I disagree. When we sing in English, what accent do we mimmick? Usually it is the American accent.
Try listening to the Pet Shop Boys. They're British, and they sound British! More British singers should sing like them! British singers who try to imitate the American accent are only doing so to make themselves sell better in the U.S., which, frankly, is quite sad.
Also, when I was in school, I was taught not to sing the rhotic R's (like at the end of words like "car", "fur", "buster", etc.). Which country's accent is known to eliminate most rhotic R's? Not the U.S.'s.
And since I subject it to massive damage playing MAME arcade games on it, it's all the more amazing that it's survived as long and as well as it has.
Severe damage? At my workplace, some of my co-workers enjoyed playing networked track and field games under MAME. They would beat the crap out of their keyboards, bashing away on two or three keys, trying to get their character to run faster...
I use KeyTronic keyboards both at home and at work. I can see all sorts of crap that's gotten between the keys, but thankfully they keep on working. I love the feel of the keys. I'm sure I'm the dissenting opinion here, but I hate the super-clicky PS/2-style boards. I also enjoy having a super-sized Enter key and having the backslash at the upper right corner to the left of BackSpace.
To anyone else who has KeyTronic (turn the keyboard upside-down and look at the label on the bottom), how does open one of these to clean it? There are no screws on the keyboard anywhere. I can blast a compressed-air can between the keys, but that must miss a lot.
Any suggestions? My keyboard at home is a circa-1995 101-key keyboard with an old-school 5-pin DIN plug. I do not want to get the 104-key variety with the infernal "Windows" keys, and I certainly don't one with the "Internet" keys or "Power" keys. There's nothing worse than playing a DOS game and accidentally hitting the Windows logo when you intended to hit Control or Alt and getting popped out of your game.
You mean like this???
<IMG SRC="http://images2.slashdot.org/Slashdot/pc.gif?/ article.pl,968716987" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
and
<IMG SRC="http://images.slashdot.org/pagecount.gif?/art icle.pl,968716987" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
Good observation. There's also Slashdot's tracking cookie, for extra measure. What's with the "anon=" cookie?
When I load the main page, or any page run by a Perl script I get a cookie like this: "anon=-1-pbfSkYi0dH". This has only been introduced in the last few months.
Can anyone who worked on the Slash source explain this? I persists even when I'm logged in. Is this a way to indentify people who post or browse anonymously by logging out? Or is it used by advertisers?
I thought Slashdot was against tracking users in this manner!
A comedy/rap band on MP3.com called "No Time" has had a bit of fun at Dr. Hawking's expense. Go to their page and listen to "No Time Presents Steven Hawking".
Sony is famous for the Beta fiasco. They didn't license it to other makers, so JVC came up with VHS. Just different enough to escape the patents, and licensed to any and all comers.
That's actually a common myth. Sony did license Betamax (in 1977), but only after they noticed all the licensees JVC and Panasonic were getting by licensing VHS (in 1976). Sony abandoned its long-standing policy of "no third-party licensing", but they didn't get as many licensees as JVC/Panasonic. There were other factors involved in Beta's downfall besides licensing.
In the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (not the movie), in chapter 9, while en route to the moon, Dr. Heywood Floyd reads from a "Newspad", thru which he can call up news from a variety of sources, perhaps a bit like CNN.com or ZDNet:
There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. [...] Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.
It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.
There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and manmade disasters threats of conflict, gloomy editorials -- these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
Wasn't The Matrix "released" on the web (unofficially, of course) before being shown in theatres? You know, the pirate version with no background music!
Perhaps, if we don't like a certain film and want to lock it out of an Oscar, we could get someone working at the studio to "release" it on the 'Net before the official release?
This isn't totally off-topic, but since we're talking about brand exposure for Apple...
Been to the movies lately? Have you ever noticed that when a movie is set on Earth, in the U.S., in the present day, whenever a character uses a computer, it's always an iMac, or some kind of Mac?
I saw Road Trip the other day. In both Josh and Tiffany's dorms, they have iMacs. The characters never use them, but the colourful neon green plastic looming in the background is unmistakeable. In Whatever It Takes, the characters who send email to each other use iMacs. Heck, in Independence Day, a Mac laptop is used to create and upload a "virus" to an alien computer.
It seems that, either by giving money to Hollywood Studios and asking them to include Macs, or supplying Macs to the studios as props, Apple is trying to make it so that when the general public thinks "computer", they think "iMac" or "Macintosh".
Of course, this isn't true of all movies -- remember the "hybrid" computers in Office Space?
This probably isn't as outlandish as it seems-- I'm sure Coke is responsible for characters in certain movies drinking Coke and Pepsi is responsible for other movies showing Pepsi vending machines and Pepsi trucks...
Some older Canadian dictionaries give color as the correct spelling with colour as an alternative. The Gage Canadian Dictionary (circa 1977) is like that. However, the newer ones list the -our spellings first. Back in the '50s, Canadian spelling was a lot more British than American in other ways; in high school, my mom used spellings like programme and encyclopædia. I prefer program, but I've got to love the "ae" ligature in encyclopædia.
I've also noticed, in more recent years, a lot more Americans spelling cancelled as canceled, as Noah Webster (inventor of American spelling) intended. Perhaps that's because, although American dictionaries have always given canceled as the correct spelling, so many Americans used cancelled and assumed it correct that few people bothered to check. The proliferation of spelling checkers on word processors is probably what has caused the change.
It's kind of silly the way dictionaries try to influence spelling and fail. I've seen British dictionaries that tell the Brits to use -ize in words like realize, organize, etc., but -ise (as in realise, etc.) is still extremely common in the U.K.
I've recently been alarmed by a lot of my fellow Canadians calling the last letter of the alphabet "zee" instead of "zed". Oh, well. At least we know that "zee" == "zed". I heard of one guy whose last name was "Fitzpatrick" and liked to order stuff by phone. Sometimes, when asked to spell his name, the operator on the other end would ask what a "zed" was. I guess I know where the other end of the line was...
Windows 98 -- TILT!! and other Pinball Fun...
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Is Pinball Dying?
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· Score: 2
Well, once, late at night, I was using Windows 98, and during a particularly long file copy process, I got the Blue Screen of Death, but it said, "TILT"! I think I was desperately in need of sleep at the time...
My favourite pinball machines are Doctor Who (being a big Who fan, myself) and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (yes, there was a Street Fighter IIpinball game). The Dr. Who pinball game is really hard to find, since I live in North America where One Is Supposed To Like Star Trek instead of Who. Hell, I can't even get Who on TV anymore.
The Street Fighter II: Champion Edition pinball was pretty cool. There was even a little bonus stage where you beat the crap out a car (just like in the video game) by hitting the ball against a small model car with a third flipper.
I like pinball games that have loads of ramps, holes, and traps and other cool stuff on the board and look really complicated. The more the better. The digital dot-matrix displays on the newer ones are pretty cool, too. The older pinball machines with seven-segment LED displays and fairly simple boards are quite bland, by comparison.
Now, I don't know how many of you had this... When I was about 6 or 7 years old, in the early '80s, I got a miniature pinball game for my birthday called "Arcade Action Pinball". It was a little pinball game, about 20cm across and 40cm long that took 5D-cell batteries. It had all sorts of cool sounds and action. The board design was pretty simple, just a trigger to launch the ball, some magnetic targets that throbbed when ball hit them, and some plastic channels and ramps and roll-over score digits. But I loved it. I still have it today. I'm not sure if it still works, as I haven't played it in a while. I have never allowed my parents to throw it out, even though they tried many times. It's pretty old (it says "copyright 1979" on the bottom), but it was a lot of fun to play...
I've never been a fan of video pinball games. They completely lack the feel of a real machine, regardless of how precise they get the physics.
One thing I don't like is that because pinball requires such a physical presence, it can't be emulated. I can grab an emulator and the ROMs for Trog, World Heroes 2 or any video game that's been out of the arcade for years, and play it at home on my PC, whenever I want, but with pinball, I'm at the mercy of the arcade. That's why (again) I'm pissed that I can't find Doctor Who pinball anywhere. It's a game I really want to play, but I can't because the arcades won't carry it, and since it can't be emulated, I'm S.O.L. for it.
I'm not in the habit of nudging or bumping the machine a lot, since everytime I do, it goes "TILT". I'm also afraid some uneducated and uncultured arcade owner will think I'm beating up the machine.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but does anyone know what the ball is made of? The way it rolls around so freely and lightly, it can't be steel. That would be too heavy. Someone once told me it was filled with mercury (and presumably made of...glass?). Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Thanks; I'll give that a try. Corel Linux has a rather "idiot-proof" installer, so this could be difficult, but I'll see what can be done.
That's interesting. You just have to tell Linux that you have two more IDE buses and what their addresses are.
I'd also better try to see if I can get a new BIOS image to flash for the HPT366 controller, because as it is now, I can't really control it enough to force it into Ultra DMA33 mode, short of connecting only ATA-33 drives to it.
Hey, that's great news! Finally, a Linux distribution that's easily available and is compatible with my computer's hardware. My computer has an ABit BE6 motherboard with four IDE buses: two ATA-66 and two ATA-33. The ATA-66 buses are controlled by an onboard HPT366 controller (by High Point Technologies). The ATA-33 buses work just like the two IDE buses in most "normal" PCs. I have five IDE peripherals, so I can't just use one set of buses. My main hard drive is ATA-66-compatible and is very fast, so it's a shame not to use that capability. Most versions of Linux can only "see" the ATA-33 buses.
I bought Corel Linux version 1.0 but couldn't install or use it except on the two ATA-33 buses on my motherboard. Unfortunately, all my non-hard-drive IDE peripherals (interal Zip drive, CD burner, etc.) are normally connected to the ATA-33 buses, so I had to mess around with the connections inside. It really sucks to have to have to mess around with the innards of my computer to switch between Windows and Linux. (I would have gotten ABit's Gentus Linux, but I don't have time to download a huge 650-meg CD image and anyway, I heard that the licence agreement with Gentus Linux violates the GPL (is this true?).)
So, has anyone tried installing Mandrake 7.1 on an ABit motherboard with peripherals on both the ATA-66 and ATA-33 buses? How did it go?
Er, hang on... The Anonymous Coward just said ATA-66 hard drives work, not necessarily the ABit motherboard... Well, still... Does it work with ABit?
I'm tired of using Windows98 all the time... I hope Mandrake will be my saviour...
I'm not if this is totally on-topic, but I'm going to talk about recent events in the MP3 world, so it just be at least partially on-topic...
I don't know about you, but I was truly disappointed when I heard MP3.com had been sued over their Beam-It service. Not because it was a case of mainstream recording industry trying again to suppress MP3, but because MP3.com had taken such a liberty with the record labels' property.
Until then, MP3.com had been a great example of legal uses of MP3 -- exposure for unsigned artists. They were putting a good face on the MP3 format. But then they got the silly idea of Beam-It and blew it.
Yes, they still expose unsigned artists' work, but what they've done has tarnished MP3's reputation for good. Now, even they are pirates, in a manner of speaking. It's hard for MP3s to be portrayed in a truly positive light anymore, at least in the mainstream media.
I have to think this is exactly what the recording industry wanted. With the main bastion of "good" MP3s now "bad", they can really step up their war on the format, especially in the mainstream news. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it's possible that an undercover agent of a major record label or the RIAA got a job at MP3.com and persuaded Michael Robertson to implement this service, just to get MP3.com into trouble.
Could we have more frequent but smaller shows? I'm having difficulty in getting them onto my PDA to listen to when I should be working.
Decode them, then re-encode them at a lower bitrate.
Anyway, as you can tell from the last few messages I've posted here, I should get back to work...
Re:The Other Pictures...
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Spring Break
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Thanks. So who the hell is Neal L. Cassady?? Look at the "Can you pass the acid test?" picture. It looks a bit like him on CowboyNeal.org (without the glasses). Maybe it's a character from a book (hence the quote) or a name he made up. Ah, who cares. I'll bet the Slashdot admins didn't mean for us to look at that stuff, anyway...
Anyway, maybe thisis where they record Geeks In Space. The Geek Compound is Rob's house, right? They said they record Geeks In Space in a spare bedroom at Rob's place. (Sometimes they record it in the basement, too, but it can't be too hard to move the essential equipment needed to record the show from one room to another.) Well, the Geek Compound has two storeys and dormer windows on its upper floor, and bedrooms are usually on the upper floor of a two-storey house. The "sound lab" has a dormer window, too (notice the sloping wall except where the window is). There are just three problems -- the Geek Compound's second-floor windows have a vertical bar in the middle bisecting the window pane, and that should show up as a shadow in the window of the "sound lab" picture; there are no microphones for the geeks to record their voices with (though they might be stowed somewhere); the electronic keyboard there is not a '303.
Anyway, I think looking at those pictures made me jealous or something. Nice car, CowboyNeal. That sound equipment looks pretty expensive, too. Didn't CowboyNeal say he was married in this week's show? Rob has a girlfriend... Damn, you lucky bastards have money and love.
I'd better stop now... I'm sounding like a bitter young man...
The Other Pictures...
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Spring Break
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· Score: 1
Thanks, Penguin_99. I got a little bored, so I started looking at the other stuff on the server.
You've got a cute dog, CowboyNeal. Is this where you record Geeks In Space? No, wait, it can't be; you do that at Rob's house.
So, CowboyNeal's last name is "Cassady" -- with an 'a'. And his first name is "Neal". So where does "Pater" (which is pronouced like "potter") come from? I looked at his website, but I couldn't get much insight there. It sounds more like a last or middle name than a nick.
<TIRED OFFTOPIC RANT> By the way, am I the only one who's gotten tired of that damn "caffeine sampler" ad from ThinkGeek? "Feed the need"? I think my body has developed either a resistance to or a dependancy on caffeine. Those damn "Enhydra" ads from Lutris are pretty stupid too. What the hell is that animal supposed to be? </TIRED OFFTOPIC RANT>
cassidy.blockstackers.com ??
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Spring Break
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· Score: 1
I listened and was quite sure he said cassidy.blockstackers.com/pics/navi/, but my DNS server could find no entry for cassidy.blockstackers.com.
Hey, Slashdot admins! Are you sure the domain for this has been set up correctly? If so, can you please post the correct domain name in this forum?
In the meantime, cassidy.blockstackers.com (or whatever it is) is probably on the same subnet as www.blockstackers.com, so try other IP addresses in www.blockstackers.com's range. Since the IP address for www.blockstackers.com is 206.170.14.74, try 206.170.14.75, 206.170.14.76, 206.170.14.72, 206.170.14.73, etc. I would try, myself, but I'm rather busy and www.blockstackers.com is not responding at the moment.
Not On the Front Page
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Spring Break
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· Score: 2
Can someone tell me why, once again, this did not show up on Slashdot's front page? Has TheSync asked the Slashdot admins not to publicize their show so TheSync won't get Slashdotted?
All the other sections' stories (Apache, YRO, etc.) show up on the front page.
Personally, I'd rather waste some of my screen space and see the movie the way it was filmed... Pan-and-scan tends to distract me too much. And apparently, many people agree, because it seems like most of the DVDs are coming out in widescreen.
Hmm... Well, you've got a point there. I think the reason videotapes were almost universally done in pan-'n-scan and DVDs are almost universally done in widescreen is because of:
resolution -- the letterboxed picture will look very sharp on DVD, but less detailed on videotape
TV size -- people today have much bigger TVs (except me, I guess) than they did when movies started coming out on videotape
Some of them are crappy and do the letterboxing on the print of the DVD, and it actually plays in 4:3 mode. That's just wrong.
Ecch. That's got to suck.
I was thinking about this once... If you play a letterboxed VHS movie on a widescreen TV, the VCR will output a 1.33:1 picture. The TV will add black bars on the left and right sides, and since the movie is letterboxed, black bars will also appear on the top and bottom. The result is a small widescreen picture inside a thick black frame. The same would be true of letterboxed (not widescreen/anamorphic) DVDs.
When HDTV becomes commonplace, though, pan-'n-scan will disappear pretty quickly. People will demand widescreen DVDs so they don't have the, um..."damn black bars"...on the sides!
There are a good number of DVDs that are only available as pan-'n-scan. I'm sure Hollywood is already taking some heat for this... Just wait until people try to watch them on their widescreen TVs...
As for "extreme widescreen" (2.35:1 or greater), I'm not sure what the consensus will be about letterboxing on a widescreen TV (1.78:1). Maybe it won't be as noticeable due to the already-prominent horizontal orientation of the screen. Or maybe it will?
Does anyone know if there are any formats wider than 2.35:1 in common use? I know Ben-Hur was filmed with 2.66:1. I thought I heard 3:1 mentioned once. Anything else?
I think if I were a director, I would just use whatever aspect ratio I wanted and shoot only once. And when it came time to make a pan-'n-scan version of the movie, I wouldn't hesitate to zoom out and show the whole screen when necessary (causing momentary letterboxing) to avoid the "talking noses" problem.
Another idea is to use "partial letterboxing" -- zoom in just enough that you crop very little on the sides, and cause thin black bars at the top and bottom. Most viewers with a preference for pan-'n-scan wouldn't mind, and some wouldn't even notice due to the thin black bars being covered up by their TV's overscan!
There's also soft matte, but, boom microphone appearances notwithstanding, it must be just an annoyance to directors to have to work with it, and it really isn't any better than letterboxing-- you are just given the illusion of not seeing a letterboxed picture.
If it isn't letterboxed, you lose 43% of the picture...
Even with HDTV, some classics like Chinatown (2.35) and Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia (both 2.66 or so) will still be letterboxed because they were shot for the 70 mm and other wider ratio formats.
True. But try watching a 2.35-aspect ratio movie on a normal (1.33) TV. Die Hard With a Vengeance and X-Files: Fight the Future are two such films. The letterboxing is terrible there. Movies with a 1.85 aspect ratio exhibit minor letterboxing and are tolerable.
You and other widescreen advocates have a very good point with respect to losing part of the picture due to "reformatting." I will definitely admit that it would be really stupid to issue DVDs in pan-'n-scan only. You'd get a full frame now, but in the future, your widescreen TV will show black bars on the sides, and you'd be pissed off at the movie studios because there'd be no excuse for losing part of the picture.
It's nice when the DVD has both pan-'n-scan and widescreen versions on the same disc. But it's kind of silly to use up so much storage space with two copies of the same movie. This makes me wonder why auto pan-'n-scan isn't implemented on very many DVDs. (After you click the link, scroll down a bit to read about auto pan-'n-scan.) Basically, auto-pan-'n-scan makes the player, itself, display part of the widescreen frame fullscreen on a 1.33 disc. The disc contains only the widescreen version, but with instructions to the player that say, "If the user wants pan-'n-scan, focus on this part of the frame...then focus on this other part of the frame..., etc." Only one copy of the movie, and you can have it either way. Peace at last, with efficient use of disc space. The problem is that the "window" it focuses with can only slide left and right. It cannot zoom in or out or move up or down. There's more information about this in the DVD FAQ. The best solution, then, is to have two versions of the movie on the same disc.
Properly made DVD's (anamorphic letterboxed) are future-proofed for HDTV, which *will* become ubiquitous (thank you, FCC).
Not every country has mandated the implementation of HDTV.
It's kind of silly that they say "DVDs are for widescreen TVs" yet we are being convinced to buy them even though we only have normal, nonwidescreen TVs. It's like a game company releases a 3D shooting game like Quake that has extremely detailed graphics -- so detailed that the game plays really choppily and slowly on most computers. It is not possible to turn down the detail level. We are told, "You'll love this game -- it's the best ever." When asked about the slowness, we are told, "It's designed for really high-end 2 GHz PCs with SuperUltraGeForce512 3D graphics accelerators." We say, "But those won't be released to the public for six months!" You can play the game, yes, but until technology catches up with it...
Perhaps that was a bad analogy, but I hope you see my point. I went down to my local TV/stereo store the other day, and the cheapest widescreen TV was $5000.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. When we sing in English, what accent do we mimmick? Usually it is the American accent.
Try listening to the Pet Shop Boys. They're British, and they sound British! More British singers should sing like them! British singers who try to imitate the American accent are only doing so to make themselves sell better in the U.S., which, frankly, is quite sad.
Also, when I was in school, I was taught not to sing the rhotic R's (like at the end of words like "car", "fur", "buster", etc.). Which country's accent is known to eliminate most rhotic R's? Not the U.S.'s.
And since I subject it to massive damage playing MAME arcade games on it, it's all the more amazing that it's survived as long and as well as it has.
Severe damage? At my workplace, some of my co-workers enjoyed playing networked track and field games under MAME. They would beat the crap out of their keyboards, bashing away on two or three keys, trying to get their character to run faster...
I use KeyTronic keyboards both at home and at work. I can see all sorts of crap that's gotten between the keys, but thankfully they keep on working. I love the feel of the keys. I'm sure I'm the dissenting opinion here, but I hate the super-clicky PS/2-style boards. I also enjoy having a super-sized Enter key and having the backslash at the upper right corner to the left of BackSpace.
To anyone else who has KeyTronic (turn the keyboard upside-down and look at the label on the bottom), how does open one of these to clean it? There are no screws on the keyboard anywhere. I can blast a compressed-air can between the keys, but that must miss a lot.
Any suggestions? My keyboard at home is a circa-1995 101-key keyboard with an old-school 5-pin DIN plug. I do not want to get the 104-key variety with the infernal "Windows" keys, and I certainly don't one with the "Internet" keys or "Power" keys. There's nothing worse than playing a DOS game and accidentally hitting the Windows logo when you intended to hit Control or Alt and getting popped out of your game.
You mean like this???/ article.pl,968716987" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>t icle.pl,968716987" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
<IMG SRC="http://images2.slashdot.org/Slashdot/pc.gif?
and
<IMG SRC="http://images.slashdot.org/pagecount.gif?/ar
Good observation. There's also Slashdot's tracking cookie, for extra measure. What's with the "anon=" cookie?
When I load the main page, or any page run by a Perl script I get a cookie like this: "anon=-1-pbfSkYi0dH". This has only been introduced in the last few months.
Can anyone who worked on the Slash source explain this? I persists even when I'm logged in. Is this a way to indentify people who post or browse anonymously by logging out? Or is it used by advertisers?
I thought Slashdot was against tracking users in this manner!
A comedy/rap band on MP3.com called "No Time" has had a bit of fun at Dr. Hawking's expense. Go to their page and listen to "No Time Presents Steven Hawking".
As far as I know, Greenland and "mainland" North America are on the same tectonic plate. They move together.
Sony is famous for the Beta fiasco. They didn't license it to other makers, so JVC came up with VHS. Just different enough to escape the patents, and licensed to any and all comers.
That's actually a common myth. Sony did license Betamax (in 1977), but only after they noticed all the licensees JVC and Panasonic were getting by licensing VHS (in 1976). Sony abandoned its long-standing policy of "no third-party licensing", but they didn't get as many licensees as JVC/Panasonic. There were other factors involved in Beta's downfall besides licensing.
In the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (not the movie), in chapter 9, while en route to the moon, Dr. Heywood Floyd reads from a "Newspad", thru which he can call up news from a variety of sources, perhaps a bit like CNN.com or ZDNet:
There was plenty to occupy his time, even if he did nothing but sit and read. When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. [...] Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.
It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.
There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and manmade disasters threats of conflict, gloomy editorials -- these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
P.S. I don't hate The Matrix... I saw it and loved it! I wasn't dissing it! I was trying to make a joke! Damn it, don't let the moderators slay me!
Hope no one beats me to this...
Wasn't The Matrix "released" on the web (unofficially, of course) before being shown in theatres? You know, the pirate version with no background music!
Perhaps, if we don't like a certain film and want to lock it out of an Oscar, we could get someone working at the studio to "release" it on the 'Net before the official release?
Never mind... I'm trying to be funny...
This isn't totally off-topic, but since we're talking about brand exposure for Apple...
Been to the movies lately? Have you ever noticed that when a movie is set on Earth, in the U.S., in the present day, whenever a character uses a computer, it's always an iMac, or some kind of Mac?
I saw Road Trip the other day. In both Josh and Tiffany's dorms, they have iMacs. The characters never use them, but the colourful neon green plastic looming in the background is unmistakeable. In Whatever It Takes, the characters who send email to each other use iMacs. Heck, in Independence Day, a Mac laptop is used to create and upload a "virus" to an alien computer.
It seems that, either by giving money to Hollywood Studios and asking them to include Macs, or supplying Macs to the studios as props, Apple is trying to make it so that when the general public thinks "computer", they think "iMac" or "Macintosh".
Of course, this isn't true of all movies -- remember the "hybrid" computers in Office Space?
This probably isn't as outlandish as it seems-- I'm sure Coke is responsible for characters in certain movies drinking Coke and Pepsi is responsible for other movies showing Pepsi vending machines and Pepsi trucks...
Has anyone else noticed this?
Some older Canadian dictionaries give color as the correct spelling with colour as an alternative. The Gage Canadian Dictionary (circa 1977) is like that. However, the newer ones list the -our spellings first. Back in the '50s, Canadian spelling was a lot more British than American in other ways; in high school, my mom used spellings like programme and encyclopædia. I prefer program, but I've got to love the "ae" ligature in encyclopædia.
I've also noticed, in more recent years, a lot more Americans spelling cancelled as canceled, as Noah Webster (inventor of American spelling) intended. Perhaps that's because, although American dictionaries have always given canceled as the correct spelling, so many Americans used cancelled and assumed it correct that few people bothered to check. The proliferation of spelling checkers on word processors is probably what has caused the change.
It's kind of silly the way dictionaries try to influence spelling and fail. I've seen British dictionaries that tell the Brits to use -ize in words like realize, organize, etc., but -ise (as in realise, etc.) is still extremely common in the U.K.
I've recently been alarmed by a lot of my fellow Canadians calling the last letter of the alphabet "zee" instead of "zed". Oh, well. At least we know that "zee" == "zed". I heard of one guy whose last name was "Fitzpatrick" and liked to order stuff by phone. Sometimes, when asked to spell his name, the operator on the other end would ask what a "zed" was. I guess I know where the other end of the line was...
Well, once, late at night, I was using Windows 98, and during a particularly long file copy process, I got the Blue Screen of Death, but it said, "TILT"! I think I was desperately in need of sleep at the time...
My favourite pinball machines are Doctor Who (being a big Who fan, myself) and Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (yes, there was a Street Fighter II pinball game). The Dr. Who pinball game is really hard to find, since I live in North America where One Is Supposed To Like Star Trek instead of Who. Hell, I can't even get Who on TV anymore.
The Street Fighter II: Champion Edition pinball was pretty cool. There was even a little bonus stage where you beat the crap out a car (just like in the video game) by hitting the ball against a small model car with a third flipper.
I like pinball games that have loads of ramps, holes, and traps and other cool stuff on the board and look really complicated. The more the better. The digital dot-matrix displays on the newer ones are pretty cool, too. The older pinball machines with seven-segment LED displays and fairly simple boards are quite bland, by comparison.
Now, I don't know how many of you had this... When I was about 6 or 7 years old, in the early '80s, I got a miniature pinball game for my birthday called "Arcade Action Pinball". It was a little pinball game, about 20cm across and 40cm long that took 5D-cell batteries. It had all sorts of cool sounds and action. The board design was pretty simple, just a trigger to launch the ball, some magnetic targets that throbbed when ball hit them, and some plastic channels and ramps and roll-over score digits. But I loved it. I still have it today. I'm not sure if it still works, as I haven't played it in a while. I have never allowed my parents to throw it out, even though they tried many times. It's pretty old (it says "copyright 1979" on the bottom), but it was a lot of fun to play...
I've never been a fan of video pinball games. They completely lack the feel of a real machine, regardless of how precise they get the physics.
One thing I don't like is that because pinball requires such a physical presence, it can't be emulated. I can grab an emulator and the ROMs for Trog, World Heroes 2 or any video game that's been out of the arcade for years, and play it at home on my PC, whenever I want, but with pinball, I'm at the mercy of the arcade. That's why (again) I'm pissed that I can't find Doctor Who pinball anywhere. It's a game I really want to play, but I can't because the arcades won't carry it, and since it can't be emulated, I'm S.O.L. for it.
I'm not in the habit of nudging or bumping the machine a lot, since everytime I do, it goes "TILT". I'm also afraid some uneducated and uncultured arcade owner will think I'm beating up the machine.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but does anyone know what the ball is made of? The way it rolls around so freely and lightly, it can't be steel. That would be too heavy. Someone once told me it was filled with mercury (and presumably made of...glass?). Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Thanks; I'll give that a try. Corel Linux has a rather "idiot-proof" installer, so this could be difficult, but I'll see what can be done.
That's interesting. You just have to tell Linux that you have two more IDE buses and what their addresses are.
I'd also better try to see if I can get a new BIOS image to flash for the HPT366 controller, because as it is now, I can't really control it enough to force it into Ultra DMA33 mode, short of connecting only ATA-33 drives to it.
ATA66 hard drives working correctly.
Hey, that's great news! Finally, a Linux distribution that's easily available and is compatible with my computer's hardware. My computer has an ABit BE6 motherboard with four IDE buses: two ATA-66 and two ATA-33. The ATA-66 buses are controlled by an onboard HPT366 controller (by High Point Technologies). The ATA-33 buses work just like the two IDE buses in most "normal" PCs. I have five IDE peripherals, so I can't just use one set of buses. My main hard drive is ATA-66-compatible and is very fast, so it's a shame not to use that capability. Most versions of Linux can only "see" the ATA-33 buses.
I bought Corel Linux version 1.0 but couldn't install or use it except on the two ATA-33 buses on my motherboard. Unfortunately, all my non-hard-drive IDE peripherals (interal Zip drive, CD burner, etc.) are normally connected to the ATA-33 buses, so I had to mess around with the connections inside. It really sucks to have to have to mess around with the innards of my computer to switch between Windows and Linux. (I would have gotten ABit's Gentus Linux, but I don't have time to download a huge 650-meg CD image and anyway, I heard that the licence agreement with Gentus Linux violates the GPL (is this true?).)
So, has anyone tried installing Mandrake 7.1 on an ABit motherboard with peripherals on both the ATA-66 and ATA-33 buses? How did it go?
Er, hang on... The Anonymous Coward just said ATA-66 hard drives work, not necessarily the ABit motherboard... Well, still... Does it work with ABit?
I'm tired of using Windows98 all the time... I hope Mandrake will be my saviour...
I'm not if this is totally on-topic, but I'm going to talk about recent events in the MP3 world, so it just be at least partially on-topic...
I don't know about you, but I was truly disappointed when I heard MP3.com had been sued over their Beam-It service. Not because it was a case of mainstream recording industry trying again to suppress MP3, but because MP3.com had taken such a liberty with the record labels' property.
Until then, MP3.com had been a great example of legal uses of MP3 -- exposure for unsigned artists. They were putting a good face on the MP3 format. But then they got the silly idea of Beam-It and blew it.
Yes, they still expose unsigned artists' work, but what they've done has tarnished MP3's reputation for good. Now, even they are pirates, in a manner of speaking. It's hard for MP3s to be portrayed in a truly positive light anymore, at least in the mainstream media.
I have to think this is exactly what the recording industry wanted. With the main bastion of "good" MP3s now "bad", they can really step up their war on the format, especially in the mainstream news. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it's possible that an undercover agent of a major record label or the RIAA got a job at MP3.com and persuaded Michael Robertson to implement this service, just to get MP3.com into trouble.
Could we have more frequent but smaller shows? I'm having difficulty in getting them onto my PDA to listen to when I should be working.
Decode them, then re-encode them at a lower bitrate.
Anyway, as you can tell from the last few messages I've posted here, I should get back to work...
Thanks. So who the hell is Neal L. Cassady?? Look at the "Can you pass the acid test?" picture. It looks a bit like him on CowboyNeal.org (without the glasses). Maybe it's a character from a book (hence the quote) or a name he made up. Ah, who cares. I'll bet the Slashdot admins didn't mean for us to look at that stuff, anyway...
Anyway, maybe this is where they record Geeks In Space. The Geek Compound is Rob's house, right? They said they record Geeks In Space in a spare bedroom at Rob's place. (Sometimes they record it in the basement, too, but it can't be too hard to move the essential equipment needed to record the show from one room to another.) Well, the Geek Compound has two storeys and dormer windows on its upper floor, and bedrooms are usually on the upper floor of a two-storey house. The "sound lab" has a dormer window, too (notice the sloping wall except where the window is). There are just three problems -- the Geek Compound's second-floor windows have a vertical bar in the middle bisecting the window pane, and that should show up as a shadow in the window of the "sound lab" picture; there are no microphones for the geeks to record their voices with (though they might be stowed somewhere); the electronic keyboard there is not a '303.
Anyway, I think looking at those pictures made me jealous or something. Nice car, CowboyNeal. That sound equipment looks pretty expensive, too. Didn't CowboyNeal say he was married in this week's show? Rob has a girlfriend... Damn, you lucky bastards have money and love.
I'd better stop now... I'm sounding like a bitter young man...
Thanks, Penguin_99. I got a little bored, so I started looking at the other stuff on the server.
You've got a cute dog, CowboyNeal. Is this where you record Geeks In Space? No, wait, it can't be; you do that at Rob's house.
So, CowboyNeal's last name is "Cassady" -- with an 'a'. And his first name is "Neal". So where does "Pater" (which is pronouced like "potter") come from? I looked at his website, but I couldn't get much insight there. It sounds more like a last or middle name than a nick.
<TIRED OFFTOPIC RANT>
By the way, am I the only one who's gotten tired of that damn "caffeine sampler" ad from ThinkGeek? "Feed the need"? I think my body has developed either a resistance to or a dependancy on caffeine. Those damn "Enhydra" ads from Lutris are pretty stupid too. What the hell is that animal supposed to be?
</TIRED OFFTOPIC RANT>
I listened and was quite sure he said cassidy.blockstackers.com/pics/navi/, but my DNS server could find no entry for cassidy.blockstackers.com.
Hey, Slashdot admins! Are you sure the domain for this has been set up correctly? If so, can you please post the correct domain name in this forum?
In the meantime, cassidy.blockstackers.com (or whatever it is) is probably on the same subnet as www.blockstackers.com, so try other IP addresses in www.blockstackers.com's range. Since the IP address for www.blockstackers.com is 206.170.14.74, try 206.170.14.75, 206.170.14.76, 206.170.14.72, 206.170.14.73, etc. I would try, myself, but I'm rather busy and www.blockstackers.com is not responding at the moment.
Can someone tell me why, once again, this did not show up on Slashdot's front page? Has TheSync asked the Slashdot admins not to publicize their show so TheSync won't get Slashdotted?
All the other sections' stories (Apache, YRO, etc.) show up on the front page.
Personally, I'd rather waste some of my screen space and see the movie the way it was filmed... Pan-and-scan tends to distract me too much. And apparently, many people agree, because it seems like most of the DVDs are coming out in widescreen.
Hmm... Well, you've got a point there. I think the reason videotapes were almost universally done in pan-'n-scan and DVDs are almost universally done in widescreen is because of:
Some of them are crappy and do the letterboxing on the print of the DVD, and it actually plays in 4:3 mode. That's just wrong.
Ecch. That's got to suck.
I was thinking about this once... If you play a letterboxed VHS movie on a widescreen TV, the VCR will output a 1.33:1 picture. The TV will add black bars on the left and right sides, and since the movie is letterboxed, black bars will also appear on the top and bottom. The result is a small widescreen picture inside a thick black frame. The same would be true of letterboxed (not widescreen/anamorphic) DVDs.
When HDTV becomes commonplace, though, pan-'n-scan will disappear pretty quickly. People will demand widescreen DVDs so they don't have the, um..."damn black bars"...on the sides!
There are a good number of DVDs that are only available as pan-'n-scan. I'm sure Hollywood is already taking some heat for this... Just wait until people try to watch them on their widescreen TVs...
As for "extreme widescreen" (2.35:1 or greater), I'm not sure what the consensus will be about letterboxing on a widescreen TV (1.78:1). Maybe it won't be as noticeable due to the already-prominent horizontal orientation of the screen. Or maybe it will?
Does anyone know if there are any formats wider than 2.35:1 in common use? I know Ben-Hur was filmed with 2.66:1. I thought I heard 3:1 mentioned once. Anything else?
I think if I were a director, I would just use whatever aspect ratio I wanted and shoot only once. And when it came time to make a pan-'n-scan version of the movie, I wouldn't hesitate to zoom out and show the whole screen when necessary (causing momentary letterboxing) to avoid the "talking noses" problem.
Another idea is to use "partial letterboxing" -- zoom in just enough that you crop very little on the sides, and cause thin black bars at the top and bottom. Most viewers with a preference for pan-'n-scan wouldn't mind, and some wouldn't even notice due to the thin black bars being covered up by their TV's overscan!
There's also soft matte, but, boom microphone appearances notwithstanding, it must be just an annoyance to directors to have to work with it, and it really isn't any better than letterboxing-- you are just given the illusion of not seeing a letterboxed picture.
I sure hope you're not referring to using FlikFX, which I hope to God really is a joke...
If it isn't letterboxed, you lose 43% of the picture...
Even with HDTV, some classics like Chinatown (2.35) and Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia (both 2.66 or so) will still be letterboxed because they were shot for the 70 mm and other wider ratio formats.
True. But try watching a 2.35-aspect ratio movie on a normal (1.33) TV. Die Hard With a Vengeance and X-Files: Fight the Future are two such films. The letterboxing is terrible there. Movies with a 1.85 aspect ratio exhibit minor letterboxing and are tolerable.
You and other widescreen advocates have a very good point with respect to losing part of the picture due to "reformatting." I will definitely admit that it would be really stupid to issue DVDs in pan-'n-scan only. You'd get a full frame now, but in the future, your widescreen TV will show black bars on the sides, and you'd be pissed off at the movie studios because there'd be no excuse for losing part of the picture.
It's nice when the DVD has both pan-'n-scan and widescreen versions on the same disc. But it's kind of silly to use up so much storage space with two copies of the same movie. This makes me wonder why auto pan-'n-scan isn't implemented on very many DVDs. (After you click the link, scroll down a bit to read about auto pan-'n-scan.) Basically, auto-pan-'n-scan makes the player, itself, display part of the widescreen frame fullscreen on a 1.33 disc. The disc contains only the widescreen version, but with instructions to the player that say, "If the user wants pan-'n-scan, focus on this part of the frame...then focus on this other part of the frame..., etc." Only one copy of the movie, and you can have it either way. Peace at last, with efficient use of disc space. The problem is that the "window" it focuses with can only slide left and right. It cannot zoom in or out or move up or down. There's more information about this in the DVD FAQ. The best solution, then, is to have two versions of the movie on the same disc.
Properly made DVD's (anamorphic letterboxed) are future-proofed for HDTV, which *will* become ubiquitous (thank you, FCC).
Not every country has mandated the implementation of HDTV.
It's kind of silly that they say "DVDs are for widescreen TVs" yet we are being convinced to buy them even though we only have normal, nonwidescreen TVs. It's like a game company releases a 3D shooting game like Quake that has extremely detailed graphics -- so detailed that the game plays really choppily and slowly on most computers. It is not possible to turn down the detail level. We are told, "You'll love this game -- it's the best ever." When asked about the slowness, we are told, "It's designed for really high-end 2 GHz PCs with SuperUltraGeForce512 3D graphics accelerators." We say, "But those won't be released to the public for six months!" You can play the game, yes, but until technology catches up with it...
Perhaps that was a bad analogy, but I hope you see my point. I went down to my local TV/stereo store the other day, and the cheapest widescreen TV was $5000.