That Hauppage card doesn't have a camera with a decent zoom lens, nor does it have a MiniDV tape for recording video while the PC is turned off.
Look, I'm sick of you're all-in-one fanboyism.
If I want a digital video capture device, I should not be compelled to buy a bundled camera and zoom lens that I may not want, nor a MiniDV tape drive.
Bring back the good old days, when a video camera was a shoulder-mounted behemoth that weighed sixty pounds and you still needed to feed its signal into a separate VCR in order to record anything. Now THAT was modularity at its finest.
You mean like the xbox360? or the macmini running frontrow?
How about five years of Windows XP Media Center Edition?
Granted, a huge number of OEM PCs today are shipped with MCE pre-installed, because TV tuner cards got really cheap and the OS license is hardly different than XP Pro or Home. But how many of those end up hooked up to the TV in the living room?
I don't know very much about the server side of dial-up networking, and am desperately trying to forget everything I knew about the client side, but I am curious as to why you guys didn't just configure YOUR modems to not handshake at anything above 2400bps, instead of having every individual customer make a temporary change on their side.
"The revised code and spec would then submit each one to an impartial panel of 100 SQA testers, selected at random from the ranks of people who work for a living testing code."
Yeah right. As if there were more than 100 competent SQA testers in the world.
as well as prosecuting every trivial violation of the law the cameras see.
Police forces will ALWAYS have more important things to do than prosecute every trivial violation of the law they observe. Even without cameras today, you can beat a lot of minor tickets simply by contesting it in court, which forces the officer to make a court appearance to testify, which they don't want to do for some stupid crap like your littering. They're not going to want to spend all their days in a courtroom telling the judge how they observed you jaywalking on the Big Brother cameras, either.
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive.
Not only do CFL's sell at a higher price than incandescents, but they also take up a lot less space in warehouses and on shelves, and are a lot less prone to inventory loss by accidental breakage.
There's plenty of reasons for a major retailer to push compact fluorescents that have nothing to do with philanthropy or promotion of science. IKEA, for example, has been pushing them for at least the past 5 years, maybe longer.
"10% of every drop of gasoline you put in your car's tank is ethanol that is produced by the most wasteful, expensive method: corn. Brazil is producing huge amounts of ethanol off of sugar cane, which produces eight times more energy."
So why doesn't the U.S. agrifuel industry convert to growing sugar cane? Oh, right, because that crop won't grow on the millions of acres of America's farmlands. Corn will.
"The majority of midwestern voters are ignorant and uneducated (especially in civics issues)."
That's my family you're talking about, asshole. And if your prejudice and anger are any indication, I'd reckon they're quite a bit less ignorant than you are, regardless of what geographical region you live in.
It's trivial to build a $1000 gaming computer that is significantly better than a PS3.
The hardware may have "significantly" better specs, but the software running on it isn't going to be significantly better.
Console software still has a lot more potential for optimization than general-purpose computer software, due to the much smaller number of hardware configurations to target. A PC game has to support hundreds of combinations of CPU, GPU, sound card, etc. -- the only way to do that is to abstract everything behind common APIs and code to those. It works, broadly, but odds are good the full potential of any given hardware combination will never be used.
A console game only has to support the one console it is compiled for, thus routines can be highly optimized for the specific hardware known to be in the console. Even titles written for multiple platforms with substantial hardware differences can be optimized at compile time rather than runtime, maintaining the potential for better performance.
But don't worry -- I have 50 times the retail price of a PS3 in a diversified array of index funds, taking advantage of the favorable tax-free and tax-deferred accounts, so I think I've got my investing in order...
Yeah, but how long is your dick? That's what you're actually trying to inform us all of, no?
The space shuttle launch and construction mission received a total of 171 hours of programming while the war in Iraq 2416 hours over all of the cable and broadcast channels in the US and UK during the same time frame.
You must realize that a generation ago, when the space program WAS getting substantial media coverage, it was not because the population had any special interest in science.
It was because we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. We couldn't let control of outer space fall into Commie hands, or they'd be able to nuke us from orbit. And I'm sure the Soviets had the same concerns about us.
4. The iPod will face it's first big competitor at Christmas 2007, from a vastly improved Zune
As we know, the 2.0 version of any Microsoft product is always the best.
3. iPod will release a hard-drive free version of it's Video iPod, utilizing multiple flash memory cards to achieve 40GB+
Sony will sue for patent infringement, claiming that the idea of a portable video player that costs over $700 is theirs exclusively.
1. Apple will announce plans for a set-top box, integrating gaming, cable, and internet browsing
Bandai will take a bath on manufacturing it and vow not to make the same mistake a third time. It doesn't help that Apple's name for the product ends up being "Power iPippin@World.mac Pro".
I can't wait until these things get shoved in a vanilla IDE (or is it SATA these days?) format. Hard drives with platters will be completely extinct in 5 years.
I could cram 40GB of Flash storage into a 3.5" drive bay today. But it's still going to be a lot longer than 5 years before Winchester drives are extinct.
Consider price alone: a new high-capacity hard drive might run you at most $0.50/GB today. Flash memory, on the other hand, I doubt you'll be able to find for very much less than $15/GB.
Flash isn't going to take over the market while there's an established, competing technology that provides the same capacity at 1/30 the cost.
Look at major cities, areas akin to the AAs, abandoned areas, offset by guarded gated compounds or "communities".
I'm looking at major cities, and all I can see is the benefits of decades of revitalization. Perhaps your comparison would have been more insightful during the urban blight of the early 1980s, but we're already trending away from a future like Heinlein's dystopic one at least in that respect.
I use JSP, which makes it a little bit easier to use "good practices" since you can't just edit the files on the web server.
That's a feature/flaw of your servlet container configuration, not of JSP itself. Websphere, for example, can allow JSP templates to be edited and recompiled on-the-fly.
I like the dev and testing environments to be different from each other... and from the production environment. I've found that doing this helps me shake out some "dependencies" that I may not have thought about.
That's okay, but the problem is that those "dependendies" aren't being revealed until the product breaks in production. And by then the damage has already been done.
I can see merit to having a different configuration for the QA/test environment than for the development environment, but you need to be as certain as you can that there will be no surprises when the product is deployed to the production environment, and that means having a pre-production environment ('staging' if you have multiple tiers, 'development' if you have only one) that mirrors the production environment to the greatest extent possible.
As a concrete example my 96 Civic gets much better gas real world mileage than my mother's 2005 Civic hybrid.
Nice anecdote, but there's too many uncontrolled variables.
How would the gas mileage that your mother gets in her 2005 Civic Hybrid compare to the gas mileage that your mother would get in a 2005 Civic with a traditional gas engine? For all we know, the improved numbers you see could be because your driving habits are more efficient than your mother'. Or because cars are less efficient across the board now than than they were ten years ago. Or any of a dozen other explanations that have nothing to do with the hybrid design.
You haven't proven that modern hybrids are not more efficient than their traditional counterparts.
There is virtually no way for Vista to fail, given the circumstances.
But there is a chance -- perhaps even a likelihood -- that "Vista Content Protection" will fail. If Microsoft cannot justify the additional trouble of working within the system to content creators/providers, they will not offer "protected" content.
Er, PS3 has DVI in the form of HDMI, they're signal compatible and straight pin adaptor cables are easy to find.
HDMI is signal-compatible with DVI-I and DVI-D, which are used to interconnect with digital LCD panels. Most low-end LCD panels and practically all CRT displays use the DVI-A signal standard, which is just analog VGA with a different connector and is not compatible with HDMI.
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Slippery slope people...
No problem. We'll just lay all your straw men out on the slope, and then it won't be slippery anymore.
That Hauppage card doesn't have a camera with a decent zoom lens, nor does it have a MiniDV tape for recording video while the PC is turned off.
Look, I'm sick of you're all-in-one fanboyism.
If I want a digital video capture device, I should not be compelled to buy a bundled camera and zoom lens that I may not want, nor a MiniDV tape drive.
Bring back the good old days, when a video camera was a shoulder-mounted behemoth that weighed sixty pounds and you still needed to feed its signal into a separate VCR in order to record anything. Now THAT was modularity at its finest.
You mean like the xbox360? or the macmini running frontrow?
How about five years of Windows XP Media Center Edition?
Granted, a huge number of OEM PCs today are shipped with MCE pre-installed, because TV tuner cards got really cheap and the OS license is hardly different than XP Pro or Home. But how many of those end up hooked up to the TV in the living room?
Be fair. There are a lot of us non-Christians who believe in loving one another, too.
I don't know very much about the server side of dial-up networking, and am desperately trying to forget everything I knew about the client side, but I am curious as to why you guys didn't just configure YOUR modems to not handshake at anything above 2400bps, instead of having every individual customer make a temporary change on their side.
I've seen untwisted coat hangers covered in electrical tape and twisted together used to supply AC between two buildings in tropical weather in PNG.
That's at least better than using coat hangers as power lines in JPEG. No compression artifacts.
"The revised code and spec would then submit each one to an impartial panel of 100 SQA testers, selected at random from the ranks of people who work for a living testing code."
Yeah right. As if there were more than 100 competent SQA testers in the world.
as well as prosecuting every trivial violation of the law the cameras see.
Police forces will ALWAYS have more important things to do than prosecute every trivial violation of the law they observe. Even without cameras today, you can beat a lot of minor tickets simply by contesting it in court, which forces the officer to make a court appearance to testify, which they don't want to do for some stupid crap like your littering. They're not going to want to spend all their days in a courtroom telling the judge how they observed you jaywalking on the Big Brother cameras, either.
They will also have converted about 28% (nearly a third) of their yearly lightbulb sales to somthing that is 8 times as expensive.
Not only do CFL's sell at a higher price than incandescents, but they also take up a lot less space in warehouses and on shelves, and are a lot less prone to inventory loss by accidental breakage.
There's plenty of reasons for a major retailer to push compact fluorescents that have nothing to do with philanthropy or promotion of science. IKEA, for example, has been pushing them for at least the past 5 years, maybe longer.
"10% of every drop of gasoline you put in your car's tank is ethanol that is produced by the most wasteful, expensive method: corn. Brazil is producing huge amounts of ethanol off of sugar cane, which produces eight times more energy."
So why doesn't the U.S. agrifuel industry convert to growing sugar cane? Oh, right, because that crop won't grow on the millions of acres of America's farmlands. Corn will.
"The majority of midwestern voters are ignorant and uneducated (especially in civics issues)."
That's my family you're talking about, asshole. And if your prejudice and anger are any indication, I'd reckon they're quite a bit less ignorant than you are, regardless of what geographical region you live in.
From the article it shows a price spike at 10/21 - 10/23 Why the spike? What was so special about those couple of days?
People buying them as Mole Day gifts, no doubt...
It's trivial to build a $1000 gaming computer that is significantly better than a PS3.
The hardware may have "significantly" better specs, but the software running on it isn't going to be significantly better.
Console software still has a lot more potential for optimization than general-purpose computer software, due to the much smaller number of hardware configurations to target. A PC game has to support hundreds of combinations of CPU, GPU, sound card, etc. -- the only way to do that is to abstract everything behind common APIs and code to those. It works, broadly, but odds are good the full potential of any given hardware combination will never be used.
A console game only has to support the one console it is compiled for, thus routines can be highly optimized for the specific hardware known to be in the console. Even titles written for multiple platforms with substantial hardware differences can be optimized at compile time rather than runtime, maintaining the potential for better performance.
But don't worry -- I have 50 times the retail price of a PS3 in a diversified array of index funds, taking advantage of the favorable tax-free and tax-deferred accounts, so I think I've got my investing in order...
Yeah, but how long is your dick? That's what you're actually trying to inform us all of, no?
The space shuttle launch and construction mission received a total of 171 hours of programming while the war in Iraq 2416 hours over all of the cable and broadcast channels in the US and UK during the same time frame.
You must realize that a generation ago, when the space program WAS getting substantial media coverage, it was not because the population had any special interest in science.
It was because we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. We couldn't let control of outer space fall into Commie hands, or they'd be able to nuke us from orbit. And I'm sure the Soviets had the same concerns about us.
Especially at the rate we are using up our own planet's resources / destroying the environment. We're going to need somewhere else to go
If we damage Earth to the point where we can't live on it anymore, perhaps we don't DESERVE to go somewhere else and do any further damage.
Humanity is smaller than this planet, not larger than it.
4. The iPod will face it's first big competitor at Christmas 2007, from a vastly improved Zune
As we know, the 2.0 version of any Microsoft product is always the best.
3. iPod will release a hard-drive free version of it's Video iPod, utilizing multiple flash memory cards to achieve 40GB+
Sony will sue for patent infringement, claiming that the idea of a portable video player that costs over $700 is theirs exclusively.
1. Apple will announce plans for a set-top box, integrating gaming, cable, and internet browsing
Bandai will take a bath on manufacturing it and vow not to make the same mistake a third time. It doesn't help that Apple's name for the product ends up being "Power iPippin@World.mac Pro".
So Google Maps is the first search result for a Google search on "maps", but isn't even on the first two pages of results for "online maps"?
Sounds like Google needs to hire an expensive SEO Consultant to help them improve their ranking.
If this hack proves to be valid, I would actually consider investing in the technology as it opens the format up to Linux/Unix/OSX/etc.
If you invest in the technology, you invest in the assholes who insisted that it be wrapped in DRM in the first place.
Wait for a Free alternative.
I can't wait until these things get shoved in a vanilla IDE (or is it SATA these days?) format. Hard drives with platters will be completely extinct in 5 years.
I could cram 40GB of Flash storage into a 3.5" drive bay today. But it's still going to be a lot longer than 5 years before Winchester drives are extinct.
Consider price alone: a new high-capacity hard drive might run you at most $0.50/GB today. Flash memory, on the other hand, I doubt you'll be able to find for very much less than $15/GB.
Flash isn't going to take over the market while there's an established, competing technology that provides the same capacity at 1/30 the cost.
Look at major cities, areas akin to the AAs, abandoned areas, offset by guarded gated compounds or "communities".
I'm looking at major cities, and all I can see is the benefits of decades of revitalization. Perhaps your comparison would have been more insightful during the urban blight of the early 1980s, but we're already trending away from a future like Heinlein's dystopic one at least in that respect.
I use JSP, which makes it a little bit easier to use "good practices" since you can't just edit the files on the web server.
That's a feature/flaw of your servlet container configuration, not of JSP itself. Websphere, for example, can allow JSP templates to be edited and recompiled on-the-fly.
I like the dev and testing environments to be different from each other... and from the production environment.
I've found that doing this helps me shake out some "dependencies" that I may not have thought about.
That's okay, but the problem is that those "dependendies" aren't being revealed until the product breaks in production. And by then the damage has already been done.
I can see merit to having a different configuration for the QA/test environment than for the development environment, but you need to be as certain as you can that there will be no surprises when the product is deployed to the production environment, and that means having a pre-production environment ('staging' if you have multiple tiers, 'development' if you have only one) that mirrors the production environment to the greatest extent possible.
As a concrete example my 96 Civic gets much better gas real world mileage than my mother's 2005 Civic hybrid.
Nice anecdote, but there's too many uncontrolled variables.
How would the gas mileage that your mother gets in her 2005 Civic Hybrid compare to the gas mileage that your mother would get in a 2005 Civic with a traditional gas engine? For all we know, the improved numbers you see could be because your driving habits are more efficient than your mother'. Or because cars are less efficient across the board now than than they were ten years ago. Or any of a dozen other explanations that have nothing to do with the hybrid design.
You haven't proven that modern hybrids are not more efficient than their traditional counterparts.
There is virtually no way for Vista to fail, given the circumstances.
But there is a chance -- perhaps even a likelihood -- that "Vista Content Protection" will fail. If Microsoft cannot justify the additional trouble of working within the system to content creators/providers, they will not offer "protected" content.
Er, PS3 has DVI in the form of HDMI, they're signal compatible and straight pin adaptor cables are easy to find.
HDMI is signal-compatible with DVI-I and DVI-D, which are used to interconnect with digital LCD panels. Most low-end LCD panels and practically all CRT displays use the DVI-A signal standard, which is just analog VGA with a different connector and is not compatible with HDMI.