Rrrriiigght. The thing I love about homeopathic medicine, is that is has to be safe when the effective ingredient is no longer there, and to make it stronger, you just increase the nothing by diluting it more! Wheeee! Un-standardized herbs full of impurities with unknown effects are so safe 'cause they're natural, like Niteshade! Plus there are so many double-blind trials showing the safety and efficacy of these treatments!!11one1one/sarcasm
You do realize that the reason primary care doctors have to see so many patients and thus get to spend less time with each is because Giant HMOs and Insurance companies have slashed what they will pay the doctors? Your doctor might even lose money on the worst insurances and Medicare and Medicaid patients. IE it costs more for the overhead and office time than they get paid.
People think that primary care doctors do this to make shitloads of money, well guess again. They are trying to stay afloat, and earn a fair wage given that they went to 8 years of formal schooling and more as a resident, and work ~70 hour weeks. I did the math for some of the doctors where I work and it works out to only about $30/hour, hardly astronomical.
Be nice to your primary care doctor, they sure as hell aren't in it for the money, there are much easier ways to make it big.
The Xbox360 might be able to emulate a 733Mhz PIII ok, but the first Xbox(180 degrees?) is MUCH more than just that one chip - It's a tightly integrated GPU-chipset-memory-CPU setup with LOTS of specific hooks and tweaks and Nvidia copy-righted whiz-bang that games were highly optimized to.
The Xbox360 CPU must emulate the whole machine, not just the PIII part. The Nvidia graphics stuff will not be able to be offloaded onto a very different ATI chip, for legal and technical reasons. The whole platform must be emulated.
Now a high-end Dual-G5 can emulate a PIII at ~600Mhz, WITHOUT 3D graphics. Factor in how much less efficient CPUs are a with graphics rendering (ever try playing HL2 or Doom3 with a software renderer?). An example of this are N64 emulators and MAME: All 3D is done with the CPU and it takes a really fast machine today to play stuff from last generation. Current gen stuff runs like a slide-show, if at all.
As bit density goes up, and is multiplied across multiple layers, scratches become more and more of a serious issue.
EG: With CD's, minor scratches were played through with little, if any, musical detriment. Major scratches might ruin part of a song, or in the worst case, a whole track or two. But the rest of the CD was still good, so you could skip to other tracts.
Now DVD's, with higher density, have higher sensitivity to scratches, and also because movies are much longer than songs, skips are much less tolerable. Scratches that would go unnoticed on a CD can cause super annoying skips on a DVD and larger scratches can just obliterate whole parts of the movie. That's why i don't rent DVDs very often: Middle of Climactic Screen>>>>> opening credits? WTF? They just don't play smoothly far too often.
This is unacceptable now, but it's going to get WAY worse with higher density media and even more layers. There are two solutions:
1) "Diamond"(or some other super scratch resistant) coat the disc surfaces...or
2) PUT THEM IN FREAKING CADDIES YOU GREEDY, SHORT-SIGHTED DUCHE-BAGS!!! YOU HAVE TO SELL MOVIES IN A CASE ANYWAY? WHY NOT ONE THAT INTEGRALLY PROTECTS THE MEDIA AT ALL TIMES!!
Look, so it might cost a (little) bit more up front, but it would also raise the cost to pirates (the real, group operation type, not 13y-olds) by a MUCH bigger percentage of their revenue, thus cutting down on their profitability, ergo, more people will buy legit copies.
I was relieved to hear that Blue-Ray was going to be in caddies, but I heard they changed their minds? Anyone know? Sony had it right with Mini-disc and UMD physically, just wrong with the proprietary BS
Anyhow, the cynic in me says that the movie houses are counting on us having to buy an new, full-price copy every time a stray piece of dust ruins the new unprotected HD-DVD-DualSided-Quadlayer-ShinyGod.
1) No hard drive. Sure a big flash card might be able to hold some of the info, but it would have to be a real big sucker, like 1 gig. That would add cost and complexity and with the frequency of writes to the drive, lifetime would be a big issue.
2) PPC vs. x86. Ok, so like you said, emulation might solve this problem, but we still don't know for sure.
3) Nvidia proprietary graphics tech. The Xbox relies heavily on this, and it's successor will use ATI. This complicates graphics emulation, to what degree I am not really qualified to say, but it can't be easy to tip-toe around all those patents without some cycle-intense translations.
4) No white or black buttons. Granted, they kind'a suck, but many games made important use of them. I suppose the controller ports could be the same allowing use of the old controller, but that means having your old controllers around to swap in and out... not ideal.
5) Something else that I can't remeber. Good old Deschutes Brewery and their winter ale... mmmm beer. Damn need to go back to the store.
Yeah, You're right about analog "bandwith" being limited only by the precision of your equipment, but remember that LD disks were only mastered with so much fidelity, and that S/N ratio is fixed. I don't know the LD spec well enough to know the S/N ratio of the analog video track, but since it's similar in age to CD tech, I'm guessing that it's in the mid to upper 90s. Good, possibly better than DVD, but I don't think it includes all of the original 35mm resolution, so something has been "lost"
Was it Archimedese who said "give me a lever long enough and I will move the Earth"? Same principle here. Analog is only truly lossless when you have infinite precision in your recording and reading equipment. Even then, at some point the precision of recorded data is going to hit atomic limits, and to increase fidelity beyond that you have to increase the upper size limit of data blocks, which in turn increases the amount of media/second. Digital can also be truly lossless with infinite Mbps. Neither option is feasible.
Not to knock on analogue stuff though, I like it just fine for my amplifiers and music, but I realize that it has it's limits and drawbacks.
Analog is not lossless, and there is a resolution limit to it, based on what basically amounts to bandwidth, e.g. a recording on cassette tape vs the studio master on 2" tape at 30 inches per second: more tape (bandwidth) means more resolution. Digital compression is not always low quality either, bandwith~quality, more or less the same as analog. I bet that if you encode a cassette tape with 512Kbps OGG or MP3, you won't notice a quality loss, since all the fidelity of cassette can fit into that space easily.
A double sided 30cm CLV LD holds ~2 hours and there is a fixed amount of information there. DVDs have variable bit rate MPEG-2 and nearly 9GB on a double-layer disc. So the question is this: can the DVD hold all the LD data without compressing it to the point where fidelity and quality are lost?
Now, I'm not sure offhand how good the starwars LD quality is, I've yet to see it. I do know that I've seen Super-bit dvds that use the highest bit-rate MPEG that will fit on the disc, and they look much better than regular editions: better colour and nearly absent digital artifacting. So assuming that these LDs were ripped by a skilled person with good kit and encoded in the highest possible bit rate, I think they could easily contain all the fidelity of the LD master. As the movies are all close to 2h, a double layer disc works out to 10Mbps, the max DVD allows. Even on a single layer, things should be OK at 5Mbps, which is better than most DVDs.
Either way, Lucas still needs a good cock-punching for destroying a masterpiece. I just pretend that Ep I, II and III don't exist, and I pray that VII, VIII and IX don't get made while Lucas is around to screw them up too.
Ha ha ha, I should never post replies to old friends while drunk at midnight...
And Slashdot has a mean sense of timing, I have mod points the day after the story about my hometown. I'll have to poke around the corner and get your email address.../smalltown
Re:Info on the State of RI mentioned...
on
Wheat Field Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
Flat Eh? I've biked from my parent's house (in town) up hills more than 800 feet high, and there are plenty of places downhill from home. There are foothills pretty much 360*.
Someone from New Hampshire once called me a "Flatlander", I laughed and told him he was from the wrong side of the Rockies.
I'll second that!
I mean, for heavens sakes, It's my machine: if the folder doesn't say "My Pictures" am I going to think someone ELSE snuck their vacation pictures onto my hard-drive?
Putting "My" in front of everything is as dumb as putting "e" or "i" in front of it. All of which are only slightly less dumb than "Xtreem" labling.
Well, get out a bottle of digital white out, time to update the old "Burn all GIFs" pictures
Is there an Open source alternative to JPEG like PNG is to GIF? I always thought that JPEG was patent free, and now that GIF is finally out of patent trouble, we get saddled with this.
Screw it, I'm going back to Bitmaps and Wave files, hard drives are big enough these days.
She should just replace the index page with a short block in large type saying something to the effect of:
"Penguin books is a horrible company, who unjustfully used my domain name as a book title, and are now using extortion to try to get me to give up the domain name I bought in 1996. Click here to continue to my page, which is completely unrelated to the katie of the book, whose address is katieT.com."
What do you mean going to have, I see women doing that all the time right now!...And that's nothing compared to doing all of the above while balancing coffee and breakfast on the lap...
Heck, I'd move to Mars to get away from the Jehovah's Witnesses! Those door-to-doors are tiresome, but occasionally I'll play along, e.g.:
ME: I already believe in God and Jesus: What do you have to offer besides not having any fun on holidays and dieing for lack of readily availible medical treatments?
JW:...
ME: If God is infinite, it follows that heaven should be too, so why is it full already? (JW heaven Max Cap: 144,000) What if you're a better 'Witness' than some shmuck who died already, how come you don't get his place? Why is getting into heaven based solely on seniority rather than something meaningful like good works, or by faith alone, like Jesus said?
JW:...
Mormons, by the lot in my experience, tend to be better about pushing their faith on you, but one of my friends once crank-called their 800 number for a free bible (or whatever the mormons use) and talked a lot about witchcraft and develry etc. A few days later, missionaries showed up at her house and hounded her for weeks. She did everything short of a restraining order to get rid of them. Good times
The way things are looking, they very well might subsidize the price to make expensive hardware more palatable to consumers (especially in light of the cheap and fun offering from Nintendo), then sell the handheld on awesome graphics, a few killer games, and video capability.
Problem is, the way the specs read, this thing is still going to be expensive, 100s of dollars expensive, and it's going to suck juice like an electronic hooker. 2-10 hours, WTF? 10h on "standby" or "idle" mode maybe, but they wouldn't have included 2h unless it's easy to drain it that fast, be it video or games.
<Flashback to the early 90s> Sega GameGear is RADICAL! The graphics are way better than Nintendo's 'Lameboy'. Plus it plays TV!! I don't care that it eats batteries like popcorn. </Flashback>
We all remember what happend before right? I fully expect the PSP to be a tech wet-dream, but with (I'm guessing) average play time close to 3-4h, a huge price tag, and gimicky "movie" features, I can't see the PSP gaining more than a devoted nich market, like the GG did. Granted, it will have considerably more resources behind it, but it really doesn't seem poised to become a market-saturating force like the GBA
Well, all of the above, but in consideration that the 22" widescreen 3840x2400 IBM LCD displays are nice, but $4000 or more, and aren't likly to become much cheaper. Plus, they only do a ghastly 42Hz at max resolution with FOUR DVI inputs in parallel. At 1920x1200, they can do 60Hz MAX. Not much of an improvement over 1600x1200-100hz.
Half the problem I have with LCDs is that so many idiots (users and also manufacurer's defaults) crank the brightness and contrast up to 100% and the think "OMG thi5 rOxOrs", because it's like reading black print on a lightbulb. But those settings suck for anything other than text.
I've spent the last few days analyzing 16-bit grayscale micrographs of neurons for my thesis. Even after correcting the settings on the LCDs (Dells with DVI) in the computer lab, they're still next to useless for visualizing fine structure. Very faint and very saturated images appear all white or all black.
Now, at my workstation the 22" pure flat, 1600x1200-100Hz, well calibrated monitor... images jump to life. It's amazing: Compression artifacts and banding in JPEGs stand out like a sore thumb, it's almost too good of a monitor. I'm about to hack off the fingers of the meat-head who keeps leaving fingerprints on the screen.
I'm not sure LCDs will ever reach that level of precision, and since the 22" CRT I use is still not much more than a 17" LCD, I don't know if LCDs will be cost competative if and when they get there.
...and will be supported by ATI, IBM, and McDonald's. It will both have a hard drive, and not have a hard drive.
Oh, then they must be using the new Heisenberg UncertaintyTM hard-drives as an anti-hacking measure.
If you open the case to mod, the Heisenberg drive will assume either a *present* or *absent* state.
Mod at your own risk!!
If you want actual Dos for perfect compatability..
on
Is DOS Gaming Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Nothing is stopping you from dual booting say winXP and win98(with it's associated dos). Win98 sp2 cds are easy to come by dirt cheap or free. If you had an older computer you probably still have them lying around, and it's still all over the p2p networks.
In my experience, you can chop a lot of crap out of win98 and fit it in a fairly small partition (people have fit it into like 30 megs). Just don't use NTFS for any partition you need to access from win98. Set up XP or 2k for dual boot and set 98 to go straight to a prompt.
But seriously, seeing as this guy aparently knows about costume design, I don't know why he didn't wear a dance belt. ESPECIALLY when wearing a tight unitard. Keeps your junk from flailing all over the place and it saves people from the horror of man-camel-toe.
Ok, dance belts fit like a tight thong, but his temporary discomfort would have prevented my mental scarring.
Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!!!!!!!!! Except he's a giant killer robot santa with joy-seeking missiles
Everybody sing along now!
He knows when you are sleeping, He know when you're on the can, He'll hunt you down and blast your ass from here to Pakistan! Ohhhhhh You better not breathe, You better not move, You're better off dead, I'm telling you dude, Santa Claus is gunning you DOWN!!!!
[Studio exec] No no no, those are different movies you see, because one comes with Gollum, one comes with special art, and... *achoo*/blows nose on your $50 bill [/Studio exec]
Wide screen with the extra footage is all you need. "Full-screen" is a cruel misnomer.
/Looking forward to an eventual 12-hour Lord of the Rings marathon
Slashdot Mirror
Rrrriiigght. The thing I love about homeopathic medicine, is that is has to be safe when the effective ingredient is no longer there, and to make it stronger, you just increase the nothing by diluting it more! Wheeee! Un-standardized herbs full of impurities with unknown effects are so safe 'cause they're natural, like Niteshade! Plus there are so many double-blind trials showing the safety and efficacy of these treatments!!11one1one /sarcasm
You do realize that the reason primary care doctors have to see so many patients and thus get to spend less time with each is because Giant HMOs and Insurance companies have slashed what they will pay the doctors? Your doctor might even lose money on the worst insurances and Medicare and Medicaid patients. IE it costs more for the overhead and office time than they get paid.
People think that primary care doctors do this to make shitloads of money, well guess again. They are trying to stay afloat, and earn a fair wage given that they went to 8 years of formal schooling and more as a resident, and work ~70 hour weeks. I did the math for some of the doctors where I work and it works out to only about $30/hour, hardly astronomical.
Be nice to your primary care doctor, they sure as hell aren't in it for the money, there are much easier ways to make it big.
The Xbox360 might be able to emulate a 733Mhz PIII ok, but the first Xbox(180 degrees?) is MUCH more than just that one chip - It's a tightly integrated GPU-chipset-memory-CPU setup with LOTS of specific hooks and tweaks and Nvidia copy-righted whiz-bang that games were highly optimized to.
The Xbox360 CPU must emulate the whole machine, not just the PIII part. The Nvidia graphics stuff will not be able to be offloaded onto a very different ATI chip, for legal and technical reasons. The whole platform must be emulated.
Now a high-end Dual-G5 can emulate a PIII at ~600Mhz, WITHOUT 3D graphics. Factor in how much less efficient CPUs are a with graphics rendering (ever try playing HL2 or Doom3 with a software renderer?). An example of this are N64 emulators and MAME: All 3D is done with the CPU and it takes a really fast machine today to play stuff from last generation. Current gen stuff runs like a slide-show, if at all.
If they pull this off, MS deserves a golf clap.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
As bit density goes up, and is multiplied across multiple layers, scratches become more and more of a serious issue.
EG:
With CD's, minor scratches were played through with little, if any, musical detriment. Major scratches might ruin part of a song, or in the worst case, a whole track or two. But the rest of the CD was still good, so you could skip to other tracts.
Now DVD's, with higher density, have higher sensitivity to scratches, and also because movies are much longer than songs, skips are much less tolerable. Scratches that would go unnoticed on a CD can cause super annoying skips on a DVD and larger scratches can just obliterate whole parts of the movie. That's why i don't rent DVDs very often: Middle of Climactic Screen>>>>> opening credits? WTF? They just don't play smoothly far too often.
This is unacceptable now, but it's going to get WAY worse with higher density media and even more layers. There are two solutions:
1) "Diamond"(or some other super scratch resistant) coat the disc surfaces...or
2) PUT THEM IN FREAKING CADDIES YOU GREEDY, SHORT-SIGHTED DUCHE-BAGS!!! YOU HAVE TO SELL MOVIES IN A CASE ANYWAY? WHY NOT ONE THAT INTEGRALLY PROTECTS THE MEDIA AT ALL TIMES!!
Look, so it might cost a (little) bit more up front, but it would also raise the cost to pirates (the real, group operation type, not 13y-olds) by a MUCH bigger percentage of their revenue, thus cutting down on their profitability, ergo, more people will buy legit copies.
I was relieved to hear that Blue-Ray was going to be in caddies, but I heard they changed their minds? Anyone know? Sony had it right with Mini-disc and UMD physically, just wrong with the proprietary BS
Anyhow, the cynic in me says that the movie houses are counting on us having to buy an new, full-price copy every time a stray piece of dust ruins the new unprotected HD-DVD-DualSided-Quadlayer-ShinyGod.
Sheesh for the love of All that is holy, Don't mod up the WRONG CODE!!!!!11oneone!11 It's:
UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A (SELECT for 2p) START
/nitpick
//lovingly caresses his NES
Can't drive here, it's BAT country!!!
/ fear and loathing
*whack!* Not to beat a dead horse *whack! smack!*
1) No hard drive. Sure a big flash card might be able to hold some of the info, but it would have to be a real big sucker, like 1 gig. That would add cost and complexity and with the frequency of writes to the drive, lifetime would be a big issue.
2) PPC vs. x86. Ok, so like you said, emulation might solve this problem, but we still don't know for sure.
3) Nvidia proprietary graphics tech. The Xbox relies heavily on this, and it's successor will use ATI. This complicates graphics emulation, to what degree I am not really qualified to say, but it can't be easy to tip-toe around all those patents without some cycle-intense translations.
4) No white or black buttons. Granted, they kind'a suck, but many games made important use of them. I suppose the controller ports could be the same allowing use of the old controller, but that means having your old controllers around to swap in and out... not ideal.
5) Something else that I can't remeber. Good old Deschutes Brewery and their winter ale... mmmm beer. Damn need to go back to the store.
Yeah, You're right about analog "bandwith" being limited only by the precision of your equipment, but remember that LD disks were only mastered with so much fidelity, and that S/N ratio is fixed. I don't know the LD spec well enough to know the S/N ratio of the analog video track, but since it's similar in age to CD tech, I'm guessing that it's in the mid to upper 90s. Good, possibly better than DVD, but I don't think it includes all of the original 35mm resolution, so something has been "lost"
Was it Archimedese who said "give me a lever long enough and I will move the Earth"? Same principle here. Analog is only truly lossless when you have infinite precision in your recording and reading equipment. Even then, at some point the precision of recorded data is going to hit atomic limits, and to increase fidelity beyond that you have to increase the upper size limit of data blocks, which in turn increases the amount of media/second. Digital can also be truly lossless with infinite Mbps. Neither option is feasible.
Not to knock on analogue stuff though, I like it just fine for my amplifiers and music, but I realize that it has it's limits and drawbacks.
Analog is not lossless, and there is a resolution limit to it, based on what basically amounts to bandwidth, e.g. a recording on cassette tape vs the studio master on 2" tape at 30 inches per second: more tape (bandwidth) means more resolution. Digital compression is not always low quality either, bandwith~quality, more or less the same as analog. I bet that if you encode a cassette tape with 512Kbps OGG or MP3, you won't notice a quality loss, since all the fidelity of cassette can fit into that space easily.
A double sided 30cm CLV LD holds ~2 hours and there is a fixed amount of information there. DVDs have variable bit rate MPEG-2 and nearly 9GB on a double-layer disc. So the question is this: can the DVD hold all the LD data without compressing it to the point where fidelity and quality are lost?
Now, I'm not sure offhand how good the starwars LD quality is, I've yet to see it. I do know that I've seen Super-bit dvds that use the highest bit-rate MPEG that will fit on the disc, and they look much better than regular editions: better colour and nearly absent digital artifacting. So assuming that these LDs were ripped by a skilled person with good kit and encoded in the highest possible bit rate, I think they could easily contain all the fidelity of the LD master. As the movies are all close to 2h, a double layer disc works out to 10Mbps, the max DVD allows. Even on a single layer, things should be OK at 5Mbps, which is better than most DVDs.
Either way, Lucas still needs a good cock-punching for destroying a masterpiece. I just pretend that Ep I, II and III don't exist, and I pray that VII, VIII and IX don't get made while Lucas is around to screw them up too.
Ha ha ha, I should never post replies to old friends while drunk at midnight... /smalltown
And Slashdot has a mean sense of timing, I have mod points the day after the story about my hometown. I'll have to poke around the corner and get your email address...
Flat Eh?
I've biked from my parent's house (in town) up hills more than 800 feet high, and there are plenty of places downhill from home. There are foothills pretty much 360*.
Someone from New Hampshire once called me a "Flatlander", I laughed and told him he was from the wrong side of the Rockies.
I bit bitter Jacob? After all, you did leave Walla Walla for Grinnell, Iowa (population 9,100), at least for college.
Frick'n home town, Oh how I wish I had mod points now.
/Surprized my Slashdot id is lower than yours
//Wondering if you lost an earlier accound
///Waiting for the negative mod points
I'll second that!
I mean, for heavens sakes, It's my machine: if the folder doesn't say "My Pictures" am I going to think someone ELSE snuck their vacation pictures onto my hard-drive?
Putting "My" in front of everything is as dumb as putting "e" or "i" in front of it. All of which are only slightly less dumb than "Xtreem" labling.
Well, get out a bottle of digital white out, time to update the old "Burn all GIFs" pictures
Is there an Open source alternative to JPEG like PNG is to GIF? I always thought that JPEG was patent free, and now that GIF is finally out of patent trouble, we get saddled with this.
Screw it, I'm going back to Bitmaps and Wave files, hard drives are big enough these days.
She should just replace the index page with a short block in large type saying something to the effect of:
"Penguin books is a horrible company, who unjustfully used my domain name as a book title, and are now using extortion to try to get me to give up the domain name I bought in 1996. Click here to continue to my page, which is completely unrelated to the katie of the book, whose address is katieT.com."
It would save on bandwith too
What do you mean going to have, I see women doing that all the time right now! ...And that's nothing compared to doing all of the above while balancing coffee and breakfast on the lap...
Heck, I'd move to Mars to get away from the Jehovah's Witnesses! Those door-to-doors are tiresome, but occasionally I'll play along, e.g.:
...
...
ME: I already believe in God and Jesus: What do you have to offer besides not having any fun on holidays and dieing for lack of readily availible medical treatments?
JW:
ME: If God is infinite, it follows that heaven should be too, so why is it full already? (JW heaven Max Cap: 144,000) What if you're a better 'Witness' than some shmuck who died already, how come you don't get his place? Why is getting into heaven based solely on seniority rather than something meaningful like good works, or by faith alone, like Jesus said?
JW:
Mormons, by the lot in my experience, tend to be better about pushing their faith on you, but one of my friends once crank-called their 800 number for a free bible (or whatever the mormons use) and talked a lot about witchcraft and develry etc. A few days later, missionaries showed up at her house and hounded her for weeks. She did everything short of a restraining order to get rid of them. Good times
The way things are looking, they very well might subsidize the price to make expensive hardware more palatable to consumers (especially in light of the cheap and fun offering from Nintendo), then sell the handheld on awesome graphics, a few killer games, and video capability.
Problem is, the way the specs read, this thing is still going to be expensive, 100s of dollars expensive, and it's going to suck juice like an electronic hooker. 2-10 hours, WTF? 10h on "standby" or "idle" mode maybe, but they wouldn't have included 2h unless it's easy to drain it that fast, be it video or games.
<Flashback to the early 90s>
Sega GameGear is RADICAL! The graphics are way better than Nintendo's 'Lameboy'. Plus it plays TV!! I don't care that it eats batteries like popcorn.
</Flashback>
We all remember what happend before right? I fully expect the PSP to be a tech wet-dream, but with (I'm guessing) average play time close to 3-4h, a huge price tag, and gimicky "movie" features, I can't see the PSP gaining more than a devoted nich market, like the GG did. Granted, it will have considerably more resources behind it, but it really doesn't seem poised to become a market-saturating force like the GBA
Well, all of the above, but in consideration that the 22" widescreen 3840x2400 IBM LCD displays are nice, but $4000 or more, and aren't likly to become much cheaper. Plus, they only do a ghastly 42Hz at max resolution with FOUR DVI inputs in parallel. At 1920x1200, they can do 60Hz MAX. Not much of an improvement over 1600x1200-100hz.
Half the problem I have with LCDs is that so many idiots (users and also manufacurer's defaults) crank the brightness and contrast up to 100% and the think "OMG thi5 rOxOrs", because it's like reading black print on a lightbulb. But those settings suck for anything other than text.
I've spent the last few days analyzing 16-bit grayscale micrographs of neurons for my thesis. Even after correcting the settings on the LCDs (Dells with DVI) in the computer lab, they're still next to useless for visualizing fine structure. Very faint and very saturated images appear all white or all black.
Now, at my workstation the 22" pure flat, 1600x1200-100Hz, well calibrated monitor... images jump to life. It's amazing: Compression artifacts and banding in JPEGs stand out like a sore thumb, it's almost too good of a monitor. I'm about to hack off the fingers of the meat-head who keeps leaving fingerprints on the screen.
I'm not sure LCDs will ever reach that level of precision, and since the 22" CRT I use is still not much more than a 17" LCD, I don't know if LCDs will be cost competative if and when they get there.
Viva la Electron Beam!!!
Oh, then they must be using the new Heisenberg UncertaintyTM hard-drives as an anti-hacking measure.
If you open the case to mod, the Heisenberg drive will assume either a *present* or *absent* state.
Mod at your own risk!!
Nothing is stopping you from dual booting say winXP and win98(with it's associated dos). Win98 sp2 cds are easy to come by dirt cheap or free. If you had an older computer you probably still have them lying around, and it's still all over the p2p networks.
In my experience, you can chop a lot of crap out of win98 and fit it in a fairly small partition (people have fit it into like 30 megs). Just don't use NTFS for any partition you need to access from win98. Set up XP or 2k for dual boot and set 98 to go straight to a prompt.
Giant man-gina! Not something I wanted to see.
But seriously, seeing as this guy aparently knows about costume design, I don't know why he didn't wear a dance belt. ESPECIALLY when wearing a tight unitard. Keeps your junk from flailing all over the place and it saves people from the horror of man-camel-toe.
Ok, dance belts fit like a tight thong, but his temporary discomfort would have prevented my mental scarring.
I need to go put bleach in my eyes
Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!!!!!!!!!
Except he's a giant killer robot santa with joy-seeking missiles
Everybody sing along now!
He knows when you are sleeping,
He know when you're on the can,
He'll hunt you down and blast your ass from here to Pakistan!
Ohhhhhh
You better not breathe,
You better not move,
You're better off dead, I'm telling you dude,
Santa Claus is gunning you DOWN!!!!
Run for your LIVES!!!!!
God I love Futurama
Wide screen with the extra footage is all you need. "Full-screen" is a cruel misnomer.