If he went to court, the first question the judge would have is "did Dell offer to refund your money, including shipping costs, in full?". As soon as you say yes the case is dismissed, because you had an option out.
There is, of course, the little niggling problem that there may not be any way to purchase a laptop without software, which (under US law) may constitute illegal bundling (IANAL), but bundling hasn't been pursued for decades and has been worn down by contrary judicial decisions (again, in the US -- the article was about someone from Canada and so it's not relevant).
Or, of course, they could've just accepted the EULAs and then ignored them. If they then broke any of them in a manner such that they'd actually end up in court then they'd get to defend themselves. Uh huh. Hope they're well off, because the legal costs are going to be staggering. Do you have a few hundred thousand lying around to defend yourself against a lawsuit from a major corporation? No? Hope you read every little bit of those EULAs then. Especially since you're probably fighting a losing battle.
It may be thumping, but it's thumping about stuff that should be thumped on. EULAs can essentially remove all of your rights regarding the software, and encumber your ability to do what you want even if you don't use the software. And all without your ability to read them prior to consent, with the only option at that point being to return the software -- which is often non-trivial to accomplish.
Really? Are you a lawyer? How did you reach that decision? What country are you discussing when you say that?
For Canada, you're quite wrong. There have been cases and EULAs have been upheld.
In the US, it's more questionable. There have been judgements either way, but from my reading of this article it would apear that they are more likely enforceable than not. The ProCD case is pretty damning from the POV of the average consumer. You don't even need to be able to read the license before agreeing to it as long as you can return the software afterward. Isn't that fun?
There are exceptions. The license cannot violate the law, nor can it be "unconscionable" (yeah, there's a term that'll be fun to define, just like "pornography"). The appellate court's ruling is not binding except inside of it's perview, and even then only specifically to Wisconsin. But it's apparantly a well regarded Federal appellate court and its decision is going to be cited/referred to in any other cases regarding EULAs.
IANAL. But I'm at least willing to do a Google search rather than spout my opinion on this kind of thing. I find most of the more absurd T&C's in EULAs to be "unconscionable", as I'm sure many/.ers do, but that doesn't mean it's going to hold water in court.
I must ask, why? Why was I getting such a good signal this far away?
Because distance doesn't matter much. All that really matters is the state of the copper between your house and the CO and the copper between the remote CO and endpoint. The stuff inbetween is almost assured to be fiber nowadays, unless it's a really small CO servicing a rural community or something.
In fact, by going cross-continent you pretty well assured a fiber connection.
As far as why it was more responsive though, dunno. Most likely there have been infrastructure upgrades in your area that cleaned up the lines. That's all I can think of.
The phone system has an 8 KHz bandwidth... I think it's something like ~150 Hz - ~8000 Hz. At least that's the spec. Some very old lines aren't that good, some newer lines are far better.
And there's a boatload of various technologies (loading coils for example) that are designed around maintaining those frequencies at the cost of all others, which causes problems with high speed modems and utterly breaks DSL.
It's ok that your data is from the 1990s... the phone system was designed in the 1930s and hasn't changed dramatically since:)
I had the pleasure of seeing the inside of a CO in downtown Atlanta in the early 90s. From the battery room with 45 gallon drums of baking soda in case of an acid spill, to the entryway with cables varying from the thickness of your arm (old, old, old copper) to less than a pencil (fiber), to 40 foot by 3 foot by 6 foot long switches that were being replaced by a pair of boxes the size of Coke machines. All an interesting mish mash of old and new technologies and all working together. At least they'd gotten rid of the mechanical switches:) (although that's not true world wide...). Interesting stuff.
No. Modems stopped increasing in baud at 2400, and then used various encoding methods (trellis, QAM, etc.) to squeeze more than 1 bit/baud. A 9600 bps modem, for instance, averages 4 bits/baud.
Well. Almost.
Better quality phone lines can support >2400 baud, but not by much. A 28800 bps connection is running at 3429 baud IIRC, and varying line conditions will reduce that baud rate, thus reducing your effective bps.
Compression is on top of all of this. It's an entirely different issue, and if you transfer straight text over a 28.8k modem you can get considerably more than 28.8kbps out of the modem.
You got the broad stuff right though, which is a lot more than most people grok.
Then quit bitching when you get no support for hardware, for commercial software, or for anything else along those lines. Why? Because it's a niche market that doesn't have enough users willing to pay money for the goods being delivered.
Frankly, I don't give a flip what Linus's or others' goals are. I'd like to see Linux on the desktop. But it has a long, long way to go to get there still. And until it starts getting a reasonable market share you'll continue to see sporadic hardware support and lackluster software support. Both have certainly gotten better in the last decade (yes, I was running Linux a decade ago), but virtually all of the focus has been on servers. Which is fine. But why limit yourself? Quit being so complacent.
If I'm a business and I make something that costs me $50 in materials, and I need to make $5 in profit to stay afloat, pay wages, etc. then how much do I sell it for? $55. Now if the government comes in and says I have to pay 10% in taxes on the profit, how much do I have to charge now? $55.56. Because I still need that $5, regardless of whatever else. The only way I won't be able to raise prices is because of market competition, but if everyone is paying the tax and has similar needs then it's a wash. And the only person that pays the extra money is the buyer.
That's the basic argument behind "companies don't pay taxes", and it's true in as far as it goes in the simple model. The real world is much more complex, and so is accounting. I think the assumption that if we removed corporate taxes that prices would magically fall is a falisy, but they would eventually edge back down toward similar profit levels as competitive pressures kicked in.
HTPC -- Home Theater PC. A PC designed specifically for use in the home theater. Generally means quieter components, a high end video and audio card with appropriate outputs, and can be used for a variety of things (DVD playback (which is unsurpassed in video quality, period), gaming, MP3 playback, video recording, video playback, web surfing, etc). Often also has things like IR remote pickup, wireless keyboard/mouse, etc. This is all off the shelf components, nothing custom made. You just have to know what to buy.
Even if you wanted to move it around, all you'd have to do is bring the box and keyboard/mouse around with you. The screen stays in one place, and power cords are absurdly cheap. Plug in video, audio, power, and network (unless you go wireless) and that's it. Generally, however, the PC stays in the home theater -- that's the entire point after all.
I highly suggest you go read AVS forum for your Xbox. They talk about VGA adapters frequently (I presume you mean the SVideo signal, since there is no such thing as a SVHS signal).
No, I don't have an HTPC, but I'm conversant with the details on them. I might consider building one when HL2 comes out, but I doubt it.
Er.. how is it more cumbersome? You use a RF keyboard and mouse and now you're 6-10' away as well. The connections are no more complex than Xbox -- take the VGA output and plug it into the VGA input (or DVI on both ends, preferred if you have a digital TV), ditto for the digital audio cable (coax/toslink). Moving it? Why? It's a HTPC. Do you move your receiver that often? It's just another HT component.
Now what is cumbersome, no doubt, is getting everything to place nice. PCs just take more time to configure and tweak and whatnot than consoles. You get a helluva lot more power for that, but the HTPC realm is still fairly new.
As far as the gameplay experience -- I agree that playing against someone next to you is generally a helluva lot more fun than playing against someone across the net, even if you're using Gamevoice, RogerWilco, or similar. And that's not an experience you can really replicate on the PC (see my original post on this subject, or the post I did on designing a game center at work if you're bored).
480p is still only 640x480 (4:3) or 853x480 (16:9). That's utterly trivial on a modern PC.
Oh, and I have a 46" DLP RPTV with a 1280x720 native resolution. If I so wish I can hook my PC up to it via VGA or DVI and get a far better display than what you're likely to get out of Xbox (esp. since most Xbox games that even do 720p only do it at 4:3 due to lack of CPU/GPU power).
If you're serious about playing games on your TV, console or PC, then I suggest reading AVS Forum's Home Theater Gaming forum. Useful info for both groups.
Er... if I read what you wrote correctly, then Dyson was theorizing on some form of water life that can tunnel through a few kilometers of ice and extend a probiscus into near vacuum that would act as a solar collector.
While that sounds absurd, I won't dismiss it out of hand. Instead I'll dismiss it for other reasons. I find it unlikely that no such structure has been observed from any of the probes we've sent out (Voyager 1/2, Galileo). They may not have been in the optimal position for such an observance, but you'd still think something would show up. After all, there's no reason to be camoflauged on the surface, right? No predators there.
Second, I find it unlikely that any life on Europa will be garnering energy from the Sun. There's just not enough of it, and there's that several kilometers of ice issue. Too much energy expended to recover from sunlight. I'd think it more likely that there are some bacteria living near the rocky core off the magma/steam vents -- if there are any. I don't know if Europa is tectonically active or not. If it's not, then I'm going to vote for a dead world. I just don't see there being enough energy input to sustain life for a long period of time, especially given occasional disruptions like meteor impacts cracking the ice (which is probably fairly violent and deadly to any life near the crack).
Of course, I could be wrong and there could be some really amazing life forms there. It's worth investigating, but it's going to be hard to do. Not only do you have to surmount the environmental challenges a previous poster mentioned, you also have to be 100% positive you don't introduce a foreign life form - which could either give you a false positive or kill off what's there already (low likelihood -- I suspect Europa's environment is too hostile to Earth bred bacteria, but we've been surprised before).
Just because nobody would intentionally write a trojan/virus/worm doesn't mean that it wouldn't occur.
Hell, look at the original sendmail worm. It was a research project that was never supposed to get out of the lab. Oops.
No, not a perfect example, but the reality is that code has bugs. A bug in some networking software could wreck havok on a completely unprotected network (and, in fact, when a current day worm gets inside of a company that hasn't kept up with patches -- because those systems are supposed to be protected behind firewalls and other security measures -- it does cause great damage). By being forced to protect against intentionally malicious code you're also protecting yourself against unintentionally malicious code. Buffer overruns can occur from malformed input just as easily as from an intentionally crafted virus.
The end effect is that in your perfect world where there are no virus/torjans/worms when something goes wrong by accident it's going to have a far wider and nastier effect than in the real world. Oh, but I presume that in your perfect world we have perfect code too. That's nice. We don't live there.
Yes, the analogy isn't perfect -- your point is correct about computer systems not evolving, but if you look at some of the newer research on IDS and anti-virus work you'd see that that's changing as well. Similarly there are base libraries available now that have concepts about what code should and shouldn't do. And when they do something "bad" the code is stopped.
One could argue linux and MacOS are succeeding because Windows is slowly killing itself off by pissing off IT departments and users...but that's darwinism.
You could argue that. You'd be even more inane than the professor you're bashing, but that doesn't prevent you from arguing it. If Linux or Macintosh ever become a big enough market segment to target, then they'll be targeted. There aren't significantly fewer holes, nor are there significantly more patched systems (percentage wise for the demographic). I personally believe that the patches do come out sooner for open source, but even that is debatable at times. There have already been several Linux virus written in labs, including some cross-OS (Linux/Windows) ones. Unix does have some definite advantages (notably the usual difference between root and user), but the overall complexity that leads to the holes is not significantly less.
So where are the fighting games for a PC? If you port to the xbox why not take the next step?
The PC just isn't designed for multiplayer in the same way consoles are. PC's still have the edge in graphics, networking, and configurability, but they're very much oriented toward one person per unit -- single keyboard, single mouse, single screen, single seat.
Consoles, on the other hand, are oriented toward multiple people sitting down and playing on the same unit. They've made some advancements toward network gaming, but they're still nowhere close to PCs. And their graphics are still way behind (yes, they are... remember that most games are still interlaced, so you have an effective resolution of ~250 lines, versus 768 (1024x768) - 1200 (1600x1200) lines on a PC. The consoles often can't drive progressive games because of insufficient CPU power; even SC2 on the most powerful platform has a max resolution of 1920x540 (1080i, 16:9) or 960x720 (720p, 4:3)).
Yeah, porting to the Xbox is a step, but it's a pretty far leap from porting to the PC. It's probably a good bit easier to write for the PC and port to the Xbox -- you're going from a wildly uncontrolled environment (3-5 variations of OS, a couple dozen graphics cards, and god knows how many peripherals/motherboards) to a very controlled one. Reversing that port is doable, but it can take a lot of time and code rewriting to avoid special cases. And while you know that they should play with a controller, you'd better support other inputs as well. Fun.
I just bought a PS2 a week ago... it's pretty fun. Most of the games have no overlap with the PC, and I'll probably not buy games (in the future) that do overlap. And while I still love playing BF1942 on my PC, and am looking forward to HL2 and D3, being able to pop in Tekken4, Crash Bandicoot, GTA (came with the PS2), or a few other games and just play them is refreshingly simple.
Not quite... what the article says (and rightly), is that viewers are willing to forgive scientific/technical blunders as long as the rest of the movie is good. We're willing to give leeway on reality in the name of "suspension of disbelief".
The problem occurs when the "rest of the movie" sucks. Bad acting, lousy script, a plot full of holes, and similar issues will shatter suspension of disbelief, and when that happens then you'll get ravaged on the other things (like science blunders). And it only gets worse as you try to write your way out of things by making things up, like The Hulk and sea cucumbers or Star Wars and midi-chlorians.
I refuse to watch utter dreck like Armageddon ever again... and not because of the bad science (hey, I enjoy Independance Day despite the equally bad science), but because of the moronic script, crappy acting, and insipid direction. Sure, it has good video and sound, but that doesn't make up for the brain sucking experience of having to endure that video and sound.
Ok, if you're serious about doing this kind of thing (and others have more than adequately covered the reasons why or why not to), then have you considered buying a Xbox or PS2 instead of PCs? They'll need less maintainance and are styled more toward same room playing than PCs. You'll need one or more consoles, and some large TVs. This'll be a lot cheaper than PCs too -- even with a large (50") TV, you can skimp on the TV -- you don't need high def, and large SDTV sets are dirt cheap now - under $1k. Heck, one TV and console per seat would probably still be cheaper than a high end gaming PC.
If you are going with PCs, don't even buy speakers for them. Buy decent quality headphones instead, but ones where you can still hear the rest of the room. Nothing's worse than a half dozen PCs playing sound through speakers for the same game -- since the sound is invariably oriented toward the individual player on the PC.
Consider how you're going to divide the room up -- if you have competitive games, then you'll need to provide some dividers to ensure you can't "cheat" by looking at a competitor's screen, or by overhearing shouted instructions/information. Doing minimal soundproofing that's configurable will be a hell of a challenge if you want to do this right.
Chairs? Buy what ever is the office standard. For God's sake don't buy better chairs for the gaming room than the rest of the office. That'll just piss people off and you'll either end up with the gaming room chairs disappearing (and regular chairs appearing if you're lucky) or people spending more time than you expect in the gaming area just because the chairs are more comfy.
Games? Consider co-op vs computer oriented games heavily. That's pretty key for team building. For after hours playing, employees are more likely to want competitive games though. I'd actually suggest UT2003 here for both -- the Invasion mode (in one of the free expansions) is a decent co-op mode, while every other mode is obviously competitive. There are damn few co-op modes out there now, at least if you want decent computer oponents (UT2k3 doesn't have decent computer opponents... it merely relies upon tons of enemies which get tougher and tougher).
If you go with PCs, you'll probably want some way of displaying the action from any one PC on a large screen for observers. Just get PCs with svideo output, a switchbox (either with remote control or accessible by observers), and an aforementioned large screen TV. Consider that you'll want one screen per "area", with the ability to easily block off viewing a competitor's screen.
I'd honestly consider ditching running competitive games, since that's where most of the difficulty comes in if you want to do it "right". That or do it and tell people not to cheat by the obvious methods, or to deal with it occurring.
If you have any local LAN parties or gaming cafes, go to them and see how they do things. They're in this for the competition/money and certainly know more about this than I do.
There is still one area in which I don't use flourescents. Dimmable lights.
They also don't work well with three-way light fixtures. I've seen three-way flourescents (3 U-bulbs, with one bulb coming on for each power level), but not in the past 2-3 years. In general, they'll work - but not come on at the lowest level and have no brightness change between the second and third levels (as you'd expect). My wife likes her three way bedside lamp, so it remains a incandescent bulb.
They also don't work well in exposed fixtures. The bulbs are certainly not designed for looks... and while I tried putting them into a 5 light chandelier in our foyer, my wife quickly objected. The ceiling fan in our room has a similar issue - 4 exposed lights.
I've switched as many bulbs as is practical over to CFL, but there's a lot of fixtures in the house that are either too small (the CFL's are still larger than incandescent, and 1/4" can make all the difference in the world), on dimmers, or exposed.
The last issue I've run across is that while a CFL may claim to be 100W of brightness, they lie. A 100W incandescent in my attic is considerably brighter than a 23W CFL - despite claims otherwise. The CFL left me peering around for things, while the incandescent provided plenty of light, particularly further away from the bulb.
Would you be willing to pay an extra $100 for the unit for those features? Do you think the number of people who would be willing to pay an extra $100 outweigh the number of people who would no longer be willing to purchase it? And that $100 is conservative, if anything... the additional material costs, additional programming/UI design, two entirely different methods for accessing the same content, additional QA for both hardware and software, etc.
While I agree that a display and buttons are a good thing, I don't think the additional cost will come out positive in the long run. Especially since the entire point of a networked audio player is that you don't need to walk up to it and plop in a CD to listen to whatever music you want. Like I said, I agree with the advantages of not having to turn on your TV, and it's something I'd like at times, but realistically it's not a winning feature for the price.
If, however, you do want this, and are willing to give up an OSD to the TV, then look into the Turtle Beach AudioTron. Music only (obviously), no video. It does have a small screen on it, with buttons for control. Costs about the same as the Prismiq.
And there's stuff out there that has the OSD, does music/video, has an on-box display, buttons, etc. too. Be prepared to pay upwards of $500 and (often) have all the data storage be on device, with really absurd pricing for expanding storage.
I still have some Team OS/2 T-shirts, purely for historical/hysterical value. Once I took a job actually having to support it in a real world environment I learned why OS/2 was doomed.
Oh, certainly the idea that IBM is orchestrating the outrage.
I mean, just think about this for a minute -- IBM and RMS working together.
Is there anything any more absurd than that? I mean, seriously... even RMS's most sane rants are off the deep end for IBM.
Re:Negative part of the book
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Masters of Doom
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No, that's not it at all... reading the book gives insight into why id kicked ass back in the Keen/Wolf3D/Doom days, why Quake was such an absurd mish-mash of textures and styles (hint -- Quake originally wasn't supposed to be a FPS at all), and why Q2 and Q3 have had absolutely no creative energy at all.
Essentially, Romero was the creative half of id while Carmack was the logical half. Carmack excels at coding, is possibly one of the most knowlegable 3D graphics people on the planet right now, and can write technical essays that leave most people's heads spinning. But he doesn't have an artistic thread in his body. He's also not a gamer.
Romero is a dreamer, and is into flash and pomp. The Ion Storm motto, "Design is Law" said it all. As did the results of that experiment. Romero can visualize, can cheerlead, and can pump up a team or fanbase with the best of them, but he doesn't have his feet grounded in reality and can't seem to remember the "little things" that make dreams into reality. He is a gamer.
The two of them together formed a top notch team that complemented each other very well -- Carmack would come up with what was possible to do, Romero would figure out where to go with it. As id became successful though they both polarized and couldn't deal with one another -- and while I side more with Carmack on a personal level (because I'm more of a realist/logical type), I can see how Carmack's focus on the code may have driven Romero further toward his own disfunction.
Since they split it appears that nobody has replaced Romero's role at id. While the engines may be revolutionary every time, the gameplay is becoming increasingly stale and the fine details are left to 3rd party mod authors to fill out (like usable in game menuing and ranking). And it certainly seems like Carmack is getting bored at id. Hopefully rocketry will keep him challanged for another decade.
Romero, on the other hand, spawned Daikatana and a bevy of other miserable games -- because there was nobody at Ion Storm that could override him and get stuff focused any more finely than "Design is Law". Maybe his new venture will work out better.
Want me to backup any of the above statements? Read the book first. No, I don't have any association with the author, the publisher, et. al. but I did think it was a very good book (if you're into gaming or coding, and I'm into both). The author pretty much lays out what I said above.
It's a complete non-issue. As others have pointed out, the maximum bandwidth for DD is ~480 kbps. All the channels are decoded out of that. And there's no reason to decode them prior to the USB device, since it can do the decoding itself.
Anything else that is going to put out multiple data streams would be advised to use DD or DTS (which generally has a maximum data stream of 512kbps, although I think I've seen 784 talked about). Yes, it requires some CPU crunching, but you'll have to do that at some point if you want to use any kind of digital outputs. Discrete analog inputs to HT systems aren't rare anymore, but they're still frowned upon.
Voice chat in a game will probably use telephone quality sound at best... that's all of 64kbps (8 KHz, mono). Doubt it'd be a strain on the USB. Nor would printing things out (remember the DD data stream is consuming under 5% of the theoretical maximum of USB)... although exactly why you're watching a DVD and printing at the same time is beyond me. I'm sure there are other, valid, cases of such things though so it's a decent what-if case.
BTW, your math is wrong. It's not 7 * 2.8, it's 7*1.4. Which, while it's below the maximum theoretical bandwidth for USB1.1, it's above the realistic realized bandwidth.
Of course, there isn't a single 7.1 discrete format out there. It's all 5.1, with "magic" being applied to the rear 2 channels to extrapolate an additional (6.1) channel or pair (7.1) of channels. So we're back to 5*1.4, which is once again within the range of USB, albeit on the edge of real world performance.
USB1.1 certainly has the bandwidth to support a full sound system. Better reading on this, with all the pluses and minuses, is available from AVS Forum's HTPC Forum.
I'm much more interested in HL2 than D3 right now, which is a complete reversal from before E3, but some of the things shown in D3 demos still intrigue me.
IIRC, every single FPS to date has had strictly oriented players and monsters -- yes, you can go above someone if the map allows you, but you are still oriented in the same direction -- head toward sky, feet on ground. Some of the D3 footage has shown monsters crawling along walls, pipes, etc -- but it's not clear if this is actual gameplay or merely cut scenes. If it's gameplay it would add a whole new dimension to the game -- not as much as Quake did with it's true 3D environment, but still quite substantial.
I do expect HL2 to have the better AI and plot regardless, and to probably be the better game. Which one is the better engine will remain to be seen.
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What does he have to go to court on?
If he went to court, the first question the judge would have is "did Dell offer to refund your money, including shipping costs, in full?". As soon as you say yes the case is dismissed, because you had an option out.
There is, of course, the little niggling problem that there may not be any way to purchase a laptop without software, which (under US law) may constitute illegal bundling (IANAL), but bundling hasn't been pursued for decades and has been worn down by contrary judicial decisions (again, in the US -- the article was about someone from Canada and so it's not relevant).
Or, of course, they could've just accepted the EULAs and then ignored them. If they then broke any of them in a manner such that they'd actually end up in court then they'd get to defend themselves. Uh huh. Hope they're well off, because the legal costs are going to be staggering. Do you have a few hundred thousand lying around to defend yourself against a lawsuit from a major corporation? No? Hope you read every little bit of those EULAs then. Especially since you're probably fighting a losing battle.
It may be thumping, but it's thumping about stuff that should be thumped on. EULAs can essentially remove all of your rights regarding the software, and encumber your ability to do what you want even if you don't use the software. And all without your ability to read them prior to consent, with the only option at that point being to return the software -- which is often non-trivial to accomplish.
Most of these Eula's are unenforceable anyway.
/.ers do, but that doesn't mean it's going to hold water in court.
Really? Are you a lawyer? How did you reach that decision? What country are you discussing when you say that?
For Canada, you're quite wrong. There have been cases and EULAs have been upheld.
In the US, it's more questionable. There have been judgements either way, but from my reading of this article it would apear that they are more likely enforceable than not. The ProCD case is pretty damning from the POV of the average consumer. You don't even need to be able to read the license before agreeing to it as long as you can return the software afterward. Isn't that fun?
There are exceptions. The license cannot violate the law, nor can it be "unconscionable" (yeah, there's a term that'll be fun to define, just like "pornography"). The appellate court's ruling is not binding except inside of it's perview, and even then only specifically to Wisconsin. But it's apparantly a well regarded Federal appellate court and its decision is going to be cited/referred to in any other cases regarding EULAs.
IANAL. But I'm at least willing to do a Google search rather than spout my opinion on this kind of thing. I find most of the more absurd T&C's in EULAs to be "unconscionable", as I'm sure many
I must ask, why? Why was I getting such a good signal this far away?
Because distance doesn't matter much. All that really matters is the state of the copper between your house and the CO and the copper between the remote CO and endpoint. The stuff inbetween is almost assured to be fiber nowadays, unless it's a really small CO servicing a rural community or something.
In fact, by going cross-continent you pretty well assured a fiber connection.
As far as why it was more responsive though, dunno. Most likely there have been infrastructure upgrades in your area that cleaned up the lines. That's all I can think of.
The phone system has an 8 KHz bandwidth... I think it's something like ~150 Hz - ~8000 Hz. At least that's the spec. Some very old lines aren't that good, some newer lines are far better.
:)
:) (although that's not true world wide...). Interesting stuff.
And there's a boatload of various technologies (loading coils for example) that are designed around maintaining those frequencies at the cost of all others, which causes problems with high speed modems and utterly breaks DSL.
It's ok that your data is from the 1990s... the phone system was designed in the 1930s and hasn't changed dramatically since
I had the pleasure of seeing the inside of a CO in downtown Atlanta in the early 90s. From the battery room with 45 gallon drums of baking soda in case of an acid spill, to the entryway with cables varying from the thickness of your arm (old, old, old copper) to less than a pencil (fiber), to 40 foot by 3 foot by 6 foot long switches that were being replaced by a pair of boxes the size of Coke machines. All an interesting mish mash of old and new technologies and all working together. At least they'd gotten rid of the mechanical switches
No. Modems stopped increasing in baud at 2400, and then used various encoding methods (trellis, QAM, etc.) to squeeze more than 1 bit/baud. A 9600 bps modem, for instance, averages 4 bits/baud.
Well. Almost.
Better quality phone lines can support >2400 baud, but not by much. A 28800 bps connection is running at 3429 baud IIRC, and varying line conditions will reduce that baud rate, thus reducing your effective bps.
Compression is on top of all of this. It's an entirely different issue, and if you transfer straight text over a 28.8k modem you can get considerably more than 28.8kbps out of the modem.
You got the broad stuff right though, which is a lot more than most people grok.
And you don't think that some enterprising company will try to grab marketshare by price cutting?
Like I said, it wouldn't happen overnight, but it would happen.
Point 1: your conclusion supports my statement.
Ye gods... could I have misread the great-grandparent comment any more?
My apologies. I'm going to go off and juxtapose some other things now...
Fine.
Then quit bitching when you get no support for hardware, for commercial software, or for anything else along those lines. Why? Because it's a niche market that doesn't have enough users willing to pay money for the goods being delivered.
Frankly, I don't give a flip what Linus's or others' goals are. I'd like to see Linux on the desktop. But it has a long, long way to go to get there still. And until it starts getting a reasonable market share you'll continue to see sporadic hardware support and lackluster software support. Both have certainly gotten better in the last decade (yes, I was running Linux a decade ago), but virtually all of the focus has been on servers. Which is fine. But why limit yourself? Quit being so complacent.
How is it untrue?
If I'm a business and I make something that costs me $50 in materials, and I need to make $5 in profit to stay afloat, pay wages, etc. then how much do I sell it for? $55. Now if the government comes in and says I have to pay 10% in taxes on the profit, how much do I have to charge now? $55.56. Because I still need that $5, regardless of whatever else. The only way I won't be able to raise prices is because of market competition, but if everyone is paying the tax and has similar needs then it's a wash. And the only person that pays the extra money is the buyer.
That's the basic argument behind "companies don't pay taxes", and it's true in as far as it goes in the simple model. The real world is much more complex, and so is accounting. I think the assumption that if we removed corporate taxes that prices would magically fall is a falisy, but they would eventually edge back down toward similar profit levels as competitive pressures kicked in.
HTPC -- Home Theater PC. A PC designed specifically for use in the home theater. Generally means quieter components, a high end video and audio card with appropriate outputs, and can be used for a variety of things (DVD playback (which is unsurpassed in video quality, period), gaming, MP3 playback, video recording, video playback, web surfing, etc). Often also has things like IR remote pickup, wireless keyboard/mouse, etc. This is all off the shelf components, nothing custom made. You just have to know what to buy.
Even if you wanted to move it around, all you'd have to do is bring the box and keyboard/mouse around with you. The screen stays in one place, and power cords are absurdly cheap. Plug in video, audio, power, and network (unless you go wireless) and that's it. Generally, however, the PC stays in the home theater -- that's the entire point after all.
I highly suggest you go read AVS forum for your Xbox. They talk about VGA adapters frequently (I presume you mean the SVideo signal, since there is no such thing as a SVHS signal).
No, I don't have an HTPC, but I'm conversant with the details on them. I might consider building one when HL2 comes out, but I doubt it.
Er.. how is it more cumbersome? You use a RF keyboard and mouse and now you're 6-10' away as well. The connections are no more complex than Xbox -- take the VGA output and plug it into the VGA input (or DVI on both ends, preferred if you have a digital TV), ditto for the digital audio cable (coax/toslink). Moving it? Why? It's a HTPC. Do you move your receiver that often? It's just another HT component.
Now what is cumbersome, no doubt, is getting everything to place nice. PCs just take more time to configure and tweak and whatnot than consoles. You get a helluva lot more power for that, but the HTPC realm is still fairly new.
As far as the gameplay experience -- I agree that playing against someone next to you is generally a helluva lot more fun than playing against someone across the net, even if you're using Gamevoice, RogerWilco, or similar. And that's not an experience you can really replicate on the PC (see my original post on this subject, or the post I did on designing a game center at work if you're bored).
480p is still only 640x480 (4:3) or 853x480 (16:9). That's utterly trivial on a modern PC.
Oh, and I have a 46" DLP RPTV with a 1280x720 native resolution. If I so wish I can hook my PC up to it via VGA or DVI and get a far better display than what you're likely to get out of Xbox (esp. since most Xbox games that even do 720p only do it at 4:3 due to lack of CPU/GPU power).
If you're serious about playing games on your TV, console or PC, then I suggest reading AVS Forum's Home Theater Gaming forum. Useful info for both groups.
Er... if I read what you wrote correctly, then Dyson was theorizing on some form of water life that can tunnel through a few kilometers of ice and extend a probiscus into near vacuum that would act as a solar collector.
While that sounds absurd, I won't dismiss it out of hand. Instead I'll dismiss it for other reasons. I find it unlikely that no such structure has been observed from any of the probes we've sent out (Voyager 1/2, Galileo). They may not have been in the optimal position for such an observance, but you'd still think something would show up. After all, there's no reason to be camoflauged on the surface, right? No predators there.
Second, I find it unlikely that any life on Europa will be garnering energy from the Sun. There's just not enough of it, and there's that several kilometers of ice issue. Too much energy expended to recover from sunlight. I'd think it more likely that there are some bacteria living near the rocky core off the magma/steam vents -- if there are any. I don't know if Europa is tectonically active or not. If it's not, then I'm going to vote for a dead world. I just don't see there being enough energy input to sustain life for a long period of time, especially given occasional disruptions like meteor impacts cracking the ice (which is probably fairly violent and deadly to any life near the crack).
Of course, I could be wrong and there could be some really amazing life forms there. It's worth investigating, but it's going to be hard to do. Not only do you have to surmount the environmental challenges a previous poster mentioned, you also have to be 100% positive you don't introduce a foreign life form - which could either give you a false positive or kill off what's there already (low likelihood -- I suspect Europa's environment is too hostile to Earth bred bacteria, but we've been surprised before).
Just because nobody would intentionally write a trojan/virus/worm doesn't mean that it wouldn't occur.
Hell, look at the original sendmail worm. It was a research project that was never supposed to get out of the lab. Oops.
No, not a perfect example, but the reality is that code has bugs. A bug in some networking software could wreck havok on a completely unprotected network (and, in fact, when a current day worm gets inside of a company that hasn't kept up with patches -- because those systems are supposed to be protected behind firewalls and other security measures -- it does cause great damage). By being forced to protect against intentionally malicious code you're also protecting yourself against unintentionally malicious code. Buffer overruns can occur from malformed input just as easily as from an intentionally crafted virus.
The end effect is that in your perfect world where there are no virus/torjans/worms when something goes wrong by accident it's going to have a far wider and nastier effect than in the real world. Oh, but I presume that in your perfect world we have perfect code too. That's nice. We don't live there.
Yes, the analogy isn't perfect -- your point is correct about computer systems not evolving, but if you look at some of the newer research on IDS and anti-virus work you'd see that that's changing as well. Similarly there are base libraries available now that have concepts about what code should and shouldn't do. And when they do something "bad" the code is stopped.
One could argue linux and MacOS are succeeding because Windows is slowly killing itself off by pissing off IT departments and users...but that's darwinism.
You could argue that. You'd be even more inane than the professor you're bashing, but that doesn't prevent you from arguing it. If Linux or Macintosh ever become a big enough market segment to target, then they'll be targeted. There aren't significantly fewer holes, nor are there significantly more patched systems (percentage wise for the demographic). I personally believe that the patches do come out sooner for open source, but even that is debatable at times. There have already been several Linux virus written in labs, including some cross-OS (Linux/Windows) ones. Unix does have some definite advantages (notably the usual difference between root and user), but the overall complexity that leads to the holes is not significantly less.
So where are the fighting games for a PC? If you port to the xbox why not take the next step?
The PC just isn't designed for multiplayer in the same way consoles are. PC's still have the edge in graphics, networking, and configurability, but they're very much oriented toward one person per unit -- single keyboard, single mouse, single screen, single seat.
Consoles, on the other hand, are oriented toward multiple people sitting down and playing on the same unit. They've made some advancements toward network gaming, but they're still nowhere close to PCs. And their graphics are still way behind (yes, they are... remember that most games are still interlaced, so you have an effective resolution of ~250 lines, versus 768 (1024x768) - 1200 (1600x1200) lines on a PC. The consoles often can't drive progressive games because of insufficient CPU power; even SC2 on the most powerful platform has a max resolution of 1920x540 (1080i, 16:9) or 960x720 (720p, 4:3)).
Yeah, porting to the Xbox is a step, but it's a pretty far leap from porting to the PC. It's probably a good bit easier to write for the PC and port to the Xbox -- you're going from a wildly uncontrolled environment (3-5 variations of OS, a couple dozen graphics cards, and god knows how many peripherals/motherboards) to a very controlled one. Reversing that port is doable, but it can take a lot of time and code rewriting to avoid special cases. And while you know that they should play with a controller, you'd better support other inputs as well. Fun.
I just bought a PS2 a week ago... it's pretty fun. Most of the games have no overlap with the PC, and I'll probably not buy games (in the future) that do overlap. And while I still love playing BF1942 on my PC, and am looking forward to HL2 and D3, being able to pop in Tekken4, Crash Bandicoot, GTA (came with the PS2), or a few other games and just play them is refreshingly simple.
Not quite... what the article says (and rightly), is that viewers are willing to forgive scientific/technical blunders as long as the rest of the movie is good. We're willing to give leeway on reality in the name of "suspension of disbelief".
The problem occurs when the "rest of the movie" sucks. Bad acting, lousy script, a plot full of holes, and similar issues will shatter suspension of disbelief, and when that happens then you'll get ravaged on the other things (like science blunders). And it only gets worse as you try to write your way out of things by making things up, like The Hulk and sea cucumbers or Star Wars and midi-chlorians.
I refuse to watch utter dreck like Armageddon ever again... and not because of the bad science (hey, I enjoy Independance Day despite the equally bad science), but because of the moronic script, crappy acting, and insipid direction. Sure, it has good video and sound, but that doesn't make up for the brain sucking experience of having to endure that video and sound.
Ok, if you're serious about doing this kind of thing (and others have more than adequately covered the reasons why or why not to), then have you considered buying a Xbox or PS2 instead of PCs? They'll need less maintainance and are styled more toward same room playing than PCs. You'll need one or more consoles, and some large TVs. This'll be a lot cheaper than PCs too -- even with a large (50") TV, you can skimp on the TV -- you don't need high def, and large SDTV sets are dirt cheap now - under $1k. Heck, one TV and console per seat would probably still be cheaper than a high end gaming PC.
If you are going with PCs, don't even buy speakers for them. Buy decent quality headphones instead, but ones where you can still hear the rest of the room. Nothing's worse than a half dozen PCs playing sound through speakers for the same game -- since the sound is invariably oriented toward the individual player on the PC.
Consider how you're going to divide the room up -- if you have competitive games, then you'll need to provide some dividers to ensure you can't "cheat" by looking at a competitor's screen, or by overhearing shouted instructions/information. Doing minimal soundproofing that's configurable will be a hell of a challenge if you want to do this right.
Chairs? Buy what ever is the office standard. For God's sake don't buy better chairs for the gaming room than the rest of the office. That'll just piss people off and you'll either end up with the gaming room chairs disappearing (and regular chairs appearing if you're lucky) or people spending more time than you expect in the gaming area just because the chairs are more comfy.
Games? Consider co-op vs computer oriented games heavily. That's pretty key for team building. For after hours playing, employees are more likely to want competitive games though. I'd actually suggest UT2003 here for both -- the Invasion mode (in one of the free expansions) is a decent co-op mode, while every other mode is obviously competitive. There are damn few co-op modes out there now, at least if you want decent computer oponents (UT2k3 doesn't have decent computer opponents... it merely relies upon tons of enemies which get tougher and tougher).
If you go with PCs, you'll probably want some way of displaying the action from any one PC on a large screen for observers. Just get PCs with svideo output, a switchbox (either with remote control or accessible by observers), and an aforementioned large screen TV. Consider that you'll want one screen per "area", with the ability to easily block off viewing a competitor's screen.
I'd honestly consider ditching running competitive games, since that's where most of the difficulty comes in if you want to do it "right". That or do it and tell people not to cheat by the obvious methods, or to deal with it occurring.
If you have any local LAN parties or gaming cafes, go to them and see how they do things. They're in this for the competition/money and certainly know more about this than I do.
There is still one area in which I don't use flourescents. Dimmable lights.
They also don't work well with three-way light fixtures. I've seen three-way flourescents (3 U-bulbs, with one bulb coming on for each power level), but not in the past 2-3 years. In general, they'll work - but not come on at the lowest level and have no brightness change between the second and third levels (as you'd expect). My wife likes her three way bedside lamp, so it remains a incandescent bulb.
They also don't work well in exposed fixtures. The bulbs are certainly not designed for looks... and while I tried putting them into a 5 light chandelier in our foyer, my wife quickly objected. The ceiling fan in our room has a similar issue - 4 exposed lights.
I've switched as many bulbs as is practical over to CFL, but there's a lot of fixtures in the house that are either too small (the CFL's are still larger than incandescent, and 1/4" can make all the difference in the world), on dimmers, or exposed.
The last issue I've run across is that while a CFL may claim to be 100W of brightness, they lie. A 100W incandescent in my attic is considerably brighter than a 23W CFL - despite claims otherwise. The CFL left me peering around for things, while the incandescent provided plenty of light, particularly further away from the bulb.
Simple -- cost.
Would you be willing to pay an extra $100 for the unit for those features? Do you think the number of people who would be willing to pay an extra $100 outweigh the number of people who would no longer be willing to purchase it? And that $100 is conservative, if anything... the additional material costs, additional programming/UI design, two entirely different methods for accessing the same content, additional QA for both hardware and software, etc.
While I agree that a display and buttons are a good thing, I don't think the additional cost will come out positive in the long run. Especially since the entire point of a networked audio player is that you don't need to walk up to it and plop in a CD to listen to whatever music you want. Like I said, I agree with the advantages of not having to turn on your TV, and it's something I'd like at times, but realistically it's not a winning feature for the price.
If, however, you do want this, and are willing to give up an OSD to the TV, then look into the Turtle Beach AudioTron. Music only (obviously), no video. It does have a small screen on it, with buttons for control. Costs about the same as the Prismiq.
And there's stuff out there that has the OSD, does music/video, has an on-box display, buttons, etc. too. Be prepared to pay upwards of $500 and (often) have all the data storage be on device, with really absurd pricing for expanding storage.
Yeah, and much of IBM management hated it.
I still have some Team OS/2 T-shirts, purely for historical/hysterical value. Once I took a job actually having to support it in a real world environment I learned why OS/2 was doomed.
Oh, certainly the idea that IBM is orchestrating the outrage.
I mean, just think about this for a minute -- IBM and RMS working together.
Is there anything any more absurd than that? I mean, seriously... even RMS's most sane rants are off the deep end for IBM.
No, that's not it at all... reading the book gives insight into why id kicked ass back in the Keen/Wolf3D/Doom days, why Quake was such an absurd mish-mash of textures and styles (hint -- Quake originally wasn't supposed to be a FPS at all), and why Q2 and Q3 have had absolutely no creative energy at all.
Essentially, Romero was the creative half of id while Carmack was the logical half. Carmack excels at coding, is possibly one of the most knowlegable 3D graphics people on the planet right now, and can write technical essays that leave most people's heads spinning. But he doesn't have an artistic thread in his body. He's also not a gamer.
Romero is a dreamer, and is into flash and pomp. The Ion Storm motto, "Design is Law" said it all. As did the results of that experiment. Romero can visualize, can cheerlead, and can pump up a team or fanbase with the best of them, but he doesn't have his feet grounded in reality and can't seem to remember the "little things" that make dreams into reality. He is a gamer.
The two of them together formed a top notch team that complemented each other very well -- Carmack would come up with what was possible to do, Romero would figure out where to go with it. As id became successful though they both polarized and couldn't deal with one another -- and while I side more with Carmack on a personal level (because I'm more of a realist/logical type), I can see how Carmack's focus on the code may have driven Romero further toward his own disfunction.
Since they split it appears that nobody has replaced Romero's role at id. While the engines may be revolutionary every time, the gameplay is becoming increasingly stale and the fine details are left to 3rd party mod authors to fill out (like usable in game menuing and ranking). And it certainly seems like Carmack is getting bored at id. Hopefully rocketry will keep him challanged for another decade.
Romero, on the other hand, spawned Daikatana and a bevy of other miserable games -- because there was nobody at Ion Storm that could override him and get stuff focused any more finely than "Design is Law". Maybe his new venture will work out better.
Want me to backup any of the above statements? Read the book first. No, I don't have any association with the author, the publisher, et. al. but I did think it was a very good book (if you're into gaming or coding, and I'm into both). The author pretty much lays out what I said above.
If I am totally wrong here speakup.
:)
Ok. You're totally wrong here.
It's a complete non-issue. As others have pointed out, the maximum bandwidth for DD is ~480 kbps. All the channels are decoded out of that. And there's no reason to decode them prior to the USB device, since it can do the decoding itself.
Anything else that is going to put out multiple data streams would be advised to use DD or DTS (which generally has a maximum data stream of 512kbps, although I think I've seen 784 talked about). Yes, it requires some CPU crunching, but you'll have to do that at some point if you want to use any kind of digital outputs. Discrete analog inputs to HT systems aren't rare anymore, but they're still frowned upon.
Voice chat in a game will probably use telephone quality sound at best... that's all of 64kbps (8 KHz, mono). Doubt it'd be a strain on the USB. Nor would printing things out (remember the DD data stream is consuming under 5% of the theoretical maximum of USB)... although exactly why you're watching a DVD and printing at the same time is beyond me. I'm sure there are other, valid, cases of such things though so it's a decent what-if case.
BTW, your math is wrong. It's not 7 * 2.8, it's 7*1.4. Which, while it's below the maximum theoretical bandwidth for USB1.1, it's above the realistic realized bandwidth.
Of course, there isn't a single 7.1 discrete format out there. It's all 5.1, with "magic" being applied to the rear 2 channels to extrapolate an additional (6.1) channel or pair (7.1) of channels. So we're back to 5*1.4, which is once again within the range of USB, albeit on the edge of real world performance.
USB1.1 certainly has the bandwidth to support a full sound system. Better reading on this, with all the pluses and minuses, is available from AVS Forum's HTPC Forum.
Because they still don't have the patent rights.
I'm much more interested in HL2 than D3 right now, which is a complete reversal from before E3, but some of the things shown in D3 demos still intrigue me.
IIRC, every single FPS to date has had strictly oriented players and monsters -- yes, you can go above someone if the map allows you, but you are still oriented in the same direction -- head toward sky, feet on ground. Some of the D3 footage has shown monsters crawling along walls, pipes, etc -- but it's not clear if this is actual gameplay or merely cut scenes. If it's gameplay it would add a whole new dimension to the game -- not as much as Quake did with it's true 3D environment, but still quite substantial.
I do expect HL2 to have the better AI and plot regardless, and to probably be the better game. Which one is the better engine will remain to be seen.