You can quite often get a refurb'd onkyo HT-580S for this price or less, and it's a pretty formiddable system. I have the older model and it's better than most other sub-$500 systems that i've heard.
Perhaps i'm living in my own little world, but most amps on the market seem to have digital inputs, and the better ones have had this for years.
Microsoft are essentialy saying "get an HDTV and Surround Sound System or you'll have a far inferior gaming experience", and they know that most of their customers will comply.
Are you seriously advocating that they bump up the unit cost of an Xbox to deal with the subset of customers who:
- want to be on the cutting edge of game technology - dont want surround sound - also dont want mono
It seems like the sensible option to let those customers swallow that cost buy buying their own amp or downsampling device, instead of making everyone else pay for it.
I've seen interviews that suggest that in the future they'll include HDMI which should do away with the problem, by letting your TV deal with the audio downsampling.
Realistically anyone that can afford an xbox and can afford an HTDV can drop $150 on a halfway decent surround sound system.
I'm not sure there's anything wrong with microsoft trying to force people (particularly early adopters) into having the best possible xbox set up. These are the people that are blazing a trail and advertizing the xbox to the xmas 06 crowds.
If you really want 2.0, cant you just connect it to your stereo and tell the amp to do Phantom Center and Phantom Rear. It should do a far better job of downmixing than the xbox itself.
Furthermore by pushing out a digital signal, they'll do away with groundloop problems and the buzzing and hissing that cheap analog interconncts provide.
I remember in a hotel (belgium i think) looking at the card with the in-room movie choices. It came with an assurance that your movie choices would not be visible to the staff at the front desk or on your bill, yet hollywood films were 5 euro and porn was 6.
I had a hotel in italy where the room lights were activated by your room key. This allowed them to know exactly when you left your room. One day we took a nap in the middle of the day, wandered round the town for an hour or so and returned to find that the bed had been remade.
The offered otherwise excellent service (Hotel Panorama, Venice btw) but using technology for a few extra touches makes all the difference.
The Mirage in las vegas had a minibar that was monitored by computer in my suite. I'm not sure if they'd have come and restocked it, but it stops you replacing that $4 bottle of aquafina you took with an inferior quality one from safeway.
My point is that these smart features wont make a craptastic hotel better, but they can make a nice one nicer.
Hmm perhaps if you look at it from a raw engineering perspective. The difference in momentum should be the same, but i think the human cost is probably different.
However in highway (vehicle - vehicle) crashes lets say that at 70mph the chance of a fatality is X and at 85 mph then the chance becomes X + a
Now consider a local (vehicle- person) crash, again at 30 mph lets make that chance Y and at 45 mph the chance of a fatality Y + b
I'm always confused by the fact (which seems to hold true in many countries) that speeding fines are based on how many mph or kph you are over the limit.
I'm of the mindset that 15mph over a 70mph limit is far less dangerous than 15mph over a 30mph limit - yet in some places they have the same penatly.
There's a trial run of them on the M90 just north of edinburgh. They dont emit radar and are much higher than regular gatsos, more like lamppost height.
My cousin is working on a driving technique which involves tailgating trucks as you pass the camera. Although at the time that the test install went up they were every mile... that's a lot harder to sustain for every quarter mile.
They could easily attempt something like this on tollways here in the US, i'm sure the ExpressToll timings give away the average speed of the vehical.
The standard in the UK police is 10% + 2 mph, so you have to be doing 79 in a 70 to be ticketed or 35 in a 30.
From what i've heard, some gatsos dont give you the 2mph but i believe laws only require that your in dash speedometer be accurate to 10% hence the slack.
Of course i'm sure speedos are more accruate nowadays so they might try to reign that in.
If Dell is paying $200 for OSX licenses, then a crappy dell workstation will cost $600 ($400 for HW and $200 for OS)
That $200 enables apple to sell a Mini like computer at the same price point, and most customers will ultimately go for the Apple. By letting other vendors sell it, it opens them up to dual boot systems and the likes. It also provides a nice migration path for businesses and home users that have a large investment in pc hardware.
If apple could certify existing hardware then they could also sell dirt cheap education licenses, since i suspect quite a lot of schools would move back to mac if they could.
Would it not be really simple to have a failsafe along the lines over "never nuke the patient for more than X seconds" where X is some value that wont kill them.
I know these machines are often used in different situations, but it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to put in a limiter that would catch the worst problems.
Without too much of a headache I wrote a single dll that provides the same user defined function/ extended stored procedure in both mysql and sql server.
If you are smart about your design then you'll encapsulate the actual functionality and simply wrap the appropriate database interface around it.
But when a white LED delivers 15-19 lumens per watt, its about the same as a 100W incandescent and five times worse than a fluorescent. LEDs appear bright because they put out a fairly focused beam - not because they put out lots of light.
Each time a search was run on Gbooks, they'd send a researcher (or a pigeon) out into a public library to find the book, read it to find the section that closely matched what you wanted, and then return the excerpt to you.
It'd be the same as if you paid someone to do a literature review on a given subject for you.
The result to the end user would be the same, except that this would obviously take much longer. I'm not sure i see a huge difference how the end is reached, only that the result it the same.
Yesterday i saw a new Geico commercial while fast forwarding and actually stopped rewound watched it, called the wife through and watched it again.
If advertizers would have spent the cash to create decent, entertaining, and memorable commercials then we'd have less need for tivo and they'd be doing a lot better right now.
Then you'll find yourself with a 15" screen in economy class. I did a little business travel with my old fujitsu lifebook and seat spacing wasn't enough to allow a comfortable viewing angle. I thought about buying a $200 dvd player for that situation, now the ipod is breaking into that market and i might do that instead.
also the ipod is more discrete and should have better battery life than a laptop decoding a video.
My experience suggests that Suns compilers beat out GCC on single processor machines and more so on 8 and 16 processor systems.
The benifit of Sun's mature sparc compilers might let you squeeze more performance out of a sparc box. Although of course the opterons have a higher clock speed in the first place.
I've been a subscriber for a while and was considering switching to comcasts dvr sicne it was cheaper. TiVo immediately countered with $6.95/mo and i've been on that for almost a year now. We've got one of the earlier version 2 boxes and i think we paid almost $200 for it so tivo have probably broken even on us.
I pay under $7 for a set of four 3rd-party carts for my i560.
The printer probably cost about 4 times the equivilent lexmark, but it's a great little printer. Probably even beats out laser for running costs since the black carts cost me $1.79 iirc.
Slashdot Mirror
That's odd, because I can't think of a single person I know that has HDTV but doesn't have a surround sound system.
I think more people will notice it looks crap that sounds crap.
You can quite often get a refurb'd onkyo HT-580S for this price or less, and it's a pretty formiddable system. I have the older model and it's better than most other sub-$500 systems that i've heard.
Perhaps i'm living in my own little world, but most amps on the market seem to have digital inputs, and the better ones have had this for years.
Microsoft are essentialy saying "get an HDTV and Surround Sound System or you'll have a far inferior gaming experience", and they know that most of their customers will comply.
Are you seriously advocating that they bump up the unit cost of an Xbox to deal with the subset of customers who:
- want to be on the cutting edge of game technology
- dont want surround sound
- also dont want mono
It seems like the sensible option to let those customers swallow that cost buy buying their own amp or downsampling device, instead of making everyone else pay for it.
I've seen interviews that suggest that in the future they'll include HDMI which should do away with the problem, by letting your TV deal with the audio downsampling.
Realistically anyone that can afford an xbox and can afford an HTDV can drop $150 on a halfway decent surround sound system.
I'm not sure there's anything wrong with microsoft trying to force people (particularly early adopters) into having the best possible xbox set up. These are the people that are blazing a trail and advertizing the xbox to the xmas 06 crowds.
If you really want 2.0, cant you just connect it to your stereo and tell the amp to do Phantom Center and Phantom Rear. It should do a far better job of downmixing than the xbox itself.
Furthermore by pushing out a digital signal, they'll do away with groundloop problems and the buzzing and hissing that cheap analog interconncts provide.
I remember in a hotel (belgium i think) looking at the card with the in-room movie choices. It came with an assurance that your movie choices would not be visible to the staff at the front desk or on your bill, yet hollywood films were 5 euro and porn was 6.
I had a hotel in italy where the room lights were activated by your room key. This allowed them to know exactly when you left your room. One day we took a nap in the middle of the day, wandered round the town for an hour or so and returned to find that the bed had been remade.
The offered otherwise excellent service (Hotel Panorama, Venice btw) but using technology for a few extra touches makes all the difference.
The Mirage in las vegas had a minibar that was monitored by computer in my suite. I'm not sure if they'd have come and restocked it, but it stops you replacing that $4 bottle of aquafina you took with an inferior quality one from safeway.
My point is that these smart features wont make a craptastic hotel better, but they can make a nice one nicer.
Hmm perhaps if you look at it from a raw engineering perspective. The difference in momentum should be the same, but i think the human cost is probably different.
However in highway (vehicle - vehicle) crashes lets say that at 70mph the chance of a fatality is X and at 85 mph then the chance becomes X + a
Now consider a local (vehicle- person) crash, again at 30 mph lets make that chance Y and at 45 mph the chance of a fatality Y + b
I'm virtually certain that b > a
I'm always confused by the fact (which seems to hold true in many countries) that speeding fines are based on how many mph or kph you are over the limit.
I'm of the mindset that 15mph over a 70mph limit is far less dangerous than 15mph over a 30mph limit - yet in some places they have the same penatly.
There's a trial run of them on the M90 just north of edinburgh. They dont emit radar and are much higher than regular gatsos, more like lamppost height.
My cousin is working on a driving technique which involves tailgating trucks as you pass the camera. Although at the time that the test install went up they were every mile... that's a lot harder to sustain for every quarter mile.
They could easily attempt something like this on tollways here in the US, i'm sure the ExpressToll timings give away the average speed of the vehical.
The standard in the UK police is 10% + 2 mph, so you have to be doing 79 in a 70 to be ticketed or 35 in a 30.
From what i've heard, some gatsos dont give you the 2mph but i believe laws only require that your in dash speedometer be accurate to 10% hence the slack.
Of course i'm sure speedos are more accruate nowadays so they might try to reign that in.
If Dell is paying $200 for OSX licenses, then a crappy dell workstation will cost $600 ($400 for HW and $200 for OS)
That $200 enables apple to sell a Mini like computer at the same price point, and most customers will ultimately go for the Apple. By letting other vendors sell it, it opens them up to dual boot systems and the likes. It also provides a nice migration path for businesses and home users that have a large investment in pc hardware.
If apple could certify existing hardware then they could also sell dirt cheap education licenses, since i suspect quite a lot of schools would move back to mac if they could.
Would it not be really simple to have a failsafe along the lines over "never nuke the patient for more than X seconds" where X is some value that wont kill them.
I know these machines are often used in different situations, but it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to put in a limiter that would catch the worst problems.
Without too much of a headache I wrote a single dll that provides the same user defined function/ extended stored procedure in both mysql and sql server.
If you are smart about your design then you'll encapsulate the actual functionality and simply wrap the appropriate database interface around it.
That's sweet.
It's amazing how fast that tech is moving.
Efficiency
LEDs are certainly better than flashlight bulbs.
But when a white LED delivers 15-19 lumens per watt, its about the same as a 100W incandescent and five times worse than a fluorescent. LEDs appear bright because they put out a fairly focused beam - not because they put out lots of light.
Each time a search was run on Gbooks, they'd send a researcher (or a pigeon) out into a public library to find the book, read it to find the section that closely matched what you wanted, and then return the excerpt to you.
It'd be the same as if you paid someone to do a literature review on a given subject for you.
The result to the end user would be the same, except that this would obviously take much longer. I'm not sure i see a huge difference how the end is reached, only that the result it the same.
Maybe i'm confused though
The Digital Rebel certainly runs DOS
Yesterday i saw a new Geico commercial while fast forwarding and actually stopped rewound watched it, called the wife through and watched it again.
If advertizers would have spent the cash to create decent, entertaining, and memorable commercials then we'd have less need for tivo and they'd be doing a lot better right now.
Then you'll find yourself with a 15" screen in economy class. I did a little business travel with my old fujitsu lifebook and seat spacing wasn't enough to allow a comfortable viewing angle. I thought about buying a $200 dvd player for that situation, now the ipod is breaking into that market and i might do that instead.
also the ipod is more discrete and should have better battery life than a laptop decoding a video.
My experience suggests that Suns compilers beat out GCC on single processor machines and more so on 8 and 16 processor systems.
The benifit of Sun's mature sparc compilers might let you squeeze more performance out of a sparc box. Although of course the opterons have a higher clock speed in the first place.
A GPS satelite is relatively inexpensive.
if we were going to send something/someone up to fix repair it, then we could just as easily (probably much more easily) send a new satelite up.
I've been a subscriber for a while and was considering switching to comcasts dvr sicne it was cheaper. TiVo immediately countered with $6.95/mo and i've been on that for almost a year now. We've got one of the earlier version 2 boxes and i think we paid almost $200 for it so tivo have probably broken even on us.
The project management (if you can call it that) in the OSS world is quite different from the corporate world.
Learning to write effective bug reports, sensibly isolated code, using CVS/SVN are important.
I send and receive email on my Nokia 6600 Smartphone and it's not too bad with the 240x320 display. Even web surfing is tolerable.
I pay under $7 for a set of four 3rd-party carts for my i560.
The printer probably cost about 4 times the equivilent lexmark, but it's a great little printer. Probably even beats out laser for running costs since the black carts cost me $1.79 iirc.