As an aside, I can assure you it is not the dev team's fault. I used to work at blizzard north, and there was a pretty strict policy on never talking about anything in public without permission. With Blizzard South, the policies are even stricter and more draconian, and they fire people on a more regular basis to keep the devs in line.
On a side note about mythTV: one of the greatest TiVo experiences i've enjoyed is with dual-receiver DirecTiVo. You can record 2 shows and watch another (recorded show). Does mythTV support multiple receivers? I'm too lazy to go find out, someone just tell me.:-)
TiVo has caved into the content producers, and handed over control of the DRM process to them. The recent accidental flagging of content in this way proves it is out of TiVo's hands, and within the realm of control of the broadcaster. That makes it only a matter of time before broadcasters will begin to use this feature. If TiVo wants to retain loyal customers, they need to take back control: they should require digital authorization codes for DRM features and DRM the DRM so that only TiVo can authorize DRM restrictions on content. Unfortunatley, even then TiVo users will have to worry about whether TiVo will allow DRM on content only in reasonable situations, or if TiVo will cave into monetary or legal pressures and allow it on anything the broadcasters want.
The end of TiVo's usefullness is approaching quickly. Probably time to get some more developers working on the open source alternatives.
No no, you've misunderstood. This is from the IT section of slashdot. Sony is cutting 7% of the jobs belonging to IT. it's jobs. I'm sure that's what they meant.
Yes, because backing up your data to an external hard drive is cheap and easy these days. For a gamer, the speed advantage offered by a raid-0 is a not insignificant gaming advantage.
They mostly don't, it's all reinstallable to them, read/write (mostly read) performance is what matters. A common solution to the increased data vulnerability is to use a backup system for important data.
The difference for a serious gamer will be in the fps achievable at a high resolution. If you can go from 40 fps (frame latency = 25ms) to 80 fps (frame latency = 12.5 ms) you gain a 12.5 ms reaction time advantage. With human eye to hand latencies running in the 80-120 ms range, that's > 10% advantage. This all assumes of course that you are using a monitor capable of displaying 80fps, but any high end CRT will do that for you.
The sound quality is probably pretty much the same, except for THX enabled titles, for which I doubt the onboard sound is certified. But the real difference will be in cpu usage, where the onboard sound you have probably eats 5% of your cpu, and the audigy 2 will use close to zero. It's not a completely worthless investment if you are obsessed with your gaming benchmarks.
The problem with that way of looking at things is that, unfortunately for ID, anything which is statistically improbable can happen by chance, by definition.
payroll: for who, specifically related to keeping my line running? The billing center?
repair work: i have to pay for that separately. Either I pay for the insurance plan or I pay out of pocket. For more global repairs, yes, that is the primary expenditure, but assuming they build right, this should not be an expensive item. Also, global maintenance is required for all their lines of business, which further supports rather than denies the claim that residential services are a 'pure profit' area.
taxes: obviously, every companies profits are taxed. but that's no different than any other company, and doesn't really pertain to the relative profitability of phone service. All of the special phone company taxes are billed to me separately anyway.
Note that in addition to being morally good or evil, an act can also be morally neutral. Many more morally neutral acts are against the law than morally good ones. While you are compelled to take a morally good act in violation of the law, you are not so compelled for a morally neutral act, but neither are you so prohibited. You have to judge the need for violation as best you can by weighing your society's level of authoritarianism vs the purpose of the law.
Except for the exceptions about limited copying for purposes of teaching and so forth. Now if Google is merely prepared to provide that kind of access, it wouldn't be a violation. If on the other hand they are going to hand out free copies of entire books to whoever wants them, they would be in violation.
Well, that's $12 per month at essentially no cost to them. And where I am that same line costs $22/mo at the same cost to the phone company. Multiply that by something like 4 million customers for my carrier, and you have about $100 million per month, or $1 billion per year of pure profit.
Board games don't have to be boring. I made a boardgame of the new show 'Prison Break'. It comes with a metal shiv for each player, and only the winner walks away. Tell me that's boring!
There shouldn't ever need to be a recording remastering again.
If you record in digital, remastering is meaningless.
If you remaster once in 24bit 96khz, you'll have more quality than anyone is likely to ever be able to hear, and you have surely captured over 99.9% of the quality on the analog recording.
If you remix, on the other hand, you could sell that as a different song.
Well, since copyright it automatic, I'd say immediately. But if you want to defend your copyright, you probably ought to go ahead and register it formally.
On the contrary, I think that slashdot grammar and spelling nazis would be stunned to learn that their skills have been rendered irrelevant by technology, and I think they would leap at the chance to deny the claim that how intelligence is applied ever changes.
Re:let me be the first to say
on
The New Face Lift
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I think that's just making things worse. Now we have to picture some guy walking around with a sloppy imperfect copy of his dead wife's face.
I know! I was really embarassed last week when I accidentally carried a petri dish of ebola out of the cdc level 4 quarantine area. And of course that was the day of my trip to new york, and wouldn't you know it, I left it in the pocket of my coat, which I in turn left on the subway. So hey... if anybody sees my coat (its brown) on the subway, could you go ahead and store it in a level 4 containment vessel until I get back there?
You should consider that the $$$ splurged on the shiny desk might free up more of your time to spend with your pen and pencil, and may leave your muscles and tendons with the strength and lack of pain to be able to hold a pencil.
First, ergonomically, you want something that works for you. Go to Office depot, office max and sit in a lot of chairs, and try a bunch of desks. Find out if a keyboard tray or keyboard on desk setup is more comfortable for you. Try out all the ergonomic keyboards and find what feels nice to you. I recommend the microsoft keyboards, but it's a very personal choice.
Second, for software, definitely buy yourself a copy of IntelliJ IDEA from jetbrains. It's another step ahead of eclipse, and there is pretty little debate left that it is the best dev environment if java is your primary platform, plus it plays nice with lots of other technologies.
For your computer, buy a system with at least 2 cores, 4 gigs of memory, and the fastest disk setup you can afford, plus at least 2 monitors. At the low end, a 2 disk 10k raptor setup is pretty fast. At the high end, a 5 drive scsi raid of 15k seagate disks will eat up as much budget as you'd like i'm sure. For the monitors, i'd recommend a pair of dell's 24 inch 1920x1200 lcd panels. Apple cinema displays i've heard are nice also, but i haven't any direct experience with those, and i've heard they have compatibility issues in terms of what video cards can drive them. The remainder of your system hardware wise won't have nearly as much impact as those items (cpu, memory, disk, monitor) will have.
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, I can assure you it is not the dev team's fault. I used to work at blizzard north, and there was a pretty strict policy on never talking about anything in public without permission. With Blizzard South, the policies are even stricter and more draconian, and they fire people on a more regular basis to keep the devs in line.
http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeature s
All right, I wasn't too lazy. MythTV does support multiple tuners.
On a side note about mythTV: one of the greatest TiVo experiences i've enjoyed is with dual-receiver DirecTiVo. You can record 2 shows and watch another (recorded show). Does mythTV support multiple receivers? I'm too lazy to go find out, someone just tell me. :-)
TiVo has caved into the content producers, and handed over control of the DRM process to them. The recent accidental flagging of content in this way proves it is out of TiVo's hands, and within the realm of control of the broadcaster. That makes it only a matter of time before broadcasters will begin to use this feature. If TiVo wants to retain loyal customers, they need to take back control: they should require digital authorization codes for DRM features and DRM the DRM so that only TiVo can authorize DRM restrictions on content. Unfortunatley, even then TiVo users will have to worry about whether TiVo will allow DRM on content only in reasonable situations, or if TiVo will cave into monetary or legal pressures and allow it on anything the broadcasters want.
The end of TiVo's usefullness is approaching quickly. Probably time to get some more developers working on the open source alternatives.
No no, you've misunderstood. This is from the IT section of slashdot. Sony is cutting 7% of the jobs belonging to IT. it's jobs. I'm sure that's what they meant.
Yes, because backing up your data to an external hard drive is cheap and easy these days. For a gamer, the speed advantage offered by a raid-0 is a not insignificant gaming advantage.
They mostly don't, it's all reinstallable to them, read/write (mostly read) performance is what matters. A common solution to the increased data vulnerability is to use a backup system for important data.
The difference for a serious gamer will be in the fps achievable at a high resolution. If you can go from 40 fps (frame latency = 25ms) to 80 fps (frame latency = 12.5 ms) you gain a 12.5 ms reaction time advantage. With human eye to hand latencies running in the 80-120 ms range, that's > 10% advantage. This all assumes of course that you are using a monitor capable of displaying 80fps, but any high end CRT will do that for you.
The sound quality is probably pretty much the same, except for THX enabled titles, for which I doubt the onboard sound is certified. But the real difference will be in cpu usage, where the onboard sound you have probably eats 5% of your cpu, and the audigy 2 will use close to zero. It's not a completely worthless investment if you are obsessed with your gaming benchmarks.
The problem with that way of looking at things is that, unfortunately for ID, anything which is statistically improbable can happen by chance, by definition.
payroll: for who, specifically related to keeping my line running? The billing center?
repair work: i have to pay for that separately. Either I pay for the insurance plan or I pay out of pocket. For more global repairs, yes, that is the primary expenditure, but assuming they build right, this should not be an expensive item. Also, global maintenance is required for all their lines of business, which further supports rather than denies the claim that residential services are a 'pure profit' area.
taxes: obviously, every companies profits are taxed. but that's no different than any other company, and doesn't really pertain to the relative profitability of phone service. All of the special phone company taxes are billed to me separately anyway.
Note that in addition to being morally good or evil, an act can also be morally neutral. Many more morally neutral acts are against the law than morally good ones. While you are compelled to take a morally good act in violation of the law, you are not so compelled for a morally neutral act, but neither are you so prohibited. You have to judge the need for violation as best you can by weighing your society's level of authoritarianism vs the purpose of the law.
Except for the exceptions about limited copying for purposes of teaching and so forth. Now if Google is merely prepared to provide that kind of access, it wouldn't be a violation. If on the other hand they are going to hand out free copies of entire books to whoever wants them, they would be in violation.
Well, that's $12 per month at essentially no cost to them. And where I am that same line costs $22/mo at the same cost to the phone company. Multiply that by something like 4 million customers for my carrier, and you have about $100 million per month, or $1 billion per year of pure profit.
1000 times less by heat, leaves you with the computing half (plus a marginal fraction of the heating part which they didn't bother to count).
I guess I probably would have, but actually, like most people, I skipped actually watching prison break, and went straight into making fun of it.
Board games don't have to be boring. I made a boardgame of the new show 'Prison Break'. It comes with a metal shiv for each player, and only the winner walks away. Tell me that's boring!
There shouldn't ever need to be a recording remastering again.
If you record in digital, remastering is meaningless.
If you remaster once in 24bit 96khz, you'll have more quality than anyone is likely to ever be able to hear, and you have surely captured over 99.9% of the quality on the analog recording.
If you remix, on the other hand, you could sell that as a different song.
Well, since copyright it automatic, I'd say immediately. But if you want to defend your copyright, you probably ought to go ahead and register it formally.
On the contrary, I think that slashdot grammar and spelling nazis would be stunned to learn that their skills have been rendered irrelevant by technology, and I think they would leap at the chance to deny the claim that how intelligence is applied ever changes.
I think that's just making things worse. Now we have to picture some guy walking around with a sloppy imperfect copy of his dead wife's face.
I know! I was really embarassed last week when I accidentally carried a petri dish of ebola out of the cdc level 4 quarantine area. And of course that was the day of my trip to new york, and wouldn't you know it, I left it in the pocket of my coat, which I in turn left on the subway. So hey ... if anybody sees my coat (its brown) on the subway, could you go ahead and store it in a level 4 containment vessel until I get back there?
Thanks.
You should consider that the $$$ splurged on the shiny desk might free up more of your time to spend with your pen and pencil, and may leave your muscles and tendons with the strength and lack of pain to be able to hold a pencil.
First, ergonomically, you want something that works for you. Go to Office depot, office max and sit in a lot of chairs, and try a bunch of desks. Find out if a keyboard tray or keyboard on desk setup is more comfortable for you. Try out all the ergonomic keyboards and find what feels nice to you. I recommend the microsoft keyboards, but it's a very personal choice.
Second, for software, definitely buy yourself a copy of IntelliJ IDEA from jetbrains. It's another step ahead of eclipse, and there is pretty little debate left that it is the best dev environment if java is your primary platform, plus it plays nice with lots of other technologies.
For your computer, buy a system with at least 2 cores, 4 gigs of memory, and the fastest disk setup you can afford, plus at least 2 monitors. At the low end, a 2 disk 10k raptor setup is pretty fast. At the high end, a 5 drive scsi raid of 15k seagate disks will eat up as much budget as you'd like i'm sure. For the monitors, i'd recommend a pair of dell's 24 inch 1920x1200 lcd panels. Apple cinema displays i've heard are nice also, but i haven't any direct experience with those, and i've heard they have compatibility issues in terms of what video cards can drive them. The remainder of your system hardware wise won't have nearly as much impact as those items (cpu, memory, disk, monitor) will have.
Aw crap, you found me out. Now I have to get off my lazy butt and come break your knees.
;-)
Remember, there is no such organization as the Unmanned Space Flight Mafia.