Well, for one thing, they're not cheaper. I mean, sure, you can find a DVD of a 1985 movie in the "bargain bin" that'll be cheaper than the brand new Blink 182 album, but when you're comparing apples-to-apples, DVDs are more expensive. A new CD is about $15. A new DVD is about $20. 'Round here, anyway.
On a dollar/hour basis, the DVD is still a much better value. For example:
Big Shiny Tunes 9 $15.99 on sale, regular $21.99 Released Nov. '04 Running time approx. 60-70 minutes.
The Day After Tomorrow (Widescreen) $17.99 Released approx. 3rd-4th quarter '04 Running time, including movie, 2 commentary tracks and featurettes, approx. 7 hours.
Welcome to Canada - land of a handful of banks. 5 consumer banks, to be exact; and they want to reduce that through mergers.
Good old bait and switch. When I started with the Toronto-Dominion, it was $5 for unlimited chequing, online, etc. Then they absorbed Standard Trust, and adopted a usurious fee schedule comparable to most other banks
Sounds like you're still on the wrong plan, or you don't have enough money in your account. I was with Canada Trust until they merged with TD, and I think my plan is called Preferred Chequing, or something like that. In a typical month, I pay no service fees. Now, I do keep a $1000 minimum balance, only use a couple of cheques a month, and usually don't use my debit card or make any withdrawls at all. The interest is basically zero (.25% on the balance over $5000, I think?), but most of my money's in an ING Direct account or long-term investments.
Fry's ads from 1989 look almost identical to those of today, but the 386's listed for $2500...
I can always remember, in the 1989 Radio Shack catalog, the top of the line machine was a 386SX-16 with 1MB of RAM, dual floppies (1 5-1/4" & 1 3-1/2"), no hard drive, a VGA card, and a monochrome monitor, all for the low, low price of CDN$9,999.99. Our dollar was stronger back then, too, so that was probably something like US$8-9 grand.
Hey, don't knock the Dill Pickle chips. IMHO, "Lays" Dill Pickle is the third best potato chip flavour in the world, close behind "President's Choice" Sour Cream & Onion and "Ruffles" Sour Cream & Onion. ISTR that Dill Pickle chips are one of the things Americans find strange up here in Canada.
It ticks me off I can't find a decent 24 pin dot matrix (not counting high end check printers) new anymore.
Really? I work in a computer store, so I just checked with Ingram Micro, and they have a whole bunch, with the least expensive being the Panasonic KX-P2023 24-pin, home office/small business dot-matrix. Retail price about CDN$250, or CDN$190 for a refurb w/1-year warranty. In fact, a customer ordered 2 of them from us a couple of weeks ago to print invoices on.
...with a $150 TV out card, display them to your Plasma TV from your computer.
Even better, many plasma TVs have VGA inputs, so you don't even need a video card with TV out. Also, at least the Radeon 8500, 9500 and 9700 can output Component (Y-Pb-Pr) video, with a US$29 adapter. In fact, VGA (which is a form of analog RGB) can be easily converted to Y-Pb-Pr, which is probably what the ATI cards do. If anyone cares about the details, there's a good explanation at this site.
I'll never buy another Creative card, either. What really turned me off them, is that a couple of years ago, they stopped providing Live!Ware for free download from the website, in the name of "convenience." (Now all you sorry dial-up users don't have to sit through a multi-hour download! Woop-dee-do, I've got cable, and it only takes me a few tens of minutes!) Now, you have to order it on CD, and pay a hefty shipping charge. I used the website's feedback form to ask why they couldn't have it both for download, and on CD, and their answer basically boiled down to, "But this way's better."
That and the whole Audigy 24/96 fiasco really turned me off.
You can add me to the list of people who had bad experiences with Yamaha CD-RW drives. A couple of years ago, I bought a Yamaha 6416S (6x4x16 SCSI). I've had various intermittent problems since I got it. The drive spontaneously resets a couple times an hour in Windows ME and 2k (but doesn't in 98SE, XP or Linux), there were 2 separate times I couldn't burn anything from Windows (98SE the first time and XP the second, with the drive working fine in between, on both OSs), but it worked fine from Linux, and now about 75% of the time I put a CD-RW disc in, it doesn't even recognize that there's a disc in it.
I just got an LG GCE-8480B (48x16x48), and so far it burns just fine, though I've only burnt 2 CD-RWs (both on 4x media) and 1 CD-R (a 32x disc) in it.
I'm probably going to buy a motherboard that has the nforce2 chipset...it's a geForce 4 built in.
Don't get too excited, there. Only the nForce2 IGP has onboard video, and it's a GF4 MX, which is actually a souped up GF2--i.e. it's a DirectX 7 core, not the DX8 core from the GF4 Ti, or even the GF3. Even the NV18 (GF5 MX?) probably isn't going to support DX8.
That said, I'm planning to use an nForce2 board in my next computer, but I can't decide whether to get an nForce2 IGP based one, or get one with the SPP version and drop some other card in the AGP slot. I'm leaning more towards the IGP, since I've also got an Xbox, but I'll have to see what the prices are like after Christmas.
On my current collection (several others were wiped out by hard-drive failures) I started out using Ogg/Vorbis, but I've switched to FLAC. I figure that as long as I have plenty of space, I may as well encode losslessly, and then when I start running out, I can convert to a lossy format. The only problem with using FLAC, is that I like to be able to listen to my music at other locations, over the Internet, but FLAC'ed audio takes too much bandwidth for that, as well as lacking popular support. I was hoping that I would be able to trans-code to MP3 (because it takes less CPU power to encode, and I know more people with MP3 players than Ogg/Vorbis) in real time on my gateway (P-166MMX), but it can't quite make it (IIRC, it runs at about.9x, using a heavily optimized version of LAME). If I gave the encoder a head start, it would probably work, but that would require prescience on the encoder's part, to know what song I wanted to play, before I requested it.
Some older bioses used to be able to init the hard drives at a timed delay. This was due to the fact that the hard drive wouldnt spin up fast enough to be recognized. This is no longer a problem, and has been omitted from all modern bioses.
Actually, I think you might have it backwards. The only BIOS I've seen with the option to delay the IDE scan is the one on the A-Bit KT7A I bought last month, and I've seen dozens of different PCs, from the 8086 on up, name-brand and no-name.
I'm getting all this info from New Toronto Homes. There's also the builder's website CityPlace, but it requires Flash 5.
It's a 20-building complex called CityPlace, and is going to go at Spadina and Front, next to SkyDome, near the financial and theatre districts, and Harbourfront. They're calling it a "digital neighbourhood," and residents will be able to "order movies, access a "virtual concierge" and connect to the Internet at speeds up to 50 times faster than high-speed cable."
Telus (Canada's second largest phone company) is installing a CDN$30million fibre-optic network, which will provide Internet access, HDTV, and video-on-demand.
There will also be a theatre, health-club, elementary school, daycare, community centre and library.
GUIs are for WIMPs;) magicfilterconfig is all anyone needs! Just answer 4 easy questions (full name of printer, short name of printer, what port it's connected to, and what kind of printer it is), and you're done, all without the security issues of having X programs running with superuser privs.
For those who didn't get the opening, WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) is the type of GUI used by Windows, MacOS, X, etc.
I'm with Rogers now, and used to be with Shaw, before they sold the GTA to Rogers. From comparing mine and friend's experiences, I think that the ranking would go, from best to worst, Shaw Wave, Rogers Wave, Shaw@Home, Rogers@Home--though I found @Home's news feed to be the best of any of them. The new Rogers feed is really crappy. Of course, maybe they just need to get the bugs worked out.
Also, are any Rogers customers getting the new homepage? When I go to http://www/, I'm still getting Excite for Rogers@Home.
I don't know for sure, but I think they use PCI-PCI bridge chips, to give you a whole second PCI bus slaved to the one on the motherboard. I've actually been tempted a couple of times to try to build a riser card with a bridge on it. There's enough room between the tops of the cards and the side of my case that I could put 2 or 3 slots there, and there's a couple of knock-outs nearby that cables could be routed through. For now, though, I still have one slot empty.
As long as the cables aren't too long, I don't think you would have too much trouble with capacitive loading, which is what causes timing issues. I forget exactly how you do it, but it's also possible to compensate for excess capacitance.
You're partly correct. Apple does have an exclusive license to SorensonVision.
However, QuickTime is just a way of storing digital audio and video, the same as AVI. There is Quicktime 4 Linux, and it supports several codecs, including DV and MotionJPEG. So, if you can find a QT clip not encoded with SorensonVision, you can watch it just fine on Linux. Also, I would imagine that it's only a matter of time before someone manages to hack the Windows SV codec into a Linux player, just like you can use Windows codecs with avifile.
I too have been living fairly close (about 6-3/4 km, or 4-1/3 miles) to a CANDU power plant for almost 15 years, with no side effects, despite a couple of low-level leaks. Right next to the plant's cooling water outlet, is a popular municipal park, and I have also walked past the reactor faces while on a tour. In fact, I believe you get more radiation from eating one banana (high in potassium) than working in a nuclear power plant for a whole year!
Let's also not forget that the combustion by-products of coal, and most other fossil fuels, are carcinogenic.
Re:Graphics is not the critical issue
on
Direct3D on Linux?
·
· Score: 2
2: There are weak support for gametools, such as Wheels, Joysticks etc.
Unless i cant use my lovely joypin and my lovely wheel, i wont game in linux.
My joystick (Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital) and wheel (Logitech Wingman Formula GP) work just fine on Linux, and there are several games that support them. I can even reboot my machine by chording buttons on the stick.
Aren't the (former) Class E addresses (240.0.0.0 to 247.255.255.255) still reserved? If they are, there's a good chunk of the address-space being wasted. 134,217,728 addresses (3.125% of the total), to be precise. Also, it may break some existing software, but unless IP Multicast magically becomes widely used, all 268,435,456 group numbers (6.25% of the address-space) aren't actually needed. Also, what happened to the addresses above 247.255.255.255? I can't find references to them anywhere.
I got the percentages from here, and calculated the number of addresses myself. They don't include reserved addresses, such as the "all hosts" address (224.0.0.1) in multicast.
Forget buying some special liquid, butane (lighter fluid) is great at dissolving adhesives, and it only costs a couple of bucks for a bottle that'll last thousands of cleanings. I use it all the time to get price tags off objects. Just pour a little bit on a cloth and wipe the surface. In the case of de-sticking Velcro(tm), I'd try dribbling a bit directly over one edge, while holding the object vertically, trying to get it to soak downwards into the joint, and then slip a finger nail under it, adding more fluid as necessary. Just make sure it's dry before you light a match;), and, like any solvent, try it in an inconspicuous spot first to make sure it doesn't attack the plastic.
Worst case traffic on each machine will be 4 modem @ 56k each
You can't just hook up a bunch of 56k modems to a computer to provide V.90 access. A V.90 modem can only do 33.6k to another V.90. To go beyond that, one end has to be a digital line (ie. a T-1+).
What's the difference between this and shrinkwrapping a city bus with an ad for violent Sylvester Stallone movies? I'd think that there would be some kind of standard for what ads get put up there
I don't know about anywhere else, but in Toronto, Canada, the only limit on what can be posted on a transit vehicle is the same advertising standards laws which apply to newspapers, TV, etc. In fact, it is the TTC's fiscal responsibility to accept any form of revenue which is not illegal. In other words, if you can put it on a non-TTC controlled billboard, the TTC has to sell you space if you want it, and are willing to pay for it. This leads to seeing ads for beer, birth control pills, and condoms.
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On a dollar/hour basis, the DVD is still a much better value. For example:
Big Shiny Tunes 9 $15.99 on sale, regular $21.99 Released Nov. '04
Running time approx. 60-70 minutes.
The Day After Tomorrow (Widescreen) $17.99 Released approx. 3rd-4th quarter '04
Running time, including movie, 2 commentary tracks and featurettes, approx. 7 hours.
You've obviously never tried to take the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, Ontario, Canada during rush hour.
Sounds like you're still on the wrong plan, or you don't have enough money in your account. I was with Canada Trust until they merged with TD, and I think my plan is called Preferred Chequing, or something like that. In a typical month, I pay no service fees. Now, I do keep a $1000 minimum balance, only use a couple of cheques a month, and usually don't use my debit card or make any withdrawls at all. The interest is basically zero (.25% on the balance over $5000, I think?), but most of my money's in an ING Direct account or long-term investments.
I can always remember, in the 1989 Radio Shack catalog, the top of the line machine was a 386SX-16 with 1MB of RAM, dual floppies (1 5-1/4" & 1 3-1/2"), no hard drive, a VGA card, and a monochrome monitor, all for the low, low price of CDN$9,999.99. Our dollar was stronger back then, too, so that was probably something like US$8-9 grand.
Hey, don't knock the Dill Pickle chips. IMHO, "Lays" Dill Pickle is the third best potato chip flavour in the world, close behind "President's Choice" Sour Cream & Onion and "Ruffles" Sour Cream & Onion. ISTR that Dill Pickle chips are one of the things Americans find strange up here in Canada.
Really? I work in a computer store, so I just checked with Ingram Micro, and they have a whole bunch, with the least expensive being the Panasonic KX-P2023 24-pin, home office/small business dot-matrix. Retail price about CDN$250, or CDN$190 for a refurb w/1-year warranty. In fact, a customer ordered 2 of them from us a couple of weeks ago to print invoices on.
...with a $150 TV out card, display them to your Plasma TV from your computer.
Even better, many plasma TVs have VGA inputs, so you don't even need a video card with TV out. Also, at least the Radeon 8500, 9500 and 9700 can output Component (Y-Pb-Pr) video, with a US$29 adapter. In fact, VGA (which is a form of analog RGB) can be easily converted to Y-Pb-Pr, which is probably what the ATI cards do. If anyone cares about the details, there's a good explanation at this site.
I'll never buy another Creative card, either. What really turned me off them, is that a couple of years ago, they stopped providing Live!Ware for free download from the website, in the name of "convenience." (Now all you sorry dial-up users don't have to sit through a multi-hour download! Woop-dee-do, I've got cable, and it only takes me a few tens of minutes!) Now, you have to order it on CD, and pay a hefty shipping charge. I used the website's feedback form to ask why they couldn't have it both for download, and on CD, and their answer basically boiled down to, "But this way's better."
That and the whole Audigy 24/96 fiasco really turned me off.
You can add me to the list of people who had bad experiences with Yamaha CD-RW drives. A couple of years ago, I bought a Yamaha 6416S (6x4x16 SCSI). I've had various intermittent problems since I got it. The drive spontaneously resets a couple times an hour in Windows ME and 2k (but doesn't in 98SE, XP or Linux), there were 2 separate times I couldn't burn anything from Windows (98SE the first time and XP the second, with the drive working fine in between, on both OSs), but it worked fine from Linux, and now about 75% of the time I put a CD-RW disc in, it doesn't even recognize that there's a disc in it.
I just got an LG GCE-8480B (48x16x48), and so far it burns just fine, though I've only burnt 2 CD-RWs (both on 4x media) and 1 CD-R (a 32x disc) in it.
Don't get too excited, there. Only the nForce2 IGP has onboard video, and it's a GF4 MX, which is actually a souped up GF2--i.e. it's a DirectX 7 core, not the DX8 core from the GF4 Ti, or even the GF3. Even the NV18 (GF5 MX?) probably isn't going to support DX8.
That said, I'm planning to use an nForce2 board in my next computer, but I can't decide whether to get an nForce2 IGP based one, or get one with the SPP version and drop some other card in the AGP slot. I'm leaning more towards the IGP, since I've also got an Xbox, but I'll have to see what the prices are like after Christmas.
On my current collection (several others were wiped out by hard-drive failures) I started out using Ogg/Vorbis, but I've switched to FLAC. I figure that as long as I have plenty of space, I may as well encode losslessly, and then when I start running out, I can convert to a lossy format. The only problem with using FLAC, is that I like to be able to listen to my music at other locations, over the Internet, but FLAC'ed audio takes too much bandwidth for that, as well as lacking popular support. I was hoping that I would be able to trans-code to MP3 (because it takes less CPU power to encode, and I know more people with MP3 players than Ogg/Vorbis) in real time on my gateway (P-166MMX), but it can't quite make it (IIRC, it runs at about .9x, using a heavily optimized version of LAME). If I gave the encoder a head start, it would probably work, but that would require prescience on the encoder's part, to know what song I wanted to play, before I requested it.
Some older bioses used to be able to init the hard drives at a timed delay. This was due to the fact that the hard drive wouldnt spin up fast enough to be recognized. This is no longer a problem, and has been omitted from all modern bioses.
Actually, I think you might have it backwards. The only BIOS I've seen with the option to delay the IDE scan is the one on the A-Bit KT7A I bought last month, and I've seen dozens of different PCs, from the 8086 on up, name-brand and no-name.
Melissa
I'm getting all this info from New Toronto Homes. There's also the builder's website CityPlace, but it requires Flash 5.
It's a 20-building complex called CityPlace, and is going to go at Spadina and Front, next to SkyDome, near the financial and theatre districts, and Harbourfront. They're calling it a "digital neighbourhood," and residents will be able to "order movies, access a "virtual concierge" and connect to the Internet at speeds up to 50 times faster than high-speed cable."
Telus (Canada's second largest phone company) is installing a CDN$30million fibre-optic network, which will provide Internet access, HDTV, and video-on-demand.
There will also be a theatre, health-club, elementary school, daycare, community centre and library.
GUIs are for WIMPs ;) magicfilterconfig is all anyone needs! Just answer 4 easy questions (full name of printer, short name of printer, what port it's connected to, and what kind of printer it is), and you're done, all without the security issues of having X programs running with superuser privs.
For those who didn't get the opening, WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) is the type of GUI used by Windows, MacOS, X, etc.
I'm with Rogers now, and used to be with Shaw, before they sold the GTA to Rogers. From comparing mine and friend's experiences, I think that the ranking would go, from best to worst, Shaw Wave, Rogers Wave, Shaw@Home, Rogers@Home--though I found @Home's news feed to be the best of any of them. The new Rogers feed is really crappy. Of course, maybe they just need to get the bugs worked out.
Also, are any Rogers customers getting the new homepage? When I go to http://www/, I'm still getting Excite for Rogers@Home.
As long as the cables aren't too long, I don't think you would have too much trouble with capacitive loading, which is what causes timing issues. I forget exactly how you do it, but it's also possible to compensate for excess capacitance.
However, QuickTime is just a way of storing digital audio and video, the same as AVI. There is Quicktime 4 Linux, and it supports several codecs, including DV and MotionJPEG. So, if you can find a QT clip not encoded with SorensonVision, you can watch it just fine on Linux. Also, I would imagine that it's only a matter of time before someone manages to hack the Windows SV codec into a Linux player, just like you can use Windows codecs with avifile.
I too have been living fairly close (about 6-3/4 km, or 4-1/3 miles) to a CANDU power plant for almost 15 years, with no side effects, despite a couple of low-level leaks. Right next to the plant's cooling water outlet, is a popular municipal park, and I have also walked past the reactor faces while on a tour. In fact, I believe you get more radiation from eating one banana (high in potassium) than working in a nuclear power plant for a whole year!
Let's also not forget that the combustion by-products of coal, and most other fossil fuels, are carcinogenic.
Unless i cant use my lovely joypin and my lovely wheel, i wont game in linux.
My joystick (Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital) and wheel (Logitech Wingman Formula GP) work just fine on Linux, and there are several games that support them. I can even reboot my machine by chording buttons on the stick.
I got the percentages from here, and calculated the number of addresses myself. They don't include reserved addresses, such as the "all hosts" address (224.0.0.1) in multicast.
Forget buying some special liquid, butane (lighter fluid) is great at dissolving adhesives, and it only costs a couple of bucks for a bottle that'll last thousands of cleanings. I use it all the time to get price tags off objects. Just pour a little bit on a cloth and wipe the surface. In the case of de-sticking Velcro(tm), I'd try dribbling a bit directly over one edge, while holding the object vertically, trying to get it to soak downwards into the joint, and then slip a finger nail under it, adding more fluid as necessary. Just make sure it's dry before you light a match ;), and, like any solvent, try it in an inconspicuous spot first to make sure it doesn't attack the plastic.
You can't just hook up a bunch of 56k modems to a computer to provide V.90 access. A V.90 modem can only do 33.6k to another V.90. To go beyond that, one end has to be a digital line (ie. a T-1+).
I don't know about anywhere else, but in Toronto, Canada, the only limit on what can be posted on a transit vehicle is the same advertising standards laws which apply to newspapers, TV, etc. In fact, it is the TTC's fiscal responsibility to accept any form of revenue which is not illegal. In other words, if you can put it on a non-TTC controlled billboard, the TTC has to sell you space if you want it, and are willing to pay for it. This leads to seeing ads for beer, birth control pills, and condoms.