You're not a true gamer until you dream of tetris blocks falling on a regular basis.
You TOO!?!...:P
In fairness, I dreamt of tetris after creating the game in javascript, close to a decade ago. I think pride had a lot to do with it, but it came back quite a few times as the months passed.
Lucid dreaming is where you know its a dream, but in the case of the article, you still control yourself in the dream state without realizing its a dream till you wake up.
There's another kind?
3 hours of videogames before bed every night for 70% of my life must've altered my mind!
But the lucid part comes when you go "This can't be right, it must be a dream". Once you realize its a dream, a whole lot of doors open up.
None of my dreams have that level of realism. I can feel that I'm dreaming, right from the start. I've had some pretty strange dreams, including one where the doorbell rings, I get up, and get some computer parts delivered - but even then I was aware it was a dream.
I have only ever had maybe 2 dozen fully controlled dreams
Almost all of mine are like that. I have complete control over what I do and can do.
I remember when I was really young, I had a sick dream/nightmare, where I was in a jeep (third person perspective - weird) and a dinosaur was chasing us (?) trying to eat us. I had the exact same dream for several years, every time I had a really bad illness. This was before mainstream 3D games, so I doubt they had an impact. Then after I got heavily into videogames, I had that dream one final time. Rather than running from the dinosaur, I did a jedi leap towards it(kotor?), grabbed one of its arms, and tossed it over the horizon. (super mario 64?)
Haven't had it since.
Every once and a while I get an instructional dream. For example, I wanted to draw a 2D sprite for a game, but I have no artistic talent. I dreamed about drawing the exact pixel art I needed in a paint program, and was able to draw it for real when I awoke. There was also the CPU heatsink Purolator-delivery dream, in which I applied thermal paste for the first time. Handy.
My current theory is I must be communicating with my dormant artistic side and/or subconscious. I've got a few other observations supporting my theory, but I won't bore you with the details unless you're interested, as my post is already getting quite long.
BATCH is a good quick&dirty tool, for quick&dirty jobs. Right now I'm using cmd files to manage cmdline folding clients. They're installed as services, but they start up faster than everything else, and then slow down other stuff loading. Now, thanks to my quick and dirty batch scripting, they get started after everything else. (on XP) With a single command I can toggle them off so they don't come on after a reboot, which is handy if I was rebooting to play a game.
I considered using Java, but it's just not worth the time. It took 2 minutes to write the first script in batch, and less than 20 minutes to refine it.
Doctors can be idiots. Just look above at the comment titled "Also: Jaundice!"
This can sometimes happen when the baby gets a big dose of red blood cells because he's a lot lower than the placenta (gravity) or because the cord isn't clamped very quickly. All those red blood cells die in a day or two, baby cannot break down/metabolize the dead RBCs correctly, and POOF, jaundice.
I bet midwives from centuries past wouldn't have made that mistake. When did all this common knowledge (keep placenta at the same elevation or slightly lower) start vanishing?
If Intel got their claws in the discreet graphics market (which is already showing signs of stagnation rather than growth), then they'd take a huge chunk of nVidia and ATI's R&D budgets away. Unable to put as much money towards advancement, GPU generations (and their pricedrops) would come slower. Meanwhile Intel would utilize their advanced (and cheap) fabbing to make a killing on that market, just as they do IGPs.
End result? Slower progress, nVidia and ATI suffer, Intel rakes in cash.
Our current duopoly is GOOD. Videocards drop in price and increase in performance quicker than CPUs do. Adding a behemoth competitor will hurt the industry.
It's interesting how although it boosts the clockspeed from 133/166mhz to 400mhz, the performance boost is approximately 25%.
It says right on the website, this is because it's RAM bandwidth starved - and as it gobbles more bandwidth, your CPU gets less, but it does result in a net gain.
That means in theory the performance gains could be higher on desktop systems with higher speed RAM, as opposed to laptops. However, being able to feed it more data also means it works harder, so the recommendation for decent cooling is good advice!
That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.
I think you're absolutely correct. Bandwidth is cheap in datacenters. A VPS like this $10/mo one has about 30mbit up/down available most of the day.
I have trouble believing that ISPs couldn't do far better with $50/mo. Maintaining lines isn't that expensive.
If I could get over 30mbit up/down, I'd pay a $1500 one-time setup fee to get it installed - but I want my monthly rate to be very low. Unfortunately, no ISPs offer that. Instead I can pay $120/mo(+$80 overages) for 75/5mbit. $2400/yr is brutal.:/
Our Internet here is made up a number of competing telecoms and transit/peering agreements work great..... but when you have to keep putting fiber runs that are longer than the entire countries of South Korea and Japan why is it any big surprise that bandwidth costs more in the US?
And yet you can get cheaper internet connections in Canada, where population densities are even lower.
You're getting reamed, and unlike a lot of people, don't even realize it.
They had a "500 cards free if you pay shipping" promo on - but it had their logo on the back. I required some appointment cards, so I contacted them, and they offered me that great deal.
It might be a first-time customer thing, but I'm definitely going back.;) Staples would charge about 8x that.
Note: Communicating with them is rather slow. I only got replies to essential emails, usually days later - but their system is quite automated, so once you work through it, it's fairly efficient.
It took about 25 days to get them printed and shipped. Plan ahead a bit and it works fine. When they arrived, they had this wonky smell, probably from the optional UV coating. I let them air out a bit in the basement, and now they're fine.
Very nice quality, and the colours came out great. (despite RGB -> CYMK conversion)
I'm very happy with how they turned out, and am looking at using them again for some more business cards, labels, and other stuff.
My bad, Quake Live doesn't use flash. (except for the main site) I remember them making a big deal about it, but apparently it uses its own plugin. (joy...!)
Now that we have way more GPU power, 3D can be inefficiently shunted into browsers...
Only very recently did it get actual hardware-accelerated 3D. I'm pretty sure Java doesn't, but JavaScript is getting 3D support soon (they're in the nightlies of the major open source browsers).
...Runescape?
Java has had 3D for a very long time. Close to a decade, actually. It looked very bad back then, compared to DirectX games not run in a browser, but it had it.
Now that we have way more GPU power, 3D can be inefficiently shunted into browsers for all our favourite old classics! (flash example)
800x600? 8"? This is supposed to be a serious contender?
8" is bigger than printed photos. And most older people have shoddy vision anyway, so a resolution like that won't bug them.
Film? Rolls? What the heck are you talking about?
Most of the people I know that still get prints insist film has better quality. Most use old Canon behemoths with all sorts of lenses and things, recommended to them by great photographers from decades past. I think any modern DSLR would take better pictures.
Everyone else just looks at their digital camera photos on computer, iPhone, camera, etc.; it's ridiculously common around here to see people wearing cameras and things around their necks. Just about everyone has cellphones. (obviously)
Calculate the cost per picture, including paper and actual averaged ink costs. I bet they're paying well over 50 cents a picture, while you can get them professionally printed at any WalMart or whatever for less than half of that.
Photo frames last a while. Assuming they buy five for $80 each, and keep them for 5 years...(~$75 in power), then the cost per photo is approximately 4 to 6 cents each.
But I don't see why they'd buy 5. For now one nice one would work fine - and I'm sure better ones will continue to be released.
What? Troll? That was supposed to be insightful, but without being long-winded. Must've been some old geezer that can't get with new technology.
I got my first inkjet printer around the time my daughter was born, seventeen years ago. Inkjet printers may be many things -- including sharp-edged tools to gouge the hell out of people's wallets -- but they are not a fad.
True.
Digital picture frames are not a replacement for printed photos.
Sure they are. You may not like them, or they may not suit your purposes, but they are. It's like using a Car as a Truck replacement. It works, with a bit of adaptation.
They're arguably tacky, especially on a wall with a power cable, they're small, they emit rather than reflect light which is often undesirable, and they have a smaller color gamut and much lower resolution than (good quality) prints, to say nothing of being overpriced themselves.
Using a single device to view photos rather than printing thousands shows environmental responsibility, and an economic sense. The better quality frames have a high DPI, making the picture quality quite nice. Automatic colour and sharpening filters plus nice transitions can make viewing your photos or videos a pleasure compared old faded printed ones.
These photo frames are cheap. As little as 200 prints will pay for a cheap one, and ~600 would pay for a high quality one. They're power efficient, costing about $2-6/yr depending on factors like LCD size and your power rate. Some can be run off rechargeable batteries, letting you easily take hundreds or thousands of photos with you when you visit friends or relatives.
As I said above(in another post), my parents have really gotten into digital cameras. They now take about 2000 pictures per year. Printing those out would bankrupt them, compared to buying devices like this!;)
You can get black and white. You have to buy laserjet rather than inkjet.
Even the cheap ones under $100 have toner cartridges under $30 that print out close to 3000 pages. And unlike inkjet, not using it for a while won't clog the heads, requiring head cleaning. (and costing you more ink)
This is correct. It's also worth noting that the third party ink is even cheaper for models like the ip2000. I've seen places that sold cartidges for $1.99 each. Good quality, too.
When the heads die, you buy another Canon Pixma for $40.
But I still favour laser printers now that I've experienced owning a monochrome network laser printer.
Printer prices cover their manufacturing costs and shipping.
But there's a heck of a lot of R&D that goes on. Designing network printers is especially difficult. I once heard that for most of these companies, three separate teams must work together. One on the UI/web-GUI, another on the internal OS(includes networking, card readers, and other device communications), and a third on printer internals. (postscript, PCL6, all the document conversion, and whatever gets the internal hardware to do its magic) I probably mixed up what the teams do, but you can see it's complicated. All of that gets paid for by the ink, and the R&D on a single printer is probably tens of millions.
Your 24" would have to be about 2400x1800 to match DPI with one of these. They look quite nice up until you're closer than a foot away.
I always tell people to go to the store to get their digital pictures printed out.
Have you been to a store lately? Developing film is expensive. Do a few rolls and you pay for some of this stuff.
It's far cheaper than owning & maintaining your own printer, and typically higher quality.
It really depends on how much volume you have. My parents have really gotten into using their digital cameras, so they now take about 2000 pictures per year. I suspect developing that many pictures would be more expensive than a laser printer and a few digital photo frames.
I've seen HP mono laser printers go for $150. Newegg's got a Brother mono laser for $70 + $2 shipping right now.
I got a Brother HL-2170w (wireless) Laserjet for $70 about 1.5-2 years ago.
New toner costs about $25-30 (shipped) for a 2800 page cartridge, if you know where to look. (Hint: Not Brother's site:P )
Now the printer costs about $150-170, so it appears they've stopped giving them away. I've dumped water on it and put it through all sorts of abuse, but it keeps going. Right now it's being shared from an Ubuntu NAS to an old Win98 box that needs to print from DOS programs. I can also print directly to the IP from any Windows or OSX computer. I love it - it's got the features and reliability of far more expensive printers. All it lacks is toner capacity. (I've seen $350 printers with 7500 page cartridges in the same pricerange - but I'd have to use up 11+ toner cartridges before that becomes more economical...)
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You're not a true gamer until you dream of tetris blocks falling on a regular basis.
You TOO!?! ... :P
In fairness, I dreamt of tetris after creating the game in javascript, close to a decade ago. I think pride had a lot to do with it, but it came back quite a few times as the months passed.
Lucid dreaming is where you know its a dream, but in the case of the article, you still control yourself in the dream state without realizing its a dream till you wake up.
There's another kind?
3 hours of videogames before bed every night for 70% of my life must've altered my mind!
But the lucid part comes when you go "This can't be right, it must be a dream". Once you realize its a dream, a whole lot of doors open up.
None of my dreams have that level of realism. I can feel that I'm dreaming, right from the start. I've had some pretty strange dreams, including one where the doorbell rings, I get up, and get some computer parts delivered - but even then I was aware it was a dream.
I have only ever had maybe 2 dozen fully controlled dreams
Almost all of mine are like that. I have complete control over what I do and can do.
I remember when I was really young, I had a sick dream/nightmare, where I was in a jeep (third person perspective - weird) and a dinosaur was chasing us (?) trying to eat us. I had the exact same dream for several years, every time I had a really bad illness. This was before mainstream 3D games, so I doubt they had an impact. Then after I got heavily into videogames, I had that dream one final time. Rather than running from the dinosaur, I did a jedi leap towards it(kotor?), grabbed one of its arms, and tossed it over the horizon. (super mario 64?)
Haven't had it since.
Every once and a while I get an instructional dream. For example, I wanted to draw a 2D sprite for a game, but I have no artistic talent. I dreamed about drawing the exact pixel art I needed in a paint program, and was able to draw it for real when I awoke. There was also the CPU heatsink Purolator-delivery dream, in which I applied thermal paste for the first time. Handy.
My current theory is I must be communicating with my dormant artistic side and/or subconscious. I've got a few other observations supporting my theory, but I won't bore you with the details unless you're interested, as my post is already getting quite long.
Speedtouch modems reveal a lot of that stuff too.
My max upstream is 576kbit, unfortunately. Downstream could go way higher, but I'm locked on a 3mbit/1mbit plan.
There's nothing wrong with cmd files. Some very advanced things are built using them.
HFslip - hotfix slipstreamer.
BATCH is a good quick&dirty tool, for quick&dirty jobs. Right now I'm using cmd files to manage cmdline folding clients. They're installed as services, but they start up faster than everything else, and then slow down other stuff loading. Now, thanks to my quick and dirty batch scripting, they get started after everything else. (on XP) With a single command I can toggle them off so they don't come on after a reboot, which is handy if I was rebooting to play a game.
I considered using Java, but it's just not worth the time. It took 2 minutes to write the first script in batch, and less than 20 minutes to refine it.
Doctors can be idiots. Just look above at the comment titled "Also: Jaundice!"
This can sometimes happen when the baby gets a big dose of red blood cells because he's a lot lower than the placenta (gravity) or because the cord isn't clamped very quickly. All those red blood cells die in a day or two, baby cannot break down/metabolize the dead RBCs correctly, and POOF, jaundice.
I bet midwives from centuries past wouldn't have made that mistake. When did all this common knowledge (keep placenta at the same elevation or slightly lower) start vanishing?
You probably made a good choice.
And don't blindly trust the doctors.
That's the best advice. Never forget it.
Are you kidding me? This is great for consumers.
If Intel got their claws in the discreet graphics market (which is already showing signs of stagnation rather than growth), then they'd take a huge chunk of nVidia and ATI's R&D budgets away. Unable to put as much money towards advancement, GPU generations (and their pricedrops) would come slower. Meanwhile Intel would utilize their advanced (and cheap) fabbing to make a killing on that market, just as they do IGPs.
End result? Slower progress, nVidia and ATI suffer, Intel rakes in cash.
Our current duopoly is GOOD. Videocards drop in price and increase in performance quicker than CPUs do. Adding a behemoth competitor will hurt the industry.
It's interesting how although it boosts the clockspeed from 133/166mhz to 400mhz, the performance boost is approximately 25%.
It says right on the website, this is because it's RAM bandwidth starved - and as it gobbles more bandwidth, your CPU gets less, but it does result in a net gain.
That means in theory the performance gains could be higher on desktop systems with higher speed RAM, as opposed to laptops. However, being able to feed it more data also means it works harder, so the recommendation for decent cooling is good advice!
Agree. Transmitting from a chip to PC or vice-versa, is no big deal. The fact he put it inside his body doesn't alter that ability.
Yes and no.
I agree that this is chip to chip transmission.
But just like GPS trackers, couldn't this be placed secretly beneath your skin, while you sleep?
That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.
I think you're absolutely correct. Bandwidth is cheap in datacenters. A VPS like this $10/mo one has about 30mbit up/down available most of the day.
I have trouble believing that ISPs couldn't do far better with $50/mo. Maintaining lines isn't that expensive.
If I could get over 30mbit up/down, I'd pay a $1500 one-time setup fee to get it installed - but I want my monthly rate to be very low. Unfortunately, no ISPs offer that. Instead I can pay $120/mo(+$80 overages) for 75/5mbit. $2400/yr is brutal. :/
From net index site [netindex.com], the U.S. has an average connection speed of 10.16 Mbps. Canada has an average connection speed of 7.89 Mbps.
Yeah, but I pay $27/mo and have a 200GB cap. What's your money get you? :P
I bet you pay more for less.
(It's a pretty safe bet..)
Our Internet here is made up a number of competing telecoms and transit/peering agreements work great..... but when you have to keep putting fiber runs that are longer than the entire countries of South Korea and Japan why is it any big surprise that bandwidth costs more in the US?
And yet you can get cheaper internet connections in Canada, where population densities are even lower.
You're getting reamed, and unlike a lot of people, don't even realize it.
1) Print Pelican
2) Yes.
3) Yes.
They had a "500 cards free if you pay shipping" promo on - but it had their logo on the back. I required some appointment cards, so I contacted them, and they offered me that great deal.
It might be a first-time customer thing, but I'm definitely going back. ;) Staples would charge about 8x that.
Note: Communicating with them is rather slow. I only got replies to essential emails, usually days later - but their system is quite automated, so once you work through it, it's fairly efficient.
It took about 25 days to get them printed and shipped. Plan ahead a bit and it works fine. When they arrived, they had this wonky smell, probably from the optional UV coating. I let them air out a bit in the basement, and now they're fine.
Very nice quality, and the colours came out great. (despite RGB -> CYMK conversion)
I'm very happy with how they turned out, and am looking at using them again for some more business cards, labels, and other stuff.
My bad, Quake Live doesn't use flash. (except for the main site) I remember them making a big deal about it, but apparently it uses its own plugin. (joy...!)
Now that we have way more GPU power, 3D can be inefficiently shunted into browsers...
Comment still applies, though. ;)
Only very recently did it get actual hardware-accelerated 3D. I'm pretty sure Java doesn't, but JavaScript is getting 3D support soon (they're in the nightlies of the major open source browsers).
...Runescape?
Java has had 3D for a very long time. Close to a decade, actually. It looked very bad back then, compared to DirectX games not run in a browser, but it had it.
Now that we have way more GPU power, 3D can be inefficiently shunted into browsers for all our favourite old classics! (flash example)
Things are a bit diluted when it comes to anything copyright related.
They do have a better history of protecting freedoms, up until this farce of a trial.
True, true... but you could get a very decent digital photo frame for that price. And it'd last several years...
How many would you print out of 5 years worth of photos - about 10000?
800x600? 8"? This is supposed to be a serious contender?
8" is bigger than printed photos. And most older people have shoddy vision anyway, so a resolution like that won't bug them.
Film? Rolls? What the heck are you talking about?
Most of the people I know that still get prints insist film has better quality. Most use old Canon behemoths with all sorts of lenses and things, recommended to them by great photographers from decades past. I think any modern DSLR would take better pictures.
Everyone else just looks at their digital camera photos on computer, iPhone, camera, etc.; it's ridiculously common around here to see people wearing cameras and things around their necks. Just about everyone has cellphones. (obviously)
Calculate the cost per picture, including paper and actual averaged ink costs. I bet they're paying well over 50 cents a picture, while you can get them professionally printed at any WalMart or whatever for less than half of that.
Photo frames last a while. Assuming they buy five for $80 each, and keep them for 5 years...(~$75 in power), then the cost per photo is approximately 4 to 6 cents each.
But I don't see why they'd buy 5. For now one nice one would work fine - and I'm sure better ones will continue to be released.
What? Troll? That was supposed to be insightful, but without being long-winded. Must've been some old geezer that can't get with new technology.
I got my first inkjet printer around the time my daughter was born, seventeen years ago. Inkjet printers may be many things -- including sharp-edged tools to gouge the hell out of people's wallets -- but they are not a fad.
True.
Digital picture frames are not a replacement for printed photos.
Sure they are. You may not like them, or they may not suit your purposes, but they are. It's like using a Car as a Truck replacement. It works, with a bit of adaptation.
They're arguably tacky, especially on a wall with a power cable, they're small, they emit rather than reflect light which is often undesirable, and they have a smaller color gamut and much lower resolution than (good quality) prints, to say nothing of being overpriced themselves.
Using a single device to view photos rather than printing thousands shows environmental responsibility, and an economic sense. The better quality frames have a high DPI, making the picture quality quite nice. Automatic colour and sharpening filters plus nice transitions can make viewing your photos or videos a pleasure compared old faded printed ones.
These photo frames are cheap. As little as 200 prints will pay for a cheap one, and ~600 would pay for a high quality one. They're power efficient, costing about $2-6/yr depending on factors like LCD size and your power rate. Some can be run off rechargeable batteries, letting you easily take hundreds or thousands of photos with you when you visit friends or relatives.
As I said above(in another post), my parents have really gotten into digital cameras. They now take about 2000 pictures per year. Printing those out would bankrupt them, compared to buying devices like this! ;)
You can get black and white. You have to buy laserjet rather than inkjet.
Even the cheap ones under $100 have toner cartridges under $30 that print out close to 3000 pages. And unlike inkjet, not using it for a while won't clog the heads, requiring head cleaning. (and costing you more ink)
I just got 1000 full colour business cards shipped to my door for $25. Ink, paper, and shipping prices certainly are cheap!
This is correct. It's also worth noting that the third party ink is even cheaper for models like the ip2000. I've seen places that sold cartidges for $1.99 each. Good quality, too.
When the heads die, you buy another Canon Pixma for $40.
But I still favour laser printers now that I've experienced owning a monochrome network laser printer.
they are selling the printer as a loss-leader
Printer prices cover their manufacturing costs and shipping.
But there's a heck of a lot of R&D that goes on. Designing network printers is especially difficult. I once heard that for most of these companies, three separate teams must work together. One on the UI/web-GUI, another on the internal OS(includes networking, card readers, and other device communications), and a third on printer internals. (postscript, PCL6, all the document conversion, and whatever gets the internal hardware to do its magic) I probably mixed up what the teams do, but you can see it's complicated. All of that gets paid for by the ink, and the R&D on a single printer is probably tens of millions.
I would make the same arguments as you, except in favour of the digital frames rather than printed photos.
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=43778&vpn=ADMPF108F&manufacture=Aluratek
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=45447&vpn=8388175&manufacture=DIGITAL%20CAMERAS
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=49378&vpn=DP854-1G&manufacture=Coby
Your 24" would have to be about 2400x1800 to match DPI with one of these. They look quite nice up until you're closer than a foot away.
I always tell people to go to the store to get their digital pictures printed out.
Have you been to a store lately? Developing film is expensive. Do a few rolls and you pay for some of this stuff.
It's far cheaper than owning & maintaining your own printer, and typically higher quality.
It really depends on how much volume you have. My parents have really gotten into using their digital cameras, so they now take about 2000 pictures per year. I suspect developing that many pictures would be more expensive than a laser printer and a few digital photo frames.
I've seen HP mono laser printers go for $150. Newegg's got a Brother mono laser for $70 + $2 shipping right now.
I got a Brother HL-2170w (wireless) Laserjet for $70 about 1.5-2 years ago.
New toner costs about $25-30 (shipped) for a 2800 page cartridge, if you know where to look. (Hint: Not Brother's site :P )
Now the printer costs about $150-170, so it appears they've stopped giving them away. I've dumped water on it and put it through all sorts of abuse, but it keeps going. Right now it's being shared from an Ubuntu NAS to an old Win98 box that needs to print from DOS programs. I can also print directly to the IP from any Windows or OSX computer. I love it - it's got the features and reliability of far more expensive printers. All it lacks is toner capacity. (I've seen $350 printers with 7500 page cartridges in the same pricerange - but I'd have to use up 11+ toner cartridges before that becomes more economical...)