Canada has American-style beer, which dominates the market due to excessive marketing and abusive exclusivity deals with the mainstream bars.
Many, many years ago we had a commercial for (i think) Molson Canadian, which poked fun at American beers: "If I wanted water, I'd ask for water. No thanks!" It still tasted like faded piss, but the true irony is that Molson eventually merged with Coors, so the company that compared beer to water is now selling the world's most watery beer, and at least here in Ottawa they are practically shoving it down our throats with excessive promotion and abusive exclusivity deals. I once attended a Superbowl party at a bar, where they only served Coors Light for the event. You couldn't even order a rail drink.
I can't tell if it's a beer geek thing, but all the mass-marketed brands are repulsive to me. Coors, Keiths, Labatt 50, Heineken, Stella, Guinness. It doesn't matter what country it's from, if they pimp it on TV, chances are it's going to be awful. I guess that goes to show that marketing trumps quality, every goddamned time.
Leffe Blonde is just as awful in Ottawa, but I'm quite fond of the occasional dessert-like Leffe Brune.
If you want a good Belgian brew, get a true Trappist beer. The authentic ones are expensive, but if you're a beer geek it is worth every penny. "Abbey" beers are a marketing ploy by the mass-brewers to cash in on the Trappists' reputation, but they don't even come close.
In what bizarro reality does 64 gig of Ram cost $100 or less ? Maybe in 5 years, but right now 64 gigs of even the cheapest stuff is worth about $1000.
Nevermind that today's games barely know what to do with 512mb of Ram, the rest goes to caching. You're not going to see anything revolutionary until developers' brains get around to it. The hardware isn't so much the issue as the software. Having all that power available does not mean we have the slightest clue how to use it.
A "reasonable" stereo ? No. Here's what I think a modest, or bang-for-the-buck stereo would be:
$129 head unit $69 front speakers $49 rear speakers $100 installation
So under $350 installed, or $250 if you DIY (an hour or two with a screwdriver and socket wrench). I think that setup would satisfy about 95% of motorists out there. Where things get hairy is if you want a subwoofer. Even a $200 active sub is still pretty terrible, you generally have to set aside $500 or more for anything remotely decent.
Ten years ago when I bought a new car, I considered my first setup quite decent at roughly $1100 for a bi-amplified setup with a 10" sub, all entry-level Clarion gear. A music lover without my audiophile disorder could stop there and be very happy, but this is far beyond reasonable for the average person.
I later upgraded that thing to a ludicrous mobile PA/studio setup, but that's way off-topic. Point being, a "reasonable" system costs less than what most automakers charge for tinny garbage.
When I bought my new car (ten years ago), the sales guy was trying to hype up the "premium" factory stereo, so I popped in my own CD, pointed out the distorted mess coming out of the speakers, and turned it off. A week later, I tore all that crap out of my doors and dashboard, and replaced it with about $700 worth of aftermarket equipment (no subwoofer yet). Even though it was "cheap" gear, the difference was night-and-day.
Full disclosure: I am an audiophile, as you had probably guessed, but I am also a hobbyist mixing/mastering guy, so I am considerate of the average stereos and average hearing. Heck, my wife has trouble telling good sound from bad, unless I point out the details (or lack thereof). There's nothing wrong with that. What offends me is when car dealers itemize a thousand-dollar stereo when really it's a handful of 99 cent construction-paper cones and a head unit worse than Wal-mart's $49 offerings. It is yet another thinly-veiled fraud to cover up the fact that the american auto industry itself is unprofitable. If it were indeed a $1000-value stereo, I would at least expect it to perform comparably to my $700 aftermarket kit, and be marketed to the same kind of customer. My mother wouldn't blow $1000 on a stereo, so why should her car include one ?
If consumers had any say in automobile design, we wouldn't have all this bullshit in the first place. They charge us thousands for a factory stereo worth less than an hundred. They sell us all these proprietary navigation systems that get trounced by an iPhone or Android. They oh-so-cleverly forget to put in a drain plug so you have to pay the dealer $150 for an oil change.
Yeah, the auto industry is taking its cues from Wall Street: more bullshit = more money.
It's not a big stretch to assume their electronics are designed by the lowest bidder.
The fact that such a device would run arbitrary code from a music file, that tells me today's programmers really are as idiotic and useless as I assumed. It's music, decoded by some type of finite state machine. There is no dynamic execution, it should treat "trojan code" like any other bits in the input stream and play them as static noise, or skip them if the checksum fails. The decoder shouldn't even be capable of smashing the stack and then executing it.
That's almost as dumb as granting this device bidirectional, unrestricted access to the car's management bus. If they're going to start building computers and networks inside our cars, they need to treat them like any other network: trust nothing, authenticate everything else.
Dude, I see you have a 5-digit ID. I know it's hard to accept for us old-timers, if you still believe/. is "a site for nerds", you need to lay off the smack. The last real nerds bailed, right around the time they made Jon Katz an editor. This place is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Factually speaking, it's not exactly like we can say Bobby Prince wrote anything. Just ask: Pantera, Slayer, Metallica, Black Sabbath, hell even that weak jesus-metal band Believer. Pretty much the entire Doom soundtrack consisted of FM covers of commercial metal tracks.
I want to agree with you, actually I used to until about a year ago. Then I bought an X360 to play with my buddies, because well I'm the only guy in the group with balls-out PC hardware. Sure, I could have played Call of Duty by myself on the PC, but that's not exactly the appeal of such a game.
Sure, obviously we'll have internet-only consoles one day, which will be about 18 months after all major markets socialize internet access and make it accessible and affordable to everyone.
The big problem with dual 580s is peak power draw would be around 750w, just for the GPUs. They would have to make certain sacrifices to fit any reasonable power envelope.
If these GPUs keep sucking more and more power, they will have to start seriously considering making them external. You'll have your PC, a GPU box beside it with its own kilowatt power supply, and just an interface board and cable between the two. There is simply no sense in cramming more heat and power into the PC chassis, just to play random games or join some hippy-dippy folding project.
Yup. Which is why I'm absolutely not a sports fan, but I love watching guys like Larry Fitzgerald carry that hand-egg with ludicrous speed and agility. They are the guys who make you go "Holy shit, I didn't know humans could do that!", in between swigs of fine microbrew and bites of artery-clogging fried finger-food.
I could not care less for the actual game or whichever side wins or loses. I'm just there for the show. And the beer. And the grub. And the suggestible peons who are more likely to call me for contract work, just because I'm watching the same sport they are.
"Tough on crime"... With the exception of a few truly heinous and destructive activities, I consider most crimes to be a fabrication of modern society and its need to pigeonhole everyone and everything. Streets drugs are outlawed, yet, it's not the act of being on drugs that's harmful to society, at least not compared to the organised crime regimes that sprout up to meet demand. Prohibition made the rich richer, and a lot of people dead. Did it stop people from getting drunk and socializing ? Not according to history.
We need a lot less chickenshits in society, and more balanced, tolerant, responsible people who can accept differences... otherwise it's not a society, it's just a bunch of archaic tribes battling over land.
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Canada has American-style beer, which dominates the market due to excessive marketing and abusive exclusivity deals with the mainstream bars.
Many, many years ago we had a commercial for (i think) Molson Canadian, which poked fun at American beers: "If I wanted water, I'd ask for water. No thanks!" It still tasted like faded piss, but the true irony is that Molson eventually merged with Coors, so the company that compared beer to water is now selling the world's most watery beer, and at least here in Ottawa they are practically shoving it down our throats with excessive promotion and abusive exclusivity deals. I once attended a Superbowl party at a bar, where they only served Coors Light for the event. You couldn't even order a rail drink.
I can't tell if it's a beer geek thing, but all the mass-marketed brands are repulsive to me. Coors, Keiths, Labatt 50, Heineken, Stella, Guinness. It doesn't matter what country it's from, if they pimp it on TV, chances are it's going to be awful. I guess that goes to show that marketing trumps quality, every goddamned time.
Leffe Blonde is just as awful in Ottawa, but I'm quite fond of the occasional dessert-like Leffe Brune.
If you want a good Belgian brew, get a true Trappist beer. The authentic ones are expensive, but if you're a beer geek it is worth every penny. "Abbey" beers are a marketing ploy by the mass-brewers to cash in on the Trappists' reputation, but they don't even come close.
Then how that does explain Asus, Acer, and all the other brands that dominate computer shops ?
In what bizarro reality does 64 gig of Ram cost $100 or less ? Maybe in 5 years, but right now 64 gigs of even the cheapest stuff is worth about $1000.
Nevermind that today's games barely know what to do with 512mb of Ram, the rest goes to caching. You're not going to see anything revolutionary until developers' brains get around to it. The hardware isn't so much the issue as the software. Having all that power available does not mean we have the slightest clue how to use it.
OnStar, sure... but the stereo ? I'm a tech freak, and I still can't think of a use for unlocking my car doors by inserting a CD.
A "reasonable" stereo ? No. Here's what I think a modest, or bang-for-the-buck stereo would be:
$129 head unit
$69 front speakers
$49 rear speakers
$100 installation
So under $350 installed, or $250 if you DIY (an hour or two with a screwdriver and socket wrench). I think that setup would satisfy about 95% of motorists out there. Where things get hairy is if you want a subwoofer. Even a $200 active sub is still pretty terrible, you generally have to set aside $500 or more for anything remotely decent.
Ten years ago when I bought a new car, I considered my first setup quite decent at roughly $1100 for a bi-amplified setup with a 10" sub, all entry-level Clarion gear. A music lover without my audiophile disorder could stop there and be very happy, but this is far beyond reasonable for the average person.
I later upgraded that thing to a ludicrous mobile PA/studio setup, but that's way off-topic. Point being, a "reasonable" system costs less than what most automakers charge for tinny garbage.
When I bought my new car (ten years ago), the sales guy was trying to hype up the "premium" factory stereo, so I popped in my own CD, pointed out the distorted mess coming out of the speakers, and turned it off. A week later, I tore all that crap out of my doors and dashboard, and replaced it with about $700 worth of aftermarket equipment (no subwoofer yet). Even though it was "cheap" gear, the difference was night-and-day.
Full disclosure: I am an audiophile, as you had probably guessed, but I am also a hobbyist mixing/mastering guy, so I am considerate of the average stereos and average hearing. Heck, my wife has trouble telling good sound from bad, unless I point out the details (or lack thereof). There's nothing wrong with that. What offends me is when car dealers itemize a thousand-dollar stereo when really it's a handful of 99 cent construction-paper cones and a head unit worse than Wal-mart's $49 offerings. It is yet another thinly-veiled fraud to cover up the fact that the american auto industry itself is unprofitable. If it were indeed a $1000-value stereo, I would at least expect it to perform comparably to my $700 aftermarket kit, and be marketed to the same kind of customer. My mother wouldn't blow $1000 on a stereo, so why should her car include one ?
If consumers had any say in automobile design, we wouldn't have all this bullshit in the first place. They charge us thousands for a factory stereo worth less than an hundred. They sell us all these proprietary navigation systems that get trounced by an iPhone or Android. They oh-so-cleverly forget to put in a drain plug so you have to pay the dealer $150 for an oil change.
Yeah, the auto industry is taking its cues from Wall Street: more bullshit = more money.
It's not a big stretch to assume their electronics are designed by the lowest bidder.
The fact that such a device would run arbitrary code from a music file, that tells me today's programmers really are as idiotic and useless as I assumed. It's music, decoded by some type of finite state machine. There is no dynamic execution, it should treat "trojan code" like any other bits in the input stream and play them as static noise, or skip them if the checksum fails. The decoder shouldn't even be capable of smashing the stack and then executing it.
That's almost as dumb as granting this device bidirectional, unrestricted access to the car's management bus. If they're going to start building computers and networks inside our cars, they need to treat them like any other network: trust nothing, authenticate everything else.
Dude, I see you have a 5-digit ID. I know it's hard to accept for us old-timers, if you still believe /. is "a site for nerds", you need to lay off the smack. The last real nerds bailed, right around the time they made Jon Katz an editor. This place is dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Factually speaking, it's not exactly like we can say Bobby Prince wrote anything. Just ask: Pantera, Slayer, Metallica, Black Sabbath, hell even that weak jesus-metal band Believer. Pretty much the entire Doom soundtrack consisted of FM covers of commercial metal tracks.
Summary: when you click "I Agree", you're agreeing to let the site do whatever with whatever for whatever reason.
Ya, duh. What is this, 1994 ?
In Soviet Russia, space-time bend you.
From my brief and infuriating experiences with EVE, my impression was that the in-game economy was already fucked beyond all hope.
I want to agree with you, actually I used to until about a year ago. Then I bought an X360 to play with my buddies, because well I'm the only guy in the group with balls-out PC hardware. Sure, I could have played Call of Duty by myself on the PC, but that's not exactly the appeal of such a game.
Sure, obviously we'll have internet-only consoles one day, which will be about 18 months after all major markets socialize internet access and make it accessible and affordable to everyone.
In other words, never.
So.... your response to PC gaming is a $5000 pile of custom hardware that will be a nightmare to design, support and program ?
I'd rather have a $800 PC that plays the same titles, along with all the other stuff a PC can do.
The big problem with dual 580s is peak power draw would be around 750w, just for the GPUs. They would have to make certain sacrifices to fit any reasonable power envelope.
If these GPUs keep sucking more and more power, they will have to start seriously considering making them external. You'll have your PC, a GPU box beside it with its own kilowatt power supply, and just an interface board and cable between the two. There is simply no sense in cramming more heat and power into the PC chassis, just to play random games or join some hippy-dippy folding project.
Yeah, NVidia's driver quality has taken a nose-dive in recent years. At least ATI is no better or worse than they've ever been.
Dude, he was counting in base 65
Yup. Which is why I'm absolutely not a sports fan, but I love watching guys like Larry Fitzgerald carry that hand-egg with ludicrous speed and agility. They are the guys who make you go "Holy shit, I didn't know humans could do that!", in between swigs of fine microbrew and bites of artery-clogging fried finger-food.
I could not care less for the actual game or whichever side wins or loses. I'm just there for the show. And the beer. And the grub. And the suggestible peons who are more likely to call me for contract work, just because I'm watching the same sport they are.
Told ya I wasn't a real sports fan.
So the team with the fastest computer to calculate the most recursions before the clock runs out, wins ?
And where I come from, a "bump" makes you go faster.
Er, yes that was a drug reference. Stay in school, kids! :)
You do realize us "suckers" are the ones making the comparisons and recommendations for you cheapskates, right ?
Just because you don't get your my money's worth out of a $10k PC doesn't mean I can't. And I do, thankyouverymuch.
"Tough on crime"... With the exception of a few truly heinous and destructive activities, I consider most crimes to be a fabrication of modern society and its need to pigeonhole everyone and everything. Streets drugs are outlawed, yet, it's not the act of being on drugs that's harmful to society, at least not compared to the organised crime regimes that sprout up to meet demand. Prohibition made the rich richer, and a lot of people dead. Did it stop people from getting drunk and socializing ? Not according to history.
We need a lot less chickenshits in society, and more balanced, tolerant, responsible people who can accept differences... otherwise it's not a society, it's just a bunch of archaic tribes battling over land.