ASnd realizing the Individual Computers site I linked to makes Catweasel sound like an Amiga product, the MK4 is a standard PCI card with Windows drivers available. I don't see that one there, but I own one so it must exist. The MK3 I believe also had a PCI standard interface.
What about the Catweasel product, which allows a PC disk drive to read numerous formats? All they need is a 5.25" drive hardware and this PCI card, and they should be good for getting the stuff into a modern PC. Or is it the 1581 3.5" disks? Use a standard PC 3.5" floppy drive with this card.
1) HD is one of the big things that the PS3 is being billed for. Sony has been pimping that heavily. If it's such a fundamental part of the console, maybe you include the hookups out of box?
Or maybe one already came with the TV?
I've got a huge pile of IDE cables. You get them with the motherboard, then you get them with the hard drive, and then you get them with the CDROM drive. I get no less than three cables when I only need one. What a waste...
My dad's printer did not come with the required USB cable, though the USB connectivity feature was made well known on the packaging. Sucked that we had to go back to the store again to get one, but this seems to be popular.
Considering how many people have HDMI inputs on their displays compared to how many people have composit inputs, is this really that suprising? I've begun workign toward a front projector setup for my home, and I've found HDMI cables are not dirt-cheap. While a lot of people with composite inputs probably won't get a PS3 until prices drop, a lot, considering how few overall PS3 buyers have HDMI inputs I'm not suprised the cable is seperate to try and save a few dollars on the retail price of the console. How is this causing people such a bad day?
P.S. When I order my projector, will it include the required 15' HDMI cable? Or will I have to buy that seperate?
I can't see paying more than a couple hundred $$ for a standalone DVD player these days. Judging from my recent visit to the super electronics store nearby, I can even get an upconverting playback DVD all-format recorder for that. How much would I pay for the ATI/Nvidia card? $400 or more? And then the computer to plug it into? While there may be some quality difference, I can't imagine that price/performance ratio makes sense beyond $200 or so for a DVD player in any form, so I can't imagine going the PC route to watch movies on my TV from the argument of picture quality.
I spent s good bit more than $200 on my MythTV box, but that gets me far more capabilities than a DVD player offers.
It's my freakin computer, you better let me silence it if I wish. Maybe I don't want to irritate people in a cafe, lobby, waiting room, whatever with noises coming from my laptop. Maybe I just don't want an "I'm ready to be used" noise. Maybe I don't care if you think it's convenient. Maybe I dont care if you think it's cool or pretty sounding. Maybe I just want the stupid thing to be quiet.
And Xbox or Playstation are not good excuses, those are for a different market. There's also a number of people out there using mod chips to regain control of those things if they don't like some decisions from the manufacturer. Just because my Xbox makes a startup noise doesn't mean that I want it to. And just because some Engineer at Microsoft or Sony decided their toy for kids should make a startup noise does not mean I want to hear it on my laptop, tower, or anything at the office in the morning.
Some parents however are 'enthusiastic laptop proponents', one saying 'the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'"
Powerpoint is a critical professional skill? I've never used it. I've never used OpenOffice's Powerpoint equivalent. Other than marketing guys, how many proffessionals actually do that kind of thing? I'm a chip designer doing VLSI layout, verilog RTL, design flow maintenence using various scripting languages and I have no use for presentation tools.
Does this parent hope their 12-year-old will grow up to be a marketing guy?
What does British law have to do wiht the new York Times? Isn't NYT outside of British jurisdiction? Even if it's regarding people actually in Britain readng that story, they aren't going to be called for jury duty or anything, I just don't get what pplies there...
Even if the subject matter sought to be patented is not exactly shown by the prior art, and involves one or more differences over the most nearly similar thing already known, a patent may still be refused if the differences would be obvious. The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. For example, the substitution of one color for another, or changes in size, are ordinarily not patentable.
This says that if something is obvious, the patent can be rejected even if there is no real prior art or previous "suggestion" or anything. Does a judge have the right to change the USPTOs rules on it's behalf?
Most of the recent Intel chips provide x86-64 support just like most of the recent AMD chips.
I hadn't realized that. I knew some Xeon chips had 64bit, but couldn't find anything about the Core/Duo, but I do see the Core2/Duo product brief does list it. Thanks for the clue.:)
I've read about other methods, such as harvesting a person's own stem cells from his or her bone marrow. Some medication is able to encourage the marrow to produce and release stem cells that can be collected from blood samples or something like that. (it's been long enough to forget some details) Why dont' we get a few of them that way for research?
And I still think it's an awful waste to toss everything into a biohazard disposal or incinerator or something when someone has an abortion. I'd rather see some benefit come from that kind of thing, rather than take that life and simply throw it in the trash. How is that better than learnign new ways to save lives?
What the new AMD led ATI can do to help show leadership is to release the information (or even drivers) needed for Linux to take full advantage of their card capabilities.
ATI was still better than Nvidia for allowing others to write drivers. They still require NDAs and did not allow open-sourcing of the code, but at least that much was possible. With Nvidia, they don't even talk to anyone requesting things under NDA that would result in binary-only drivers. For Linux, Nvidia's own binary-only proprietary drivers seem to work better and are easier to get running that ATI's equivalent, but I still prefer ATI simply because they are at least willing to do business with 3rd parties.
How could I have missed it? I wasn't intentionally avoiding anything, I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Do I just not visit the right sites to have witnessed the internet Snakes hype? Where was it?
And why would it make any difference? An hour and a half of lots of snakes, on an airplane, scaring people. I just can't wrap my head around how that could possibly be worth an hour and a half of my time, hype or not.
Everyone knows that's a crap law passed by the coal mining lobbyists to protect their business models and piles of cash. Much like the water powered car, this would already exist if it wasn't for the greedy politicians and the energy industry that owns them.:p
To what extent are the service providers expected to know what the NSA is and is not allowed to do? If the NSA comes in and says you must do something, how much right do you have in that situation to say "no", or "let our lawyers approve this first"? With the Patriot Act in place and the fact that no one has ever really read what it actually says, how is anyone expected to stand up and tell the NSA to bugger off, that's unconstitutional? But these companies are not even the victims I'm concerned about.
What about those victims who were wrongly spied on? Those are the ones I'm afraid will end up paying for all this. If the service providers are sued for damages, where does that money come from? Either increased fees to consumers (who are the real victims), or the companies sue the government for some sort of wrongful representation of what the legality of the program was and NSA/Bush's rights to require them to comply and all that, and the government uses tax money to pay off their own legal losses, again going back to the consumers/victims.
Legally, we may have a win. Financially, we're all screwed, but I guess that's not really any different than any other day. Hopefully it at least gives companies reason to have a backbone and look into legal issues like that instead of just assuming NSA's requests are legit and immediately caving into that kind of intimidation, and possibly avoid a recurrence. But I won' tbe suprised if government in the future again will fool companies into unknowingly (in at least some cases) doing illegal things, or intimidating them into doing it anyway.
Every now and then at work, the chip layout tool we use will completely stop responding to keypresses and sometimes mouse commands. The first few times was weird and annoying as heck, because I didn't have a clue how to get it back working again. Youcould quit and restart, but the new session would be hosed from the beginning. Eventually we realized that the caps lock was lit up when the tool went into this state, and the problem as cured by turning off the caps lock. I think it's rediculously stupid for the EDA vendor to allow such a thing to happen when caps lock is on, but not much I can do about it and the boss wouldn't likely let me break my keyboard.
I'd love to get rid of it on my work keyboard, even if we do know what to look for now. I never use caps lock as intended, I'm pretty good at holding down a regular shift key with my pinky finger while I type along...
Cancel your land line and get a cell phone (and remember to put a text-messaging block on it). You won't receive ANY telemarketing calls.
I wouldn't receive ANY phone calls at home. Period. I get a great signal at work, but at home the signal is very poor and calls often disconnect in the middle of conversations, which mostly consist of "are you still there?"... And I went with this service because it's supposed to have the best coverage anywhere, and other roommates have not had any signal whatsoever at home with other services. Cell phones suck, and it's more expensive than my landline. ($40/mo for cell, $29/mo or less for landline including long-distance charges, and now I'm stuck paying for both)
Are computers really so necessary for survival that we need to give them to those who have never seen them before? My parents didn;t have computers in school. They didn't exist when my grandparents were in school. Cavemen didn't have them. And yet here we all are.
I'd hope that some degree of education is still possible without having computers involved. It'd suck for the rest of us if only the Amish have the skills to survive after WW3 or something breaks all our precious computers.
Cow Power costs only 4 cents/kWh more than market price
Uhm, even after this month's amazing 72% electricity increase where I live (Thank you deregulation, "competition" really is better for me!), my price per kWh is 11.03cents. This 4 cent increase is 36% increase. My current bill is $153.78, and a 36% increase over that would have me paying $209.14. That's a little mroe than your $5 to $6/month increase. There's no natural gas available on my street, so the whole house is electric, including furnace, basement electric baseboard heating, water heater, clothes dryer, etc. And this is after I just spent $5700 on a new Air Conditioning system in an attempt to reduce my bill.
Last year this month I paid about $220 in electric with the old 8-SEER system, my new bill is my first month with the new 16-Seer system, with the same average outside temperature as this month last year. A 36% increase on the old system wouldhave had me paying $299.20 then, and would be $514.62 today considering our new 72% rate increase that took effect on my current billing statement. I'd be paying about $378.74 now if I'd kept the old AC system. (Yes, I think that $5700 will be well worth it in a couple years)
I don't think that the word "only" works well on a 36% rate hike compared to the new market price I'm now paying. You might have gas for everything other than your computer and TV, but there's a lot of people out there that would see huge monthly billing increases on this additional 4cents/kWh.
I work for a small computer sales/service retailer, and over the past 2-3 years I've experienced a sharp increase in the number of Dell computers coming in for service, relative to the number of other brands.
Is that truely representative though? Maybe there's just that many more people buying Dells than anything else, that given the same percentage of owners/brand bringing things in that this % of Dell owners might just happen to come out to a higher number?
I bought an Asus laptop. I got an HP laptop for my sister. But everyone else I know has Dells for either laptop or desktop. 10% of myself means I probably won't bring in my Asus or my sister's HP at all. 10% of the people I know that have Dells would probably get you at least 1 visit from somebody. Going really crazy, even if you got 100% of each brand owner coming in, of the people that I know, you'd get one Asus, one HP, and 9 or so Dells.
It is mostly for creative/artistic reasons and preserving the integrity of the film as the creators intended it.
If the movie distributors don't want sanitized copies out there because it's something other than the creators intended it to be, then how do they get "edited for TV" things approved? Different channels/networks have different censorship guidelines. Different things will be removed or changed, and for different reasons. Some things are changed because of "bad words" or scenes which are too graphic either sexually or violently, some things are flat out removed for the same reason or just to make more time for advertizements and not because of any real complaint about the scene itself.
Do all permutations of these TV edits have to get approved? Or does a network get the rights to edit something as they wish to be compatible with their particular guidelines when they buy the rights to broadcast the movie?
If someone is giving approval, who is it? The director? The editor? The writer(s) of the screenplay? The author of the book(s) a screenplay is based on? Heck, the made-for-TV incarnation of EarthSea doesn't appear to come out as the creator of EarthSea intended at all. Do you have to get permission from a group of all these people who were involved with creating the final movie?
How do test audiences fit in? They're effectively telling the directors/producers to change certain things. "Waa, that ending was sad, make it a happy ending instead so I feel better". Things like that. Sometimes studio execs make demands that things be changed. Check out Army of Darkness's theatrical cut vs the director's cut, the endings are seriously different and the original (aka directors cut) ending is said to have been ordred changed by the studio.
I'd like to know exactly who's feelings are getting hurt if someone makes a remix of their movie, and why it matters to them if they've already been paid. I'd also like to know why their feelings are enough intact to allow TV broaadcasters to edit things as they see fit but their hurt feelings make life so bad they have to completely forbid the DVD equivalent of TV broadcast edits.
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That just happens to be my birthday. Thank you SciFi!
ASnd realizing the Individual Computers site I linked to makes Catweasel sound like an Amiga product, the MK4 is a standard PCI card with Windows drivers available. I don't see that one there, but I own one so it must exist. The MK3 I believe also had a PCI standard interface.
What about the Catweasel product, which allows a PC disk drive to read numerous formats? All they need is a 5.25" drive hardware and this PCI card, and they should be good for getting the stuff into a modern PC. Or is it the 1581 3.5" disks? Use a standard PC 3.5" floppy drive with this card.
http://ami.ga/indexe.htm
Remember the dual HDMI output touted and now dropped?
No, but I haven't really been paying much attention.
What would two HDMI outputs even be useful for? Connect one to your TV or projector, and connect the second one to???
1) HD is one of the big things that the PS3 is being billed for. Sony has been pimping that heavily. If it's such a fundamental part of the console, maybe you include the hookups out of box?
Or maybe one already came with the TV?
I've got a huge pile of IDE cables. You get them with the motherboard, then you get them with the hard drive, and then you get them with the CDROM drive. I get no less than three cables when I only need one. What a waste...
My dad's printer did not come with the required USB cable, though the USB connectivity feature was made well known on the packaging. Sucked that we had to go back to the store again to get one, but this seems to be popular.
Considering how many people have HDMI inputs on their displays compared to how many people have composit inputs, is this really that suprising? I've begun workign toward a front projector setup for my home, and I've found HDMI cables are not dirt-cheap. While a lot of people with composite inputs probably won't get a PS3 until prices drop, a lot, considering how few overall PS3 buyers have HDMI inputs I'm not suprised the cable is seperate to try and save a few dollars on the retail price of the console. How is this causing people such a bad day?
P.S. When I order my projector, will it include the required 15' HDMI cable? Or will I have to buy that seperate?
It seems that the more internet access I have, the less work I get done. And on days our link is down, I get a lot of work done.
I can't see paying more than a couple hundred $$ for a standalone DVD player these days. Judging from my recent visit to the super electronics store nearby, I can even get an upconverting playback DVD all-format recorder for that. How much would I pay for the ATI/Nvidia card? $400 or more? And then the computer to plug it into? While there may be some quality difference, I can't imagine that price/performance ratio makes sense beyond $200 or so for a DVD player in any form, so I can't imagine going the PC route to watch movies on my TV from the argument of picture quality.
I spent s good bit more than $200 on my MythTV box, but that gets me far more capabilities than a DVD player offers.
It's my freakin computer, you better let me silence it if I wish. Maybe I don't want to irritate people in a cafe, lobby, waiting room, whatever with noises coming from my laptop. Maybe I just don't want an "I'm ready to be used" noise. Maybe I don't care if you think it's convenient. Maybe I dont care if you think it's cool or pretty sounding. Maybe I just want the stupid thing to be quiet.
And Xbox or Playstation are not good excuses, those are for a different market. There's also a number of people out there using mod chips to regain control of those things if they don't like some decisions from the manufacturer. Just because my Xbox makes a startup noise doesn't mean that I want it to. And just because some Engineer at Microsoft or Sony decided their toy for kids should make a startup noise does not mean I want to hear it on my laptop, tower, or anything at the office in the morning.
Some parents however are 'enthusiastic laptop proponents', one saying 'the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'"
Powerpoint is a critical professional skill? I've never used it. I've never used OpenOffice's Powerpoint equivalent. Other than marketing guys, how many proffessionals actually do that kind of thing? I'm a chip designer doing VLSI layout, verilog RTL, design flow maintenence using various scripting languages and I have no use for presentation tools.
Does this parent hope their 12-year-old will grow up to be a marketing guy?
What does British law have to do wiht the new York Times? Isn't NYT outside of British jurisdiction? Even if it's regarding people actually in Britain readng that story, they aren't going to be called for jury duty or anything, I just don't get what pplies there...
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/doc/general/i ndex.html#whatpat
Even if the subject matter sought to be patented is not exactly shown by the prior art, and involves one or more differences over the most nearly similar thing already known, a patent may still be refused if the differences would be obvious. The subject matter sought to be patented must be sufficiently different from what has been used or described before that it may be said to be nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention. For example, the substitution of one color for another, or changes in size, are ordinarily not patentable.
This says that if something is obvious, the patent can be rejected even if there is no real prior art or previous "suggestion" or anything. Does a judge have the right to change the USPTOs rules on it's behalf?
Most of the recent Intel chips provide x86-64 support just like most of the recent AMD chips.
:)
I hadn't realized that. I knew some Xeon chips had 64bit, but couldn't find anything about the Core/Duo, but I do see the Core2/Duo product brief does list it. Thanks for the clue.
Is this our explanation for why Dell finally gave in to AMD?
I've read about other methods, such as harvesting a person's own stem cells from his or her bone marrow. Some medication is able to encourage the marrow to produce and release stem cells that can be collected from blood samples or something like that. (it's been long enough to forget some details) Why dont' we get a few of them that way for research?
And I still think it's an awful waste to toss everything into a biohazard disposal or incinerator or something when someone has an abortion. I'd rather see some benefit come from that kind of thing, rather than take that life and simply throw it in the trash. How is that better than learnign new ways to save lives?
What the new AMD led ATI can do to help show leadership is to release the information (or even drivers) needed for Linux to take full advantage of their card capabilities.
ATI was still better than Nvidia for allowing others to write drivers. They still require NDAs and did not allow open-sourcing of the code, but at least that much was possible. With Nvidia, they don't even talk to anyone requesting things under NDA that would result in binary-only drivers. For Linux, Nvidia's own binary-only proprietary drivers seem to work better and are easier to get running that ATI's equivalent, but I still prefer ATI simply because they are at least willing to do business with 3rd parties.
How could I have missed it? I wasn't intentionally avoiding anything, I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Do I just not visit the right sites to have witnessed the internet Snakes hype? Where was it?
And why would it make any difference? An hour and a half of lots of snakes, on an airplane, scaring people. I just can't wrap my head around how that could possibly be worth an hour and a half of my time, hype or not.
Everyone knows that's a crap law passed by the coal mining lobbyists to protect their business models and piles of cash. Much like the water powered car, this would already exist if it wasn't for the greedy politicians and the energy industry that owns them. :p
To what extent are the service providers expected to know what the NSA is and is not allowed to do? If the NSA comes in and says you must do something, how much right do you have in that situation to say "no", or "let our lawyers approve this first"? With the Patriot Act in place and the fact that no one has ever really read what it actually says, how is anyone expected to stand up and tell the NSA to bugger off, that's unconstitutional? But these companies are not even the victims I'm concerned about.
What about those victims who were wrongly spied on? Those are the ones I'm afraid will end up paying for all this. If the service providers are sued for damages, where does that money come from? Either increased fees to consumers (who are the real victims), or the companies sue the government for some sort of wrongful representation of what the legality of the program was and NSA/Bush's rights to require them to comply and all that, and the government uses tax money to pay off their own legal losses, again going back to the consumers/victims.
Legally, we may have a win. Financially, we're all screwed, but I guess that's not really any different than any other day. Hopefully it at least gives companies reason to have a backbone and look into legal issues like that instead of just assuming NSA's requests are legit and immediately caving into that kind of intimidation, and possibly avoid a recurrence. But I won' tbe suprised if government in the future again will fool companies into unknowingly (in at least some cases) doing illegal things, or intimidating them into doing it anyway.
Every now and then at work, the chip layout tool we use will completely stop responding to keypresses and sometimes mouse commands. The first few times was weird and annoying as heck, because I didn't have a clue how to get it back working again. Youcould quit and restart, but the new session would be hosed from the beginning. Eventually we realized that the caps lock was lit up when the tool went into this state, and the problem as cured by turning off the caps lock. I think it's rediculously stupid for the EDA vendor to allow such a thing to happen when caps lock is on, but not much I can do about it and the boss wouldn't likely let me break my keyboard.
I'd love to get rid of it on my work keyboard, even if we do know what to look for now. I never use caps lock as intended, I'm pretty good at holding down a regular shift key with my pinky finger while I type along...
Cancel your land line and get a cell phone (and remember to put a text-messaging block on it). You won't receive ANY telemarketing calls.
I wouldn't receive ANY phone calls at home. Period. I get a great signal at work, but at home the signal is very poor and calls often disconnect in the middle of conversations, which mostly consist of "are you still there?"... And I went with this service because it's supposed to have the best coverage anywhere, and other roommates have not had any signal whatsoever at home with other services. Cell phones suck, and it's more expensive than my landline. ($40/mo for cell, $29/mo or less for landline including long-distance charges, and now I'm stuck paying for both)
Are computers really so necessary for survival that we need to give them to those who have never seen them before? My parents didn;t have computers in school. They didn't exist when my grandparents were in school. Cavemen didn't have them. And yet here we all are.
I'd hope that some degree of education is still possible without having computers involved. It'd suck for the rest of us if only the Amish have the skills to survive after WW3 or something breaks all our precious computers.
Cow Power costs only 4 cents/kWh more than market price
Uhm, even after this month's amazing 72% electricity increase where I live (Thank you deregulation, "competition" really is better for me!), my price per kWh is 11.03cents. This 4 cent increase is 36% increase. My current bill is $153.78, and a 36% increase over that would have me paying $209.14. That's a little mroe than your $5 to $6/month increase. There's no natural gas available on my street, so the whole house is electric, including furnace, basement electric baseboard heating, water heater, clothes dryer, etc. And this is after I just spent $5700 on a new Air Conditioning system in an attempt to reduce my bill.
Last year this month I paid about $220 in electric with the old 8-SEER system, my new bill is my first month with the new 16-Seer system, with the same average outside temperature as this month last year. A 36% increase on the old system wouldhave had me paying $299.20 then, and would be $514.62 today considering our new 72% rate increase that took effect on my current billing statement. I'd be paying about $378.74 now if I'd kept the old AC system. (Yes, I think that $5700 will be well worth it in a couple years)
I don't think that the word "only" works well on a 36% rate hike compared to the new market price I'm now paying. You might have gas for everything other than your computer and TV, but there's a lot of people out there that would see huge monthly billing increases on this additional 4cents/kWh.
I work for a small computer sales/service retailer, and over the past 2-3 years I've experienced a sharp increase in the number of Dell computers coming in for service, relative to the number of other brands.
Is that truely representative though? Maybe there's just that many more people buying Dells than anything else, that given the same percentage of owners/brand bringing things in that this % of Dell owners might just happen to come out to a higher number?
I bought an Asus laptop. I got an HP laptop for my sister. But everyone else I know has Dells for either laptop or desktop. 10% of myself means I probably won't bring in my Asus or my sister's HP at all. 10% of the people I know that have Dells would probably get you at least 1 visit from somebody. Going really crazy, even if you got 100% of each brand owner coming in, of the people that I know, you'd get one Asus, one HP, and 9 or so Dells.
It is mostly for creative/artistic reasons and preserving the integrity of the film as the creators intended it.
If the movie distributors don't want sanitized copies out there because it's something other than the creators intended it to be, then how do they get "edited for TV" things approved? Different channels/networks have different censorship guidelines. Different things will be removed or changed, and for different reasons. Some things are changed because of "bad words" or scenes which are too graphic either sexually or violently, some things are flat out removed for the same reason or just to make more time for advertizements and not because of any real complaint about the scene itself.
Do all permutations of these TV edits have to get approved? Or does a network get the rights to edit something as they wish to be compatible with their particular guidelines when they buy the rights to broadcast the movie?
If someone is giving approval, who is it? The director? The editor? The writer(s) of the screenplay? The author of the book(s) a screenplay is based on? Heck, the made-for-TV incarnation of EarthSea doesn't appear to come out as the creator of EarthSea intended at all. Do you have to get permission from a group of all these people who were involved with creating the final movie?
How do test audiences fit in? They're effectively telling the directors/producers to change certain things. "Waa, that ending was sad, make it a happy ending instead so I feel better". Things like that. Sometimes studio execs make demands that things be changed. Check out Army of Darkness's theatrical cut vs the director's cut, the endings are seriously different and the original (aka directors cut) ending is said to have been ordred changed by the studio.
I'd like to know exactly who's feelings are getting hurt if someone makes a remix of their movie, and why it matters to them if they've already been paid. I'd also like to know why their feelings are enough intact to allow TV broaadcasters to edit things as they see fit but their hurt feelings make life so bad they have to completely forbid the DVD equivalent of TV broadcast edits.