Or if it just happens the next time I rip an Xbox game into the HDD for easier access..
Yeah. You should demand your money back from the guys. I mean, it's just money-grabbing of them to provide slightly inferior version for the cheapskates.
Maybe they could make everyone happy by dropping their half-assed small apps and supporting some FOSS apps in Windows by default. It would be awesome to install Windows 2000 or XP and have the option to install GIMP, VLC, Crimson Editor, a better console, and a decent FTP client preloaded. OpenOffice would be nice too, but since MS-Office is big business, I could understand that being left out.
You know, if they did that, everyone would hate Microsoft for cashing in on the voluntary work of OSS guys..
And here I was thinking Germans had several remote-controlled MGs in their panzers toward the end of the war.. And in STuG-IV etc and not in some exotic limited manufacturing vehicles too.
.. Oh, M1A2. Nobody said they can't recognize a good idea when they see one!
Then again, they had periscopes for tank commander too. Something US army adopted with
And which alternate reality are you coming from?
Having used NT 3.51 and 4.0 at work for a couple of years, it was rock solid, if ugly and boring.
Like I said, been there, done that, didn't work.
I went thru quite a few of those, many with drivers.
In fact, us old farts remember Microsoft plugging upgrades from OS/2 Warp to Dos 6.22!!
I kid you not. They really marketed it that way. Goebbels would be proud.
All things being equal, most any things being marketed at the time WRT NT 3.5x and Windows 95 was utter and complete festering crap.
There's one gigantic advantage to using NT, thought. It can really, truly kill a process 99.5% of the time, no matter if the app is FUBARred or not. With OS/2 reboot was necessary from time to time since you had too many hung apps kicking around which you couldn't kill no matter what. Yes, I had all those fancy-schmancy "kill" drivers installed, none worked. If the app wouldn't/couldn't process it's exit list, it was there for good.
Another huge downside was that a single misbehaving app could freeze the user interface. Yeah, every app would still RUN, but you couldn't do anything!
There was eventually patch/kludge to help this a bit but on NT this never was a problem.
For the record, I skipped the dos-based windows series (95, 98, ME) and jumped on happy bill wagon when they came up with W2k. Finally they made an os that didn't, basically, suck.
But, really, all of those fan and water and air-conditioning based cooling options are just really good ways to make your office or computer area really friggin' loud.
And that's where you're dead wrong. The annoying high pitched whine from the ancient Radeon9700 was finally strangled by replacing CPU and GPU fans by a watercooling kit. Really big drop in fan noise. In fact the power supply fan came to completely dominate the PC hum, water pump or that 12cm radiator fan are undetectable.
I quess I should buy a "silent" PSU but of course in the world of web reviews, every damned hairdryer is "silent" if the reviewer gets 2 half-price movie tickets with the test unit.
I can recommend Bigwater kit without reserve WRT noise, thought.
The thing in the article that pegged my bullshit detector is the 'audible difference' in capacitors. I design high frequency pulse amplifiers, and at subnanosecond risetimes, capacitors act pretty awful. but in the audio range, there is no way to hear the difference in a good quality capacitor.
ESR is a real issue, thought. You do get a nice switching spike every time the SMPS charges the output capacitor which is directly affected by capacitor ESR. However, it's also directly affected by PCB layout, which ties closely with ground loop management. Good capacitor on so-so layout won't help.
Schottky diodes do not "ring".
Yes it does, when the current direction is reversed, as for example, in a SMPS circuit. You get this nice reverse recovery current which can produce a nice spike. Gets worse when the power output gets bigger. And the spike is often in RF territory, which can bite you in the ass in the EMC testing stage.
A Schottky barrier diode has no stored charge, and therefore does not snap off like a normal juntion diode.
In fact Schottky diodes are fairly crappy capacitance-wise.
There's a trend for using SMPS as an amplifier. You can modulate the SMPS output by manipulating the feedback loop.
:-)
It's true switching noise exists, however by common mode filtering and proper ground loop management it can become reasonable, at least for normal people. Not for people who go on to put rope caulk on clock crystals..
Pros: Huge power output compared to same weight/size traditional amplifier.
Cons: Very difficult to get right, even for consumer grade quality.
Oh, and if you cannot pass EMI test with SMPS, you're crap if you're a circuit designer
Actually it doesn't. Unless you have a nice FFT software to go with it to analyze various parasitic noise peaks etc. And you're performing the measurement in a Faraday cage.
There is a trend toward SMPS-style amplifier in fact. Switchmode power supply can create a variable waveform by manipulating the feedback loop.
Obvious benefits are that you can generate true 300W output power on ridiculously small box, which doesn't even necessarily get hot. Downside is that SMPS noise exists and it has nasty tendency to fold into audio frenquencies in the DSP/DA/AD stages.
One things this guy didn't touch is common mode filtering for the PSU. Probably because that's actually integral to the layout design and it's not on sale by "acclaimed" audio snake oil salesmen. Common mode choke on SMPS output will in fact improve noise situation dramatically if implemented properly with controlled ground loops.
I can see why you can get improvement with replacing caps with lower-impedance ESR. However, unless the PCB layout is good, this is useless and waste of money. And for replacing the SMPS output cap size? Assuming the design is stable mucking around with the output cap value can make it unstable which will give you perhaps a nice sine wave in your operating voltage! (oscillation) Of course, with 1:2 adjustment it shouldn't make a huge difference if the SMPS has a decent phase margin but many do not. But if you replace a 100uF with 1000uF..
And for RCA jacks? Oh please.
As a guy who designs SMPS for living, I call bullshit.
No reasonable SMPS feedback loop exists that goes up to 1MHz. In fact things work usually quite fine on 2-5kHz range, assuming you have a current-controlled design. Voltage controlled designs need more bandwith to deliver worse results, but these also rarely go beyond more than 50kHz or so.
At the base level, you cannot approach switching frequency without suffering. Old rule of thumb used to be 1/5th of the switching frequency but with modern SMPS capable of 1MHz operation it would become 200kHz which is, to put it mildly, problematic.
You're asking for a lot of trouble (instability) for little or nonexistent gain on step load response. Output capacitor and the chip-level bypass caps are responsible for smoothing out digital spikes, it's not a job for the feedback loop which is responsible for keeping the output voltage level steady on a given load level.
12 amps?? On that dinky wire?? That's like 5x12 = 60 watts! Thats, er, great efficiency right there.
So this guy runs his 2.5V*~100mA= 0.25W mouse with 0.25W/60W = 0.4% efficiency? You people make me sick.
Have a real life anecdote about this. Uncle of mine, a hunter with great many years of experience made a hole in a ceiling.
He always, always checked visually by pulling back the bolt that the breech was empty. And then he shot with the empty gun at the ceiling. Only this one time the bullet was not properly seated in the breech so he didn't see it when he pulled the bolt back. So he made a hole in the ceiling.
Moral of the story, this guy had 2-tier safety procedure and when step 1 failed, step 2 still stopped him from shooting his pet poodle while cleaning an "unloaded" gun.
I guess this is why Trillian updated the MSN plugin today. Seriously, I don't know why more people don't switch to either Trillian or Gaim.
One word. Unicode. Yeah, I know it's a mouthful. But us funky europeans and our decadent slavic friends need more than just US-ASCII to communicate.
Sorry, but DU isn't nuclear waste.. And neither it's really radioactive. But it's about as healthy as asbestos to breathe.
It's the same as spam: virtually zero-cost advertising. For every millon that ignores the ad you might have one or two willing to check it out; they can afford to bother people since it costs nothing to place the ad.
Actually, popups cost money. It takes actual nice server(farm) to serve all those annoying bloody blinky ads. Plus the bandwith, which is not free either. So unlike SPAM, popups actually cost money to the advertisers.
There's one huge benefit to NT as opposed to OS/2.
You simply never could kill an app reliably which crashed in OS/2. Yes, I did try all the fancy device driver add ons that were supposed to fix the issue.. And had pretty much zero results.
Simply, if the app couldn't process it's exit list, you were stuck with it. Never had such problem with NT or any varieties.