Or even better, we actually start treating it like a utility, and get the government to run it relatively non-profit. Use the money collected for the service to upgrade infrastructure, not pad the pockets of investors. Price it accordingly to some pre-set target for infrastructure improvement (ie - "100/100 for every home" or something). Integrate network development with business development strategies to increase availability of cheap bandwidth to Canadian businesses so that they can develop innovative networked platforms in all sorts of fields. Driving down the cost of bandwidth nationally, by having the government run stuff (even with the government overhead). Let companies like Rogers, Bell, even the small ISPs, compete over the services they currently offer - like e-mail, newsgroups, net-filtering, etc. even support for home internet users and support for home network devices/set-up, etc. - sure it'll hurt their bottom line. A lot. But rogers is already adjusting to people watching TV on the internet by offering on-demand service online if you subscribe to their cable service. Sell THAT to the barebones internet customer. Compete over streaming media offerings. Or whatever. But competition between the coax and rj-11 jacks in my house is never going to drive the cost of the internet down as much as a government run monopoly can (not will necessarily... but it COULD). [Though to be fair, I'm in general, just moderately pissed off at having absolutely no competition in my area, as Bell refuses to service my area with any new DSLAM circuits to service new customers, so I can ONLY get Rogers internet or no internet - at least until "2012 or so..."]
- rant over -
But seriously, I expect a public utility to be a bit above self-sustaining, with room for adequate and well paced growth... not raking in profit hand over fist. And with an ISP the size of "All of Canada" - the peering agreements should be decent enough to keep even out of network bandwidth costs low.
But even with fonts like Gentium, and Linux Libertine, there's one optical size, one or two weights... compare that to Neue Helvetica family which ships with 3 widths, 9 weights, including obliques for each weight, and an outline font - a total of 51 fonts; or Jenson Pro which ships with 4 optical sizes, four weights, including Roman and Oblique forms...
I'm not saying that Gentium, for example, is crap - compared to many free fonts, it's actually quite beautiful... and the care that was put into the Greek characters is fantastic... but it only compares to the basic levels of what many type foundries have to offer when they design and implement a family.
Because generally speaking, free fonts are crap: They often don't come with lower case numerals, proper small-caps, decent contextual ligature support, multiple weights, properly prepared bold, oblique, and bold-oblique forms, proper hinting at small sizes, and variations of different optical sizes. All of which SOMEONE has to come up with, and properly implement. And that person/people SHOULD be paid for the insane amount of work required to prepare even the basic latin alphabet in all these variations, let alone implementing decent unicode support...
It might... Blu-Ray rips play fine on my Pentium 4 840EE, and they played fine on my 3.2GHz 950D before it kicked the bucket when my cheap motherboard decided to quit on me. It'd be a struggle without FFDShow's DXVA codec, but Shark007's codec pack makes that easy to set up. I can also play real Blu-Ray movies perfectly nicely too... that's with a 9600GT though....
I assume you mean "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", unless you meant the 2009 movie which I have seen called "Star Trek: The Movie" a few times... but that would appear to be off topic?
Yup, to load really old DOS games onto my 286, via a trip to my 386 first (which has both 3.5" and 5.25" drives... the BIOS on my current computer doesn't support 2 floppy drives, or else I'd stick a 5.25" drive right under my blu-ray drive for fun).
Why? Because sometimes, on rare occasion, it's more fun, and just a tad easier, to play a game that assumed a certain CPU speed, on a CPU of that speed, instead of via emulation.
I used to do it over a network by running a DOS FTP server and uploading the files from my main computer... but that was back before I finally had to replace the aging 20MB SCSI drive with a pretty "new" 40MB IDE drive - I don't have the disks for any of that old networking software anymore... and being that it's relatively hard to find software that doesn't require a minimum of a 386 to run anymore...
If anything, Microsoft has a relatively connected-to-objective-reality version of "DPI" - in that, at least in every version of windows I can remember which support custom DPI setting (at least as far back as XP), when you go in to set a custom DPI, it presents a ruler on the screen, which you then are supposed to "resize" to represent 1 physical inch so that the OS can calculate how many dots (or pixels) are in that inch. To see what this looks like in Windows 7, you can go to control panel > display > Set custom text size (DPI). Of course I use a CRT so this can change fairly frequently for me....
Additionally, one of the big pushes with Vista was to introduce resolution independent programs - the rebuilt games (Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc.) demonstrate this.
Well, you COULD say that, but I still use a CRT screen, so it CAN have 640x480 pixels, or it can have 2048x1536 pixels... or, given custom timings and a bit of hacking, I think I can push about 40 pixels extra in each dimension.
But if you had a 27" iMac, and a 24" iMac, both with 2560x1440 (or a 24" second screen with that resolution, or whatever) - would the text be the same physical size? And what about elements that AREN'T text? Would your computer REALLY be usable if all of your text was rendered perfectly and the system controls were smaller than the tip of a pen?
DPI is different than resolution. Think about it this way - imagine, the circle that indicates that you close a window is physically.25" in diameter at 640x480. (Obviously that's a made up number). Now imagine you have more pixels avaliable. You can either make that circle smaller (same number of pixels, but the pixels are a smaller size), or make that circle more detailed (increased number of pixels used to render the shape at the same size). Changing your resolution accomplishes the first situation - the higher you set your resolution, the smaller everything on your screen gets.
On an LCD screen, one issue that comes up is that the display looks "best" at it's native resolution. So making things bigger, also tends to make things blurry or ugly or distorted, etc. If you could make things bigger by adjusting the DPI, AND your operating system/application supported it, you could take advantage of those small pixels to render your big object more clearly.
On today's screens, if you have great eyesight you might say "So what? Things look pretty good right now... and I like how everything is small."
However, what some people want are high DPI screen - ie, screens where the number of dots per inch approaches the equivalent of printed text. So where a screen might have 72 DPI (lets say dots are pixels), so a native resolution of 72 pixels per inch, what some people want is a screen where that might be instead 300 DPI, or 600 DPI... or whatever.
The benefit of this would be that - if your screen has so many pixels that the eye physically can't distinguish one from the other, then text that's 1" high is gonna look smooth. A game rendered at the new ludicrously high resolution, wouldn't need anti-aliasing, because you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the pixels anyway, so stuff wouldn't render "blocky". Etc.
The problem is - when you can't adjust the DPI, instead of having something look crisp, you'd just have something that's really tiny. That.25" circle becomes too small to see. All that 12 point text becomes illegible greyish lines. However, the other problem is, when you CAN adjust the DPI, SO many applications break, because they've all been developed to ASSUME a certain DPI, so either the layout breaks, or the text doesn't flow properly, or raster graphics look ugly when scaled up, etc.
Which is why, say, Apple getting rid of the ability to change the DPI could be frustrating to people who want high DPI devices - because if the OPTION doesn't exist, then you can't even see what WOULD break. And it indicates that the developer of the OS probably doesn't care too much about things breaking.
The real problem for 3D for me anyway, is that it has a fixed-focus. Which always winds up giving me headaches, because my eye doesn't always want to look at the same thing as has been decided by the film maker, and I obviously can't resolve detail in say, the background of a scene. And whenever there's a cut, the focus changes - in a way that's completely unnatural to reality - where there is no such thing as a "cut". Even when it's CGI where they'd have the option of not blurring anything to make it appear "out of focus" it's still unnatural because then nothing is ever OUT of focus.
It would be cool if, for instance, in an FPS, the renderer tracked the z-distance of whatever you were aimed at and adjusted the world "focus" based on that distance... then at least you would have SOME control... but anything shot on film, ever, will be limited to a pre-selected focal length, with a pre-selected focus, and thus will never be real enough for it to be worth it to me anyway. Until that is, we all have holodecks.
Having played around with several of the old Chicago builds, I'm pretty sure you'll find that it was labeled "start" fairly early on, at least by the first beta build. See screen-shots at http://toastytech.com/guis/chicago.html.
And having mixed a few albums, I can think of a few reasons why this wouldn't work. First and foremost - rarely is the finished product a result of merely the addition of separate tracks or instruments. There are all sorts of plug-ins and devices which - even at the mixing stage - make the one instrument dependent on the other. Maybe it's a compressor on the overall instrument mix that keeps the volume steady as more and more layers come in. Maybe there's some side-chain compression in the mix dropping the acoustic guitar automatically when the lead vocalist starts singing. Then you get to the mastering stage, and there's probably some overall volume compression going on, potentially some multi-band compression to make sure that certain frequency ranges don't interfere with each other. There's also probably some EQ that's been applied on the final mix - maybe some reverbs that have been applied on instrument or vocal groupings - etc.
There's an incredible convenience and practicality in the mixing stage of NOT running a whole bunch of effects in parallel simply so that somewhere down the road, someone can arbitrarily decide to change levels of - practically, groups of tracks at a time (as there's probably more than one layer of vocal, more than one or two guitar layers, etc). There's almost a necessity of mastering engineers working on complete mixes - it's what they, in their years of training, with incredibly expensive and accurate equipment, are paid the big bucks to focus on. And all of that means that... your Rock Band or Guitar Hero tracks, which have the ability for certain layers to "turn off" if you don't play, or hit a wrong note - aren't going to sound the same as the CD, and in the end, the CD is probably going to sound better (not always, cos the music game guys that come up with those mixes are good...) but yeah.
You don't need to still have the DRM file, it apparently works off of purchase history not the contents of your music collection. And though not everything is still around (you have to pay an anual fee to put content on the store), they do an OK job at providing upgrades for more popular content, for example, the U2 collection is no longer avaliable, but they did release an upgrade for it.
When I was in elementary school / high school, encyclopedias may have been deemed good starting points for research, but we were encouraged to go a little further than tertiary sources with our research. Usually in the earlier grades this meant reading books written on the subject with a child-audience in mind - the kind of thing selected for availability by the school librarian, or available in the children section of the local public library. In high school we were starting to use primary sources, especially for things like law classes where we would work directly with constitutions or court cases in building research essays. My work would probably have been highly criticized if I had actually been referencing encyclopedias in my footnotes, though I think we were allowed to use them to cite the occasional statistic in grades 4-6.
So - though not necessarily more "reliable" - secondary sources were, at least in my day, considered more valuable than tertiary sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Or even better, we actually start treating it like a utility, and get the government to run it relatively non-profit. Use the money collected for the service to upgrade infrastructure, not pad the pockets of investors. Price it accordingly to some pre-set target for infrastructure improvement (ie - "100/100 for every home" or something). Integrate network development with business development strategies to increase availability of cheap bandwidth to Canadian businesses so that they can develop innovative networked platforms in all sorts of fields. Driving down the cost of bandwidth nationally, by having the government run stuff (even with the government overhead). Let companies like Rogers, Bell, even the small ISPs, compete over the services they currently offer - like e-mail, newsgroups, net-filtering, etc. even support for home internet users and support for home network devices/set-up, etc. - sure it'll hurt their bottom line. A lot. But rogers is already adjusting to people watching TV on the internet by offering on-demand service online if you subscribe to their cable service. Sell THAT to the barebones internet customer. Compete over streaming media offerings. Or whatever. But competition between the coax and rj-11 jacks in my house is never going to drive the cost of the internet down as much as a government run monopoly can (not will necessarily... but it COULD). [Though to be fair, I'm in general, just moderately pissed off at having absolutely no competition in my area, as Bell refuses to service my area with any new DSLAM circuits to service new customers, so I can ONLY get Rogers internet or no internet - at least until "2012 or so..."] - rant over - But seriously, I expect a public utility to be a bit above self-sustaining, with room for adequate and well paced growth... not raking in profit hand over fist. And with an ISP the size of "All of Canada" - the peering agreements should be decent enough to keep even out of network bandwidth costs low.
But even with fonts like Gentium, and Linux Libertine, there's one optical size, one or two weights... compare that to Neue Helvetica family which ships with 3 widths, 9 weights, including obliques for each weight, and an outline font - a total of 51 fonts; or Jenson Pro which ships with 4 optical sizes, four weights, including Roman and Oblique forms... I'm not saying that Gentium, for example, is crap - compared to many free fonts, it's actually quite beautiful... and the care that was put into the Greek characters is fantastic... but it only compares to the basic levels of what many type foundries have to offer when they design and implement a family.
Because generally speaking, free fonts are crap: They often don't come with lower case numerals, proper small-caps, decent contextual ligature support, multiple weights, properly prepared bold, oblique, and bold-oblique forms, proper hinting at small sizes, and variations of different optical sizes. All of which SOMEONE has to come up with, and properly implement. And that person/people SHOULD be paid for the insane amount of work required to prepare even the basic latin alphabet in all these variations, let alone implementing decent unicode support...
It might... Blu-Ray rips play fine on my Pentium 4 840EE, and they played fine on my 3.2GHz 950D before it kicked the bucket when my cheap motherboard decided to quit on me. It'd be a struggle without FFDShow's DXVA codec, but Shark007's codec pack makes that easy to set up. I can also play real Blu-Ray movies perfectly nicely too... that's with a 9600GT though....
I got a blu-ray drive included in my cheap Sony laptop... so to be fair, the PS3 isn't the ONLY Sony product pushing blu-ray adoption.
I assume you mean "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", unless you meant the 2009 movie which I have seen called "Star Trek: The Movie" a few times... but that would appear to be off topic?
Yup, to load really old DOS games onto my 286, via a trip to my 386 first (which has both 3.5" and 5.25" drives... the BIOS on my current computer doesn't support 2 floppy drives, or else I'd stick a 5.25" drive right under my blu-ray drive for fun). Why? Because sometimes, on rare occasion, it's more fun, and just a tad easier, to play a game that assumed a certain CPU speed, on a CPU of that speed, instead of via emulation. I used to do it over a network by running a DOS FTP server and uploading the files from my main computer... but that was back before I finally had to replace the aging 20MB SCSI drive with a pretty "new" 40MB IDE drive - I don't have the disks for any of that old networking software anymore... and being that it's relatively hard to find software that doesn't require a minimum of a 386 to run anymore...
If anything, Microsoft has a relatively connected-to-objective-reality version of "DPI" - in that, at least in every version of windows I can remember which support custom DPI setting (at least as far back as XP), when you go in to set a custom DPI, it presents a ruler on the screen, which you then are supposed to "resize" to represent 1 physical inch so that the OS can calculate how many dots (or pixels) are in that inch. To see what this looks like in Windows 7, you can go to control panel > display > Set custom text size (DPI). Of course I use a CRT so this can change fairly frequently for me.... Additionally, one of the big pushes with Vista was to introduce resolution independent programs - the rebuilt games (Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc.) demonstrate this.
Well, you COULD say that, but I still use a CRT screen, so it CAN have 640x480 pixels, or it can have 2048x1536 pixels... or, given custom timings and a bit of hacking, I think I can push about 40 pixels extra in each dimension.
But if you had a 27" iMac, and a 24" iMac, both with 2560x1440 (or a 24" second screen with that resolution, or whatever) - would the text be the same physical size? And what about elements that AREN'T text? Would your computer REALLY be usable if all of your text was rendered perfectly and the system controls were smaller than the tip of a pen?
DPI is different than resolution. Think about it this way - imagine, the circle that indicates that you close a window is physically .25" in diameter at 640x480. (Obviously that's a made up number). Now imagine you have more pixels avaliable. You can either make that circle smaller (same number of pixels, but the pixels are a smaller size), or make that circle more detailed (increased number of pixels used to render the shape at the same size). Changing your resolution accomplishes the first situation - the higher you set your resolution, the smaller everything on your screen gets.
On an LCD screen, one issue that comes up is that the display looks "best" at it's native resolution. So making things bigger, also tends to make things blurry or ugly or distorted, etc. If you could make things bigger by adjusting the DPI, AND your operating system/application supported it, you could take advantage of those small pixels to render your big object more clearly.
On today's screens, if you have great eyesight you might say "So what? Things look pretty good right now... and I like how everything is small."
However, what some people want are high DPI screen - ie, screens where the number of dots per inch approaches the equivalent of printed text. So where a screen might have 72 DPI (lets say dots are pixels), so a native resolution of 72 pixels per inch, what some people want is a screen where that might be instead 300 DPI, or 600 DPI... or whatever.
The benefit of this would be that - if your screen has so many pixels that the eye physically can't distinguish one from the other, then text that's 1" high is gonna look smooth. A game rendered at the new ludicrously high resolution, wouldn't need anti-aliasing, because you wouldn't be able to distinguish between the pixels anyway, so stuff wouldn't render "blocky". Etc.
The problem is - when you can't adjust the DPI, instead of having something look crisp, you'd just have something that's really tiny. That .25" circle becomes too small to see. All that 12 point text becomes illegible greyish lines. However, the other problem is, when you CAN adjust the DPI, SO many applications break, because they've all been developed to ASSUME a certain DPI, so either the layout breaks, or the text doesn't flow properly, or raster graphics look ugly when scaled up, etc.
Which is why, say, Apple getting rid of the ability to change the DPI could be frustrating to people who want high DPI devices - because if the OPTION doesn't exist, then you can't even see what WOULD break. And it indicates that the developer of the OS probably doesn't care too much about things breaking.
The real problem for 3D for me anyway, is that it has a fixed-focus. Which always winds up giving me headaches, because my eye doesn't always want to look at the same thing as has been decided by the film maker, and I obviously can't resolve detail in say, the background of a scene. And whenever there's a cut, the focus changes - in a way that's completely unnatural to reality - where there is no such thing as a "cut". Even when it's CGI where they'd have the option of not blurring anything to make it appear "out of focus" it's still unnatural because then nothing is ever OUT of focus. It would be cool if, for instance, in an FPS, the renderer tracked the z-distance of whatever you were aimed at and adjusted the world "focus" based on that distance... then at least you would have SOME control... but anything shot on film, ever, will be limited to a pre-selected focal length, with a pre-selected focus, and thus will never be real enough for it to be worth it to me anyway. Until that is, we all have holodecks.
Windows 1 could do multiple apps. Tiled. Try doing THAT on an iPad.
Having played around with several of the old Chicago builds, I'm pretty sure you'll find that it was labeled "start" fairly early on, at least by the first beta build. See screen-shots at http://toastytech.com/guis/chicago.html.
And having mixed a few albums, I can think of a few reasons why this wouldn't work. First and foremost - rarely is the finished product a result of merely the addition of separate tracks or instruments. There are all sorts of plug-ins and devices which - even at the mixing stage - make the one instrument dependent on the other. Maybe it's a compressor on the overall instrument mix that keeps the volume steady as more and more layers come in. Maybe there's some side-chain compression in the mix dropping the acoustic guitar automatically when the lead vocalist starts singing. Then you get to the mastering stage, and there's probably some overall volume compression going on, potentially some multi-band compression to make sure that certain frequency ranges don't interfere with each other. There's also probably some EQ that's been applied on the final mix - maybe some reverbs that have been applied on instrument or vocal groupings - etc. There's an incredible convenience and practicality in the mixing stage of NOT running a whole bunch of effects in parallel simply so that somewhere down the road, someone can arbitrarily decide to change levels of - practically, groups of tracks at a time (as there's probably more than one layer of vocal, more than one or two guitar layers, etc). There's almost a necessity of mastering engineers working on complete mixes - it's what they, in their years of training, with incredibly expensive and accurate equipment, are paid the big bucks to focus on. And all of that means that... your Rock Band or Guitar Hero tracks, which have the ability for certain layers to "turn off" if you don't play, or hit a wrong note - aren't going to sound the same as the CD, and in the end, the CD is probably going to sound better (not always, cos the music game guys that come up with those mixes are good...) but yeah.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the first part of the Constitution Act, signed into law in 1982, specifically covers both Freedom of Expression, and Freedom of Thought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms
You don't need to still have the DRM file, it apparently works off of purchase history not the contents of your music collection. And though not everything is still around (you have to pay an anual fee to put content on the store), they do an OK job at providing upgrades for more popular content, for example, the U2 collection is no longer avaliable, but they did release an upgrade for it.
When I was in elementary school / high school, encyclopedias may have been deemed good starting points for research, but we were encouraged to go a little further than tertiary sources with our research. Usually in the earlier grades this meant reading books written on the subject with a child-audience in mind - the kind of thing selected for availability by the school librarian, or available in the children section of the local public library. In high school we were starting to use primary sources, especially for things like law classes where we would work directly with constitutions or court cases in building research essays. My work would probably have been highly criticized if I had actually been referencing encyclopedias in my footnotes, though I think we were allowed to use them to cite the occasional statistic in grades 4-6. So - though not necessarily more "reliable" - secondary sources were, at least in my day, considered more valuable than tertiary sources.
DSL isn't over phone lines?
Hey, hey... not ALL the others... some of us are still enjoying our buckling spring keyboards...