the Xbox 360 will not support HDDVD games. This ended the war in my mind.
So that explains why it's all quiet on the Your Mind front.
Who the hell is going to spend several hundred dollars for a cumbersome ADDON HD-DVD player for their xbox 360, JUST to watch movies?
Indeed. The very IDEA of a consumer electronics device that can only playback movies and not be used for interactive gaming is PREPOSTEROUS! If there were any market for a "video player", we would have seen them thirty years ago!
Look at how profitable Sony made the completely proprietary UMD movie
I'm looking. What I see is movement towards a model where if you buy the DVD of a movie, you get the UMD of it for free (or is it vice-versa?), because a year of sales figures of shown that UMD alone AIN'T SELLING. It's as much a failure as SACD, Minidisc, or consumer Betamax.
Had they REALLY supported HDDVD, they would have waited to bring their product to market, and included a HD-DVD player standard.
Now THIS I can agree with. Microsoft never really intended to support HD-DVD beyond corporate political lip service.
Seriously I can see a group of pissed off owners of these devices crying "Fraud" over the fact that the player automatically downgrades the signal to their televisions.
If there hasn't been a class action suit over Macrovision copy protection -- which works by intentionally wrecking part of the composite signal -- I doubt that a suit over this type of signal degradation would be successful.
Actually, my question is: is there even enough bandwidth on an analog component signal to carry 1080p video? There may be technological as well as/rather than DRM reasons for the resolution downgrading.
All these issues should have been identified on election day so that appropriate actions could be taken
I don't care for this idea we've been developing over the past few decades that we ought to have an uncontested victor in an election within hours of the polls closing. In close races, that's simply not enough time to properly audit the voting.
If it takes until the day before swearing-in to determine who won, let it take until the day before swearing-in. There's too much pressure on the APPARENT loser to be a "good sport" and concede even when there's serious and credible allegations of voting problems.
Judging by his involvement in the Danger Inc Hiptop
How much involvement does he have, really? I know he sits on Danger's advisory board, but I would imagine that if he had much of a hands-on role, a few really nasty bugs in the Hiptop API would have been history a long time ago.
You know, I don't think the intented users of Google Page Creator are going to give an ass's ass whether the code it generates is compliant with the W3C HTML 4.01 Strict specification. They just want access to basic hosting and formatting.
Take the Drew McLellan page you linked to as an example. The HTML may be atrocious, but I haven't looked at the source code, so I wouldn't know. All I see is a sparse, but not entirely inelegant, basic web page. What's so bad about that?
Wouldn't it make more sense to cool the water to just ABOVE freezing? Seems like spending time and energy just to phase-change liquid to solid and back to liquid again is wasteful. (Liquid water takes less space, too.)
Or (possibly) better yet, dissolve a salt into the water to bring its freezing point below 32F. This would depend on the types of pipe the chilled water would be running through, corrosion could be problematic.
the radioactive waste from coal goes straight into the atmosphere.
Where it is effectively diluted throughout the entire airspace, and that most likely means it presents less of a risk of radiation poisoning than the concentrated stores of spent nuclear fuel that are associated with traditional nuclear power plants.
There's plenty of other nasty things in coal smoke, like carcinogens, which I would imagine present a much more real danger than trace amounts of radioactive material.
Microsoft caught up to Netscape once Netscape started to lose focus.
You must have lived through a different late '90s than I did. Microsoft caught up to Netscape for two reasons:
1. They dumped their browser offering on the market at a price of $0 2. They bundled their browser offering (inextricably so, even) into their OS offerings
"City officials turned down Nees, saying the teen could come in and hand-copy the list. Officials said giving out copies of address lists would leave the newsletter subscribers open to spam and computer viruses."
And each of these claims disproves the other. If giving out the list represents a risk, he should not be allowed to hand-copy it.
I mean this has taken over a year now. He could have hand copied them and been done with it long before now.
Is that the lesson you want young people to learn? That it's best to take the easiest way out, even when your government is not acting in compliance with the law?
The information that's missing is information that your brain can't detect anyway (if the bitrate is reasonable and your encoder does a good job).
What if it isn't and it doesn't?
Would you argue that a 192kbps joint stereo MP3 file is functionally equivalent to the original CD audio, but a 32kbps mono MP3 file is not? Where do we draw the line?
It makes sense. Apart from the movies from some ill-advised, heavily edited syndication on I think Comedy Central in the 90s, Python's US exposure has been on PBS.
I was first exposed to the Python when MTV aired episodes of Flying Circus, at midnight I think, in the mid-1980's. I seem to remember them being unedited and commercial-free, but I was a wee lad at the time so I may be wrong about that. But I'm CERTAIN it was MTV.
The American NES also had extra pins on the cartridge connector to give the cart direct access to the expansion slot on the bottom of the console, which was never used for anything.
Cartridges had (and still have) the advantage over optical media of trivial load times.
But in order to stay competetive with CD-based games, N64 developers often had to compress their data to fit it on the cart, which led to wait states as the CPU unpacked the data into RAMy. Granted, the wait wasn't as bad as transfering dozens of megs of data off a 2x-speed CD-ROM, but it was still a concern.
we learned that our friends overseas now have to blow like maniacs into their cartridge in order for the game to play.
Our friends overseas had top-loading Famicoms with card-edge connectors, which were not susceptible to the same cartridge problems as the front-loading ZIF-connector US version.
Surround music is a superfluous and unnatural extension of digital music.
It's not specific to digital music. Remember quadraphonic record players? Remember Iannis Xenakis' 21-speaker tape installation?
There is no need to discretely record reverb. Recording reverb will only mess up the recorded source
There is no way to AVOID recording reverb. All musical instruments work by exciting the air molecules around them. As all recording engineers know, the amount of air between the instrument and the microphone makes a huge difference in the sound, and for most there's an optimum distance. Close-mic'ing everything in an acoustically sterile environment might minimize the natural reverb, but it would sound awful.
And I'm no audiophile purist, but you'll NEVER convince me that the sound of a digital "reverb" algorithm can compare to the utter ENVELOPMENT in sound you get standing in an acoustically complimentary cathedral while a choir of voices reverberates around you.
Don't we already have 2 competing standards that are more then capable of offering high quality multi-channel sound? (DTS and Dolby Digital)
Sure, we have them, but they're both designed for much higher bit rates than MP3. You might as well ask why anyone bothered to design MPEG-4 video when we already had MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. Different needs.
I would prefer if MP3 became a high fidelity format, storing music in BETTER then CD quality, storing music with higher bit and sampling rates.
Wouldn't be MP3, then, would it? MPEG Layer 3 being, by definition, a lossy psychoacoustic compression algorithm.
Storing more of the information, not just the audio range humans supposedly can only hear.
What good would that do? Almost all speaker systems are designed only to reproduce the frequencies that humans can hear -- from ~16Hz up to ~25kHz. Many have filters to specifically suppress signals outside of that range. What you ask for would require the entire audio electronics industry to rethink their approach.
Momentum is, of course, another reason why MP3 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
If I've been spending the past five years ripping my entire CD collection to MP3 format, I'm not going to be eager to RE-rip it all to FLAC or AAC or MP3 Surround or any other new format. I may begin to mix in newer formats for newly added content as time goes on, if all my gear supports them, but just as a Core Duo can still execute code originally written for an 8088, digital audio players will keep supporting MP3 from now until t=infinity.
You really want the killer app? Create a shared database for recruiters like what exists for real-estate.
As someone who has been looking for a home recently, AND has worked in online real estate, I would like to say "oh GOD no".
Multiple listings services and other "shared" closed databases don't benefit the buyer. They don't benefit the seller. They benefit the middlemen, the brokers. The people who feel they deserve 6% or more commission on your transaction for at most a few days' work.
I won't argue that middlemen don't provide valuable filtering services to those that need them, but for those of us that would prefer to do our own filtering, give us a TRULY open database. Craigslist and GoogleBase are good starts, but there's still a long way to go.
Nothing is more annoying than some C-average H.R. major who didn't even bother to look at your name until the phone was ringing, say "So tell me what it is you do!"
The correct answer to this is "I hang up on morons who waste their time and mine."
If the drive is already characterized as "rickety", is it really a good idea to power it down, physically move it to another machine, and power it back up?
Considering the timeframe OS/2 was developed in, and its complexity excuse me if I don't believe it is secure.
Remember, most of the OS/2 codebase was developed by IBM, whose minicomputer and mainframe OSes have frequently been used in the most complex and secure computing systems, ever since computers went electric.
On the other hand, the rest of the codebase was developed by Microsoft in the late 1980s, so you're probably right.
Slashdot Mirror
the Xbox 360 will not support HDDVD games. This ended the war in my mind.
So that explains why it's all quiet on the Your Mind front.
Who the hell is going to spend several hundred dollars for a cumbersome ADDON HD-DVD player for their xbox 360, JUST to watch movies?
Indeed. The very IDEA of a consumer electronics device that can only playback movies and not be used for interactive gaming is PREPOSTEROUS! If there were any market for a "video player", we would have seen them thirty years ago!
Look at how profitable Sony made the completely proprietary UMD movie
I'm looking. What I see is movement towards a model where if you buy the DVD of a movie, you get the UMD of it for free (or is it vice-versa?), because a year of sales figures of shown that UMD alone AIN'T SELLING. It's as much a failure as SACD, Minidisc, or consumer Betamax.
Had they REALLY supported HDDVD, they would have waited to bring their product to market, and included a HD-DVD player standard.
Now THIS I can agree with. Microsoft never really intended to support HD-DVD beyond corporate political lip service.
Seriously I can see a group of pissed off owners of these devices crying "Fraud" over the fact that the player automatically downgrades the signal to their televisions.
If there hasn't been a class action suit over Macrovision copy protection -- which works by intentionally wrecking part of the composite signal -- I doubt that a suit over this type of signal degradation would be successful.
Actually, my question is: is there even enough bandwidth on an analog component signal to carry 1080p video? There may be technological as well as/rather than DRM reasons for the resolution downgrading.
All these issues should have been identified on election day so that appropriate actions could be taken
I don't care for this idea we've been developing over the past few decades that we ought to have an uncontested victor in an election within hours of the polls closing. In close races, that's simply not enough time to properly audit the voting.
If it takes until the day before swearing-in to determine who won, let it take until the day before swearing-in. There's too much pressure on the APPARENT loser to be a "good sport" and concede even when there's serious and credible allegations of voting problems.
You use the one your boss tells you that you are going to use.
Sure. And how does your boss decide which one you are going to use?
Judging by his involvement in the Danger Inc Hiptop
How much involvement does he have, really? I know he sits on Danger's advisory board, but I would imagine that if he had much of a hands-on role, a few really nasty bugs in the Hiptop API would have been history a long time ago.
You know, I don't think the intented users of Google Page Creator are going to give an ass's ass whether the code it generates is compliant with the W3C HTML 4.01 Strict specification. They just want access to basic hosting and formatting.
Take the Drew McLellan page you linked to as an example. The HTML may be atrocious, but I haven't looked at the source code, so I wouldn't know. All I see is a sparse, but not entirely inelegant, basic web page. What's so bad about that?
they want you as dumb as can be and easy to control.
Who are "they"?
Wouldn't it make more sense to cool the water to just ABOVE freezing? Seems like spending time and energy just to phase-change liquid to solid and back to liquid again is wasteful. (Liquid water takes less space, too.)
Or (possibly) better yet, dissolve a salt into the water to bring its freezing point below 32F. This would depend on the types of pipe the chilled water would be running through, corrosion could be problematic.
the radioactive waste from coal goes straight into the atmosphere.
Where it is effectively diluted throughout the entire airspace, and that most likely means it presents less of a risk of radiation poisoning than the concentrated stores of spent nuclear fuel that are associated with traditional nuclear power plants.
There's plenty of other nasty things in coal smoke, like carcinogens, which I would imagine present a much more real danger than trace amounts of radioactive material.
Understanding of subject/verb agreement are also minimal, it would seem.
Microsoft caught up to Netscape once Netscape started to lose focus.
You must have lived through a different late '90s than I did. Microsoft caught up to Netscape for two reasons:
1. They dumped their browser offering on the market at a price of $0
2. They bundled their browser offering (inextricably so, even) into their OS offerings
"City officials turned down Nees, saying the teen could come in and hand-copy the list. Officials said giving out copies of address lists would leave the newsletter subscribers open to spam and computer viruses."
And each of these claims disproves the other. If giving out the list represents a risk, he should not be allowed to hand-copy it.
I mean this has taken over a year now. He could have hand copied them and been done with it long before now.
Is that the lesson you want young people to learn? That it's best to take the easiest way out, even when your government is not acting in compliance with the law?
The information that's missing is information that your brain can't detect anyway (if the bitrate is reasonable and your encoder does a good job).
What if it isn't and it doesn't?
Would you argue that a 192kbps joint stereo MP3 file is functionally equivalent to the original CD audio, but a 32kbps mono MP3 file is not? Where do we draw the line?
It makes sense. Apart from the movies from some ill-advised, heavily edited syndication on I think Comedy Central in the 90s, Python's US exposure has been on PBS.
I was first exposed to the Python when MTV aired episodes of Flying Circus, at midnight I think, in the mid-1980's. I seem to remember them being unedited and commercial-free, but I was a wee lad at the time so I may be wrong about that. But I'm CERTAIN it was MTV.
The American NES also had extra pins on the cartridge connector to give the cart direct access to the expansion slot on the bottom of the console, which was never used for anything.
Maybe this is because in the legal profession you need to be forceful and unyielding in order to help you argue your cases.
"bla bla bla"
Cartridges had (and still have) the advantage over optical media of trivial load times.
But in order to stay competetive with CD-based games, N64 developers often had to compress their data to fit it on the cart, which led to wait states as the CPU unpacked the data into RAMy. Granted, the wait wasn't as bad as transfering dozens of megs of data off a 2x-speed CD-ROM, but it was still a concern.
Do you remember when Nintendo Power started to print color? (With the clay statue of Mario on the cover.)
You mean "Nintendo Power, Volume 1, Issue 1"?
The Nintendo Fan Club newsletters that preceded that issue did not use the name Nintendo Power.
(Why do I remember this stuff?)
we learned that our friends overseas now have to blow like maniacs into their cartridge in order for the game to play.
Our friends overseas had top-loading Famicoms with card-edge connectors, which were not susceptible to the same cartridge problems as the front-loading ZIF-connector US version.
Surround music is a superfluous and unnatural extension of digital music.
It's not specific to digital music. Remember quadraphonic record players? Remember Iannis Xenakis' 21-speaker tape installation?
There is no need to discretely record reverb. Recording reverb will only mess up the recorded source
There is no way to AVOID recording reverb. All musical instruments work by exciting the air molecules around them. As all recording engineers know, the amount of air between the instrument and the microphone makes a huge difference in the sound, and for most there's an optimum distance. Close-mic'ing everything in an acoustically sterile environment might minimize the natural reverb, but it would sound awful.
And I'm no audiophile purist, but you'll NEVER convince me that the sound of a digital "reverb" algorithm can compare to the utter ENVELOPMENT in sound you get standing in an acoustically complimentary cathedral while a choir of voices reverberates around you.
Don't we already have 2 competing standards that are more then capable of offering high quality multi-channel sound? (DTS and Dolby Digital)
Sure, we have them, but they're both designed for much higher bit rates than MP3. You might as well ask why anyone bothered to design MPEG-4 video when we already had MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. Different needs.
I would prefer if MP3 became a high fidelity format, storing music in BETTER then CD quality, storing music with higher bit and sampling rates.
Wouldn't be MP3, then, would it? MPEG Layer 3 being, by definition, a lossy psychoacoustic compression algorithm.
Storing more of the information, not just the audio range humans supposedly can only hear.
What good would that do? Almost all speaker systems are designed only to reproduce the frequencies that humans can hear -- from ~16Hz up to ~25kHz. Many have filters to specifically suppress signals outside of that range. What you ask for would require the entire audio electronics industry to rethink their approach.
Momentum is, of course, another reason why MP3 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
If I've been spending the past five years ripping my entire CD collection to MP3 format, I'm not going to be eager to RE-rip it all to FLAC or AAC or MP3 Surround or any other new format. I may begin to mix in newer formats for newly added content as time goes on, if all my gear supports them, but just as a Core Duo can still execute code originally written for an 8088, digital audio players will keep supporting MP3 from now until t=infinity.
You really want the killer app? Create a shared database for recruiters like what exists for real-estate.
As someone who has been looking for a home recently, AND has worked in online real estate, I would like to say "oh GOD no".
Multiple listings services and other "shared" closed databases don't benefit the buyer. They don't benefit the seller. They benefit the middlemen, the brokers. The people who feel they deserve 6% or more commission on your transaction for at most a few days' work.
I won't argue that middlemen don't provide valuable filtering services to those that need them, but for those of us that would prefer to do our own filtering, give us a TRULY open database. Craigslist and GoogleBase are good starts, but there's still a long way to go.
Nothing is more annoying than some C-average H.R. major who didn't even bother to look at your name until the phone was ringing, say "So tell me what it is you do!"
The correct answer to this is "I hang up on morons who waste their time and mine."
If the drive is already characterized as "rickety", is it really a good idea to power it down, physically move it to another machine, and power it back up?
Considering the timeframe OS/2 was developed in, and its complexity excuse me if I don't believe it is secure.
Remember, most of the OS/2 codebase was developed by IBM, whose minicomputer and mainframe OSes have frequently been used in the most complex and secure computing systems, ever since computers went electric.
On the other hand, the rest of the codebase was developed by Microsoft in the late 1980s, so you're probably right.