I also went to a school where over half the hours I would take before I graduated were required to go towards my major (and virtually none of those counted to general education goals). However, I also enrolled in my school's honors program, which was three years of courses in ethics, humanities, women's studies, and more. I wrote more papers in a term and read more books than I did in all my other classes during the rest of my college career.
While I had to work like crazy, give up sleep, and become horribly addicted to caffeine while doing this, I'm also the only CS person I know that can talk about the differences in Kant and Aristotle as well as many other things. I also got to research and write interesting papers, such as a 20 page paper on women in computer science, which helped to educate me on questions we all ask ourselves (Why aren't more women in computers?) and improve writing skills. Of course, as I write code all day, these skills go downhill, and I did have to read Dickens (hated him), but it was better than only taking CS.
Hotmail account picks up spam, it's good at that. I have to use IE at work because it's what everyone uses at work, and since I write web sites all day for people at work, I don't have much of a choice in the matter.
I know it's off topic, but since everyone seems to have pop-ups here with such a passion, why doesn't Slashdot adopt a policy to not link to stories (like this) at Yahoo!, who has pop-ups, and instead only link to sites that are pop-up free? I'm sure this story is going to be picked up by many other sites, but Yahoo! will get all that traffic, and keep serving up the pop-up ads, as we all go there.
Maybe I'm not sure what exactly the submitter means by Anonymous Checkout, but if they don't know who checked out a book, why would anyone ever return it? I guess I'm just confused about that issue of this idea, they have to maintain some records so that they can fine people that don't return books, right?
That example on using two pieces of hardware doesn't work in many, many cases. Say I make a trip to Radioshack, buy some perfectly legal parts, then go home and take these legal parts and combine them to make a cell phone jammer? Or a wire tap? Are those legal beacuse I took hardware parts I legally owned and combined them? What if I go to my work today, combine some perfectly legal chemicals, and make methanthetamines? Are those legal because I took the parts (if you work at a store in an area with lots of meth production, the cops tell you what to look out for) that were legal, and then combined them on my own time? While I don't like the DMCA either, it's pretty easy to see how you can take two possibly legal pieces of hardware and make something totally illegal out of them, DMCA or not.
Really, cooking isn't that hard if you take a little time to try to learn how to do it decently. Go out, buy a cookbook or two (just basic ones), and start to learn to cook something. Try something harder than you have before. Like parts of different sauces? Try to improvise and make your own.
If you want to try to get really creative, go out and buy yourself a copy of Larousse Gastronomique and then learn to really cook. Once you've gotten past the point that you're worried about totally screwing everything up, you'll find how really great some pasta with a bit of extra virgin olive oil and some diced tomatos can really be. I keep screwing up things that I try to make (and still can't cook holandaise sauce), but I can also whip up some salmon, guacamole, and pasta for a quick dinner if I have people coming over and not worry.
I have mp3's at work on my computer because I keep all my CD's at home in a 300 disc changer, and have ripped them all to my mp3 server at home. If I want to listen to an album, I'll download it from my FTP then listen to it for a few weeks before I delete it. It takes me no more time to queue up an album in Winamp than to swap between CD's like other people do at work for music. If I'm not pirating or sharing files, why can't I listen to mp3's?
More examples of this would be the last two albums from Radiohead (Kid A, Amnesiac) as well as The Fragile from Nine Inch Nails. All the die hard fans went out and bought them as soon as they were released, so they would debut at #1 on the Billboard charts, but they had no radio/video airplay to keep them going. Both bands might still be great (and Radiohead is as good as anyone in the world right now), but without a single and a video that's really popular (and I mean higher than #15 on the Modern Rock chart), you won't stay up there for long.
Didn't they give an award to Metal Gear Solid 2 a couple of years ago over the demo they showed of that? E3 is all about hype, not playable games, and Doom 3 was definately all that anyone could talk about, so it was the leader in hype. The video was just amazing, and coworkers that went to E3 said the demo there was just amazing as well. If it was the best looking and most interesting thing that people saw at E3, even if it wasn't playable, why shouldn't it win?
If I recall correctly, W's big tax cut reduced the maximum federal income tax rate from 39.6% to 33% or so, which means someone making $50,000 a year will see a small gain, but those that are incredibly wealthly, making $1 Million a year, will see a huge windfall. They say it's a multibillion reduction in taxes, but they just don't say that it's for the wealthy once again, not the working class who pay a larger tax percentage once you subtract the cost of living (which you have to do in order to have a fair comparison).
I acually don't think you should lose any of the quality. This isn't VHS where it's stored in an analog format that degrades, I'd think of it more as a DAT tape with all digital data that should keep it's quality. Just keep it away from a magnet. Since JVC came up with it, and they own the patent on VHS, I'm sure the name came from that, and the fact that it's on tapes.
Unfortunately, at least Axis and Allies on the computer is a horrible memory hog, and some games were just meant to be played on a board anyway. The computer games are great for over the net, or when no one else will play, but it's far more fun to lay the game out when there are the people there to do it. Also, the computer rolling those 6's for heavy bombers isn't nearly as much fun as doing it yourself.
Why not also have games like Diplomacy, Risk, Axis and Allies, and other strategy board games for groups of people as well? It might be low tech, but a full game of Diplomacy is more fun than almost any computer game still.
All films shot at 24fps will still only be 24fps when projected digitally. If you upconvert it to 60fps, you can wind up with funny motion errors from running certain frames more often than other frames (you get this on TV with 3:2 pulldown problems). Additionally, if you looked at how Star Wars was shot digitally, it was shot at 24fps just like any other movie. Just because you possibly can have movies at 60fps doesn't mean they will. Why shoot things at 60fps when you're going to either more than double your film costs or have something that has to be downsampled for everyone else?
The DLP projectors that they use in a theater have a resolution of 1280x1024, and that's progressivly scanned of course. So, you get approxmiately 1.3 megapixels out of it. For comparison, a 35mm print has around 4 megapixels of resolution, and a 35mm negative can have around 20 million megapixels of effective resolution. See why I don't like digital?
Theaters are also able to project one copy of a flim in multiple theaters, as long as they stagger the start times by around 15 minutes. It's fairly easy, and really common now. Saturday night they could easily move the popular movie into an additional theater and remove the horrible film with no problem. However, if they have no control over the digital film (you think they would ever let them copy it to a different projector?), they would lose that ability. If you go up into the projectionist booth at a theater, you'll see how they do this.
The technically better console doesn't always win. The Saturn was an incredibly powerful system when Sega brought it out against the Playstation. However, the Saturn, like the XBox, was cobbled together from off-the-shelf chips and parts and not custom engineered, as the Playstation (and Playstation2) were. The Playstation had a dream IDE and code libraries to help with development. The Saturn had two processors that you can to code for at the same time, different chips for every function, and was just a mess.
So, while the Saturn might have had a ton of power under that hood, it doesn't matter if no one can utilize it. When Sony needed to design the Playstation 2, they knew what it needed to do: FPU/Matrix Math, 3D effects, and do them fast. It needed to do other stuff, but none of that was as important as the main things. They designed a new chipset just to do what the console needed. They didn't take a chip that had years and years of backwards compatibility so you could still run WordPerfect 5.0 on it because that didn't matter. Think how much that backwards compatibility, which is never used, costs the XBox in terms of price and performance? Even though the originial IDE for the PS2 wasn't great compared to the original Playstation one, it's design is still better than the Xbox design because it's all new, and will get cheaper as time goes on better.
Heh, I'm wondering who at kexp is reading Slashdot while at work right now. The 96k mp3 stream is nice since at my work (Fred Hutch Cancer Center) we're in the basement, 20 feet underground, so radio reception is non-existant, and my co-workers can only handle me playing Radiohead and The Strokes so much.
If you want commercial free (basically), FM radio, try out kexp.org. Also 90.3 FM up in Seattle, they have multiple streaming options (56k and 96k mp3, Real Audio, and even a 1.4 Mb uncompressed WMA stream), live playlists, and a really diverse music selection.
They are paid for my sponsorship drives, like public television, but also supported by the Experience Music Project up here (note: EMP is a project of Paul Allen as well, so the station basically exists thanks to all that Microsoft money that Allen has). They also take song requests from people continaully, and it's introduced me to lots of bands that I otherwise never would have heard on most commercial radio, or even most streaming internet radio.
Atari's complaints about the Playstation price (which were in an interview in Next Generation magazine a long time ago) dealt with the fact that the Playstation was originally around $400 in Japan before it came out in the US, and the US price was going to be $300. However, Sony redesigned the Japanese version (manufacturing techniques constantly improve on console, the Playstation 2 is on it's 5th revision already) and lowered the price in Japan to $300, which means it would no longer be dumping in the US. If the XBox was $100 everywhere in the world, they can sell it for that in the US. They can give it away if they want, just they can't give it away in the US and then sell it for $500 in Europe.
Cigarettes and Porn and Alcohol are all legally set to be 18 years of age in the US. However, alcohol is really 21 because the government (due to pressure from MADD years ago) says you don't get federal highway money if your drinking age is under 21. Movies, however, police themselves, and every kid can usually find a theater where they know they don't card, or they know people that work there, since that's not a legal responsibility to keep them out.
There is a big difference between learning from other code, and writing code when that's what the assignment was. One professor always told us that you were stupid to start over at the beginning if code already existed and works and this is true. If you wrote code for a program that does part of what your new project is, then you would be stupid to write that all over again, unless your old code was really bad.
However, if your teacher told you to write a compression program using B-Trees, and the whole point of the problem is that you can acually write the code to create the B-Tree, read straight binary from a file, and compress and decompress text, then if you are borrowing old code that does any of this, are you really doing the work? Discovering that Java doesn't handle signed datatypes the way other languages did was part of what I learned from doing this. If you copy the code, do you learn that?
I helped people with their work a lot in college, but there is a big difference between me trying to help them understand why they should use a while loop over a for loop as opposed to me writing the loops out for them.
My point was that movies shot using techniques like Super35 can't do Pan and Scan on the fly, because the Pan and Scan version contains information that isn't in the widescreen (normal) version of the film. Seamless Branching also isn't nearly fast enough to respond to moving between scenes where you could zoom on the widescreen image (effects scenes) and those that would use different footage. The DVD spec might have originally mandated that there is the capability for Pan and Scan on the fly, but they found it's basically impossible to pull off.
Slashdot Mirror
While I had to work like crazy, give up sleep, and become horribly addicted to caffeine while doing this, I'm also the only CS person I know that can talk about the differences in Kant and Aristotle as well as many other things. I also got to research and write interesting papers, such as a 20 page paper on women in computer science, which helped to educate me on questions we all ask ourselves (Why aren't more women in computers?) and improve writing skills. Of course, as I write code all day, these skills go downhill, and I did have to read Dickens (hated him), but it was better than only taking CS.
Hotmail account picks up spam, it's good at that. I have to use IE at work because it's what everyone uses at work, and since I write web sites all day for people at work, I don't have much of a choice in the matter.
I know it's off topic, but since everyone seems to have pop-ups here with such a passion, why doesn't Slashdot adopt a policy to not link to stories (like this) at Yahoo!, who has pop-ups, and instead only link to sites that are pop-up free? I'm sure this story is going to be picked up by many other sites, but Yahoo! will get all that traffic, and keep serving up the pop-up ads, as we all go there.
Maybe I'm not sure what exactly the submitter means by Anonymous Checkout, but if they don't know who checked out a book, why would anyone ever return it? I guess I'm just confused about that issue of this idea, they have to maintain some records so that they can fine people that don't return books, right?
That example on using two pieces of hardware doesn't work in many, many cases. Say I make a trip to Radioshack, buy some perfectly legal parts, then go home and take these legal parts and combine them to make a cell phone jammer? Or a wire tap? Are those legal beacuse I took hardware parts I legally owned and combined them? What if I go to my work today, combine some perfectly legal chemicals, and make methanthetamines? Are those legal because I took the parts (if you work at a store in an area with lots of meth production, the cops tell you what to look out for) that were legal, and then combined them on my own time? While I don't like the DMCA either, it's pretty easy to see how you can take two possibly legal pieces of hardware and make something totally illegal out of them, DMCA or not.
If you want to try to get really creative, go out and buy yourself a copy of Larousse Gastronomique and then learn to really cook. Once you've gotten past the point that you're worried about totally screwing everything up, you'll find how really great some pasta with a bit of extra virgin olive oil and some diced tomatos can really be. I keep screwing up things that I try to make (and still can't cook holandaise sauce), but I can also whip up some salmon, guacamole, and pasta for a quick dinner if I have people coming over and not worry.
I have mp3's at work on my computer because I keep all my CD's at home in a 300 disc changer, and have ripped them all to my mp3 server at home. If I want to listen to an album, I'll download it from my FTP then listen to it for a few weeks before I delete it. It takes me no more time to queue up an album in Winamp than to swap between CD's like other people do at work for music. If I'm not pirating or sharing files, why can't I listen to mp3's?
More examples of this would be the last two albums from Radiohead (Kid A, Amnesiac) as well as The Fragile from Nine Inch Nails. All the die hard fans went out and bought them as soon as they were released, so they would debut at #1 on the Billboard charts, but they had no radio/video airplay to keep them going. Both bands might still be great (and Radiohead is as good as anyone in the world right now), but without a single and a video that's really popular (and I mean higher than #15 on the Modern Rock chart), you won't stay up there for long.
Didn't they give an award to Metal Gear Solid 2 a couple of years ago over the demo they showed of that? E3 is all about hype, not playable games, and Doom 3 was definately all that anyone could talk about, so it was the leader in hype. The video was just amazing, and coworkers that went to E3 said the demo there was just amazing as well. If it was the best looking and most interesting thing that people saw at E3, even if it wasn't playable, why shouldn't it win?
Just remember, 640k should be enough for anything, so you've got lots of extra overhead on that thing!
If I recall correctly, W's big tax cut reduced the maximum federal income tax rate from 39.6% to 33% or so, which means someone making $50,000 a year will see a small gain, but those that are incredibly wealthly, making $1 Million a year, will see a huge windfall. They say it's a multibillion reduction in taxes, but they just don't say that it's for the wealthy once again, not the working class who pay a larger tax percentage once you subtract the cost of living (which you have to do in order to have a fair comparison).
I acually don't think you should lose any of the quality. This isn't VHS where it's stored in an analog format that degrades, I'd think of it more as a DAT tape with all digital data that should keep it's quality. Just keep it away from a magnet. Since JVC came up with it, and they own the patent on VHS, I'm sure the name came from that, and the fact that it's on tapes.
Unfortunately, at least Axis and Allies on the computer is a horrible memory hog, and some games were just meant to be played on a board anyway. The computer games are great for over the net, or when no one else will play, but it's far more fun to lay the game out when there are the people there to do it. Also, the computer rolling those 6's for heavy bombers isn't nearly as much fun as doing it yourself.
Why not also have games like Diplomacy, Risk, Axis and Allies, and other strategy board games for groups of people as well? It might be low tech, but a full game of Diplomacy is more fun than almost any computer game still.
All films shot at 24fps will still only be 24fps when projected digitally. If you upconvert it to 60fps, you can wind up with funny motion errors from running certain frames more often than other frames (you get this on TV with 3:2 pulldown problems). Additionally, if you looked at how Star Wars was shot digitally, it was shot at 24fps just like any other movie. Just because you possibly can have movies at 60fps doesn't mean they will. Why shoot things at 60fps when you're going to either more than double your film costs or have something that has to be downsampled for everyone else?
The DLP projectors that they use in a theater have a resolution of 1280x1024, and that's progressivly scanned of course. So, you get approxmiately 1.3 megapixels out of it. For comparison, a 35mm print has around 4 megapixels of resolution, and a 35mm negative can have around 20 million megapixels of effective resolution. See why I don't like digital?
Theaters are also able to project one copy of a flim in multiple theaters, as long as they stagger the start times by around 15 minutes. It's fairly easy, and really common now. Saturday night they could easily move the popular movie into an additional theater and remove the horrible film with no problem. However, if they have no control over the digital film (you think they would ever let them copy it to a different projector?), they would lose that ability. If you go up into the projectionist booth at a theater, you'll see how they do this.
So, while the Saturn might have had a ton of power under that hood, it doesn't matter if no one can utilize it. When Sony needed to design the Playstation 2, they knew what it needed to do: FPU/Matrix Math, 3D effects, and do them fast. It needed to do other stuff, but none of that was as important as the main things. They designed a new chipset just to do what the console needed. They didn't take a chip that had years and years of backwards compatibility so you could still run WordPerfect 5.0 on it because that didn't matter. Think how much that backwards compatibility, which is never used, costs the XBox in terms of price and performance? Even though the originial IDE for the PS2 wasn't great compared to the original Playstation one, it's design is still better than the Xbox design because it's all new, and will get cheaper as time goes on better.
Heh, I'm wondering who at kexp is reading Slashdot while at work right now. The 96k mp3 stream is nice since at my work (Fred Hutch Cancer Center) we're in the basement, 20 feet underground, so radio reception is non-existant, and my co-workers can only handle me playing Radiohead and The Strokes so much.
They are paid for my sponsorship drives, like public television, but also supported by the Experience Music Project up here (note: EMP is a project of Paul Allen as well, so the station basically exists thanks to all that Microsoft money that Allen has). They also take song requests from people continaully, and it's introduced me to lots of bands that I otherwise never would have heard on most commercial radio, or even most streaming internet radio.
Atari's complaints about the Playstation price (which were in an interview in Next Generation magazine a long time ago) dealt with the fact that the Playstation was originally around $400 in Japan before it came out in the US, and the US price was going to be $300. However, Sony redesigned the Japanese version (manufacturing techniques constantly improve on console, the Playstation 2 is on it's 5th revision already) and lowered the price in Japan to $300, which means it would no longer be dumping in the US. If the XBox was $100 everywhere in the world, they can sell it for that in the US. They can give it away if they want, just they can't give it away in the US and then sell it for $500 in Europe.
Cigarettes and Porn and Alcohol are all legally set to be 18 years of age in the US. However, alcohol is really 21 because the government (due to pressure from MADD years ago) says you don't get federal highway money if your drinking age is under 21. Movies, however, police themselves, and every kid can usually find a theater where they know they don't card, or they know people that work there, since that's not a legal responsibility to keep them out.
However, if your teacher told you to write a compression program using B-Trees, and the whole point of the problem is that you can acually write the code to create the B-Tree, read straight binary from a file, and compress and decompress text, then if you are borrowing old code that does any of this, are you really doing the work? Discovering that Java doesn't handle signed datatypes the way other languages did was part of what I learned from doing this. If you copy the code, do you learn that?
I helped people with their work a lot in college, but there is a big difference between me trying to help them understand why they should use a while loop over a for loop as opposed to me writing the loops out for them.
Go to cnn.com and look up a stock quote on BDE, you'll find Brilliant Digital Entertainment. It might be a stupid name, but they are a public company.
My point was that movies shot using techniques like Super35 can't do Pan and Scan on the fly, because the Pan and Scan version contains information that isn't in the widescreen (normal) version of the film. Seamless Branching also isn't nearly fast enough to respond to moving between scenes where you could zoom on the widescreen image (effects scenes) and those that would use different footage. The DVD spec might have originally mandated that there is the capability for Pan and Scan on the fly, but they found it's basically impossible to pull off.