Prior to 5.1 movies, that was always the argument against "quadrophonic" surround systems, too.
The argument was, if you pass on surround, you were giving up a tiny bit of ambiance imaging, but you had twice as much money to spend on good stereo speakers, and could buy a much better amp.
It's still true. For what I spent on my home theater's audio set-up, I could build a downright orgasmic stereo listening room... but my desire to watch movies in 5.1 trumps my craving for maximizing my hi-fi ! for $.
Besides, Hi-Fi ain't what it used to be... it's better and cheaper. Thanks to the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s pushing down the cost of transistors, I can buy a $100 stereo amplifier which kicks ass all over stereo amps which cost twenty times as much back in the 70s. My $500 5.1 amp does a fine job at faithfully reproducing music.
Quality speakers have come down, too. Again, thank computers. Home-brew acoustic design software de-mystified the art of building speakers a little bit, and launched a new wave of small-name designers.
My B&W speakers (Bowers & Wilkins, a British speaker-builder) sound downright glorious, and even with the center channel, they cost less than the kit my father once used to build his own I.M. Freed subwoofer/satelite combo. Plus, he had to deal with an expensive cross-over amp, while my powered sub enjoys the discrete 5.1 subwoofer signal with far less hassle.
Of course. Are you using a school computer or something?
I still get Administrator password prompts when installing OS upgrades and the like, but installing the newest version of EyeTV went like this:
Step 1: Download the image. Step 2: Drag the application from the image into my Applications folder. Step 3: There's no step three. *laughs* There's no step three!
I use iChat every day, and have other Mac users on my "Buddies" list, yet I've still yet to get this particular worm delivered to me, and it's been well over a week since I heard about it being "in the wild." There was even a story about it over on Drudge, so somebody must have been hit by it, right? Yet, I still have yet to hear a first-person account of somebody getting this particular worm sent to them.
Part of the reason for this might be that the Mac gives all kinds of warnings about the nature of incoming files, and even requires that you type in your admin password before running anything that hits any important part of the OS. (Hint: just installing an application or performing trivial tasks does not require a password. Whenever you get a password prompt on a Mac, you know that the app in question is trying to do something which requires root-level access.)
Installing antivirus software on a Mac is worse than useless. Should a virus ever come along which can get past both MacOS security and simple user awareness, currently-existing anitvirus software won't be ready for it anyway.
Plus, I know enough from running antivirus software on my Windows PC at work (which I would never DARE go without) that anitvirus software means a performance hit and less stability of the operating system.
I think I'll just stick with common sense and Apple's frequent OS update patches.
Thanks for refreshing my memory. The MOS was a cheaper knock-off of the Moto 6800, yes?
*checks wiki to avoid being so very wrong a second time*
The 6502 was designed primarily by the same team that had designed the Motorola 6800. After quitting Motorola en-masse, they quickly designed the 6501, a completely new design that was nevertheless pin-compatible with the 6800. Motorola sued immediately, and although today the case would have been dismissed out of hand, the damage to MOS was enough for them to agree to stop producing the 6501.
The result was the "lawsuit-compatible" 6502, differing only by a pinout re-arrangement unusable in a 6800 motherboard; now Motorola was apparently no longer interested.
Okay. There's were I was mis-remembering. The MOS was based on a Motorola design, but wasn't a "real" Motorola chip.
Nevertheless, the main reason it was chosen was because it was really freakin' cheap, not because it had any great technical advantage over Intel.
Yeah, I feel really sorry for Woz, the way he only became a millionaire for something he had fun building in his garage to scratch his own personal itch at the time.
Thank goodness an evil Steve Jobs type of person hasn't come along to exploit the outcome of my hobbies like that, leaving me living exactly the same life I have now, except with lots and lots more money.
Re:How is he questioning the move to Intel?
on
Woz On Apple's Success
·
· Score: 2, Informative
People forget that Woz originally chose Motorola over Intel for the first Apple computers because of cost more than any other factor. Motorola had a chip available which was a fraction of the price of most other options at the time.
Re:Why do people care about this guy? (serious inq
on
Woz On Apple's Success
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
His design ideas in the Apple ][ were revolutionary, so he as geek cred because of his clever engineering skills.
Plus, he's kind of a hippy who marginalized himself at Apple and eventually quit because it stopped being fun, so he also has anti-establishment cred.
He's also very good at talking about technology, and a fairly likable person, so the press loves the guy.
Finally, Steve Jobs haters love to hail him as the "real" genius behind anything good that Apple has ever done, in spite of the fact that he was never really part of the Macintosh team and hasn't been involved in any company of note for a couple of decades now.
and it is not clear how many people will buy a new television just for the latest version of the Madden football game.
From all accounts, the new Madden game sucks.
But it is just possible that one or two people might buy a new TV for some other reason, like... oh, I don't know... watching television, perhaps? Those people will probably want a console that looks good on their new set.
DOA4 is almost enough to make me want a 360 for my HD system... almost. A couple more good games, and I'll seriously consider it. Meanwhile, I'm waiting to see what Sony comes up with.
That comparison doesn't hold; single-player baseball would be equally dull. The thrill is to watch the best players in the world play against each other.
Except I'd rather watch a high school basketball game than the best Half-life players in the universe square off against each other.
The only problem with gaming as a spectator sport is that you need to have played the game (or a similar one) to understand the skill and tactics involved.
In my prime, I was a Quake god. Seriously, I took great pride in splattering "good" players into chunks of meat with great ease. I was the Magic Johnson of the low-G level. Eventually, I'd start darting aournd the Quad glyph and ignoring the rocket launcher, just to make things interesting.
Needless to say, I "understand" the skill and tactics involved in FPS gaming.
I'd still rather watch paint dry than sit and watch somebody else play Quake. Do you know why? Because watching other people play video games is boring!
Not to mention that the very first music video on MTV was the very high-concept "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.
The very first video I ever saw (before NBC got off the ground with "Friday Night Videos" IIRC) was the Talking Heads video for "Once in a Lifetime", in which David Byrne was doing his famously quirky dance moves in front of a white background, with the aid of various cheesy video effects.
DEVO's first album was intended to be a video art project, sold on VHS. It never got off the ground, but they managed to use their material to create some seriously messed-up videos on MTV.
Peter Jackson is clearly remembering it wrong.
Heck, you could even go back to the Elvis & Beatles movies.
Back even further, to black & white footage of Leadbelly playing his guitar by night while wearing a prison uniform.
Those ads ran in the states with the words "Actual Game Footage" on the screen.
Well, it was an "actual" cut-scene from the game.:/
It would be nice to see the end of this practice.... not only because it will make the ads more honest, but it will mean game devs might finally stop filling up disks with little video clips in lieu of playable content.
Personally, I thought the little cut-scenes in Ms. Pac-Man were too long. If I ever gotta sit through the opening scenes of GTA:SA again, I'm going to pop a gasket.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet "Dark Side of the Moon", recorded by Alan Parsons back in '72, does a much better job of defining a depth of field than either of those albums do.
Prior to 5.1 movies, that was always the argument against "quadrophonic" surround systems, too.
The argument was, if you pass on surround, you were giving up a tiny bit of ambiance imaging, but you had twice as much money to spend on good stereo speakers, and could buy a much better amp.
It's still true. For what I spent on my home theater's audio set-up, I could build a downright orgasmic stereo listening room... but my desire to watch movies in 5.1 trumps my craving for maximizing my hi-fi ! for $.
Besides, Hi-Fi ain't what it used to be... it's better and cheaper. Thanks to the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s pushing down the cost of transistors, I can buy a $100 stereo amplifier which kicks ass all over stereo amps which cost twenty times as much back in the 70s. My $500 5.1 amp does a fine job at faithfully reproducing music.
Quality speakers have come down, too. Again, thank computers. Home-brew acoustic design software de-mystified the art of building speakers a little bit, and launched a new wave of small-name designers.
My B&W speakers (Bowers & Wilkins, a British speaker-builder) sound downright glorious, and even with the center channel, they cost less than the kit my father once used to build his own I.M. Freed subwoofer/satelite combo. Plus, he had to deal with an expensive cross-over amp, while my powered sub enjoys the discrete 5.1 subwoofer signal with far less hassle.
Step 3: Scratch your head and wonder why EyeTV, a Mac OS X program, isn't running on your Debian box.
If Windows users 1) used common sense and 2) applied Microsoft's patches immediately
Except that common sense tells me not to apply Microsoft's patches immediately, so 1) and 2) are mutually exclusive.
It doesn't. Seems most apps don't.
Oh, snap!
Of course. Are you using a school computer or something?
I still get Administrator password prompts when installing OS upgrades and the like, but installing the newest version of EyeTV went like this:
Step 1: Download the image.
Step 2: Drag the application from the image into my Applications folder.
Step 3: There's no step three. *laughs* There's no step three!
One of the recent worms relies on iChat.
I use iChat every day, and have other Mac users on my "Buddies" list, yet I've still yet to get this particular worm delivered to me, and it's been well over a week since I heard about it being "in the wild." There was even a story about it over on Drudge, so somebody must have been hit by it, right? Yet, I still have yet to hear a first-person account of somebody getting this particular worm sent to them.
Part of the reason for this might be that the Mac gives all kinds of warnings about the nature of incoming files, and even requires that you type in your admin password before running anything that hits any important part of the OS. (Hint: just installing an application or performing trivial tasks does not require a password. Whenever you get a password prompt on a Mac, you know that the app in question is trying to do something which requires root-level access.)
Installing antivirus software on a Mac is worse than useless. Should a virus ever come along which can get past both MacOS security and simple user awareness, currently-existing anitvirus software won't be ready for it anyway.
Plus, I know enough from running antivirus software on my Windows PC at work (which I would never DARE go without) that anitvirus software means a performance hit and less stability of the operating system.
I think I'll just stick with common sense and Apple's frequent OS update patches.
You heard wrong. The taint is as the parent post described it. The space between the genitals and the asshole.
Also known as a "grundel" or the New Jersey.
Honestly, have you people never heard the the Urban Dictionary?
What happens if your HDD crashes
Restore from backup.
and you dont have a backup?
Oh.
Kick my own ass for being a retard, I guess, because I would have to be utterly stupid not to have my music files backed up somehow.
What happens when you lose your CD's to fire, theft, damage, etc, and YOU don't have them archived on hard drives?
Thanks for refreshing my memory. The MOS was a cheaper knock-off of the Moto 6800, yes?
*checks wiki to avoid being so very wrong a second time*
The 6502 was designed primarily by the same team that had designed the Motorola 6800. After quitting Motorola en-masse, they quickly designed the 6501, a completely new design that was nevertheless pin-compatible with the 6800. Motorola sued immediately, and although today the case would have been dismissed out of hand, the damage to MOS was enough for them to agree to stop producing the 6501.
The result was the "lawsuit-compatible" 6502, differing only by a pinout re-arrangement unusable in a 6800 motherboard; now Motorola was apparently no longer interested.
Okay. There's were I was mis-remembering. The MOS was based on a Motorola design, but wasn't a "real" Motorola chip.
Nevertheless, the main reason it was chosen was because it was really freakin' cheap, not because it had any great technical advantage over Intel.
The pceuliar thing is, I read your post just fine wthiout even ntoicing the miastke uintl you poientd it out.
Yeah, I feel really sorry for Woz, the way he only became a millionaire for something he had fun building in his garage to scratch his own personal itch at the time.
Thank goodness an evil Steve Jobs type of person hasn't come along to exploit the outcome of my hobbies like that, leaving me living exactly the same life I have now, except with lots and lots more money.
People forget that Woz originally chose Motorola over Intel for the first Apple computers because of cost more than any other factor. Motorola had a chip available which was a fraction of the price of most other options at the time.
His design ideas in the Apple ][ were revolutionary, so he as geek cred because of his clever engineering skills.
Plus, he's kind of a hippy who marginalized himself at Apple and eventually quit because it stopped being fun, so he also has anti-establishment cred.
He's also very good at talking about technology, and a fairly likable person, so the press loves the guy.
Finally, Steve Jobs haters love to hail him as the "real" genius behind anything good that Apple has ever done, in spite of the fact that he was never really part of the Macintosh team and hasn't been involved in any company of note for a couple of decades now.
and it is not clear how many people will buy a new television just for the latest version of the Madden football game.
From all accounts, the new Madden game sucks.
But it is just possible that one or two people might buy a new TV for some other reason, like... oh, I don't know... watching television, perhaps? Those people will probably want a console that looks good on their new set.
DOA4 is almost enough to make me want a 360 for my HD system... almost. A couple more good games, and I'll seriously consider it. Meanwhile, I'm waiting to see what Sony comes up with.
That comparison doesn't hold; single-player baseball would be equally dull. The thrill is to watch the best players in the world play against each other.
Except I'd rather watch a high school basketball game than the best Half-life players in the universe square off against each other.
The only problem with gaming as a spectator sport is that you need to have played the game (or a similar one) to understand the skill and tactics involved.
In my prime, I was a Quake god. Seriously, I took great pride in splattering "good" players into chunks of meat with great ease. I was the Magic Johnson of the low-G level. Eventually, I'd start darting aournd the Quad glyph and ignoring the rocket launcher, just to make things interesting.
Needless to say, I "understand" the skill and tactics involved in FPS gaming.
I'd still rather watch paint dry than sit and watch somebody else play Quake. Do you know why? Because watching other people play video games is boring!
Not to mention that the very first music video on MTV was the very high-concept "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.
The very first video I ever saw (before NBC got off the ground with "Friday Night Videos" IIRC) was the Talking Heads video for "Once in a Lifetime", in which David Byrne was doing his famously quirky dance moves in front of a white background, with the aid of various cheesy video effects.
DEVO's first album was intended to be a video art project, sold on VHS. It never got off the ground, but they managed to use their material to create some seriously messed-up videos on MTV.
Peter Jackson is clearly remembering it wrong.
Heck, you could even go back to the Elvis & Beatles movies.
Back even further, to black & white footage of Leadbelly playing his guitar by night while wearing a prison uniform.
What part of the country are you from?
The Midwest. Otherwise known as "fly-over land", where the cost of living is much cheaper than on the coasts.
Okay, I'll give you the British variation on "ise" vs. "ize."
That still doesn't explain how you don't seem to know the difference between "where" and "were."
We descend from britain not your screwed over country.
Which one would that be? For all you know, I'm posting from New Zealand.
BOO is BACK!
Next you'll be telling me that I can pay for stuff there with Flooz.
Those ads ran in the states with the words "Actual Game Footage" on the screen.
:/
Well, it was an "actual" cut-scene from the game.
It would be nice to see the end of this practice.... not only because it will make the ads more honest, but it will mean game devs might finally stop filling up disks with little video clips in lieu of playable content.
Personally, I thought the little cut-scenes in Ms. Pac-Man were too long. If I ever gotta sit through the opening scenes of GTA:SA again, I'm going to pop a gasket.
"Eighty-five percent of life is just showing up."
-- Woody Allen
Sure, bashing 'pro video game players' is an easy target
I must have missed the spot in my post where I bashed anyone.
Dont stop there, sometimes long witty satire and elaborate artwork are not practical but that should not stop you from spreading freedom of speech
:)
Lack of wit and artistic skill certainly didn't stop me.
You did click on the link, didn't you? It's a crappy stick-figure cartoon ending with a dick joke. Setting the bar low was part of my objective.