Let's see audio players doing this, shall we? I'd love to walk in with a player in my pocket and have it automatically sync with my desktop's current media collection. Granted, plugging the darn thing in isn't terribly taxing, but I'd like not to have to remember.
I'd love to see some more Bluetooth devices coming out. Buzzwords aside, if all my random tech bits could say hi and do something usful when I put them in the same room, that'd be so incredibly cool, and probably useful too. Rather than a Picturebook with a camera you have to carry around with you all the time, I'd rather have separate camera and laptop, but when I take pix with the camera while the laptop's in my bag, it should send the pictures there, keeping the internal storage free. Keep a copy there in case I don't need the space, but mark it as "duplicated" so it can be overwritten Tivo-style if the space needs to be used.
Combine this with some of the wireless power things coming out, and we're halfway to a Star Trek world. Network the tricorders indeed!
Why? Because people are stupid and think it makes them safer.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - box cutters, nail files, really sharp paper, these are not the problem. This is sort of like saying iron ore causes handgun deaths, so we should ban iron ore. Repeat after me, a nail file is NOT the problem. The problem was that some schmuck with a box cutter managed to cow a few hundred people into giving him an airplane.
Now, what *should* have happened is that some schmuck with a box cutter stands up and starts screaming; the two people next to him, two people in front, and two people behind stand up and jump the asshole, take his knife, and beat him senseless with it. Or maybe one of those idiots who can't read "your carry-on baggage must fit in this box" should hit him with the small cars they try to cram into the overhead compartments and under their seats.
One more time, everyone together now: Nail clippers do not throw airplanes at buildings. People throw airplanes at buildings.
...it would be a shame for people to associate their site with this litigation crazy moron.
Shame? It's not a shame if you're the Pet Warehouse lawyer who gets to sue Pets Warehouse for each and every piece of dirisive email misdirected to you, and for any drop in share price (if applicable), revenue, market share, etc. for the next six months. No, I would have to say it's not a shame at all.
Is it any wonder there are more lawyers per capita in the USA than anywhere else?
Infact while reveiw, the whole commentry is manufacturers spec sheet. Where are the facts buddy!!? No comparison, as if it were the only card in the market?
It might as well be the only card on the market. Is there anything even *close* to the performance and featureset of the AIW 9700? Does any other company have the same reputation for quality in this segment that ATI has? As far as I have seen, the answer to both questions is a resounding no, yet one single company has managed to combine both into a storied series of outstanding products.
I'm starting to sound like an ATI ad myself, but your objections seem totally out of line. You want specifications? Read the numerous Radeon 9700 - that part of the card is identical. And what specifications would satisfy you as regards the AIW features of the card? The review discusses both hardware and software in this area, and I expect the product will be as shiny and glowing as the review was. You want benchmarks or something? How would you propose benchmarking a TV card? You're pretty much stuck at 29.97 fields per second (or 25 for PAL), no matter what you do.
Consider: CF buys a movie. CF sells a movie. Both of these are perfectly legal. CF also edits the movie. Are you saying that is illegal? Why? Because they're removing parts of it? Then what if they left them all in, but moved them to the end of the movie, after 10 minutes of blank tape? Don't like that, eh? Why not?
Consider: I buy a movie. I edit the movie because I don't like Natalie Portman (too many bad memories of/. trolls). Would you then prohibit me from selling my movie in the future? Now look - you're trampling on the right of first sale.
Do you need more examples? Or can you understand how your position is untenable, leading to too many rediculous notions when it is taken to its logical conclusion?
A Briq with OSX makes a nice addition to anyone's drab beige PC:) With the dual-NIC option, you can have your firewall right above your DVD drive. It's a bit more than 400 Euros though.
You spend tens to hundreds of hours constructing a faithful replica of a WWII battleship. You paint it, you fuel it, you wire up the controls, you test and refine it. Then you go wreck it. So, it's sort of like RC planes?
The MTBF ratings on modern hard drives belie your statements. Seagate's top-end 15k RPM drives carry MTBF ratings of over a million hours (more than 100 years). Even much-maligned consumer drives like WDC's Caviar line are rated at 500,000 hours MTBF.
Think about it this way. The outer track on a 3.5" platter running at 7200RPM is going at over 60MPH. The read head is precise enough to find a single sector in a track 1/40,000th of an inch wide while it's whizzing by that fast. A car moving at 60MPH would be lucky to hit a dime and has hardly a prayer of lasting 57 years (500,000 hours), let alone running that long.
I hate car analogies, and I think a 1-year warranty sucks but even so, do we really need to be bitching about hard drives? The price per megabyte has dropped by a factor of 1000 in under 10 years; reliability (based on MTBF ratings) and speed have increased by a factor of 5-10 in the same time frame. Name me one other computer component that can boast the same.
No point in buying RAM, a spendy mainboard, or even a video card.
Not sure what you mean there. I'd argue that you should *always* buy more ram and a spendy mainboard. Cheap motherboards suck so get a good one. Cheap CPUs are just 25% slower - who can tell? As someone who spent 10x as much on a monitor as he did on his CPU, I can say unequivocally that I'm a happier man than someone who split the money evenly between the two.
I know its coming... I've seen (pictures) of the engineering samples...
Yeah, but since they've pushed 'em back a quarter, I might have to grab one of those lovely cheap Athlon XPs. If I can scrounge up a floppy somewhere I can flash my BIOS to recognize them. The Duron/600 I've got cost me about $50. Amazing what I can get for $50 now, almost exactly 2 years later.
yuk yuk yuk. My 600Mhz Duron does everything (including OO 1.0) I do bar 3 just fine. Winamp's visualization studio absolutely murders my CPU - it won't run bigger than about 512x384 below 100% CPU load. High-quality two-pass divx encoding takes almost 12 hours for an average-length movie. Audio encoding is also unnecessarily slow whether it be using lame with -r3mix or ogg vorbis.
Anyone who claims a 600mhz CPU is too slow for office apps needs more memory and/or a faster hard drive and/or a motherboard that doesn't have the magic numbers (i810, i820) on it.
A law banning it won't work. Like the laws that make it illegal for 15-year-olds to get pregnant. So the real question becomes "Would you pay $0.50 more for a cell-free performance?" That would nicely pay a theater employee or two to sit in movies and escort people whose phones ring to the parking lot, sans refund. It would also pay for the cellphone-using assholes who would stop going to the theater. At $7.50-$10.00 a ticket, a fifty-cent surcharge on cell-free showings is about 6%, less than what many people pay in sales tax.
I'm too tired (and I gotta pee) to look up numbers, but the space shuttle fleet costs an arm and a leg to maintain. It was designed as the do-anything vehicle and ended up as the do-nothing-well vehicle. Sure it works but like masturbation there are better ways to get it done. At the current price/mass ratio, large space projects like ISS are uneconomical. Before building a space station, NASA should build a better launch facility either here or on the moon. Seeing as it's immeasurably easier and cheaper to build on Earth, I'd recommend starting with a big linear accelerator (think rail gun) here. If memory serves, the price/mass ratio is somewhere between 10 and 1000 times less than using the Shuttle fleet. It shouldn't take too long to recoup costs at that price, especially when one considers that lower price to orbit will mean lots more traffic. The flip side is that much more debris in the popular belts but the cost to send up a garbage collector would be that much less too.
Where's someone with 10 years and a hundred billion dollars to spend when you need 'em? By my count, 5 people could do it. Hey Bill, want to be a big player in an emerging market? Get your ass moving on a few square miles of solar cells and a linear accelerator.
Grocery stores make way less than 15%. This of course depends on what type of store and where it's located, but the grocery store I shop at makes way less than that, and under 5% on me.
Most people don't pay $300 for Office, they get it bundled with their computer and don't realize how much it's costing them. I actually paid for a legal copy. It cost me $25. It wasn't worth it. I used it for about 6 months, maybe a dozen times in that time. Now I use openOffice.
11 - consumers hear about $100 million movies and can buy 2 hours of audio *and* video for the same price they get less than an hour of audio only on a CD. If it costs so much to make a CD that you can't make a profit on a $10 disc, someone needs to figure out how to make a CD for less money.
Red's a poor example because reds suck. The (OK, one) reason high-end video monitors cost so much is because their phosphors adhere to the standards. TVs and computer monitors have a certain tendency to use cheap phosphors and reds suffer the most.
What I personally would like to see is a change from RGB to something with a bigger color gamut. Something that's not *smaller* than what the human eye can see. We've got monitors with pixels small enough our eyes can't tell the difference between one and two. We've got framerates so high we can't tell the difference between half and ful lframerate. But every color in every pixel of every frame is substandard. Entire classes of colors (royal purples, for example) cannot be expressed in RGB space. If you don't believe me, take a graphics class. You'll learn how incredible video cards really are and how substandard the colors they're working with really are.
Actually, I just want FP colors so when I find a dark corner in an FPS and try to snipe at people, I don't get rocket-blasted by some asshole with the gamma jacked up sky-high who sees me a mile away.
Think about it slightly differently. The sun is about 8 minutes away from the earth, and the gravitational attraction between the earth and the sun keeps the earth's orbit curved. Now, take the sun away. The earth cannot instantly begin travelling in a straight line because that would imply knowledge of the disappearance of the sun travelling faster than light. From this we can infer that gravity is transmitted at a speed less than c. It is in fact (at least, as far as anyone knows) transmitted by bosons which bring to each particle in the earth a message telling them to move toward the sun. Block the bosons, and you would block the gravitational effect of the sun.
You're completely off-base here. This is the kind of thinking that has led to the frenzy of new laws in the past few years. If my brother records something and mails me a VHS cassette, we both get copies of a show. If he records it to vcd and mails me a CD, we both get copies of a show. If he records it and sends it over the internet, we both get copies of a show. If he watches it and telepathically broadcasts it to me, we both get copies of the show. USING THE INTERNET DOES NOT MAKE IT DIFFERENT!!!
To respond to your other point: Yes, it should be okay for you to record stuff with a VCR and copy the tapes and distribute them via a catalog. The person who buys your VHS cassette could have recorded the show him/herself, so the effect on the original copyright holders is nil. Since they didn't, you are providing a service which you should be able to charge for.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see audio players doing this, shall we? I'd love to walk in with a player in my pocket and have it automatically sync with my desktop's current media collection. Granted, plugging the darn thing in isn't terribly taxing, but I'd like not to have to remember.
I'd love to see some more Bluetooth devices coming out. Buzzwords aside, if all my random tech bits could say hi and do something usful when I put them in the same room, that'd be so incredibly cool, and probably useful too. Rather than a Picturebook with a camera you have to carry around with you all the time, I'd rather have separate camera and laptop, but when I take pix with the camera while the laptop's in my bag, it should send the pictures there, keeping the internal storage free. Keep a copy there in case I don't need the space, but mark it as "duplicated" so it can be overwritten Tivo-style if the space needs to be used.
Combine this with some of the wireless power things coming out, and we're halfway to a Star Trek world. Network the tricorders indeed!
Look at all the neat technology you silly gamers are paying for!
Go play Frisbee.
Why? Because people are stupid and think it makes them safer.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - box cutters, nail files, really sharp paper, these are not the problem. This is sort of like saying iron ore causes handgun deaths, so we should ban iron ore. Repeat after me, a nail file is NOT the problem. The problem was that some schmuck with a box cutter managed to cow a few hundred people into giving him an airplane.
Now, what *should* have happened is that some schmuck with a box cutter stands up and starts screaming; the two people next to him, two people in front, and two people behind stand up and jump the asshole, take his knife, and beat him senseless with it. Or maybe one of those idiots who can't read "your carry-on baggage must fit in this box" should hit him with the small cars they try to cram into the overhead compartments and under their seats.
One more time, everyone together now: Nail clippers do not throw airplanes at buildings. People throw airplanes at buildings.
Shame? It's not a shame if you're the Pet Warehouse lawyer who gets to sue Pets Warehouse for each and every piece of dirisive email misdirected to you, and for any drop in share price (if applicable), revenue, market share, etc. for the next six months. No, I would have to say it's not a shame at all.
Is it any wonder there are more lawyers per capita in the USA than anywhere else?
It might as well be the only card on the market. Is there anything even *close* to the performance and featureset of the AIW 9700? Does any other company have the same reputation for quality in this segment that ATI has? As far as I have seen, the answer to both questions is a resounding no, yet one single company has managed to combine both into a storied series of outstanding products.
I'm starting to sound like an ATI ad myself, but your objections seem totally out of line. You want specifications? Read the numerous Radeon 9700 - that part of the card is identical. And what specifications would satisfy you as regards the AIW features of the card? The review discusses both hardware and software in this area, and I expect the product will be as shiny and glowing as the review was. You want benchmarks or something? How would you propose benchmarking a TV card? You're pretty much stuck at 29.97 fields per second (or 25 for PAL), no matter what you do.
I'd give you a mod point if I had any.
I've had slashdot's images blocked for so long I've forgotten they used to have 'em.
Why? Can you defend your position at all here?
/. trolls). Would you then prohibit me from selling my movie in the future? Now look - you're trampling on the right of first sale.
Consider: CF buys a movie. CF sells a movie. Both of these are perfectly legal. CF also edits the movie. Are you saying that is illegal? Why? Because they're removing parts of it? Then what if they left them all in, but moved them to the end of the movie, after 10 minutes of blank tape? Don't like that, eh? Why not?
Consider: I buy a movie. I edit the movie because I don't like Natalie Portman (too many bad memories of
Do you need more examples? Or can you understand how your position is untenable, leading to too many rediculous notions when it is taken to its logical conclusion?
A Briq with OSX makes a nice addition to anyone's drab beige PC:) With the dual-NIC option, you can have your firewall right above your DVD drive. It's a bit more than 400 Euros though.
You spend tens to hundreds of hours constructing a faithful replica of a WWII battleship. You paint it, you fuel it, you wire up the controls, you test and refine it. Then you go wreck it. So, it's sort of like RC planes?
The MTBF ratings on modern hard drives belie your statements. Seagate's top-end 15k RPM drives carry MTBF ratings of over a million hours (more than 100 years). Even much-maligned consumer drives like WDC's Caviar line are rated at 500,000 hours MTBF.
Think about it this way. The outer track on a 3.5" platter running at 7200RPM is going at over 60MPH. The read head is precise enough to find a single sector in a track 1/40,000th of an inch wide while it's whizzing by that fast. A car moving at 60MPH would be lucky to hit a dime and has hardly a prayer of lasting 57 years (500,000 hours), let alone running that long.
I hate car analogies, and I think a 1-year warranty sucks but even so, do we really need to be bitching about hard drives? The price per megabyte has dropped by a factor of 1000 in under 10 years; reliability (based on MTBF ratings) and speed have increased by a factor of 5-10 in the same time frame. Name me one other computer component that can boast the same.
Not sure what you mean there. I'd argue that you should *always* buy more ram and a spendy mainboard. Cheap motherboards suck so get a good one. Cheap CPUs are just 25% slower - who can tell? As someone who spent 10x as much on a monitor as he did on his CPU, I can say unequivocally that I'm a happier man than someone who split the money evenly between the two.
Yeah, but since they've pushed 'em back a quarter, I might have to grab one of those lovely cheap Athlon XPs. If I can scrounge up a floppy somewhere I can flash my BIOS to recognize them. The Duron/600 I've got cost me about $50. Amazing what I can get for $50 now, almost exactly 2 years later.
I've got thick hair - does that mean my computer will run faster?
yuk yuk yuk. My 600Mhz Duron does everything (including OO 1.0) I do bar 3 just fine. Winamp's visualization studio absolutely murders my CPU - it won't run bigger than about 512x384 below 100% CPU load. High-quality two-pass divx encoding takes almost 12 hours for an average-length movie. Audio encoding is also unnecessarily slow whether it be using lame with -r3mix or ogg vorbis.
Anyone who claims a 600mhz CPU is too slow for office apps needs more memory and/or a faster hard drive and/or a motherboard that doesn't have the magic numbers (i810, i820) on it.
A law banning it won't work. Like the laws that make it illegal for 15-year-olds to get pregnant. So the real question becomes "Would you pay $0.50 more for a cell-free performance?" That would nicely pay a theater employee or two to sit in movies and escort people whose phones ring to the parking lot, sans refund. It would also pay for the cellphone-using assholes who would stop going to the theater. At $7.50-$10.00 a ticket, a fifty-cent surcharge on cell-free showings is about 6%, less than what many people pay in sales tax.
I'm too tired (and I gotta pee) to look up numbers, but the space shuttle fleet costs an arm and a leg to maintain. It was designed as the do-anything vehicle and ended up as the do-nothing-well vehicle. Sure it works but like masturbation there are better ways to get it done. At the current price/mass ratio, large space projects like ISS are uneconomical. Before building a space station, NASA should build a better launch facility either here or on the moon. Seeing as it's immeasurably easier and cheaper to build on Earth, I'd recommend starting with a big linear accelerator (think rail gun) here. If memory serves, the price/mass ratio is somewhere between 10 and 1000 times less than using the Shuttle fleet. It shouldn't take too long to recoup costs at that price, especially when one considers that lower price to orbit will mean lots more traffic. The flip side is that much more debris in the popular belts but the cost to send up a garbage collector would be that much less too.
Where's someone with 10 years and a hundred billion dollars to spend when you need 'em? By my count, 5 people could do it. Hey Bill, want to be a big player in an emerging market? Get your ass moving on a few square miles of solar cells and a linear accelerator.
A few points:
Grocery stores make way less than 15%. This of course depends on what type of store and where it's located, but the grocery store I shop at makes way less than that, and under 5% on me.
Most people don't pay $300 for Office, they get it bundled with their computer and don't realize how much it's costing them. I actually paid for a legal copy. It cost me $25. It wasn't worth it. I used it for about 6 months, maybe a dozen times in that time. Now I use openOffice.
11 - consumers hear about $100 million movies and can buy 2 hours of audio *and* video for the same price they get less than an hour of audio only on a CD. If it costs so much to make a CD that you can't make a profit on a $10 disc, someone needs to figure out how to make a CD for less money.
You're all crazy. She's only attractive when you don't have to look at her face or listen to her talk. And he's just creepy.
Perfect! A billion fat people moving north should balance the ocean right out and we'll be back to normal in no time!
...were it Microsoft doing something similar you'd be raising all kind of hell.
Nah. We'd just beat to a bloody pulp anyone in Fry's or CompUSA holding a boxed copy of winXP.
Red's a poor example because reds suck. The (OK, one) reason high-end video monitors cost so much is because their phosphors adhere to the standards. TVs and computer monitors have a certain tendency to use cheap phosphors and reds suffer the most.
What I personally would like to see is a change from RGB to something with a bigger color gamut. Something that's not *smaller* than what the human eye can see. We've got monitors with pixels small enough our eyes can't tell the difference between one and two. We've got framerates so high we can't tell the difference between half and ful lframerate. But every color in every pixel of every frame is substandard. Entire classes of colors (royal purples, for example) cannot be expressed in RGB space. If you don't believe me, take a graphics class. You'll learn how incredible video cards really are and how substandard the colors they're working with really are.
Actually, I just want FP colors so when I find a dark corner in an FPS and try to snipe at people, I don't get rocket-blasted by some asshole with the gamma jacked up sky-high who sees me a mile away.
Think about it slightly differently. The sun is about 8 minutes away from the earth, and the gravitational attraction between the earth and the sun keeps the earth's orbit curved. Now, take the sun away. The earth cannot instantly begin travelling in a straight line because that would imply knowledge of the disappearance of the sun travelling faster than light. From this we can infer that gravity is transmitted at a speed less than c. It is in fact (at least, as far as anyone knows) transmitted by bosons which bring to each particle in the earth a message telling them to move toward the sun. Block the bosons, and you would block the gravitational effect of the sun.
What kind of hardware guy looks at this and doesnt say "WTF Xabre 4000??
The kind of hardware guy who knows the Xabre was the first video card to support AGP8x and is still one of very few that do.
Maxtor bought Quantum. Thus Maxtor Atlas 10K IIIs. I cringe every time I see Maxtor on a SCSI drive.
You're completely off-base here. This is the kind of thinking that has led to the frenzy of new laws in the past few years. If my brother records something and mails me a VHS cassette, we both get copies of a show. If he records it to vcd and mails me a CD, we both get copies of a show. If he records it and sends it over the internet, we both get copies of a show. If he watches it and telepathically broadcasts it to me, we both get copies of the show. USING THE INTERNET DOES NOT MAKE IT DIFFERENT!!!
To respond to your other point: Yes, it should be okay for you to record stuff with a VCR and copy the tapes and distribute them via a catalog. The person who buys your VHS cassette could have recorded the show him/herself, so the effect on the original copyright holders is nil. Since they didn't, you are providing a service which you should be able to charge for.