Aye, I'm one of those. I bought a 15" MBP a couple of years ago, and I'm happy Apple don't try to cram more pixels in to the display, even if it's not really big enough in the Y-axis for a lot of things. I looked at the 17" model as it supports the HD 1080 resolution, but found everything too small.
My Dell M60 laptop at work that I got in 2004 had an usable display. I'd run it about half resolution (1280x900 or something), which was the right dimensions, but looked absolutely abysmal. My newer Dell M6300 is a monster, and I can run it at it's native 1920x1200... with the large fonts configured (120DPI I guess). It really buggers up a lot of applications, things like labels on dialogs clipped. The web though is fine though in any browser I've tried. I'm stuck on Windows XP too. It comes down to most developers don't follow the UI guidelines properly, nor do any testing in this area.
I was getting quite a lot of G.DMT connection (not ADSL2+) for $25 from Teksavvy.com when I when I moved to China two years ago. It looks to me like prices have gone up to $30 speeds down from 6mbs to 5mbs. At least they still offer dry loop DSL. Here in the UK one is required to have a phone line (BT charges about £10-15) before evening paying for the internet connection (£25 - expensive compared to Canada even after the crash of GBP), and only getting 6mbs/448kbs (yes that upstream is killing me). Once my year contract is up I will hopefully find a better deal.
That sounds like a waste of money. I think the country would benefit more by spending that money on education, or more preventative health care. Or just paying the interest on Gordon Brown's debts.
Never had trouble getting a second phone line installed anywhere I lived in Canada. They'd just hook it up at the pole, and sometimes run a second line (4 wires) from the pole to the house if the existing run wasn't good enough. Then again, DSL in Canada was cheaper in 1999 than when I was living in Australia last year... maybe it's just typical Telestra BS. They have spare lines to the exchange, but maybe not enough for every house in a neighbourhood to have two or more lines.
Is this picture genuine? I'm inclined to think not. Having lived in Shanghai for a while, I can attest to a culture of after lunch naps in China, in an office where software engineers earn many times as much. I was quite surprised the first time I came back to the office after lunch, to find people strewn across their desks, or heads back on chairs. I was looking for our QA Lead one day and thought maybe he was off on holiday. No: he was snoozing on something like a yoga matt under the desk of an empty cubicle at the back of the office.
You know whether you have active 3D or not because the for active, the glasses need a power supply (i.e. they need to be recharged occasionally, and turned on/off). Active 3D generally means shuttering (the glasses are synced with the video display and alternatively block the view through to each eye. Passive 3D generally uses polarisation or displays that require you to be in one of several very specific viewing positions. You probably know this if you work in a store.
You don't get to specify the screen's parameters too much when you're playing back a BD. You might specify 60Hz, but if the content is 23.976Hz (or even true 24p), then that's what you'll get. This is better than the player's decoder faffing around doing 3:2 pull down, etc, or trying to change the speed of the audio. Your settings will presumably be used for the player's setup menus, etc, but not during playback. If you only have a 720p screen, then I guess there will be some scaling and maybe de-interlacing applied, but that is different to trying to change the frequency.
Do HDMI 1.4 cables have different connectors/pins, or is it just that one is guaranteed to work at a higher rate? If the latter, then I don't doubt that shorter HDMI 1.3 cables will suffice.
What was your source of the 3D content? Were you actually showing 3D content at the time? Is it a passive or active screen? Active 3D content is actually going at 120Hz (60Hz to each eye) for 1080p@60 (i.e. the display's info might have been accurate in a sense.)
Don't forget that the PS3 only has an HDMI 1.3 connector, not an HDMI 1.4. That means that at best, the 3D experience will have 1080i to each eye. Maybe 720p was a good compromise.
There's an argument that the likes of Britain stopped the war too soon to prevent the US gaining too much global influence. If in fact the war had gone longer to defeat Germany properly that they wouldn't have suffered in the same way. Of course, US gained their advantage after WW2, leaving Britain bankrupt and losing their empire.
Actual bank security in Canada is pretty pathetic though, and I should know as I've been a victim of identity and had my bank accounts compromised, TFSA cleaned out and nearly $10,000 of RRSPs redeemed. MBNA Canada allowed somebody to change the address on the account, and requested a new card and PIN based on just knowing my DoB. HSBC Canada allowed somebody to change the record of my mother's maiden name to lock me out - that's something that doesn't change by definition! Sears Canada will issue you a credit that you can use that day in store without doing any background checks (they would have found a Fraud Victim warning if they'd called Transunion or Equifax). As will HBC and Home Depot it seems. Somebody was even bold enough to call my bank and ask for my manager by name... they were caught out because they had the wrong accent (I hadn't lost my British accent after nearly 15 years in N. America) - other banks where you don't know the account manager would have let them get away with it.
I've just moved to London (UK, not Ontario), and found bank security way higher. About every third time I use my credit card, it gets blocked and they call me. Every transaction with the bank online or the phone requires knowing random numbers from my security code. Contrast that to the process with my new ATM card mailed to me from Canada - when I called (via Skype) to setup internet banking as it uses the bank card, no security questions, but they did ask me contact details, what my new security questions should be, etc, which if my mail was compromised meant somebody could regained faudulent access to my accounts. There were times in Canada when I called banks or credit card companies and couldn't remember the info they wanted for security, and I just blagged my way through it. Pathetic.
Interac was ahead of the curve in the early 90s. It's not without problems - several times a year I'd get a call from my bank saying that my PIN was compromised and needed to go to a branch to change it. Apparently Interac terminals are frequently used fraudelently. The rest of the world has been moving to chip+pin for a decade, and it's time Canada caught up and abandoned Interac. I was asked for a PIN in India recently when I tried to use my UK credit card... Canadian merchants will still insist on a signature that they don't even bother to look at. So what if Visa offer me fraud protection... I'd rather not the time on the phone dealing with it.
They could do what they do in many places in Europe: paint a circle in the road that people can drive over, and put yield signs/lines at the "intersection".
Traffic reduction is a very good idea too. No reason why you can't aim for both.
And now the optometrists are jumping on the bandwagon by stirring up people's doubts about their vision. Some the stories they've been pushing about the miracle some people have experienced since "learning to see in 3D" is nauseating.
I can attest to this. Watching Channel 4's video on demand (TV catch-up service) is impossible on my 2008 MBP running OS X 10.6 due to dropped frames, etc. Fire up a Windows Vista virtual machine in VM Fusion and try there instead, and it is perfectly watchable.
The BBC iPlayer also became unwatchable about September or October last year on OS X 10.5. I don't know if that's still the case as I switched to watching on my PS3 instead. Now I just have to put up with sound of a jet engine in the background:P
They have Java ranked as the number one language in 2000. Maybe the number language for discussion, but I remember there being a relatively tiny number of jobs... the majority were C or C++, and I would say that C++ was the main language for anything started in the previous five years. Java was barely out the gates in 2000, four years after all the (over-)hype about applets in the browser (a Pentium 75 for instance could barely run a Java applet in Netscape). Java was mostly an academic language that didn't feature in the real world.
So no, these rankings are incredible shite if you want to use them as a basis for directing your career.
And how is that different to say Formula 1? All the high speed cars have little to do with the real world where we have speed limits, imperfect road surfaces and require time to react to pedestrians as we come around blind corners.
Seems good to me for archiving photos. BDREs and BDRs take up less shelf space than hard drives. I came back from an 18 day trip over Christmas to Asia with 25GB of photos (after deleting 1,100 too!). Easy to make a couple of copies and leave one of them at my parents house. I'm happy to spend a couple of quid a disc for that, and they're getting cheaper too.
What is it with this government and trying to...
on
UK Space Agency Launched
·
· Score: 0, Troll
... bankrupt us? They spent nearly a billion pounds reorganisng and creating agencies in the last few years, many of which don't even exist any more. Then they try to deflect attention by blaming the bankers for the recession when it was their own policies of raising both spending and taxes and running a deficit when the economy was at its peak that is the real cause of our pain. Their "quantitative easing" means the Bank of England has delete 200 billion pounds from its accounts at some point. I don't even want to know how much we're paying just in interest servicing Gordon Brown's debts.
Space Agency my arse. What a waste of money at a time when we can least afford it. What a nepotistic racket these guys are running.
I heard back when the big three started suffering for this most recent recession that they had costs of $2,000 per car compared with their foreign competitors from countries where the government provides healthcare.
Re:Health care: break the MD cartel
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 4, Informative
In 1999, administration cost $1,059 per capita in the US, versus $307 per capita in Canada, per New England Journal of Medicine. So much for private businesses being better than the government. I've lived in Cyprus, UK, Canada, USA, Australia and China, and my experience, the UK has the most encompassing system, and Canada (Ontario at least) the most proactive and efficient. I totally hated the American system, and I can't say I'm much of a fan of what I saw in Melbourne. China was great as an expat because it was so bloody affordable, but that's not what we're discussing here.
Actually I'd argue that the accursed cheap electronics are that way because they were developed in Asia. They're not showing mm-dd-yyyy with the year missing, but rather yyyy-mm-dd with the year missing.
Still bloody annoying and confusing for everywhere else in the world.
The US system is dreadful for chronological sorting. It only holds up if you don't go past 31st Dec, and then in time you end up with a bloody mess that is hard to sift through, which is only marginally better than dd-mm-yyyy.
Who said anything about the US? They don't have "chequing" accounts - they don't know how to spell the "cheque" properly. With BIC/IBAN, and can make a guess at where you bank is. With some information required for setting up DD (e.g. address) I'm already part of the way there. And yes, I expect Visa to have better protection on their database than other smaller companies whose core business isn't financial. Loss of faith in their security will wipe them out... do you think the gym for instance keeps as good tabs on their customer records (I could probably just walk in to their back office when nobody's looking). My experience of identity theft has shown people willing to use social engineering, and be very aggressive and confident about it. Humans, as always, end up being the weakest link.
I don't like giving my bank details to anyone. Even Visa's database has been hacked over the years, so do you expect any old company to be able to protect your data? I've been a victim of identity and fraud. At one point when the fraudsters were having trouble accessing my accounts via telephone banking, they somehow managed to find the name of my account manager and called the bank asking for her by name! She was alerted because she knows me and she realised they had the wrong accent, even though they could answer her other questions. Even so, they managed to redeem part of my pension in to my chequing account and transfer out nearly $10,000. Talk about a headache for me resolving it. No idea where they got that much information about me from.
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Aye, I'm one of those. I bought a 15" MBP a couple of years ago, and I'm happy Apple don't try to cram more pixels in to the display, even if it's not really big enough in the Y-axis for a lot of things. I looked at the 17" model as it supports the HD 1080 resolution, but found everything too small.
My Dell M60 laptop at work that I got in 2004 had an usable display. I'd run it about half resolution (1280x900 or something), which was the right dimensions, but looked absolutely abysmal. My newer Dell M6300 is a monster, and I can run it at it's native 1920x1200... with the large fonts configured (120DPI I guess). It really buggers up a lot of applications, things like labels on dialogs clipped. The web though is fine though in any browser I've tried. I'm stuck on Windows XP too. It comes down to most developers don't follow the UI guidelines properly, nor do any testing in this area.
I was getting quite a lot of G.DMT connection (not ADSL2+) for $25 from Teksavvy.com when I when I moved to China two years ago. It looks to me like prices have gone up to $30 speeds down from 6mbs to 5mbs. At least they still offer dry loop DSL. Here in the UK one is required to have a phone line (BT charges about £10-15) before evening paying for the internet connection (£25 - expensive compared to Canada even after the crash of GBP), and only getting 6mbs/448kbs (yes that upstream is killing me). Once my year contract is up I will hopefully find a better deal.
That sounds like a waste of money. I think the country would benefit more by spending that money on education, or more preventative health care. Or just paying the interest on Gordon Brown's debts.
Never had trouble getting a second phone line installed anywhere I lived in Canada. They'd just hook it up at the pole, and sometimes run a second line (4 wires) from the pole to the house if the existing run wasn't good enough. Then again, DSL in Canada was cheaper in 1999 than when I was living in Australia last year... maybe it's just typical Telestra BS. They have spare lines to the exchange, but maybe not enough for every house in a neighbourhood to have two or more lines.
Is this picture genuine? I'm inclined to think not. Having lived in Shanghai for a while, I can attest to a culture of after lunch naps in China, in an office where software engineers earn many times as much. I was quite surprised the first time I came back to the office after lunch, to find people strewn across their desks, or heads back on chairs. I was looking for our QA Lead one day and thought maybe he was off on holiday. No: he was snoozing on something like a yoga matt under the desk of an empty cubicle at the back of the office.
Really, don't trust the Daily Mail.
You know whether you have active 3D or not because the for active, the glasses need a power supply (i.e. they need to be recharged occasionally, and turned on/off). Active 3D generally means shuttering (the glasses are synced with the video display and alternatively block the view through to each eye. Passive 3D generally uses polarisation or displays that require you to be in one of several very specific viewing positions. You probably know this if you work in a store.
You don't get to specify the screen's parameters too much when you're playing back a BD. You might specify 60Hz, but if the content is 23.976Hz (or even true 24p), then that's what you'll get. This is better than the player's decoder faffing around doing 3:2 pull down, etc, or trying to change the speed of the audio. Your settings will presumably be used for the player's setup menus, etc, but not during playback. If you only have a 720p screen, then I guess there will be some scaling and maybe de-interlacing applied, but that is different to trying to change the frequency.
Do HDMI 1.4 cables have different connectors/pins, or is it just that one is guaranteed to work at a higher rate? If the latter, then I don't doubt that shorter HDMI 1.3 cables will suffice.
What was your source of the 3D content? Were you actually showing 3D content at the time? Is it a passive or active screen? Active 3D content is actually going at 120Hz (60Hz to each eye) for 1080p@60 (i.e. the display's info might have been accurate in a sense.)
Don't forget that the PS3 only has an HDMI 1.3 connector, not an HDMI 1.4. That means that at best, the 3D experience will have 1080i to each eye. Maybe 720p was a good compromise.
There's an argument that the likes of Britain stopped the war too soon to prevent the US gaining too much global influence. If in fact the war had gone longer to defeat Germany properly that they wouldn't have suffered in the same way. Of course, US gained their advantage after WW2, leaving Britain bankrupt and losing their empire.
Actual bank security in Canada is pretty pathetic though, and I should know as I've been a victim of identity and had my bank accounts compromised, TFSA cleaned out and nearly $10,000 of RRSPs redeemed. MBNA Canada allowed somebody to change the address on the account, and requested a new card and PIN based on just knowing my DoB. HSBC Canada allowed somebody to change the record of my mother's maiden name to lock me out - that's something that doesn't change by definition! Sears Canada will issue you a credit that you can use that day in store without doing any background checks (they would have found a Fraud Victim warning if they'd called Transunion or Equifax). As will HBC and Home Depot it seems. Somebody was even bold enough to call my bank and ask for my manager by name... they were caught out because they had the wrong accent (I hadn't lost my British accent after nearly 15 years in N. America) - other banks where you don't know the account manager would have let them get away with it.
I've just moved to London (UK, not Ontario), and found bank security way higher. About every third time I use my credit card, it gets blocked and they call me. Every transaction with the bank online or the phone requires knowing random numbers from my security code. Contrast that to the process with my new ATM card mailed to me from Canada - when I called (via Skype) to setup internet banking as it uses the bank card, no security questions, but they did ask me contact details, what my new security questions should be, etc, which if my mail was compromised meant somebody could regained faudulent access to my accounts. There were times in Canada when I called banks or credit card companies and couldn't remember the info they wanted for security, and I just blagged my way through it. Pathetic.
Interac was ahead of the curve in the early 90s. It's not without problems - several times a year I'd get a call from my bank saying that my PIN was compromised and needed to go to a branch to change it. Apparently Interac terminals are frequently used fraudelently. The rest of the world has been moving to chip+pin for a decade, and it's time Canada caught up and abandoned Interac. I was asked for a PIN in India recently when I tried to use my UK credit card... Canadian merchants will still insist on a signature that they don't even bother to look at. So what if Visa offer me fraud protection... I'd rather not the time on the phone dealing with it.
They could do what they do in many places in Europe: paint a circle in the road that people can drive over, and put yield signs/lines at the "intersection".
Traffic reduction is a very good idea too. No reason why you can't aim for both.
You guys need roundabouts. They keep the traffic flowing.
And now the optometrists are jumping on the bandwagon by stirring up people's doubts about their vision. Some the stories they've been pushing about the miracle some people have experienced since "learning to see in 3D" is nauseating.
I can attest to this. Watching Channel 4's video on demand (TV catch-up service) is impossible on my 2008 MBP running OS X 10.6 due to dropped frames, etc. Fire up a Windows Vista virtual machine in VM Fusion and try there instead, and it is perfectly watchable.
The BBC iPlayer also became unwatchable about September or October last year on OS X 10.5. I don't know if that's still the case as I switched to watching on my PS3 instead. Now I just have to put up with sound of a jet engine in the background :P
They have Java ranked as the number one language in 2000. Maybe the number language for discussion, but I remember there being a relatively tiny number of jobs... the majority were C or C++, and I would say that C++ was the main language for anything started in the previous five years. Java was barely out the gates in 2000, four years after all the (over-)hype about applets in the browser (a Pentium 75 for instance could barely run a Java applet in Netscape). Java was mostly an academic language that didn't feature in the real world.
So no, these rankings are incredible shite if you want to use them as a basis for directing your career.
And how is that different to say Formula 1? All the high speed cars have little to do with the real world where we have speed limits, imperfect road surfaces and require time to react to pedestrians as we come around blind corners.
Seems good to me for archiving photos. BDREs and BDRs take up less shelf space than hard drives. I came back from an 18 day trip over Christmas to Asia with 25GB of photos (after deleting 1,100 too!). Easy to make a couple of copies and leave one of them at my parents house. I'm happy to spend a couple of quid a disc for that, and they're getting cheaper too.
... bankrupt us? They spent nearly a billion pounds reorganisng and creating agencies in the last few years, many of which don't even exist any more. Then they try to deflect attention by blaming the bankers for the recession when it was their own policies of raising both spending and taxes and running a deficit when the economy was at its peak that is the real cause of our pain. Their "quantitative easing" means the Bank of England has delete 200 billion pounds from its accounts at some point. I don't even want to know how much we're paying just in interest servicing Gordon Brown's debts.
Space Agency my arse. What a waste of money at a time when we can least afford it. What a nepotistic racket these guys are running.
How much is healthcare already costing employers?
I heard back when the big three started suffering for this most recent recession that they had costs of $2,000 per car compared with their foreign competitors from countries where the government provides healthcare.
In 1999, administration cost $1,059 per capita in the US, versus $307 per capita in Canada, per New England Journal of Medicine. So much for private businesses being better than the government. I've lived in Cyprus, UK, Canada, USA, Australia and China, and my experience, the UK has the most encompassing system, and Canada (Ontario at least) the most proactive and efficient. I totally hated the American system, and I can't say I'm much of a fan of what I saw in Melbourne. China was great as an expat because it was so bloody affordable, but that's not what we're discussing here.
I think that 22nd July is more appropriate because we can only ever approximate pi anyway.
Actually I'd argue that the accursed cheap electronics are that way because they were developed in Asia. They're not showing mm-dd-yyyy with the year missing, but rather yyyy-mm-dd with the year missing.
Still bloody annoying and confusing for everywhere else in the world.
The US system is dreadful for chronological sorting. It only holds up if you don't go past 31st Dec, and then in time you end up with a bloody mess that is hard to sift through, which is only marginally better than dd-mm-yyyy.
Who said anything about the US? They don't have "chequing" accounts - they don't know how to spell the "cheque" properly. With BIC/IBAN, and can make a guess at where you bank is. With some information required for setting up DD (e.g. address) I'm already part of the way there. And yes, I expect Visa to have better protection on their database than other smaller companies whose core business isn't financial. Loss of faith in their security will wipe them out... do you think the gym for instance keeps as good tabs on their customer records (I could probably just walk in to their back office when nobody's looking). My experience of identity theft has shown people willing to use social engineering, and be very aggressive and confident about it. Humans, as always, end up being the weakest link.
I don't like giving my bank details to anyone. Even Visa's database has been hacked over the years, so do you expect any old company to be able to protect your data? I've been a victim of identity and fraud. At one point when the fraudsters were having trouble accessing my accounts via telephone banking, they somehow managed to find the name of my account manager and called the bank asking for her by name! She was alerted because she knows me and she realised they had the wrong accent, even though they could answer her other questions. Even so, they managed to redeem part of my pension in to my chequing account and transfer out nearly $10,000. Talk about a headache for me resolving it. No idea where they got that much information about me from.