Oh my god!!! Seriously, are all the old ones becoming obsolete or something?
As a matter of fact... some are. We're gradually losing the antibiotics arms-race with the germs as resistant strains to the best we come up with keep popping up. We only have a few drugs left that still kill the worst multi-drug-resistant strains.
In these cases, we do indeed need new drugs because the old ones are obsolete.
Your point about the business model is valid, though. Outside of the drug resistance issue, in many cases, the "new" drugs are simply minor modifications to the formula of old drugs released near the end of a patent to give them more patent control. The end of a patent means the appearance of commoditized generics and price competition with a much thinner profit margin, so they market the crap out of their slightly-modified version (say, a time release formula, or something) to convince people it's better than the form of the drug available as a generic.
The resolution of standard NTSC television is more easily approximated as 640x480. 320x240 is much closer to a home-recorded VHS tape.
The shows are well encoded for their size, but they are less than 1/4 the resolution of a DVD-- which plays back on standard televisions without scaling.
So far, the only reason I've considered purchasing a tv show from iTunes is for the occasional missed episode of a show that has multi-episode plotlines. They're too expensive and too low quality for me to use as anything but a stopgap measure.
I'm not surprised that keyboards are filthy, but frankly, when I was a kid wandering around in creeks hunting crawfish, climbing trees, etc etc I never got sick, and I (almost) never get sick as an adult.
When I was a kid, wandering around in creeks and hunting crawfish, etc etc I got sick 3-4 times a year. That continued into adulthood.
I'm not saying you're wrong with the implication that you can "train" your immune system, I'm just saying that you can't draw a conclusion based on a sample size of one.
All of us of a certain age remember the advent of parallax scrolling-- which is using multiple regions of scrolling graphics at varying speeds to simulate the real-world parallax effect. (ie, clouds scroll more slowly than the foreground.)
Parallax mapping, however, is something else entirely in this context. It appears to be the name for a more advanced form of bump-mapping that incorporates the sort of depth and occlusion you'd get from a real object as you panned around it. One more advance in creating the illusion of a bajillion polygons from simple surfaces.
Space Quest 1 VGA was perhaps a poor choice of example, since it *is* easy to run and play. Easier than when it was new, in fact. Rather than the old IRQ/Highmem/Soundblaster/blahblah DOS config nightmare, I just installed NAGI and copied my old game disks into the folder. See also FreeSCI for later Sierra games, and ScummVM for the lucasarts games.
You're right about hanging back on the lifecycle, though. I bought all of the last generation of consoles with a pile of controllers for a sum total of $180. It can pay to wait.
How easy it is for you to find old PC bits probably depends on your particular circle of friends. In this regard, it pays to know a couple of those "buy the latest all the time" guys, because they are perpetually unloading last years' gear at cut-rate prices.
Yep. No records. Now, I'm not advocating one side or the other here, but 2005 seems to have been a year of extremes, not one that didn't set any records. There will *always* be records in a given year, particularly local ones. It's the worldwide records like "highest average temp on record, despite the absence of El Nino" and "lowest arctic ice recorded" that matter. Not "Hottest July 3rd ever in Tempe, AZ."
You missed an option that I think is more likely: pick both. If you offer somebody two ways to make money that don't interfere with eachother, I suspect you'll find both implemented. Nothing about windmills is going to get in the way of hog farming, and people simply will not turn down money, even when it makes their town smell like shit.
The ones I saw in rural Illinois on the drive to Wisconsin looked pretty sweet. And it's not like they were ruining any sort of view-- all there was for miles in any direction was flat, boring farmland. If your idea of a view is an infinity of corn, I suppose it could ruin that.
Those things were impressive. Sleek, white, aerodynamic towers-- more like a sports car or an airplane than a factory. Personally, I thought they were nicer to look at than the endless farms.
That's a fair way to look at it as well. But google is a bit schizophrenic in this regard-- there's "what the guys do," and there's "how they make their money." It's the latter that I believe is most properly viewed as their business model.
You could say "google is a company that builds cool software and sells ads as a way to pay for it," just as legitimately as "google is an ad company that builds software as a way to drive ad revenue." But in both cases, their money comes from selling ads. This, at least to my naive engineer eyes, would appear to be the business model.
A-freaking-men. We have a new standard to replace our power-of-two bastardization of the SI prefixes for powers of 10. Just because we've been doing it forever doesn't mean the computer geeks are in the right-- we clearly took an established international standard for the meaning of prefixes and changed it. As dumb as the new prefixes sound to my ears, it's time we stepped up and got used to it.
You'd think that programmers, of all people, would value the clarity of meaning something like this would bring-- but it just goes to show that even those of us who are logical for a living have things we're irrationally attached to.
If their business model is still selling ads, then I don't see much clutter in their model. Everything they've done so far is either to create things people want to look at so they'll see ads, to gather information to to better target ads, and to increase the number of people with access to their ads.
The brilliantly simple and useful software they crank out is just to get us in the door.
The hours cap for residents is 80 hours. It used to be worse, but nobody's gonna argue that they're really down to a sensible number yet. The 80 hours doesn't include things like the regular conferences theey have to attend as part of residency, either-- just the shifts they work. Some of which are as long as 30 hours. (My SO just got off work around noon today. She went in at 5am yesterday. They have to give them a day off after a shift like that, but apparently working until noon counts as "off.")
There have only been guidelines for resident work hours since 2003. 2003. It took that long for somebody to say "wow, 110 hour weeks and 2-day shifts with no sleep is probably bad for the patients AND the doctors." Unfortunately, residents are cheap, and hospitals work them like this to keep costs down.
Depending on which guidelines you're talking about, I'm not sure there's a fine involved, either. The only teeth the rules my SO is under have is that the residency could lose its accreditation. Are you really gonna complain about the hours if it means the program you're in will vanish? There may be some better state/local rules in other places.
The worst part is that the hospitals are fully aware of studies like these. My SO is required to attend "sleep etiquette" classes several times a year that warn them about the dangers of not getting enough sleep and make all sorts of dire threats. And the SAME DAMN PEOPLE then schedule her for 80 hours of work, 30 hour shifts, and the additional weekly hours of meetings that go with the residency. They even tried to suggest that nobody was allowed to drive home after the 30-hour shifts because it was like driving drunk. Yes, it was okay 30 minutes ago for that person to be working in the ER, but they shouldn't drive? That makes sense. And, of course, the hospital had nowhere for all the off-shift docs to sleep.
Blargh. Hospitals are incredibly cheap. So cheap it's killing people.
See if you can find a CVT automatic to test drive somewhere. I've got one in my old Civic HX-- gets fuel economy and performance very close to a manual, because it is slipless. Plus, it weirds everybody out that your car never shifts, your tach stays precisely in your powerband, and it is possible to have the tach moving gradually downward while your speed is moving up.
Thankfully, it's starting to change. There are some caps on what residents can work now. Unfortunately, the caps themselves are still absurd by any realistic standard, but it just goes to show you how bad it really was. When residents (my fiancee is an ER resident) are thankful that the new rules keep things restricted to "just" 80 hours a week, something is wrong. She gets off a 30-hour ER shift today. Keep in mind that the 80 hour cap doesn't include things that aren't "work", like the conferences they have to attend. Even with the 80 hour cap, they can still work well over 80 hours without breaking the rules.
There are two big problems with the rules. (that I can see-- I suspect she knows more) Hospitals have become dependent on cheap 100-hours-a-week residents to do the work. Without additional funding, the hour restrictions mean that the staffing isn't going to cover what it used to.
Additionally, the only teeth the rules have is to take away a residency's accreditation. If you're a resident, and your residency loses that, you're screwed. It's like having your college shut down mid-degree. So if you're being abused under the rules and working 110 hours a week, your options are "report it and possibly lose your residency," or "suck it up."
But seriously-- does anyone really want brand new doctors running on no sleep for whole days treating them? Unfortunately, this is exactly what we have. The fact that we have as few incidents as we do is a testament to the residents.
Since last year, you've been able to pull shows off the Series 2 Tivos. It's an mpeg2 file with a tivo DRM wrapper, although I understand the wrapper is easy to remove. Even without the hackage, it's pretty stinking easy (and supported!) to download shows and watch them on your laptop or iPod on the airplane or whatever.
I'd be surprised if the Series 3 didn't support TivoToGo, but dumber things have happened.
No demo, short of having an actual tivo for a few weeks, is going to get it all across. Too much of the functionality that differentiates it from a VCR just doesn't sink in until you've used it for a while *and tried to switch back*.
Anymore, I find I'd rather not watch TV without a DVR. Somebody else will eventually get the little things down as well as Tivo, and a few companies have features I wish Tivo had (automatic commercial skip, the ability to speed up video) but the Tivo package is still my favorite.
It's the same signal, with audio and DRM, in one cable. You can buy an adapter fairly inexpensively online that will let you plug DVI into HDMI and vice versa.
Here's one for $7. The same shop has them in M-F and F-M, depending on your particular needs.
Must be regional, and if you're still seeing it, they certainly haven't fixed their bug. I've been on a tivo of some sort or another since early 2000, like I said, and have *never* run into the DRM.
Never saw it on comcast, and haven't seen it on DirecTV. It's possible the DTV version of the software doesn't include the DRM stuff at all, although that seems like the sort of thing they would jump to include. They've just been notoriously slow to make software updates to their branch of the Tivo software.
I used to think the same thing, and then in 2000 I won a free 14-hour unit in some online contest back in the crazy days of the web. I didn't even have cable, and it was still the greatest thing since sliced bread. seen I still haven't found the right way to explain it to somebody who (like me in 2000) doesn't get it. I think the difficulty of explaining the box is hurting their sales, too.
Suffice it to say it's more reliable than a VCR, 100x easier to program and use, and it's the only piece of my home theatre that my fiancee doesn't think was designed by antisocial engineers specifically to torture her.
I worry about the DRM a bit, but so far, I've never run into it. I understand the flap we saw earlier this year was over a bug-- only PPV shows are supposed to disappear. Because, you know, you have to pay... per... view.
This is a cablecard box. That was a DirecTV box. You'll note that they are not the same thing.
That said, it still seems like "mid to late 2006" is a tad late for something like this, although I believe most of their delay trouble has been wrestling with the cablecard standard.
This box also includes MPEG-4 and WMV support, probably for both downloadable content and futureproofing in case cable companies change codecs away from MPEG-2 as DirecTV has done. That change by DirecTV has obsoleted the HD DirecTivo-- isn't it worth a little extra wait to have one that won't become useless the second your cableco goes MPEG-4?
This box, and their Comcast partnership, should keep them afloat. (crosses fingers)
The Series 3 unit doesn't need or support external tuner boxes. It *is* the cable box now. Two cablecard, two ATSC, and two NTSC tuners cover everything from unencrypted OTA SDTV to encrypted cable ATSC. No more latency since *it* will be changing the channel.
They haven't required a landline since Series 2, and all the previous tivo iterations, including the directv model, have included a short remote-control code to enable 30-second skip.
And to head off the question, yes, even the initial setup on a Series 2 can be done via broadband, but only with *supported* USB ethernet adapters. Wireless can't be enabled until after setup, at least with v3.2. I think v4.0 of the software supports more adapters out-of-the-box, so it depends a little bit on which version you get in the package.
I completely agree. I see this complaint waaaay too often-- it needs a name. There are enough people on slashdot that some subset of them will argue just about any position on a given issue. It's not inconsistency-- it's that not everyone on slashdot is exactly the same person.
I use an HD tuner card I bought used plugged into a PC made out of used parts, and a $15 antenna from radio shack. Works great, but as is always the case with network TV, there's nothing worth watching 98% of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh my god!!! Seriously, are all the old ones becoming obsolete or something?
As a matter of fact... some are. We're gradually losing the antibiotics arms-race with the germs as resistant strains to the best we come up with keep popping up. We only have a few drugs left that still kill the worst multi-drug-resistant strains.
In these cases, we do indeed need new drugs because the old ones are obsolete.
Your point about the business model is valid, though. Outside of the drug resistance issue, in many cases, the "new" drugs are simply minor modifications to the formula of old drugs released near the end of a patent to give them more patent control. The end of a patent means the appearance of commoditized generics and price competition with a much thinner profit margin, so they market the crap out of their slightly-modified version (say, a time release formula, or something) to convince people it's better than the form of the drug available as a generic.
The resolution of standard NTSC television is more easily approximated as 640x480. 320x240 is much closer to a home-recorded VHS tape.
The shows are well encoded for their size, but they are less than 1/4 the resolution of a DVD-- which plays back on standard televisions without scaling.
So far, the only reason I've considered purchasing a tv show from iTunes is for the occasional missed episode of a show that has multi-episode plotlines. They're too expensive and too low quality for me to use as anything but a stopgap measure.
I'm not surprised that keyboards are filthy, but frankly, when I was a kid wandering around in creeks hunting crawfish, climbing trees, etc etc I never got sick, and I (almost) never get sick as an adult.
When I was a kid, wandering around in creeks and hunting crawfish, etc etc I got sick 3-4 times a year. That continued into adulthood.
I'm not saying you're wrong with the implication that you can "train" your immune system, I'm just saying that you can't draw a conclusion based on a sample size of one.
All of us of a certain age remember the advent of parallax scrolling-- which is using multiple regions of scrolling graphics at varying speeds to simulate the real-world parallax effect. (ie, clouds scroll more slowly than the foreground.)
Parallax mapping, however, is something else entirely in this context. It appears to be the name for a more advanced form of bump-mapping that incorporates the sort of depth and occlusion you'd get from a real object as you panned around it. One more advance in creating the illusion of a bajillion polygons from simple surfaces.
http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/
Disclaimer: I am absolutely not an expert on this. If I am wildly wrong, please post and explain-- i'm curious too!
Space Quest 1 VGA was perhaps a poor choice of example, since it *is* easy to run and play. Easier than when it was new, in fact. Rather than the old IRQ/Highmem/Soundblaster/blahblah DOS config nightmare, I just installed NAGI and copied my old game disks into the folder. See also FreeSCI for later Sierra games, and ScummVM for the lucasarts games.
You're right about hanging back on the lifecycle, though. I bought all of the last generation of consoles with a pile of controllers for a sum total of $180. It can pay to wait.
How easy it is for you to find old PC bits probably depends on your particular circle of friends. In this regard, it pays to know a couple of those "buy the latest all the time" guys, because they are perpetually unloading last years' gear at cut-rate prices.
And yet....no records were set....uh..
Yep. No records. Now, I'm not advocating one side or the other here, but 2005 seems to have been a year of extremes, not one that didn't set any records. There will *always* be records in a given year, particularly local ones. It's the worldwide records like "highest average temp on record, despite the absence of El Nino" and "lowest arctic ice recorded" that matter. Not "Hottest July 3rd ever in Tempe, AZ."
Worst hurricane season on record.
200 Western US cities set heat records.
Hottest year ever, least arctic ice ever, most intense single hurricane ever, worst drought in decades.
Third worst year on record for extreme weather, hottest year on record despite the fact that the previous record had El Nino to drive it. (and in a contrast, very few tornados).
You missed an option that I think is more likely: pick both. If you offer somebody two ways to make money that don't interfere with eachother, I suspect you'll find both implemented. Nothing about windmills is going to get in the way of hog farming, and people simply will not turn down money, even when it makes their town smell like shit.
The ones I saw in rural Illinois on the drive to Wisconsin looked pretty sweet. And it's not like they were ruining any sort of view-- all there was for miles in any direction was flat, boring farmland. If your idea of a view is an infinity of corn, I suppose it could ruin that.
Those things were impressive. Sleek, white, aerodynamic towers-- more like a sports car or an airplane than a factory. Personally, I thought they were nicer to look at than the endless farms.
That's a fair way to look at it as well. But google is a bit schizophrenic in this regard-- there's "what the guys do," and there's "how they make their money." It's the latter that I believe is most properly viewed as their business model.
You could say "google is a company that builds cool software and sells ads as a way to pay for it," just as legitimately as "google is an ad company that builds software as a way to drive ad revenue." But in both cases, their money comes from selling ads. This, at least to my naive engineer eyes, would appear to be the business model.
A-freaking-men. We have a new standard to replace our power-of-two bastardization of the SI prefixes for powers of 10. Just because we've been doing it forever doesn't mean the computer geeks are in the right-- we clearly took an established international standard for the meaning of prefixes and changed it. As dumb as the new prefixes sound to my ears, it's time we stepped up and got used to it.
You'd think that programmers, of all people, would value the clarity of meaning something like this would bring-- but it just goes to show that even those of us who are logical for a living have things we're irrationally attached to.
If their business model is still selling ads, then I don't see much clutter in their model. Everything they've done so far is either to create things people want to look at so they'll see ads, to gather information to to better target ads, and to increase the number of people with access to their ads.
The brilliantly simple and useful software they crank out is just to get us in the door.
The hours cap for residents is 80 hours. It used to be worse, but nobody's gonna argue that they're really down to a sensible number yet. The 80 hours doesn't include things like the regular conferences theey have to attend as part of residency, either-- just the shifts they work. Some of which are as long as 30 hours. (My SO just got off work around noon today. She went in at 5am yesterday. They have to give them a day off after a shift like that, but apparently working until noon counts as "off.")
There have only been guidelines for resident work hours since 2003. 2003. It took that long for somebody to say "wow, 110 hour weeks and 2-day shifts with no sleep is probably bad for the patients AND the doctors." Unfortunately, residents are cheap, and hospitals work them like this to keep costs down.
Depending on which guidelines you're talking about, I'm not sure there's a fine involved, either. The only teeth the rules my SO is under have is that the residency could lose its accreditation. Are you really gonna complain about the hours if it means the program you're in will vanish? There may be some better state/local rules in other places.
The worst part is that the hospitals are fully aware of studies like these. My SO is required to attend "sleep etiquette" classes several times a year that warn them about the dangers of not getting enough sleep and make all sorts of dire threats. And the SAME DAMN PEOPLE then schedule her for 80 hours of work, 30 hour shifts, and the additional weekly hours of meetings that go with the residency. They even tried to suggest that nobody was allowed to drive home after the 30-hour shifts because it was like driving drunk. Yes, it was okay 30 minutes ago for that person to be working in the ER, but they shouldn't drive? That makes sense. And, of course, the hospital had nowhere for all the off-shift docs to sleep.
Blargh. Hospitals are incredibly cheap. So cheap it's killing people.
See if you can find a CVT automatic to test drive somewhere. I've got one in my old Civic HX-- gets fuel economy and performance very close to a manual, because it is slipless. Plus, it weirds everybody out that your car never shifts, your tach stays precisely in your powerband, and it is possible to have the tach moving gradually downward while your speed is moving up.
Thankfully, it's starting to change. There are some caps on what residents can work now. Unfortunately, the caps themselves are still absurd by any realistic standard, but it just goes to show you how bad it really was. When residents (my fiancee is an ER resident) are thankful that the new rules keep things restricted to "just" 80 hours a week, something is wrong. She gets off a 30-hour ER shift today. Keep in mind that the 80 hour cap doesn't include things that aren't "work", like the conferences they have to attend. Even with the 80 hour cap, they can still work well over 80 hours without breaking the rules.
There are two big problems with the rules. (that I can see-- I suspect she knows more) Hospitals have become dependent on cheap 100-hours-a-week residents to do the work. Without additional funding, the hour restrictions mean that the staffing isn't going to cover what it used to.
Additionally, the only teeth the rules have is to take away a residency's accreditation. If you're a resident, and your residency loses that, you're screwed. It's like having your college shut down mid-degree. So if you're being abused under the rules and working 110 hours a week, your options are "report it and possibly lose your residency," or "suck it up."
But seriously-- does anyone really want brand new doctors running on no sleep for whole days treating them? Unfortunately, this is exactly what we have. The fact that we have as few incidents as we do is a testament to the residents.
Since last year, you've been able to pull shows off the Series 2 Tivos. It's an mpeg2 file with a tivo DRM wrapper, although I understand the wrapper is easy to remove. Even without the hackage, it's pretty stinking easy (and supported!) to download shows and watch them on your laptop or iPod on the airplane or whatever.
I'd be surprised if the Series 3 didn't support TivoToGo, but dumber things have happened.
No demo, short of having an actual tivo for a few weeks, is going to get it all across. Too much of the functionality that differentiates it from a VCR just doesn't sink in until you've used it for a while *and tried to switch back*.
Anymore, I find I'd rather not watch TV without a DVR. Somebody else will eventually get the little things down as well as Tivo, and a few companies have features I wish Tivo had (automatic commercial skip, the ability to speed up video) but the Tivo package is still my favorite.
It's the same signal, with audio and DRM, in one cable. You can buy an adapter fairly inexpensively online that will let you plug DVI into HDMI and vice versa.
Here's one for $7. The same shop has them in M-F and F-M, depending on your particular needs.
Must be regional, and if you're still seeing it, they certainly haven't fixed their bug. I've been on a tivo of some sort or another since early 2000, like I said, and have *never* run into the DRM.
Never saw it on comcast, and haven't seen it on DirecTV. It's possible the DTV version of the software doesn't include the DRM stuff at all, although that seems like the sort of thing they would jump to include. They've just been notoriously slow to make software updates to their branch of the Tivo software.
I used to think the same thing, and then in 2000 I won a free 14-hour unit in some online contest back in the crazy days of the web. I didn't even have cable, and it was still the greatest thing since sliced bread.
seen
I still haven't found the right way to explain it to somebody who (like me in 2000) doesn't get it. I think the difficulty of explaining the box is hurting their sales, too.
Suffice it to say it's more reliable than a VCR, 100x easier to program and use, and it's the only piece of my home theatre that my fiancee doesn't think was designed by antisocial engineers specifically to torture her.
I worry about the DRM a bit, but so far, I've never run into it. I understand the flap we saw earlier this year was over a bug-- only PPV shows are supposed to disappear. Because, you know, you have to pay... per... view.
This is a cablecard box. That was a DirecTV box. You'll note that they are not the same thing.
That said, it still seems like "mid to late 2006" is a tad late for something like this, although I believe most of their delay trouble has been wrestling with the cablecard standard.
This box also includes MPEG-4 and WMV support, probably for both downloadable content and futureproofing in case cable companies change codecs away from MPEG-2 as DirecTV has done. That change by DirecTV has obsoleted the HD DirecTivo-- isn't it worth a little extra wait to have one that won't become useless the second your cableco goes MPEG-4?
This box, and their Comcast partnership, should keep them afloat. (crosses fingers)
The Series 3 unit doesn't need or support external tuner boxes. It *is* the cable box now. Two cablecard, two ATSC, and two NTSC tuners cover everything from unencrypted OTA SDTV to encrypted cable ATSC. No more latency since *it* will be changing the channel.
They haven't required a landline since Series 2, and all the previous tivo iterations, including the directv model, have included a short remote-control code to enable 30-second skip.
And to head off the question, yes, even the initial setup on a Series 2 can be done via broadband, but only with *supported* USB ethernet adapters. Wireless can't be enabled until after setup, at least with v3.2. I think v4.0 of the software supports more adapters out-of-the-box, so it depends a little bit on which version you get in the package.
I completely agree. I see this complaint waaaay too often-- it needs a name. There are enough people on slashdot that some subset of them will argue just about any position on a given issue. It's not inconsistency-- it's that not everyone on slashdot is exactly the same person.
I use an HD tuner card I bought used plugged into a PC made out of used parts, and a $15 antenna from radio shack. Works great, but as is always the case with network TV, there's nothing worth watching 98% of the time.
Ah, a farker! I hereby vote for you to win this thread, as well.
Brilliant.