and, likely, attempting to close the
non-activation loophole for volume licensed
copies with Longhorn
First, plenty of pirated versions of XP
just use a cracked activator. VLK might make up
for a larger percentage, only because it takes
less effort. Fix that approach, and they'll
just shift the balance rather than significantly
affect the total.
Second, although to the average home user,
the magic acronym "VLK" might sound like a
godsend for piracy, for the average corporate
IT person dealing with more than a dozen
machines, the idea of not using a
VLK sounds like insanity.
I spend almost half of my time at work
healing PCs (around 150 wired employees,
and not even my primary job description
to keep them all happy). For anything
more serious than "I can't print" (hyperbole,
but not all that much), I just reinstall XP.
Now, if I had to go through activation each
time I do that... <Shudder>.
If every Joe User and even every Bob SuperAdmin
had to pay full price (even OEM) for every single
copy of Windows & Office (and Photoshop and x and
y and z) out there, you would see a serious exodus
to Linux and related.
Agree completely. You can currently get a decent
new PC for well under $500. If the cost of that
tripled just for software licensing, no one
would run Windows.
Do you expect Tivo to say "FUCK YOU WORLD,
WE'Z DOING IT OUR WAY!"
Yes, actually, I do.
If you bought a TiVo, you paid for a hardware
device with certain capabilities, as well as
a subscription to a given level of service from
the parent company.
TiVo, IMO, therefore has an obligation
to continue providing the service people paid
for (in some cases, up to three years up
front).
As for getting sued out of existance - IANAL,
but TiVo doesn't do anything a VCR can't,
except making the same features available in a
more convenient and higher resolution format. In
order to successfully sue TiVo, a media provider
would need to start by basically undoing the
classic BetaMax decision.
And if TiVo won't stand up for its customers
with the support of a pretty strong
legal precedent, I would not want to do business
wih them.
So, by your reasoning we only protect those
who have done only right? What do we do those
who have been sent to prison and released for
serving their time - let them rot in there?
Pretty harsh judgement.
Slashdot does not equal a court of law.
Considering that, a posting about this issue
here can serve only one purpose - Trying to
scare Nintendo by pointing a nest of angry
geeks at them.
Well, how many people felt sorry for Rush
after getting busted with a Perc habit,
after he expressed for years how
the government should just round up and
execute all the junkies?
Same situation.
Nintendo may have overstepped its bounds
here, but they didn't exactly pick on a
random innocent (no pun intended) party
for whom we should all feel sympathy.
SG has had a bad rep for years over
aggressively "protecting" their IP.
Should we all cry foul because a far, far
bigger company has decided to pull the same
sort of stunt SG has pulled dozens of times?
I think not.
And with my super powers of Pricewatch-checking...
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
OK, can we build a reasonable PC for just $100
and a copy of Linux?
The cheapest reasonably modern (Athlon XP 2000)
barebones system on Pricewatch goes for $76.
Now you'll have to excuse me, I think I'll spend
the rest of the morning finding a cure for cancer,
and after that, on to the really hard
problems, like deciding what to cook for supper.
If I run Bochs to boot Win2k3 on an old 386, will
I get a Slashdot FP?
Shit, I suppose I can look forward to seeing that
tomorrow now, can't I?
I appreciate emulation, I really do. But aside from
the author of the emulator, no one else gets to
claim geek cred from using one. Had this person
really gotten OS X to run on a 68040, I'd consider it
somewhat cool. Running it on an emulator, though?
Here, hold on, I'll come back and describe my experience
getting SMB3 to run under SNES9x on a 2GHz Win2k box...
Woo-woo, rolling in the coolness now, baby!
But why do you think you're important enough
for them to care about?
I've always considered that response as a
red herring... Technically true that, right
at this moment, no government or corporation
cares about me enough to follow my every move.
That doesn't mean such information can't hide
in a database somewhere for 50 years, until I
decide to, I don't know, run for president or
apply for a mortgage or something like that.
"Records clearly show that the defendant came
within 10 feet of a known terrorist leader on
two occasions, once in Times Square, and once
on the Boston subway."
"Gee, we'd love to offer you insurance, but
tracking data shows that on June 15th, 2007,
you exceeded the posted speed limit by 1500mph,
strangely vanishing from Newton, MA, to a
number of points in Southern France over a
period of 47 seconds. Oh, and as much as we
hate to do this, well, you know the
"mandatory incrimination" laws and all, so a
customs agent waiting outside would like a
word with you..."
No one cares about me now. But someone
tracking me in realtime doesn't concern me
nearly as much as, say, an overly-zealous
DA grasping at straws to close a particularly
irksome unsolved crime ten years down the road.
I wonder if for $349, a hundred dollars more,
they could produce a similar package for here
in the US with a nic instead of a modem along
with some sort of optical drive.
From Pricewatch:
"Complete sys - Intel Celeron 2.0GHz 400FSB Win
CD COA 128MB 20GBHD CDROM Video Sound Keyboard
mouse USD$151, including shipping.
Add a monitor (15", $49 including shipping listed
at pricewatch, or just look around - people can't
give them away, I threw out three working
15-inchers just in the past six months), and you
have a complete working system for $200 even.
And while certainly not something I would trust
my tax records to, still a FAR superior machine
to this new little toy from AMD.
People who want absolutely rock-bottom prices for
computers need to get out of the "Oh, did you buy
a Dell or an HP" mindset.
Ditto for "deconstruct." If I had a dime
for every fool who throws that around without
having read a word of Derrida I'd be a rich
man...
If I had a dime for every fool who reads another
"respected" fool's redefinition of a perfectly
good word, I could afford to have all such fools
taken out and shot.
"Deconstruct"? To take apart.
"Postmodernism"? Get back to me in 30 years,
meaningless otherwise.
Your author-of-the-week may have different
ideas, but if you have the purpose of using
words to communicate, rather than to
posture yourself above all the other pretentious
twits playing the same game... Well, you might
find it helpful not to use definitions from a
source that you yourself point out few people
have read, and stick with English (or at
least something true to its apparent Latinate
root word and any applied pre/in/suf-fixes).
Not mine. I burn hydrogen to get my water. No one's messing
with my precious bodily fluids.
Ah, not any better. You could just as well prove that
in any given glass of "newly made" H2O, you have a few
million hydrogen molecules that once gave Hitler the
winds...
You just can't escape the "bio" part of living in a
biosphere.
I'll probably still convert from the FLAC
files to MP3 (probably 256kbps) for my main
audio listening
Same here... My home collection I keep in FLAC.
When I need to take my required-listening-library
elsewhere, I convert to Q7 Vorbis. And for the
car, I burn a CD of ABR MP3 (Not VBR, just because
MP3 CD players seem to have truly horrible
support for it, while most can deal with ABR).
I doubt anyone will want to hear this, but
I fail to see why more traditional advertisers
can pay-per-play to get their message out, but
the RIAA (which has music as its product, thus
radio play seems comparable to giving out free
samples of product) cannot?
Don't get me wrong, it actually does please me
to hear about the government finally cracking
down on payola, and I hate the RIAA as much as
any self-respecting geek. But in this case...
I wouldn't necessarily call it
black-and-white. Perhaps a matter of monopolistic
control of a market, but beyond that?
As an aside... This addresses labels trying to
do an end-run around the payola laws... But a much
more obvious way to comply in letter if not in
spirit exists. Payola laws forbid paying for
songs without admitting it. Who sees the
next big thing in radio as "and now, BoiBand9000's
latest hit, brought to you by the kind, friendly,
law-abiding, just-shy-of-saintly folks at Sony"?
why they are bothering to do this, and
should they really be concentrating on
developing smaller true VGA screens
Because it comes basically "free"... To produce
something resembling the human visual range
on a screen, you need (at least) three pixels,
regardless of the colorspace you choose (note
that, although you could theoretically
have those pixels stacked into the plane of the
display, for some reason (money?) no one seems
to do that).
So, ClearType and what OS-X use, which many
have misunderstood and called identical to
this, both make use of the actual 3x horizontal
resolution of the screen to make text more
readable, as it smooths out vertically-oriented
diagonals (which dominate "hard" text strokes).
Now, ClearType et al can only use the physically
higher horizontal resolution, because at the
vertical level, the screen resolution equals the
subpixel resolution. They also only use this on
text, rather than the entire display.
How to solve that? Simple - Add a fourth pixel
(which also just happens to address the common
complaint about display brightness) and rearrange
the linear RGB triad into a square RG BW quartet
(tetrad?).
Thus, although the full-color-per-pixel resolution
has remained the same, you can, for most purposes,
get effectively double the resolution in both
directions.
Would I rather have cheap "true" 3840x2560
displays available? Of course! In the meantime,
I sure as hell won't complain if someone found
a way to make my 1920x1280 panel look better.
but then they've probably got sheds full of
existing screens that they can't shift at a profit
and intend to use this as a stopgap until they've
shifted them.
Despite my last point above, this technology
sadly will not help make existing panels
look better. It should, however, not cost
significantly more to manufacture new panels
with a new subpixel configuration, thus costing
roughly the same as existing panels.
If you read some of my posts on that very topic, you'll
see that I agree with you, for the most part.
However, where more-than-two channels does matter,
you described as the most likely situations in which to
listen to music - Moving around the house (better position
independant spatial reproduction), in a noisy environment
(better resistance to directional noise), etc.
But no... Sitting at home, in the living room, deliberately
"just" listening to music - A good pair of 'phones will do
worlds more for sound quality than adding more
channels to the signal. No argument there.
How many people do you know who have a 5.1 system
and would sit down and actually listen to music in that
environment?
Several, but I'll grant your point - Still not very many,
percentage-wise.
How many 5.1 systems are installed in cars again?
I actually see that as the most likely place for 5.1 to catch
on... Most newer cars already have digital audio systems, as
well as 4+ speakers. The leap to 5.1 (or more realistically,
4.1) would take only a bass tube (a standard upgrade for most
car audio systems) and software support.
You can get a 200GB HDD (which will store at least
1000 CDs as FLAC) for $90. Or, for the "financially
disadvantaged", a spool of 50 DVD+Rs costs (checks
Pricewatch) $11.
It takes me less than a day of work to make enough
to buy that 200GB HDD.
It takes me a LOT more than a day to re-rip my
entire CD collection.
Thus, it makes sense to save myself the
hassle of ever needing to re-rip my CDs
again.
Or, considering it from another angle...
A CD costs an average of $6-$10 (I buy
mostly used and indie). My SO's car eats
them at a rate of 1 per month (more, in a
bad month, or when she feels in a rush and
won't stop for five minutes to let me copy
the disc). $90/$6=15. In about a year,
having the ability to recreate bitwise-identical
CDs to replace originals, rather than re-buy
them, will/has saved me the cost of the drive
it takes to store them.
Whether for quality or for backups, ripping
to lossless just makes sense.
The first year you discover MP3, you get
everything you always wanted, but could
never find on CD. The second year, you
go back to your first-year tracks, realize
that 128/Xing sounds like ass, and redownload
them at 192/LAME.
Then the third year you realize MP3 in general
sounds like ass, and switch to all Vorbis. The
fourth year, you realize that not all Vorbis
encoders work equally well (same as with Xing
vs Lame), and switch to GT3 or aoTuV at Q10.
The fifth year you realize that you can hear
(admittedly very little, but some) distortion
even at the highest possible Vorbis quality you
can get, and try using things like AAC, hacked
WMV, and other oddballs.
Finally, the sixth year, you realize that HDD
space has grown to the point where you can
afford to store your entire CD collection in a
lossless format, and rip everything, one last
time, to FLAC.
And on the seventh year, I finally got to rest.;-)
Now, of course, 5.1ch 24bps@192KHz will become
the dominant PCM format (or something even more
exotic and non-PCM, like DSD used by SACD), and
we start the entire cycle over. Those damned
Jonses, they just keep getting better compression
ratios than me!
15 bucks is a lot anywhere for a cd! ... that's why i like online music stores where
you can get singles for $1.
Uhh...
A typical CD has 12-18 tracks. At $1 per track,
that still comes out to around $15 per CD,
on average.
Now, in fairness, you do mention that you
mostly listen to music where a given CD only has
a couple of good tracks. So for such tripe,
I suppose only buying the top-40s that MTV would
play works out, economically.
I'd recommend a different solution, though - Quit
supporting an industry that sells 2 million
copies of a 12-track CD for $16, justified by
2 singles. For starters, try shunning the
wall-o'-hits. Work your way on to only buying
indies. If you must buy major-label crap,
at least buy used.
Always keep in mind, when buying anything,
that if you buy it, they'll keep making more of
the same. That applies to both the good and
the bad.
My point is: since our brain can only pay
attention to one screen at a time, why do we
need two of them?
Three good reasons come to mind...
First, peripheral vision. I almost always keep SysInternals' Process Explorer (similar in use to
Windows Task Manager, but about a million times
better) open on my second desktop. If a process
starts or stops, I notice it instantly without
even needing to change focus off my primary
display.
Second, I also keep WinAmp and Yahoo IM (which I
use for work... No, really!) open on the second
display. I could get by without them always
open, but it takes less time to flick my eye
over at the other screen than it does to pop
up a minimized window.
And, of course, when needing to use a reference
for something (say, the parameters passed to a
hellishly long function), having the reference
material (such as a webpage or help file) open
on the second screen makes life FAR easier than
needing to keep flipping back and forth between
to fullscreen windows.
yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I don't mean
to sound callous, but realy...
NEVER underestimate the needs of Amateur
Radio in catastrophic situations.
During the biggest domestic US "disaster" of
the past 50 years, one that actually targetted
a building used as a communications
nexus (namely, 09/11/2001), over a third of
cell phones in the area still worked. And
all satellite phones, though uncommon,
still worked.
We don't need ham radio anymore. period. It
once served a valuable purpose; that purpose
has ceased to exist. Buggy whips once served
a valuable purpose as well.
In a true, near-planetary-scale disaster (let's
say the kooks have it right and the Yellowstone
caldera takes out the entire South/Midwestern
US sometime in the near future, as an example),
it won't really matter if people can call
for help, because no help will come.
It's got to be way easier to extend the life
span of just one organ when you don't have to
worry about keeping the rest of your body alive,
right?
Well, for any other organ, yes.
For the brain?
Sadly, although humans usually die of
some other critical organ (ie, heart) failing,
our brains still steadily deteriorate as we
age.
By about age 150, we'd all have the mental
capacity of broccoli. Now, you might think,
"sure, 150 beats beats 80", but consider the
bigger problem - Immortal 150+ year old
broccoli-controlled mech suits running around
your local farmers' market. Do we really want
that, for a gain of a few extra years?
I propose a low-tech solution. Warn people
that they will be trown out if their mobile
rings. Enforce.
I've gone to a number of live performances that
do something very much like this...
I've heard a number of variations, and seen them
carried out about half the time (just the threat
helps remind people to act civilized and turn the
damned things off)... My favorite (at a play),
the entire cast just stopped in mid-sentence,
all turned toward the idiot with the ringing
phone, and the main actor on stage asked him to
answer it, insisting over rude-boy's mumbled
apologies, that he please go ahead, take his call,
all the rest of us would wait politely.
I have never seen another human turn that
shade of red.
Most importantly, about six seconds later (you
could almost hear the cogs turning in peoples'
heads), a wave of soft little clicks and low
bleeps moved across the theatre as all the other
potential rude-idiots-that-ignored-the-initial-warning
turned off their phones. Truly beautiful.
Who needs technology when plain ol' public
humiliation will work? Unfortunately, most
for-pay venues don't have the balls to carry
through on threats like that.
Try working a job like construction, back
breaking physical labor, dangerous work
enviroment, and you can wake up one day and
find out the company went bust and you don't
get paid, or the construction industry is
slowing down, and theres no work period.
Nice troll, but during two of the last four years
of national economic prosperity, I did work
construction to pay the bills between sweet
IT contracting jobs (short and paid well, but
you can't get by with $5k/6mos).
"Backbreaking" work gets far easier after two
weeks of it, and you look about a million times
better than you ever have in your life (except
for the ragged bleeding hands and forearms).
Job security? The entire duration of my
"prolonged sebatical", I saw a few dozen
newspaper ads per week for skilled carpenters,
tileworkers, and just about every construction
related job you could think of (not even counting
the ones that require guild membership like
plumbers and electricians). At the same time,
I responded to all (up-to-)three IT jobs posted
per week, each of which had several hundred applicant
against whom this 10-year firmware engineer got to
compete for the honor of maintaining a cheesy
corporate webpage.
Pay? Okay, I get paid a little more per
hour than I did doing construction,
assuming a 40-hour work week. And
any IT guy knows how often we put in 40 hour
weeks.
would you care to back up your claims of
scientist losing their funding due to their
research?
Stem cell research, anyone?
Or how about caribou migration patterns in the
ANWR? Not just individual scientists, but
entire consulting firms got the axe for coming
up with the "wrong" answers.
Now, as for global warming... Well, I don't
know of any specific instances off the top of
my head. But I have "faith", just like a
certain US president regarding WMDs, that
examples exist.
Slashdot Mirror
and, likely, attempting to close the non-activation loophole for volume licensed copies with Longhorn
First, plenty of pirated versions of XP just use a cracked activator. VLK might make up for a larger percentage, only because it takes less effort. Fix that approach, and they'll just shift the balance rather than significantly affect the total.
Second, although to the average home user, the magic acronym "VLK" might sound like a godsend for piracy, for the average corporate IT person dealing with more than a dozen machines, the idea of not using a VLK sounds like insanity.
I spend almost half of my time at work healing PCs (around 150 wired employees, and not even my primary job description to keep them all happy). For anything more serious than "I can't print" (hyperbole, but not all that much), I just reinstall XP. Now, if I had to go through activation each time I do that... <Shudder>.
If every Joe User and even every Bob SuperAdmin had to pay full price (even OEM) for every single copy of Windows & Office (and Photoshop and x and y and z) out there, you would see a serious exodus to Linux and related.
Agree completely. You can currently get a decent new PC for well under $500. If the cost of that tripled just for software licensing, no one would run Windows.
Do you expect Tivo to say "FUCK YOU WORLD, WE'Z DOING IT OUR WAY!"
Yes, actually, I do.
If you bought a TiVo, you paid for a hardware device with certain capabilities, as well as a subscription to a given level of service from the parent company.
TiVo, IMO, therefore has an obligation to continue providing the service people paid for (in some cases, up to three years up front).
As for getting sued out of existance - IANAL, but TiVo doesn't do anything a VCR can't, except making the same features available in a more convenient and higher resolution format. In order to successfully sue TiVo, a media provider would need to start by basically undoing the classic BetaMax decision.
And if TiVo won't stand up for its customers with the support of a pretty strong legal precedent, I would not want to do business wih them.
So, by your reasoning we only protect those who have done only right? What do we do those who have been sent to prison and released for serving their time - let them rot in there? Pretty harsh judgement.
Slashdot does not equal a court of law. Considering that, a posting about this issue here can serve only one purpose - Trying to scare Nintendo by pointing a nest of angry geeks at them.
Well, how many people felt sorry for Rush after getting busted with a Perc habit, after he expressed for years how the government should just round up and execute all the junkies?
Same situation.
Nintendo may have overstepped its bounds here, but they didn't exactly pick on a random innocent (no pun intended) party for whom we should all feel sympathy.
SG has had a bad rep for years over aggressively "protecting" their IP.
Should we all cry foul because a far, far bigger company has decided to pull the same sort of stunt SG has pulled dozens of times?
I think not.
OK, can we build a reasonable PC for just $100 and a copy of Linux?
The cheapest reasonably modern (Athlon XP 2000) barebones system on Pricewatch goes for $76.
Now you'll have to excuse me, I think I'll spend the rest of the morning finding a cure for cancer, and after that, on to the really hard problems, like deciding what to cook for supper.
Chances are parent was too, and just had a mental slip regarding the name of the appropriate emulator
:)
True enough. Good catch...
Replace S9X with FCEU. My bad.
Flamebait? C'mon, people, get a clue!
Using an emulator does count as cheating.
If I run Bochs to boot Win2k3 on an old 386, will I get a Slashdot FP?
Shit, I suppose I can look forward to seeing that tomorrow now, can't I?
I appreciate emulation, I really do. But aside from the author of the emulator, no one else gets to claim geek cred from using one. Had this person really gotten OS X to run on a 68040, I'd consider it somewhat cool. Running it on an emulator, though? Here, hold on, I'll come back and describe my experience getting SMB3 to run under SNES9x on a 2GHz Win2k box... Woo-woo, rolling in the coolness now, baby!
But why do you think you're important enough for them to care about?
I've always considered that response as a red herring... Technically true that, right at this moment, no government or corporation cares about me enough to follow my every move.
That doesn't mean such information can't hide in a database somewhere for 50 years, until I decide to, I don't know, run for president or apply for a mortgage or something like that.
"Records clearly show that the defendant came within 10 feet of a known terrorist leader on two occasions, once in Times Square, and once on the Boston subway."
"Gee, we'd love to offer you insurance, but tracking data shows that on June 15th, 2007, you exceeded the posted speed limit by 1500mph, strangely vanishing from Newton, MA, to a number of points in Southern France over a period of 47 seconds. Oh, and as much as we hate to do this, well, you know the "mandatory incrimination" laws and all, so a customs agent waiting outside would like a word with you..."
No one cares about me now. But someone tracking me in realtime doesn't concern me nearly as much as, say, an overly-zealous DA grasping at straws to close a particularly irksome unsolved crime ten years down the road.
I wonder if for $349, a hundred dollars more, they could produce a similar package for here in the US with a nic instead of a modem along with some sort of optical drive.
From Pricewatch:
"Complete sys - Intel Celeron 2.0GHz 400FSB Win CD COA 128MB 20GBHD CDROM Video Sound Keyboard mouse USD$151, including shipping.
Add a monitor (15", $49 including shipping listed at pricewatch, or just look around - people can't give them away, I threw out three working 15-inchers just in the past six months), and you have a complete working system for $200 even. And while certainly not something I would trust my tax records to, still a FAR superior machine to this new little toy from AMD.
People who want absolutely rock-bottom prices for computers need to get out of the "Oh, did you buy a Dell or an HP" mindset.
Ditto for "deconstruct." If I had a dime for every fool who throws that around without having read a word of Derrida I'd be a rich man...
If I had a dime for every fool who reads another "respected" fool's redefinition of a perfectly good word, I could afford to have all such fools taken out and shot.
"Deconstruct"? To take apart.
"Postmodernism"? Get back to me in 30 years, meaningless otherwise.
Your author-of-the-week may have different ideas, but if you have the purpose of using words to communicate, rather than to posture yourself above all the other pretentious twits playing the same game... Well, you might find it helpful not to use definitions from a source that you yourself point out few people have read, and stick with English (or at least something true to its apparent Latinate root word and any applied pre/in/suf-fixes).
Not mine. I burn hydrogen to get my water. No one's messing with my precious bodily fluids.
Ah, not any better. You could just as well prove that in any given glass of "newly made" H2O, you have a few million hydrogen molecules that once gave Hitler the winds...
You just can't escape the "bio" part of living in a biosphere.
Not to nit-pick, but Prince of Persia 2 came out over a decade ago, and looked nothing like the screenshot in the linked article.
And UbiSoft? What happened to Broderbund?
Strange. Do they mean this as a sort of re-release with updated graphics, or did someone in marketing simply forget how to count?
I'll probably still convert from the FLAC files to MP3 (probably 256kbps) for my main audio listening
Same here... My home collection I keep in FLAC. When I need to take my required-listening-library elsewhere, I convert to Q7 Vorbis. And for the car, I burn a CD of ABR MP3 (Not VBR, just because MP3 CD players seem to have truly horrible support for it, while most can deal with ABR).
I doubt anyone will want to hear this, but I fail to see why more traditional advertisers can pay-per-play to get their message out, but the RIAA (which has music as its product, thus radio play seems comparable to giving out free samples of product) cannot?
Don't get me wrong, it actually does please me to hear about the government finally cracking down on payola, and I hate the RIAA as much as any self-respecting geek. But in this case... I wouldn't necessarily call it black-and-white. Perhaps a matter of monopolistic control of a market, but beyond that?
As an aside... This addresses labels trying to do an end-run around the payola laws... But a much more obvious way to comply in letter if not in spirit exists. Payola laws forbid paying for songs without admitting it. Who sees the next big thing in radio as "and now, BoiBand9000's latest hit, brought to you by the kind, friendly, law-abiding, just-shy-of-saintly folks at Sony"?
why they are bothering to do this, and should they really be concentrating on developing smaller true VGA screens
Because it comes basically "free"... To produce something resembling the human visual range on a screen, you need (at least) three pixels, regardless of the colorspace you choose (note that, although you could theoretically have those pixels stacked into the plane of the display, for some reason (money?) no one seems to do that).
So, ClearType and what OS-X use, which many have misunderstood and called identical to this, both make use of the actual 3x horizontal resolution of the screen to make text more readable, as it smooths out vertically-oriented diagonals (which dominate "hard" text strokes).
Now, ClearType et al can only use the physically higher horizontal resolution, because at the vertical level, the screen resolution equals the subpixel resolution. They also only use this on text, rather than the entire display.
How to solve that? Simple - Add a fourth pixel (which also just happens to address the common complaint about display brightness) and rearrange the linear RGB triad into a square RG BW quartet (tetrad?).
Thus, although the full-color-per-pixel resolution has remained the same, you can, for most purposes, get effectively double the resolution in both directions.
Would I rather have cheap "true" 3840x2560 displays available? Of course! In the meantime, I sure as hell won't complain if someone found a way to make my 1920x1280 panel look better.
but then they've probably got sheds full of existing screens that they can't shift at a profit and intend to use this as a stopgap until they've shifted them.
Despite my last point above, this technology sadly will not help make existing panels look better. It should, however, not cost significantly more to manufacture new panels with a new subpixel configuration, thus costing roughly the same as existing panels.
OK, here's the deal: 5.1 music is a fucking joke.
If you read some of my posts on that very topic, you'll see that I agree with you, for the most part.
However, where more-than-two channels does matter, you described as the most likely situations in which to listen to music - Moving around the house (better position independant spatial reproduction), in a noisy environment (better resistance to directional noise), etc.
But no... Sitting at home, in the living room, deliberately "just" listening to music - A good pair of 'phones will do worlds more for sound quality than adding more channels to the signal. No argument there.
How many people do you know who have a 5.1 system and would sit down and actually listen to music in that environment?
Several, but I'll grant your point - Still not very many, percentage-wise.
How many 5.1 systems are installed in cars again?
I actually see that as the most likely place for 5.1 to catch on... Most newer cars already have digital audio systems, as well as 4+ speakers. The leap to 5.1 (or more realistically, 4.1) would take only a bass tube (a standard upgrade for most car audio systems) and software support.
FLAC is a waste of space.
Perhaps. But, space comes cheap. Time does not.
You can get a 200GB HDD (which will store at least 1000 CDs as FLAC) for $90. Or, for the "financially disadvantaged", a spool of 50 DVD+Rs costs (checks Pricewatch) $11.
It takes me less than a day of work to make enough to buy that 200GB HDD.
It takes me a LOT more than a day to re-rip my entire CD collection.
Thus, it makes sense to save myself the hassle of ever needing to re-rip my CDs again.
Or, considering it from another angle... A CD costs an average of $6-$10 (I buy mostly used and indie). My SO's car eats them at a rate of 1 per month (more, in a bad month, or when she feels in a rush and won't stop for five minutes to let me copy the disc). $90/$6=15. In about a year, having the ability to recreate bitwise-identical CDs to replace originals, rather than re-buy them, will/has saved me the cost of the drive it takes to store them.
Whether for quality or for backups, ripping to lossless just makes sense.
The first year you discover MP3, you get everything you always wanted, but could never find on CD. The second year, you go back to your first-year tracks, realize that 128/Xing sounds like ass, and redownload them at 192/LAME.
;-)
Then the third year you realize MP3 in general sounds like ass, and switch to all Vorbis. The fourth year, you realize that not all Vorbis encoders work equally well (same as with Xing vs Lame), and switch to GT3 or aoTuV at Q10. The fifth year you realize that you can hear (admittedly very little, but some) distortion even at the highest possible Vorbis quality you can get, and try using things like AAC, hacked WMV, and other oddballs.
Finally, the sixth year, you realize that HDD space has grown to the point where you can afford to store your entire CD collection in a lossless format, and rip everything, one last time, to FLAC.
And on the seventh year, I finally got to rest.
Now, of course, 5.1ch 24bps@192KHz will become the dominant PCM format (or something even more exotic and non-PCM, like DSD used by SACD), and we start the entire cycle over. Those damned Jonses, they just keep getting better compression ratios than me!
15 bucks is a lot anywhere for a cd!
...
that's why i like online music stores where you can get singles for $1.
Uhh...
A typical CD has 12-18 tracks. At $1 per track, that still comes out to around $15 per CD, on average.
Now, in fairness, you do mention that you mostly listen to music where a given CD only has a couple of good tracks. So for such tripe, I suppose only buying the top-40s that MTV would play works out, economically.
I'd recommend a different solution, though - Quit supporting an industry that sells 2 million copies of a 12-track CD for $16, justified by 2 singles. For starters, try shunning the wall-o'-hits. Work your way on to only buying indies. If you must buy major-label crap, at least buy used.
Always keep in mind, when buying anything, that if you buy it, they'll keep making more of the same. That applies to both the good and the bad.
My point is: since our brain can only pay attention to one screen at a time, why do we need two of them?
Three good reasons come to mind...
First, peripheral vision. I almost always keep SysInternals' Process Explorer (similar in use to Windows Task Manager, but about a million times better) open on my second desktop. If a process starts or stops, I notice it instantly without even needing to change focus off my primary display.
Second, I also keep WinAmp and Yahoo IM (which I use for work... No, really!) open on the second display. I could get by without them always open, but it takes less time to flick my eye over at the other screen than it does to pop up a minimized window.
And, of course, when needing to use a reference for something (say, the parameters passed to a hellishly long function), having the reference material (such as a webpage or help file) open on the second screen makes life FAR easier than needing to keep flipping back and forth between to fullscreen windows.
So, screw HAM radio, right?
yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I don't mean to sound callous, but realy...
NEVER underestimate the needs of Amateur Radio in catastrophic situations.
During the biggest domestic US "disaster" of the past 50 years, one that actually targetted a building used as a communications nexus (namely, 09/11/2001), over a third of cell phones in the area still worked. And all satellite phones, though uncommon, still worked.
We don't need ham radio anymore. period. It once served a valuable purpose; that purpose has ceased to exist. Buggy whips once served a valuable purpose as well.
In a true, near-planetary-scale disaster (let's say the kooks have it right and the Yellowstone caldera takes out the entire South/Midwestern US sometime in the near future, as an example), it won't really matter if people can call for help, because no help will come.
It's got to be way easier to extend the life span of just one organ when you don't have to worry about keeping the rest of your body alive, right?
Well, for any other organ, yes.
For the brain?
Sadly, although humans usually die of some other critical organ (ie, heart) failing, our brains still steadily deteriorate as we age.
By about age 150, we'd all have the mental capacity of broccoli. Now, you might think, "sure, 150 beats beats 80", but consider the bigger problem - Immortal 150+ year old broccoli-controlled mech suits running around your local farmers' market. Do we really want that, for a gain of a few extra years?
I think not.
I propose a low-tech solution. Warn people that they will be trown out if their mobile rings. Enforce.
I've gone to a number of live performances that do something very much like this...
I've heard a number of variations, and seen them carried out about half the time (just the threat helps remind people to act civilized and turn the damned things off)... My favorite (at a play), the entire cast just stopped in mid-sentence, all turned toward the idiot with the ringing phone, and the main actor on stage asked him to answer it, insisting over rude-boy's mumbled apologies, that he please go ahead, take his call, all the rest of us would wait politely.
I have never seen another human turn that shade of red.
Most importantly, about six seconds later (you could almost hear the cogs turning in peoples' heads), a wave of soft little clicks and low bleeps moved across the theatre as all the other potential rude-idiots-that-ignored-the-initial-warning turned off their phones. Truly beautiful.
Who needs technology when plain ol' public humiliation will work? Unfortunately, most for-pay venues don't have the balls to carry through on threats like that.
Try working a job like construction, back breaking physical labor, dangerous work enviroment, and you can wake up one day and find out the company went bust and you don't get paid, or the construction industry is slowing down, and theres no work period.
Nice troll, but during two of the last four years of national economic prosperity, I did work construction to pay the bills between sweet IT contracting jobs (short and paid well, but you can't get by with $5k/6mos).
"Backbreaking" work gets far easier after two weeks of it, and you look about a million times better than you ever have in your life (except for the ragged bleeding hands and forearms).
Job security? The entire duration of my "prolonged sebatical", I saw a few dozen newspaper ads per week for skilled carpenters, tileworkers, and just about every construction related job you could think of (not even counting the ones that require guild membership like plumbers and electricians). At the same time, I responded to all (up-to-)three IT jobs posted per week, each of which had several hundred applicant against whom this 10-year firmware engineer got to compete for the honor of maintaining a cheesy corporate webpage.
Pay? Okay, I get paid a little more per hour than I did doing construction, assuming a 40-hour work week. And any IT guy knows how often we put in 40 hour weeks.
Shit. Why the hell did I get back into IT?
would you care to back up your claims of scientist losing their funding due to their research?
Stem cell research, anyone?
Or how about caribou migration patterns in the ANWR? Not just individual scientists, but entire consulting firms got the axe for coming up with the "wrong" answers.
Now, as for global warming... Well, I don't know of any specific instances off the top of my head. But I have "faith", just like a certain US president regarding WMDs, that examples exist.