I'd actually prefer something along the lines of some of Panasonic's drives (both standalone and integrated into set-top DVD recorders) that will accept both caddied and bare DVD-RAM discs. Most of the modern caddied DVD-RAM media can actually be de-caddied and vice-versa.
Ideally they'd make the drive mechanism accepting a disc in a caddy the standard, but make the caddy itself optional for the media. People with a penchant for caddies could buy caddies and caddy their media as appropriate.
This way you could keep your most frequently used media in caddies (games, OS media, whatever), but buy cheaper decaddied media and store less frequently used media bare in binders or other storage systems.
I can appreciate mandating that all media be caddied would crank up the cost of media, but negating caddies completely doesn't make sense, either.
...on Al Jazeera and all the other Islamofacist propaganda satellite channels?
Yes, this is a troll, but I don't exactly see where giving publicity to people who behead civilians is doing anything to contribute constructively to reconstructing Iraq or Islamic terrorism generally.
It's very lame. There's no pre-eclipse moon (although perhaps there wasn't?), and the moon itself is very tiny relative to the screen size, and not much larger than many of the blinking background lights of the city, which are in and of themselves distracting.
A tighter framing, no background lights, and a starting reference point (non-eclipsed moon) would have made it much more interesting.
Medical malpractice would be over tomorrow if all of the local medical boards would be willing to honestly review cases and de-license members. Instead they shield their members, hand out wrist slaps only when they have to, and complain about how high their malpractice insurance is. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if "clean" medical board reviews weren't affirmative defenses in malpractice suits, or at least admitted as evidence of peer review.
I had a friend who went to the dentist and had bleeding and pain for days afterwards. He went to a different dentist and the first thing out of his mouth was "Who the hell did this to you?" The second dentist fixed the hack job the first delivered, as well as signing the complaint forms and providing documentation for the written complaint he filed with the dental board.
The result? "Claims not sustained", despite needing fairly urgent additional dental work to fix the problems caused by the first dentist. It's kind of like Bill Gates having to earn +5 Insightful on Slashdot when complaining about Samba; not *impossible*, but if he did, he better go buy a lottery ticket, too.
Isn't that the idea? If the technology can be disrupted to the extent that it undermines its value to the implementor, they might be inclined to scale it back or not use it at all.
Meanwhile, take a couple of xanax and shop someplace else besides Wal Mart.
Apparently he just wanted to bring out the fact that in ancient egypt, the role of women wasn't exactly like it is today,
How is it different than the role of women in most Muslim (and particularly Arab) countries now?
This is what drives me crazy about feminists. They'll rant and rave about a model making $50K for appearing in a swimsuit in a beer ad being "exploited", but are *silent* about the so-dehuminizing-its-absurd treatment of women in most Islamic socities, including those subgroups in the U.S.
What gives? You'd think that they'd be barricading every Arab embassy, demanding civil rights for women.
Routing the cables is trivial for the typical Slashdot reader, but for the kinds of people that want to hook up the VCR(!), DVD player and cable/sat box, having the thing in the ceiling isn't something they do themselves.
I'm not sure I'd be crazy about it, either -- I finally got an HD cable box a few months after getting my RP TV. Dunno where I would have found decent 25' component video cables or how I would have felt about having to fish them into the ceiling.
A dedicated room for a projector setup makes the most sense, since you can mount the components and the projector on the back wall and not play electrician each time you want to change something, but that's not something most people have.
And resistant to consumer damage - What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING? It comes down to hardware/media price and avialiablity.
Resistant to damage is a legitimate consumer concern and should be taken into account when evaluating a media system.
Certainly hardware, media pricing, and availability are key items in determining *economic* success, but just because something is widespread and inexpensive doesn't make it "better" than something else, just likely to be adopted by cheapskates.
I'd wager that anyone who lives on the Mississippi south of St. Cloud, Minnesota is drinking water that has been used to flush all manner of human excrement. Minneapolis gets its water from the river and we all dump purified sewage waste back in about 25 miles south.
How would you like to live in New Orleans, or drink the tap water in Memphis?
I don't disagree that a good projector setup is an awesome experience, and ALL RPTVs eat high-dollar bulbs, so the bulb issue is kind of moot.
RPTVs (especially the tabletop models like Sony's LCD RPTV and Samsung's DLP) offer far better ambient light pictures than a projector and are much simpler to integrate into a room.
The latter is important for most people -- mounting a projector in a ceiling or floor and then cabling it to your video sources *neatly* isn't trivial. If you just want to run a ton of cables around the horn or don't give a shit, it doesn't matter, but most people don't want that look or have a dedicated theater room where it could all get mounted in the back of the room.
And then there's the matter of the screen. A quality, high-gain screen ain't cheap. And unless you're building a cinema-specific room, you're talking even more money to install a screen in the ceiling that can get dropped down and raised up.
> Yes, a small battery taped to a pcb with some wires and a timer hidden in an airport sounds like fun for everyone!
It won't work in most airports I've been in because the TVs are mounted in enclosed cases (often badged with CNN or something) and the IR ports aren't visible.
It would work great in a lot of bars and restaurants, though. They usually have a really busy interior (lots of doodads on the walls) which makes for great IR annoyer concealment, and often mount their sets high on swingarms and need IR control.
Back in the stone age (ie, early 80s) one of the electronics projects in our class was a "librarian annoyer" -- a small circuit that would run for a long time on a 9v battery and would periodically emit a shrill noise for a brief time and then go silent again. The idea was to put it in a hollowed out book in the library and the librarian would go nuts trying to find the source of the noise.
Why not combine this concept with the TV turner-offer? A small device that would periodically emit all the OFF IR codes for TVs. Make it unobtrusive enough that it could be stuck someplace where it wouldn't be seen, or camouflaged as something that belonged on the wall (many places have rectangular thermostat sensors all over -- small metal rectangle with no controls).
With the right power source and camouflage, you could really have some fun. It may also be interesting to not just send OFF codes, but to send random channel or input codes, mutes, volume up/down commands and so on.
A single IR command might be simpler to implement, but it'd still be a blast.
I agree with the spirit here -- exploration is inherently dangerous and simply because it is doesn't mean you don't do it.
Although I pick one minor nit about seafaring -- while there were some utterly unfixable catastrophic problems in open water, many problems WERE fixable, some in open water, and many major ones near sources of wood. The crews could repair sails and repair or replace much of the ships wooden structure from scratch if materials were available (ie, trees).
It'd take a pretty big spaceship with a lot of extra crap to fix it in flight.
You hit the nail on the head -- Windows desktop users wouldn't care what the hardware was, as long as it was fast and cheap. Presumably a PPC clone wouldn't be cheaper, particularly in the peripheral selection department. (We'll assume for arguments sake that there's some magical way all the apps would run on PPC, too).
However, enterprise/app specific users might even if it wasn't cheaper, as long as there was reasonable choice in peripherals (mainly disk controllers, I'd guess) and, more importantly, if there was some huge performance or scalability gain WAS there.
What if a PPC version that ran on Power platform gave enterprise DBs some huge I/O gain? Or a big gain in MPEG2 encoding times for video editing?
As long as the performance gain was some performance/cost ratio above 1.5, it might gain real traction over Intel kit.
And who knows -- while the NT on MIPS/Alpha/PPC was a pretty big flop, I'd be kind of surprised if Microsoft didn't make a half-assed attempt to fund a portability group that kept Windows OS running on G3/4/5 PPC and maybe even Power and Sparc internally, if anything to keep Intel from playing too cutesy with FOSS OSes. Plus, if they're at all serious about Xbox's future on non-Intel CPUs, portability is a real here-and-now business issue.
Even if it cost them $20 million a year, that's *peanuts* to know that if you really had to you could be booting your OS on another platform. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't making it $30 and producing their own motherboards for alternative CPUs so that they could have an alternative CPU platform on the market in 6 months if they needed to.
When we changed to a new tape storage vendor, they sales guy told us that the new thinking isn't "How long should I keep it?" it's "How soon can I destroy it?"
They can't hold evidence you don't have against you (unless they can hold not having evidence against you, but that's a different problem).
...for just about everything. Some horrible things, like killing people or hurting loved ones, are so high as to be functionally unreachable (nobody is going to pay me $250 billion tax free to leave my wife, for example).
Nobile and heroic are just moral deadweights put on the common man to keep him in line.
Whether the trajectories are any good or not is kind of immaterial, since the energy is for shit beyond 100 yards anyway..375 H&H has better ballistics at those distances.
The.458 Win is essentially Winchester's flavor of H&H's.600 Nitro Express.
I think the big slugs lineage is important -- they were elephant guns, and to shoot elephants you have to get *CLOSE* and you get two shots (since your Holland and Holland double gun only can do two shots). And you've either killed the fucking elephant, or it killed you.
If I lion can close 150 yards in 5 seconds, it's moving at 61 mph, which is probably faster than an actual lion can move. This means you have 3.5 seconds to shoot it (leaving 1.5 seconds for a high-powered round to kill it and have it drop dead at your feet).
It's close, to be sure -- I'd bet Casull or.50AE would drop it. Someone was shooting the.50AE at the range yesterday. That just scares the shit out of me.
..which is why we need real, RICO investigations that are criminal in nature. Clearly this behavior is no different than the kinds of Cosa Nostra shenanigans RICO was designed for.
Once you figure out who the *people* are, the corporate shells no longer matter -- or count in the prosecutions favor, as they are prima faciae evidence of a deliberate plan to deceive and evade -- a Corrupt Organization.
....or do they only value them based upon their cashflows and sales projections?
I'm kind of thinking of the world I work in (advertising), where I've been told that ad companies are usually bought and sold valued on 3-5 year profit projections, and even then there's a lot of negotiating room based upon the stability of key client relationships, client spending plans and patterns, etc.
Advertising is more limited in that the IP is sold once and reused by the client, seemingly forever in some cases, so the only "value" is in the particular collection of employees and the client relationships.
Given how nebulous IP is vs. real estate, machines, mining rights, train tracks and all the other physical property manifestations of a business, it just makes me wonder how often anyone looks at the "inherent" value of the IP vs. just what people might buy the IP for in the future (ie, future sales and cashflow).
Overpenetration is a problem, but not on large game and particularly not with soft-nosed bullets like the.458. Even without vitals penetration, the hydrostatic shock from 4k ft/lbs is enough to kill pretty much anything.
Even with pass-through penetration, anything hit will bleed out quickly -- figure a 6" exit wound. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't live long with a 6" hole in my torso.
You're high. Cable companies have never broadcast any digital channels uncompressed. SD and SD signals are transmitted compressed.
I don't doubt that they step on the HD (and SD) signals harder than they should, the HD content I've seen from TW here in Minnesota has been good, especially the video-based content on Discovery HD and basketball in HD.
I'll agree with other posters that the quality isn't as much the issue, it's the lack of content available. I can get about 8 channels max, and that will cost me an arm and a leg (adding HDNet and Showtime) -- the content isn't worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd actually prefer something along the lines of some of Panasonic's drives (both standalone and integrated into set-top DVD recorders) that will accept both caddied and bare DVD-RAM discs. Most of the modern caddied DVD-RAM media can actually be de-caddied and vice-versa.
Ideally they'd make the drive mechanism accepting a disc in a caddy the standard, but make the caddy itself optional for the media. People with a penchant for caddies could buy caddies and caddy their media as appropriate.
This way you could keep your most frequently used media in caddies (games, OS media, whatever), but buy cheaper decaddied media and store less frequently used media bare in binders or other storage systems.
I can appreciate mandating that all media be caddied would crank up the cost of media, but negating caddies completely doesn't make sense, either.
...on Al Jazeera and all the other Islamofacist propaganda satellite channels?
Yes, this is a troll, but I don't exactly see where giving publicity to people who behead civilians is doing anything to contribute constructively to reconstructing Iraq or Islamic terrorism generally.
It's very lame. There's no pre-eclipse moon (although perhaps there wasn't?), and the moon itself is very tiny relative to the screen size, and not much larger than many of the blinking background lights of the city, which are in and of themselves distracting.
A tighter framing, no background lights, and a starting reference point (non-eclipsed moon) would have made it much more interesting.
Medical malpractice would be over tomorrow if all of the local medical boards would be willing to honestly review cases and de-license members. Instead they shield their members, hand out wrist slaps only when they have to, and complain about how high their malpractice insurance is. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if "clean" medical board reviews weren't affirmative defenses in malpractice suits, or at least admitted as evidence of peer review.
I had a friend who went to the dentist and had bleeding and pain for days afterwards. He went to a different dentist and the first thing out of his mouth was "Who the hell did this to you?" The second dentist fixed the hack job the first delivered, as well as signing the complaint forms and providing documentation for the written complaint he filed with the dental board.
The result? "Claims not sustained", despite needing fairly urgent additional dental work to fix the problems caused by the first dentist. It's kind of like Bill Gates having to earn +5 Insightful on Slashdot when complaining about Samba; not *impossible*, but if he did, he better go buy a lottery ticket, too.
Isn't that the idea? If the technology can be disrupted to the extent that it undermines its value to the implementor, they might be inclined to scale it back or not use it at all.
Meanwhile, take a couple of xanax and shop someplace else besides Wal Mart.
Apparently he just wanted to bring out the fact that in ancient egypt, the role of women wasn't exactly like it is today,
How is it different than the role of women in most Muslim (and particularly Arab) countries now?
This is what drives me crazy about feminists. They'll rant and rave about a model making $50K for appearing in a swimsuit in a beer ad being "exploited", but are *silent* about the so-dehuminizing-its-absurd treatment of women in most Islamic socities, including those subgroups in the U.S.
What gives? You'd think that they'd be barricading every Arab embassy, demanding civil rights for women.
Routing the cables is trivial for the typical Slashdot reader, but for the kinds of people that want to hook up the VCR(!), DVD player and cable/sat box, having the thing in the ceiling isn't something they do themselves.
I'm not sure I'd be crazy about it, either -- I finally got an HD cable box a few months after getting my RP TV. Dunno where I would have found decent 25' component video cables or how I would have felt about having to fish them into the ceiling.
A dedicated room for a projector setup makes the most sense, since you can mount the components and the projector on the back wall and not play electrician each time you want to change something, but that's not something most people have.
And resistant to consumer damage - What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING? It comes down to hardware/media price and avialiablity.
Resistant to damage is a legitimate consumer concern and should be taken into account when evaluating a media system.
Certainly hardware, media pricing, and availability are key items in determining *economic* success, but just because something is widespread and inexpensive doesn't make it "better" than something else, just likely to be adopted by cheapskates.
Wouldn't that the "Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal"?
I'd wager that anyone who lives on the Mississippi south of St. Cloud, Minnesota is drinking water that has been used to flush all manner of human excrement. Minneapolis gets its water from the river and we all dump purified sewage waste back in about 25 miles south.
How would you like to live in New Orleans, or drink the tap water in Memphis?
I call further bullshit, with some exceptions.
I don't disagree that a good projector setup is an awesome experience, and ALL RPTVs eat high-dollar bulbs, so the bulb issue is kind of moot.
RPTVs (especially the tabletop models like Sony's LCD RPTV and Samsung's DLP) offer far better ambient light pictures than a projector and are much simpler to integrate into a room.
The latter is important for most people -- mounting a projector in a ceiling or floor and then cabling it to your video sources *neatly* isn't trivial. If you just want to run a ton of cables around the horn or don't give a shit, it doesn't matter, but most people don't want that look or have a dedicated theater room where it could all get mounted in the back of the room.
And then there's the matter of the screen. A quality, high-gain screen ain't cheap. And unless you're building a cinema-specific room, you're talking even more money to install a screen in the ceiling that can get dropped down and raised up.
> Yes, a small battery taped to a pcb with some wires and a timer hidden in an airport sounds like fun for everyone!
It won't work in most airports I've been in because the TVs are mounted in enclosed cases (often badged with CNN or something) and the IR ports aren't visible.
It would work great in a lot of bars and restaurants, though. They usually have a really busy interior (lots of doodads on the walls) which makes for great IR annoyer concealment, and often mount their sets high on swingarms and need IR control.
Back in the stone age (ie, early 80s) one of the electronics projects in our class was a "librarian annoyer" -- a small circuit that would run for a long time on a 9v battery and would periodically emit a shrill noise for a brief time and then go silent again. The idea was to put it in a hollowed out book in the library and the librarian would go nuts trying to find the source of the noise.
Why not combine this concept with the TV turner-offer? A small device that would periodically emit all the OFF IR codes for TVs. Make it unobtrusive enough that it could be stuck someplace where it wouldn't be seen, or camouflaged as something that belonged on the wall (many places have rectangular thermostat sensors all over -- small metal rectangle with no controls).
With the right power source and camouflage, you could really have some fun. It may also be interesting to not just send OFF codes, but to send random channel or input codes, mutes, volume up/down commands and so on.
A single IR command might be simpler to implement, but it'd still be a blast.
Aye. We're not likely to have the crew die of scurvey.
I wonder what the head shrinkers say about mutiny, though?
I agree with the spirit here -- exploration is inherently dangerous and simply because it is doesn't mean you don't do it.
Although I pick one minor nit about seafaring -- while there were some utterly unfixable catastrophic problems in open water, many problems WERE fixable, some in open water, and many major ones near sources of wood. The crews could repair sails and repair or replace much of the ships wooden structure from scratch if materials were available (ie, trees).
It'd take a pretty big spaceship with a lot of extra crap to fix it in flight.
You hit the nail on the head -- Windows desktop users wouldn't care what the hardware was, as long as it was fast and cheap. Presumably a PPC clone wouldn't be cheaper, particularly in the peripheral selection department. (We'll assume for arguments sake that there's some magical way all the apps would run on PPC, too).
However, enterprise/app specific users might even if it wasn't cheaper, as long as there was reasonable choice in peripherals (mainly disk controllers, I'd guess) and, more importantly, if there was some huge performance or scalability gain WAS there.
What if a PPC version that ran on Power platform gave enterprise DBs some huge I/O gain? Or a big gain in MPEG2 encoding times for video editing?
As long as the performance gain was some performance/cost ratio above 1.5, it might gain real traction over Intel kit.
And who knows -- while the NT on MIPS/Alpha/PPC was a pretty big flop, I'd be kind of surprised if Microsoft didn't make a half-assed attempt to fund a portability group that kept Windows OS running on G3/4/5 PPC and maybe even Power and Sparc internally, if anything to keep Intel from playing too cutesy with FOSS OSes. Plus, if they're at all serious about Xbox's future on non-Intel CPUs, portability is a real here-and-now business issue.
Even if it cost them $20 million a year, that's *peanuts* to know that if you really had to you could be booting your OS on another platform. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't making it $30 and producing their own motherboards for alternative CPUs so that they could have an alternative CPU platform on the market in 6 months if they needed to.
"Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual."
Friedrich Nietzsche
When we changed to a new tape storage vendor, they sales guy told us that the new thinking isn't "How long should I keep it?" it's "How soon can I destroy it?"
They can't hold evidence you don't have against you (unless they can hold not having evidence against you, but that's a different problem).
...for just about everything. Some horrible things, like killing people or hurting loved ones, are so high as to be functionally unreachable (nobody is going to pay me $250 billion tax free to leave my wife, for example).
Nobile and heroic are just moral deadweights put on the common man to keep him in line.
Crap, yet another DRM-less/security-less gizmo I gotta hoard for when they're all wired into Ashcroft's penal colony.
Whether the trajectories are any good or not is kind of immaterial, since the energy is for shit beyond 100 yards anyway. .375 H&H has better ballistics at those distances.
.458 Win is essentially Winchester's flavor of H&H's .600 Nitro Express.
.50AE would drop it. Someone was shooting the .50AE at the range yesterday. That just scares the shit out of me.
The
I think the big slugs lineage is important -- they were elephant guns, and to shoot elephants you have to get *CLOSE* and you get two shots (since your Holland and Holland double gun only can do two shots). And you've either killed the fucking elephant, or it killed you.
If I lion can close 150 yards in 5 seconds, it's moving at 61 mph, which is probably faster than an actual lion can move. This means you have 3.5 seconds to shoot it (leaving 1.5 seconds for a high-powered round to kill it and have it drop dead at your feet).
It's close, to be sure -- I'd bet Casull or
..which is why we need real, RICO investigations that are criminal in nature. Clearly this behavior is no different than the kinds of Cosa Nostra shenanigans RICO was designed for.
Once you figure out who the *people* are, the corporate shells no longer matter -- or count in the prosecutions favor, as they are prima faciae evidence of a deliberate plan to deceive and evade -- a Corrupt Organization.
....or do they only value them based upon their cashflows and sales projections?
I'm kind of thinking of the world I work in (advertising), where I've been told that ad companies are usually bought and sold valued on 3-5 year profit projections, and even then there's a lot of negotiating room based upon the stability of key client relationships, client spending plans and patterns, etc.
Advertising is more limited in that the IP is sold once and reused by the client, seemingly forever in some cases, so the only "value" is in the particular collection of employees and the client relationships.
Given how nebulous IP is vs. real estate, machines, mining rights, train tracks and all the other physical property manifestations of a business, it just makes me wonder how often anyone looks at the "inherent" value of the IP vs. just what people might buy the IP for in the future (ie, future sales and cashflow).
Overpenetration is a problem, but not on large game and particularly not with soft-nosed bullets like the .458. Even without vitals penetration, the hydrostatic shock from 4k ft/lbs is enough to kill pretty much anything.
Even with pass-through penetration, anything hit will bleed out quickly -- figure a 6" exit wound. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't live long with a 6" hole in my torso.
You're high. Cable companies have never broadcast any digital channels uncompressed. SD and SD signals are transmitted compressed.
I don't doubt that they step on the HD (and SD) signals harder than they should, the HD content I've seen from TW here in Minnesota has been good, especially the video-based content on Discovery HD and basketball in HD.
I'll agree with other posters that the quality isn't as much the issue, it's the lack of content available. I can get about 8 channels max, and that will cost me an arm and a leg (adding HDNet and Showtime) -- the content isn't worth it.