While Christopher Walken's "more cowbell" bit on SNL was a comedy classic, if you listen carefully to the original "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult, you will find that there's actually no cowbell in the song... it was a wood block.
Look, you seem to think that you and I are engaged in some kind of debate.
We're not.
I'm just recommending an entertaining and informative investigative TV documentary which I would mod as insightful if I saw their case made here.
If you don't want to see it, and want somebody to summarize it for you so you can try to deconstruct whatever their points may be, that's not really my problem.
Watch it or don't. I think you would probably enjoy it and even possibly come away with a few facts you might not have been already aware of, but what the fuck do I know?
I see now that the proper way to respond your post would have been to simply direct you to go buy/rent a pro-recycling book/film, before commenting further. Sorry to bother you...
I'm not the one who's trying to argue against a case he hasn't actually heard yet, based on speculation about what it might be.
All of this being said, I say again that I did not see the Penn and Teller special, so if they made a better argument than the one I am defending against, I truly am interested in hearing it.
Then go buy or rent it. I'm not going to summarize their documentary-length case with a few unreferenced paragraphs for you do dismiss out of hand. They certainly do make a much, much better argument than the straw man you just knocked down.
I don't even know where to start on explaining how wrong you are about the forth paragraph of what you just wrote. Do you honestly believe we could drastically reduce our military budget if only we stopped making new plastic bottles!?!?!?
It just so happens that the Penn & Teller documentary series on Showtime, called "Bullshit!", just released their Season 2 DVD set, and happens to include an episode that lays out in horrifying detail, that most recycling is exactly that. Bullshit.
Everybody here should see it before commenting further.
Yes. The EyeTV 300, or the port of MythTV for OS X.
Even though there's not very much HDTV content over the air yet, all of the stations in my market (Twin Cities) have 24-hour digital broadcasts, often on more than one station. Since I don't subscribe to cable, there's no reason why I feel the need for an analog tuner anymore. YMMV.
The GF3 was a full blown top card when it came out.
But as we all know, the X-Box does not contain an actual GF3. It's a similar chip, but unlike the GeForce cards you buy for the AGP slot in your computer, it's integrated with the motherboard.
Say it with me now: Shared memory.
Unlike the ATI Radeon in the mini, the GPU in the X-Box has no memory of its own, and shares the system memory. If you've ever used a low-end budget-box PC with integrated video, you should be keenly aware of what a huge performance hit that is.
To be fair to the mini, you can also had more HD space to it via firewire. Even if you add two external firewire drives, it will still take up less shelf space than the X-Box.
Plus, the software it comes with can already do everything the X-Box Media Center can do, and then some.
Don't get me wrong, the purchase of a mini doesn't mean I'm throwing my X-Box in the trash. I'm just moving it out of the home theater room and putting it in the basement rec room.
Are you sure the graphic chip on Xbox is inferior to the one in Mac Mini? I find it almost impossible to believe.
You find it almost impossible to believe that a low-end integrated chip in a three-year-old set-top console which currently sells for $125 for the entire system and was intended to connect to TV sets is inferior to a low-end GPU card from a $500 computer with DVI output that was just released this month? Okay.
To answer your question: Yes. Yes I'm sure. I own both. The ATI Radeon is a better solution.
The X-Box puts the PS2 to shame, sure. That doesn't mean it holds up to the standards of a real AGP-based video card, even a low-memory one like the 32MB 9200. Notice that HALO (the original "show off what the X-Box can do" game) actually only ran at about 30 fps on a standard-definition TV set, and sometimes it couldn't even keep up that sluggish pace.
The Radeon 9200, on the other hand, actually seems to perform better than the GeForce 5200 FX Ultra which is currenly loaded into the Apple iMac, in spite of having half the video memory. It's a pretty darn good card.
The video card in the mac mini is vastly inferior to the x-box card, since the x-box card is derived from a full power geforce 3.
The mini-card is a ATI Radeon 9200, which isn't better than a geforce 3.
You really have no clue, do you?
The X-Box is a 733 MHz Pentium system with 64 MB of system RAM, and the video "card" which you say is "derived from a full power geforce 3" is a 300 MHz GPU designed specifically for the X-Box by Microsoft and nVidia. It's an integrated chip which shares the system bus. It supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1080. Plenty good enough for hooking up to TV sets, even some HDTV sets, but pathetic by computer card standards.
I'll take the Radeon 9200 with it's own DDR video memory, thanks.
P.S. I've got both an X-Box and a mini, and have witnessed both of them perform. There's no question that the X-Box fails to even come close to the video performance of the mini. Sorry. It just isn't as good, no matter how much you might want it to be.
Yes, a lot of Macs use mobo jumpers for the speed setting. Back when I dropped a G4 (500 MHz) chip into my 1999-built G3 (350 MHz) Tower, I had to swap the jumpers around for the new speed.
I would imagine that they only bother to test the chips for the 1.25 system at 1.25, so it's always a gamble.
The thing is, while it's easy enough to pop open the mini case for minor things like swapping out memory or media drives, the motherboard is a little trickier to get at. The linked article is a little incomplete as to how easy it is to swap those jumpers. I know that a lot of computer companies in the past, including Apple, have put a piece of watermarked tape over the speed control jumpers, so they would be able to tell if you overclocked it.
I fail to understand that logic. If you fry the mini while breaking the warranty, you have a paperweight you paid $500 for, not one you paid $50.
Any advice given on hacking hardware must begin with the assumption that you know what the hell you are doing. Otherwise the discussion is kind of a waste of time.
The only benefit I can see as far as using it as a media player or similar is that you don't need an Xbox to USB cable.
I see a few others.
1. The mini is very quiet, the X-Box is notoriously noisy.
2. The mini video card is modest by modern PC standards, but vastly superior to the one in the X-Box.
3. The mini is ready for use as a media server with no hacking required. iTunes is a fantastic app for storing your music library. Plug an EyeTV 500 into the firewire port, and you've got a digital broadcast Tivo-alike. Install VLC (which is a free download), and you're playing full-screen videos of whatever gray-market stuff you find on the Internet. The DVI out plugs right into most modern HD televisons and projectors without the need for an adapter. Plus, all of this can be controlled with an IR remote from Keyspan, which I've seen on the web for as little as $22. The built-in bluetooth and 802.11g options are nice to have, as well.
That said, it's not perfect.
1. The CPU isn't really fast enough to give you full-frame 1080i HDTV via the EyeTV. Not the end of the world if you are using an XGA or WXGA projector, but still...
2. You need a USB break-out box to get surround sound... but at least the OS supports both Dolby 5.1 and DTS.
When it comes to the Mac mini, you might want to consider this:
The default warranty (if you don't buy the extended AppleCare) is one year.
This is a $499 electronic device.
A 1-year hardware warranty on a gadget this cheap is worth, what? Maybe $50?
So whenever you are considering doing something like this (and yes, overclocking pretty much alwasys voids warranties, even if all the early FUD about opening the mini case turned out to be false), the judgement call you need to make is: Will this mod be worth more than about $50 to me?
In the case of this mod, it's a way to turn a 1.25 GHz mini into a 1.42 GHz mini.
But for $20 more than the price of upgrading the HD from 40GB to 80GB, you can get an actual 1.42 GHz mini with an 80GB drive already installed, and keep the warranty intact.
So in this case, no. Probably not really worth it.
However, on a system this inexpensive, it's really just a matter of time before some people start coming up with interesting hacks which are more than worth it.
I doubt the mini will replace the X-Box as the hardware hacker's favorite toy anytime soon, but it will be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so.
Actually, the truth is I didn't actively dislike Enterprise. I tuned in a few episodes, thought very little of them, and moved on. I was exposed to a hell of a lot of Voyager. Sometimes when other people are around, you don't always get to choose what is watched. It was gawd-awful.
As I said once before, Voyager was bad enough to make me hate Star Trek, and Enterprise was not good enough to make me like it again.
Peace out... I'm going to see how much of the State of the Union address I can stand to sit through. I'm not optimistic, but I'm betting it will at least be more fun to watch than the episodes of Enterprise I've seen.
I wish I had mod points right now, obviously whoever modded the parent "+4 Insightful" is a retard - the post is obviously a troll.
I'm not sure I deserved "insightful" mods for bashing Star Trek (probably love thrown my way for reminding people of the existence of Dr. Who or something), but it wasn't trolling either. It was my honest opinion, and from the current cancellation of the show, I'm obviously far from alone.
Seriously. Those of you who think you like Enterprise most likely only feel that way because it sucks slightly less... very slightly less... than Voyager did. Ten years from now I strongly suspect you'll catch a rerun of it on some small cable channel and say "crap, did I really like this!?"
That, or your taste in sci-fi is so bad that you actually thought Voyager was a good show and Enterprise proudly carried on a tradition of greatness.
Either way, call me a troll all you like, but at least I don't waste an hour a week watching really shitty TV sci-fi.
If you are the sort of person who already has the need to lug around a PDA, and you can get enough battery life out of it, then by all means use it for your MP3 player and save yourself the hassle of carrying yet another device.
I, on the other hand, don't even wear a watch. I sometimes carry a mobile phone (which is the very smallest one I could afford), and I almost always have my iPod with me. It's like having a "pull-out" faceplate for your car stereo which you can still listen to while you're out of the car.
I used to carry a PDA, but then I realized a few things about it:
1. All my work appointments happen when I'm at work, in front of a computer with a perfectly good appointment program.
2. All my contacts are stored in my phone, and I don't look them up or even pay attention to the numbers - I just select them and hit "call."
3. When I'm not at work, I prefer to let my time be largely unstructured.
4. Clipping a PDA to your belt is a perhaps a rather metrosexual look, but the best alternative (wearing a belt-pouch, a.k.a. "belly bag" a.k.a. "fanny pack", a.k.a. "man purse") is downright full-on Richard Simmons gay. Jeans pockets provide room for a wallet, an iPod, a money clip, a phone, and keys. Walking around with anything more than that requires some kind of luggage space.
They did. They also paid an "undisclosed" ammount of money under the table to settle any remaining possibility of litigation over stolen technologies, and agreed on a plan which would allow MS to make future purchases of Apple's OS breakthroughs.
However, in their haste to hype a "Microsoft buys Apple" story, the press often ignores three important facts about the purchase:
1. They were non-voting shares.
2. $150 Million is a very tiny percentage of Apple's publicly-traded shares.
3. Microsoft has already sold them off, and made a huge profit doing so.
... their image search is actually less useful than the new MSN effort...
I agree with most of what you said, and I also agree that Microsoft will eventually kick Google's ass at their own game, no matter how much they have to lie, cheat, and steal to do it. That's what Microsoft almost always does when they enter a market. I suspect sometime around the release of X-Box 3 we will be reading about the former dominance of Sony in the console market, as some kind of evil MS/EA oligopoly will surely scorch the earth...
However, I was not aware of the MSN image search, so I thought I would take a look and see how it stacks up.
Turns out that MSN has a long way to go.
For this completely unscientific experiment, I tried an image search which I figured would be likely to be performed by geeks like Cmdr. Taco.
The search was for three words: Sailor Jupiter Cosplay.
A few false positives, but lots and lots of nerdy girls in poorly-tailored Sailor Jupiter costumes made of cheap shiny fabric, some of whom are even kinda cute... in their own sort of way... I guess.
Anyway, I consider the matter settled. Google Image Search wins, hands down.
Heh. Or you do like Mark Cuban, and ride the lightning just long enough to be filthy rich, then jump ship a year before everybody else does, buy whatever the worst basketball team in the NBA is at the moment, build them into winners while becoming enough of a celebrity to get your own reality show, and act like a total ass for the rest of your life.
At last! Somebody gets the joke! Thank you, EvanED.
I post looking for a little "+1, Funny" love, and what do I get, two angry replies about Google's smoke-and-mirrors profit models, and a "+1, Insightful" mod.
I just wanted to make one or two people chuckle. Sheesh. If you consider a discussion of fincances on Slashdot to be worth anything more than a few yucks, I fear for your portfolio, people.
Slashdot Mirror
While Christopher Walken's "more cowbell" bit on SNL was a comedy classic, if you listen carefully to the original "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult, you will find that there's actually no cowbell in the song... it was a wood block.
Look, you seem to think that you and I are engaged in some kind of debate.
We're not.
I'm just recommending an entertaining and informative investigative TV documentary which I would mod as insightful if I saw their case made here.
If you don't want to see it, and want somebody to summarize it for you so you can try to deconstruct whatever their points may be, that's not really my problem.
Watch it or don't. I think you would probably enjoy it and even possibly come away with a few facts you might not have been already aware of, but what the fuck do I know?
I see now that the proper way to respond your post would have been to simply direct you to go buy/rent a pro-recycling book/film, before commenting further. Sorry to bother you...
I'm not the one who's trying to argue against a case he hasn't actually heard yet, based on speculation about what it might be.
All of this being said, I say again that I did not see the Penn and Teller special, so if they made a better argument than the one I am defending against, I truly am interested in hearing it.
Then go buy or rent it. I'm not going to summarize their documentary-length case with a few unreferenced paragraphs for you do dismiss out of hand. They certainly do make a much, much better argument than the straw man you just knocked down.
I don't even know where to start on explaining how wrong you are about the forth paragraph of what you just wrote. Do you honestly believe we could drastically reduce our military budget if only we stopped making new plastic bottles!?!?!?
This is bullshit.
A perfect choice of words.
It just so happens that the Penn & Teller documentary series on Showtime, called "Bullshit!", just released their Season 2 DVD set, and happens to include an episode that lays out in horrifying detail, that most recycling is exactly that. Bullshit.
Everybody here should see it before commenting further.
Yes. The EyeTV 300, or the port of MythTV for OS X.
Even though there's not very much HDTV content over the air yet, all of the stations in my market (Twin Cities) have 24-hour digital broadcasts, often on more than one station. Since I don't subscribe to cable, there's no reason why I feel the need for an analog tuner anymore. YMMV.
The GF3 was a full blown top card when it came out.
But as we all know, the X-Box does not contain an actual GF3. It's a similar chip, but unlike the GeForce cards you buy for the AGP slot in your computer, it's integrated with the motherboard.
Say it with me now: Shared memory.
Unlike the ATI Radeon in the mini, the GPU in the X-Box has no memory of its own, and shares the system memory. If you've ever used a low-end budget-box PC with integrated video, you should be keenly aware of what a huge performance hit that is.
To be fair to the mini, you can also had more HD space to it via firewire. Even if you add two external firewire drives, it will still take up less shelf space than the X-Box.
Plus, the software it comes with can already do everything the X-Box Media Center can do, and then some.
Don't get me wrong, the purchase of a mini doesn't mean I'm throwing my X-Box in the trash. I'm just moving it out of the home theater room and putting it in the basement rec room.
Are you sure the graphic chip on Xbox is inferior to the one in Mac Mini? I find it almost impossible to believe.
You find it almost impossible to believe that a low-end integrated chip in a three-year-old set-top console which currently sells for $125 for the entire system and was intended to connect to TV sets is inferior to a low-end GPU card from a $500 computer with DVI output that was just released this month? Okay.
To answer your question: Yes. Yes I'm sure. I own both. The ATI Radeon is a better solution.
The X-Box puts the PS2 to shame, sure. That doesn't mean it holds up to the standards of a real AGP-based video card, even a low-memory one like the 32MB 9200. Notice that HALO (the original "show off what the X-Box can do" game) actually only ran at about 30 fps on a standard-definition TV set, and sometimes it couldn't even keep up that sluggish pace.
The Radeon 9200, on the other hand, actually seems to perform better than the GeForce 5200 FX Ultra which is currenly loaded into the Apple iMac, in spite of having half the video memory. It's a pretty darn good card.
The video card in the mac mini is vastly inferior to the x-box card, since the x-box card is derived from a full power geforce 3.
The mini-card is a ATI Radeon 9200, which isn't better than a geforce 3.
You really have no clue, do you?
The X-Box is a 733 MHz Pentium system with 64 MB of system RAM, and the video "card" which you say is "derived from a full power geforce 3" is a 300 MHz GPU designed specifically for the X-Box by Microsoft and nVidia. It's an integrated chip which shares the system bus. It supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1080. Plenty good enough for hooking up to TV sets, even some HDTV sets, but pathetic by computer card standards.
I'll take the Radeon 9200 with it's own DDR video memory, thanks.
P.S. I've got both an X-Box and a mini, and have witnessed both of them perform. There's no question that the X-Box fails to even come close to the video performance of the mini. Sorry. It just isn't as good, no matter how much you might want it to be.
Yes, a lot of Macs use mobo jumpers for the speed setting. Back when I dropped a G4 (500 MHz) chip into my 1999-built G3 (350 MHz) Tower, I had to swap the jumpers around for the new speed.
I would imagine that they only bother to test the chips for the 1.25 system at 1.25, so it's always a gamble.
The thing is, while it's easy enough to pop open the mini case for minor things like swapping out memory or media drives, the motherboard is a little trickier to get at. The linked article is a little incomplete as to how easy it is to swap those jumpers. I know that a lot of computer companies in the past, including Apple, have put a piece of watermarked tape over the speed control jumpers, so they would be able to tell if you overclocked it.
I fail to understand that logic. If you fry the mini while breaking the warranty, you have a paperweight you paid $500 for, not one you paid $50.
Any advice given on hacking hardware must begin with the assumption that you know what the hell you are doing. Otherwise the discussion is kind of a waste of time.
The only benefit I can see as far as using it as a media player or similar is that you don't need an Xbox to USB cable.
I see a few others.
1. The mini is very quiet, the X-Box is notoriously noisy.
2. The mini video card is modest by modern PC standards, but vastly superior to the one in the X-Box.
3. The mini is ready for use as a media server with no hacking required. iTunes is a fantastic app for storing your music library. Plug an EyeTV 500 into the firewire port, and you've got a digital broadcast Tivo-alike. Install VLC (which is a free download), and you're playing full-screen videos of whatever gray-market stuff you find on the Internet. The DVI out plugs right into most modern HD televisons and projectors without the need for an adapter. Plus, all of this can be controlled with an IR remote from Keyspan, which I've seen on the web for as little as $22. The built-in bluetooth and 802.11g options are nice to have, as well.
That said, it's not perfect.
1. The CPU isn't really fast enough to give you full-frame 1080i HDTV via the EyeTV. Not the end of the world if you are using an XGA or WXGA projector, but still...
2. You need a USB break-out box to get surround sound... but at least the OS supports both Dolby 5.1 and DTS.
3. Hmmm... actually, that's the whole list.
When it comes to the Mac mini, you might want to consider this:
The default warranty (if you don't buy the extended AppleCare) is one year.
This is a $499 electronic device.
A 1-year hardware warranty on a gadget this cheap is worth, what? Maybe $50?
So whenever you are considering doing something like this (and yes, overclocking pretty much alwasys voids warranties, even if all the early FUD about opening the mini case turned out to be false), the judgement call you need to make is: Will this mod be worth more than about $50 to me?
In the case of this mod, it's a way to turn a 1.25 GHz mini into a 1.42 GHz mini.
But for $20 more than the price of upgrading the HD from 40GB to 80GB, you can get an actual 1.42 GHz mini with an 80GB drive already installed, and keep the warranty intact.
So in this case, no. Probably not really worth it.
However, on a system this inexpensive, it's really just a matter of time before some people start coming up with interesting hacks which are more than worth it.
I doubt the mini will replace the X-Box as the hardware hacker's favorite toy anytime soon, but it will be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so.
Actually, the truth is I didn't actively dislike Enterprise. I tuned in a few episodes, thought very little of them, and moved on. I was exposed to a hell of a lot of Voyager. Sometimes when other people are around, you don't always get to choose what is watched. It was gawd-awful.
As I said once before, Voyager was bad enough to make me hate Star Trek, and Enterprise was not good enough to make me like it again.
Peace out... I'm going to see how much of the State of the Union address I can stand to sit through. I'm not optimistic, but I'm betting it will at least be more fun to watch than the episodes of Enterprise I've seen.
I wish I had mod points right now, obviously whoever modded the parent "+4 Insightful" is a retard - the post is obviously a troll.
I'm not sure I deserved "insightful" mods for bashing Star Trek (probably love thrown my way for reminding people of the existence of Dr. Who or something), but it wasn't trolling either. It was my honest opinion, and from the current cancellation of the show, I'm obviously far from alone.
Seriously. Those of you who think you like Enterprise most likely only feel that way because it sucks slightly less... very slightly less... than Voyager did. Ten years from now I strongly suspect you'll catch a rerun of it on some small cable channel and say "crap, did I really like this!?"
That, or your taste in sci-fi is so bad that you actually thought Voyager was a good show and Enterprise proudly carried on a tradition of greatness.
Either way, call me a troll all you like, but at least I don't waste an hour a week watching really shitty TV sci-fi.
It also wasn't a new idea. Most of the biggest reality shows are American remakes of shows from Europe and Japan.
In other words, out with the old, in with the... slightly less old.
Here's a thought.
How about having a frikkin' new idea once in a while???
Jeez I hate our TV networks!
"Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"
actually it's "YES!"
The word you are looking for is:
meh.
Now the question is, will it be rescued by Fox?
And the answer is: Nobody cares.
Star Trek has sucked for years. I've got higher hopes for the latest attempt to resurrect Doctor Who than for that sinking franchise.
If you are the sort of person who already has the need to lug around a PDA, and you can get enough battery life out of it, then by all means use it for your MP3 player and save yourself the hassle of carrying yet another device.
I, on the other hand, don't even wear a watch. I sometimes carry a mobile phone (which is the very smallest one I could afford), and I almost always have my iPod with me. It's like having a "pull-out" faceplate for your car stereo which you can still listen to while you're out of the car.
I used to carry a PDA, but then I realized a few things about it:
1. All my work appointments happen when I'm at work, in front of a computer with a perfectly good appointment program.
2. All my contacts are stored in my phone, and I don't look them up or even pay attention to the numbers - I just select them and hit "call."
3. When I'm not at work, I prefer to let my time be largely unstructured.
4. Clipping a PDA to your belt is a perhaps a rather metrosexual look, but the best alternative (wearing a belt-pouch, a.k.a. "belly bag" a.k.a. "fanny pack", a.k.a. "man purse") is downright full-on Richard Simmons gay. Jeans pockets provide room for a wallet, an iPod, a money clip, a phone, and keys. Walking around with anything more than that requires some kind of luggage space.
They did. They also paid an "undisclosed" ammount of money under the table to settle any remaining possibility of litigation over stolen technologies, and agreed on a plan which would allow MS to make future purchases of Apple's OS breakthroughs.
However, in their haste to hype a "Microsoft buys Apple" story, the press often ignores three important facts about the purchase:
1. They were non-voting shares.
2. $150 Million is a very tiny percentage of Apple's publicly-traded shares.
3. Microsoft has already sold them off, and made a huge profit doing so.
... their image search is actually less useful than the new MSN effort...
I agree with most of what you said, and I also agree that Microsoft will eventually kick Google's ass at their own game, no matter how much they have to lie, cheat, and steal to do it. That's what Microsoft almost always does when they enter a market. I suspect sometime around the release of X-Box 3 we will be reading about the former dominance of Sony in the console market, as some kind of evil MS/EA oligopoly will surely scorch the earth...
However, I was not aware of the MSN image search, so I thought I would take a look and see how it stacks up.
Turns out that MSN has a long way to go.
For this completely unscientific experiment, I tried an image search which I figured would be likely to be performed by geeks like Cmdr. Taco.
The search was for three words: Sailor Jupiter Cosplay.
This was the MSN result.
Three images, and none of them any good. One was a completely dead link. Another is an ugly, low-res 50x50 headshot.
As you can see, Google did much better.
A few false positives, but lots and lots of nerdy girls in poorly-tailored Sailor Jupiter costumes made of cheap shiny fabric, some of whom are even kinda cute... in their own sort of way... I guess.
Anyway, I consider the matter settled. Google Image Search wins, hands down.
Heh. Or you do like Mark Cuban, and ride the lightning just long enough to be filthy rich, then jump ship a year before everybody else does, buy whatever the worst basketball team in the NBA is at the moment, build them into winners while becoming enough of a celebrity to get your own reality show, and act like a total ass for the rest of your life.
...
Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger!
At last! Somebody gets the joke! Thank you, EvanED.
I post looking for a little "+1, Funny" love, and what do I get, two angry replies about Google's smoke-and-mirrors profit models, and a "+1, Insightful" mod.
I just wanted to make one or two people chuckle. Sheesh. If you consider a discussion of fincances on Slashdot to be worth anything more than a few yucks, I fear for your portfolio, people.