Either way, the term nvCJD is deprecated. It used to mean "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease," but after the disease had been recognized for over a decade, the term "new" was dropped.
To me, the deprecation would seem unnecessary. The "new" variant only needs to be newer than the old one, unless an even newer variant has come along since then.
Yeah, promoting a product for its negative use has been problematic, even if it might have legit uses. Heck, even Ford might be held responsible for pedestrian collisions if they say "helps kill those pesky pedestrians" in their marketing.
LCDs have no flicker. Though, ironically, they're often powered by something akin to flourescent lighting.
Because it is flourescent lighting. It might just be higher frequency with the better displays. I think your bad experiences with flourecesnt lighting is because low frequency ballasts are used, technology has improved.
LED displays flicker too. There may be explainations to why it doesn't bother you, but trust me, they flicker, it is visible to me.
I am having some problems with CRT flicker, but I have been keeping the refresh as high as possible, 120Hz, 100 and down to 85 only when necessary.
DLPs have improved, mostly by increasing the color wheel. Bad DLPs use 1x or 2x speed color wheels, when I think there are 8x equivalent systems out now.
I think you should keep in mind that not everyone has the problems that you do, and thus would make different choices.
Finding info on SED isn't hard, I found this in Google using "SED display":
Yeah, it's even more basic. Us internet veterans call it "downloading a file".
The energy the tech industry invests in rebranding benign ideas into something flashy and new is laughable.
The lack of energy some tech users invest in actually understanding the entire concept leads to ignorant statements like this.
I think podcast aggregators are to manually downloading files are fuel injection to manaully adjusting a model-T's carburetor. In that comparison, the engine gets the air and fuel, but FI is a lot simpler, in the same way, "keeping up" by manually downloading files is tedious and time wasting, whereas a podcast aggregator does all the work for you.
I'm surprised that people on a geek site wave technical ideas away before even bothering to spend any time understand them. It is more than just an audio file on a web site somewhere.
What makes "podcasts" an improvement over just audio files on a web site somewhere is that you can subscribe to them using a podcast aggregator. An aggregator lets the user subscribe to a bunch of different feeds, when a feed has a new file, it automatically downloads the latest files. It then takes those files and puts them in the user's media library, and also can copy them to the user's portable audio device. Then the user can play the "recently added files" on the media player in the way to work while driving or riding.
That whole automated chain of events is what makes podcasting a vastly improved delivery system over manually checking every site, downloading every single file and them manually copying them to their portable audio device. I think it is a great improvement over radio. While most of radio, and most podcasts are garbage, with podcasts, I can pick and chose when and where I can play the recordings.
If you go to the recovery console, you might be able to use 'fixbmr' or 'fixboot'. I think you will need the Windows install CD to make this work, but maybe pressing F8, F4 or some other F key when booting Windows might get you some options.
Also compared to other technologies? What technology would you chose for a 50" flat display, if not plasma?
One called SED should be available early next year. It should be better than plasma, but more expensive than plasma for a while, despite being cheaper to make, because it is supposedly superior to plasma in many ways.
One thing is that each display tech has its own benefits and drawbacks. If one was clearly superior in all ways, then we wouldn't be seeing so many types that we have now.
Personally, my pick is with front or rear projection displays. I'm not hung up on "flat panels" because I don't value display depth enough to pay 50% or more than a deeper display type. I think it's odd that many slashdotters say they don't value display thinness but the same ones flock to flat panel displays for that reason.
Currently, I have an XGA projector projecting a wall-sized image, and in a couple years, the replacement will probably be a 720p or 1080p projector.
Well, the four are the ones most accessible to the average person. Many of those states aren't even made in labs right now, and some of the ones listed in Wikipedia seem to be theoretical at best.
Lots of solids (maybe liquids too) have sub-phases based on bond and crystal alignment based on temperature, pressure and percentage of different atims, I'd be interested in knowing where those fit in.
Discussing (in a blog) about an article in a blog about "blogging is dead" is dead!
I've never understood the claim that Slashdot is a blog. Being short for "web log", I know Slashdot is a web site, but where is the log part? I've always understood log as in diary or records of events done on a specific object. It really doesn't make sense to say that it's a log of all of nerd-dom (or nerd-dumb) because that's pretty vague rather than specific.
blogging is just the second wave of Geocities accounts
All those blogs are Geocities accounts?
Uh, I think you missed the point by being too rigidly literal.
The point was that Geocities made it easy for anyone to put up a personal web page (and anyone did, thus the low average quality), and blogs made it easier for anyone to post their own public diary (and anyone did, thus the low average quality).
I think it's easy to downplay "blogs"* but didn't they have a strong influence in how some elections played out? They seem to have been instrumental in getting out some embarassing facts that certain politicians didn't want known and wasn't covered by the regular media. Wasn't the video of evidence of Pat Robertson's lie first posted on a web log?
The operating system is only one small part of the puzzle. Part of the problem could be bad custom software, bad planning, bad mechanical engineering, bad civil engineering, bad politics, maybe some payoffs and conflicts of interest and so on.
The problem with your argument is that analog telephone service is generally a lot more reliable than DSL or cable. Putting VoIP over DSL or cable is yet another level of unreliability. Also, turnaround to repair is regulated for telephone service (IIRC, in my state, 1 day), it is not regulated for broadband, I've known people where their cable service is dead for nearly a week before they get around to fixing it.
I think the usability is poor. For one, having to click to expose just the root menu is excessive. The root menu should always be visible, IMO. Hiding everything as much as possible goes too far, and requires more work to do the same task.
But come on record lables, get itunes popular so people are addicted then when people are hooked change the prices. dont do it yet! (even though most people are hooked)
While the sales of downloaded music has exploded, last I read any stats in the press, it still accounts for less than 5% of total music sales.
Even if Apple has dominance in legal downloaded music, it's just a tiny slice of the pie.
If NT4 => 2000 was an upgrade worth mentioning, I would think that this will be, too.
I think that transition offered a lot more than the 2000->XP, and I really don't have a solid picture of what Longhorn will actually ship with other than a badly needed desktop UI engine improvement.
Regarding NT->2000, Support for larger hard drives, wider industry support, greatly improved support for DirectX, DVD, Firewire and USB were all very significant advances.
(And, hey, on a laptop/TFT desktop, Cleartype is enough for me to want XP if I run Windows)
Cleartype bothers me. I don't like how the edges of the fonts cycle through the rainbow of colors. I'm not sure I like the trade-off to get smoother font edges. I can tell despite having a 125dpi screen on my laptop. I'd rather see support for higher dpi screens like Longhorn is supposed to bring. I'd like to see good support for 200dpi screens for added detail and sharpness, not smaller icons and text, and also support 300dpi screens as they (hopefully) become available.
Is the PSP technically superior to the DS? Yes, Was the Game Gear technically superior to the Game Boy? Yes. Which console won?
The problem is that looking at technical superiority and ignoring practicality issues gives a very distorted view. DS may be somewhat inferior to PSP technically, but costing 48% less, it's not hard to see where the cash-strapped buyer will go.
I think most of the other handheld corpses were too impractical, with steep high-end pricing compared to the "everyman" Gameboy pricing, or high maintainance costs where they sucked down batteries.
I think Nintendo was right to be conservative, now that rechargeables are a lot more practical, the NiCd batteries of the original Game Boy era were simply horrible, now we have affordable NiMH and Lithium batteries, and that color screens and backlights are now a lot more reasonable in cost and practical in power consumption.
I think the touch screen is useful and has potential. I played solitaire and Sim City on my recently bought Palm device and the touch screen is IMO the only sensible way to play it on a portable device like that.
Personally, I'd prefer a single, larger screen with touch screen, but if it were primarily a game system, then I'd save my money by paying 48% less and get the DS.
where the threshhold is set in a manner that represents absolute distance from the access point.
Meaning that it assumes that people using a device from too great a distance must be a hacker? Do network cards / computers have predictable enough response times? I say that because sometimes there is some other processes might slow down response times, and a computer chugging along on a bunch of eyecandy might not respond quickly enough.
I think another point to add is the cost. One can buy two DS units for $10 more than it costs to buy one PSP.
Sony has to work hard to promote the PSP as an all-around portable entertainment machine. For me, that won't happen unless they open up the UMD spec so I can record UMDs and use them on the PSP. I don't think that will happen though.
I don't have either unit, and I am planning to sell my backlight-modded GBA because I use it only rarely now.
Right now, I am just using a Palm compatible device, and it does what I want for now, games (though rarely), more for images, audio, video and PDA functions.
From reading that release, it looks to me that D&M is into holding companies that make low volume, high-end and high margin home theater products, and then there's Rio and Replay, both of those companies seem to be driven to the ground. Portable media players are in a completely different market.
Slashdot Mirror
Siemens Dematic was working on a conveyor belt so fast that the air resistance was lifting the parts, and I'm certain it was faster than this.
Either way, the term nvCJD is deprecated. It used to mean "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease," but after the disease had been recognized for over a decade, the term "new" was dropped.
To me, the deprecation would seem unnecessary. The "new" variant only needs to be newer than the old one, unless an even newer variant has come along since then.
Yeah, promoting a product for its negative use has been problematic, even if it might have legit uses. Heck, even Ford might be held responsible for pedestrian collisions if they say "helps kill those pesky pedestrians" in their marketing.
LCDs have no flicker. Though, ironically, they're often powered by something akin to flourescent lighting.
0 04/09/29/236.aspx
Because it is flourescent lighting. It might just be higher frequency with the better displays. I think your bad experiences with flourecesnt lighting is because low frequency ballasts are used, technology has improved.
LED displays flicker too. There may be explainations to why it doesn't bother you, but trust me, they flicker, it is visible to me.
I am having some problems with CRT flicker, but I have been keeping the refresh as high as possible, 120Hz, 100 and down to 85 only when necessary.
DLPs have improved, mostly by increasing the color wheel. Bad DLPs use 1x or 2x speed color wheels, when I think there are 8x equivalent systems out now.
I think you should keep in mind that not everyone has the problems that you do, and thus would make different choices.
Finding info on SED isn't hard, I found this in Google using "SED display":
http://blog.sagetechnology.com/techsage/archive/2
I wonder if you would still have problems with that.
Yeah, it's even more basic. Us internet veterans call it "downloading a file".
The energy the tech industry invests in rebranding benign ideas into something flashy and new is laughable.
The lack of energy some tech users invest in actually understanding the entire concept leads to ignorant statements like this.
I think podcast aggregators are to manually downloading files are fuel injection to manaully adjusting a model-T's carburetor. In that comparison, the engine gets the air and fuel, but FI is a lot simpler, in the same way, "keeping up" by manually downloading files is tedious and time wasting, whereas a podcast aggregator does all the work for you.
Point still valid.
I'm surprised that people on a geek site wave technical ideas away before even bothering to spend any time understand them. It is more than just an audio file on a web site somewhere.
What makes "podcasts" an improvement over just audio files on a web site somewhere is that you can subscribe to them using a podcast aggregator. An aggregator lets the user subscribe to a bunch of different feeds, when a feed has a new file, it automatically downloads the latest files. It then takes those files and puts them in the user's media library, and also can copy them to the user's portable audio device. Then the user can play the "recently added files" on the media player in the way to work while driving or riding.
That whole automated chain of events is what makes podcasting a vastly improved delivery system over manually checking every site, downloading every single file and them manually copying them to their portable audio device. I think it is a great improvement over radio. While most of radio, and most podcasts are garbage, with podcasts, I can pick and chose when and where I can play the recordings.
If you go to the recovery console, you might be able to use 'fixbmr' or 'fixboot'. I think you will need the Windows install CD to make this work, but maybe pressing F8, F4 or some other F key when booting Windows might get you some options.
Also compared to other technologies? What technology would you chose for a 50" flat display, if not plasma?
One called SED should be available early next year. It should be better than plasma, but more expensive than plasma for a while, despite being cheaper to make, because it is supposedly superior to plasma in many ways.
One thing is that each display tech has its own benefits and drawbacks. If one was clearly superior in all ways, then we wouldn't be seeing so many types that we have now.
Personally, my pick is with front or rear projection displays. I'm not hung up on "flat panels" because I don't value display depth enough to pay 50% or more than a deeper display type. I think it's odd that many slashdotters say they don't value display thinness but the same ones flock to flat panel displays for that reason.
Currently, I have an XGA projector projecting a wall-sized image, and in a couple years, the replacement will probably be a 720p or 1080p projector.
Well, the four are the ones most accessible to the average person. Many of those states aren't even made in labs right now, and some of the ones listed in Wikipedia seem to be theoretical at best.
Lots of solids (maybe liquids too) have sub-phases based on bond and crystal alignment based on temperature, pressure and percentage of different atims, I'd be interested in knowing where those fit in.
Discussing (in a blog) about an article in a blog about "blogging is dead" is dead!
I've never understood the claim that Slashdot is a blog. Being short for "web log", I know Slashdot is a web site, but where is the log part? I've always understood log as in diary or records of events done on a specific object. It really doesn't make sense to say that it's a log of all of nerd-dom (or nerd-dumb) because that's pretty vague rather than specific.
I'd say that less geek blogging would mean more OMFG!?, worse grammar and more soap opera garbage.
blogging is just the second wave of Geocities accounts
All those blogs are Geocities accounts?
Uh, I think you missed the point by being too rigidly literal.
The point was that Geocities made it easy for anyone to put up a personal web page (and anyone did, thus the low average quality), and blogs made it easier for anyone to post their own public diary (and anyone did, thus the low average quality).
I think it's easy to downplay "blogs"* but didn't they have a strong influence in how some elections played out? They seem to have been instrumental in getting out some embarassing facts that certain politicians didn't want known and wasn't covered by the regular media. Wasn't the video of evidence of Pat Robertson's lie first posted on a web log?
* I really don't like the name, hence the quotes.
2 comments, both below my threshhold and the article has been here for a good 5 minutes.
Yah geek blogging is dead
I don't know, isn't there a sci-fi show on cable somewhere right now? That can explain geeks not responding in a timely manner.
The operating system is only one small part of the puzzle. Part of the problem could be bad custom software, bad planning, bad mechanical engineering, bad civil engineering, bad politics, maybe some payoffs and conflicts of interest and so on.
Photoshop Essentials 3 doesn't have a main window either. All tools and windows default to one screen, but they can be moved to any screen.
The problem with your argument is that analog telephone service is generally a lot more reliable than DSL or cable. Putting VoIP over DSL or cable is yet another level of unreliability. Also, turnaround to repair is regulated for telephone service (IIRC, in my state, 1 day), it is not regulated for broadband, I've known people where their cable service is dead for nearly a week before they get around to fixing it.
I think the usability is poor. For one, having to click to expose just the root menu is excessive. The root menu should always be visible, IMO. Hiding everything as much as possible goes too far, and requires more work to do the same task.
But come on record lables, get itunes popular so people are addicted then when people are hooked change the prices. dont do it yet! (even though most people are hooked)
While the sales of downloaded music has exploded, last I read any stats in the press, it still accounts for less than 5% of total music sales.
Even if Apple has dominance in legal downloaded music, it's just a tiny slice of the pie.
If NT4 => 2000 was an upgrade worth mentioning, I would think that this will be, too.
I think that transition offered a lot more than the 2000->XP, and I really don't have a solid picture of what Longhorn will actually ship with other than a badly needed desktop UI engine improvement.
Regarding NT->2000, Support for larger hard drives, wider industry support, greatly improved support for DirectX, DVD, Firewire and USB were all very significant advances.
(And, hey, on a laptop/TFT desktop, Cleartype is enough for me to want XP if I run Windows)
Cleartype bothers me. I don't like how the edges of the fonts cycle through the rainbow of colors. I'm not sure I like the trade-off to get smoother font edges. I can tell despite having a 125dpi screen on my laptop. I'd rather see support for higher dpi screens like Longhorn is supposed to bring. I'd like to see good support for 200dpi screens for added detail and sharpness, not smaller icons and text, and also support 300dpi screens as they (hopefully) become available.
Is the PSP technically superior to the DS? Yes, Was the Game Gear technically superior to the Game Boy? Yes. Which console won?
The problem is that looking at technical superiority and ignoring practicality issues gives a very distorted view. DS may be somewhat inferior to PSP technically, but costing 48% less, it's not hard to see where the cash-strapped buyer will go.
I think most of the other handheld corpses were too impractical, with steep high-end pricing compared to the "everyman" Gameboy pricing, or high maintainance costs where they sucked down batteries.
I think Nintendo was right to be conservative, now that rechargeables are a lot more practical, the NiCd batteries of the original Game Boy era were simply horrible, now we have affordable NiMH and Lithium batteries, and that color screens and backlights are now a lot more reasonable in cost and practical in power consumption.
I think the touch screen is useful and has potential. I played solitaire and Sim City on my recently bought Palm device and the touch screen is IMO the only sensible way to play it on a portable device like that.
Personally, I'd prefer a single, larger screen with touch screen, but if it were primarily a game system, then I'd save my money by paying 48% less and get the DS.
where the threshhold is set in a manner that represents absolute distance from the access point.
Meaning that it assumes that people using a device from too great a distance must be a hacker? Do network cards / computers have predictable enough response times? I say that because sometimes there is some other processes might slow down response times, and a computer chugging along on a bunch of eyecandy might not respond quickly enough.
I think another point to add is the cost. One can buy two DS units for $10 more than it costs to buy one PSP.
Sony has to work hard to promote the PSP as an all-around portable entertainment machine. For me, that won't happen unless they open up the UMD spec so I can record UMDs and use them on the PSP. I don't think that will happen though.
I don't have either unit, and I am planning to sell my backlight-modded GBA because I use it only rarely now.
Right now, I am just using a Palm compatible device, and it does what I want for now, games (though rarely), more for images, audio, video and PDA functions.
From reading that release, it looks to me that D&M is into holding companies that make low volume, high-end and high margin home theater products, and then there's Rio and Replay, both of those companies seem to be driven to the ground. Portable media players are in a completely different market.