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User: modecx

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  1. Re:But it's not just the player... on Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players · · Score: 1

    Well, I bet your wish will come true this time next year. Until then, if you're fine with your 26" TV, great. If it fits your needs, perfect! I'm not saying you need to rush out and blow cash on a shiny new TV. I was just saying that HD TVs are within the range of a lot of people, and prices are coming down fast.

    It's a funny thing, though: when a friend or family member does get a new TV, they don't go throw their other one in the dump. They almost always find another place for their old set and hang the flat screen on the wall.

  2. Re:But it's not just the player... on Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players · · Score: 1

    Huh. I can go down to Costco and get a 27" standard def TV for $100.

    Maybe you can, I bet it won't last for long, though. My Costco doesn't sell any TV that doesn't have a HDTV tuner and isn't some kind of flat screen technology. In other words, no SDTV, no tubes. At any rate, I was talking a 42" screen, 1080P HDTV. Comparing that kind of TV to a 27" CRT is like comparing CGA to VGA. FYI, an LCD HDTV approximately your 27" size is hovering around $400 dollars at this point. If it's not worth the bones to you, no problem. My point was that real HD is within the range of a lot more people right now than it was this time last year. If trends continue, prices are going to sink.

  3. Re:But it's not just the player... on Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Huh. I can go down to Costco and pick up a name brand 42 inch 1080(P!) LCD HDTV that actually does have 1920x1080 pixels, for just over a thousand dollars. It has HDMI and all sorts of other connectors out the wazoo. HDTV is not out of the range of as many people as you think, and the situation has improved 100% over last year. When I go for a walk, I'm always seeing a new shiny, new wide screen monitor through someone's window, where there was none before.

    It's a funny thing. When you become a landlord, you notice that people you think would be desperate enough not to want to pay $60/month for cable ALMOST ALWAYS DO--and they almost always prefer to neglect everything else but the cable TV bill. Back when I owned real estate, I used to cut my poorer tenants slack. I'd pay the water bill so they wouldn't let my lawn die. I pitched in on the electricity and gas because I couldn't see them living in the dark, shivering to death.

    When I found out that oh, 80% percent (my experience) of the people in this situation in life would rather have deluxe fucking digital cable TV than running water, or heat... I lost all sympathy. I mean, this was at a time where I just got basic cable six months before, because it was like $3 more after I got the internet package from Comcast. I will not ever pay that much for freaking TV. So, anyway, I kicked their asses out and eventually sold my rentals. They now live in cold, dark closets of apartments and I'm much happier.

    Lesson is, if people slowed down on the Cable, starbucks, restaurants and other money pits in their lives, a vast majority of them could afford nice things. Maybe it's not some strange coincidence that lots of people who aren't good with money end up the low person on the totem pole?

  4. Re:material on Open-Source 3D Printer Lets Users Make Anything · · Score: 1

    How about hot glue? That's basically what one of the rapid prototype machines I've used made parts from. It was some kind of thermoplastic in bead form. Same premise applies, and hot glue is readily available most places.

  5. Re:Too much wire/cable BS on Building a "Reference" Home Theater · · Score: 1

    What? Ok, some of those issues might be important on a high bandwidth digital link many many meters long... For a home theater with relatively low bandwidth links of rarely exceeding ten feet? Pfeh! S/PDIF is the de-facto home theater digital audio interconnect. For all practical purposes, in consumer devices It's limited to sending 48khz PWM data, it's not remotely near anything possibly considered high frequency.

    The signal is biphase mark code phase modulated, with 4 bits of synchronization preamble per 32bit word. It takes either a seriously fucked up cable to degrade the signal bad enough for the receiver to sputter, or it takes a cable long enough to make impedance or optical attenuation a factor; in which case it's outside of the spec of the interface in the first place!

  6. Re:So we're buying NEW stuff now? on Australian Army Invests in Electrical Shirts · · Score: 1

    I thought our politicians only saw it fit to buy decommissioned US junk, such as 30 year-old helicopters

    To be fair, there's plenty of late twenty, 30-40 and even 50 year old aircraft in the US military inventory. Sure, most have had their share of upgrades, but they're still doing their job.

  7. Re:Supposed to be easy to use... on The Official Ubuntu Book · · Score: 1

    Huh, I was wondering that myself. The liveCD wants 384MB RAM to boot. I wanted to put Ubuntu on two of my old computers, so I could give one to a family member. Ubuntu detected the swap drive on the one that had a 2004 installation of Debian and only 256MB RAM, so it booted, eventually. That one is a 400Mhz PII, and worked reasonably once booted. I guess the alt image can work on a machine with 128 MB RAM, and no preexisting swap partition, but I wasn't clear on what was so alternate about it before now. Good info, thanks.

  8. Re:I respectfully disagree... on The Real Mother of All Bombs, 46 Years Ago · · Score: 1

    Everyone agrees that nuclear weapons are the most heinous, disgusting, inhuman devices ever created.

    I respectfully disagree. The most heinous, disgusting, inhuman device ever created by humans has to be the boy band, or perhaps black liquorice candy. It's kind of a tie, as far as I'm concerned.

  9. Re:unfair competition on Google Caught in Comcast Traffic Filtering? · · Score: 1

    That's not quite true. My electric company won't cut off my service if I use more electric this month then I did at the same time last year.

    But if you're running a laundromat, you don't pay your power company the same amount of cash as a typical three person household would. With the power company, your limit is whatever your pocketbook can support. Want to run an aluminum re-processing center that consumes millions of amp hours? Sure, they'll run their generators up just for you... But you're going to pay for it.

    But that's not exactly true of Comcast, is it? A person downloading boatloads of torrents pays the same as a grandma who checks her mail and browses quilting sites, and a person working from home who uses VPN, and VOIP all day pays the same as grandma. It would be nice if they said, "hey, if you download more than a hundred gigs, we're gonna cut you off"... But it would probably encourage many people to push that limit, stressing an oversold service. From their perspective, it's better to be nebulous about it. I can't blame 'em. About 10% of people are going to be fuckheads and they will abuse anything they can. As a customer, this connection reset business, has to stop, however.

  10. Re:It's not that uncommon on Vinyl To Signal the End for CDs? · · Score: 1

    Some switching power supplies drive me nuts. I can hear 'em lust fine: freaking high pitch, some louder than others. I measured one particularly obnoxious power supply, and it was putting out quite a bit of volume in the 20-22-23kHz range, peaking at 22kHz. It's a wonder dogs don't go nuts.

  11. Re:English Teachers on Wikipedia Begets Veropedia · · Score: 1

    If you need to quote something, you shouldn't be quoting wikipedia anyway. Isn't that the point? Wikipedia often serves as good place to get an general/overview about a certain subject, and might be a place to find links to some decent primary sources about certain things... In other words, it's a great place to get your feet wet, but it should not be used as an authoritative source of information! If you're doing anything of importance, you deserve to be smacked down (and hard) if you're being lazy--but it should be noted that laziness isn't confined to wikipedia quoters alone!

  12. Re:If I was blowing whistles... on US Democrats Accidentally Publish Whistleblowers' Email Addresses · · Score: 1

    What do you do?!

    You find his wife's and friends' email addresses, and send anything that could vaguely lead them to believe he's having a gay love affair with a Latino named Raul, including photoshopped images of him, if at all possible.

    That's what you do.

  13. Re:Rural internet access? on Internet Connection Tax Held Off for A Few More Years · · Score: 1

    Hell, even if you want to pay the cost to have the cable/fiber/whatever laid--and then give the corporation plenty of profit on the deal--to get high speed internet in rural areas, you're going to be shot down by the major internet suppliers. They will not do it at any price, unless it's of their own motivation. You'd have to form your own freaking regional ISP to get rights to land lines laid in some areas, ala that Canadian volunteer run ISP. What a pain. Not that it couldn't be without benefit...

    But it would be far easier to beam a wireless signal from a neighbor who can get some kind of high speed and make a deal to give them free net access. Satellite will just not work with a lot of stuff people want to do--and why should we not be able to do these things in this day and age, just because we live a few miles out of the way?

  14. Re:Ugh iPhoto on Vista Vs. Gutsy Gibbon · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah, but the simple enough idea of smart layers feature hasn't appeared until CS3. I mean, for a program that has been under development as long as photoshop, no less a program intended for professionals, I would think this would have been around for a little while longer. The idea of a virtual layer that applies a series of filters to the parent layer, in a specific order, seems simple enough--and of course it would save gobs of memory on huge images, but would probably require lots more processor, depending on the usage.

    Same thing for "save selection", and adjustment layers that would be better served without a layer mask. Is it really necessary to create a full color channel the same size of the full image, so that you can load a selection area? Sure, you can take your selection and save it as a vector path, and that works fine and dandy sometimes. Doesn't work well with flowing hair in my experience, unless you get the just right feather radius. I mean, a MacPro with 16GB of memory looks pretty attractive for the things I want to do sometimes, and yet it might not be enough for doing big images right, and in an easily modifiable way. The next step is to do the mac and keep a swap drive on some kind of beefy fibre channel array, or super computer/datacenter/cluster-worthy NAS.

  15. Re:obligatory on 'I Was a Hacker for the MPAA' · · Score: 4, Funny

    More like pissing into the exhaust of a GE90 turbofan engine.

  16. Re:Apple needs to come out with 10.5 of all system on Apple's Missed Opportunity With Leopard Delay · · Score: 1

    What? Look at the MacBook. It starts at $1099, only $99 over the top of your bracket, and includes all of the stuff most home users could possibly want--and it's portable! It's right there in the home market sweet spot along side the iMac. I know a few families that use the MacBook as the household computer, and the kids can take it wherever in the house the need it. Should it be a surprise that Apple caters to the upper middle class market with these products?

  17. Re:Safety? on Mythbusters to Test Cockroach Radiation Myth · · Score: 1

    Don't forget the cantaloupes. Those things are the evil redheaded bastard stepchild of the melon world!

  18. Re:ThinkingInBinary circa 1997 on Adobe Intends To Move All of Its Applications Online · · Score: 1

    I tell you what, when you start using multiple layers and channels, things add up real quick, and they add up doubly when you work in a 16 bit space. For instance, the 16 MP Canon 1Ds MkII produces files that are around 85MB per 16 bit layer, and if you're producing prints or commercial shots, and you're not using the full capability and color space that camera can provide, you don't deserve to lay your grubby mitts on pro gear in the first place.

    Compared to the information on a simple 4x5 inch color transparency (or especially an 8x10 inch slab of film), the digital king of the hill that is the 1Ds MkII just can't compare. If everything is focused right, a 4x5" shot can contain 1 GB+ of usable information. In that case, every subsequent adjustment layer (which is the only way to do work in a 16 bit work flow losslessly) will consume that same amount of data.

    The thing is, the Computer industry is an industry that evolves. There hasn't been a true revolution since, well, ever, really. Sure, there have been a few incremental discoveries that have helped improve computers--incrementally. This sort of internet application would take a series of multiple revolutions in the industry. IMO, Ain't gonna happen none too soon. Do you envision everyone having a 10Gb connection straight to the Adobe servers in ten years, like this will require?

    Cameras and optics will probably evolve just as fast as computers, too. Hell, we'll probably have professional SLRs that sense more than the visible spectrum coming into the market at that point in the future.

  19. Re:Not the entire run on Viacom Puts the Daily Show Archive Online · · Score: 1

    Mmmmm... Meat Paste...

  20. Re:The summary contradicts itself on Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" Is Out · · Score: 1

    Gentoo, unlike other distributions, actually has testicles.

    Unfortunately, you have to assemble them by sticking the right cells together in the right order.

  21. Re:Worse than ignorance, it's iggerunt. on Cisco Offices Raided, Execs Arrested In Brazil · · Score: 1

    1) Do you have billboards in your city? Sao Paulo, Brazil, one of the biggest cities in the world does not. Sao Paulo is more advanced than most cities in that way.

    I actually LOL'd at that. So they no longer have signs, but instead the landscape is littered with the rotting husks of former signs--and nobody can find anything. Woah, that's so totally advanced, it blows my mind!

  22. Re:LOVE Bionic Commando on Bionic Commando Returns · · Score: 1

    They could have done what they did for Return to Castle Wolfenstein: take out all of the swastikas, replace them with a stylized logo, and change the names of the relevant characters to something similar.

  23. Re:Misparsed... on Oracle's $6.7 Billion Bid for BEA Turned Down · · Score: 1

    Hell, that's not the worst of it! They also make nuclear submarines (and indirectly) French nuclear tipped missiles, and (far more worse than the above) what used to be the world's single largest machine (by occupied square footage)--the former Denver International Airport Baggage System (which incidentally is now ran by Siemens, which officially make it only slightly less evil than Wal-Mart, which itself is only slightly less evil than NAMBLA.)

  24. Re:That explains it on The Russian Mafia Doesn't Like Spam Either · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Personally, I doubt that he got assassinated because someone hated him. He probably got whacked because he refused to pay the mob for his cut for illicit activities on their turf--and being an asshole was simply icing on the cake.

  25. Re:Ok, someone explain it to me on NSSO on Space Based Solar Power · · Score: 2, Interesting


    If you really lose 50% in transmission *and* 50% in receiving the case is harder to make - most estimates seem to have higher numbers for overall system end-to-end efficiency, but of course nobody's buit one yet.


    Actually, I'm quite sure someone has built an earth bound a set of devices capable of comparable beam energy density to a proposed orbit power system. IIRC, the efficiency of the receiving antenna can be around 90%, not sure about that of the transmitter.

    Personally, I'm sure an array of heat engines could provide more power density than currently comparably priced solar panels, it's silly to pass them up.