I just hate to see HD-DVD gain any support even if its "advanced" codecs can cram an HD movie onto a single 15Gb layer. I'd sooner use less compressable codecs on a larger medium -- less CPU power to decode and encode, and the larger medium is a nice side bennie.
Why settle for what's *only* barely "good enough" for our current needs when we could pick a format that has real room for growth and can accomodate our needs today and tomorrow?
Blu Ray holds more data, layer for layer, than HD-DVD and therefore can hold more data at equivilent compression levels, or, more beneficially, *better* data at lower compression levels.
Why settle for a lesser amount of storage? Blu Ray makes more sense for data storage as well. Even 50GB per disc is weak compared to tape, but it's still a meaningful amount of storage. HD-DVD is 15GB now and 30 GB later, and 15GB isn't enough to stop using DVD-R and adopt a new technology -- but Blu Ray's 25 would be now, and growth to 50 and above would make it relevant for some time to come.
What I find odd about HD-DVD fans is that while they ignore the lower storage capacities, they love to focus on codecs. It's possible to run you favorite codec on any storage media, why settle for a crappier medium to do it?
Many resumes aren't actually "read" for grammatical correctness, they're scanned for keywords either electronically or by people. Even when someone tries to read them, most resume books say "short and sweet" which precludes a lot of paragraph-type writing. Furthermore, the people reading them are often as weak at writing skills as the submitters, so any standard being applied is low to begin with.
And then there are the people who have professional services do their resumes, CVs and cover letters -- either once for manual submission, or as part of a headhunter type operation where fixing their clients weaknesses is part of the job.
And let's face it, when YOU were in college, what was the general intellectual orientation of most business/marketing school types, anyway? I found they nearly all fit the stereotype -- frat/sorority members with more interest in their personal appearance and social standing. Grades (and not necessarily *learning*) merely being important if they had some kind of status-oriented grad school plans or a cash payback plan from Mom and Dad for not flunking out.
To be fair, there were people that fit that description who were real smart, too, but most of them really weren't. College was something they were expected to do, like wear Polo-brand clothes, and join the right Greek house, and get a corporate job.
Is it any surprise that once this anti-intellectual group is in a position where they have to represent their ideas in writing that they fall apart? I think half the problem with them isn't just a lack of writing skills, it's also the quality of the ideas. It's hard to write well about a bad idea.
And many home-defense books agree with you -- limited aiming requirements, very inexpensive (a brand-new Mossberg 500 is like $350), easily obtainable ammo, trivial to use and highly intimidating, as well as offering a low risk over overpenetration on soft backstops.
There are downsides, though. Shotguns are unweildy in close quarters, and the small pellet count in buck loads at close distances produces a tight pattern in even open chokes that still requires aiming. It's hard to find places where a shotgun can practice fired, especially in urban settings. It's hard to store a shotgun both secure enough to keep burglars and kids out of it, yet easy to access when it's needed. The heavy game loads required for serious stopping power in a shotgun produce more recoil, particularly in pump-action guns, than most of the effective handgun rounds and my be overwhelming for smaller shooters (moving down to 20 guage isn't much help, since the loss in recoil includes a loss of pellet count and much more restricted load choices). They're also awkward to reload.
The handgun's liabilities -- aiming, more limited power and overpenetraton risk -- are easily mitigated. Practice is required for any firearm defense solution, and a handgun is easier to practice with, particularly for urban residents. The handgun's more limited power vs. buck shotgun loads is like calling a pickup underpowered for moving a piano vs. a semi; handguns are proven people stoppers, even in.38 special loads. Overpenetration can be mitigated by the use of frangible ammo like Glaser safety slugs designed to break apart on hard surfaces.
Furthermore, a handgun is easy to store in a small bedside safe, and even petite women can easily handle heavier loads such as.45ACP without a lot of problems. They're fast to reload and can be carried outside the home for protection in ways and places a shotgun can't.
While I don't doubt that more sophisticated and organized criminals may be utilizing body armor, considering that the average cop only fires his weapon during qualifying, it still strikes me as machismo run amok the way "stopping power" is flaunted.
And if body armor is a real problem, we'll need to issue rifles, since class IV armor will stop almost every handgun round, with the exception of the ridiculous rounds like.50AE and.454 Casull.
I've recently gotten into shooting, and as I've researched handguns it's amazing the "requirement" for personal defense was often the fairly low-powered.25 ACP and.32 ACP. Even police officers only carried.32 caliber revolvers around 75 years ago.
Now the requirement is considered *at minimum* to be 9 mm, and even that at +P or the ill-defined +P+ pressure loadings, which are usually at the outer edge of modern firearm pressure design parameters. Many others consider more powerful cartridges such as.40S&W and.45 ACP to be necessary for "stopping power".
Some of the definition of "stopping power" (one shot, incapacitated attacker, even if fueled by drugs and rage -- the apocryphal PCP user) has changed over time, but as I did my research I found that even a.25 ACP round has a similar amount of force, concentrated in a small area, as a baseball bat swung by an average male..32 rounds are slightly more powerful than a baseball bat swung by a major league player, concentrated in the bullet's cross section.
To me, getting hit by anyone swinging a baseball bat is a pretty serious thing, especially if the force is concentrated in a tiny cross section. I think the increased desire for power in firearms has some legitimacy, but it also strikes me as just a demand for power.
I think this is probably true in many things we buy or use.
I see a bright light in upper right corner of the photo. The line is going from upper left to bottom right, and appears to have nothing to do with the bright light; the line itself seems to have nothing to do with any flash of light.
If you *can* make an app this way, why not? It seems to make so much sense.
Are developers just reflexively following some "How to make a Windows application: DLLs in %WINDIR%, SYSTEM32, and the Program Files Directory, 2000 Registry Entries, and a unique directory for settings"?
Is there some valid architectural reason for it? Or is it some kind of twisted copy-protection-through-complexity?
Soft padding is but one of a long laundry list of features that Tivo has failed to add -- batch play/save to VCR is my personal missing favorite. Instead we have photo showing, MP3 playback, and multi-room, which are features that are either not core to the mission of Tivo (television recording and playback) and/or are code-intensive and relevent to the very few people who own multiple Tivos.
In order for Tivo to survive the onslaught of cable and satellite provider based DVRs (not to mention Myth and Replay), Tivo needs to stay ahead of everyone else on features core to watching TV, and not invest a bunch of effort in side projects like photo viewing and MP3 playing. Tivo is better, but for $5 per month for most Time-Warner SA8000s, Tivo isn't really $600 up front better (Tivo+lifetime).
Check out this list for a ton of things that would make Tivo much better, and much of it would be trivial to implement. Some of it is (as the list's author suggests) be more complicated than Joe Sixpack could deal with, but a lot of it wouldn't even be noticable as a "new" feature.
Because there's no other rational explanation for totalitarian apologia like this:
China is a sovereign nation.
And so was Nazi Germany, yet no one with any sense believes that gave them the moral authority to commit genocide. Neither does China's sovreign status give it the moral authority to kill protestors, run forced labor camps and imprison, torture and kill its citizens who object to its politics.
It doesn't take much more than a second grade education to figure this out, yet people like you believe that the thge US social and political system must reach some historically unprecedented level of perfection before we can criticize brutal totalitarian regeimes like China.
WSJ I find to be too loaded with technical reporting about financial markets to really count as a "daily news source". It's more a specialty paper that also prints some news.
I pick up a copy if I find something compelling on the cover, but when I buy it without scanning the cover first, I always feel shortchanged because the "news" invariably involves fairly tedious reporting about the mechanics of business industries, financial markets and decision making. And then there's page after page of financial tables.
My other gripe is political; I'm skeptical of the assumptions underlying contemporary corporate culture, and the WSJ I think panders to that audience by adopting those assumptions; it's operating in a tight space with a lot of competition -- Barron's, Financial Times, Investor's Business Daily.
USN&WR is OK for a weekly, but I don't really read weeklies, other than the random copy of the Economist and my New Yorker subscription.
The Times isn't too terribly biased, the writing is superior, and the depth of coverage in very nearly every category is heads and shoulders above any other daily news *source* with the possible exception of the Washington Post's coverage of Washington politics. Stacked end on end, the Times even gives the Economist a run for its money on its home turf.
From a quality, and more importantly, *availability* perspective, it's hard to beat the New York Times.
I'd argue that NPR is largely in the same boat, although I also think that NPR's liberal slant is more obvious and pointed.
What I don't get, though, is outside of a very few slim (in terms of pages of content) low-circulation magazines, why can't the right put together a newspaper, magazine or TV show that doesn't both insult my intelligence and bore me to tears?
National Review is like a diet of plain oatmeal; substantive and healthy, but not what a man can live on. Washington Times? Amusing, but it's run by the Moonies and hard to take seriously. Christain Science Monitor is OK, but once again, I'm asking to take the daily product of a cult seriously. Anything Rupert Murdoch is involved in has the intelligence of a grocery tabloid and the apparent independence of 1950s Pravda.
I'd love a NYT-quality daily with a 'conservative' angle to it, but conservatives aren't satisfied unless its a mouthpiece, and at that point quality is flushed down the shitter.
I would agree. I'm just a geek and not a videophile and I will say that I don't really see that big of a difference between commercial DVDs played on my progressive scan player and HBO-HD when viewed on my 42" Sony Grand Wega III. In fact there are times where it seems that the compression used on HBO-HD actually makes for a lower quality movie.
As for rank-and-file consumers? They just got done buying $2000 TVs, needlessly expensive new DVD players and so on, and anyone who thinks they will be buying a new deck to replace the old one needs their head examined. Unless of course they just stop making regular DVDs, but they haven't even done that with most videos yet.
I do think Blu-Ray will be interesting in the existing DVD recorder space; it will be a useful media for recording 480i content at XP/1 hour bitrates and getting 6 hours of recording time.
If business really lost this much...
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 1
...wouldn't their lapdogs in government be doing something about this?
I wonder if $10.2 billion represents a "real" number, as in $10.2 billion dollars total actual sucked out of bank accounts, or if its one of those squishy numbers that represents a bunch of soft costs like customer service time and other "clean up" costs (you know, like the RIAA "lost sales" number or "virus cleanup" costs).
While I don't doubt that fraud runs rampant on the Internet, I also have a hard time believing that a business sector is actually losing billions of dollars without either making it up by charging everyone fees, or having the government bail them out in some way or other.
but you'll find this weird vid at a car boot sale in 2014
Why would I buy boots for my car? And why would I buy a video from a place that sold car boots?
Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm assuming a "car boot sale" is a retail outlet being operated from the boot/trunk of a car, and that lots of weird, unrelated things are sold, including strange old videos.
If launching space vehicles is so profitable, why are the only competitors involved government entities? Why doesn't Lockheed Martin or Boeing or British Aerospace or _______ have a commercial space launch business?
The only thing profitable about space launch is being a contractor to the government entity doing the launches.
How does a 720p broadcast use more bandwidth than a 1080i broadcast?
A 720p frame is 1280x720 or 921k pixels. A 1080i field is 1920x540 or 1.03 megapixels. 720p is 60 full frames a second, 1080i is 60 fields per second. That works out to 6 megapixels per second fewer for 720p, a substantial savings for 720p signals.
My gripe with 1080i's display probably has more to do with the fact that you only see it on CRTs and CRT RPTVs, and I don't see many that are that good (I only know one person with a recent Pioneer Elite). Everyone else has lame-ish CRT direct views that don't do much for it. The only other displays I see regularly are all 720p native displays, such as Samsung DLP, my own Grand Wega III and the HD plasmas at work.
I also don't get how 1080i suffers less from compression than 720p. That doesn't make intuitive sense to me.
How many 1080i images are captured by 1080 line CCDs, and how many are assembled from 540 line CCDs?
I personally have never been impressed with the 1080i displays I've seen, there's a graininess to them I find unappealing.
I'd also wager that a lot of content is in 720p, simply because there's fewer pixels per complete frame (which has all kinds of editing, distribution and production advantages) yet a full 720p frame will display as many pixels as the active field of a 1080i display.
Well, I don't regard the battery as weak. I understand that it may appear as weak compared to some other players but not in my opinion.
There are additions to the iPod that give you a battery time far beyond other harddisk players. In my opinion the battery is sufficient and there's almost always a recharge option nearby. Adapter, computer, 12v outlet or otherwise.
You must not travel much. Where I travel, outlets are scarce. Once you've run your iPod for 5-6 hours (stopping and starting as necessary to deal with security or other situations), the battery is done and so is your listening.
And it's not like I'm the only one with a gripe about iPod batteries.
So design a better door. Virtually every consumer electronics item has, for very good reasons, a triviailly replaceable/exchangable battery -- camcorders/walkmen/md players/calculators/cordless phones/cameras -- you name it.
The iPod's "door" is complicated and time-consuming to open. It's battery is too quickly discharged. What's solution?
Make the battery easy to replace with a charged battery. There's clever ways to do removable batteries without bad doors.
If you insist on a sealed battery, the iPod's needs about double the power for a reasonable long-distance travel or other "extended" usage.
But you can't argue that sealing in a weak battery makes any sense.
Whether an act is evil or not should be evaluated on the merits of the act itself, not the actor.
The act of going to Antarctica, when judged in a vacuum, isn't inherently evil. The fact that its paid for by a totalitarian dictatorship, presumably benefitting from slave/prison labor and other practices of totalitarianism certainly make it a highly tainted act.
And then there's the question of motivation -- the act itself may be neutral or even objectively good (public scientific data), but who's to say it's not primarily or even secondarily an act of propaganda designed to put a happy face on their otherwise evil government?
One design paradim shift that Apple has done correct is the no battery hatch approach. It is truly controversial, but a step in the right direction. Like my old MD, the battery hatch is one of the weakes points in the case design. The Sony MZ-R50 is semi professional, but still the battery hatch is very weak.
You're cracked. I've owned a dozen Walkmen since the 1980s, an MD player, and a flash-based MP3 player that all had battery doors and NEVER was there a problem with the battery door.
Apple's sealed battery design is just an attempt at planned obsolence. Not only is the *maybe* 8 hours of playback time (no skipping or starting up/shutting down) without recharging on my 3G iPod grossly inadequate for any kind of travel, my experience has largely been that unless my iPod is kept parked in the charger 24/7, it will go from nearly full charge to near zero charge in about a week and a half.
If they HAD to have a sealed battery, they could have nearly doubled its size (providing a realistic 10 hours of typical usage, and maybe 16 hours of cached-from-playlist usage) and added such a nominal increase in size that (a) nobody would have cared and (b) fewer people would bitch about the battery.
A better design for 3Gs would have been a cell-phone type LI battery and a dock that accepted both the ipod and a seperate battery, like most cell phone desk chargers. Then the iPod would have been awesome for travel or other places where AC adapting wasn't practical. You could carry as many spare batteries as you could afford.
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I just hate to see HD-DVD gain any support even if its "advanced" codecs can cram an HD movie onto a single 15Gb layer. I'd sooner use less compressable codecs on a larger medium -- less CPU power to decode and encode, and the larger medium is a nice side bennie.
Why settle for what's *only* barely "good enough" for our current needs when we could pick a format that has real room for growth and can accomodate our needs today and tomorrow?
Blu Ray holds more data, layer for layer, than HD-DVD and therefore can hold more data at equivilent compression levels, or, more beneficially, *better* data at lower compression levels.
Why settle for a lesser amount of storage? Blu Ray makes more sense for data storage as well. Even 50GB per disc is weak compared to tape, but it's still a meaningful amount of storage. HD-DVD is 15GB now and 30 GB later, and 15GB isn't enough to stop using DVD-R and adopt a new technology -- but Blu Ray's 25 would be now, and growth to 50 and above would make it relevant for some time to come.
What I find odd about HD-DVD fans is that while they ignore the lower storage capacities, they love to focus on codecs. It's possible to run you favorite codec on any storage media, why settle for a crappier medium to do it?
I thought that there *was* honor among thieves, the contradictory nature of the statement "There is honor among thieves" giving it its resonance.
Many resumes aren't actually "read" for grammatical correctness, they're scanned for keywords either electronically or by people. Even when someone tries to read them, most resume books say "short and sweet" which precludes a lot of paragraph-type writing. Furthermore, the people reading them are often as weak at writing skills as the submitters, so any standard being applied is low to begin with.
And then there are the people who have professional services do their resumes, CVs and cover letters -- either once for manual submission, or as part of a headhunter type operation where fixing their clients weaknesses is part of the job.
And let's face it, when YOU were in college, what was the general intellectual orientation of most business/marketing school types, anyway? I found they nearly all fit the stereotype -- frat/sorority members with more interest in their personal appearance and social standing. Grades (and not necessarily *learning*) merely being important if they had some kind of status-oriented grad school plans or a cash payback plan from Mom and Dad for not flunking out.
To be fair, there were people that fit that description who were real smart, too, but most of them really weren't. College was something they were expected to do, like wear Polo-brand clothes, and join the right Greek house, and get a corporate job.
Is it any surprise that once this anti-intellectual group is in a position where they have to represent their ideas in writing that they fall apart? I think half the problem with them isn't just a lack of writing skills, it's also the quality of the ideas. It's hard to write well about a bad idea.
And many home-defense books agree with you -- limited aiming requirements, very inexpensive (a brand-new Mossberg 500 is like $350), easily obtainable ammo, trivial to use and highly intimidating, as well as offering a low risk over overpenetration on soft backstops.
.38 special loads. Overpenetration can be mitigated by the use of frangible ammo like Glaser safety slugs designed to break apart on hard surfaces.
.45ACP without a lot of problems. They're fast to reload and can be carried outside the home for protection in ways and places a shotgun can't.
There are downsides, though. Shotguns are unweildy in close quarters, and the small pellet count in buck loads at close distances produces a tight pattern in even open chokes that still requires aiming. It's hard to find places where a shotgun can practice fired, especially in urban settings. It's hard to store a shotgun both secure enough to keep burglars and kids out of it, yet easy to access when it's needed. The heavy game loads required for serious stopping power in a shotgun produce more recoil, particularly in pump-action guns, than most of the effective handgun rounds and my be overwhelming for smaller shooters (moving down to 20 guage isn't much help, since the loss in recoil includes a loss of pellet count and much more restricted load choices). They're also awkward to reload.
The handgun's liabilities -- aiming, more limited power and overpenetraton risk -- are easily mitigated. Practice is required for any firearm defense solution, and a handgun is easier to practice with, particularly for urban residents. The handgun's more limited power vs. buck shotgun loads is like calling a pickup underpowered for moving a piano vs. a semi; handguns are proven people stoppers, even in
Furthermore, a handgun is easy to store in a small bedside safe, and even petite women can easily handle heavier loads such as
While I don't doubt that more sophisticated and organized criminals may be utilizing body armor, considering that the average cop only fires his weapon during qualifying, it still strikes me as machismo run amok the way "stopping power" is flaunted.
.50AE and .454 Casull.
And if body armor is a real problem, we'll need to issue rifles, since class IV armor will stop almost every handgun round, with the exception of the ridiculous rounds like
But this is typical in all walks of life.
.25 ACP and .32 ACP. Even police officers only carried .32 caliber revolvers around 75 years ago.
.40S&W and .45 ACP to be necessary for "stopping power".
.25 ACP round has a similar amount of force, concentrated in a small area, as a baseball bat swung by an average male. .32 rounds are slightly more powerful than a baseball bat swung by a major league player, concentrated in the bullet's cross section.
I've recently gotten into shooting, and as I've researched handguns it's amazing the "requirement" for personal defense was often the fairly low-powered
Now the requirement is considered *at minimum* to be 9 mm, and even that at +P or the ill-defined +P+ pressure loadings, which are usually at the outer edge of modern firearm pressure design parameters. Many others consider more powerful cartridges such as
Some of the definition of "stopping power" (one shot, incapacitated attacker, even if fueled by drugs and rage -- the apocryphal PCP user) has changed over time, but as I did my research I found that even a
To me, getting hit by anyone swinging a baseball bat is a pretty serious thing, especially if the force is concentrated in a tiny cross section. I think the increased desire for power in firearms has some legitimacy, but it also strikes me as just a demand for power.
I think this is probably true in many things we buy or use.
I see a bright light in upper right corner of the photo. The line is going from upper left to bottom right, and appears to have nothing to do with the bright light; the line itself seems to have nothing to do with any flash of light.
If you *can* make an app this way, why not? It seems to make so much sense.
Are developers just reflexively following some "How to make a Windows application: DLLs in %WINDIR%, SYSTEM32, and the Program Files Directory, 2000 Registry Entries, and a unique directory for settings"?
Is there some valid architectural reason for it? Or is it some kind of twisted copy-protection-through-complexity?
Soft padding is but one of a long laundry list of features that Tivo has failed to add -- batch play/save to VCR is my personal missing favorite. Instead we have photo showing, MP3 playback, and multi-room, which are features that are either not core to the mission of Tivo (television recording and playback) and/or are code-intensive and relevent to the very few people who own multiple Tivos.
In order for Tivo to survive the onslaught of cable and satellite provider based DVRs (not to mention Myth and Replay), Tivo needs to stay ahead of everyone else on features core to watching TV, and not invest a bunch of effort in side projects like photo viewing and MP3 playing. Tivo is better, but for $5 per month for most Time-Warner SA8000s, Tivo isn't really $600 up front better (Tivo+lifetime).
Check out this list for a ton of things that would make Tivo much better, and much of it would be trivial to implement. Some of it is (as the list's author suggests) be more complicated than Joe Sixpack could deal with, but a lot of it wouldn't even be noticable as a "new" feature.
Because there's no other rational explanation for totalitarian apologia like this:
China is a sovereign nation.
And so was Nazi Germany, yet no one with any sense believes that gave them the moral authority to commit genocide. Neither does China's sovreign status give it the moral authority to kill protestors, run forced labor camps and imprison, torture and kill its citizens who object to its politics.
It doesn't take much more than a second grade education to figure this out, yet people like you believe that the thge US social and political system must reach some historically unprecedented level of perfection before we can criticize brutal totalitarian regeimes like China.
Get a sense of perspective.
WSJ I find to be too loaded with technical reporting about financial markets to really count as a "daily news source". It's more a specialty paper that also prints some news.
I pick up a copy if I find something compelling on the cover, but when I buy it without scanning the cover first, I always feel shortchanged because the "news" invariably involves fairly tedious reporting about the mechanics of business industries, financial markets and decision making. And then there's page after page of financial tables.
My other gripe is political; I'm skeptical of the assumptions underlying contemporary corporate culture, and the WSJ I think panders to that audience by adopting those assumptions; it's operating in a tight space with a lot of competition -- Barron's, Financial Times, Investor's Business Daily.
USN&WR is OK for a weekly, but I don't really read weeklies, other than the random copy of the Economist and my New Yorker subscription.
The Times isn't too terribly biased, the writing is superior, and the depth of coverage in very nearly every category is heads and shoulders above any other daily news *source* with the possible exception of the Washington Post's coverage of Washington politics. Stacked end on end, the Times even gives the Economist a run for its money on its home turf.
From a quality, and more importantly, *availability* perspective, it's hard to beat the New York Times.
I'd argue that NPR is largely in the same boat, although I also think that NPR's liberal slant is more obvious and pointed.
What I don't get, though, is outside of a very few slim (in terms of pages of content) low-circulation magazines, why can't the right put together a newspaper, magazine or TV show that doesn't both insult my intelligence and bore me to tears?
National Review is like a diet of plain oatmeal; substantive and healthy, but not what a man can live on. Washington Times? Amusing, but it's run by the Moonies and hard to take seriously. Christain Science Monitor is OK, but once again, I'm asking to take the daily product of a cult seriously. Anything Rupert Murdoch is involved in has the intelligence of a grocery tabloid and the apparent independence of 1950s Pravda.
I'd love a NYT-quality daily with a 'conservative' angle to it, but conservatives aren't satisfied unless its a mouthpiece, and at that point quality is flushed down the shitter.
I would agree. I'm just a geek and not a videophile and I will say that I don't really see that big of a difference between commercial DVDs played on my progressive scan player and HBO-HD when viewed on my 42" Sony Grand Wega III. In fact there are times where it seems that the compression used on HBO-HD actually makes for a lower quality movie.
As for rank-and-file consumers? They just got done buying $2000 TVs, needlessly expensive new DVD players and so on, and anyone who thinks they will be buying a new deck to replace the old one needs their head examined. Unless of course they just stop making regular DVDs, but they haven't even done that with most videos yet.
I do think Blu-Ray will be interesting in the existing DVD recorder space; it will be a useful media for recording 480i content at XP/1 hour bitrates and getting 6 hours of recording time.
...wouldn't their lapdogs in government be doing something about this?
I wonder if $10.2 billion represents a "real" number, as in $10.2 billion dollars total actual sucked out of bank accounts, or if its one of those squishy numbers that represents a bunch of soft costs like customer service time and other "clean up" costs (you know, like the RIAA "lost sales" number or "virus cleanup" costs).
While I don't doubt that fraud runs rampant on the Internet, I also have a hard time believing that a business sector is actually losing billions of dollars without either making it up by charging everyone fees, or having the government bail them out in some way or other.
...is AIDS activitst and animal rights activist. Ladies and Gentlemen, the subject is "AIDS drug testing". Discuss.
I find the debate that ensues made all the more hilarious as the two groups generally agree on about 99% of issues.
but you'll find this weird vid at a car boot sale in 2014
Why would I buy boots for my car? And why would I buy a video from a place that sold car boots?
Sorry, couldn't resist. I'm assuming a "car boot sale" is a retail outlet being operated from the boot/trunk of a car, and that lots of weird, unrelated things are sold, including strange old videos.
If launching space vehicles is so profitable, why are the only competitors involved government entities? Why doesn't Lockheed Martin or Boeing or British Aerospace or _______ have a commercial space launch business?
The only thing profitable about space launch is being a contractor to the government entity doing the launches.
"Why do women fake their orgasms?"
"Because they think that men care."
Which is kind of harsh if you think about it.
How does a 720p broadcast use more bandwidth than a 1080i broadcast?
A 720p frame is 1280x720 or 921k pixels. A 1080i field is 1920x540 or 1.03 megapixels. 720p is 60 full frames a second, 1080i is 60 fields per second. That works out to 6 megapixels per second fewer for 720p, a substantial savings for 720p signals.
My gripe with 1080i's display probably has more to do with the fact that you only see it on CRTs and CRT RPTVs, and I don't see many that are that good (I only know one person with a recent Pioneer Elite). Everyone else has lame-ish CRT direct views that don't do much for it. The only other displays I see regularly are all 720p native displays, such as Samsung DLP, my own Grand Wega III and the HD plasmas at work.
I also don't get how 1080i suffers less from compression than 720p. That doesn't make intuitive sense to me.
How many 1080i images are captured by 1080 line CCDs, and how many are assembled from 540 line CCDs?
I personally have never been impressed with the 1080i displays I've seen, there's a graininess to them I find unappealing.
I'd also wager that a lot of content is in 720p, simply because there's fewer pixels per complete frame (which has all kinds of editing, distribution and production advantages) yet a full 720p frame will display as many pixels as the active field of a 1080i display.
Well, I don't regard the battery as weak. I understand that it may appear as weak compared to some other players but not in my opinion.
There are additions to the iPod that give you a battery time far beyond other harddisk players. In my opinion the battery is sufficient and there's almost always a recharge option nearby. Adapter, computer, 12v outlet or otherwise.
You must not travel much. Where I travel, outlets are scarce. Once you've run your iPod for 5-6 hours (stopping and starting as necessary to deal with security or other situations), the battery is done and so is your listening.
And it's not like I'm the only one with a gripe about iPod batteries.
So design a better door. Virtually every consumer electronics item has, for very good reasons, a triviailly replaceable/exchangable battery -- camcorders/walkmen/md players/calculators/cordless phones/cameras -- you name it.
The iPod's "door" is complicated and time-consuming to open. It's battery is too quickly discharged. What's solution?
Make the battery easy to replace with a charged battery. There's clever ways to do removable batteries without bad doors.
If you insist on a sealed battery, the iPod's needs about double the power for a reasonable long-distance travel or other "extended" usage.
But you can't argue that sealing in a weak battery makes any sense.
Whether an act is evil or not should be evaluated on the merits of the act itself, not the actor.
The act of going to Antarctica, when judged in a vacuum, isn't inherently evil. The fact that its paid for by a totalitarian dictatorship, presumably benefitting from slave/prison labor and other practices of totalitarianism certainly make it a highly tainted act.
And then there's the question of motivation -- the act itself may be neutral or even objectively good (public scientific data), but who's to say it's not primarily or even secondarily an act of propaganda designed to put a happy face on their otherwise evil government?
One design paradim shift that Apple has done correct is the no battery hatch approach. It is truly controversial, but a step in the right direction. Like my old MD, the battery hatch is one of the weakes points in the case design. The Sony MZ-R50 is semi professional, but still the battery hatch is very weak.
You're cracked. I've owned a dozen Walkmen since the 1980s, an MD player, and a flash-based MP3 player that all had battery doors and NEVER was there a problem with the battery door.
Apple's sealed battery design is just an attempt at planned obsolence. Not only is the *maybe* 8 hours of playback time (no skipping or starting up/shutting down) without recharging on my 3G iPod grossly inadequate for any kind of travel, my experience has largely been that unless my iPod is kept parked in the charger 24/7, it will go from nearly full charge to near zero charge in about a week and a half.
If they HAD to have a sealed battery, they could have nearly doubled its size (providing a realistic 10 hours of typical usage, and maybe 16 hours of cached-from-playlist usage) and added such a nominal increase in size that (a) nobody would have cared and (b) fewer people would bitch about the battery.
A better design for 3Gs would have been a cell-phone type LI battery and a dock that accepted both the ipod and a seperate battery, like most cell phone desk chargers. Then the iPod would have been awesome for travel or other places where AC adapting wasn't practical. You could carry as many spare batteries as you could afford.