"Fox probably thought, 'Since widescreen at 480 is good enough for the millions who watch DVDs, why spend a lot more to please the few purists?'"
As much as I hate to admit it, from a purely business standpoint the network executives are probably being most prudent in not commencing with the conversion at this point.
Uh... no.
The article was wrong here, as well as in some other points. Fox has done some of the conversion to HD already, although they're the slackest of the five broadcast networks (the leader is PBS, which probably surprises a lot of people). All the other networks are broadcasting in either 1080i or 720p at some point during the day.
The catch here is that the cost difference between broadcasting a high-def digital format vs a standard def digital format (both of which fall under the umbrella of DTV) is minimal. Really. Either way you have to buy a boatload of new equipment -- new digital cameras, digital editing equipment, encoders, decoders, a new antenna and all it's associated equipment, yadda yadda yadda. This is not cheap. By the time you've paid for all of that the difference between resolution costs is truely minimal.
So why doesn't Fox want to do HD? Because Rupert Murdoch would prefer to use the bandwidth, which was given to the broadcasters for free for digital interactive services, multiple channels, etc. Despite the minor nit that this was not what the spectrum giveaway was for.
Anyone who has actually seen HD on a decently setup monitor knows just how good it looks. And how shabby 480, even 480p, looks in comparison. The issues are rampant though, and I'm seriously doubting that HD will take off now.
The biggest issues, which were missed completely by the article, are the FCC and the content providers. The content providers (e.g. - hollywood) are once again wringing their hands over copyrights. A connection and encryption standard was finally set about a year ago, but there are still companies complaining that they want the right to reach into any recording device and delete, limit the viewings of, or otherwise invalidate a recording. The FCC has made all of the problems with HD even worse by doing absolutely nothing. They refused to beat the industry into a connection standard, a set-top box standard, or anything else beyond vague warnings that if the industry didn't set a standard then they would. Sometime. Really.
Probably the worst decision, and the one that is likely to doom HD to dieing, is the FCC's decision that HD does not fall under the "must carry" rules for cable. Under US law cable providers must carry local broadcast channels to their designated broadcast areas. When HD came about it was unclear if these new signals would fall under that law as well -- they were broadcast by the same channels, but it wasn't any "new" information, just higher bitrate. The cable companies don't want to touch HD because it eats too much of their bandwidth - which they'd rather use for another dozen or so low bitrate channels. The FCC ruled in favor of the cable companies. The problem is that 80% of the US receives ALL of its television over cable. And for HD, mere rabbit ears don't cut it. You have to have a full blown rooftop or attic antenna. Preferably directional. Because 8-VSB sucks.
If you really want to learn more about all of the crap that's gone on, I highly recommend Stereophile Guide to Home Theater. They've done a pretty good job of keeping on top of it, particularly on their website.
No it's not a huge setback. Eventually the various Asian admins that are causing this will get the clue and fix their mail systems.
I get roughly 100 messages or so of SPAM a day on my Hotmail account -- I can't give an accurate number because I keep blocking entire domains (some jackhole, and I think I know who, decided to add me to various coupon and ad sites, which becomes a deluge as they share mailing lists). Of the 150 or so blocked domains, about 10% of them are Asian (surf to xyzzy.net and note that entire webpage is in a font I don't have installed).
Make a law? Sure. In which country? Or do you mean you want to outlaw SPAM in the US, and then somehow think you're going to be able to prosecute a company located entirely in North Korea under US Law? Things just aren't that easy. I'd like to see a reasonable way to legislate SPAM to be illegal, even if it only did affect the US, but I'm yet to see anything that has teeth AND makes logical sense.
Yes, because when you search for "Floral Delivery" then obviously the absolute top match is the one company you want to use.
Uh huh.
This is exactly the kind of search where web ads are useful. Google only display's relevant ads (you're not going to get an ad for computer hardware in the middle of that hunt for flowers... barring pretty, fluffy floral computer cases), so it actually gives you additional information - the companies that are big enough to afford advertising and who you may want to do business with (or, alternately, who you may want to avoid because you want to give your business to a smaller company).
Like many others, I fail to see anything to complain about with this. It makes logical sense from all three points of view - Google's, advertisers, and searchers.
At a point, the detail becomes so fine that the human eye can't distinguish it. XviD [xvid.org] (a fork of the last free DivX 4 release) attempts to find that point
Ok, I looked at the site briefly and I can't find what you are referring to here.
But, uh... in exactly what circumstances? Because I can assure you that while you may not be able to distinguish between detail on a 21" monitor, put the same image(s) on a 90" front projection system and they'll SCREAM at you. And at some point you can cease to distinguish between image(s) at that size. Until you increase the resolution beyond the point that the projector doesn't have enough scan lines to display it properly.
Frankly, you're better off using that 90" system to decide on "indistinguishibility" than a smaller screen, because you're assured that if it can't be perceived at that scale/resolution, then it shouldn't be perceived below it. For some reason, however, a lot of people seem to think that if they can't tell the difference on their monitor then nobody will be able to tell the difference on anything else either.
You make good points about MPEG-2 vs 4 and the trade-offs, but you're (pseudo) incorrect about it not having enough storage capacity.
27 GB at HDTV resolution gives you nearly 2.5 hours of video (note that HDTV tops out at approx. 22 Mbps as I recall). 27 GB/22 Mbps = 9818 seconds or 2.7 hours (don't forget to convert bytes to bits, and I'm assuming base 10 for giga/mega, not base 2).
So yeah, the longer movies such as LotR, Lawrence of Arabia, etc. would be a bit squeezed for space. Until you consider that that was for a single layer disk. The spec allows for dual layer disks with a capacity around 50 GB. That's... adequate. If you STILL run into space issues, shunt all the extra features onto a second disk. And that'll happen, because no matter how much space is available, you'll still want more.
Not likely, it would take a couple of weeks max for the first compilers to appear
You obviously know nothing about Itanium, EPIC, VLIW, or pretty much anything else on this topic.
The issue isn't whether or not there's a compiler available. The issue is how GOOD the compiler is. In the case of a Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) CPU like the Itanium, the compiler is the bottleneck for system performance. Why? Because the premise of these CPUs is that while they have a low clockspeed (750-800 MHz for Itanium), they execute many instructions per cycle - 10 or more. So while "slower", they get more done per cycle, resulting in a faster overall execution. It's up to the compiler to properly structure the executable machine code to take maximum advantage of this layout and keep all execution units of the CPU busy at all times, as well as reduce disseparate memory accesses and so forth.
The intial compilers that are released with these machines do it, but not as well as they could. In fact, compiler writers are still trying to grasp the issues with pipelining on modern CPUs and their much lower number of execution units, and this is without utilizing special instructions that explicitly do non-conflicting operations at once. We're still years away from writing fully optimized compilers for contemporary CPUs. And while there's been a great deal of work done on VLIW already (prior to Itanium), there's even more yet to be done. A decade for a "good" compiler is probably optimistic.
You may be wondering, what's the point anyway? If VLIW is so damn hard, why bother? Just ramp up that clock speed and get more CPU power! Well, that's nice, but it doesn't work in reality. We're starting to bump up against physical limitations in CPU speeds. Electrons are not magical particles that travel instantaeously. They are limited to slightly under the speed of light, which means roughly 1 cm per nanosecond. This doesn't seem to be a big deal until you realize that a 2.0 GHz CPU means each clock cycle is 0.5 nanoseconds. So if you have to fetch an instruction or data from main memory, and that memory is a mere 5 cm away, under optimal conditions you've just sat around for 10 clock cycles waiting on that memory to be fetched. This is ignoring the fact that there's propogation delays, latch delays, and other things. So go ahead, pump that CPU up to 10 GHz and waste even more clock cycles waiting on data. That or redesign the entire thing, expect the compiler to do the work and properly feed you data and instructions such that you can do 10x as much in the same amount of time, and all with no wasted CPU instructions.
That's the theory at least.
Reality is that not only does the compiler have to properly organize the machine code, it also has to have some idea of what the code is doing to do so. Compile the code w/ profiling, run the code against a "realistic" data set, then recompile it again feeding it the profile data. Many compilers can do this now, but it's rarely done. Because it's hard to guess a "realistic" data set, it's hard to acquire the same, how you expect the code to be used and how it actually is used are rarely the same, and there's more development time involved in all of this. So most companies don't bother. And despite what I said above, 2.0 GHz still hasn't reached the point where the CPU is sitting on it's ass more than it's doing work. Until we start approaching that point there's little incentive to put in the R&D time necessary to switch to a new CPU archictecture.
And, of course, on top of all of the above is the issue that Joe Sixpack will invariably see 2 GHz as faster than 750 MHz no matter what. Have fun with that one.
Go read the hardware sites. Quake3 does ABSURDLY well on a P4 for some reason. Nobody can explain why. Jon Carmack doesn't even understand why last I read. But because of this, it's not a wonderful benchmark for AMD vs P4 comparisons. If it's all you play, then that's fine - benchmark it off that. Otherwise go look at other gaming benchmarks, like Serious Sam and Anandtech's new Unreal2 benchmark (which is of debatable value, admittedly).
Of course, then you might realize that people who have a clue are right, and that RDRAM costs 2-4x as much as DDR for no performance gain. Or for a performance loss in some cases.
And no, AMD doesn't use RDRAM. Nobody's even bothered to even design an AMD motherboard that uses Rambus. Partly because it makes no sense - AMD is still mostly used by people who are cost conscious, and RDRAM isn't desired in that catagory. Partly because it would be relatively difficult to design such a beast, due to lack of support from AMD. And partly because there's no performance advantage in the real world.
Oh... and even in Q3... consider how much more you spent for RDRAM, a P4, and the premium on the motherboard as compared to a comparable Athlon system. Then figure that out as a percentage of system cost. Then figure out how much performance percentage you gained. I bet the first is greater than the latter.
Interleaved memory designs (interleaving on a slot basis rather than interleaving on the RAM stick itself) causes many issues. First off, you have to have more slots for equivalent upgradeability. And more slots requires you to have more layers on the motherboard due to increased number of traces (although, admittedly, RDRAM has vastly fewer traces than SDRAM even so). It also requires more real estate on the board, which isn't debateable. Second, you start running into timing issues more often with interleaving than standard memory clocking. Sure, as you say, it depends how robust your controller is. But, funny thing, RDRAM either has amazingly shitty controllers, or they're just vastly more prone to lockups when you have slightly differing speed memory.
As for heat - it's not a tradeoff issue. DDR didn't double the heat of standard SDRAM, and RDRAM isn't merely twice as hot as DDR. It's absurdly hot. And heat is a major computer issue already between CPUs, chipsets, and graphics cards throwing off oodles of heat as is. I don't know of a manufacturer that has a fan blowing specifically over the RAM, but RDRAM could certainly benefit from this. Heat kills systems (more specifically, thermal changes kill systems, but you'll get faster thermal changes with hotter components), so why design a system with RDRAM that is so much hotter than the alternatives? For how little (if any) of a performance gain?
Oh, and you claim RDRAM is twice the speed. Ok. Want to compare apples to apples? Put RDRAM in a non-interleaved system (yes, they're out there. They're even predominant) and the memory bandwidth is only slightly higher than DDR. Or compare it to an interleaved DDR system (again, they're out there). Boom. You have a DDR system with nearly as much bandwidth as RDRAM.
And, frankly, bandwidth ain't all it's cracked up to be. Funny how DDR systems routinely spank RDRAM systems in real world benchmarks (not pure memory bench's). Why? Because latency is king. Particularly if you're multitasking. You'll hit different areas of memory so much that bandwidth will make little difference compared to latency. And RDRAM has really, really miserable latency. And it gets higher as you add more sticks. So while it's great for some things (video editing/streaming, etc), it sucks for most applications.
As far meeting people in online games like EQ, well, if you are doing that you probably have a problem, not the least of which is a distorted sense of reality (looking for chicks in a game where 70% of the populous is male and 80% of the chicks are in relationships?).
Well, I met my fiancee in EQ, and we're getting married in just over a month.
For the record, however, neither of us was "looking" for someone else in the game (we were both doing the dating thing outside the game of course). And we've both said that we never thought we'd be those dweebs that meet someone else in game and fall in love and whatever. But hey, here we are. She lived 800 miles away from me at the time, so we started off just talking to each other in game. Then we used Gamevoice to talk to each other at night while playing, roughly 6-8 hours a night, every night (yes, we were serious EQ addicts and are in the uber guild on our server). Things progressed over a few months, and we met each other in real life, and eventually things worked out well enough that she was able to relocate to the same city I live in.
This is two people in their late-20s too, both college graduates in the technical field. We're not a couple of stupid school kids, and we took things slowly and carefully. And thus far it's working out. A couple of our best friends met each other on a MUD many years ago and got married. About a month ago they celebrated their 6th wedding anniversary. And yes, these are friends in real life who I knew from work.
We don't play that much now - on rare occasions we spend 2 or 3 nights a week playing now - but we do still play and enjoy playing together.
The internet is just another place to meet people, no different from bars, nightclubs, sport and social clubs, or anything else. Generally to meet someone it means you have to be yourself, you have to be careful, and you have to not be desperately seeking someone. Ignoring the first means you'll never find someone you fit with. Ignoring the second means you'll just hurt yourself. Ignoring the third means you'll never actually meet someone as they avoid the "needy" aura eminating from you.
Ok, I spent the last 3 years working (indirectly) for a credit card company that had really icky interest rates and did a lot of sell-throughs and joint marketing. So I'm pretty familiar with the details and legalities of everything here.
The fact of the matter is, while everyone on/. seems to think that the consumer doesn't want this crap, don't you think that credit card companies would stop doing it if the response rate was that low? Realistically the response rate on these suckers is really damn good. Anywhere from 5-20% for a good tie-in. So obviously there are people who do want this stuff.
That said, if you ever respond to one of the tie-in's, you're a freaking idiot. The credit card companies make oodles of money on this stuff. Things like insurance against loss of employment are pretty much 100% profit for the insurer and the card company -- and they don't protect you, they protect the lender (from bankruptcy filing on your part in general). Price clubs and stuff are nearly never a good deal, and the credit card company gets 50-75% of the signup money.
I think Vermont is on the right track here though. With one caveat. I haven't seen a link to the actual law yet (yes, I looked), so I don't know exactly how it's worded or who it targets. But if it's overly broad then it most certainly CAN hurt consumers. Not sharing data with co-marketers is one thing. Not sharing data back to the credit bureaus is another. If the law prevents companies from reporting financial data back to Equifax, Trans Union, and Experion, then you, as a consumer, WILL be hurt by the law.
How so? Because of the way the credit system works. Not having a credit history is worse than having a bad history in many ways. The previously mentioned credit card company sold cards w/ 30%+ rates and $50-$100 annual fees to people with little to no credit histories. And since they didn't report GOOD credit information back to the bureaus, you never got better. In fact, you got worse because you had a new open line of credit with jack info about it. If companies can't report info back to the bureaus on Vermont residents, then every single one of them is going to end up in this limbo. The entire credit system in the US (excepting utilities, which have their own system) is based on data in these three bureaus. You can't buy a house or finance a car without a positive record here. Even opening a bank account or getting a job can be hard if there's enough issues (or enough lack of information) in the bureau databases.
If the law exempts the big three from generalized financial data sharing, that's fine. Otherwise you're going to wind up with serious credit problems should you not opt-in (which will then open you up to all the other crap mentioned previously).
Go look at the benchmarks. In particular, Anandtech's Unreal2 benchmark. This is the shape of things to come - and the MX cards can't handle it, even at low resolutions.
MX cards aren't DX8 compliant, and so while they'll work fine with most games out even now, they're not going to work worth a damn in a year or two.
Which merely proves that you haven't read the article, or pretty much ANY article on nVidia cards.
The MX isn't a stripped down GeForce3/4 - it's a totally different chip without nearly any of the features that make the GF3/4 powerful and a good match for today's and tomorrow's games.
The MX chips lack any vertex or pixel shaders. Yes, the GF4 MX has limited vertex shader support, but it's more akin to the GF2 shader than anything else.
Go look at the benchmarks. There's a reason that the MX line score so far below the regular ones. And a reason why they're performing abysmally in DX8 games - they aren't DX8 compliant. It's about like getting a 2D card and trying to run Quake with it - it simply doesn't have the guts needed to do it.
If you want to go on the cheap, pick up a full fledged GF3, GF3 Ti200, or the as-yet-unreleased GF4 4200 (I think that's the designation). All have the hardware needed for DX8 games (and contrary to the articles and to what some would have you believe, there are games out right now that make use of DX8 and these cards - one of them is Everquest), and they're cheap - under $200. I suspect the GF3 Ti200 will be heading toward $100 very soon now.
Personally I bought a GF2 the 2nd day it was out. I paid $350 for it. I would've liked to wait for a bit of a price drop, but my new computer wouldn't work with my old cards (dual Voodoo2 at the time). That was two years ago, and my GF2 is still perfectly acceptable for playing games. It's a bit slow in EQ, but I'll live. It won't handle the upcoming games though.
EQ is not a PvP game. There are servers that are PvP, with different rules (the original, Rallos Zek, is wide open PvP within x levels of your own. Later came team based PvP, and most recently alignment based PvP).
The fact of the matter, however, is that EQ is not designed for PvP and so PvP sucks.
Scarcity of resources is a nifty concept. It'd work great for my guild - since every other guild on our server is 9 months behind us. But that's rather unfair to others.
Currently items are removed from the economy by making them NO DROP - that is, once you loot the item off the monster's corpse, you can't trade it, sell it, give it away, drop it, etc. You either wear it, keep it in your inventory/bank, or destroy it. It's not a perfect solution, since it just means that all the droppable items of lower quality get sold more often, but it does keep the highest end items restricted to those who have earned them and reduces twinking.
Oh, and interest would be bad. Deflation is GOOD for the EQ economy. It's the ONLY way things fall out of the game really. I currently have over 600,000 platinum in my bank, and have another million or so worth in items to sell (I'm the guild treasurer). At one point my guild controlled 40% of all the platinum on the server. You really want us earning interest on that?
How do we spend all that cash? Well, burning 10-20k per day in peridots and other reagents is one way. On the rare occasions that a total wipe out demands necro's doing corpse summons that costs another 5k or so. And there's the odd items, quests, etc. that can suck up plat. I expect for there to be many large money sinks in Luclin still.
Which does absolutely nothing like what Moxi offers.
With leapfrog you're just slaving the other TV's to your main TV. If Bob is watching the primary TV and he wants to watch infomercials then you get to watch infomercials too! With Moxie Bob could watch infomercials, live or recorded, while you watch all the stuff you recorded on Skinemax last night in the privacy of your own bedroom.
This isn't likely to get into legal issues like Replay/SonicBlue since there's no sharing between individuals. And being able to do this kind of thing really is pretty cool -- I have 2 TiVo's, initially because my fiancee and I wanted to watch different shows at the same time, but being able to watch whatever show we want in whichever room we want would be really nice. And last I looked, TivoNet is still a PITA to use.
Smart entrepeneurs are doing this because they can charge you for every time you want to view something for media on demand.
And I sincerly doubt it'll be low cost. The cost of implementing these systems is tremendous. So far every single "video on demand" test has had the videos priced at the same or more than what it costs to go to a video store and rent them. The only plus is that you don't have to return them. But most systems don't have accomodations for pausing, rewinding, etc - although you can sometimes watch a movie as many times as you'd like in a given time frame.
I also deeply question whether or not this is a "dead end concept". If you think it is, then you MUST be expecting all the networks to go belly up and for all TV shows to go to a pay for play scheme - no more networks, only data brokers. After all, who's going to pay for the next episode of Buffy, Junkyard Wars, or whatever? Not the advertisers, not when you can fast forward past or delete out the commercials. Frankly, expecting modern broadcast and cable delivery schemes to go out the window in the next 20 years is a pipe dream. Hell, we can't even transition to HDTV, much less some fantastic new delivery and payment scheme.
Frankly, I love my TiVo's. They're the best thing that's happened to TV for me, well, ever. And everyone I show them to decides they need to get one sooner or later, because being freed from watching things when the networks want you to watch it is very, very refreshing.
I think Moxie is an interesting move on the PTV front, and perhaps an ugly echo of things to come. Because the cable companies and content providers are way off the rocker - there's still no HDTV cable interface standard because now the cable companies are demanding the right to delete data off of ANY recording device hooked up to their stream, and the hardware makers are telling them to shove it. This is the first box I've seen that is confirmed to give cable companies that "right".
I'm not an astrophysicist by any means, but beyond the general idea of "increase the breadth of human knowledge and understanding", there's the reality that we are totally and utterly dependant on that big ball of flaming hydrogen and helium 67 million miles away. Any ability to improve our modeling of that warmish ball of gas may result in some insight on how to eventually control it and thus control our own fates.
This is obviously assuming that we manage to not kill ourselves off beforehand, which remains questionable.
Long term is heat death of the universe, but if humanity survives those few quadrillion years then I think we'll have "succeeded".
Funny, I actually had this conversation with my fiancee night before last (thanks to Junkyard Wars torpedo episode talking about 50 kg displacing 50 L of water).
The reality is that the English units make more sense to you and I simply because that's what we've been raised with. They are no more or less sensical than metric units. Yes, I'm more comfortable with arbitrary measurements in the English system - I know my handspan is 10". I know one of my knuckles is roughly 1". I know how far a mile is, how big a gallon is, and how heavy 10 pounds is.
But to say that 1 kilometer, or 1 liter, or 1 kilogram is obviously not as simple to understand just shows how short sighted you are. If you'd been raised in a country that had transitioned to these measurements decades ago then you'd be wondering what the hell is up with these silly english units.
And yes, the only time it really matters is when you start doing conversions. You don't have to do them? That's nice. Not planning on doing much cooking are you? Because scaling recipes would sure as hell be easier to do with metric than English. Or doing reasonable conversions in any kind of construction (length of wood, sq ft->sq yd vs sq meter, etc). And I'm not even going to get into doing scientific calculations.
Oh, and before someone whines that metric doesn't make sense unless you convert to a metric time system, get a clue. The time system already has a fairly consistant base - base 60. There isn't a single English system that has anything even vaguely consistent. Besides which, once you get to seconds everyone starts using them as a metric baseline - milliseconds, nanoseconds, megaseconds, etc.
As a counterpoint, however, I do wish people would stop bringing up inane English units like bushel, league, hectares, etc. These units aren't used in anything but the same specialized fields that they were originally invented for. The only units that are in common usage are inches, feet, yards, miles (length); ounces, pounds, tons (weight); and teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, pints, quarts, gallons (volume - yes, this is the single most fucked up system of the bunch).
What all this boils down to, of course, is that the most expensive part of lift is the lower stages. As you get higher, it gets easier - thus the various investigations into high-altitude burns after being lifted there by jet, balloon, dirigible, and now maglev.
Yes, the previous numbers were off, but it is asymptotic. Certainly a 2 km or even 100 km rail isn't going to get you orbital speed. Not on this planet. But it is going to reduce the amount of expendables you have to burn (which, in turn, lowers your weight and further reduces how much you have to burn, yadda yadda yadda).
It remains to be seen that it's: 1) significantly less expensive, 2) as reliable (hah), and 3) as flexible (one of the key dearths of jet/balloon high altitude release) as current rocket launch systems. If it doesn't meet all three it'll die. If it does meet all three it may still die simply because there are people in charge that refuse to look at alternatives to big rockets.
So learn a different command set for every utility I want to view text files with?
No thanks. I'm pretty damn happy that I can use vi-like commands for most of the stuff I do - whether it be at the command line (ksh in vi mode), using vile (shrug, used it before vim), using less, or whatever.
Frankly, I very often have to muck around with data files that are hundreds of megabytes in size. And sometimes they get bad data in them. Like nulls. This immediately trashes most of the unix text based tools, all of which were written with the idea of a null terminated string. That nukes the data I was trying to get to. I generally end up having to beat the file into submission with a perl script and load the resulting file into vi(le).
It's a helluva lot easier when I can skip the rigamarole and just load the file into the editor. I'm probably going to look at switching from vile to vim based on the hope that vim is more efficient at loading large files, both in Unix and NT.
Of course, this means I'm going to have to go home, download the source and binaries there, burn them to a CD or copy to a floppy, and bring it to work. Why the hell doesn't vim have any mirrors with http download? ftp is blocked by our proxy at work, so I can't download files via ftp. No problems with http. But after poking around a good bit I couldn't find a single download site that offered anything but ftp.
Yes, I know. Our proxy sucks. Our admins are freaking overzealous. And ftp is the proper way to download files. Doesn't help me a bit.
Actually, put several coils or strips together and you will change their reflective signature. Generally in ways that aren't readily predictable (so, no, you couldn't get a signature back and say "that's two 10 Euro notes!"). So no, people aren't going to be able to magically read how much money is in your pocket. At least not unless you carefully make sure that none of the strips are aligned in the same direction, none are touching each other, etc.
It's also defeated easily by wrapping other foil around the primary strip/coil/etc. - as silly as it sounds, if you wrapped your wallet with aluminum foil, it'd be as good as scrambled.
Finally, tracking systems break pretty fast. Go to the ATM, get some Euro notes that now belong to "you". Go to lunch with a friend and have him pay by check, credit, whatever and you pay him in cash. That's an untrackable transaction. These kinds of transactions happen constantly, and there's no way to trace them. (Yes, get paranoid - do the above enough with one person and They will figure out that You and Him are friends, and then They will watch both of You. When you want to step back to reality, let me know).
Didn't this kind of thing come up when the US Treasury started adding magstripes to $100, $50, and $20 bills?
But, guess what - even if your computer game has a G that would crush humans, or elasticity that makes super balls look tame, or centers of gravity below the pavement, it still needs to be CONSISTENT.
And being consistent means modeling real world physics. With tweaks.
If you don't model real world physics properly though you're going to end up with erratic behavior that will either lead to frustrated players or exploitation by players (which often trivializes the game).
And while I never thought about it, now I understand the purpose behind some of the abysmal math courses I took in college. I guess it's a good thing I don't do game coding, since I certainly don't recall much at all from those courses. (Another reason why math profs should come out of their theoretical world and mention real world uses for some of the stuff upon occasion).
I believe so, or at least I recall someone working on some a year ago when it first came out. Check AVS Forum in the HTPC forum. Search there and you should find out the driver situ.
I'd give the real answer, but my workplace proxy blocks AVS.
Wholly trusting client-side packets in a MMORPG (or any competitive client-server system) is Bad Programming
The corallary to this is, don't send the client anything more than they REALLY need to know.
Why? Because you have to assume that if you send the data, it will be displayed. Even if you don't build a display for it (e.g. - numeric data used to display some other message) or you have conditions for it being displayed (e.g. - invisible things). Someone _will_ crack your data stream and figure out a way to get the info either inside the game or outside of it.
Witness ShowEQ for Everquest. There's not a great many hacks that have been done on the game (yes, a few memory editors... and to my knowledge using them results in your being banned sooner or later), but the ShowEQ author and later developers figured out the datastream and have broken every encryption since. Verant has become clued about these things slowly and is doing fewer stupid things. Instead of sending a monster's hit points, they now send a percentage (which is all that's displayed to the client anyway). Instead of sending a number indicating exactly how much you are liked or disliked by a group of monsters, they send a number indicating what level of faction you have (again, all that was displayed anyway).
The downside of not being able to trust the client is that you require a lot more server bandwidth - particularly CPU wise. And you do run into client side issues when you start talking about limited disclosure (e.g. - invisible players/monsters/etc) because in order to do it Right, changing from visible/invisible means that you change what data you're sending. If you have collision between PCs and other moving objects then how do you handle someone trying to walk through an invisible object? You either have to tell them it's there all the time (but don't display), or you have to let them walk through it and get corrected back by a server update, which is very confusing for the player. Fun fun fun.
Re:What's wrong with Live!?
on
Testing the Audigy
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· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, it's more accurate to say "If you're looking for QUALITY sound from Creative Labs, you're clearly just an idiot, though". (Again, I will disclaim from stating anything regarding the Audigy, since I haven't bothered to do much research on it).
CL has never made a decent quality sound card. Even back when the original 8-bit Soundblaster came out it had horrid noise.
But there are consumer level audio cards that have decent to excellent quality. Turtle Beach has long made cards that were comparably priced but far better in quality. And while M-Audio isn't a big name by any means, $149 for a 4 channel 24/96 soundcard isn't absurdly priced either (unlike so many things in high end audio).
Even so, yes, most consumer sound cards have crap for audio quality. But look at video cards. Nvidia has quality issues, but ATI has long been known for very good results (and I'm not talking about very good on that rocking 15" monitor you bought for $100. I'm talking about use in an HTPC where you're outputing to a front projection monitor with screen sizes ranging from 60-120" diagonal).
And the silly thing here is that Creative could really increase sound quality without increasing cost much. It only takes a few more resistors and transformers in the right places. We're talking about $1-5 per card.
Re:What's wrong with Live!?
on
Testing the Audigy
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· Score: 5, Informative
Hook up the Live to some real speakers. No. Not those. Virtually nothing you can buy that are advertised as "computer speakers" qualifies. I'm talking about an actual preamp/amp/receiver and some good home theater or music speakers.
The Live is very, very noisy. The connector for digital output conforms to no standard known on earth (yes, you can often connect it to other gear and it will work, but the voltage on the thing is totally out of whack). There's also absolutely no dejittering or noise protection on the digital output.
The DACs are low quality, which makes a big difference if you're not using the digital output (see above).
Most people putting together home theater PC's used the Live only because nothing else was available. That changed last year when M-Audio made the Audiophile 24/96 available. It has high quality 24 bit/96 KHz 2-channel output and a good digital output for 5.1. Apparantly the latest version has 4 input/output 24/96 channels now.
Best resource for information is the HTPC forum on AVS. I haven't been reading there recently, so I don't know what the real story is on the Audigy.
Personally, I found the review linked to be pretty useless. They didn't actually talk about sound quality at all, at least not beyond the absolute basics.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fox probably thought, 'Since widescreen at 480 is good enough for the millions who watch DVDs, why spend a lot more to please the few purists?'"
As much as I hate to admit it, from a purely business standpoint the network executives are probably being most prudent in not commencing with the conversion at this point.
Uh... no.
The article was wrong here, as well as in some other points. Fox has done some of the conversion to HD already, although they're the slackest of the five broadcast networks (the leader is PBS, which probably surprises a lot of people). All the other networks are broadcasting in either 1080i or 720p at some point during the day.
The catch here is that the cost difference between broadcasting a high-def digital format vs a standard def digital format (both of which fall under the umbrella of DTV) is minimal. Really. Either way you have to buy a boatload of new equipment -- new digital cameras, digital editing equipment, encoders, decoders, a new antenna and all it's associated equipment, yadda yadda yadda. This is not cheap. By the time you've paid for all of that the difference between resolution costs is truely minimal.
So why doesn't Fox want to do HD? Because Rupert Murdoch would prefer to use the bandwidth, which was given to the broadcasters for free for digital interactive services, multiple channels, etc. Despite the minor nit that this was not what the spectrum giveaway was for.
Anyone who has actually seen HD on a decently setup monitor knows just how good it looks. And how shabby 480, even 480p, looks in comparison. The issues are rampant though, and I'm seriously doubting that HD will take off now.
The biggest issues, which were missed completely by the article, are the FCC and the content providers. The content providers (e.g. - hollywood) are once again wringing their hands over copyrights. A connection and encryption standard was finally set about a year ago, but there are still companies complaining that they want the right to reach into any recording device and delete, limit the viewings of, or otherwise invalidate a recording. The FCC has made all of the problems with HD even worse by doing absolutely nothing. They refused to beat the industry into a connection standard, a set-top box standard, or anything else beyond vague warnings that if the industry didn't set a standard then they would. Sometime. Really.
Probably the worst decision, and the one that is likely to doom HD to dieing, is the FCC's decision that HD does not fall under the "must carry" rules for cable. Under US law cable providers must carry local broadcast channels to their designated broadcast areas. When HD came about it was unclear if these new signals would fall under that law as well -- they were broadcast by the same channels, but it wasn't any "new" information, just higher bitrate. The cable companies don't want to touch HD because it eats too much of their bandwidth - which they'd rather use for another dozen or so low bitrate channels. The FCC ruled in favor of the cable companies. The problem is that 80% of the US receives ALL of its television over cable. And for HD, mere rabbit ears don't cut it. You have to have a full blown rooftop or attic antenna. Preferably directional. Because 8-VSB sucks.
If you really want to learn more about all of the crap that's gone on, I highly recommend Stereophile Guide to Home Theater. They've done a pretty good job of keeping on top of it, particularly on their website.
No it's not a huge setback. Eventually the various Asian admins that are causing this will get the clue and fix their mail systems.
I get roughly 100 messages or so of SPAM a day on my Hotmail account -- I can't give an accurate number because I keep blocking entire domains (some jackhole, and I think I know who, decided to add me to various coupon and ad sites, which becomes a deluge as they share mailing lists). Of the 150 or so blocked domains, about 10% of them are Asian (surf to xyzzy.net and note that entire webpage is in a font I don't have installed).
Make a law? Sure. In which country? Or do you mean you want to outlaw SPAM in the US, and then somehow think you're going to be able to prosecute a company located entirely in North Korea under US Law? Things just aren't that easy. I'd like to see a reasonable way to legislate SPAM to be illegal, even if it only did affect the US, but I'm yet to see anything that has teeth AND makes logical sense.
Yes, because when you search for "Floral Delivery" then obviously the absolute top match is the one company you want to use.
Uh huh.
This is exactly the kind of search where web ads are useful. Google only display's relevant ads (you're not going to get an ad for computer hardware in the middle of that hunt for flowers... barring pretty, fluffy floral computer cases), so it actually gives you additional information - the companies that are big enough to afford advertising and who you may want to do business with (or, alternately, who you may want to avoid because you want to give your business to a smaller company).
Like many others, I fail to see anything to complain about with this. It makes logical sense from all three points of view - Google's, advertisers, and searchers.
At a point, the detail becomes so fine that the human eye can't distinguish it. XviD [xvid.org] (a fork of the last free DivX 4 release) attempts to find that point
Ok, I looked at the site briefly and I can't find what you are referring to here.
But, uh... in exactly what circumstances? Because I can assure you that while you may not be able to distinguish between detail on a 21" monitor, put the same image(s) on a 90" front projection system and they'll SCREAM at you. And at some point you can cease to distinguish between image(s) at that size. Until you increase the resolution beyond the point that the projector doesn't have enough scan lines to display it properly.
Frankly, you're better off using that 90" system to decide on "indistinguishibility" than a smaller screen, because you're assured that if it can't be perceived at that scale/resolution, then it shouldn't be perceived below it. For some reason, however, a lot of people seem to think that if they can't tell the difference on their monitor then nobody will be able to tell the difference on anything else either.
You make good points about MPEG-2 vs 4 and the trade-offs, but you're (pseudo) incorrect about it not having enough storage capacity.
27 GB at HDTV resolution gives you nearly 2.5 hours of video (note that HDTV tops out at approx. 22 Mbps as I recall). 27 GB/22 Mbps = 9818 seconds or 2.7 hours (don't forget to convert bytes to bits, and I'm assuming base 10 for giga/mega, not base 2).
So yeah, the longer movies such as LotR, Lawrence of Arabia, etc. would be a bit squeezed for space. Until you consider that that was for a single layer disk. The spec allows for dual layer disks with a capacity around 50 GB. That's... adequate. If you STILL run into space issues, shunt all the extra features onto a second disk. And that'll happen, because no matter how much space is available, you'll still want more.
Not likely, it would take a couple of weeks max for the first compilers to appear
You obviously know nothing about Itanium, EPIC, VLIW, or pretty much anything else on this topic.
The issue isn't whether or not there's a compiler available. The issue is how GOOD the compiler is. In the case of a Very Large Instruction Word (VLIW) CPU like the Itanium, the compiler is the bottleneck for system performance. Why? Because the premise of these CPUs is that while they have a low clockspeed (750-800 MHz for Itanium), they execute many instructions per cycle - 10 or more. So while "slower", they get more done per cycle, resulting in a faster overall execution. It's up to the compiler to properly structure the executable machine code to take maximum advantage of this layout and keep all execution units of the CPU busy at all times, as well as reduce disseparate memory accesses and so forth.
The intial compilers that are released with these machines do it, but not as well as they could. In fact, compiler writers are still trying to grasp the issues with pipelining on modern CPUs and their much lower number of execution units, and this is without utilizing special instructions that explicitly do non-conflicting operations at once. We're still years away from writing fully optimized compilers for contemporary CPUs. And while there's been a great deal of work done on VLIW already (prior to Itanium), there's even more yet to be done. A decade for a "good" compiler is probably optimistic.
You may be wondering, what's the point anyway? If VLIW is so damn hard, why bother? Just ramp up that clock speed and get more CPU power! Well, that's nice, but it doesn't work in reality. We're starting to bump up against physical limitations in CPU speeds. Electrons are not magical particles that travel instantaeously. They are limited to slightly under the speed of light, which means roughly 1 cm per nanosecond. This doesn't seem to be a big deal until you realize that a 2.0 GHz CPU means each clock cycle is 0.5 nanoseconds. So if you have to fetch an instruction or data from main memory, and that memory is a mere 5 cm away, under optimal conditions you've just sat around for 10 clock cycles waiting on that memory to be fetched. This is ignoring the fact that there's propogation delays, latch delays, and other things. So go ahead, pump that CPU up to 10 GHz and waste even more clock cycles waiting on data. That or redesign the entire thing, expect the compiler to do the work and properly feed you data and instructions such that you can do 10x as much in the same amount of time, and all with no wasted CPU instructions.
That's the theory at least.
Reality is that not only does the compiler have to properly organize the machine code, it also has to have some idea of what the code is doing to do so. Compile the code w/ profiling, run the code against a "realistic" data set, then recompile it again feeding it the profile data. Many compilers can do this now, but it's rarely done. Because it's hard to guess a "realistic" data set, it's hard to acquire the same, how you expect the code to be used and how it actually is used are rarely the same, and there's more development time involved in all of this. So most companies don't bother. And despite what I said above, 2.0 GHz still hasn't reached the point where the CPU is sitting on it's ass more than it's doing work. Until we start approaching that point there's little incentive to put in the R&D time necessary to switch to a new CPU archictecture.
And, of course, on top of all of the above is the issue that Joe Sixpack will invariably see 2 GHz as faster than 750 MHz no matter what. Have fun with that one.
Congrats on using a bad benchmark.
Go read the hardware sites. Quake3 does ABSURDLY well on a P4 for some reason. Nobody can explain why. Jon Carmack doesn't even understand why last I read. But because of this, it's not a wonderful benchmark for AMD vs P4 comparisons. If it's all you play, then that's fine - benchmark it off that. Otherwise go look at other gaming benchmarks, like Serious Sam and Anandtech's new Unreal2 benchmark (which is of debatable value, admittedly).
Of course, then you might realize that people who have a clue are right, and that RDRAM costs 2-4x as much as DDR for no performance gain. Or for a performance loss in some cases.
And no, AMD doesn't use RDRAM. Nobody's even bothered to even design an AMD motherboard that uses Rambus. Partly because it makes no sense - AMD is still mostly used by people who are cost conscious, and RDRAM isn't desired in that catagory. Partly because it would be relatively difficult to design such a beast, due to lack of support from AMD. And partly because there's no performance advantage in the real world.
Oh... and even in Q3... consider how much more you spent for RDRAM, a P4, and the premium on the motherboard as compared to a comparable Athlon system. Then figure that out as a percentage of system cost. Then figure out how much performance percentage you gained. I bet the first is greater than the latter.
No, his points are valid.
Interleaved memory designs (interleaving on a slot basis rather than interleaving on the RAM stick itself) causes many issues. First off, you have to have more slots for equivalent upgradeability. And more slots requires you to have more layers on the motherboard due to increased number of traces (although, admittedly, RDRAM has vastly fewer traces than SDRAM even so). It also requires more real estate on the board, which isn't debateable. Second, you start running into timing issues more often with interleaving than standard memory clocking. Sure, as you say, it depends how robust your controller is. But, funny thing, RDRAM either has amazingly shitty controllers, or they're just vastly more prone to lockups when you have slightly differing speed memory.
As for heat - it's not a tradeoff issue. DDR didn't double the heat of standard SDRAM, and RDRAM isn't merely twice as hot as DDR. It's absurdly hot. And heat is a major computer issue already between CPUs, chipsets, and graphics cards throwing off oodles of heat as is. I don't know of a manufacturer that has a fan blowing specifically over the RAM, but RDRAM could certainly benefit from this. Heat kills systems (more specifically, thermal changes kill systems, but you'll get faster thermal changes with hotter components), so why design a system with RDRAM that is so much hotter than the alternatives? For how little (if any) of a performance gain?
Oh, and you claim RDRAM is twice the speed. Ok. Want to compare apples to apples? Put RDRAM in a non-interleaved system (yes, they're out there. They're even predominant) and the memory bandwidth is only slightly higher than DDR. Or compare it to an interleaved DDR system (again, they're out there). Boom. You have a DDR system with nearly as much bandwidth as RDRAM.
And, frankly, bandwidth ain't all it's cracked up to be. Funny how DDR systems routinely spank RDRAM systems in real world benchmarks (not pure memory bench's). Why? Because latency is king. Particularly if you're multitasking. You'll hit different areas of memory so much that bandwidth will make little difference compared to latency. And RDRAM has really, really miserable latency. And it gets higher as you add more sticks. So while it's great for some things (video editing/streaming, etc), it sucks for most applications.
As far meeting people in online games like EQ, well, if you are doing that you probably have a problem, not the least of which is a distorted sense of reality (looking for chicks in a game where 70% of the populous is male and 80% of the chicks are in relationships?).
Well, I met my fiancee in EQ, and we're getting married in just over a month.
For the record, however, neither of us was "looking" for someone else in the game (we were both doing the dating thing outside the game of course). And we've both said that we never thought we'd be those dweebs that meet someone else in game and fall in love and whatever. But hey, here we are. She lived 800 miles away from me at the time, so we started off just talking to each other in game. Then we used Gamevoice to talk to each other at night while playing, roughly 6-8 hours a night, every night (yes, we were serious EQ addicts and are in the uber guild on our server). Things progressed over a few months, and we met each other in real life, and eventually things worked out well enough that she was able to relocate to the same city I live in.
This is two people in their late-20s too, both college graduates in the technical field. We're not a couple of stupid school kids, and we took things slowly and carefully. And thus far it's working out. A couple of our best friends met each other on a MUD many years ago and got married. About a month ago they celebrated their 6th wedding anniversary. And yes, these are friends in real life who I knew from work.
We don't play that much now - on rare occasions we spend 2 or 3 nights a week playing now - but we do still play and enjoy playing together.
The internet is just another place to meet people, no different from bars, nightclubs, sport and social clubs, or anything else. Generally to meet someone it means you have to be yourself, you have to be careful, and you have to not be desperately seeking someone. Ignoring the first means you'll never find someone you fit with. Ignoring the second means you'll just hurt yourself. Ignoring the third means you'll never actually meet someone as they avoid the "needy" aura eminating from you.
Ok, I spent the last 3 years working (indirectly) for a credit card company that had really icky interest rates and did a lot of sell-throughs and joint marketing. So I'm pretty familiar with the details and legalities of everything here.
/. seems to think that the consumer doesn't want this crap, don't you think that credit card companies would stop doing it if the response rate was that low? Realistically the response rate on these suckers is really damn good. Anywhere from 5-20% for a good tie-in. So obviously there are people who do want this stuff.
The fact of the matter is, while everyone on
That said, if you ever respond to one of the tie-in's, you're a freaking idiot. The credit card companies make oodles of money on this stuff. Things like insurance against loss of employment are pretty much 100% profit for the insurer and the card company -- and they don't protect you, they protect the lender (from bankruptcy filing on your part in general). Price clubs and stuff are nearly never a good deal, and the credit card company gets 50-75% of the signup money.
I think Vermont is on the right track here though. With one caveat. I haven't seen a link to the actual law yet (yes, I looked), so I don't know exactly how it's worded or who it targets. But if it's overly broad then it most certainly CAN hurt consumers. Not sharing data with co-marketers is one thing. Not sharing data back to the credit bureaus is another. If the law prevents companies from reporting financial data back to Equifax, Trans Union, and Experion, then you, as a consumer, WILL be hurt by the law.
How so? Because of the way the credit system works. Not having a credit history is worse than having a bad history in many ways. The previously mentioned credit card company sold cards w/ 30%+ rates and $50-$100 annual fees to people with little to no credit histories. And since they didn't report GOOD credit information back to the bureaus, you never got better. In fact, you got worse because you had a new open line of credit with jack info about it. If companies can't report info back to the bureaus on Vermont residents, then every single one of them is going to end up in this limbo. The entire credit system in the US (excepting utilities, which have their own system) is based on data in these three bureaus. You can't buy a house or finance a car without a positive record here. Even opening a bank account or getting a job can be hard if there's enough issues (or enough lack of information) in the bureau databases.
If the law exempts the big three from generalized financial data sharing, that's fine. Otherwise you're going to wind up with serious credit problems should you not opt-in (which will then open you up to all the other crap mentioned previously).
Go look at the benchmarks. In particular, Anandtech's Unreal2 benchmark. This is the shape of things to come - and the MX cards can't handle it, even at low resolutions.
MX cards aren't DX8 compliant, and so while they'll work fine with most games out even now, they're not going to work worth a damn in a year or two.
Which merely proves that you haven't read the article, or pretty much ANY article on nVidia cards.
The MX isn't a stripped down GeForce3/4 - it's a totally different chip without nearly any of the features that make the GF3/4 powerful and a good match for today's and tomorrow's games.
The MX chips lack any vertex or pixel shaders. Yes, the GF4 MX has limited vertex shader support, but it's more akin to the GF2 shader than anything else.
Go look at the benchmarks. There's a reason that the MX line score so far below the regular ones. And a reason why they're performing abysmally in DX8 games - they aren't DX8 compliant. It's about like getting a 2D card and trying to run Quake with it - it simply doesn't have the guts needed to do it.
If you want to go on the cheap, pick up a full fledged GF3, GF3 Ti200, or the as-yet-unreleased GF4 4200 (I think that's the designation). All have the hardware needed for DX8 games (and contrary to the articles and to what some would have you believe, there are games out right now that make use of DX8 and these cards - one of them is Everquest), and they're cheap - under $200. I suspect the GF3 Ti200 will be heading toward $100 very soon now.
Personally I bought a GF2 the 2nd day it was out. I paid $350 for it. I would've liked to wait for a bit of a price drop, but my new computer wouldn't work with my old cards (dual Voodoo2 at the time). That was two years ago, and my GF2 is still perfectly acceptable for playing games. It's a bit slow in EQ, but I'll live. It won't handle the upcoming games though.
EQ is not a PvP game. There are servers that are PvP, with different rules (the original, Rallos Zek, is wide open PvP within x levels of your own. Later came team based PvP, and most recently alignment based PvP).
The fact of the matter, however, is that EQ is not designed for PvP and so PvP sucks.
Scarcity of resources is a nifty concept. It'd work great for my guild - since every other guild on our server is 9 months behind us. But that's rather unfair to others.
Currently items are removed from the economy by making them NO DROP - that is, once you loot the item off the monster's corpse, you can't trade it, sell it, give it away, drop it, etc. You either wear it, keep it in your inventory/bank, or destroy it. It's not a perfect solution, since it just means that all the droppable items of lower quality get sold more often, but it does keep the highest end items restricted to those who have earned them and reduces twinking.
Oh, and interest would be bad. Deflation is GOOD for the EQ economy. It's the ONLY way things fall out of the game really. I currently have over 600,000 platinum in my bank, and have another million or so worth in items to sell (I'm the guild treasurer). At one point my guild controlled 40% of all the platinum on the server. You really want us earning interest on that?
How do we spend all that cash? Well, burning 10-20k per day in peridots and other reagents is one way. On the rare occasions that a total wipe out demands necro's doing corpse summons that costs another 5k or so. And there's the odd items, quests, etc. that can suck up plat. I expect for there to be many large money sinks in Luclin still.
Which does absolutely nothing like what Moxi offers.
With leapfrog you're just slaving the other TV's to your main TV. If Bob is watching the primary TV and he wants to watch infomercials then you get to watch infomercials too! With Moxie Bob could watch infomercials, live or recorded, while you watch all the stuff you recorded on Skinemax last night in the privacy of your own bedroom.
This isn't likely to get into legal issues like Replay/SonicBlue since there's no sharing between individuals. And being able to do this kind of thing really is pretty cool -- I have 2 TiVo's, initially because my fiancee and I wanted to watch different shows at the same time, but being able to watch whatever show we want in whichever room we want would be really nice. And last I looked, TivoNet is still a PITA to use.
Smart entrepeneurs are doing this because they can charge you for every time you want to view something for media on demand.
And I sincerly doubt it'll be low cost. The cost of implementing these systems is tremendous. So far every single "video on demand" test has had the videos priced at the same or more than what it costs to go to a video store and rent them. The only plus is that you don't have to return them. But most systems don't have accomodations for pausing, rewinding, etc - although you can sometimes watch a movie as many times as you'd like in a given time frame.
I also deeply question whether or not this is a "dead end concept". If you think it is, then you MUST be expecting all the networks to go belly up and for all TV shows to go to a pay for play scheme - no more networks, only data brokers. After all, who's going to pay for the next episode of Buffy, Junkyard Wars, or whatever? Not the advertisers, not when you can fast forward past or delete out the commercials. Frankly, expecting modern broadcast and cable delivery schemes to go out the window in the next 20 years is a pipe dream. Hell, we can't even transition to HDTV, much less some fantastic new delivery and payment scheme.
Frankly, I love my TiVo's. They're the best thing that's happened to TV for me, well, ever. And everyone I show them to decides they need to get one sooner or later, because being freed from watching things when the networks want you to watch it is very, very refreshing.
I think Moxie is an interesting move on the PTV front, and perhaps an ugly echo of things to come. Because the cable companies and content providers are way off the rocker - there's still no HDTV cable interface standard because now the cable companies are demanding the right to delete data off of ANY recording device hooked up to their stream, and the hardware makers are telling them to shove it. This is the first box I've seen that is confirmed to give cable companies that "right".
I'm not an astrophysicist by any means, but beyond the general idea of "increase the breadth of human knowledge and understanding", there's the reality that we are totally and utterly dependant on that big ball of flaming hydrogen and helium 67 million miles away. Any ability to improve our modeling of that warmish ball of gas may result in some insight on how to eventually control it and thus control our own fates.
This is obviously assuming that we manage to not kill ourselves off beforehand, which remains questionable.
Long term is heat death of the universe, but if humanity survives those few quadrillion years then I think we'll have "succeeded".
Funny, I actually had this conversation with my fiancee night before last (thanks to Junkyard Wars torpedo episode talking about 50 kg displacing 50 L of water).
The reality is that the English units make more sense to you and I simply because that's what we've been raised with. They are no more or less sensical than metric units. Yes, I'm more comfortable with arbitrary measurements in the English system - I know my handspan is 10". I know one of my knuckles is roughly 1". I know how far a mile is, how big a gallon is, and how heavy 10 pounds is.
But to say that 1 kilometer, or 1 liter, or 1 kilogram is obviously not as simple to understand just shows how short sighted you are. If you'd been raised in a country that had transitioned to these measurements decades ago then you'd be wondering what the hell is up with these silly english units.
And yes, the only time it really matters is when you start doing conversions. You don't have to do them? That's nice. Not planning on doing much cooking are you? Because scaling recipes would sure as hell be easier to do with metric than English. Or doing reasonable conversions in any kind of construction (length of wood, sq ft->sq yd vs sq meter, etc). And I'm not even going to get into doing scientific calculations.
Oh, and before someone whines that metric doesn't make sense unless you convert to a metric time system, get a clue. The time system already has a fairly consistant base - base 60. There isn't a single English system that has anything even vaguely consistent. Besides which, once you get to seconds everyone starts using them as a metric baseline - milliseconds, nanoseconds, megaseconds, etc.
As a counterpoint, however, I do wish people would stop bringing up inane English units like bushel, league, hectares, etc. These units aren't used in anything but the same specialized fields that they were originally invented for. The only units that are in common usage are inches, feet, yards, miles (length); ounces, pounds, tons (weight); and teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, pints, quarts, gallons (volume - yes, this is the single most fucked up system of the bunch).
What all this boils down to, of course, is that the most expensive part of lift is the lower stages. As you get higher, it gets easier - thus the various investigations into high-altitude burns after being lifted there by jet, balloon, dirigible, and now maglev.
Yes, the previous numbers were off, but it is asymptotic. Certainly a 2 km or even 100 km rail isn't going to get you orbital speed. Not on this planet. But it is going to reduce the amount of expendables you have to burn (which, in turn, lowers your weight and further reduces how much you have to burn, yadda yadda yadda).
It remains to be seen that it's: 1) significantly less expensive, 2) as reliable (hah), and 3) as flexible (one of the key dearths of jet/balloon high altitude release) as current rocket launch systems. If it doesn't meet all three it'll die. If it does meet all three it may still die simply because there are people in charge that refuse to look at alternatives to big rockets.
So learn a different command set for every utility I want to view text files with?
No thanks. I'm pretty damn happy that I can use vi-like commands for most of the stuff I do - whether it be at the command line (ksh in vi mode), using vile (shrug, used it before vim), using less, or whatever.
Frankly, I very often have to muck around with data files that are hundreds of megabytes in size. And sometimes they get bad data in them. Like nulls. This immediately trashes most of the unix text based tools, all of which were written with the idea of a null terminated string. That nukes the data I was trying to get to. I generally end up having to beat the file into submission with a perl script and load the resulting file into vi(le).
It's a helluva lot easier when I can skip the rigamarole and just load the file into the editor. I'm probably going to look at switching from vile to vim based on the hope that vim is more efficient at loading large files, both in Unix and NT.
Of course, this means I'm going to have to go home, download the source and binaries there, burn them to a CD or copy to a floppy, and bring it to work. Why the hell doesn't vim have any mirrors with http download? ftp is blocked by our proxy at work, so I can't download files via ftp. No problems with http. But after poking around a good bit I couldn't find a single download site that offered anything but ftp.
Yes, I know. Our proxy sucks. Our admins are freaking overzealous. And ftp is the proper way to download files. Doesn't help me a bit.
Actually, put several coils or strips together and you will change their reflective signature. Generally in ways that aren't readily predictable (so, no, you couldn't get a signature back and say "that's two 10 Euro notes!"). So no, people aren't going to be able to magically read how much money is in your pocket. At least not unless you carefully make sure that none of the strips are aligned in the same direction, none are touching each other, etc.
It's also defeated easily by wrapping other foil around the primary strip/coil/etc. - as silly as it sounds, if you wrapped your wallet with aluminum foil, it'd be as good as scrambled.
Finally, tracking systems break pretty fast. Go to the ATM, get some Euro notes that now belong to "you". Go to lunch with a friend and have him pay by check, credit, whatever and you pay him in cash. That's an untrackable transaction. These kinds of transactions happen constantly, and there's no way to trace them. (Yes, get paranoid - do the above enough with one person and They will figure out that You and Him are friends, and then They will watch both of You. When you want to step back to reality, let me know).
Didn't this kind of thing come up when the US Treasury started adding magstripes to $100, $50, and $20 bills?
Of course they're not about realistic physics.
But, guess what - even if your computer game has a G that would crush humans, or elasticity that makes super balls look tame, or centers of gravity below the pavement, it still needs to be CONSISTENT.
And being consistent means modeling real world physics. With tweaks.
If you don't model real world physics properly though you're going to end up with erratic behavior that will either lead to frustrated players or exploitation by players (which often trivializes the game).
And while I never thought about it, now I understand the purpose behind some of the abysmal math courses I took in college. I guess it's a good thing I don't do game coding, since I certainly don't recall much at all from those courses. (Another reason why math profs should come out of their theoretical world and mention real world uses for some of the stuff upon occasion).
I believe so, or at least I recall someone working on some a year ago when it first came out. Check AVS Forum in the HTPC forum. Search there and you should find out the driver situ.
I'd give the real answer, but my workplace proxy blocks AVS.
Wholly trusting client-side packets in a MMORPG (or any competitive client-server system) is Bad Programming
The corallary to this is, don't send the client anything more than they REALLY need to know.
Why? Because you have to assume that if you send the data, it will be displayed. Even if you don't build a display for it (e.g. - numeric data used to display some other message) or you have conditions for it being displayed (e.g. - invisible things). Someone _will_ crack your data stream and figure out a way to get the info either inside the game or outside of it.
Witness ShowEQ for Everquest. There's not a great many hacks that have been done on the game (yes, a few memory editors... and to my knowledge using them results in your being banned sooner or later), but the ShowEQ author and later developers figured out the datastream and have broken every encryption since. Verant has become clued about these things slowly and is doing fewer stupid things. Instead of sending a monster's hit points, they now send a percentage (which is all that's displayed to the client anyway). Instead of sending a number indicating exactly how much you are liked or disliked by a group of monsters, they send a number indicating what level of faction you have (again, all that was displayed anyway).
The downside of not being able to trust the client is that you require a lot more server bandwidth - particularly CPU wise. And you do run into client side issues when you start talking about limited disclosure (e.g. - invisible players/monsters/etc) because in order to do it Right, changing from visible/invisible means that you change what data you're sending. If you have collision between PCs and other moving objects then how do you handle someone trying to walk through an invisible object? You either have to tell them it's there all the time (but don't display), or you have to let them walk through it and get corrected back by a server update, which is very confusing for the player. Fun fun fun.
Actually, it's more accurate to say "If you're looking for QUALITY sound from Creative Labs, you're clearly just an idiot, though". (Again, I will disclaim from stating anything regarding the Audigy, since I haven't bothered to do much research on it).
CL has never made a decent quality sound card. Even back when the original 8-bit Soundblaster came out it had horrid noise.
But there are consumer level audio cards that have decent to excellent quality. Turtle Beach has long made cards that were comparably priced but far better in quality. And while M-Audio isn't a big name by any means, $149 for a 4 channel 24/96 soundcard isn't absurdly priced either (unlike so many things in high end audio).
Even so, yes, most consumer sound cards have crap for audio quality. But look at video cards. Nvidia has quality issues, but ATI has long been known for very good results (and I'm not talking about very good on that rocking 15" monitor you bought for $100. I'm talking about use in an HTPC where you're outputing to a front projection monitor with screen sizes ranging from 60-120" diagonal).
And the silly thing here is that Creative could really increase sound quality without increasing cost much. It only takes a few more resistors and transformers in the right places. We're talking about $1-5 per card.
Hook up the Live to some real speakers. No. Not those. Virtually nothing you can buy that are advertised as "computer speakers" qualifies. I'm talking about an actual preamp/amp/receiver and some good home theater or music speakers.
The Live is very, very noisy. The connector for digital output conforms to no standard known on earth (yes, you can often connect it to other gear and it will work, but the voltage on the thing is totally out of whack). There's also absolutely no dejittering or noise protection on the digital output.
The DACs are low quality, which makes a big difference if you're not using the digital output (see above).
Most people putting together home theater PC's used the Live only because nothing else was available. That changed last year when M-Audio made the Audiophile 24/96 available. It has high quality 24 bit/96 KHz 2-channel output and a good digital output for 5.1. Apparantly the latest version has 4 input/output 24/96 channels now.
Best resource for information is the HTPC forum on AVS. I haven't been reading there recently, so I don't know what the real story is on the Audigy.
Personally, I found the review linked to be pretty useless. They didn't actually talk about sound quality at all, at least not beyond the absolute basics.