I think CR reviews with the "average" person in mind. Sports cars and nicer audio products often fall into the "enthusiast" range which is, IMO, outside of CR's typical reader market.
They have no business reviewing those products except possibly to give returned for warranty work data which that alone is important information that simply escapes most other publications.
In TV, channel separation really doesn't seem to be that great. Whenever I had a game system set to CH4, channel 3 starts exhibiting a lot of extra noise unless I turned off the game system, so I don't think you can have "adjacent" channels very well.
I don't know about you, but I've noticed that say, CH8's signal often tends to "leak" into that of and CH4, possibly due to the fundementals and harmonics in the signal. CH3 shows up faintly in CH6, etc, channel 6 probably would be seen interfering a little with channels 3 and 12.
How much did NTSC tuners cost at first? Come on, say it. Probably hundreds of dollars.
An NTSC tuner module (rectangular metal can you get on PCI tuner cards and inside VCRs & TVs) doesn't cost $5 now. Try finding a television without one.
Do you honestly think that an ATSC tuner will still cost $200 a set? Once you sell ten million or so of these things, I believe the cost for the chips will probably go under $10.
By the way, there is a loophole. Call it a _monitor_, not a TV. That way there aren't any internal tuners required of any kind. Nor is closed captioning, v-chip, etc required. Not that those are expensive either, probably a couple dollars a set.
By the way, please give a source for those stats. Those stats also don't say how many of those subscribing households have _all_ TVs hooked up to a cable box.
The low-flow toilets work just fine. If you just get the crappiest toilets (no pun intended) then it won't flush well. This was true of the high-flow toilets too. People made a big deal about it but I really have yet to use a low flow toilet that didn't work properly, with the biggest loads, on first flush.
Most dvd players i know of will play picture discs burnded with jpgs, how is this better?
I don't know of a whole lot of _good_ DVD players that have this. This is a fairly new feature and so far mostly used in the $100 class junk (their playback likely looks like junk on such a screen), although there are a few nice DVD recorders that have a built-in memory card slot.
If it really is true that the project maintainers has turned off more developers than any other free software project then this high profile event isn't going to help things. I really haven't been keeping track of XFree.
Don't forget Althlon XP, Windows XP and eXtreme Programming (XP).
I'm beginning to think that someone needs to copyright the letter "X", I think that would cut down on the X, XXX, XP, XM, FX and all the other crap with that letter in it.
Which boards have only single-channel DDR memory? I ask because I wish to avoid buying them:-)
The one that I really clearly remember, I think was one of the Tyans, but I thought I saw others. I'll try to look it up ASAP, but not tonight.
If adjacent slots really are second channels (looked like slots on same channel), then that might have been part of the confusion, but I hadn't seen anything like that before.
Well for a lot of things at least it still is faster than Barton or Thunderbird for a lot of things even in 32 bit mode.
If they were running a real 64 bit OS then at least they'd get the larger and twice as many registers. I suspect the doubling of the number of registers in the A64 architecture is what makes it run faster in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. As a lot of the other 64 bit architectures IIRC have the same number of registers for both modes, 32 bit mode actually runs a little faster than 64 bit mode. I suspect that is because of storing pointers, a 64 bit pointer takes twice the bandwidth to load and store vs. a 32 bit pointer.
I think a lot of these system designers think their buyers are retards. I've found several dual Opteron boards with _one_ memory channel. If the A64 platform is the hot sh!t that people say it is, why not let it have the memory bandwidth it really needs? I have a four year old Xeon that has two memory channels and I think it's still a pretty badass system. I think dual Opterons might be capable of running four memory channels. I understand there's a lot of wire routing and that makes boards more expensive, but compared to the prices of the chips, I don't mind spending more.
Except for _one_ maybe two Tyan boards, one cannot get 64 bit or 66MHz PCI or better _and_ AGP. Multiple PCI busses are also nice for anything truly I/O intensive. I have three systems that have two (maybe one has three) PCI busses. I don't think I need it but it's nice to know it is there.
IIRC, the fan only speeds up when you take the plexiglass cover plate off, you can leave it on and still "admire" the layout. I do applaud their noise and thermal conciousness.
I think Apple's layout sacrifices too much internal expansion anyway.
In my case, I have two 15k RPM system drive (granted, one Windows, one Linux), two data drives mirror raided.
I have six PCI slots and am on my way to filling them all, with multiple video input cards, SCSI, etc.
I like to have a CD-only reader for running secure CDDA extraction and not beat up on the DVD writer too much, because programs like EAC can be pretty hard on drives.
Sadly, I can do none of these things on a G5 unless I like buying expensive external alternatives, often an extra $100 per device and often at reduced quality unless I spend even more.
And my case also has three cooling zones, one for the PCI card cage, one for the dual CPU / memory / chipset and one for the drives. No, the fans don't speed up or slow down based on the cover sensor but why should it?
Maybe you just like noise and really are distracted by quiet? Not everyone is the same, and I know some people are this way, some are the opposite.
If I can hear the thing from fifteen feet away then it is time to quiet it down. Having a machine running with several fans also reduces the dynamic range of music.
My computers have usually sat under a desk on decent carpet and with an accoustical wall behind it and I think it is quiet enough like that. If it were out in the open or surrounded by reflective surfaces then I'd want to improve on it.
I want a computer that I can haul around to look at and edit my drawings. A keyboard and trackpoint is pretty clumsy, IMO. A portable digitizing tablet which you "draw" on the display screen directly to the display screen rather than a separate tablet is pretty nifty to have.
I haven't bought one of these yet.
I'd actually like to see a regular PDA that's 1cm thick with a 10x13 cm screen, much like the PADDs on Star Trek, I think that would be the best of both worlds.
I've had metal cut with a laser machine before. I am nearly certain that there is little comparison that can be made.
One time we tried to see if we can engrave with it. It ended up looking like a nine pin dot matrix print-out. It simply did not have fine enough control, and I doubt that a 15 year old machine would do any better. A machine with 34,000 hours of operation may be pretty well worn out too, there's a reason why it costs much less than many of thethe others listed. That is 17 years of full 40 hour work weeks, so I think it has seen its share of abuse.
If they can convert solar energy into a chemical form, that could work. Otherwise there is no point as transmission losses on electricity make it prohibitive to transmit farther than a few hundred km.
Hopefully this sets a reform in motion. With what I've heard of HIPPA, if enforced, I think a lot of people's collective asses would be hauled into court.
I'd be wary as the ones I've seen at Radio Shack aren't X10 brand but they look like relabels of X10's product line. I thought the name was SmartHome, I am not sure.
If you can find compatible units from other suppliers, more power to you. The build quality of the X10 branded products was sorely lacking. I've had my light turn on for no apparent reason and sometimes the RS232 sender part doesn't work right. On the system that I ran the X10 sender, the software for it needed to be restarted every day.
I hope that fate doesn't fall on competing products.
Calorie is a unit of heat transfer, 1 Cal (uppercase C) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1g of water 1 degree celsius. Lower case calorie is 1/100th that.
...from their computer? If it is 30dB at 1M / 3ft then that is approaching quiet enough. Just because new drives are a lot quieter doesn't mean there isn't some room for improvement.
That said, in most systems, these new drives would be far from the weakest (or loudest) link. Optical drives are often pretty loud on read, and I'd love to downclock their speed without a contrived app in the system tray. A lot of fans could be replaced with fans of roughly similar CFM rating (a percent or three) but be 3-6dB quieter.
Too bad backyard hackers couldn't be bothered to learn basic microcontrollers. Using the parallel port for direct electrical I/O is contrived at best. It's not as if serial port work is hard with any good microcontroller, many of them have it built-in minus simple RS232 level conversion provided by a simple MAX232 chip. Program a few instructions to set up the chip, a few more to respond to new data, etc.
I agree. One thing to watch out for is that some S-ATA drives are starting to standardize on TCQ.
SCSI drives do seem to be more reliable under load, and have shorter seek times, etc, but at a prohibitively higher cost per MB.
I run both SCSI and IDE. I generally try to have SCSI as the "system" drive that holds OS and software, much of it a lot of little files accessed often, and a "data" drive that just holds large tracts of data, most of it large files not accessed often.
As for bus detachment, I've run IDE drives one drive per channel (IIRC, S-ATA enforces this, it is point-to-point only, one drive per channel), so if there are bus detachment problems it is on the PCI bus and not the drive controller bus.
Defense isn't going to worry about civil engineering unless they thought it could help them in their task.
IIRC, there are DoD projects for using lasers in defense, anti-missile, etc.
The point of the DoD and any other military is 1) to maintain a convincing threat that they can kill people and break things when called upon, 2) to be able to follow through with it. Which isn't to say they don't do the other things, and pop popcorn because they have to move troops and feed them too.
The first part is to get the things down to a practical size, etc then see what it can be used for.
Doesn't the phone turn into a PDA?
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't see the point in a distinction. Is it a PDA with phone capabilities? Is it a phone with PDA capabilities? Either way, if this happens, I wouldn't consider it a "death" but an evolution in what technologies and packagings people decide fits their lifestyles the best.
Just because a radio was integrated into a clock doesn't mean that radio died then, although maybe I wish it did.
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I think CR reviews with the "average" person in mind. Sports cars and nicer audio products often fall into the "enthusiast" range which is, IMO, outside of CR's typical reader market.
They have no business reviewing those products except possibly to give returned for warranty work data which that alone is important information that simply escapes most other publications.
In TV, channel separation really doesn't seem to be that great. Whenever I had a game system set to CH4, channel 3 starts exhibiting a lot of extra noise unless I turned off the game system, so I don't think you can have "adjacent" channels very well.
I don't know about you, but I've noticed that say, CH8's signal often tends to "leak" into that of and CH4, possibly due to the fundementals and harmonics in the signal. CH3 shows up faintly in CH6, etc, channel 6 probably would be seen interfering a little with channels 3 and 12.
How much did NTSC tuners cost at first? Come on, say it. Probably hundreds of dollars.
An NTSC tuner module (rectangular metal can you get on PCI tuner cards and inside VCRs & TVs) doesn't cost $5 now. Try finding a television without one.
Do you honestly think that an ATSC tuner will still cost $200 a set? Once you sell ten million or so of these things, I believe the cost for the chips will probably go under $10.
By the way, there is a loophole. Call it a _monitor_, not a TV. That way there aren't any internal tuners required of any kind. Nor is closed captioning, v-chip, etc required. Not that those are expensive either, probably a couple dollars a set.
By the way, please give a source for those stats. Those stats also don't say how many of those subscribing households have _all_ TVs hooked up to a cable box.
I don't agree with that analogy.
The low-flow toilets work just fine. If you just get the crappiest toilets (no pun intended) then it won't flush well. This was true of the high-flow toilets too. People made a big deal about it but I really have yet to use a low flow toilet that didn't work properly, with the biggest loads, on first flush.
Most dvd players i know of will play picture discs burnded with jpgs, how is this better?
I don't know of a whole lot of _good_ DVD players that have this. This is a fairly new feature and so far mostly used in the $100 class junk (their playback likely looks like junk on such a screen), although there are a few nice DVD recorders that have a built-in memory card slot.
(i.e. about 400mHz)
Completing an operation every 2.5 seconds is sloooow.
I agree on your points. I want something in the 10cm x 15cm screen size range without paying a fourth this much.
If it really is true that the project maintainers has turned off more developers than any other free software project then this high profile event isn't going to help things. I really haven't been keeping track of XFree.
Don't forget Althlon XP, Windows XP and eXtreme Programming (XP).
I'm beginning to think that someone needs to copyright the letter "X", I think that would cut down on the X, XXX, XP, XM, FX and all the other crap with that letter in it.
Which boards have only single-channel DDR memory? I ask because I wish to avoid buying them :-)
The one that I really clearly remember, I think was one of the Tyans, but I thought I saw others. I'll try to look it up ASAP, but not tonight.
If adjacent slots really are second channels (looked like slots on same channel), then that might have been part of the confusion, but I hadn't seen anything like that before.
Well for a lot of things at least it still is faster than Barton or Thunderbird for a lot of things even in 32 bit mode.
If they were running a real 64 bit OS then at least they'd get the larger and twice as many registers. I suspect the doubling of the number of registers in the A64 architecture is what makes it run faster in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode. As a lot of the other 64 bit architectures IIRC have the same number of registers for both modes, 32 bit mode actually runs a little faster than 64 bit mode. I suspect that is because of storing pointers, a 64 bit pointer takes twice the bandwidth to load and store vs. a 32 bit pointer.
I think a lot of these system designers think their buyers are retards. I've found several dual Opteron boards with _one_ memory channel. If the A64 platform is the hot sh!t that people say it is, why not let it have the memory bandwidth it really needs? I have a four year old Xeon that has two memory channels and I think it's still a pretty badass system. I think dual Opterons might be capable of running four memory channels. I understand there's a lot of wire routing and that makes boards more expensive, but compared to the prices of the chips, I don't mind spending more.
Except for _one_ maybe two Tyan boards, one cannot get 64 bit or 66MHz PCI or better _and_ AGP. Multiple PCI busses are also nice for anything truly I/O intensive. I have three systems that have two (maybe one has three) PCI busses. I don't think I need it but it's nice to know it is there.
IIRC, the fan only speeds up when you take the plexiglass cover plate off, you can leave it on and still "admire" the layout. I do applaud their noise and thermal conciousness.
I think Apple's layout sacrifices too much internal expansion anyway.
In my case, I have two 15k RPM system drive (granted, one Windows, one Linux), two data drives mirror raided.
I have six PCI slots and am on my way to filling them all, with multiple video input cards, SCSI, etc.
I like to have a CD-only reader for running secure CDDA extraction and not beat up on the DVD writer too much, because programs like EAC can be pretty hard on drives.
Sadly, I can do none of these things on a G5 unless I like buying expensive external alternatives, often an extra $100 per device and often at reduced quality unless I spend even more.
And my case also has three cooling zones, one for the PCI card cage, one for the dual CPU / memory / chipset and one for the drives. No, the fans don't speed up or slow down based on the cover sensor but why should it?
Maybe you just like noise and really are distracted by quiet? Not everyone is the same, and I know some people are this way, some are the opposite.
If I can hear the thing from fifteen feet away then it is time to quiet it down. Having a machine running with several fans also reduces the dynamic range of music.
My computers have usually sat under a desk on decent carpet and with an accoustical wall behind it and I think it is quiet enough like that. If it were out in the open or surrounded by reflective surfaces then I'd want to improve on it.
At least in the US, IIRC, people are by default was allowed to make their own replicas of patented devices. IIRC, one cannot sell it, that is all.
I wouldn't use it as a PDA.
I want a computer that I can haul around to look at and edit my drawings. A keyboard and trackpoint is pretty clumsy, IMO. A portable digitizing tablet which you "draw" on the display screen directly to the display screen rather than a separate tablet is pretty nifty to have.
I haven't bought one of these yet.
I'd actually like to see a regular PDA that's 1cm thick with a 10x13 cm screen, much like the PADDs on Star Trek, I think that would be the best of both worlds.
I've had metal cut with a laser machine before. I am nearly certain that there is little comparison that can be made.
One time we tried to see if we can engrave with it. It ended up looking like a nine pin dot matrix print-out. It simply did not have fine enough control, and I doubt that a 15 year old machine would do any better. A machine with 34,000 hours of operation may be pretty well worn out too, there's a reason why it costs much less than many of thethe others listed. That is 17 years of full 40 hour work weeks, so I think it has seen its share of abuse.
If they can convert solar energy into a chemical form, that could work. Otherwise there is no point as transmission losses on electricity make it prohibitive to transmit farther than a few hundred km.
Hopefully this sets a reform in motion. With what I've heard of HIPPA, if enforced, I think a lot of people's collective asses would be hauled into court.
I'd be wary as the ones I've seen at Radio Shack aren't X10 brand but they look like relabels of X10's product line. I thought the name was SmartHome, I am not sure.
If you can find compatible units from other suppliers, more power to you. The build quality of the X10 branded products was sorely lacking. I've had my light turn on for no apparent reason and sometimes the RS232 sender part doesn't work right. On the system that I ran the X10 sender, the software for it needed to be restarted every day.
I hope that fate doesn't fall on competing products.
Calorie is a unit of heat transfer, 1 Cal (uppercase C) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1g of water 1 degree celsius. Lower case calorie is 1/100th that.
...from their computer? If it is 30dB at 1M / 3ft then that is approaching quiet enough. Just because new drives are a lot quieter doesn't mean there isn't some room for improvement.
That said, in most systems, these new drives would be far from the weakest (or loudest) link. Optical drives are often pretty loud on read, and I'd love to downclock their speed without a contrived app in the system tray. A lot of fans could be replaced with fans of roughly similar CFM rating (a percent or three) but be 3-6dB quieter.
Too bad backyard hackers couldn't be bothered to learn basic microcontrollers. Using the parallel port for direct electrical I/O is contrived at best. It's not as if serial port work is hard with any good microcontroller, many of them have it built-in minus simple RS232 level conversion provided by a simple MAX232 chip. Program a few instructions to set up the chip, a few more to respond to new data, etc.
I agree. One thing to watch out for is that some S-ATA drives are starting to standardize on TCQ.
SCSI drives do seem to be more reliable under load, and have shorter seek times, etc, but at a prohibitively higher cost per MB.
I run both SCSI and IDE. I generally try to have SCSI as the "system" drive that holds OS and software, much of it a lot of little files accessed often, and a "data" drive that just holds large tracts of data, most of it large files not accessed often.
As for bus detachment, I've run IDE drives one drive per channel (IIRC, S-ATA enforces this, it is point-to-point only, one drive per channel), so if there are bus detachment problems it is on the PCI bus and not the drive controller bus.
Defense isn't going to worry about civil engineering unless they thought it could help them in their task.
IIRC, there are DoD projects for using lasers in defense, anti-missile, etc.
The point of the DoD and any other military is 1) to maintain a convincing threat that they can kill people and break things when called upon, 2) to be able to follow through with it. Which isn't to say they don't do the other things, and pop popcorn because they have to move troops and feed them too.
The first part is to get the things down to a practical size, etc then see what it can be used for.
I don't see the point in a distinction. Is it a PDA with phone capabilities? Is it a phone with PDA capabilities? Either way, if this happens, I wouldn't consider it a "death" but an evolution in what technologies and packagings people decide fits their lifestyles the best.
Just because a radio was integrated into a clock doesn't mean that radio died then, although maybe I wish it did.