I mean, yeah, the quality of XM/Sirius is CD-level so the comparison to taping plain old OTA radio is a bit weak, but it still applies.
Actually, the sound quality of XM is pretty bad compared to FM through a decent quality tuner. And no, this isn't he CD vs Vinyl argument either. You don't need "golden ears" to tell the difference, just a reasonable set of speakers. XM's audio streams are highly compressed. You're probably confusing XM and Sirius with the "audio only" channels of Dish Network and DirecTV. Those actually are near-CD quality.
There's quite a few threads on AudioAsylum about sat. radio quality (or lack thereof).
Preferences, man, preferences. Don't wanna read about Apple? Set it in your user options and it will be so. Some of us like hearing what's going on outside of the 98% marketshare...
You're right about Kevin Rose though, the guy is a doushe. "Look at me, I spent $500 on a case that came with all these Mac part thingies I don't need!" I'm sure the next thing he'll be doing is a Segway destruction derby.
Wow, someone decides to have some fun and cobble some stuff together, so you decide to call him an ``arrogant, spoiled fuckhead'' and ``garbage''.
He's well-deserving of the title. Does he have a right to take a $500 computer and gut it? You bet. The moment he puts it on the Internet for all to see, however, he's no longer someone with some free time and a bit too much money to burn - he's flaunting his wastefulness. It didn't take any real ingenuity to accomplish his modification - just money. If he doesn't mind sharing his wastefulness with the Internet, why should he mind when people waste his bandwidth and page space with spam?
You can see it as him having fun. I see it as analogous to him buying a bottle of fine wine to dump down the drain and refill with Coke so he can look sophisticated while drinking an inexpensive, common beverage. I'll have mine in cans, thanks.
No, I get the point. Kevin Rose is an arrogant, spoiled fuckhead. He could have easily proven whatever profound point he thought he was making by cramming his leet 0-day 'prerelease' motherboard into a cardboard box of the same dimensions as the Mac mini. Then he also could have cheated by making it a bit taller and adding a DVD/CD-RW drive like the real Mac mini.
Look, PC component manufacturers and people like K.R. can jizz on themselves all day long over the Mac mini's formfactor and still miss the bigger picture. What Apple accomplished was producing a machine that's as easy to use and afford as it is to integrate into your living space. It's more than just some hardware specs crammed into a small case.
As for what Kevin did being News for Nerds, it's not. You can run VirtualPC or Remote Desktop Connection on OS X and make people think your Mac houses PC hardware without ever cracking the case. It's not as if what he did added any real additional capability to the machine. I find it rather fitting that Kevin's blog is being filled with ponzi scheme spam - it's only natural that garbage attracts maggots.
Re:I don't understand.......
on
Mac mini Dissection
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't understand how the MAC-mini works. If it's so small, how does it keep the rain out?
The same way you've kept out my understanding of your implied humor in your post. Security through obscurity! The water does not know the Mac Mini isn't waterproof.
A few months ago I was buying the parts to put together an entire irrigation system from Home Depot. Had the whole deal in two carts, one full of PVC fittings/heads/etc., the other full of pipes.
The cashier just looked at the entire mess of items with disgust and ended up tossing every part into a bag regardless of whether or not it scanned on the first try. For what was supposed to be $300 - $350 in parts, I ended up paying around $180 for.
If you don't pay your employees enough to care, you're gonna have losses.:-P
The whole point to getting music over P2P back in the days of (the original) Napster, was that it was free and there were no other legal ways to purchase individual tracks at the time. With services like iTunes, the current Napster, Wal-Mart, RealAudio, and even the legally questionable AllOfMP3, why would you want the hassle of P2P's unreliability?
I've never had to wait for a track I purchased from iTunes to start downloading. Everything is exactly as it should be, no improperly named or corrupt files. I would NEVER pay a fee to use a P2P network. IMHO, with the choices people have for music stores at the moment, I don't see this idea working at all.
[i]The first people to play the game will be those who buy it, people waiting on the "free" version will likely be waiting at least a day for it to be cracked.[/i]...where patience pays off.
There's only 3 reasons you'd buy a modchip for an Xbox (pick one).
1. You have an Xbox version 1.6 or higher. 2. You want to turn it off to play on Live. 3. You like wasting money.
ALL Xboxes prior to the 1.6 have a reflashable BIOS chip (referred to incorrectly by Xbox modders as a "TSOP" due to the packaging of the IC itself). There's several ways to do exploits to run Linux to run the Raincoat reflashing software, the easiest of which is a gamesave exploit. You can build a memory card reader/writer (to transfer the gamesave) in about 5 minutes by splicing together an Xbox joystick extension cable and a USB cable. You can find an exploitable game at a used game shop, at Blockbuster or on eBay. Solder two points together on the motherboard to enable the write lines and you're good to go. I've lost count of how many Xboxes I've modded this way. Works perfect every time.
All this info is on Xbox-Scene, it truly surprises me AnandTech made a $75 X 8 mistake.
I belong to a very rare subset of Geek known as the Tri-Geek.
I'm a more common type of geek. I sit on my fat ass in a nice air conditioned car listening to my non-waterproof iPod. If it has wheels and can seat a passenger, it must have an engine or I will not own it. I won't be buying this MP3 player.
Let's see, these scammers send a rubber check written for an amount greater than the sum of their purchase, ask for a refund in cash - then cash and their items for free. How is this different than a standard bad check scam?
Who in this day and age still accepts checks from strangers over the Internet and ships without waiting for the funds to clear first, or verifiying the check electronically? Even newbie eBay sellers make sure funds clear before shipping. You want your item shipped now, you pay by a more verifiable method.
It seems to me, anyone that falls for a bad check scam nowadays gets what they have coming to them. I did RTFA and it's pretty damn funny that the baiters manager to get the scammer to send cash along with his rubber check, but truthfully, if you're a seller and you ship items to someone you don't know before clearing their payment, you deserve to be scammed.
I have a small, 20 minute UPS. Once the battery could no longer hold a charge, I took it out and replaced it with a higher capacity VRLA battery that I got from work.
To anyone that reads this and thinks it's a good idea to go out and buy a big massive marine deep cycle battery - don't. Most UPS systems have pretty bad cooling and if they're run at full load for an extended period of time (thanks to being connected to your giant battery) they can overheat and cause a fire. When you consider the fact this is something for standby use, the last thing you want is to come home and find your place burned down because the power went out and your UPS overheated.
Also, most UPS systems are designed to work with absorbed glass mat (AGM) batteries and may not properly charge a different type of battery. Best case, a larger capacity battery may take forever to charge, worse case, the charger won't lower the charging current to a trickle when it should and the battery will boil off its electrolyte, outgassing explosive hydrogen in the process. Tons of fun if a source of ignition is nearby. In a nutshell, use a UPS for what it is designed for - enough backup power to shut down properly or for your automatic genset to kick in.
I happen to have some experience in the matter since I've been through 3 hurricanes here in Florida. If you think you're going to be dealing with a power outage, you want a decent sized generator and a lot of petrol. Don't bother with batteries and inverters unless you want a headache instead of electricity.
Oh yeah, and to the person that asked, VRLA stands for "Valve Regulated Lead Acid".
70 or lower? You must be one of those people that when moving to Florida won't buy a 1,800sq ft. house without first DEMANDING the builder/seller install a 5 ton A/C system, heat load calculations be damned. I know your type, if ice cubes aren't flying from the registers, you're not happy.
The reason my frame rate in Doom 3 drags ass isn't because my Radeon 8500 is old & busted, it's the Earth's fault? Stupid Earth, see if I want to save the planet now...
Use bike trails or ride during off-peak hours...
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
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· Score: 1
...or get out of the way.
Seriously, riding a bike on roadways is dangerous - you are going slower than the flow of traffic and possibly illegally so. You're annoying the other drivers - drivers who have PAID for the roads with fuel taxes. Yes, people who buy fuel really do have more of a right to use the roads.
While you probably don't care, you'll eventually encounter some asshole who does something careless to pass you and ends up getting you seriously injured. Put yourself in the position of the driver - when you're making car payments, buying fuel, and to top it off you're already late from traffic, ending up behind someone on a bicycle can be a very frustrating situation. Some people actually have deadlines and don't have the luxury of taking their time getting to their destination at a leasurely pace.
I'm not trying to flame, I'm just saying that you DO have a right to use the road like any other public utility provided you contribute your fair share (taxes) and don't disrupt the normal flow of traffic. No one likes someone who pisses in the pool.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, yeah, the quality of XM/Sirius is CD-level so the comparison to taping plain old OTA radio is a bit weak, but it still applies.
Actually, the sound quality of XM is pretty bad compared to FM through a decent quality tuner. And no, this isn't he CD vs Vinyl argument either. You don't need "golden ears" to tell the difference, just a reasonable set of speakers. XM's audio streams are highly compressed. You're probably confusing XM and Sirius with the "audio only" channels of Dish Network and DirecTV. Those actually are near-CD quality.
There's quite a few threads on AudioAsylum about sat. radio quality (or lack thereof).
I was truly hoping Can Spam meant sealing spammers up in airtight containers, preserving them for study by future generations.
Preferences, man, preferences. Don't wanna read about Apple? Set it in your user options and it will be so. Some of us like hearing what's going on outside of the 98% marketshare...
You're right about Kevin Rose though, the guy is a doushe. "Look at me, I spent $500 on a case that came with all these Mac part thingies I don't need!" I'm sure the next thing he'll be doing is a Segway destruction derby.
Wow, someone decides to have some fun and cobble some stuff together, so you decide to call him an ``arrogant, spoiled fuckhead'' and ``garbage''.
He's well-deserving of the title. Does he have a right to take a $500 computer and gut it? You bet. The moment he puts it on the Internet for all to see, however, he's no longer someone with some free time and a bit too much money to burn - he's flaunting his wastefulness. It didn't take any real ingenuity to accomplish his modification - just money. If he doesn't mind sharing his wastefulness with the Internet, why should he mind when people waste his bandwidth and page space with spam?
You can see it as him having fun. I see it as analogous to him buying a bottle of fine wine to dump down the drain and refill with Coke so he can look sophisticated while drinking an inexpensive, common beverage. I'll have mine in cans, thanks.
No, I get the point. Kevin Rose is an arrogant, spoiled fuckhead. He could have easily proven whatever profound point he thought he was making by cramming his leet 0-day 'prerelease' motherboard into a cardboard box of the same dimensions as the Mac mini. Then he also could have cheated by making it a bit taller and adding a DVD/CD-RW drive like the real Mac mini.
Look, PC component manufacturers and people like K.R. can jizz on themselves all day long over the Mac mini's formfactor and still miss the bigger picture. What Apple accomplished was producing a machine that's as easy to use and afford as it is to integrate into your living space. It's more than just some hardware specs crammed into a small case.
As for what Kevin did being News for Nerds, it's not. You can run VirtualPC or Remote Desktop Connection on OS X and make people think your Mac houses PC hardware without ever cracking the case. It's not as if what he did added any real additional capability to the machine. I find it rather fitting that Kevin's blog is being filled with ponzi scheme spam - it's only natural that garbage attracts maggots.
I don't understand how the MAC-mini works. If it's so small, how does it keep the rain out?
The same way you've kept out my understanding of your implied humor in your post. Security through obscurity! The water does not know the Mac Mini isn't waterproof.
I should note, there was no intent of fraud on my part - the cashier simply did not care to make sure every item I purchased got scanned.
A few months ago I was buying the parts to put together an entire irrigation system from Home Depot. Had the whole deal in two carts, one full of PVC fittings/heads/etc., the other full of pipes.
:-P
The cashier just looked at the entire mess of items with disgust and ended up tossing every part into a bag regardless of whether or not it scanned on the first try. For what was supposed to be $300 - $350 in parts, I ended up paying around $180 for.
If you don't pay your employees enough to care, you're gonna have losses.
I'm curious. In NHL 2005 do you just sit there and watch an empty ice surface?
I don't get it. Seriously, I'm a nerd, so kindly explain the joke, thanks.
The whole point to getting music over P2P back in the days of (the original) Napster, was that it was free and there were no other legal ways to purchase individual tracks at the time. With services like iTunes, the current Napster, Wal-Mart, RealAudio, and even the legally questionable AllOfMP3, why would you want the hassle of P2P's unreliability?
I've never had to wait for a track I purchased from iTunes to start downloading. Everything is exactly as it should be, no improperly named or corrupt files. I would NEVER pay a fee to use a P2P network. IMHO, with the choices people have for music stores at the moment, I don't see this idea working at all.
If you are gay, you can recreate Light-Sabre fight scenes from Star Wars.
Don't you mean Spaceballs?
Dark Helmet: I see your schwartz is as big as mine. Let's see how well you handle it.
[i]The first people to play the game will be those who buy it, people waiting on the "free" version will likely be waiting at least a day for it to be cracked.[/i] ...where patience pays off.
Jerky low-res video, out of sync audio, why, it's a perfect pocket-size recreation of XingMPEG on my 486 laptop!
Course, there's probably some old geezer who thinks us youngins have it real good cause in his day he had to crank the projecter by hand. Oh, wait...
So they're using Slashcode's dupe-checking module?
There's only 3 reasons you'd buy a modchip for an Xbox (pick one).
1. You have an Xbox version 1.6 or higher.
2. You want to turn it off to play on Live.
3. You like wasting money.
ALL Xboxes prior to the 1.6 have a reflashable BIOS chip (referred to incorrectly by Xbox modders as a "TSOP" due to the packaging of the IC itself). There's several ways to do exploits to run Linux to run the Raincoat reflashing software, the easiest of which is a gamesave exploit. You can build a memory card reader/writer (to transfer the gamesave) in about 5 minutes by splicing together an Xbox joystick extension cable and a USB cable. You can find an exploitable game at a used game shop, at Blockbuster or on eBay. Solder two points together on the motherboard to enable the write lines and you're good to go. I've lost count of how many Xboxes I've modded this way. Works perfect every time.
All this info is on Xbox-Scene, it truly surprises me AnandTech made a $75 X 8 mistake.
...if I'm not spending halloween reading Slashdot (read: this won't actually happen), I'm going to dress up as a Slashdotted website.
Hey wait a second, there's still time... I'll go get a T-Shirt and write "Server too busy" on it.
Ah, so that's what they mean by the North Pole.
I belong to a very rare subset of Geek known as the Tri-Geek.
I'm a more common type of geek. I sit on my fat ass in a nice air conditioned car listening to my non-waterproof iPod. If it has wheels and can seat a passenger, it must have an engine or I will not own it. I won't be buying this MP3 player.
Different target markets, I guess.
Let's see, these scammers send a rubber check written for an amount greater than the sum of their purchase, ask for a refund in cash - then cash and their items for free. How is this different than a standard bad check scam?
Who in this day and age still accepts checks from strangers over the Internet and ships without waiting for the funds to clear first, or verifiying the check electronically? Even newbie eBay sellers make sure funds clear before shipping. You want your item shipped now, you pay by a more verifiable method.
It seems to me, anyone that falls for a bad check scam nowadays gets what they have coming to them. I did RTFA and it's pretty damn funny that the baiters manager to get the scammer to send cash along with his rubber check, but truthfully, if you're a seller and you ship items to someone you don't know before clearing their payment, you deserve to be scammed.
I have a small, 20 minute UPS. Once the battery could no longer hold a charge, I took it out and replaced it with a higher capacity VRLA battery that I got from work.
To anyone that reads this and thinks it's a good idea to go out and buy a big massive marine deep cycle battery - don't. Most UPS systems have pretty bad cooling and if they're run at full load for an extended period of time (thanks to being connected to your giant battery) they can overheat and cause a fire. When you consider the fact this is something for standby use, the last thing you want is to come home and find your place burned down because the power went out and your UPS overheated.
Also, most UPS systems are designed to work with absorbed glass mat (AGM) batteries and may not properly charge a different type of battery. Best case, a larger capacity battery may take forever to charge, worse case, the charger won't lower the charging current to a trickle when it should and the battery will boil off its electrolyte, outgassing explosive hydrogen in the process. Tons of fun if a source of ignition is nearby. In a nutshell, use a UPS for what it is designed for - enough backup power to shut down properly or for your automatic genset to kick in.
I happen to have some experience in the matter since I've been through 3 hurricanes here in Florida. If you think you're going to be dealing with a power outage, you want a decent sized generator and a lot of petrol. Don't bother with batteries and inverters unless you want a headache instead of electricity.
Oh yeah, and to the person that asked, VRLA stands for "Valve Regulated Lead Acid".
70 or lower? You must be one of those people that when moving to Florida won't buy a 1,800sq ft. house without first DEMANDING the builder/seller install a 5 ton A/C system, heat load calculations be damned. I know your type, if ice cubes aren't flying from the registers, you're not happy.
The reason my frame rate in Doom 3 drags ass isn't because my Radeon 8500 is old & busted, it's the Earth's fault? Stupid Earth, see if I want to save the planet now...
...or get out of the way.
Seriously, riding a bike on roadways is dangerous - you are going slower than the flow of traffic and possibly illegally so. You're annoying the other drivers - drivers who have PAID for the roads with fuel taxes. Yes, people who buy fuel really do have more of a right to use the roads.
While you probably don't care, you'll eventually encounter some asshole who does something careless to pass you and ends up getting you seriously injured. Put yourself in the position of the driver - when you're making car payments, buying fuel, and to top it off you're already late from traffic, ending up behind someone on a bicycle can be a very frustrating situation. Some people actually have deadlines and don't have the luxury of taking their time getting to their destination at a leasurely pace.
I'm not trying to flame, I'm just saying that you DO have a right to use the road like any other public utility provided you contribute your fair share (taxes) and don't disrupt the normal flow of traffic. No one likes someone who pisses in the pool.
...meet the i-Opener. The year 2000 called, they want their computer design back.
And if you're the record company, in Soviet Russia everyone raids YOU!