Actually, there were keno machines out for a while that used pi as par of the random number generations process for generating the keno balls. Since the code was based on pi, someone (with access to the code for the program) wrote a program to predict the numbers the machine would pick next. They attempted to use that program to 'win' on keno, they got caught though, I saw it on history channel durring the whole vegas cheating special week. The reason they got caught was for winning the top prize on keno, and they stayed in the casino under an assumed identity, and then used thier real identity to claim the prize.
So, it's not really saying pi isn't 'random' it's just saying using pi isn't 'random enough' it's a vulnerability which may allow others to predict the outcome, since pi can be calculated. Kinda like how using RF noise as a RNG is a vulnerability, as one can conceal a radio tranmitter in a cell phone, and if they know the working of the rng, produce a burst of noise that will cause a predetermined vale to occur.
But what are the airlines going to do when jet fuel becomes so expensive
They do what they've been doing for the past 50 years, they use the cheapest fuel that can combust inside a jet-turbine engine... there are something like 14 types of high-octane fuels that are suitable for jet turbine engines, and only 'pure' petrochemical is kerosene type jet fuel. As a matter of fact, airplanes can fly of of any number of distiled alchohols, so if every drop of oil on the plannet was used up, we could alway grow some plant that could be refined into alchohol cheaply enough and regrow fast enough to produce a constant supply for jet turbine engines.
The reason airlines have been so dependant on keresone jet fuel in the past is traditionally it's been the cheapest fuel source for airlines. as prices have already nearly doubled, that could easily change... forcing airlines to consider one of the many alternatives to using pure kerosene as a jet fuel.
Also your example of a $5,000 airline ticket is rediculous. the single largest expense for any airline, is the cost of planes, and 'renting' terminals at airports. followed closely by employee costs, and the least signfigant price is the cost of fuel. The reason it costs $3,000+ for some flights is the cost of renting an airport terminal that you have 1 weekly flight going out of, simply due to lack of demand on that route.. compare that to a popular route where the cost of a ticket is in the $200 range, because they have nearly hourly flights 7 days a week... If renting your terminal gate is $1 million a year you need to clear a lot of passengers to keep the ticket price at $200 and the number one factor in rising ticket prices is due to Increased demand for terminals and a lack of increased capacity at many airports.
If rising oil prices has impacted any airlines bankruptcy it is clearly a case of 'the straw that broke the camel's back' because of the narrow profit margin with the high upfront costs and the enormous cost of leasing terminal space at airports.
12 meter dishes are mounted into a nice solid poured concrete foundation. all movement is done by precision motors and the dish is 'locked' into place so firmly that it's highly unlikely that even a person jumping around inside the dish is going to 'realign' it manually. And they are a serious pain to align, although they were analog, so you'd get staticky fuzz of the image/sound prior to aquiring a full signal... which made it easier for human operators to figure out if they were pointing the dish at the right satelite. Also, to make large dishes cheaper they eventually settled on using a lower wind resistance 'mesh' and cheaper stabilizer systems...
My uncle had an old analog dish, which is now in disrepair as it hasn't been used, was old to begin with etc etc.. he has a standard digital satelite now, as most people do.
much to his chargin I once used the alignment controls to 'look' for satelites, and wound up watching chinese morning programming, but what geek could resist playing with a motorized dish;)
Actually multi-core systems will make it harder for a 'user' to notice they have spyware... since a 'slowing down' of the system can often times be quite noticable when a spyware has hijacked you. With dual cores, spyware could potentially take up the better part of a core's processing power, and the luser would never be the wiser...
Maybe the library isn't such a bad idea after all.
Let me be the first to correct you on that. with some exceptions, most libraries have at least some fiction section... and while reading fiction is at least likely to promote some higher thinking skills, it's really easy to use the worlds inside fiction novels to escape everyday life.
I spent the better part of my grade school years inside a library... so I know the time spend inside one isn't always that productive. People who want to escape reality find a way to do so, the internet just makes things so much easier.
I can show you a stack of them I have, they're all on cd-r though... Mine are actually SVCDs though, Since my capture card could capture natively to SVCD specification, it was much easier a capture process than to try and make divx out of say, an anime I had rented locally.
They probably added something rediculous to the bill, so that if it passed it would allow employers to 'protect' themselves if they inquired as to the sexual status of an employee shortly before they were mysteriously terminated from their position.
Congress sucks. M$ft sucks too, but they probably had good reason to go to 'neutral' status on this..
While I seem to remember Win 3.1 running is less than 32 MB of RAM, I don't think it could boot from floppy. Actually it can boot from a floppy, but only if you hack it to;) I remember running windows under 4MB of ram, and when they made web browsers that could actually browse the web with that little ram.
standard analog sticks I find it ironic that the only gaming company to go with an entirely digital gaming pad, when Everyone had analog gaming pads, some with numerical digital pads.. is now considered to be the the company to bring back standard analog sticks.
Nintendo Killed the analog stick. Atari had 2 buttons and an analog stick. Colecovision had 2 digital fire buttons, 12 digital numberpad buttons, and an analog stick. Intellivision had an analog pad, and a number pad.. the NES had a digital pad, and 4 buttons. I think sega dropped the analog stick too, but i'm not sure at what point they did.
Analog control sticks are back out of the grave, but half of the people I know hate them. They're only 'back' because they co-exist with the d-pad, which is a much easier input device to handle.
Doh you opened the door, now this batch is all shot!
As many have stated here, if the window is tinted yellow, the room inside infact has all yellow (amber) lighting. This is because much as a photo negative will expose under more than the slightest infrared lighting, CPUs will not be etched correctly if exposed to UV rays in the wrong areas.
The entire building is not yellow, as only certain processes are UV sensative, and once the part has been given the needed chemical baths they are no longer light sensitive.
White light would burn out the chips about to be etched as surely as opening the door to a dark room before the film/photo paper can be given it's chemical bath to 'crystalize' the paper/films light sensitivity.
*drools* Japan public TV really knows what people want... 6/GiB/s uncompressed for the video alone, even with 100:1 mpeg-4 compression you've got 60/MB/s just for the video.. and mpeg 4 looks better at ~60:1 ratio so 100-MB/sec.. the audio has 24 channel, so FLAC would need ~8-9 mb/s (cross channel redundancy checking might reduce it even further) So, to stream 1 channel you need a dedicated gigabit ethernet card that isn't crappy. A 2 hour program with flac audio, and mpeg-4 video would fit on a a 1 TB disc, if the audio was lossily compressed, and you compromized on the mpeg-4 quality a bit you could fit 3 hours on the 1 TB size media.
So to clarify, the WORM optical media in this story is Just Barely Big enough to distribute feature UHDV format length movies is one uses high levels of compression. That would be one way to curtail piracy, one would need to greatly reduce the resolution to make the movies downloadable on the internet by anyone other than bill gates... I doubt he'd pay 10 million dollars a month in bandwith to download movies though, especially if it took him a full day to download one movie download over an oc-192.
They buy used, sweetheart. try an average price of more like $5 per disc, because they're hunting bargain auctions/ lot sales etc. And they generally have accumulated the collections over a few years of collecting... At an average price of $5 the cost is more like $25,000 Music purchases can be itemized as a tax write off, most small time DJ's have a 'day job' and purchase enough music for thier 'weekend moonlighting' as a DJ to have a tax bill of 0. It works out good. I know at least 6 DJs, in 3 states.
They all love music, that's why they're in a very expensive small time buisness where you're lucky to get $300 for a day's work..
I consider 5000 albums an 'average' size for an independant DJ who's been in the business for a few years.
pay more for an elegant case I dub thee yuppie. Any geek worth his salt will drag out the dremel+ hole drill, and custom mod the case himself, then drag out the door paint and paint it too! you can use stencils if you can't draw, though, as long as they were printed by yourself on a computer.
I loaded it but hadn't read it. This media device Is planning on using optics as opposed to physical movement. It's currently targted at removable storage, because it's currently write once. However, the technology this device uses could pave the way for optical hard drive replacements, theoretically with capacities in the hundreds of terrabytes..
Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities you apparently weren't around in 1970's when the first prototype optical recorder recorded an hour worth of video in digital bytes UNCOMPRESSED. Yes, it was a prototype, Yes it cost a million dollars (in 1970's) dollars to build... But there wasn't even a hard drive capable of storing more than a handful of megabytes at the time. Early Reasearch for optical storage was always in the 'hundreds' of gigabytes range. the smaller sizes they choose to go with were dictated by market forces/cost feasability issues. Slower access times are a limiting factor for optical devices, but magnetic devices have already gone past what was beleived to be the theoretical limit for the greatest data density of magnetic devices and still be readable.. the current state of Magnetic drives means only get bigger and heavier, to increase storage capacity, the therotical limit of optical data density is nowhere NEAR to being achieved, even in a labratory. And one thing is clear, higher density == greater access speed. Since optical devices have a higher theoretical density than magnetic drives, they have a higher therotical maximimum data transfer speed, however, for optical devices, the maximim seek speed can only be achieved when designers move away from the 'rotational' media development, and simply, use mirrors and lenses, and sensor arrays to read a stationary media. Rotational reading made sense for magnetic media, because the read head has to be physically near the media. with optics, the best thing to move is the light, which can travel great distances, at vastly greater speeds than any rotational device could ever dream of spinning. The problem is, we're already so tied into rotational media, and noone is reasearching the best optical storage devices, which would rely on mirrors and lenses, and the insane speed of light to perform the data seeking ^_- rather than trying to move the media. Also, such a media would be capable of being engineered to continue flawless operation even under 100,000 Gs worth of shock impact. There is no reason the data storage device couldn't be removable either. The media could be flat and rectangular, or remain round and flat, or could even be a pure holographic cube of data, encased in a protective casing, to prevent dust and fingerpinting. It's in virtually every science fiction book since the 1950's and yet no-one seems to care to actually build a holographic optical data device (except in a lab) that relies on optics to seek the data, rather than rotational speed.
Right, but your FLAC files only have 2 audio channels. If they had 5.1(6) audio channels, were lossless and did cross channel redundancy checking you'd probabbly get about 2025/kpbs. DVD-audio hasn't become widely popular yet, however Since DVD-audio playing devices can all play normal audio CDs I think it's only a matter of time before 5.1 channel replaces 2-channel music. Some legitimate music download sites are already offering 5.1 channel audio version of music that comes in a 5.1 format. Ogg vorbis allows 5.1 channel music to be shared over p2p networks at a small files size.
If you think your music library is large, imagine if the files were nearly 3x as large? I have a very small collection (10gb) of mostly 128 kbit (ugh) mp3s. Mostly I ripped from CD's so the audio quality is 'good enough.' However if my collection were magically replaced with 5.1 channel lossless it would take 160 GB This is a 'small' (around 250 albums) collection. Imagine a 5,000+ album collection like many small time DJs own (and generally they own all that music 'legitimately') That's some 3.2TB in 5.1 channel, lossless compression.
yet every single office supply superstore and electronics/appliance place has a full aisle of nothing but mice and keyboards! This wouldn't happen if most people were just content with their original mice/kbds.
And every wal-mart has an isle too. I can honestly tell you the reason for it though. Violent online gamers. Actually smashing the monitor is too expensive, but throwing a mouse at the wall, or smashing the keyboard on the ground... well, that's all too easy to do, and the keyboard can take a good 6-7 good whacks before you need to buy a replacement. I've known quite a few angry gamers... and if I play seriously I too become an angry gamer. The x-box has break-away controllers for a reason man. Microsoft knows there are a lot of angry gamers, who choose to destroy the instrument of their frustration, the input device;) Also a keyboard can be had for $10, so one can buy a couple month supply for not a lot of cash, depending on how violent of a gamer one is;)
You always-always have to research your motherboards for issues. If you've got money to burn go ahead blow it on crap boards, and let everyone know what the deal is online, on a highly page-ranked hardware info site. You can't 'trust' any motherboard manufacturer, they all have suspicious warrenty procedures, they always try to pawn off buggy boards with the holy grail of "we'll fix in the next bios revision." I never buy a board that hasn't been on the market at least a full 30-days because some issues won't turn up right away.
Production costs are lower north of the 49th there are a lot of reasons, 1. Screen actors guild of america. Everyone who says more than 5 words has to be a screen actors guild member, so that means they get paid enough money to pay guild fees etc... 2. land value Compared the price of land in hollywood compared to toronto? yeah, it's a huge difference, and because land values are so high, that means rent is high, that means everyone who works for you building sets etc needs more money to make a decent living. there are probabbly more factors too, the thing is you don't see anyone building a movie studio in minneapolis where land values are still nearly mid-west priced and there is a high population of perfomance artists etc. People build those things in hollywood;) where everyone else is, noone thinks 'well we could do it cheaper elsewhere...' they think 'then we wouldn't be able to say made in hollywood.'
I download all my Tv from Japan. There is no question as to where the Japanese stand on copyright. 'If you are only stealing our competitors product we don't care.' Ahh nice to have a civilized country where there is actually a free market and some companies simply don't even ask to have copyrighted material removed from the web 'because it costs too much money.'
It might have a little to do with the overall laxness eastern philisophy has over IP laws. People mention many eastern countries when referring to the $5 copies of windows software etc, but there is an entire distrect in tokyo where everything you buy is ripped off someone elses ip/etc. This in a country where posession of a firearm is a criminal offense.
America almost had a nice lax set of laws concerning IP, back in the early days it was 10 years for pretty much everything. nowadays only 'life saving medicines' are still restricted to 14 years of copyright. Mickey mouse will be owned by disney in all likenesses until the entire earth is destroyed by a fleet of angry vogons.
Keep in mind, the only reason most eastern nations even have a copyright law of any kind is to be able to legally trade products with the united states of america and our trading partners. the extent to which these laws are enforced is directly proportional to the money those countries recieve from copyright lobbies. In eastern philosophy ideas (in general) belong to to the common good. Pretty much the only place where 'secrecy' was deemed important was in martial arts and war. Because industrialization was all pretty well begged borowed or stolen there ip system is about 100 years behind america, which accelerated greatly due to large influxes of scientists into the united states, due to favorable living conditions. When you're inventing/creating a lot strong IP laws favor your nation, when you're stealing IP to catch up lax ip laws favor your society.
Rember america used to consider the ability to have access to IP such as books etc as part of 'Freedom' at one point in our history too, so it's probably only a matter of time until eastern nations have all caught up on trying to squeeze every last penny from every last person for every piece of IP they can.
intel fanboy myth 1 AMD can't pump out the volume Dell needs Bzzt incorrect, AMD won't BEND Over, Kiss dell's shiny metal ass, and ship 95% of it's early production volume to dell so dell can 'trump' competitors. Intel has an entire devision dedicated to bending over backwards and kissing ass.
Intel fanboy myth 2 AMD processors are less stable Bzzt wrong again, AMD CPUs have had as clean or better a 'stability' track record as Intel. 'but my windows crashes more using amd' This isn't a CPU issue, it's a software vendor issue, usually related to 3rd party drivers for sound cards etc, although if you buy a cheap chipset, instead of a quality one, the chipset could bring stability issues into the system, but plenty of tiwanese intel chipsets can be had too, and can cause as much system instability.
Intel fanboy myth number 3 (w)Intel platform is always a safe bet, if you want to keep your job. In some companies the FUD is piled high and deep, however, 'keeping your job' in a tough economy is going to be rough if some fly by night linux guru sells the board on some cutrate GNU/AMD solution that has a TCO of roughly 5% of you (w)intel platform. Taking risks can get you fired, but staying tried and true to the 'old' way is how k-mart and sears were crushed into bankruptcy by wal-mart. What good does it do you to get laid-off because your company was crushed by an upstart company, with a better revenue model, that no longer needs anyone to fill it's job openings;)
I'll give you point D. as it was the only point you made that wasn't either complete BS or fanboy ravings.
Ubuntu crashes on my system, and generally just breaks. the LiveCD works okay but has some quirks, Sarge installed generally without problem, other than having 6-month old everything. Keep in mind, sarge isn't even the 'stable' branch.
Ubuntu wants to work with debian, to make a better debian, but the goals of Ubuntu and Debian are different. debian aims at a pure FOSS os, while ubuntu aims at a viable commercial desktop linux distro. A viable commercial Linux require a lot of 'free as in beer' software to run properly (java/nvidia-ati drivers, etc) Even though i have sarge, i installed both of the above, 'free as in beer' because I needed an accelerated X-server to play mpeg-4 streams at certain resolutions without 'skipping' and java's vm was needed to run p2p apps. in my experience p2p apps run about 20% greater efficiency under a default linux config, vs a 'default' xp config, so obviously linux is the os of choice for p2p users.
Debian has always had a problem keeping up to date, I still use it, because it seems like the only viable alternative to it is gentoo, which would take a week to install on my current system;) Ubuntu might weaken Debian, but it is unlikely to kill Debian in the long run, and even if they did, new distros would take it's place. Also, as good as apt-get is, it still require an obsolete server/mirror model as the primary method to distribute files needed for upgrading/installing the os. Seeded swarming (aka Bittorrent) is the future... why force individuals to connect and try 20 different mirrors, when all mirrors can connect to one central tracker, and everyone connected to the tracker can swarm stream files not only from mirrors, but also from other users downloading files;) mirrors can set all sorts of bandwith caps/user connection limits etc with a modern torrent client like azureus. Even with most broadband users having an 8:1 ratio on down/upload streams, bittorrent uses donated bandwith more efficiently, instead of 'popular' mirrors footing most of the bill, the tracker helps ensure that all mirrors take on as much bandwith as they planned to dontate. because this can change dynamically the tracker can change who's donating bandwith on an hourly basis easily. that's not something you can do with conventional ftp mirroring.
If debian was already using torrent technology, all ubuntu would have to do is set up it's own tracker, and the farther they diverged from debian, the less bandwith of debian's mirrors they'd use.
However, the argument for putting the battery backup directly into an power supply, in unaffected by this statement.... also, having an atx supply with a DC input, and an external UPS with DC output with a cord shorter than 10 meters also has minimal issues. Also, by having the conversion process take place in the UPS you are shifting 20% of the heat generated by a modern PC away from the enclosure, and putting it into an external device. (compare devices like the PS1 and PS2 which have an internal converter, and early models had serious overheating issues, and other consoles that decided to place the conversion in an external device, even if that converter is on the console connection side, it removes heat from inside the console, and lets it dissipate outside the console.)
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Actually, there were keno machines out for a while that used pi as par of the random number generations process for generating the keno balls. Since the code was based on pi, someone (with access to the code for the program) wrote a program to predict the numbers the machine would pick next. They attempted to use that program to 'win' on keno, they got caught though, I saw it on history channel durring the whole vegas cheating special week. The reason they got caught was for winning the top prize on keno, and they stayed in the casino under an assumed identity, and then used thier real identity to claim the prize.
So, it's not really saying pi isn't 'random' it's just saying using pi isn't 'random enough' it's a vulnerability which may allow others to predict the outcome, since pi can be calculated. Kinda like how using RF noise as a RNG is a vulnerability, as one can conceal a radio tranmitter in a cell phone, and if they know the working of the rng, produce a burst of noise that will cause a predetermined vale to occur.
But what are the airlines going to do when jet fuel becomes so expensive
They do what they've been doing for the past 50 years, they use the cheapest fuel that can combust inside a jet-turbine engine... there are something like 14 types of high-octane fuels that are suitable for jet turbine engines, and only 'pure' petrochemical is kerosene type jet fuel. As a matter of fact, airplanes can fly of of any number of distiled alchohols, so if every drop of oil on the plannet was used up, we could alway grow some plant that could be refined into alchohol cheaply enough and regrow fast enough to produce a constant supply for jet turbine engines.
The reason airlines have been so dependant on keresone jet fuel in the past is traditionally it's been the cheapest fuel source for airlines. as prices have already nearly doubled, that could easily change... forcing airlines to consider one of the many alternatives to using pure kerosene as a jet fuel.
Also your example of a $5,000 airline ticket is rediculous. the single largest expense for any airline, is the cost of planes, and 'renting' terminals at airports. followed closely by employee costs, and the least signfigant price is the cost of fuel. The reason it costs $3,000+ for some flights is the cost of renting an airport terminal that you have 1 weekly flight going out of, simply due to lack of demand on that route.. compare that to a popular route where the cost of a ticket is in the $200 range, because they have nearly hourly flights 7 days a week... If renting your terminal gate is $1 million a year you need to clear a lot of passengers to keep the ticket price at $200 and the number one factor in rising ticket prices is due to Increased demand for terminals and a lack of increased capacity at many airports.
If rising oil prices has impacted any airlines bankruptcy it is clearly a case of 'the straw that broke the camel's back' because of the narrow profit margin with the high upfront costs and the enormous cost of leasing terminal space at airports.
12 meter dishes are mounted into a nice solid poured concrete foundation. all movement is done by precision motors and the dish is 'locked' into place so firmly that it's highly unlikely that even a person jumping around inside the dish is going to 'realign' it manually. And they are a serious pain to align, although they were analog, so you'd get staticky fuzz of the image/sound prior to aquiring a full signal... which made it easier for human operators to figure out if they were pointing the dish at the right satelite. Also, to make large dishes cheaper they eventually settled on using a lower wind resistance 'mesh' and cheaper stabilizer systems...
;)
My uncle had an old analog dish, which is now in disrepair as it hasn't been used, was old to begin with etc etc.. he has a standard digital satelite now, as most people do.
much to his chargin I once used the alignment controls to 'look' for satelites, and wound up watching chinese morning programming, but what geek could resist playing with a motorized dish
Actually multi-core systems will make it harder for a 'user' to notice they have spyware... since a 'slowing down' of the system can often times be quite noticable when a spyware has hijacked you.
With dual cores, spyware could potentially take up the better part of a core's processing power, and the luser would never be the wiser...
Maybe the library isn't such a bad idea after all.
Let me be the first to correct you on that. with some exceptions, most libraries have at least some fiction section... and while reading fiction is at least likely to promote some higher thinking skills, it's really easy to use the worlds inside fiction novels to escape everyday life.
I spent the better part of my grade school years inside a library... so I know the time spend inside one isn't always that productive. People who want to escape reality find a way to do so, the internet just makes things so much easier.
I've almost NEVER seen video CDs here in the US
I can show you a stack of them I have, they're all on cd-r though... Mine are actually SVCDs though, Since my capture card could capture natively to SVCD specification, it was much easier a capture process than to try and make divx out of say, an anime I had rented locally.
They probably added something rediculous to the bill, so that if it passed it would allow employers to 'protect' themselves if they inquired as to the sexual status of an employee shortly before they were mysteriously terminated from their position.
Congress sucks. M$ft sucks too, but they probably had good reason to go to 'neutral' status on this..
While I seem to remember Win 3.1 running is less than 32 MB of RAM, I don't think it could boot from floppy. ;) I remember running windows under 4MB of ram, and when they made web browsers that could actually browse the web with that little ram.
Actually it can boot from a floppy, but only if you hack it to
They were clicking on competitors ads... not their own. so that competitors ads would 'run out of clicks' and stop being viewed.
standard analog sticks
I find it ironic that the only gaming company to go with an entirely digital gaming pad, when Everyone had analog gaming pads, some with numerical digital pads.. is now considered to be the the company to bring back standard analog sticks.
Nintendo Killed the analog stick. Atari had 2 buttons and an analog stick. Colecovision had 2 digital fire buttons, 12 digital numberpad buttons, and an analog stick. Intellivision had an analog pad, and a number pad.. the NES had a digital pad, and 4 buttons. I think sega dropped the analog stick too, but i'm not sure at what point they did.
Analog control sticks are back out of the grave, but half of the people I know hate them. They're only 'back' because they co-exist with the d-pad, which is a much easier input device to handle.
Doh you opened the door, now this batch is all shot!
As many have stated here, if the window is tinted yellow, the room inside infact has all yellow (amber) lighting. This is because much as a photo negative will expose under more than the slightest infrared lighting, CPUs will not be etched correctly if exposed to UV rays in the wrong areas.
The entire building is not yellow, as only certain processes are UV sensative, and once the part has been given the needed chemical baths they are no longer light sensitive.
White light would burn out the chips about to be etched as surely as opening the door to a dark room before the film/photo paper can be given it's chemical bath to 'crystalize' the paper/films light sensitivity.
*drools* Japan public TV really knows what people want... 6/GiB/s uncompressed for the video alone, even with 100:1 mpeg-4 compression you've got 60/MB/s just for the video.. and mpeg 4 looks better at ~60:1 ratio so 100-MB/sec.. the audio has 24 channel, so FLAC would need ~8-9 mb/s (cross channel redundancy checking might reduce it even further) So, to stream 1 channel you need a dedicated gigabit ethernet card that isn't crappy. A 2 hour program with flac audio, and mpeg-4 video would fit on a a 1 TB disc, if the audio was lossily compressed, and you compromized on the mpeg-4 quality a bit you could fit 3 hours on the 1 TB size media.
So to clarify, the WORM optical media in this story is Just Barely Big enough to distribute feature UHDV format length movies is one uses high levels of compression. That would be one way to curtail piracy, one would need to greatly reduce the resolution to make the movies downloadable on the internet by anyone other than bill gates... I doubt he'd pay 10 million dollars a month in bandwith to download movies though, especially if it took him a full day to download one movie download over an oc-192.
They buy used, sweetheart. try an average price of more like $5 per disc, because they're hunting bargain auctions/ lot sales etc. And they generally have accumulated the collections over a few years of collecting... At an average price of $5 the cost is more like $25,000 Music purchases can be itemized as a tax write off, most small time DJ's have a 'day job' and purchase enough music for thier 'weekend moonlighting' as a DJ to have a tax bill of 0. It works out good. I know at least 6 DJs, in 3 states.
They all love music, that's why they're in a very expensive small time buisness where you're lucky to get $300 for a day's work..
I consider 5000 albums an 'average' size for an independant DJ who's been in the business for a few years.
pay more for an elegant case
I dub thee yuppie.
Any geek worth his salt will drag out the dremel+ hole drill, and custom mod the case himself, then drag out the door paint and paint it too! you can use stencils if you can't draw, though, as long as they were printed by yourself on a computer.
I loaded it but hadn't read it. This media device Is planning on using optics as opposed to physical movement. It's currently targted at removable storage, because it's currently write once. However, the technology this device uses could pave the way for optical hard drive replacements, theoretically with capacities in the hundreds of terrabytes..
Optical storage capacities have always lagged hard drive capacities you apparently weren't around in 1970's when the first prototype optical recorder recorded an hour worth of video in digital bytes UNCOMPRESSED. Yes, it was a prototype, Yes it cost a million dollars (in 1970's) dollars to build... But there wasn't even a hard drive capable of storing more than a handful of megabytes at the time. Early Reasearch for optical storage was always in the 'hundreds' of gigabytes range. the smaller sizes they choose to go with were dictated by market forces/cost feasability issues. Slower access times are a limiting factor for optical devices, but magnetic devices have already gone past what was beleived to be the theoretical limit for the greatest data density of magnetic devices and still be readable.. the current state of Magnetic drives means only get bigger and heavier, to increase storage capacity, the therotical limit of optical data density is nowhere NEAR to being achieved, even in a labratory. And one thing is clear, higher density == greater access speed. Since optical devices have a higher theoretical density than magnetic drives, they have a higher therotical maximimum data transfer speed, however, for optical devices, the maximim seek speed can only be achieved when designers move away from the 'rotational' media development, and simply, use mirrors and lenses, and sensor arrays to read a stationary media. Rotational reading made sense for magnetic media, because the read head has to be physically near the media. with optics, the best thing to move is the light, which can travel great distances, at vastly greater speeds than any rotational device could ever dream of spinning. The problem is, we're already so tied into rotational media, and noone is reasearching the best optical storage devices, which would rely on mirrors and lenses, and the insane speed of light to perform the data seeking ^_- rather than trying to move the media. Also, such a media would be capable of being engineered to continue flawless operation even under 100,000 Gs worth of shock impact. There is no reason the data storage device couldn't be removable either. The media could be flat and rectangular, or remain round and flat, or could even be a pure holographic cube of data, encased in a protective casing, to prevent dust and fingerpinting. It's in virtually every science fiction book since the 1950's and yet no-one seems to care to actually build a holographic optical data device (except in a lab) that relies on optics to seek the data, rather than rotational speed.
Right, but your FLAC files only have 2 audio channels. If they had 5.1(6) audio channels, were lossless and did cross channel redundancy checking you'd probabbly get about 2025/kpbs. DVD-audio hasn't become widely popular yet, however Since DVD-audio playing devices can all play normal audio CDs I think it's only a matter of time before 5.1 channel replaces 2-channel music. Some legitimate music download sites are already offering 5.1 channel audio version of music that comes in a 5.1 format. Ogg vorbis allows 5.1 channel music to be shared over p2p networks at a small files size.
If you think your music library is large, imagine if the files were nearly 3x as large? I have a very small collection (10gb) of mostly 128 kbit (ugh) mp3s. Mostly I ripped from CD's so the audio quality is 'good enough.' However if my collection were magically replaced with 5.1 channel lossless it would take 160 GB This is a 'small' (around 250 albums) collection. Imagine a 5,000+ album collection like many small time DJs own (and generally they own all that music 'legitimately') That's some 3.2TB in 5.1 channel, lossless compression.
yet every single office supply superstore and electronics/appliance place has a full aisle of nothing but mice and keyboards! This wouldn't happen if most people were just content with their original mice/kbds.
;) Also a keyboard can be had for $10, so one can buy a couple month supply for not a lot of cash, depending on how violent of a gamer one is ;)
And every wal-mart has an isle too. I can honestly tell you the reason for it though. Violent online gamers. Actually smashing the monitor is too expensive, but throwing a mouse at the wall, or smashing the keyboard on the ground... well, that's all too easy to do, and the keyboard can take a good 6-7 good whacks before you need to buy a replacement. I've known quite a few angry gamers... and if I play seriously I too become an angry gamer. The x-box has break-away controllers for a reason man. Microsoft knows there are a lot of angry gamers, who choose to destroy the instrument of their frustration, the input device
You always-always have to research your motherboards for issues. If you've got money to burn go ahead blow it on crap boards, and let everyone know what the deal is online, on a highly page-ranked hardware info site. You can't 'trust' any motherboard manufacturer, they all have suspicious warrenty procedures, they always try to pawn off buggy boards with the holy grail of "we'll fix in the next bios revision." I never buy a board that hasn't been on the market at least a full 30-days because some issues won't turn up right away.
Production costs are lower north of the 49th ;) where everyone else is, noone thinks 'well we could do it cheaper elsewhere...' they think 'then we wouldn't be able to say made in hollywood.'
there are a lot of reasons, 1. Screen actors guild of america. Everyone who says more than 5 words has to be a screen actors guild member, so that means they get paid enough money to pay guild fees etc... 2. land value Compared the price of land in hollywood compared to toronto? yeah, it's a huge difference, and because land values are so high, that means rent is high, that means everyone who works for you building sets etc needs more money to make a decent living.
there are probabbly more factors too, the thing is you don't see anyone building a movie studio in minneapolis where land values are still nearly mid-west priced and there is a high population of perfomance artists etc. People build those things in hollywood
I download all my Tv from Japan. There is no question as to where the Japanese stand on copyright. 'If you are only stealing our competitors product we don't care.' Ahh nice to have a civilized country where there is actually a free market and some companies simply don't even ask to have copyrighted material removed from the web 'because it costs too much money.'
It might have a little to do with the overall laxness eastern philisophy has over IP laws. People mention many eastern countries when referring to the $5 copies of windows software etc, but there is an entire distrect in tokyo where everything you buy is ripped off someone elses ip/etc. This in a country where posession of a firearm is a criminal offense.
America almost had a nice lax set of laws concerning IP, back in the early days it was 10 years for pretty much everything. nowadays only 'life saving medicines' are still restricted to 14 years of copyright. Mickey mouse will be owned by disney in all likenesses until the entire earth is destroyed by a fleet of angry vogons.
Keep in mind, the only reason most eastern nations even have a copyright law of any kind is to be able to legally trade products with the united states of america and our trading partners. the extent to which these laws are enforced is directly proportional to the money those countries recieve from copyright lobbies. In eastern philosophy ideas (in general) belong to to the common good. Pretty much the only place where 'secrecy' was deemed important was in martial arts and war. Because industrialization was all pretty well begged borowed or stolen there ip system is about 100 years behind america, which accelerated greatly due to large influxes of scientists into the united states, due to favorable living conditions. When you're inventing/creating a lot strong IP laws favor your nation, when you're stealing IP to catch up lax ip laws favor your society.
Rember america used to consider the ability to have access to IP such as books etc as part of 'Freedom' at one point in our history too, so it's probably only a matter of time until eastern nations have all caught up on trying to squeeze every last penny from every last person for every piece of IP they can.
intel fanboy myth 1 AMD can't pump out the volume Dell needs Bzzt incorrect, AMD won't BEND Over, Kiss dell's shiny metal ass, and ship 95% of it's early production volume to dell so dell can 'trump' competitors. Intel has an entire devision dedicated to bending over backwards and kissing ass.
;)
Intel fanboy myth 2 AMD processors are less stable Bzzt wrong again, AMD CPUs have had as clean or better a 'stability' track record as Intel. 'but my windows crashes more using amd' This isn't a CPU issue, it's a software vendor issue, usually related to 3rd party drivers for sound cards etc, although if you buy a cheap chipset, instead of a quality one, the chipset could bring stability issues into the system, but plenty of tiwanese intel chipsets can be had too, and can cause as much system instability.
Intel fanboy myth number 3 (w)Intel platform is always a safe bet, if you want to keep your job. In some companies the FUD is piled high and deep, however, 'keeping your job' in a tough economy is going to be rough if some fly by night linux guru sells the board on some cutrate GNU/AMD solution that has a TCO of roughly 5% of you (w)intel platform. Taking risks can get you fired, but staying tried and true to the 'old' way is how k-mart and sears were crushed into bankruptcy by wal-mart. What good does it do you to get laid-off because your company was crushed by an upstart company, with a better revenue model, that no longer needs anyone to fill it's job openings
I'll give you point D. as it was the only point you made that wasn't either complete BS or fanboy ravings.
Ubuntu crashes on my system, and generally just breaks. the LiveCD works okay but has some quirks, Sarge installed generally without problem, other than having 6-month old everything. Keep in mind, sarge isn't even the 'stable' branch.
;) Ubuntu might weaken Debian, but it is unlikely to kill Debian in the long run, and even if they did, new distros would take it's place. Also, as good as apt-get is, it still require an obsolete server/mirror model as the primary method to distribute files needed for upgrading/installing the os. Seeded swarming (aka Bittorrent) is the future... why force individuals to connect and try 20 different mirrors, when all mirrors can connect to one central tracker, and everyone connected to the tracker can swarm stream files not only from mirrors, but also from other users downloading files ;) mirrors can set all sorts of bandwith caps/user connection limits etc with a modern torrent client like azureus. Even with most broadband users having an 8:1 ratio on down/upload streams, bittorrent uses donated bandwith more efficiently, instead of 'popular' mirrors footing most of the bill, the tracker helps ensure that all mirrors take on as much bandwith as they planned to dontate. because this can change dynamically the tracker can change who's donating bandwith on an hourly basis easily. that's not something you can do with conventional ftp mirroring.
Ubuntu wants to work with debian, to make a better debian, but the goals of Ubuntu and Debian are different. debian aims at a pure FOSS os, while ubuntu aims at a viable commercial desktop linux distro. A viable commercial Linux require a lot of 'free as in beer' software to run properly (java/nvidia-ati drivers, etc) Even though i have sarge, i installed both of the above, 'free as in beer' because I needed an accelerated X-server to play mpeg-4 streams at certain resolutions without 'skipping' and java's vm was needed to run p2p apps. in my experience p2p apps run about 20% greater efficiency under a default linux config, vs a 'default' xp config, so obviously linux is the os of choice for p2p users.
Debian has always had a problem keeping up to date, I still use it, because it seems like the only viable alternative to it is gentoo, which would take a week to install on my current system
If debian was already using torrent technology, all ubuntu would have to do is set up it's own tracker, and the farther they diverged from debian, the less bandwith of debian's mirrors they'd use.
In other words, Infinidim Enterprises is the corperate sponsor?
However, the argument for putting the battery backup directly into an power supply, in unaffected by this statement.... also, having an atx supply with a DC input, and an external UPS with DC output with a cord shorter than 10 meters also has minimal issues.
Also, by having the conversion process take place in the UPS you are shifting 20% of the heat generated by a modern PC away from the enclosure, and putting it into an external device. (compare devices like the PS1 and PS2 which have an internal converter, and early models had serious overheating issues, and other consoles that decided to place the conversion in an external device, even if that converter is on the console connection side, it removes heat from inside the console, and lets it dissipate outside the console.)