>By and large, the original series was not especially >lacking in the FX department. It was generally on par >with any science fiction show during its time, really.
I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who, but the truth is that most of the time the show's sets and effects were severely lacking, compared to its sci-fi contemporaries (they did better when it came to costumes, usually). If you compare the effects from late '60s outings of Who to those of the original Star Trek there's no comparison - Trek blows 'em away. Likewise in the mid-'70s if you compare the sets and effects on Who to those on Space:1999, the good Doctor's show also comes off looking like a joke.
Who's producers did what they could I suppose on too-tight a budget, but the results - while almost always inventive - were seldom impressive (or even particularly convincing). Here's hoping modern computer animation helps to even the odds a little bit in that department.
>"Genesis" and "Remembrance" both are generally considered >to be the best of the post-1960s Dalek stories.
Yeah, and that says a lot about how awful the other post-'60s Dalek serials were. While it sports a creepy atmosphere in the first episode, "Genesis" grows boring as hell and dismally oppressive in spots - like most Who 6-part serials the middle is hopelessly padded - and many of the guest performances are wretched. It becomes less enjoyable than endurable. Tom Baker doesn't have a good handle on the character of the Doctor yet either, which leaves poor Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane to carry much of the story for the good guys (she does what she can, although her character is somewhat wimped out and dumbed down by the writers during this season).
Fortunately "Genesis" has the late Michael Wisher's spectacular, over-the-top performance as Davros. Unfortunately he was so good the writers kept bringing Davros back over and over again for the next decade, with diminishing results (largely because they recast the role - the other actors couldn't deliver performances up to the level of Wisher's).
>A similar problem faces a lot of Doctor Who monsters, though: >the Cybermen suffered through almost all their post-1960s >appearances as writers generally tended to disregard the whole >risks-of-technology idea that was at their core of their creation.
Bang. Nail. Head.
That's what worries me about this latest return of the Daleks. Will they be used as a statement against fascism, which was at least to some degree their intended purpose when originally concocted by Nation back in the '60s, or will they just be trotted out the way they were pretty much from 1979 on, as a, "Oh look, here are the Daleks being nasty" kind of irrelevant nostalgia trip? Because if the story doesn't address what makes them a unique menace, you might as well use the Cybermen or the Borg or Darth Vader or whatever. Here's hoping the new writers and producers understand that better than their predecessors did during the end days of the program.
>I'd have to disagree that the Sontarans or the Cybermen >are more plausable enemies - the first a race devoted to >war but unable to do anything about that little vent on >the back of the neck and the second vulnerable to any >opponent that can rustle up some gold and a cheesegrater.
Oh, I agree - they both need work as well. Those Achilles heels the writers built into the races were silly 20 years ago.
I just think there's more there to work with than there is with the Daleks. The original concept behind the Cybermen was truly creepy, for the '60s. I think that would be easy to recapture for a modern audience. Likewise the Sontarans are physically an impressive enemy, though clearly someone needs to teach them the concept behind the "gas cap".
The Daleks could probably be reimaged as well into a truly credible threat - say as little biomechanical tanks that fly around and blow stuff up - but you'd probably have to change so much of their behavior and their backstory you might as well spend your time coming up with new, better enemies.
One of the other problems late-era Doctor Who had back in the late '80s was needlessly dredging up old enemies - Omega, the Daleks & Davros, the Sea Monsters - just to have a nostalgia fest. Invariably the results were mixed at best. Even back in Tom Baker's day, the outstanding episodes - "The Ark In Space", "Terror of the Zygons" (if you can overlook the bad effects for a certain monster), "The Pyramids of Mars", "The Face of Evil", "The Robots of Death", "The Talons of Weng Chiang" - all of them introduced new adversaries for the Doctor to combat. Offhand the only episode I can think of that brought back an old adversary and sorta kinda worked was "Earthshock", which re-introduced the Cybermen after nearly a decade's absence. It wasn't perfect either, but at least it had its moments and wasn't terribly dull or silly.
There hasn't been a good Dalek story since the mid-'60s. Pertwee's encounters with the Daleks were hardly the highlight of his career as the Doctor in the late '60s and early '70s. During his 7-season run as the Doctor Tom Baker had one mediocre, overlong Dalek serial (1975's "Genesis of the Daleks", redeemed only by Michael Wisher's fantastic performance as the Dalek's crazed creator, Davros), and one truly awful Dalek 4-parter, "Destiny of the Daleks" in 1979. Peter Davison's Doctor encountered the portly pepperpots half a decade later in 1984's lamentable "Resurrection of the Daleks". Colin Baker's Doctor runs into the Daleks the next year in the silly "Revelation of the Daleks". I've never seen Sylvester McCoy's Doctor's 1988 Dalek serial "Remembrance of the Daleks", but the general consensus seems to regard it as no better than "Genesis of the Daleks" at best.
The Daleks were an idea that ran out of gas after the initial Dalek craze of the early '60s ran its course in the UK. Since then, a Dalek serial has been a guaranteed bad time. They're more a curse to Doctor Who than a blessing, and the real challenge for any new Who series would be trying to reinvent them into something truly chilling and remotely plausible to a contemporary audience. It's possible I suppose, but Who's past producers tried and failed for almost 20 years to produce a Dalek serial as engaging to modern audiences as original Dalek adventures like "Dalek Invasion Earth" were to audiences in the early '60s. I think they'd be better off ignoring the Daleks - and particularly the Davros character, who has been unnecessarily and ludicrously dredged into every Dalek adventure since 1975's "Genesis" - and concentrating on creating compelling new enemies for the Doctor to fight.
And if they must revisit the past, they'd be far better off reimaging more plausible Who adversaries, like the Sontarans (reptilian clone warriors) and the Cybermen (televised sci-fi's original Borg).
>This was about two years ago. I did say "the last time".. >and that doesn't necessarily mean last month.
That's fine, but "the last time" could mean anywhere from a minute ago to 1999. And yes, two years ago a lot of Athlon motherboards did kinda suck, though I think if you'd shopped online you could have found a board that came with Firewire. My old Compaq (ugh) Athlon 600 system from 1999 had a network connection and onboard Firewire, though the audio was still on a card at that time, IIRC. Boards with all three were certainly around two years ago at reasonable prices, although frankly at that time few users had any use for Firewire.
>Buy online, and you generally have to service it yourself. >With a good local shop, at least a buyer can get >diagnostic help should the need arise, hassle free >returns, etc.
That's all well and good, but your original post was making price comparisons between the Athlon and Pentium motherboards. Using one sample - at a local shop, no less - as the source of that comparison isn't particularly valid. All it might show is that your local shop offered sucky deals - for whatever reason - on Athlon motherboards.
Well, there's half of your problem right there. If you don't price compare online, you're going to have no idea if the local shop is ripping you off or not. That simply wasn't a valid sample of prices.
>The kicker at the time was that the Intel chipset >board included sound, a couple Firewire ports and >a network jack all onboard. Even the shop's best >Athlon boards didn't have all three
Then this was either a couple of years or more ago, or the shop's "best" Athlon boards were crap. A quick search at newegg.com reveals a slew of high-end Athlon boards that support all three, along with Serial ATA and a host of additional features.
Sounds like less of a problem with the Athlon platform and more of a problem with your local shop.
>So a CD gives you 600-700 minutes of music, or between >10 and 12 hours. My days are longer than that.:(
The goal isn't to have umpteen hours of music to play sequentially. The goal is to have your entire library on hand, so you can hear whatever you want when you want, and not be limited to a 10 hour slice of your multi-thousand-hour collection.
I have an MP3 CD player in the car, and while it's nice - better than one of those stupid CD changers in the trunk - it still isn't as nice as an iPod.
Winamp may support FLAC, but few other gadgets do. I have a wireless music streamer that supports.WAV,.WMA and.MP3, so I can stream and control audio from my living room. It doesn't support FLAC, unfortunately.
I have a feeling FLAC is going to be going the way of the dodo. Microsoft has its own lossless.WMA format (based on Meridian's lossless packing, also used by DVD-Audio discs), and Apple just introduced a lossless format based on Dolby's lossless compression. While I'd like to see the open format win, I think FLAC is going to be the lossless Vorbis.
>Given this, why bother with an iPod or similar device at >all? Blank CDs are cheap, and if I burn 3 or 4 I have more >than enough selection to keep me going for several days.
Yeah, but you have to burn a slew of CD's. That's tedious if you have a large library. I have all of my CD's - about 500 of 'em - ripped to.WAV files on my hard drives. So I'd have to convert them to.MP3s and then burn individual batches to dozens of CD's. Ugh.
With an iPod or similar hard-drive based device, I could set my system to batch convert everything that's a.WAV to an.MP3 or.AAC file, then dump that onto the iPod and delete the copies. I think the largest iPod could just about hold my entire library - at least, everything I want to hear frequently - converted to.AAC. And then to hear any song, you just touch a button and spin a wheel. No swapping CD's looking for that song or album you want to listen to.
>No... For the past 50 years they've been concentrating on >*treatment* not *cures*. Because they don't want a one >time sale... they want an annuity.
This poster nails it. Cancer cure? Nope. Lots of expensive "treatments", though. Diabetes? No cure. AIDS? No cure. Some track record there, big pharma. And this after *taxpayers* have shoveled tens of billions of dollars of cash at big pharma, in the form of patent protections, tax breaks, subsidies and research grants.
Yet another corporate scam. When will you suckers wake up? If big pharma spent as much on cures as they did on marketing, lobbying and PR propaganda, we'd have a disease-free planet. And they'd all be out of a job.
>The decision to bring the Russians in was a nice >geopolitical gesture, but their hardware requires >too much maintenance
As opposed to the American hardware - the Space Shuttle. No maintenance required there . ..
If we hadn't brought the Russians onboard, we'd be royally and truly f***** right now, with no way to get supplies to the ISS or get replacement crews up to the station. She'd be unmanned and probably tumbling out of control.
Not that I'd consider that much of a loss, since the ISS is a totally useless white elephant, a $100 billion welfare project for defense contractors. But still, blaming the Russians for the trouble with the ISS - in light of the latest Shuttle disaster - seems kind of ridiculous.
>Since the launch of Pocket PC, Windows CE devices have >been growing in marketshare consistantly. In fact, the #1 >PDA manufacturer isn't PalmOne anymore, it's HP.
Great. Microsoft will be king of a **DEAD MARKET**. Congratulations, Bill Gates! Now maybe you can realize your lifelong ambition and become the world's #1 buggy whip manufacturer, too!
PDA's are so 9/10, dude. The market for them is contracting. Cell phones are where the action is now, and Palm has the hottest - and most profitable - cell phone by far with their Treo line.
That's the downside to Microsoft having a business model that's based upon leveraging their monopoly OS position and ripping off the innovations of others. That model only works when dealing with devices that truly need to run software written for their OS. Few people need to run Word or Excel on a dinky cell phone or PDA display, which leaves Microsoft incapable of leveraging their OS monopoly in the cell / PDA space to gain total market control. They have to compete on useful features and the functionality users crave (or didn't know they needed), and Microsoft is incapable of developing either. The day Microsloth comes up with something on their own as useful as Palm did with the Treo is the day hell freezes over. MS is way too busy trying to lock customers into their OS jail to spend a nanosecond worrying about what the customer truly wants or needs.
"Human ears listen up to about 16kHz." Leaving aside the variance between ears (which is huge- some can hear above 20khz)
*Very* few adults can hear up to 20kHz, let alone above it, particularly here in the west, where we're exposed to loud mechanical sounds and amplified music almost from birth.
nigh-subconscious overtones depend on these frequencies.
If you can't hear those frequencies - and the vast majority adults simply can't - their absence isn't going to be noticed. Ever.
Even if you can't hear these high frequencies alone very well, they do (measurably, and meaningfully) add something to music.
How, if you can't hear them?
Just crop everything above 16khz on a song and listen critically.
But if you "just crop everything above 16kHz on a song", you're performing some sort of filtering operation on the signal, in either the analog or digital domain, and that's going to have an impact on lower frequency signals as well. You're going to be introducing distortion into those signals as well. Performing the same kind of filtering at 20kHz is also going to have an impact on lower frequency signals, but hopefully most of that impact will be felt across frequencies in excess of 15kHz, where our hearing isn't particularly acute or able to discern any possible distortion, anyhow.
Assuming you can hear much of anything above 16kHz, which again most adults can't.
Yeah, but what is the level of the tone versus mid-frequencies? I can hear a 20 kHz tone in my right ear when the volume is cranked up, but it winds up being about a 20 dB gain versus a reference frequency of 1 kHz.
Exactly. And since there's little high-end energy in most music - certainly not much going on that's 20dB louder than what's at 1kHz - little is being missed by most adults if frequencies above 15-16kHz are being rolled off.
Another important point - if you're cranking the gain on those 20kHz tones, you're probably also producing lots of harmonics, and some of those are going to fall well below 20kHz. So, are you really hearing the 20kHz tones, or are you hearing harmonics at 15kHz or so, generated by the electronics or the speakers themselves?
Most of the problems with Windows comes with it's market size. There's no major virus threat for an Apple for example, and all that crap that gets poured in to your computer from the web isn't going to cause as many problems for Apple. However is they had 95% of the market (or whatever) I'm sure they'd be in the same boat.
Well, that's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Neither Linux nor OS X systems have traditionally shipped with settings as insecure as the default settings in Windows. Even if they controlled 95% of the market, I don't think it would be possible for either system to experience the kind of daily virus and worm assault that Windows systems experience.
The fact is, if you tweak a few settings in Windows XP, disable some services and activate the built-in firewall, you're going to be immune to the vast majority of crap being flung at you on the Internet. Don't run Outlook and you'll be immune to much of the rest. That tells me the problem isn't so much with the fundamental core of Windows as it is the default settings the OS ships with (although it's my understanding the basic Windows architecture is far from ideal from a security perspective, too).
The ironic thing is, you'd think an OS with 90+% marketshare, utilized by millions of barely computer-literate users, would ship by default with the most secure settings possible. Because for the Average Joe or Jane user, running around turning off services and changing network settings is so complicated to them you might as well be asking them to code the OS themselves - they simply aren't going to be able to do it on their own (reliably, anyhow).
I've thought for some time the reason why Windows has so many security problems is by design. Surely Microsoft must have realized by now the problems with the default settings in Windows - particularly in the home environment. You'd think an OS like XP Home would come with a lot of services and such disabled. The fact that it doesn't tells me that these worms and virus attacks and spyware and such are "features", ones designed to help sell the next version of Windows. I think the hope in Redmond is that home users' computers will be so fucked up after 3 or 4 years of exposure to all of this crap that they'll be forced to buy a new computer and the latest version of Windows. Because apart from slightly-enhanced security and stability, I can't think of a single reason why the Average Joe home user would need to upgrade from an older Pentium III or Athlon box running Win 98 to a newer system with more horsepower running XP. Unless they're trying to do desktop video or run bleeding-edge games, there's little need in the home for a system more capable than those 4 - 5 year old machines. Unless of course their machines have become so infested they've slowed to a crawl and crash constantly. That could certainly encourage them to replace their, "old, slow" computer.
For Linux this isn't an issue. That community always seems to be adding important new features to the OS - ones that members of the community feel they need (as opposed to the crap Microsoft keeps adding to their products, like those idiotic animated assistants). And since Linux is seldom bundled in the way Windows is, there's no incentive to make older PC's "break". If anything, the Linux advantage is making older PC's useful again, either as standalone desktop systems or in new applications (perhaps as a server or as part of a cluster).
Apple long ago adapted to longer upgrade cycles than are common in the PC market, however they also have the advantage of innovative hardware designs that entice users to upgrade. For some inexplicable reason, PC vendors still seem to be lagging a couple of years behind Apple when it comes to hardware design - the Mac adopted everything from Firewire and USB to CD-ROMs and DVD burners faster than the PC marketplace (even the high-end PC marketplace) did, and their case designs still make the crud coming from Compaq/hp and Dell look e
I can't understand why your message has been modded as Flamebait. Seriously - everything you've said is true. One of those el cheapo Sun WalMart Linux PC's or an iMac is a far, far simpler and safer option for grandma, who only needs to check her "e's" and surf eBay for quilts.
I've personally been called to help several older friends and relatives out of a jam when their Windows PC has become infested with worms, spybots, adware and the occasional virus. Although folks seem to be getting better about paying the Norton tax and keeping their scanners up to date, keeping most virus attacks at bay, they just don't understand why the anti-virus software isn't protecting them from this other crap.
Of course, they also can't understand why the "new and improved" Windows XP isn't immune to these problems. And I know a few who are sticking with older versions of Windows *because* they've seen all the problems their friends have had with their XP boxes. Whoops. Microsoft really screwed the pooch on security in XP.
For neophytes and occasional users who don't need to run Windows-only wares, OS X or a cheap pre-configured Linux box are now not only viable alternatives, they're the preferred solution as far as I'm concerned. The Macs couldn't be easier to configure and use (they can even run MS Office), and while the setup of the Linux box might still require handholding, they seem to be a lot more bullet proof and less susceptible to attack and the general "bloatrot" that afflicts virtually all Windows left in the care of Joe or Jane user.
>There aren't exactly alot of software out there only on dvd...
That's the odd thing, too. You'd think that by now, somebody somewhere would have released a "killer app" that took advantage of the increased storage space afforded by DVD.
>DVD drives are not yet as ubiquitous as CD drives. >For a backup of critical data, I'd want to be able >to read it at as many places as possible.
Huh?? How on earth did this post get modded "insightful"? I've had a DVD drive in my PC since 1999. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a home PC that *didn't* have a DVD drive. Personally, I haven't seen one in several years now.
Corporate PC's might be another matter, but then, you've got the network and LOTS of PC's to choose from in that environment. I'm sure one of the hundreds of machines at the typical corporate site will have a DVD drive.
And since vanilla DVD-ROM drives can be had for around $30 or so, it's not like they're some exotic technology nobody could afford to add to a machine, in the unlikely event they're somehow stuck with DVD backup discs they can't read because some PC dinosaur doesn't have a DVD-ROM drive.
If you're so worried about being compatible with "as many places as possible", backup to 3.5" floppies. They're ubiquitous. At 1.44MB a pop though, be prepared to deal with 1,000+ discs to backup today's average PC hard drive.
>I assume that yes, most them are there to sell goods and >services. So what? Jobs are jobs, would you rather not >have them?:)
I don't have any substantial objection to foreign firms operating on US soil, employing Americans to service the American market.
But when it comes to "outsourcing", that's not what's happening. What's happening is US workers are being replaced with foreign workers, based overseas, to produce goods or services for export back to the US market. This is a parasitic relationship at best, it's hollowing out our economy, driving insane trade and budget deficits, and leading to an erosion of our living, health and education standards in a classic race to the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and the Zygon costumes themselves are great I think, at least for the time. Their ship model looked pretty good too, IIRC. Again, for Dr. Who.
But that monster . . . yech!
>By and large, the original series was not especially
>lacking in the FX department. It was generally on par
>with any science fiction show during its time, really.
I'm a huge fan of Doctor Who, but the truth is that most of the time the show's sets and effects were severely lacking, compared to its sci-fi contemporaries (they did better when it came to costumes, usually). If you compare the effects from late '60s outings of Who to those of the original Star Trek there's no comparison - Trek blows 'em away. Likewise in the mid-'70s if you compare the sets and effects on Who to those on Space:1999, the good Doctor's show also comes off looking like a joke.
Who's producers did what they could I suppose on too-tight a budget, but the results - while almost always inventive - were seldom impressive (or even particularly convincing). Here's hoping modern computer animation helps to even the odds a little bit in that department.
>"Genesis" and "Remembrance" both are generally considered
>to be the best of the post-1960s Dalek stories.
Yeah, and that says a lot about how awful the other post-'60s Dalek serials were. While it sports a creepy atmosphere in the first episode, "Genesis" grows boring as hell and dismally oppressive in spots - like most Who 6-part serials the middle is hopelessly padded - and many of the guest performances are wretched. It becomes less enjoyable than endurable. Tom Baker doesn't have a good handle on the character of the Doctor yet either, which leaves poor Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane to carry much of the story for the good guys (she does what she can, although her character is somewhat wimped out and dumbed down by the writers during this season).
Fortunately "Genesis" has the late Michael Wisher's spectacular, over-the-top performance as Davros. Unfortunately he was so good the writers kept bringing Davros back over and over again for the next decade, with diminishing results (largely because they recast the role - the other actors couldn't deliver performances up to the level of Wisher's).
>A similar problem faces a lot of Doctor Who monsters, though:
>the Cybermen suffered through almost all their post-1960s
>appearances as writers generally tended to disregard the whole
>risks-of-technology idea that was at their core of their creation.
Bang. Nail. Head.
That's what worries me about this latest return of the Daleks. Will they be used as a statement against fascism, which was at least to some degree their intended purpose when originally concocted by Nation back in the '60s, or will they just be trotted out the way they were pretty much from 1979 on, as a, "Oh look, here are the Daleks being nasty" kind of irrelevant nostalgia trip? Because if the story doesn't address what makes them a unique menace, you might as well use the Cybermen or the Borg or Darth Vader or whatever. Here's hoping the new writers and producers understand that better than their predecessors did during the end days of the program.
>I'd have to disagree that the Sontarans or the Cybermen
>are more plausable enemies - the first a race devoted to
>war but unable to do anything about that little vent on
>the back of the neck and the second vulnerable to any
>opponent that can rustle up some gold and a cheesegrater.
Oh, I agree - they both need work as well. Those Achilles heels the writers built into the races were silly 20 years ago.
I just think there's more there to work with than there is with the Daleks. The original concept behind the Cybermen was truly creepy, for the '60s. I think that would be easy to recapture for a modern audience. Likewise the Sontarans are physically an impressive enemy, though clearly someone needs to teach them the concept behind the "gas cap".
The Daleks could probably be reimaged as well into a truly credible threat - say as little biomechanical tanks that fly around and blow stuff up - but you'd probably have to change so much of their behavior and their backstory you might as well spend your time coming up with new, better enemies.
One of the other problems late-era Doctor Who had back in the late '80s was needlessly dredging up old enemies - Omega, the Daleks & Davros, the Sea Monsters - just to have a nostalgia fest. Invariably the results were mixed at best. Even back in Tom Baker's day, the outstanding episodes - "The Ark In Space", "Terror of the Zygons" (if you can overlook the bad effects for a certain monster), "The Pyramids of Mars", "The Face of Evil", "The Robots of Death", "The Talons of Weng Chiang" - all of them introduced new adversaries for the Doctor to combat. Offhand the only episode I can think of that brought back an old adversary and sorta kinda worked was "Earthshock", which re-introduced the Cybermen after nearly a decade's absence. It wasn't perfect either, but at least it had its moments and wasn't terribly dull or silly.
Why, thank you, Dork Pope!
There hasn't been a good Dalek story since the mid-'60s. Pertwee's encounters with the Daleks were hardly the highlight of his career as the Doctor in the late '60s and early '70s. During his 7-season run as the Doctor Tom Baker had one mediocre, overlong Dalek serial (1975's "Genesis of the Daleks", redeemed only by Michael Wisher's fantastic performance as the Dalek's crazed creator, Davros), and one truly awful Dalek 4-parter, "Destiny of the Daleks" in 1979. Peter Davison's Doctor encountered the portly pepperpots half a decade later in 1984's lamentable "Resurrection of the Daleks". Colin Baker's Doctor runs into the Daleks the next year in the silly "Revelation of the Daleks". I've never seen Sylvester McCoy's Doctor's 1988 Dalek serial "Remembrance of the Daleks", but the general consensus seems to regard it as no better than "Genesis of the Daleks" at best.
The Daleks were an idea that ran out of gas after the initial Dalek craze of the early '60s ran its course in the UK. Since then, a Dalek serial has been a guaranteed bad time. They're more a curse to Doctor Who than a blessing, and the real challenge for any new Who series would be trying to reinvent them into something truly chilling and remotely plausible to a contemporary audience. It's possible I suppose, but Who's past producers tried and failed for almost 20 years to produce a Dalek serial as engaging to modern audiences as original Dalek adventures like "Dalek Invasion Earth" were to audiences in the early '60s. I think they'd be better off ignoring the Daleks - and particularly the Davros character, who has been unnecessarily and ludicrously dredged into every Dalek adventure since 1975's "Genesis" - and concentrating on creating compelling new enemies for the Doctor to fight.
And if they must revisit the past, they'd be far better off reimaging more plausible Who adversaries, like the Sontarans (reptilian clone warriors) and the Cybermen (televised sci-fi's original Borg).
>This was about two years ago. I did say "the last time"..
>and that doesn't necessarily mean last month.
That's fine, but "the last time" could mean anywhere from a minute ago to 1999. And yes, two years ago a lot of Athlon motherboards did kinda suck, though I think if you'd shopped online you could have found a board that came with Firewire. My old Compaq (ugh) Athlon 600 system from 1999 had a network connection and onboard Firewire, though the audio was still on a card at that time, IIRC. Boards with all three were certainly around two years ago at reasonable prices, although frankly at that time few users had any use for Firewire.
>Buy online, and you generally have to service it yourself.
>With a good local shop, at least a buyer can get
>diagnostic help should the need arise, hassle free
>returns, etc.
That's all well and good, but your original post was making price comparisons between the Athlon and Pentium motherboards. Using one sample - at a local shop, no less - as the source of that comparison isn't particularly valid. All it might show is that your local shop offered sucky deals - for whatever reason - on Athlon motherboards.
>Granted, this was at a local shop.
Well, there's half of your problem right there. If you don't price compare online, you're going to have no idea if the local shop is ripping you off or not. That simply wasn't a valid sample of prices.
>The kicker at the time was that the Intel chipset
>board included sound, a couple Firewire ports and
>a network jack all onboard. Even the shop's best
>Athlon boards didn't have all three
Then this was either a couple of years or more ago, or the shop's "best" Athlon boards were crap. A quick search at newegg.com reveals a slew of high-end Athlon boards that support all three, along with Serial ATA and a host of additional features.
Sounds like less of a problem with the Athlon platform and more of a problem with your local shop.
Yeah dude, and you'll quickly eat up your iPod's hard drive if you load it with .WAV files.
>So a CD gives you 600-700 minutes of music, or between :(
>10 and 12 hours. My days are longer than that.
The goal isn't to have umpteen hours of music to play sequentially. The goal is to have your entire library on hand, so you can hear whatever you want when you want, and not be limited to a 10 hour slice of your multi-thousand-hour collection.
I have an MP3 CD player in the car, and while it's nice - better than one of those stupid CD changers in the trunk - it still isn't as nice as an iPod.
Winamp may support FLAC, but few other gadgets do. I have a wireless music streamer that supports .WAV, .WMA and .MP3, so I can stream and control audio from my living room. It doesn't support FLAC, unfortunately.
.WMA format (based on Meridian's lossless packing, also used by DVD-Audio discs), and Apple just introduced a lossless format based on Dolby's lossless compression. While I'd like to see the open format win, I think FLAC is going to be the lossless Vorbis.
I have a feeling FLAC is going to be going the way of the dodo. Microsoft has its own lossless
>Given this, why bother with an iPod or similar device at
.WAV files on my hard drives. So I'd have to convert them to .MP3s and then burn individual batches to dozens of CD's. Ugh.
.WAV to an .MP3 or .AAC file, then dump that onto the iPod and delete the copies. I think the largest iPod could just about hold my entire library - at least, everything I want to hear frequently - converted to .AAC. And then to hear any song, you just touch a button and spin a wheel. No swapping CD's looking for that song or album you want to listen to.
>all? Blank CDs are cheap, and if I burn 3 or 4 I have more
>than enough selection to keep me going for several days.
Yeah, but you have to burn a slew of CD's. That's tedious if you have a large library. I have all of my CD's - about 500 of 'em - ripped to
With an iPod or similar hard-drive based device, I could set my system to batch convert everything that's a
>No... For the past 50 years they've been concentrating on
>*treatment* not *cures*. Because they don't want a one
>time sale... they want an annuity.
This poster nails it. Cancer cure? Nope. Lots of expensive "treatments", though. Diabetes? No cure. AIDS? No cure. Some track record there, big pharma. And this after *taxpayers* have shoveled tens of billions of dollars of cash at big pharma, in the form of patent protections, tax breaks, subsidies and research grants.
Yet another corporate scam. When will you suckers wake up? If big pharma spent as much on cures as they did on marketing, lobbying and PR propaganda, we'd have a disease-free planet. And they'd all be out of a job.
>The decision to bring the Russians in was a nice
.
>geopolitical gesture, but their hardware requires
>too much maintenance
As opposed to the American hardware - the Space Shuttle. No maintenance required there . .
If we hadn't brought the Russians onboard, we'd be royally and truly f***** right now, with no way to get supplies to the ISS or get replacement crews up to the station. She'd be unmanned and probably tumbling out of control.
Not that I'd consider that much of a loss, since the ISS is a totally useless white elephant, a $100 billion welfare project for defense contractors. But still, blaming the Russians for the trouble with the ISS - in light of the latest Shuttle disaster - seems kind of ridiculous.
>Since the launch of Pocket PC, Windows CE devices have
>been growing in marketshare consistantly. In fact, the #1
>PDA manufacturer isn't PalmOne anymore, it's HP.
Great. Microsoft will be king of a **DEAD MARKET**. Congratulations, Bill Gates! Now maybe you can realize your lifelong ambition and become the world's #1 buggy whip manufacturer, too!
PDA's are so 9/10, dude. The market for them is contracting. Cell phones are where the action is now, and Palm has the hottest - and most profitable - cell phone by far with their Treo line.
That's the downside to Microsoft having a business model that's based upon leveraging their monopoly OS position and ripping off the innovations of others. That model only works when dealing with devices that truly need to run software written for their OS. Few people need to run Word or Excel on a dinky cell phone or PDA display, which leaves Microsoft incapable of leveraging their OS monopoly in the cell / PDA space to gain total market control. They have to compete on useful features and the functionality users crave (or didn't know they needed), and Microsoft is incapable of developing either. The day Microsloth comes up with something on their own as useful as Palm did with the Treo is the day hell freezes over. MS is way too busy trying to lock customers into their OS jail to spend a nanosecond worrying about what the customer truly wants or needs.
"Human ears listen up to about 16kHz." Leaving aside the variance between ears (which is huge- some can hear above 20khz)
*Very* few adults can hear up to 20kHz, let alone above it, particularly here in the west, where we're exposed to loud mechanical sounds and amplified music almost from birth.
nigh-subconscious overtones depend on these frequencies.
If you can't hear those frequencies - and the vast majority adults simply can't - their absence isn't going to be noticed. Ever.
Even if you can't hear these high frequencies alone very well, they do (measurably, and meaningfully) add something to music.
How, if you can't hear them?
Just crop everything above 16khz on a song and listen critically.
But if you "just crop everything above 16kHz on a song", you're performing some sort of filtering operation on the signal, in either the analog or digital domain, and that's going to have an impact on lower frequency signals as well. You're going to be introducing distortion into those signals as well. Performing the same kind of filtering at 20kHz is also going to have an impact on lower frequency signals, but hopefully most of that impact will be felt across frequencies in excess of 15kHz, where our hearing isn't particularly acute or able to discern any possible distortion, anyhow.
Assuming you can hear much of anything above 16kHz, which again most adults can't.
Yeah, but what is the level of the tone versus mid-frequencies? I can hear a 20 kHz tone in my right ear when the volume is cranked up, but it winds up being about a 20 dB gain versus a reference frequency of 1 kHz.
Exactly. And since there's little high-end energy in most music - certainly not much going on that's 20dB louder than what's at 1kHz - little is being missed by most adults if frequencies above 15-16kHz are being rolled off.
Another important point - if you're cranking the gain on those 20kHz tones, you're probably also producing lots of harmonics, and some of those are going to fall well below 20kHz. So, are you really hearing the 20kHz tones, or are you hearing harmonics at 15kHz or so, generated by the electronics or the speakers themselves?
Is the SSN just a serial number, though? I thought the first 3 digits indicated which state the SSN was issued in. Or has that been changed?
Most of the problems with Windows comes with it's market size. There's no major virus threat for an Apple for example, and all that crap that gets poured in to your computer from the web isn't going to cause as many problems for Apple. However is they had 95% of the market (or whatever) I'm sure they'd be in the same boat.
Well, that's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Neither Linux nor OS X systems have traditionally shipped with settings as insecure as the default settings in Windows. Even if they controlled 95% of the market, I don't think it would be possible for either system to experience the kind of daily virus and worm assault that Windows systems experience.
The fact is, if you tweak a few settings in Windows XP, disable some services and activate the built-in firewall, you're going to be immune to the vast majority of crap being flung at you on the Internet. Don't run Outlook and you'll be immune to much of the rest. That tells me the problem isn't so much with the fundamental core of Windows as it is the default settings the OS ships with (although it's my understanding the basic Windows architecture is far from ideal from a security perspective, too).
The ironic thing is, you'd think an OS with 90+% marketshare, utilized by millions of barely computer-literate users, would ship by default with the most secure settings possible. Because for the Average Joe or Jane user, running around turning off services and changing network settings is so complicated to them you might as well be asking them to code the OS themselves - they simply aren't going to be able to do it on their own (reliably, anyhow).
I've thought for some time the reason why Windows has so many security problems is by design. Surely Microsoft must have realized by now the problems with the default settings in Windows - particularly in the home environment. You'd think an OS like XP Home would come with a lot of services and such disabled. The fact that it doesn't tells me that these worms and virus attacks and spyware and such are "features", ones designed to help sell the next version of Windows. I think the hope in Redmond is that home users' computers will be so fucked up after 3 or 4 years of exposure to all of this crap that they'll be forced to buy a new computer and the latest version of Windows. Because apart from slightly-enhanced security and stability, I can't think of a single reason why the Average Joe home user would need to upgrade from an older Pentium III or Athlon box running Win 98 to a newer system with more horsepower running XP. Unless they're trying to do desktop video or run bleeding-edge games, there's little need in the home for a system more capable than those 4 - 5 year old machines. Unless of course their machines have become so infested they've slowed to a crawl and crash constantly. That could certainly encourage them to replace their, "old, slow" computer.
For Linux this isn't an issue. That community always seems to be adding important new features to the OS - ones that members of the community feel they need (as opposed to the crap Microsoft keeps adding to their products, like those idiotic animated assistants). And since Linux is seldom bundled in the way Windows is, there's no incentive to make older PC's "break". If anything, the Linux advantage is making older PC's useful again, either as standalone desktop systems or in new applications (perhaps as a server or as part of a cluster).
Apple long ago adapted to longer upgrade cycles than are common in the PC market, however they also have the advantage of innovative hardware designs that entice users to upgrade. For some inexplicable reason, PC vendors still seem to be lagging a couple of years behind Apple when it comes to hardware design - the Mac adopted everything from Firewire and USB to CD-ROMs and DVD burners faster than the PC marketplace (even the high-end PC marketplace) did, and their case designs still make the crud coming from Compaq/hp and Dell look e
I can't understand why your message has been modded as Flamebait. Seriously - everything you've said is true. One of those el cheapo Sun WalMart Linux PC's or an iMac is a far, far simpler and safer option for grandma, who only needs to check her "e's" and surf eBay for quilts.
I've personally been called to help several older friends and relatives out of a jam when their Windows PC has become infested with worms, spybots, adware and the occasional virus. Although folks seem to be getting better about paying the Norton tax and keeping their scanners up to date, keeping most virus attacks at bay, they just don't understand why the anti-virus software isn't protecting them from this other crap.
Of course, they also can't understand why the "new and improved" Windows XP isn't immune to these problems. And I know a few who are sticking with older versions of Windows *because* they've seen all the problems their friends have had with their XP boxes. Whoops. Microsoft really screwed the pooch on security in XP.
For neophytes and occasional users who don't need to run Windows-only wares, OS X or a cheap pre-configured Linux box are now not only viable alternatives, they're the preferred solution as far as I'm concerned. The Macs couldn't be easier to configure and use (they can even run MS Office), and while the setup of the Linux box might still require handholding, they seem to be a lot more bullet proof and less susceptible to attack and the general "bloatrot" that afflicts virtually all Windows left in the care of Joe or Jane user.
>There aren't exactly alot of software out there only on dvd...
That's the odd thing, too. You'd think that by now, somebody somewhere would have released a "killer app" that took advantage of the increased storage space afforded by DVD.
That's a good point, but it's true only on some of the very latest systems.
But then, most newer system also come with a device that will at least play, if not record, DVD's.
>DVD drives are not yet as ubiquitous as CD drives.
>For a backup of critical data, I'd want to be able
>to read it at as many places as possible.
Huh?? How on earth did this post get modded "insightful"? I've had a DVD drive in my PC since 1999. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a home PC that *didn't* have a DVD drive. Personally, I haven't seen one in several years now.
Corporate PC's might be another matter, but then, you've got the network and LOTS of PC's to choose from in that environment. I'm sure one of the hundreds of machines at the typical corporate site will have a DVD drive.
And since vanilla DVD-ROM drives can be had for around $30 or so, it's not like they're some exotic technology nobody could afford to add to a machine, in the unlikely event they're somehow stuck with DVD backup discs they can't read because some PC dinosaur doesn't have a DVD-ROM drive.
If you're so worried about being compatible with "as many places as possible", backup to 3.5" floppies. They're ubiquitous. At 1.44MB a pop though, be prepared to deal with 1,000+ discs to backup today's average PC hard drive.
Apparently it's still controversial, although the testing done to date has returned consistent results that nobody can explain:
t ra ns.htm
http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/webcourse/lost/coc
>I assume that yes, most them are there to sell goods and :)
>services. So what? Jobs are jobs, would you rather not
>have them?
I don't have any substantial objection to foreign firms operating on US soil, employing Americans to service the American market.
But when it comes to "outsourcing", that's not what's happening. What's happening is US workers are being replaced with foreign workers, based overseas, to produce goods or services for export back to the US market. This is a parasitic relationship at best, it's hollowing out our economy, driving insane trade and budget deficits, and leading to an erosion of our living, health and education standards in a classic race to the bottom.