This was going on when I was in high school, 10 years ago. (not that I'm incredibly old, but being ten years behind the curve is spectacular even for slashdot) You could overclock a TI-85 pretty easily, although it wasn't really necessary. The real joy was in installing a hacked ROM through an overflow on the link cable and running games written in Z80 assembly. It was the ultimate time-waster: a gameboy that your teachers allowed in class. TI even caught on later that their overflow bug had become a feature, and built in access to run assembly code on the TI-86.
There were some truly great games written, too. A few (Sqrxz comes to mind) even eventually made the leap to the gameboy.
Is that it routinely gives that "it's good, no, wait... it's bad!" impression to people. Take the studies on the benefits of drinking red wine before you go to bed, for example. Yes, it has benefits. Is alcohol still bad for you in other ways? Yes.
Caffeine seems to have a positive effect on athletic training according to some recent research. Does that mean that the other things it does (diuretic, addiction) have suddenly gone away? No. But the way these studies are reported leads people to believe that only the most recent finding is true, and everything else is false-- when the truth of the matter is that all of the facts are still there.
Everything has ups and downs. Your joke is apt-- the news is terribly guilty of making people believe that research is perpetually changing its mind, when in fact the studies are much more specific and non-contradictory than we are led to believe.
"Will the cable companies work with Tivo to get this going or will they do what another poster said and reverse engineer."
Cable companies are now following a standard. You rent a CableCARD from your cable company, which allows you to decrypt (this is something like $5 a month). This card plugs into your 3rd-party box or television, and allows it to decrypt the content. TV sets are already available with the CableCARD slot.
There was a picture posted yesterday (see partway down the thread) of the back of the new CableCARD tivo at CES, and it had two card slots, indicating that it will support dual-tuner recording from encrypted cable.
Tivo's biggest problem is going to be the confusion they're creating, not decrypting the cable. For a company that designs brilliant, easy-to-use interfaces, they seem to be having a hard time designing brilliant, easy-to-understand plans. They have dual-tuner units, but only on directv. They have tivo-to-go (copy the shows to a PC) but only on non-DVD and non-direcTV units. The DirecTV boxes are slow. There's no HD on standalone units. There's no DVD-burner units for DirecTV. They have all the great features, but you literally can't get them in one unit. Their plans moving forward mention the one thing tivo fans want-- the dual-tuner standalone cablecard tivo, but seem to indicate it's a lower priority than nebulous things like "working with a PC" and the unlikely-to-succeed content downloading/selling. (hint to tivo: everybody and their brother already has pay-per-view-- why would they pay you a monthly fee just to be able to pay you again for your special PPV stuff?) If the new cablecard unit were here today, they'd have a much better chance of not losing subscribers to the vastly improved cable/satellite PVRs we're seeing from other companies.
He's right, but few people in *computers* use it that way, so you're sorta right, too. Spatial resolution, temporal resolution, effective resolution (like how if your dot pitch isn't small enough, you may not actually be seeing 1600x1200 pixels when you tell your CRT to do it), differing chrominance and luminance resolutions, or the more traditional optical usage that means something like "how small an object we can discern as a separate object" etc... all confuse the issue.
You're right. I can't imagine what it would be like if, say, the government started delivering packages in competition with UPS and FedEx.
I imagine the whole system would collapse and nothing would ever get delivered.
Oh, wait...
Sarcasm aside, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. At the moment, the ILECs are corrupt enough by themselves that it doesn't matter what quarter the competition comes from-- it would be hard to make it worse. I'm all for private competition, but since regulation is heavily restricting colocation by DSL companies like Covad (who does own their own network, and just needs colo for last-mile), there isn't a lot of room for it.
The regulations should be fixed, but I don't mind the government dropping some broadband in. The more the merrier.
You're right-- tivos have had network access via a USB ethernet adapter for several years now.
The directv tivos don't need the phone line plugged in at all after initial setup, unless you do a lot of Pay Per View. It gets the guide data directly from the satellite-- mine has been unplugged for months since I moved. It does suck that DirecTV cripples their tivos, though. It's a crappy choice to make right now:
Dual-tuner, dvd burning, tivo-to-go, HD: pick one. Although, to be strictly true, the HD unit does have dual tuners. It also costs $800.
The SSID will still be broadcast during communication between the computers and the base station. I have a neighbor who is "secured" like this. Windows XP occasionally prompts me to see if I want to connect, which means he's using his internet connection. If I copy down the SSID, I can reconnect later without trouble even though he is no longer doing anything that causes the SSID to be transmitted.
1080p is fairly common now in LCDs, both in the direct-view ("flat panel") and rear-projection variety. LCD is a progressive technology by nature, so any native 1080i LCD set is actually a 1080p display. Whether they bothered to include hardware to process a 1080p input signal is another matter.
DLP is just starting to get to 1080. CRT rear-projection sets typically support 1080i, but due to the size of the phosphors on the tubes, most of the sets can't really resolve 1920x1080i. (The phosphors are larger than the pixels we're trying to represent)
Where does one find these mythical 12v DC sockets in an airplane? I have travelled pretty regularly inside the US for work (coach, of course-- my company is cheap) and have yet to ever spot an outlet of any sort, on any plane, on any airline. Hell, I've been toying with trying to see how much current I could coax out of the headphone jack, but I doubt it's worth doing.
How about just "keep your damn arms in your own seat?" I don't care if you bring a 15" or 17" laptop with you, as long as you're willing to deal with the fact that you don't get to type comfortably, and that there will be no "elbow easement" into my ribcage to accomodate you.
That was a bit harsher than I intended. You make excellent points all over this article, and I hate to see somebody bogged down arguing over a freaking definition rather than discussing actual issues.
Especially when you're both using valid terms for the same thing.
Don't be dense. You kids are arguing over a definition. "Ground-loop geothermal" is the correct term for what he is referring to. A heat pump with a pipe that circulates water underground to take advantage of the nice, constant temp down there.
This may have changed since you first learned what the word "geothermal" meant, but a quick google would have prevented the confusion.
You misunderstood me, I think. Sorry if I wasn't clearer. What I was saying about the california windfarm I saw was that there is plenty of land where windmills aren't going to be an eyesore issue. It was just an example of a good place to put one.
My only point is that there ARE good places to put them. I didn't mean to sound like I was suggesting building them where there isn't wind, and where the land's value far outweighs the windmill's usefulness. San Francisco is obviously not a good place. The sprawling parking lot for a midwestern stripmall might be... as would farms in wisconsin where the windmills don't impair the current use of the land.
This is true, but if we didn't need anything they had, we could just pack the fuck up and not care whether they hate us or not.
Factoring in the cost of keeping troops in the region indefinitely only makes good, practical sense when evaluating our energy options. To do otherwise is to be the idiot who buys "cheaper" things online that cost more after you add in shipping.
I won't even pretend to know what all the actual numbers are, or which way works out cheaper-- but to ignore actual costs is foolish.
Hey-- there's always a need for cheap housing. Not everybody can afford to live on land with a view, and I've seen some FAR uglier locales than used-to-be-farmland suburbs with windmills could ever be.
On top of that, preferences differ. I suspect a windfarm could probably be sold as a scenic plus to the "modern" house aficionado.
Large, slow windmills are not a problem for bird populations. I gather from the prevalence of this that most people have never seen a new commercial windfarm-- the blades turn so slowly that there are sometimes birds *sitting on the blades* when I drive by on the way to my relatives' place in wisconsin. They're not a spinning semitransparent blur like an airplane propeller. I'm sure by now plenty of other slashdotters have posted with links to studies showing this, but I'll leave you to find them on your own.
That's a reasonable point, if it's true. I was thinking only from a "physically possible" standpoint. Additionally, the housing value of property under windmills would probably not be terribly high-- but there is a large market for low-end housing.
It doesn't change the viability of using farmland or desert, though.
Ugly is all relative. I certainly wouldn't put them all over the grand canyon.... but there's plenty of farmland that could handle a windmill or two. And i can think of some huge, barren expanses of stripmall asphalt wasteland in sprawling midwestern shopping centers that could hold more than a few.
How much uglier can a couple of sleek windmills make your local low-rent stripmall parking lot? And there's no need to pave access roads for maintenance if you're building in the middle of a sea of pavement.
I suspect you could even design an office park in a low-wind area with buildings carefully placed to concentrate the wind on a few well-placed windmills. If anyone's ever had to lean into the wind under the Math building at Purdue, you know the effect I'm referring to.
Why do "nuke nuts" get so into nuclear power that they fail to see how a mixed power system is more practical?
I love nuclear power. But I don't see why nuke plants should keep us from putting solar shingles on our rooftops-- so what if they only make 50% of the power you need, and only during the day? It's just that much less load on the nuke plants. At the very least, it would soften the peak load from my air conditioner in the summer daytime.
And why not stick a few windmills in the middle of farmland? Indiana farmland is like a giant, flat, patchwork quilt. It's not the sort of grand scenery you'd mind a windmill in the middle of, and you can farm around the poles just fine.
Why can't anybody take a moderate, practical look at things and realize that both solutions *together* are our most likely bet to get out of the coal and oil dependency?
Nobody's going to survive on windmills alone just yet. But why not use them where it's practical?
Have you ever seen a commercial windfarm? The blades are enormous, slow, and waaaay above the ground. The "base of the pole" is relatively small. You could build houses among them without difficulty-- and at least in the midwest, they are typically built in farmland that still functions as farmland. The single windfarm I've seen in california was built in what was clearly middle-of-nowhere desert. The only other thing I saw near it was a parking lot/graveyard for unused commercial airplanes.
Generally, windmills are a way to make the land do something extra, rather than less than it is capable of.
Of course, there's always the offshore farms, too-- and that's even better. The plans for the farm off the coast of new york puts them far enough out you can't see them from land. They're gigantic, so complaints about "hazards to navigation" fall a little flat-- if the boat's captain can't avoid a ginormous windmill, how does he expect to navigate around invisible sandbars and shallow areas?
All that said, I'd love to see working fusion, too, and have nothing against well-run fission plants-- but why not put windmills on farmland or desert? Or even housing editions in the suburbs? The space is there, and adding windmills to the average middle-of-nowhere midwestern farm does very little to its farming output.
I always thought it was supposed to refer to "things so new they don't work properly." Which, given the bug reports (stuttering, crashing) for HL2 and the hoop-jumping required and general lukewarm success in running it on linux make the phrase seem like a better fit.
This would seem to confirm that definition, but wikipedia isn't exactly the most authoritative source in the universe.
Perhaps rich, angry DVD fans will succeed where angry slashdot DVD fans fail. I suspect that anyone who can afford a $27,000 DVD player has more clout than 27,000 nerds when it comes to getting this mess straightened out in court.
Slashdot Mirror
This was going on when I was in high school, 10 years ago. (not that I'm incredibly old, but being ten years behind the curve is spectacular even for slashdot) You could overclock a TI-85 pretty easily, although it wasn't really necessary. The real joy was in installing a hacked ROM through an overflow on the link cable and running games written in Z80 assembly. It was the ultimate time-waster: a gameboy that your teachers allowed in class. TI even caught on later that their overflow bug had become a feature, and built in access to run assembly code on the TI-86.
There were some truly great games written, too. A few (Sqrxz comes to mind) even eventually made the leap to the gameboy.
Is that it routinely gives that "it's good, no, wait... it's bad!" impression to people. Take the studies on the benefits of drinking red wine before you go to bed, for example. Yes, it has benefits. Is alcohol still bad for you in other ways? Yes.
Caffeine seems to have a positive effect on athletic training according to some recent research. Does that mean that the other things it does (diuretic, addiction) have suddenly gone away? No. But the way these studies are reported leads people to believe that only the most recent finding is true, and everything else is false-- when the truth of the matter is that all of the facts are still there.
Everything has ups and downs. Your joke is apt-- the news is terribly guilty of making people believe that research is perpetually changing its mind, when in fact the studies are much more specific and non-contradictory than we are led to believe.
Cable companies are now following a standard. You rent a CableCARD from your cable company, which allows you to decrypt (this is something like $5 a month). This card plugs into your 3rd-party box or television, and allows it to decrypt the content. TV sets are already available with the CableCARD slot.
There was a picture posted yesterday (see partway down the thread) of the back of the new CableCARD tivo at CES, and it had two card slots, indicating that it will support dual-tuner recording from encrypted cable.
Tivo's biggest problem is going to be the confusion they're creating, not decrypting the cable. For a company that designs brilliant, easy-to-use interfaces, they seem to be having a hard time designing brilliant, easy-to-understand plans. They have dual-tuner units, but only on directv. They have tivo-to-go (copy the shows to a PC) but only on non-DVD and non-direcTV units. The DirecTV boxes are slow. There's no HD on standalone units. There's no DVD-burner units for DirecTV. They have all the great features, but you literally can't get them in one unit. Their plans moving forward mention the one thing tivo fans want-- the dual-tuner standalone cablecard tivo, but seem to indicate it's a lower priority than nebulous things like "working with a PC" and the unlikely-to-succeed content downloading/selling. (hint to tivo: everybody and their brother already has pay-per-view-- why would they pay you a monthly fee just to be able to pay you again for your special PPV stuff?) If the new cablecard unit were here today, they'd have a much better chance of not losing subscribers to the vastly improved cable/satellite PVRs we're seeing from other companies.
Are you suggesting that there aren't enough lying, controlling bitches in mainstream religions already?
He's right, but few people in *computers* use it that way, so you're sorta right, too. Spatial resolution, temporal resolution, effective resolution (like how if your dot pitch isn't small enough, you may not actually be seeing 1600x1200 pixels when you tell your CRT to do it), differing chrominance and luminance resolutions, or the more traditional optical usage that means something like "how small an object we can discern as a separate object" etc... all confuse the issue.
You're right. I can't imagine what it would be like if, say, the government started delivering packages in competition with UPS and FedEx.
I imagine the whole system would collapse and nothing would ever get delivered.
Oh, wait...
Sarcasm aside, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. At the moment, the ILECs are corrupt enough by themselves that it doesn't matter what quarter the competition comes from-- it would be hard to make it worse. I'm all for private competition, but since regulation is heavily restricting colocation by DSL companies like Covad (who does own their own network, and just needs colo for last-mile), there isn't a lot of room for it.
The regulations should be fixed, but I don't mind the government dropping some broadband in. The more the merrier.
You're right-- tivos have had network access via a USB ethernet adapter for several years now.
The directv tivos don't need the phone line plugged in at all after initial setup, unless you do a lot of Pay Per View. It gets the guide data directly from the satellite-- mine has been unplugged for months since I moved. It does suck that DirecTV cripples their tivos, though. It's a crappy choice to make right now:
Dual-tuner, dvd burning, tivo-to-go, HD: pick one. Although, to be strictly true, the HD unit does have dual tuners. It also costs $800.
The SSID will still be broadcast during communication between the computers and the base station. I have a neighbor who is "secured" like this. Windows XP occasionally prompts me to see if I want to connect, which means he's using his internet connection. If I copy down the SSID, I can reconnect later without trouble even though he is no longer doing anything that causes the SSID to be transmitted.
1080p is fairly common now in LCDs, both in the direct-view ("flat panel") and rear-projection variety. LCD is a progressive technology by nature, so any native 1080i LCD set is actually a 1080p display. Whether they bothered to include hardware to process a 1080p input signal is another matter.
DLP is just starting to get to 1080. CRT rear-projection sets typically support 1080i, but due to the size of the phosphors on the tubes, most of the sets can't really resolve 1920x1080i. (The phosphors are larger than the pixels we're trying to represent)
Fair enough. But Beyond Good & Evil is a reasonable approximation of the Zelda gameplay and puzzles. If you like Zelda, you'll probably like it.
It took me a while to realize it while playing the game, but it is almost entirely an homage to Zelda redone in a sci-fi setting.
Where does one find these mythical 12v DC sockets in an airplane? I have travelled pretty regularly inside the US for work (coach, of course-- my company is cheap) and have yet to ever spot an outlet of any sort, on any plane, on any airline. Hell, I've been toying with trying to see how much current I could coax out of the headphone jack, but I doubt it's worth doing.
How about just "keep your damn arms in your own seat?" I don't care if you bring a 15" or 17" laptop with you, as long as you're willing to deal with the fact that you don't get to type comfortably, and that there will be no "elbow easement" into my ribcage to accomodate you.
That was a bit harsher than I intended. You make excellent points all over this article, and I hate to see somebody bogged down arguing over a freaking definition rather than discussing actual issues.
Especially when you're both using valid terms for the same thing.
Don't be dense. You kids are arguing over a definition. "Ground-loop geothermal" is the correct term for what he is referring to. A heat pump with a pipe that circulates water underground to take advantage of the nice, constant temp down there.
This may have changed since you first learned what the word "geothermal" meant, but a quick google would have prevented the confusion.
Thank you, I think.
You misunderstood me, I think. Sorry if I wasn't clearer. What I was saying about the california windfarm I saw was that there is plenty of land where windmills aren't going to be an eyesore issue. It was just an example of a good place to put one.
My only point is that there ARE good places to put them. I didn't mean to sound like I was suggesting building them where there isn't wind, and where the land's value far outweighs the windmill's usefulness. San Francisco is obviously not a good place. The sprawling parking lot for a midwestern stripmall might be... as would farms in wisconsin where the windmills don't impair the current use of the land.
This is true, but if we didn't need anything they had, we could just pack the fuck up and not care whether they hate us or not.
Factoring in the cost of keeping troops in the region indefinitely only makes good, practical sense when evaluating our energy options. To do otherwise is to be the idiot who buys "cheaper" things online that cost more after you add in shipping.
I won't even pretend to know what all the actual numbers are, or which way works out cheaper-- but to ignore actual costs is foolish.
Someone give this man a job in charge of windmill placement. Quickly.
Hey-- there's always a need for cheap housing. Not everybody can afford to live on land with a view, and I've seen some FAR uglier locales than used-to-be-farmland suburbs with windmills could ever be.
On top of that, preferences differ. I suspect a windfarm could probably be sold as a scenic plus to the "modern" house aficionado.
Large, slow windmills are not a problem for bird populations. I gather from the prevalence of this that most people have never seen a new commercial windfarm-- the blades turn so slowly that there are sometimes birds *sitting on the blades* when I drive by on the way to my relatives' place in wisconsin. They're not a spinning semitransparent blur like an airplane propeller. I'm sure by now plenty of other slashdotters have posted with links to studies showing this, but I'll leave you to find them on your own.
That's a reasonable point, if it's true. I was thinking only from a "physically possible" standpoint. Additionally, the housing value of property under windmills would probably not be terribly high-- but there is a large market for low-end housing.
It doesn't change the viability of using farmland or desert, though.
Ugly is all relative. I certainly wouldn't put them all over the grand canyon.... but there's plenty of farmland that could handle a windmill or two. And i can think of some huge, barren expanses of stripmall asphalt wasteland in sprawling midwestern shopping centers that could hold more than a few.
How much uglier can a couple of sleek windmills make your local low-rent stripmall parking lot? And there's no need to pave access roads for maintenance if you're building in the middle of a sea of pavement.
I suspect you could even design an office park in a low-wind area with buildings carefully placed to concentrate the wind on a few well-placed windmills. If anyone's ever had to lean into the wind under the Math building at Purdue, you know the effect I'm referring to.
Why do "nuke nuts" get so into nuclear power that they fail to see how a mixed power system is more practical?
I love nuclear power. But I don't see why nuke plants should keep us from putting solar shingles on our rooftops-- so what if they only make 50% of the power you need, and only during the day? It's just that much less load on the nuke plants. At the very least, it would soften the peak load from my air conditioner in the summer daytime.
And why not stick a few windmills in the middle of farmland? Indiana farmland is like a giant, flat, patchwork quilt. It's not the sort of grand scenery you'd mind a windmill in the middle of, and you can farm around the poles just fine.
Why can't anybody take a moderate, practical look at things and realize that both solutions *together* are our most likely bet to get out of the coal and oil dependency?
Nobody's going to survive on windmills alone just yet. But why not use them where it's practical?
Have you ever seen a commercial windfarm? The blades are enormous, slow, and waaaay above the ground. The "base of the pole" is relatively small. You could build houses among them without difficulty-- and at least in the midwest, they are typically built in farmland that still functions as farmland. The single windfarm I've seen in california was built in what was clearly middle-of-nowhere desert. The only other thing I saw near it was a parking lot/graveyard for unused commercial airplanes.
Generally, windmills are a way to make the land do something extra, rather than less than it is capable of.
Of course, there's always the offshore farms, too-- and that's even better. The plans for the farm off the coast of new york puts them far enough out you can't see them from land. They're gigantic, so complaints about "hazards to navigation" fall a little flat-- if the boat's captain can't avoid a ginormous windmill, how does he expect to navigate around invisible sandbars and shallow areas?
All that said, I'd love to see working fusion, too, and have nothing against well-run fission plants-- but why not put windmills on farmland or desert? Or even housing editions in the suburbs? The space is there, and adding windmills to the average middle-of-nowhere midwestern farm does very little to its farming output.
I always thought it was supposed to refer to "things so new they don't work properly." Which, given the bug reports (stuttering, crashing) for HL2 and the hoop-jumping required and general lukewarm success in running it on linux make the phrase seem like a better fit.
This would seem to confirm that definition, but wikipedia isn't exactly the most authoritative source in the universe.
Perhaps rich, angry DVD fans will succeed where angry slashdot DVD fans fail. I suspect that anyone who can afford a $27,000 DVD player has more clout than 27,000 nerds when it comes to getting this mess straightened out in court.