As much as I would like to think the short pipeline in my Dual 500 G4 makes my machine fast, outside of Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro, I do not feel like I am driving a HotRod compared to a 1Ghz+ x86 box.
I'll tell you what, I will gladly trade you my 1.2 GHz PC for your Dual 500 G4. Then you can feel like you are "driving a HotRod", and we will both be happy.
Compare a 1.5Ghz PC ripping Mp3s off a CD vs. a 733Mhz G4.
Ripping CD's has more to do with media speed than the CPU. The standard CD drives that ship in Apple's are otnay ootay astfay, compared to the better after-market players.
For a more fair comparison, try something like this:
How fast does each machine compile the same program using gcc? (Mac OS X and pretty much all distro's of Linux ship with it, so it is an easy test to run).
Actually, I always throught the iMac DV made a pretty sweet dorm room set-up. Add a USB TV tuner, and you get your computer, TV, stereo, and DVD player, all in one box that fits on half of a small desk. Those who really wanted to burn CD's could plug in a firewire based burner (which out-performed most of Apple's built-in offerings anyway).
I don't think I am going very far out on a limb when I predict that the CD-R in the new line of iMacs will probably be replaced by DVD/CD-R "combo" drives, like the one in some iBooks, by January (at least as an option).
Traditionally, stock prices in tech companies (especially ones as secretive about their R&D as Apple) get artificially inflated upon news and speculation about "upcoming announcements".
When the actual announcement happens, the wild speculation ends and prices fall back down to Earth.
Therefore, if you choose to ignore the previous price hikes, it always looks like a company's value tanked right after an announcement. The truth is that ownership of shares just transfered back from speculators to investors.
Re:But how will authorities regulate illegal conte
on
Wireless Freenets
·
· Score: 1
Also, you can't connect external antennas to airport cards
Yes you can.
The first case I heard about somebody using 802.11b for wide area connections, it was done with airport cards.
Granted, it is a hardware hack that requires you to know what you are doing, but it can be done.
Maybe in HIS day, but now? I have exactly one choice for cable.
In his day there were exactly zero choices for cable.
Besides, you have choices. You can: Get cable Use an antenna, and watch whatever is free in your town. Buy a dish. Go outside.
I have two choices for telco, but one is the aforementioned cable monstrosity and the other blows goats.
Your father didn't even have a choice for long distance phone service provider. He must find your whining endlessly amusing.
I have a couple of choices for DBS, but I can't afford what it would take to get it into three rooms with a decent channel selection.
See, you made a choice. You chose not to buy it. If they want your money, they will have to offer something with a better value. Ta-Da! The system in action. Wasn't that easy?
I hate that if I want a decent movie or CD, I have to pay into the evil that is MPAA/RIAA.
If you really cared that much, you would simply not buy them.
I also believe well-organized civil disobedience has a place here.
There was a time when such extremes of action were reserved for such things as colonialism, religious persecution and racism. Are you seriously advocating open defiance of law and order over the fact that Disney fucked up your DVD of "The Emporer's New Groove" in order to make it harder to rip with your Linux box?
I think you need to listen to your dad a little more. He might still be able to teach you to get a sense of perspective.
You know what? Sometimes it IS necessary to draw comparisons to Nazis.
Godwin's Law exists because it is well established that calling your opposition nazis (or accusing those with moderate views of being tollerant of nazis) almost always indicates both intellectual laziness and fanatical dogmatic extremism.
In a world where relatively few things are held as moral absolutes anymore, we all still seem to agree that "Hitler == Evil", therefore the easiest way to defend a view which you hold as axiomatic and unchallengable is to present it as somehow being the opposite of German National Socialism.
Godwin was right. Whenever somebody resorts to such a tactic, they probably just lost the debate.
Re:But how will authorities regulate illegal conte
on
Wireless Freenets
·
· Score: 1
Um. Some people already "building their own wireless to wired bridges" with cheap ($99) Airport cards. A Mac with an Airport card stands in for a $300 hub very nicely while still operating as a workstation (although it will not handle quite as many simultanious connections, IIRC).
Ah. Don't go to the Mall of America for movies if you can avoid it.
It sucks.
A mere 10 minutes South of the megamall (right down the Cedar Avenue highway), is the Regal Eagan 16. Better sound, better screens, stadium seating, and cheaper. (Take the Cliff Road exit from Cedar, and go East about 4 blocks).
Actually, I had read that film rotoscoping was used as an alternative to wire frames.
Motion capture doesn't do as good a job at getting things like facial expressions as rotoscope, so they actually filmed actors, and positioned the CGI models excactly the same way.
It's a method that goes all the way back to the dwarves in Snow White, but Heavy Metal is the best known example.
Speaking as an audiopile snob, I would rather lament that the goal of "CD quality" sound seems to be where the bar is set, when the goal for recording in any medium should be to sound as much like a real-life performance as possible (except in the case of electronic music, which often only exists on the master source).
Transparency is great, but most people who know the contortions that a sound engineer goes through to create the illusion of stero sound will tell you, audio reproduction is still as much an art as it is a science, and sometimes a less true sound going to the speakers will result in you thinking you hear something more true. It's all smoke and mirrors.
If I were the boss of a project to design a new digital format for the Internet, the goal would not be to make it sound as much like a CD as possible. The goal would be to make it sound as good as possible. Who knows, maybe some mad genious out there will come up with a format that uses fewer bits, yet sounds better than CD's.
Then maybe someday people will be saying "sure that new CD format sounds okay, but it can't compete with MP8 quality, like you get from web streaming."
I've never even played Final Fantasy once, so "avid" player is really not a term that applies to me.
Actually, I'm a movie junkie, and other movie junkies, such as Ebert and Roeper, seem to agree more with me and your younger brother.
I don't think that the story was anything special. Pretty well-tread fare to anybody with an even passing familiarity with anime.
Film, like most performance art, is a medium where story is not always the point. Film-makers are allowed to speak in abstractions.
For the life of me, I can't recall the exact plot of Bergman's "Wild Strawberries". It's been years since I've watched it. But the themes of lost innocence and the way the story was presented has managed to stick with me.
Final Fantasy probably did not meet the expectations of a lot of people because it was not a typical sci fi action flick, nor did it contain the charms a typical cartoon. The structure and pace held little or no resemblence to the typical summer "blockbuster" (which it seems is what you were hoping for). It is a movie clearly built on the conventions of eastern films... not just Kurosawa's cowbows-with-katana films, but from Chinese dramas and Japanese anime. This makes it very different from what you usually see on the big screen in the US.
Instead of speaking of it in contrast with "Tomb Raider" or "Pearl Harbor", I would put it on the same lofty shelf with the recent imports, "Princess Mononoke" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
Actually the characters in the Diablo II cutscenes showed more expression and emotion than in Final Fantasy.
Which is why Final Fantasy was so much better than a Diablo II scene.
In the scene where Aki cries, we don't get a big explosion of obvious, broad emotion. We get a very subtle, quiet shot of her fighting back tears. They moved her face as little as possible while still making it obvious that she was crying.
Actors like Keven Spacey and Jack Lemmon dedicated their whole careers to achieving such understated gestures.
You can have the mad old man in the Diablo II scenes, with all of his gimacing and hand-waving. The animator who drew Aki (each character had their own animator), the rotoscope model actress, and the voice actress should colectively get a "best actress" nomination.
Actually, the timing of nearly everything was based on rotoscopes that were used to rough in the animation frames, so if the reactions were out of sync, that would be the fault of the body actors, not the animators.
I think that speaks to the high quality that this film has really achieved, that critics of the film can't even tell the human elements from the CGI in things they disliked.
There are several reasons why MLB insists on good ol' wood bats, too.
1. Tradition 2. "The crack of the bat" is a much more elegant thing to say than "the dink of the bat" 3. Tradition 4. Guys like Sosa and Griffey could potentially kill a pitcher or third-base coach if you let them hit with metal bats 5. Tradition 6. It's absolutely hillarious entertainment when a good pitch breaks the bat of a cheater, and we see shards of cork fly all over the field. 7. Tradition
McGwire does have a huge set of guns on his shoulders, but the timing of the swing, accuracy of the hit, and position of the torso all have a much greater impact on the distance and direction of a baseball than arm strength does.
Besides, it's kind of cheap to start by saying "he took steroids" only to parenthetically acknowledge that actually, he did not. Let me cut the redundant text by rephrasing your second sentence:
Mark McGwire was not takeing steroids the year he set the home-run record.
Much shorter, much more accurate.
Carefully chosing the right foods would have had the exact same effect as McGwire's daily clump of nutrient powder. That crap is really just a quick-n-dirty alternative to eating the same health-food entree every damn day. It's not at all the same thing as taking artificial hormone pills.
Besides, why get worked up over a record that Bonds is probably going to shatter this year anyway?
And if you start hitting well against it after about 60 pitches, a robot Tom Kelly comes out, takes the ball away, and calls for the Eddie Guardado machine.:)
For that matter, every beer-league ball player would really get a kick out of paying a couple bucks at the amusement park to see what hitting against somebody like Nomo would really be like. You could even program it to mix up the pitches according to who you want to have catching for him.
I can accept most of your criticism of my comments as fairly well thought-out, but there are a couple sticking points:
2. We (humans) are putting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short amount of time.
What do you mean by "huge amount"? One statistic that the anti-alarmist crowd likes to trot out is that the total industrial-age output of CO2 from fossil fuel burning is less than the CO2 blasted from a single volcanic eruption.
Clearly, the biosphere is more than capable of adjusting to a massive injetion of carbon into the atmosphere. It has had to do so on many occations.
Putting that aside for a moment, there are a couple questions worth asking:
What is the exact percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere today? How much has it risen since... oh, say 1960? How much of that change is from man-made sources?
Simply looking at a net 1 degree change in temperature over 120 years of land measurements is hardly evidence that we are putting ourselves in grave danger. It might not even be something that we are doing.
Another point of yours I take issue with:
It is true that climate models are generally crappy, but that doesn't mean that we are unable to predict general trends, and that has been done.
As I said before, use those models to predict general trends with data from 20 years ago, and they prove to be wildly inaccurate. Why should we trust the predictions that they make with current data?
The simplest explanation that is supported by real evidence (invoking Occam's Razor) is that CO2 is causing the temperature of the atmosphere to rise.
No, the simplest explanation is that global climate is in constant flux, and a change of 1 degree over 120 years is nothing to be overly concerned about.
Furthermore, what nobody who replied to me wants to address is the fact that the only total global measurement (total atmostphere, including over the oceans, measured mostly from space) record we have (which goes back a couple decades) show absolutely no evidence of global warming at all.
The only "evidence" of current global warming we have at this point is a record of land-based tempreature measurements going back to about the 1890's, and a lot of very unreliable predictive models which indicate trouble in the near future.
If you have other evidence to present, fine. I would love to see it. (And don't just link to yet another web site that will just repeat the same arguments we've seen here. Just tell me, in once paragraph, what other evidence do you know of which demonstrates that potentially catastrophic global warming is occurring?)
The comment I'm replying to here should not be modded -1. Please mod it up so it has the visibility it deserves
Perhaps it's not modded up because it mischaracterized the findings of the NAS. The NAS most emphatically did not agree on the global warming issue.
If you simply look at the actual report (rather than the press kit summary), you will see that they said there is no consensus and no certainty concerning the conventional wisdom of CO2 causing catastrophic global warming.
Here is what the NAS actually said:
Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward).
That's from page 1 of the report. If you click here you can order a copy the 28-page report yourself. As shot as it is, the word "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appears 43 times.
Or you can go here and read how two actual participants in the study reacted to the massive distortion of their findings by the global-warming crowd and their cheerleaders in the media. It's loaded with actual facts about the NAS findings, something the global warming debate could use a lot more of.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you what, I will gladly trade you my 1.2 GHz PC for your Dual 500 G4. Then you can feel like you are "driving a HotRod", and we will both be happy.
Ripping CD's has more to do with media speed than the CPU. The standard CD drives that ship in Apple's are otnay ootay astfay, compared to the better after-market players.
For a more fair comparison, try something like this:
How fast does each machine compile the same program using gcc? (Mac OS X and pretty much all distro's of Linux ship with it, so it is an easy test to run).
I don't think I am going very far out on a limb when I predict that the CD-R in the new line of iMacs will probably be replaced by DVD/CD-R "combo" drives, like the one in some iBooks, by January (at least as an option).
When the actual announcement happens, the wild speculation ends and prices fall back down to Earth.
Therefore, if you choose to ignore the previous price hikes, it always looks like a company's value tanked right after an announcement. The truth is that ownership of shares just transfered back from speculators to investors.
Yes you can.
The first case I heard about somebody using 802.11b for wide area connections, it was done with airport cards.
Granted, it is a hardware hack that requires you to know what you are doing, but it can be done.
In his day there were exactly zero choices for cable.
Besides, you have choices. You can:
Get cable
Use an antenna, and watch whatever is free in your town.
Buy a dish.
Go outside.
I have two choices for telco, but one is the aforementioned cable monstrosity and the other blows goats.
Your father didn't even have a choice for long distance phone service provider. He must find your whining endlessly amusing.
I have a couple of choices for DBS, but I can't afford what it would take to get it into three rooms with a decent channel selection.
See, you made a choice. You chose not to buy it. If they want your money, they will have to offer something with a better value. Ta-Da! The system in action. Wasn't that easy?
I hate that if I want a decent movie or CD, I have to pay into the evil that is MPAA/RIAA.
If you really cared that much, you would simply not buy them.
I also believe well-organized civil disobedience has a place here.
There was a time when such extremes of action were reserved for such things as colonialism, religious persecution and racism. Are you seriously advocating open defiance of law and order over the fact that Disney fucked up your DVD of "The Emporer's New Groove" in order to make it harder to rip with your Linux box?
I think you need to listen to your dad a little more. He might still be able to teach you to get a sense of perspective.
Godwin's Law exists because it is well established that calling your opposition nazis (or accusing those with moderate views of being tollerant of nazis) almost always indicates both intellectual laziness and fanatical dogmatic extremism.
In a world where relatively few things are held as moral absolutes anymore, we all still seem to agree that "Hitler == Evil", therefore the easiest way to defend a view which you hold as axiomatic and unchallengable is to present it as somehow being the opposite of German National Socialism.
Godwin was right. Whenever somebody resorts to such a tactic, they probably just lost the debate.
Um. Some people already "building their own wireless to wired bridges" with cheap ($99) Airport cards. A Mac with an Airport card stands in for a $300 hub very nicely while still operating as a workstation (although it will not handle quite as many simultanious connections, IIRC).
Close enough that a Chinese fighter can "accidentally" collide with one of our surveillance planes.
Yes, but where would you depart from? We may not watch the whole Atlantic, but you can be damn sure that we watch the ports of our rivals.
It sucks.
A mere 10 minutes South of the megamall (right down the Cedar Avenue highway), is the Regal Eagan 16. Better sound, better screens, stadium seating, and cheaper. (Take the Cliff Road exit from Cedar, and go East about 4 blocks).
Motion capture doesn't do as good a job at getting things like facial expressions as rotoscope, so they actually filmed actors, and positioned the CGI models excactly the same way.
It's a method that goes all the way back to the dwarves in Snow White, but Heavy Metal is the best known example.
Transparency is great, but most people who know the contortions that a sound engineer goes through to create the illusion of stero sound will tell you, audio reproduction is still as much an art as it is a science, and sometimes a less true sound going to the speakers will result in you thinking you hear something more true. It's all smoke and mirrors.
If I were the boss of a project to design a new digital format for the Internet, the goal would not be to make it sound as much like a CD as possible. The goal would be to make it sound as good as possible. Who knows, maybe some mad genious out there will come up with a format that uses fewer bits, yet sounds better than CD's.
Then maybe someday people will be saying "sure that new CD format sounds okay, but it can't compete with MP8 quality, like you get from web streaming."
Actually, I'm a movie junkie, and other movie junkies, such as Ebert and Roeper, seem to agree more with me and your younger brother.
I don't think that the story was anything special. Pretty well-tread fare to anybody with an even passing familiarity with anime.
Film, like most performance art, is a medium where story is not always the point. Film-makers are allowed to speak in abstractions.
For the life of me, I can't recall the exact plot of Bergman's "Wild Strawberries". It's been years since I've watched it. But the themes of lost innocence and the way the story was presented has managed to stick with me.
Final Fantasy probably did not meet the expectations of a lot of people because it was not a typical sci fi action flick, nor did it contain the charms a typical cartoon. The structure and pace held little or no resemblence to the typical summer "blockbuster" (which it seems is what you were hoping for). It is a movie clearly built on the conventions of eastern films... not just Kurosawa's cowbows-with-katana films, but from Chinese dramas and Japanese anime. This makes it very different from what you usually see on the big screen in the US.
Instead of speaking of it in contrast with "Tomb Raider" or "Pearl Harbor", I would put it on the same lofty shelf with the recent imports, "Princess Mononoke" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".
Which is why Final Fantasy was so much better than a Diablo II scene.
In the scene where Aki cries, we don't get a big explosion of obvious, broad emotion. We get a very subtle, quiet shot of her fighting back tears. They moved her face as little as possible while still making it obvious that she was crying.
Actors like Keven Spacey and Jack Lemmon dedicated their whole careers to achieving such understated gestures.
You can have the mad old man in the Diablo II scenes, with all of his gimacing and hand-waving. The animator who drew Aki (each character had their own animator), the rotoscope model actress, and the voice actress should colectively get a "best actress" nomination.
I think that speaks to the high quality that this film has really achieved, that critics of the film can't even tell the human elements from the CGI in things they disliked.
Then the Twins will find one just as good for 1/10 of the price. :)
1. Tradition
2. "The crack of the bat" is a much more elegant thing to say than "the dink of the bat"
3. Tradition
4. Guys like Sosa and Griffey could potentially kill a pitcher or third-base coach if you let them hit with metal bats
5. Tradition
6. It's absolutely hillarious entertainment when a good pitch breaks the bat of a cheater, and we see shards of cork fly all over the field.
7. Tradition
Besides, it's kind of cheap to start by saying "he took steroids" only to parenthetically acknowledge that actually, he did not. Let me cut the redundant text by rephrasing your second sentence:
Mark McGwire was not takeing steroids the year he set the home-run record.
Much shorter, much more accurate.
Carefully chosing the right foods would have had the exact same effect as McGwire's daily clump of nutrient powder. That crap is really just a quick-n-dirty alternative to eating the same health-food entree every damn day. It's not at all the same thing as taking artificial hormone pills.
Besides, why get worked up over a record that Bonds is probably going to shatter this year anyway?
And if you start hitting well against it after about 60 pitches, a robot Tom Kelly comes out, takes the ball away, and calls for the Eddie Guardado machine. :)
For that matter, every beer-league ball player would really get a kick out of paying a couple bucks at the amusement park to see what hitting against somebody like Nomo would really be like. You could even program it to mix up the pitches according to who you want to have catching for him.
I thought he was already on Star Trek when he got at gig.
What do you mean "broke with tradition"?
Avery Brooks was Hawk!
Hawk!!!
Not to mention Patrick Stuart's small-yet-crucial roles in both Dune and Excalibur.
And let us not forget Chief Engineer Kunta-Kinte himself (LeVar Burton).
2. We (humans) are putting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere in a very short amount of time.
What do you mean by "huge amount"? One statistic that the anti-alarmist crowd likes to trot out is that the total industrial-age output of CO2 from fossil fuel burning is less than the CO2 blasted from a single volcanic eruption.
Clearly, the biosphere is more than capable of adjusting to a massive injetion of carbon into the atmosphere. It has had to do so on many occations.
Putting that aside for a moment, there are a couple questions worth asking:
What is the exact percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere today?
How much has it risen since... oh, say 1960?
How much of that change is from man-made sources?
Simply looking at a net 1 degree change in temperature over 120 years of land measurements is hardly evidence that we are putting ourselves in grave danger. It might not even be something that we are doing.
Another point of yours I take issue with:
It is true that climate models are generally crappy, but that doesn't mean that we are unable to predict general trends, and that has been done.
As I said before, use those models to predict general trends with data from 20 years ago, and they prove to be wildly inaccurate. Why should we trust the predictions that they make with current data?
The simplest explanation that is supported by real evidence (invoking Occam's Razor) is that CO2 is causing the temperature of the atmosphere to rise.
No, the simplest explanation is that global climate is in constant flux, and a change of 1 degree over 120 years is nothing to be overly concerned about.
Furthermore, what nobody who replied to me wants to address is the fact that the only total global measurement (total atmostphere, including over the oceans, measured mostly from space) record we have (which goes back a couple decades) show absolutely no evidence of global warming at all.
The only "evidence" of current global warming we have at this point is a record of land-based tempreature measurements going back to about the 1890's, and a lot of very unreliable predictive models which indicate trouble in the near future.
If you have other evidence to present, fine. I would love to see it. (And don't just link to yet another web site that will just repeat the same arguments we've seen here. Just tell me, in once paragraph, what other evidence do you know of which demonstrates that potentially catastrophic global warming is occurring?)
Perhaps it's not modded up because it mischaracterized the findings of the NAS. The NAS most emphatically did not agree on the global warming issue.
If you simply look at the actual report (rather than the press kit summary), you will see that they said there is no consensus and no certainty concerning the conventional wisdom of CO2 causing catastrophic global warming.
Here is what the NAS actually said:
That's from page 1 of the report. If you click here you can order a copy the 28-page report yourself. As shot as it is, the word "uncertain" or "uncertainty" appears 43 times.
Or you can go here and read how two actual participants in the study reacted to the massive distortion of their findings by the global-warming crowd and their cheerleaders in the media. It's loaded with actual facts about the NAS findings, something the global warming debate could use a lot more of.