Yeah...I'm pretty suprised that 20% of the population knows how to operate a computer better than a TV.
"Yeah, I've got a (insert favorite HW+SW flavor here) in the den that I use all the time. There's something in my living room that my mom gave me for my birthday last year - it looks kind of like a computer, but the input device is too limited. I've figured out how to turn it on, but for two months I just couldn't figure out how to get anything but this black and white static. A friend came over and hooked up something he called an "antenna" but it was way bigger than the one on my cell phone. He just sat down and was getting all sorts of different stuff by pressing the buttons. Once he was gone, I tried it, but the sound was always too loud and there was no knob to turn it down. Not that it mattered 'cause I never figured out how to make all the different shows come up. I guess you have to be an expert user to get anything other than this PBS that seems to be on. I've given up and I just download the DiVX shows I like over my DSL line and burn 'em to disc so I can watch 'em whenever I want."
I'm guessing that the poll has a 20% margin of error, and it was all the way to the stops on that question.
What they should learn is that this card will be used for unintended purposes unless those purposes are strictly forbidden. Your Social Security number is for *gasp* social security. It is also used by Uncle Sam as your taxpayer ID number and medicare. No big deal. But it's used by financial institutions to track you and your credit - not solely for the purpose of reporting income to the federal government.
Now, in Virginia (as well as other states), your SSN is your drivers license number. Why? Its unique and convenient - for Virgnia. I made them give me a non-SSN drivers license number. Many business establishments require your DL# for ID purposes, but don't need to have the key which unlocks your entire financial history.
What they should consider is that a single item which provides full verification also eliminates any redundancy in the system. This will, eventually, lead to errors - either through accidental cause or deliberate deception. At least now, most diligent businesses will verify your information through more than one source to determine your (credit worthiness, employment, whatever). If the smart card is all you need, then it's always right - no matter what is encoded on it or who wields it.
I spoke to Rep Boucher in person a couple of weeks ago and he is genuine. I live in his district and he has fairly regular meetings in which he speaks (usually announcing something being funded by the fed gov't for your community), and then he stays afterwards for a while and talks to whomever is there and wants to bend his ear for a couple of minutes.
He really does care about this stuff. He mentioned that he would be introducing some new legislation "soon" which he expects will have the entire Hollywood establishment come down on his head (his own words). He asks that everyone write their opinions down and send them in to congress so that he can show he has public support for this stuff.
Re:Your lawyer is a fucking retard
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 1
As for his moral obligation, I believe he has done the right thing at this point. We can't all just up and quit our jobs when a _proposal_ for a business practice doesn't seem kosher. By airing it here at/. and providing potential (negative) exposure to the company this whole issue may be headed off. For all we know this is a great firm and a great potential product, and some leech in management thought he might get that second cottage in Aspen if he could wring some hours out of his manpower budget.
With the resources of/. he's got a real reason why this won't work, and maybe an anonymous suggestion or two to the proper brass at the company will scuttle this plan. If not, then we're all on the lookout now, and when it does surface the GPL community will silently cut their throats while they sleep;-)
It's funny you mention HFS. My folks live in the area, and whenever I'm up (about every three or four months) I flip over and listen a bit. I was amazed last time I was there - I swear that the music sounds the same as it did ten years ago. Its not the same music, of course - I've never heard of the songs or artists they play now - but "alternative" sure doesn't seem to change much. Oh well, it beats pop country, classic rock, or top 40, which is all they play in s/w VA.
I just call DirecTV. I have a "dormant" account. Each year, they put NFL Sunday Ticket on my spring bill. Each year I call up CS and ask, "$140 is a pretty good chunch of change - are all the games going to be broadcast in High Definition?" Each year the rep has informed me that the games would not be in HD. Each year I tell them to cancel my Sunday Ticket and call me when they start broadcasting in High Def.
They're going to have to push this thing really hard, IMO, if they expect it to grab. 27GB just isn't enough of a jump over 8.5 to make it worthwhile, except as a niche data storage medium.
No, a single sided (n-layer is okay) disc is going to have to be able to do a solid 4 hours of full-rate 1080p to take hold. This might do 3 hours, with no room for extras.
What's really needed (some of you will hate this), is time of use metering. I had it for electricity when I lived in Maryland, and it worked quite well. There were three levels of fees: low, medium, and high usage. An example for the winter was: during the work day, when business were sucking up a lot of electricity, the rates were medium. Morning and evening, during transition times, a high rate was in effect. At night, when the demand was the lowest, the rates were the lowest. Why? Electricity generation is most efficient when the generators run at a constant rate. In the summer, the cost of electricity during mid-day was almost ten times the night rate. I could heat my hot water with electricity for less than natural gas. I put a timer on it and heated the water at night. It stayed hot all day, and if we used a large amount if it, I could just go flip the manual on switch. I never needed to.
Since max bandwidth is limited, why not a time-of-use metering for it? The idea is that there are fixed fees for providing you service. Say, $20 a month goes to general network and management operations - billing, help desk, infrastructre support. Then, there's the pipes you've got to lease, and each has a capacity. A fee structure might be $0.50 a gig during the day, $1 a gig in the evening, and $0.10 a gig in the middle of the night/early morning.
If you must surf when everybody and their brother is on the net, you pay extra. If you can schedule those 20 ISOs you want for off-peak times, you should. Here's the financial incentive for it! If you paid a $1 a gig for downloading all of the.binaries portion of USENET on your PC from 8-10pm each day, but only $0.10 a gig from 4-6am, when would you do it? Time of use metering helps to smooth out the flow. An OC3 can get 40 TB/mo throughput (excuse me if I've slipped a digit in the math). If 80% of the traffic occurs in a 3 hour "peak" window, you will only realize 6TB of your available bandwidth. That's horribly wasteful. If you could entice your heavy users to do more off-time up/downloading, you could effectively increase throughput without increasing costs. And, honestly, does it really matter if you are physically awake to watch the d/l meter on the latest linux distro? Plan ahead, and have it ready when you get there. Tag your Gnutella files for later.
This kind of headline really rubs me the wrong way. It compares with building a car for $500. Sure, it can be done. You use the spare parts you've got lying around the house for the chassis and wheels, head down to the local scrapyard for what you don't have. Don't count any minor capital costs such as tools. Count the 18 man years of labor that you and your friends spent as "volunteer" work for $0. Oh, and don't forget that a friend a Ford who thought the project was neat donated the engine. Puh-leeze.
If you had to count the cost of the project, it would be quite high. It fall into the "college students are free labor" category. Wonder why colleges get grants? 'Cause you get third-world child labor rates for your technical experts. Why spend up to 100 grand a year (burdened labor) for a lab tech, when you can get one free at the local university. If prisoners all had Master's degrees in technical fields, we'd doubtless have high tech grant money going there, too.
If you think this didn't cost any real money, think again. I'll bet the launch space was "donated" and written off. Congratulations, the US Government just paid (40% corp tax rate * 500,000 secondary payload lauch fee) for this $50,000 satellite.
Now - don't get me wrong - with the brave 5XX folks we send to D.C. spending two trillion dollars a year this $200,000 is small potatoes, but it's still _our money_. If whomever provided launch services didn't pay it, that money's got to be made up somewhere.
I applaude the learning experience the cadets got, and I'm glad it worked. I know the rush you get when they flip the switch and your satellite comes to life. I'm not knocking the opportunity these kids had - I'm just asking for a bit of genuine disclosure when you talk about the money involved.
That's the timeframe being considered according to videotropic.com news from 12/27. That leaves a window for either a Special Edition in November, or a short re-release of the theatrical version about the same time.
A November freshening of the DVD will also let them put some extra making-of and trailers for LOTR-TT in the mix.
I agree. I usually wait, and it's not just because it costs less to purchase a DVD than for me and my wife to go out. I've got a 120" screen and an HD front projector (don't scoff, in the summer of '99 when I bought it I spent the same as I would have on a 55" widescreen HDTV) and a decent 5.1 sound system.
The only exception are some of the brand new stadium seat theatres - they can be really great, even edging out my home theater. However, at 2:15 minutes into LOTR, I really wished I could put it on pause for a trip to the little boy's room. That's the real killer app of the home theater;-)
Okay, I've been waiting on HD for a while, and have grown tired for the tuners to come down in price. $500 is not what I want to pay for a 3 year old first generation box. And there are really no alternatives on the horizon. My advice is to save the extra grand you'd pay for an HD model and get a smallish RPTV (60" diagonal) with component inputs for DVD viewing. It's the advice I give to friends and family. However...
If you really itching to spend a few grand, and you're viewing room has light control (blinds on the windows for daytime watching), consider researching a digital front projector. Two years ago I was in the market for an HDTV for my new home. 55" 16:9 ratio monitors were running $5500-$6500. I planned a little recess in the living room to accomodate the behemoth, and started counting up the costs for all the extras. Then I ran across a review of the soon-to-be-released Sony VW10HT projector. It was a 16:9 ratio, 1366x768 pixel digital projector. Street price: $5500. Holy shnikes! I reworked my plan, put a bookcase on the wall with a soffit above, and spent another $1000 on a 120" diagonal 16:9 ratio automatic screen. I still don't have HD in my area, and only one station in my city (Roanoke, VA) is planning on going live prior to the revised 2003 deadline. My wait for HD will be rewarded eventually, but until then I have the best movie watching setup in the neighborhood.
Since then, the big black boxes have gotten cheaper, and seem to be dipping below $3000. Inexpensive (but quality) front projectors are still in the $3000-$7000 range if you do your research and find a good vendor. Though the prices haven't come down as quickly as the console units, the new projectors have higher brightness, higher resolution, and better image processing than those of just a year or two ago. If you think you might want to go this route, surf on over to avsforum.com and check out the digital projector area. Just remember that we're fanatical and will argue about the most minute flaws - don't be scared off. My projector gets panned on a daily basis for its shorcomings, but it's really an argument on whether it's 94 or a 98 on a scale of 100. Either way it's a winner.
This could be quite a boon for MP3 software makers - guaranteeing upgrade fees from users each year. I can see it now, "Buy MusicRipper 3.0 and get a free yearly subscription to upgraded rip plugins!" It'll be just like Norton and LiveUpdate. Each time a new "protection" scheme hits the market, teams of programmers will code 'round the clock to find out how to rip the tracks sucessfully. Then, as long as your subscription is good, your ripper software will check to see if any new "enhancement" plugins have been posted. No more need to add lots of features, just keeping pace with the music industry will be enough.
The DMCA. If you reverse engineer it and try to profit off that information, you've violated federal law today. The code inside is copyright MS, you broke the code, you sold it, you go to jail.
Actually, I think you have it backwards. The filesharing is the red herring. They'd be pleased as punch for you to send the commercials to all your friends who missed them.
What they're afraid of is the AUTOMATIC commercial skip capabilities. You don't even get to see the fast-forwarded version (which, one might argue, can grab your attention). That's the revenue stream they don't want to mess with. If the advertisers find out that a significant protion of the audience is skipping the commercials, without any effort on thier part, they will demand to pay lower rates. For example: Nielsen gives your show a 2.3 share, but the ad execs say that's really only a 1.8 share when you consider that 22% of that demographic owns a replay-like PVR, so they should get to pay only 78% of the requested rate.
Besides, if you could distill out the commercials automagically, drop 'em to tape or (*gasp*) VideoCD/DVD-R, why bother to buy the box set when it comes out at $79.95 per season next year. These packaged versions are commanding big $$$ in DVD-released formats. Part of the draw is the no-commercial format. If you have a machine that makes this automatically by recording, commercial stripping, and packaging for download to your favorite media, you may as well be taking food right out of the mouth of the children of the executives. ("Please, think of the children!")
Tell you what - you build me one of these babys with a DVD-R and a simple interactive interface and I'll beat down your door to get one. Geez...how sweet would that be...
I think I'd be more likely to buy an Entre' Hub from Kenwood. It's only got a 20GB drive (you just gotta bea able to hack those things!), but it'll link up to their 400+3 CD/DVD changers and will catalog and provide an interface for your real disks as well as the cool MP3 functions. List on the Entre' is $1800 or so, but street should be about $1000.
Combine it with the Kenwood Sovereign amplifier (a bit pricey at $3k list, $2k street) and you can distribute audio via telephone jacks throughout your home and play multiple MP3s simultaneously in different locations.
Me, I'm just drooling over the 400+3 disk progessive player...
I believe it was once said about Goldin and the budget process in the early 90s (when many good programs were in fear of losing funding from congress), "He saw the invading army miles in the distance and ordered all the women and children slaughtered so they wouldn't be captured."
If you want NASA to be special - make it special. Don't make it a civil service career choice where you never get fired and you plod along, engineering paper, while the contractors do all the hands-on work. Fire all the contractors. If you don't want something to be in house, it's not important enough to keep at all - just sell it off.
Make NASA the place that every top engineering and science Brainiac want's to go. Yeah, it might be a training ground for industry - but make people want to stay. Make every project important. Some science areas are like this. It's amazing when you see the fire in the eyes of a scientist in Goddard SFCs earth sciences area working twelve hour days because they absolutly love it. It's also depressing to see engineers - good, creative engineers - reduced to pushing papers so that engineers at a contractor (be it large or small) can do the hands on work.
I'd eliminate the contract system for engineering and science services. If you want it done, do it in house.
Already been done. It's called technology transfer and there's an office at most, if not all, centers. Every year they fill a book, called "Spinoffs," which highlights the successes.
Oh, and we are spending all of our money on consultants and private companies. All though Goldin's reign the mantra was "outsoure". Every CS in the place is a manager now, managing various contracts. In an ideal world, that means when a project ends, NASA no longer pays for the manpower. In the real world, those contractors are co-workers of the CS folks - they go to baseball games and have cookouts together. So when a project ends, CS find a place (another project) that those contractors can "sit on" until more work pops up.
I've seen it from both sides of the fence. Of course, I got paid more as a contractor and my company tacked on G&A, overhead, and fee. They even paid me overtime (which NEVER happened as a CS). But somehow that costs less than the same me being a civil servant.
Oh, and private firms will never take up a space race until the proforma shows a 20% ROI. And that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
OZT
Re:Architectural stuff
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
Ahhh, but you seem to forget: Stairs don't pay rent. Leasable space is what really matters when owners direct the architect. Everybody wants more useful square footage. Stairs don't count. You wanna make the building appealing? Fine. Big, fast elevators, do. Tall ceilings do. Walls of glass do. Stairs in a 110 story building don't. Expensive fire suppression systems don't. Extra pounds of steel and concrete don't.
If you asked me the question, "Can you design a building which can withstand a fully fueled 767 crashing into it?" I would say, "Yes, but you can't afford to build it."
I get asked much more mundane questions each day and I give the same response. I know the budgets on our facilites - and some of them are generous - but there are certain things that just aren't financially credible.
Dammit, I prefer furlongs per fortnight as my primary unit of velocity.
Besides, if you're in metric you never know where you screwed up - everything is a multiple 10! At least in feet and pounds, you know where you've screwed up. If you're analysis is off by a factor of 20, you've forgotten to convert to slugs & inches: SQRT(32.2 ft/s**2 x 12 in/ft)=19.65. (It's pretty common for students/newbies in vibration problems to miss this one, and it's also easy to catch.)
Actually, the real story of interest here is that this scramjet apparently showed positive net thrust. This may seem academic, but the Russians sucessfully flight tested a scramjet more than 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it had a net negative thrust (could not overcome drag, even on the decending leg of a ballistic trajectory) and managed to bury itself quite completely in the permafrost after the recovery chute failed to operate.
Scramjets are not that exotic, just bitchin' hard to get to work. It's one of three types of internal combustion jet engines (turboprops don't count and cycle-type props are a totally different beast). You'll have to excuse any minor errors below...it's been a while since I've been through the nuts & bolts of aircraft engines (no pun intended):
Tradtional jets take in air and compress it mechanically, burn it with fuel in a combustion chamber, then pass the exhaust through a turbine to recover the mechanical work required to keep the compressor running. The "waste" exhaust is passed through a nozzle to optimize the thrust. Note: in a turboprop, the turbine also powers the blade rotor. The waste exhast still exists, but its momentum is negligible.
RAM jets eliminate the compressor/turbine system. The supersonic freestream flow is compressed at the engine inlet over a normal shockwave after a series of oblique shockwaves reduces the incoming flow to just above sonic. Note: oblique shock waves are relatively efficient at slowing down and compressing the flow, normal shock waves are "lossy" and the energy lost is proportional to the supersonic speed upstream of the shockwave. The compressed, subsonic flow enters the combustion chamber where fuel is added. The expanding exhaust is then returned to supersonic speeds through a converging-diverging nozzle. If it's been too long since you've had compr. aero, subsonic flows increase in velocity as the airstream constricts (aka Bernoulli's Principle), but supersonic streams increase in velocity as the airstream expands.
SCRAM jets (Supersonic Combustion RAM) are just RAM jets without the incoming air being dropped below the speed of sound. The combustion must then happen at speeds greater than sound - a tricky feat to accomplish. A diverging nozzle then allows the supersonic exhaust to accelerate out the rear of the engine. The SCRAMjet avoids the high energy loss (entropy gain) of the normal shockwave required in a RAMjet.
2 tuners (capable of NTSC and ATSC)
40+ hours of HD / 100+ hrs high qual NTSC
A DVD-R tray for archiving
Commercial pruning for the DVD-R (even if manual)
LMAO...they just don't get it. Too freakin' young to remember single sided floppies, I guess. I think I still have my old 1XXkB memorex 5.25. If I had an apple II, I could probably pull out the old basic routines to generate D&D characters! Ha!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...I'm pretty suprised that 20% of the population knows how to operate a computer better than a TV.
"Yeah, I've got a (insert favorite HW+SW flavor here) in the den that I use all the time. There's something in my living room that my mom gave me for my birthday last year - it looks kind of like a computer, but the input device is too limited. I've figured out how to turn it on, but for two months I just couldn't figure out how to get anything but this black and white static. A friend came over and hooked up something he called an "antenna" but it was way bigger than the one on my cell phone. He just sat down and was getting all sorts of different stuff by pressing the buttons. Once he was gone, I tried it, but the sound was always too loud and there was no knob to turn it down. Not that it mattered 'cause I never figured out how to make all the different shows come up. I guess you have to be an expert user to get anything other than this PBS that seems to be on. I've given up and I just download the DiVX shows I like over my DSL line and burn 'em to disc so I can watch 'em whenever I want."
I'm guessing that the poll has a 20% margin of error, and it was all the way to the stops on that question.
What they should learn is that this card will be used for unintended purposes unless those purposes are strictly forbidden. Your Social Security number is for *gasp* social security. It is also used by Uncle Sam as your taxpayer ID number and medicare. No big deal. But it's used by financial institutions to track you and your credit - not solely for the purpose of reporting income to the federal government.
Now, in Virginia (as well as other states), your SSN is your drivers license number. Why? Its unique and convenient - for Virgnia. I made them give me a non-SSN drivers license number. Many business establishments require your DL# for ID purposes, but don't need to have the key which unlocks your entire financial history.
What they should consider is that a single item which provides full verification also eliminates any redundancy in the system. This will, eventually, lead to errors - either through accidental cause or deliberate deception. At least now, most diligent businesses will verify your information through more than one source to determine your (credit worthiness, employment, whatever). If the smart card is all you need, then it's always right - no matter what is encoded on it or who wields it.
I spoke to Rep Boucher in person a couple of weeks ago and he is genuine. I live in his district and he has fairly regular meetings in which he speaks (usually announcing something being funded by the fed gov't for your community), and then he stays afterwards for a while and talks to whomever is there and wants to bend his ear for a couple of minutes.
He really does care about this stuff. He mentioned that he would be introducing some new legislation "soon" which he expects will have the entire Hollywood establishment come down on his head (his own words). He asks that everyone write their opinions down and send them in to congress so that he can show he has public support for this stuff.
As for his moral obligation, I believe he has done the right thing at this point. We can't all just up and quit our jobs when a _proposal_ for a business practice doesn't seem kosher. By airing it here at /. and providing potential (negative) exposure to the company this whole issue may be headed off. For all we know this is a great firm and a great potential product, and some leech in management thought he might get that second cottage in Aspen if he could wring some hours out of his manpower budget.
/. he's got a real reason why this won't work, and maybe an anonymous suggestion or two to the proper brass at the company will scuttle this plan. If not, then we're all on the lookout now, and when it does surface the GPL community will silently cut their throats while they sleep ;-)
With the resources of
It's funny you mention HFS. My folks live in the area, and whenever I'm up (about every three or four months) I flip over and listen a bit. I was amazed last time I was there - I swear that the music sounds the same as it did ten years ago. Its not the same music, of course - I've never heard of the songs or artists they play now - but "alternative" sure doesn't seem to change much. Oh well, it beats pop country, classic rock, or top 40, which is all they play in s/w VA.
I just call DirecTV. I have a "dormant" account. Each year, they put NFL Sunday Ticket on my spring bill. Each year I call up CS and ask, "$140 is a pretty good chunch of change - are all the games going to be broadcast in High Definition?" Each year the rep has informed me that the games would not be in HD. Each year I tell them to cancel my Sunday Ticket and call me when they start broadcasting in High Def.
I vote with my wallet.
--
They're going to have to push this thing really hard, IMO, if they expect it to grab. 27GB just isn't enough of a jump over 8.5 to make it worthwhile, except as a niche data storage medium.
No, a single sided (n-layer is okay) disc is going to have to be able to do a solid 4 hours of full-rate 1080p to take hold. This might do 3 hours, with no room for extras.
What's really needed (some of you will hate this), is time of use metering. I had it for electricity when I lived in Maryland, and it worked quite well. There were three levels of fees: low, medium, and high usage. An example for the winter was: during the work day, when business were sucking up a lot of electricity, the rates were medium. Morning and evening, during transition times, a high rate was in effect. At night, when the demand was the lowest, the rates were the lowest. Why? Electricity generation is most efficient when the generators run at a constant rate. In the summer, the cost of electricity during mid-day was almost ten times the night rate. I could heat my hot water with electricity for less than natural gas. I put a timer on it and heated the water at night. It stayed hot all day, and if we used a large amount if it, I could just go flip the manual on switch. I never needed to.
.binaries portion of USENET on your PC from 8-10pm each day, but only $0.10 a gig from 4-6am, when would you do it? Time of use metering helps to smooth out the flow. An OC3 can get 40 TB/mo throughput (excuse me if I've slipped a digit in the math). If 80% of the traffic occurs in a 3 hour "peak" window, you will only realize 6TB of your available bandwidth. That's horribly wasteful. If you could entice your heavy users to do more off-time up/downloading, you could effectively increase throughput without increasing costs. And, honestly, does it really matter if you are physically awake to watch the d/l meter on the latest linux distro? Plan ahead, and have it ready when you get there. Tag your Gnutella files for later.
Since max bandwidth is limited, why not a time-of-use metering for it? The idea is that there are fixed fees for providing you service. Say, $20 a month goes to general network and management operations - billing, help desk, infrastructre support. Then, there's the pipes you've got to lease, and each has a capacity. A fee structure might be $0.50 a gig during the day, $1 a gig in the evening, and $0.10 a gig in the middle of the night/early morning.
If you must surf when everybody and their brother is on the net, you pay extra. If you can schedule those 20 ISOs you want for off-peak times, you should. Here's the financial incentive for it! If you paid a $1 a gig for downloading all of the
This kind of headline really rubs me the wrong way. It compares with building a car for $500. Sure, it can be done. You use the spare parts you've got lying around the house for the chassis and wheels, head down to the local scrapyard for what you don't have. Don't count any minor capital costs such as tools. Count the 18 man years of labor that you and your friends spent as "volunteer" work for $0. Oh, and don't forget that a friend a Ford who thought the project was neat donated the engine. Puh-leeze.
If you had to count the cost of the project, it would be quite high. It fall into the "college students are free labor" category. Wonder why colleges get grants? 'Cause you get third-world child labor rates for your technical experts. Why spend up to 100 grand a year (burdened labor) for a lab tech, when you can get one free at the local university. If prisoners all had Master's degrees in technical fields, we'd doubtless have high tech grant money going there, too.
If you think this didn't cost any real money, think again. I'll bet the launch space was "donated" and written off. Congratulations, the US Government just paid (40% corp tax rate * 500,000 secondary payload lauch fee) for this $50,000 satellite.
Now - don't get me wrong - with the brave 5XX folks we send to D.C. spending two trillion dollars a year this $200,000 is small potatoes, but it's still _our money_. If whomever provided launch services didn't pay it, that money's got to be made up somewhere.
I applaude the learning experience the cadets got, and I'm glad it worked. I know the rush you get when they flip the switch and your satellite comes to life. I'm not knocking the opportunity these kids had - I'm just asking for a bit of genuine disclosure when you talk about the money involved.
That's the timeframe being considered according to videotropic.com news from 12/27. That leaves a window for either a Special Edition in November, or a short re-release of the theatrical version about the same time.
A November freshening of the DVD will also let them put some extra making-of and trailers for LOTR-TT in the mix.
I agree. I usually wait, and it's not just because it costs less to purchase a DVD than for me and my wife to go out. I've got a 120" screen and an HD front projector (don't scoff, in the summer of '99 when I bought it I spent the same as I would have on a 55" widescreen HDTV) and a decent 5.1 sound system.
;-)
The only exception are some of the brand new stadium seat theatres - they can be really great, even edging out my home theater. However, at 2:15 minutes into LOTR, I really wished I could put it on pause for a trip to the little boy's room. That's the real killer app of the home theater
Okay, I've been waiting on HD for a while, and have grown tired for the tuners to come down in price. $500 is not what I want to pay for a 3 year old first generation box. And there are really no alternatives on the horizon. My advice is to save the extra grand you'd pay for an HD model and get a smallish RPTV (60" diagonal) with component inputs for DVD viewing. It's the advice I give to friends and family. However...
If you really itching to spend a few grand, and you're viewing room has light control (blinds on the windows for daytime watching), consider researching a digital front projector. Two years ago I was in the market for an HDTV for my new home. 55" 16:9 ratio monitors were running $5500-$6500. I planned a little recess in the living room to accomodate the behemoth, and started counting up the costs for all the extras. Then I ran across a review of the soon-to-be-released Sony VW10HT projector. It was a 16:9 ratio, 1366x768 pixel digital projector. Street price: $5500. Holy shnikes! I reworked my plan, put a bookcase on the wall with a soffit above, and spent another $1000 on a 120" diagonal 16:9 ratio automatic screen. I still don't have HD in my area, and only one station in my city (Roanoke, VA) is planning on going live prior to the revised 2003 deadline. My wait for HD will be rewarded eventually, but until then I have the best movie watching setup in the neighborhood.
Since then, the big black boxes have gotten cheaper, and seem to be dipping below $3000. Inexpensive (but quality) front projectors are still in the $3000-$7000 range if you do your research and find a good vendor. Though the prices haven't come down as quickly as the console units, the new projectors have higher brightness, higher resolution, and better image processing than those of just a year or two ago. If you think you might want to go this route, surf on over to avsforum.com and check out the digital projector area. Just remember that we're fanatical and will argue about the most minute flaws - don't be scared off. My projector gets panned on a daily basis for its shorcomings, but it's really an argument on whether it's 94 or a 98 on a scale of 100. Either way it's a winner.
This could be quite a boon for MP3 software makers - guaranteeing upgrade fees from users each year. I can see it now, "Buy MusicRipper 3.0 and get a free yearly subscription to upgraded rip plugins!" It'll be just like Norton and LiveUpdate. Each time a new "protection" scheme hits the market, teams of programmers will code 'round the clock to find out how to rip the tracks sucessfully. Then, as long as your subscription is good, your ripper software will check to see if any new "enhancement" plugins have been posted. No more need to add lots of features, just keeping pace with the music industry will be enough.
The DMCA. If you reverse engineer it and try to profit off that information, you've violated federal law today. The code inside is copyright MS, you broke the code, you sold it, you go to jail.
:-/
Isn't the land of the free wonderful?
Actually, I think you have it backwards. The filesharing is the red herring. They'd be pleased as punch for you to send the commercials to all your friends who missed them.
What they're afraid of is the AUTOMATIC commercial skip capabilities. You don't even get to see the fast-forwarded version (which, one might argue, can grab your attention). That's the revenue stream they don't want to mess with. If the advertisers find out that a significant protion of the audience is skipping the commercials, without any effort on thier part, they will demand to pay lower rates. For example: Nielsen gives your show a 2.3 share, but the ad execs say that's really only a 1.8 share when you consider that 22% of that demographic owns a replay-like PVR, so they should get to pay only 78% of the requested rate.
Besides, if you could distill out the commercials automagically, drop 'em to tape or (*gasp*) VideoCD/DVD-R, why bother to buy the box set when it comes out at $79.95 per season next year. These packaged versions are commanding big $$$ in DVD-released formats. Part of the draw is the no-commercial format. If you have a machine that makes this automatically by recording, commercial stripping, and packaging for download to your favorite media, you may as well be taking food right out of the mouth of the children of the executives. ("Please, think of the children!")
Tell you what - you build me one of these babys with a DVD-R and a simple interactive interface and I'll beat down your door to get one. Geez...how sweet would that be...
I think I'd be more likely to buy an Entre' Hub from Kenwood. It's only got a 20GB drive (you just gotta bea able to hack those things!), but it'll link up to their 400+3 CD/DVD changers and will catalog and provide an interface for your real disks as well as the cool MP3 functions. List on the Entre' is $1800 or so, but street should be about $1000.
Combine it with the Kenwood Sovereign amplifier (a bit pricey at $3k list, $2k street) and you can distribute audio via telephone jacks throughout your home and play multiple MP3s simultaneously in different locations.
Me, I'm just drooling over the 400+3 disk progessive player...
I believe it was once said about Goldin and the budget process in the early 90s (when many good programs were in fear of losing funding from congress), "He saw the invading army miles in the distance and ordered all the women and children slaughtered so they wouldn't be captured."
If you want NASA to be special - make it special. Don't make it a civil service career choice where you never get fired and you plod along, engineering paper, while the contractors do all the hands-on work. Fire all the contractors. If you don't want something to be in house, it's not important enough to keep at all - just sell it off.
Make NASA the place that every top engineering and science Brainiac want's to go. Yeah, it might be a training ground for industry - but make people want to stay. Make every project important. Some science areas are like this. It's amazing when you see the fire in the eyes of a scientist in Goddard SFCs earth sciences area working twelve hour days because they absolutly love it. It's also depressing to see engineers - good, creative engineers - reduced to pushing papers so that engineers at a contractor (be it large or small) can do the hands on work.
I'd eliminate the contract system for engineering and science services. If you want it done, do it in house.
Already been done. It's called technology transfer and there's an office at most, if not all, centers. Every year they fill a book, called "Spinoffs," which highlights the successes.
Oh, and we are spending all of our money on consultants and private companies. All though Goldin's reign the mantra was "outsoure". Every CS in the place is a manager now, managing various contracts. In an ideal world, that means when a project ends, NASA no longer pays for the manpower. In the real world, those contractors are co-workers of the CS folks - they go to baseball games and have cookouts together. So when a project ends, CS find a place (another project) that those contractors can "sit on" until more work pops up.
I've seen it from both sides of the fence. Of course, I got paid more as a contractor and my company tacked on G&A, overhead, and fee. They even paid me overtime (which NEVER happened as a CS). But somehow that costs less than the same me being a civil servant.
Oh, and private firms will never take up a space race until the proforma shows a 20% ROI. And that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
OZT
Ahhh, but you seem to forget: Stairs don't pay rent. Leasable space is what really matters when owners direct the architect. Everybody wants more useful square footage. Stairs don't count. You wanna make the building appealing? Fine. Big, fast elevators, do. Tall ceilings do. Walls of glass do. Stairs in a 110 story building don't. Expensive fire suppression systems don't. Extra pounds of steel and concrete don't.
If you asked me the question, "Can you design a building which can withstand a fully fueled 767 crashing into it?" I would say, "Yes, but you can't afford to build it."
I get asked much more mundane questions each day and I give the same response. I know the budgets on our facilites - and some of them are generous - but there are certain things that just aren't financially credible.
And people wonder why I don't want children. It's not fair to them, IMHO.
Dammit, I prefer furlongs per fortnight as my primary unit of velocity.
Besides, if you're in metric you never know where you screwed up - everything is a multiple 10! At least in feet and pounds, you know where you've screwed up. If you're analysis is off by a factor of 20, you've forgotten to convert to slugs & inches: SQRT(32.2 ft/s**2 x 12 in/ft)=19.65. (It's pretty common for students/newbies in vibration problems to miss this one, and it's also easy to catch.)
;-)
Actually, the real story of interest here is that this scramjet apparently showed positive net thrust. This may seem academic, but the Russians sucessfully flight tested a scramjet more than 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it had a net negative thrust (could not overcome drag, even on the decending leg of a ballistic trajectory) and managed to bury itself quite completely in the permafrost after the recovery chute failed to operate.
Scramjets are not that exotic, just bitchin' hard to get to work. It's one of three types of internal combustion jet engines (turboprops don't count and cycle-type props are a totally different beast). You'll have to excuse any minor errors below...it's been a while since I've been through the nuts & bolts of aircraft engines (no pun intended):
Tradtional jets take in air and compress it mechanically, burn it with fuel in a combustion chamber, then pass the exhaust through a turbine to recover the mechanical work required to keep the compressor running. The "waste" exhaust is passed through a nozzle to optimize the thrust. Note: in a turboprop, the turbine also powers the blade rotor. The waste exhast still exists, but its momentum is negligible.
RAM jets eliminate the compressor/turbine system. The supersonic freestream flow is compressed at the engine inlet over a normal shockwave after a series of oblique shockwaves reduces the incoming flow to just above sonic. Note: oblique shock waves are relatively efficient at slowing down and compressing the flow, normal shock waves are "lossy" and the energy lost is proportional to the supersonic speed upstream of the shockwave. The compressed, subsonic flow enters the combustion chamber where fuel is added. The expanding exhaust is then returned to supersonic speeds through a converging-diverging nozzle. If it's been too long since you've had compr. aero, subsonic flows increase in velocity as the airstream constricts (aka Bernoulli's Principle), but supersonic streams increase in velocity as the airstream expands.
SCRAM jets (Supersonic Combustion RAM) are just RAM jets without the incoming air being dropped below the speed of sound. The combustion must then happen at speeds greater than sound - a tricky feat to accomplish. A diverging nozzle then allows the supersonic exhaust to accelerate out the rear of the engine. The SCRAMjet avoids the high energy loss (entropy gain) of the normal shockwave required in a RAMjet.
For two grand, it had better have:
2 tuners (capable of NTSC and ATSC)
40+ hours of HD / 100+ hrs high qual NTSC
A DVD-R tray for archiving
Commercial pruning for the DVD-R (even if manual)
Otherwise, I'm not interested.
LMAO...they just don't get it. Too freakin' young to remember single sided floppies, I guess. I think I still have my old 1XXkB memorex 5.25. If I had an apple II, I could probably pull out the old basic routines to generate D&D characters! Ha!