don't know if you'll see this, but I was really talking about the b/w 4xxx series (4050 etc.), they're built like a tank and 'just work'. No experience with the colour units, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had more hassles, being something 'newer' (the 4xxx b/w printers are based on the old Laserjet 4 IIRC, which means that they've been around a loooong time)
has the quality of high end consumer electronics declined?
cheap crap has always been available within a few months or at most a year of the wide availability of any new technology (the first year CD players costed an arm and a leg, but they probably are still working fine now, my first generation cheap CD player stopped reading CDs within a year and a half) but I find that some years back, if you bought the top of the line (or close to) model of a decent brand, odds were it would go strong for years and years and years.
Lately it seems, like others have said, that the discriminator between high and low price of a specific product is not reliability anymore, but just features, and the reliability is the same (usually not that great) all across the board.
Things are starting to get to the point that buying an extended 3 yrs 'no questions asked' replacement warranty is not the waste of money that it was some years ago.
In my personal experience good products are still obtainable, but getting fewer and fewer, off the top of my head: high-end HP printers (4xxx series), denon CD players, toshiba DVD players, toyota cars, bosh/whirlpool appliances, philips razors, you get the idea.
I really couldn't pick a TV, though, as I keep hearing horror stories about pretty much every projection TV out there, and direct view plasma HDTVs are way out of the reach of us common mortals pricewise...
No, I mean that the satellites put in orbit by China, will be scrutinized by China's secret service, the ones put in orbit by India, by India's secret service and so on.
The rationale is that if a 'rogue' group put in orbit a weapon that created a lot of casualties, the retaliation would presumably be against the country that launched it, so every launch capable country in the world has in their best interest to make sure that anything that goes up is well scrutinized.
Obviously other countries' militaries are likely putting in orbit military-sensitive satellites *for themselves*, but due to the world balance of power (you nuke us, we nuke you, everybody dies) unsavory accidents don't happen.
The same rationale makes, for example, *extremely* unlikely that a country would put in orbit a commercial imaging satellite with 'enhanced' capabilities and sell the images freely: I bet that if something like this happened, the US of A would remind said country that said satellite could start experiencing 'malfunctions' or have an 'untimely re-entry' unless said images were distribution-controlled.
For all these reasons, I really don't think it will ever, ever, ever happen that private entities will be allowed to develop in space without overt or covert government regulation and/or intervention.
I might be jaded & fond of conspiracy theories
on
How the West Wasn't Won
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
but don't you think that the main reason because national governments do not want commercial enterprises to own/operate rockets that can reach orbit is concerns of 'national/global security'?
I bet that every satellite put in orbit right now, is thoroughly scrutinized by the various nations' secret services, and I also bet that satellites that would have 'too sensitive' capabilites would be 'rejected' unless appropriate agreements are made with the satellite's owner/operator.
After all, if I was company X interested in mapping/data acquisition at resolutions much higher than currently offered (say, 1 foot resolution images at different wavelengths etc.) I doubt I would be allowed to launch such a satellite without signing some papers saying that I won't photograph 'sensitive' areas, or that I won't give that info to 'bad people'.
If there was a 'free market', and I was a country that the US wouldn't like to have satellite sensing capabilities, there wouldn't be much they could do to stop me from using, hypotetically, my petroldollars to buy it.
I could also, extremely hypotetically of course, make a bogus communication satellite, which is really a nuke or bio weapon, and get this commercial company to put it in orbit, and from there I can just make it drop anywhere in the world.
While I do believe that there should be commercial competition to lower prices and so on, I really don't think it will be allowed to happen: only state-based space agencies will be allowed to have launch capabilities, and because of the deterrence factor, they will make very sure that the above rogue scenarios won't happen.
what about 8-9 years of email? my thesis? custom firewall/sendmail/other rules that would take ages to rewrite? digital pictures taken at important events in my life?
These are just some examples why I am probably going to go through the 'offsite box at my bank' route pretty soon...
mod parent up: a while ago I was thinking about getting a fireproof safe for my own backups, but fireproof (as defined by manufacturers) doesn't really mean 'compatible with magnetic media', since an inside temperature that doesn't make paper burn and/or plastic liquefy, is still a temperature that will probably cook your cdr dye and/or play havoc with other magnetic media.
I found that there were safes that were guaranteed to keep the inside at a temperature compatible with storage media, but their prices were not as affordable (obviously).
there's one BIG plus to having a palm-PDA-in-a-watch even if you already have a PDA: getting decent alarms!
I don't keep my Palm on me all the time (obviously) which limits its usefulness for alarms quite a bit: having a watch that can be synced with my iiic would be a really nice bonus.
Being able to look up somebody's phone number wherever you are, is really good, and if they mod this to be able to do DTMF (sp?) directly, it would be even better.
Also, if they are smart, they will also include a vibrating alarm in this watch, but I'm not holding my breath on this one.
I mean, come on: the board with the interface and glue logic shouldn't cost more than $500-$1000 (and even that is really pushing it), while for the ram the manifacturer can use ram they already have that didn't pass testing and/or that is slower that what currently is sold these days.
Obviously it's not good if you buy a stick of RAM for your PC and 100K out of 256Meg don't work, but for an HD-like application, where you have a map of 'bad sectors', it's not a problem.
Heck, considering that nowadays 'bad' RAM chips are basically thrown away, I could see a 10gig model (external maybe, due to space constraints) going for half of what this 2gig model costs.
Spending $2000 on 2 gigs of ram seems really gouging of the early adopters.
for a second I thought that this device was able to function as a mouse while being held by the presenter (via some sort of inertial sensor presumably) but it seems that the mouse function is just a standard 'put it on the desk and move it' type of thing...
Pity, because if you're in the middle of a stage giving a presentation, I doubt you'd want to have to trek to the sides if/when you have to move the mouse pointer on the screen.
that this 'cat weasel' also has a 'spellchecker' (or better, 'grammar tutor' option)? I don't mean to flame, but reading "they're" instead of their makes me totally cringe...
I hope somebody replies here, I'm leaning towards buying a TV card for the exact same reason (building a library of seinfeld episodes, why, oh why don't they sell a DVD set) and I really would like to know beforehand that it's going to work...
between being able to set up a server that can take a Slashdotting and being able to afford a setup that can take a Slashdotting there is quite a difference (esp. in your bank account after you get the bandwidth bill...)
Maybe the author will make more $$$ releasing the perl 5 book now, and the 'revised' perl 6 version next year:)
Also don't forget the sometimes extremely long lead times for book publishing, it is entirely possible that the author finished this book 6+ months ago.
And last but not least, yeah, perl 6 is going to come out soon, but do you really think I'm going to use it for production code right away? I really don't think so, perl 5 will be the tool of choice for quite a while longer.
The biggest advantage that film does have - it will continue to enjoy for some time to come - is dynamic range.
I don't buy that: how many stops of dynamic range does slide film have? Not to mention that with digital you can do really interesting things like taking multiple exposures of the same scene and combining them for some really impossible-to-repro-with-film results.
this out for example (check these 5 composite images)
let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print.
you're talking apples & oranges here: those prints have been hand-developed, dodged, burned and so on, you can do the same (increasing apparent film dynamic range) in photoshop and print the results if you so choose.
A master with the film camera, will probably produce masterful digital pics very quickly, if you look at the pictures of the week on photo.net, you'll probably see some stunning digital shots, which would have been just as stunning in shots on film, and sometimes even more so due to the possibilities inherent in a digital imaging workflow.
oh come on, while Sanskrit is a 'dead language', it can be obviously spoken if you really want to learn it: do a google search for 'spoken sanskrit' to find in #1 position a site with some realaudio files for example.
Re:Just curious...
on
3D LCD Display
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the whole point of this display from sharp is that the '3d' mode can be switched on on demand and that day to day applications and GUIs will work the same way they always do.
When you're using word etc. you keep the parallax element transparent, and the screen is just a normal 2d LCD display, when you're using 3d studio, playing doom3 etc. you switch it in 3d.
Now, it will be interesting to see if there is going to be more eye strain for people using the 3d mode all day long vs using LCD-shutter-based solutions (with the screen at 160Hz obviously). I don't think so, but you never know...
Re:Does anybody have more info?
on
3D LCD Display
·
· Score: 5, Informative
by reading a post later (which is the original press release) it is clear that there is a 50% loss of resolution in the horizontal axis.
The press release on yahoo says that this 2d/3d display has the same resolution as a 2d-only display, not that in 2d and 3d it has the same resolution (which I thought I saw when reading it the first time)
Basically this display works the same as the 'older' 3d LCDs when 3d, but the parallax blocker is not physical, it's switchable, so the screen can be flipped to 2d when needed and not forcibly left in 3d like the others.
Does anybody have more info?
on
3D LCD Display
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
the article doesn't really have any technical details, I'm curious to see what principle this screen operates on, and what makes it different technologically from the previous 3d LCD screens we've already seen (I think it's the 2d/3d nature of the screen without loss of resolution, as the article says, but I'd like to know how they get this to work)
But I really don't quite understand the vast resentment about this latest RedHat move: will somebody please enlighten me why it's so out of line?
Besides 'nicety' issues (it would be nice if RH didn't do this) and besides marketing reasons (obviously having a consistent interface is very desirable) can anybody explain any legal reason why RH isn't allowed to do what they are doing?
As far as I remember, when you GPL your software, anybody can do practically whatever they want with it as long as they provide it at cost (duplication costs) and as long as they publish their (modified) sources.
If you don't like the way RH ships their preconfigured Gnome/KDE desktop, well, uninstall the provided packages and install the ones you can download from ftp.kde.org and so on.
The people that would be interested in having a 'pure' KDE and/or a 'pure' Gnome, are technically inclined people which are more than capable of doing what I just outlined: I really doubt that your average non-power-user cares at all about this, as long as they can use mozilla, openoffice etc. I don't think they'd care.
If you have licensed your software under a specific license (GPL, BSD, Artistic...) and a licensee does things to your software that you don't like, well, maybe you didn't think long & hard enough before opting to use the license you've been using. The only solution is to decide on a new license (good luck in getting everybody to agree) and to fork the codebase under that new license, but it's definitely not a painless or sometimes even possible solution (given the 'viral' nature of the GPL).
esp. the already mentioned scene with the engine intake, I was already rolling my eyes at the usual 'let-the-baddy-go' stupid plot, that when it happened it took me by surprise;)
The only scene that really didn't work for me (I changed channel for a sec, it was like pulling teeth) was the one between the sister of the doctor and the guy who gets drugged later: her delivery/lines seemed totally cliche and really yanked me out of the show.
SPOILER:
There was a plot hole IMHO, though, when they were stealing the cargo on the train, and the stormtrooper came busting in, they just whacked him on the head or something, not killed him, so how come he didn't point them out later?
Slashdot Mirror
come on, if you really want to cut (or significantly degrade) internet access for people you can just get a backhoe and start digging ;)
more seriously: if somebody took out MAE-East and MAE-West, even if you had all your 14,000 towers up, it wouldn't really make much of a difference...
RTA: they are putting these up in the stratosphere which is above the part of the atmosphere where weather is a problem.
don't know if you'll see this, but I was really talking about the b/w 4xxx series (4050 etc.), they're built like a tank and 'just work'. No experience with the colour units, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had more hassles, being something 'newer' (the 4xxx b/w printers are based on the old Laserjet 4 IIRC, which means that they've been around a loooong time)
has the quality of high end consumer electronics declined?
cheap crap has always been available within a few months or at most a year of the wide availability of any new technology (the first year CD players costed an arm and a leg, but they probably are still working fine now, my first generation cheap CD player stopped reading CDs within a year and a half) but I find that some years back, if you bought the top of the line (or close to) model of a decent brand, odds were it would go strong for years and years and years.
Lately it seems, like others have said, that the discriminator between high and low price of a specific product is not reliability anymore, but just features, and the reliability is the same (usually not that great) all across the board.
Things are starting to get to the point that buying an extended 3 yrs 'no questions asked' replacement warranty is not the waste of money that it was some years ago.
In my personal experience good products are still obtainable, but getting fewer and fewer, off the top of my head: high-end HP printers (4xxx series), denon CD players, toshiba DVD players, toyota cars, bosh/whirlpool appliances, philips razors, you get the idea.
I really couldn't pick a TV, though, as I keep hearing horror stories about pretty much every projection TV out there, and direct view plasma HDTVs are way out of the reach of us common mortals pricewise...
No, I mean that the satellites put in orbit by China, will be scrutinized by China's secret service, the ones put in orbit by India, by India's secret service and so on.
The rationale is that if a 'rogue' group put in orbit a weapon that created a lot of casualties, the retaliation would presumably be against the country that launched it, so every launch capable country in the world has in their best interest to make sure that anything that goes up is well scrutinized.
Obviously other countries' militaries are likely putting in orbit military-sensitive satellites *for themselves*, but due to the world balance of power (you nuke us, we nuke you, everybody dies) unsavory accidents don't happen.
The same rationale makes, for example, *extremely* unlikely that a country would put in orbit a commercial imaging satellite with 'enhanced' capabilities and sell the images freely: I bet that if something like this happened, the US of A would remind said country that said satellite could start experiencing 'malfunctions' or have an 'untimely re-entry' unless said images were distribution-controlled.
For all these reasons, I really don't think it will ever, ever, ever happen that private entities will be allowed to develop in space without overt or covert government regulation and/or intervention.
but don't you think that the main reason because national governments do not want commercial enterprises to own/operate rockets that can reach orbit is concerns of 'national/global security'?
I bet that every satellite put in orbit right now, is thoroughly scrutinized by the various nations' secret services, and I also bet that satellites that would have 'too sensitive' capabilites would be 'rejected' unless appropriate agreements are made with the satellite's owner/operator.
After all, if I was company X interested in mapping/data acquisition at resolutions much higher than currently offered (say, 1 foot resolution images at different wavelengths etc.) I doubt I would be allowed to launch such a satellite without signing some papers saying that I won't photograph 'sensitive' areas, or that I won't give that info to 'bad people'.
If there was a 'free market', and I was a country that the US wouldn't like to have satellite sensing capabilities, there wouldn't be much they could do to stop me from using, hypotetically, my petroldollars to buy it.
I could also, extremely hypotetically of course, make a bogus communication satellite, which is really a nuke or bio weapon, and get this commercial company to put it in orbit, and from there I can just make it drop anywhere in the world.
While I do believe that there should be commercial competition to lower prices and so on, I really don't think it will be allowed to happen: only state-based space agencies will be allowed to have launch capabilities, and because of the deterrence factor, they will make very sure that the above rogue scenarios won't happen.
what about 8-9 years of email? my thesis? custom firewall/sendmail/other rules that would take ages to rewrite? digital pictures taken at important events in my life?
These are just some examples why I am probably going to go through the 'offsite box at my bank' route pretty soon...
mod parent up: a while ago I was thinking about getting a fireproof safe for my own backups, but fireproof (as defined by manufacturers) doesn't really mean 'compatible with magnetic media', since an inside temperature that doesn't make paper burn and/or plastic liquefy, is still a temperature that will probably cook your cdr dye and/or play havoc with other magnetic media.
I found that there were safes that were guaranteed to keep the inside at a temperature compatible with storage media, but their prices were not as affordable (obviously).
there's one BIG plus to having a palm-PDA-in-a-watch even if you already have a PDA: getting decent alarms!
I don't keep my Palm on me all the time (obviously) which limits its usefulness for alarms quite a bit: having a watch that can be synced with my iiic would be a really nice bonus.
Being able to look up somebody's phone number wherever you are, is really good, and if they mod this to be able to do DTMF (sp?) directly, it would be even better.
Also, if they are smart, they will also include a vibrating alarm in this watch, but I'm not holding my breath on this one.
I mean, come on: the board with the interface and glue logic shouldn't cost more than $500-$1000 (and even that is really pushing it), while for the ram the manifacturer can use ram they already have that didn't pass testing and/or that is slower that what currently is sold these days.
Obviously it's not good if you buy a stick of RAM for your PC and 100K out of 256Meg don't work, but for an HD-like application, where you have a map of 'bad sectors', it's not a problem.
Heck, considering that nowadays 'bad' RAM chips are basically thrown away, I could see a 10gig model (external maybe, due to space constraints) going for half of what this 2gig model costs.
Spending $2000 on 2 gigs of ram seems really gouging of the early adopters.
for a second I thought that this device was able to function as a mouse while being held by the presenter (via some sort of inertial sensor presumably) but it seems that the mouse function is just a standard 'put it on the desk and move it' type of thing...
Pity, because if you're in the middle of a stage giving a presentation, I doubt you'd want to have to trek to the sides if/when you have to move the mouse pointer on the screen.
that this 'cat weasel' also has a 'spellchecker' (or better, 'grammar tutor' option)? I don't mean to flame, but reading "they're" instead of their makes me totally cringe...
huh? what about
./-p
rmdir
?
I hope somebody replies here, I'm leaning towards buying a TV card for the exact same reason (building a library of seinfeld episodes, why, oh why don't they sell a DVD set) and I really would like to know beforehand that it's going to work...
between being able to set up a server that can take a Slashdotting and being able to afford a setup that can take a Slashdotting there is quite a difference (esp. in your bank account after you get the bandwidth bill...)
Some observations:
:)
Maybe the author will make more $$$ releasing the perl 5 book now, and the 'revised' perl 6 version next year
Also don't forget the sometimes extremely long lead times for book publishing, it is entirely possible that the author finished this book 6+ months ago.
And last but not least, yeah, perl 6 is going to come out soon, but do you really think I'm going to use it for production code right away? I really don't think so, perl 5 will be the tool of choice for quite a while longer.
The biggest advantage that film does have - it will continue to enjoy for some time to come - is dynamic range.
I don't buy that: how many stops of dynamic range does slide film have? Not to mention that with digital you can do really interesting things like taking multiple exposures of the same scene and combining them for some really impossible-to-repro-with-film results.
this out for example (check these 5 composite images)
let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print.
you're talking apples & oranges here: those prints have been hand-developed, dodged, burned and so on, you can do the same (increasing apparent film dynamic range) in photoshop and print the results if you so choose.
A master with the film camera, will probably produce masterful digital pics very quickly, if you look at the pictures of the week on photo.net, you'll probably see some stunning digital shots, which would have been just as stunning in shots on film, and sometimes even more so due to the possibilities inherent in a digital imaging workflow.
oh come on, while Sanskrit is a 'dead language', it can be obviously spoken if you really want to learn it: do a google search for 'spoken sanskrit' to find in #1 position a site with some realaudio files for example.
the whole point of this display from sharp is that the '3d' mode can be switched on on demand and that day to day applications and GUIs will work the same way they always do.
When you're using word etc. you keep the parallax element transparent, and the screen is just a normal 2d LCD display, when you're using 3d studio, playing doom3 etc. you switch it in 3d.
Now, it will be interesting to see if there is going to be more eye strain for people using the 3d mode all day long vs using LCD-shutter-based solutions (with the screen at 160Hz obviously). I don't think so, but you never know...
by reading a post later (which is the original press release) it is clear that there is a 50% loss of resolution in the horizontal axis.
The press release on yahoo says that this 2d/3d display has the same resolution as a 2d-only display, not that in 2d and 3d it has the same resolution (which I thought I saw when reading it the first time)
Basically this display works the same as the 'older' 3d LCDs when 3d, but the parallax blocker is not physical, it's switchable, so the screen can be flipped to 2d when needed and not forcibly left in 3d like the others.
the article doesn't really have any technical details, I'm curious to see what principle this screen operates on, and what makes it different technologically from the previous 3d LCD screens we've already seen (I think it's the 2d/3d nature of the screen without loss of resolution, as the article says, but I'd like to know how they get this to work)
But I really don't quite understand the vast resentment about this latest RedHat move: will somebody please enlighten me why it's so out of line?
Besides 'nicety' issues (it would be nice if RH didn't do this) and besides marketing reasons (obviously having a consistent interface is very desirable) can anybody explain any legal reason why RH isn't allowed to do what they are doing?
As far as I remember, when you GPL your software, anybody can do practically whatever they want with it as long as they provide it at cost (duplication costs) and as long as they publish their (modified) sources.
If you don't like the way RH ships their preconfigured Gnome/KDE desktop, well, uninstall the provided packages and install the ones you can download from ftp.kde.org and so on.
The people that would be interested in having a 'pure' KDE and/or a 'pure' Gnome, are technically inclined people which are more than capable of doing what I just outlined: I really doubt that your average non-power-user cares at all about this, as long as they can use mozilla, openoffice etc. I don't think they'd care.
If you have licensed your software under a specific license (GPL, BSD, Artistic...) and a licensee does things to your software that you don't like, well, maybe you didn't think long & hard enough before opting to use the license you've been using. The only solution is to decide on a new license (good luck in getting everybody to agree) and to fork the codebase under that new license, but it's definitely not a painless or sometimes even possible solution (given the 'viral' nature of the GPL).
like amazon.ca, it would be great...
esp. the already mentioned scene with the engine intake, I was already rolling my eyes at the usual 'let-the-baddy-go' stupid plot, that when it happened it took me by surprise ;)
The only scene that really didn't work for me (I changed channel for a sec, it was like pulling teeth) was the one between the sister of the doctor and the guy who gets drugged later: her delivery/lines seemed totally cliche and really yanked me out of the show.
SPOILER:
There was a plot hole IMHO, though, when they were stealing the cargo on the train, and the stormtrooper came busting in, they just whacked him on the head or something, not killed him, so how come he didn't point them out later?
so, what games do you prefer to play? If you play a game that with 'perfect play' should end in a draw, if you win or lose you know whose fault it is.
:):)
Or maybe that's why you don't like games where you can't blame luck/lousy cards/...