Where is Lady Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer?
She wrote a functional program for a later, base-10 analog version of Babbage's differential engine. The catch was that the device had plans, but was never actually constructed. Years later, when they actually got around to building (or emulating, I'm not sure) the beast, Ada's software ran correctly.
Anyone else care to claim that they could step up to that challenge. Write a program in what would essentially be assembly, for a computer that's never been built, and you're the first one to ever write a program.
Incidentally, she has been honored by having a lesser-used language named after her (Ada, obviously).
I suppose I should've added in further elaboration. I do PC repair, so I see XP all day long, in various stages from freshly installed to spyware and virus-riddled. I do plenty enough with the OS to know what the differences are, and if I've overlooked some I invite you to elaborate on them for me.
Because of my job, I am given several opportunities each year to purchase legitimate OEM copies of XP Pro for as low as $7 or $8. I assure you, it's not the cost that's preventing me from upgrading. I haven't upgraded because I haven't seen anything sustantially different from 2000 to XP, and honestly, that seems to be the consensus with a lot of people. It's why XP is NT 5.1 to 2000's NT 5.0; it's a fairly minor upgrade in everything other than the marketing/OEM support sense. This is not to be confused with Apple's model, where 10.2 could legitimately have been named 11, although in fairness 10.3 would probably have been considered an "11.1". 2000 had shitty driver support when it first shipped, but that issue has long since been corrected (and doesn't count as an upgrade, IMHO, since it was mostly a case of manufacturers being pushed into improvements). Other than that, XP is very, very similar.
10.0 was awful, no doubt. It was a beta that apple chose to ship along with their computers as a sort of "demo" software. It was even referred to as "public beta". 10.1 was completely useable for me, and I installed it without any classic support on both of my macs at the time. I simply took the speed improvements as nice upgrades. But Apple took an alternate, and in my opinion, logical tack with the OS. They made sure shit was set in place before they worried about ratcheting the speed, and it has paid off quite well with the later versions. Windows is nice and fast, no doubt, but we're just now getting to the point where security exploits are in obscure services or apps, and not services that shouldn't have been on in the first place. To each his own "improvements".
OS 10.3 will install on anything G3 or up (excluding the original, weird B&W G3s sans USB) with a sufficient amount of RAM (128MB minimum) and sufficient hard drive space. In order to find non-capable hardware, you're talking about ca. 1997 powermacs, and even then it CAN be installed if you're willing to tinker with some of the installation processes. Of course at that point, you'd have had to upgrade RAM and probably HDD anyway, so it's not as though using a different install program is some out-of-the-blue expectation. At that point, I'd say you're definitely talking about legacy equipment. Of course, I'd like you to show me the ca 1997 PC (we'd be talking somewhere in the late Pentium/early PII era) that even has any business running XP, which has a minimum system requirement of 450 PII and 128MB of RAM, IIRC. I might also point out that there are plenty of pieces of PC software that are ME/2K/XP, and even more recently, 2k/XP only, so it's not as though this whole idea of "forced" upgrades is exclusive to Apple, or even remotely new in the computer world. If I want the new version of iMovie, that's using APIs that call for Quartz Extreme, then I need the OS that has Quartz Extreme. That doesn't mean that my OS 9 version of iMovie 2 doesn't work anymore, nor does it mean that my office 2001 is non-functional. Part of the reason for adding those new features is to allow developers to take advantage of them.
Or, compare this to Windows. I have a copy of Windows 2000 from early 2000, as in right around when they released it. Retailed for $300 (OEMed for about $180, if I remember right). And that's right about the time of OS 10.0 (a little before, actually). So for $300 for 2000, and another $200 for XP Pro (the actually comparable upgrade) in that span, I would really have gained very little.
2000's updates were mostly security issues, a few Direct X upgrades (not something I consider an added value, but definitely important for games), Windows Media 9 which I actively work to keep away from everything, and some Journal Reader add-ins.
Had I decided to upgrade to XP, I would've gained an eye-bleed inducing green and blue color scheme by default, system restore, and...? As far as I can tell, with the exception of some bluetooth products and a few system hack-type programs (stuff to change the UI and so forth), XP would've been 2000 pretty edition (hence the NT 5.1). So in these accumulated 4 years and some change, I'd have paid somewhere between $350 and $500, depending on how I valued support and whether I felt it necessary to upgrade to XP (I don't). I'm sure some harder-core windows historians could tell me a few of the other things introduced, so feel free.
On my macs, I got 10.0 included with an iMac, and 10.1 for free (the free upgrade offer), but we'll call it $150 there to be fair (assuming that I bought 10.1 retail). I paid $129 for 10.2 and $129 for 10.3, which puts me in essentially the same price category. I've seen substantial speed improvements, particularly on my older hardware (a 450mhz g3 iMac and a 500mhz iBook), which alone makes upgrading even more worthwhile (in stark contrast to XP's potnetial to run slower on a given system out of the box). I've seen quartz extreme, encrypted filesystems, easier integration of X11, fast user switching, and expose all introduced in that span, as well.
Honestly, to me, it's worth the cash. I'll need to see what Tiger brings to the forefront, although I suspect that theories about heavy G5 optimizations are probably true. If it turns out that people start noticing it running faster on their older hardware, which is entirely possible given the track record, I'll drop my $129 again.
See my above post for a further expression of the issues with raising polys.
Do they create them from scratch? Highly doubtful. I would be imminently surprised if the art team on GT3 started out by deleting every model from GT2 and beginning anew, but several magazine articles and interviews indicated that each model took 3 weeks of man hours to produce. Don't forget that the model also has to be textured, another thing which can't just magically happen.
Do I think that it's going to come crashing down? No. I saw a presentation given by an engine designer at Origin about 4 or 5 years ago. Apparently, a modeler makes a single model, then produces 5 or 6 versions of it (depending on the target platform) in various poly levels, so that a tank out on the horizon is made of 50 polys (since you can't see the detail anyway), rather than bogging the system down by drawing 5,000 polygons that you can't see. This Origin guy's engine culled polys down in realtime, fast enough for the system to continue playing the game at normal framerates, while making continual steps up and down. I don't know if such a system is currently in use, or if it's already become almost industry standard, or what. I could imagine a sort of reverse intelligent culling (adding?), but as I indicated in another response, past a certain number, you need to start adding actual detail to make a 40,000 poly model worth having 40,000 polys. And you need to texture it. And that takes time.
My concern is not that people can't do it; it's that a graphical precedent will be set so high that smaller games that could be great end up not even being made.
Agreed, up to a point (although from what I understand, making low poly models is more difficult, because it still needs to look fairly close to the original). The problem is that past about 10,000 or so polys, more work needs to be done to justify the number of primitives.
To continue with the Gran Turismo example, take an Acura NSX. The difference between a 300 poly model and a 3,000 poly model is pretty significant. Less seaming on the high poly model, curved surfaces actually look curved. You can even get cool and toss in a simple 8 poly raised Honda or Acura Badge.
Once you get to a certain point, though, you have diminishing returns. The curved surfaces aren't going to be more curved, and things like bezier curves (that was what Carmack used in Q3, right?) do away with a lot of those issues anyway. What you have to do at that point is add detail. Model the brake disks and calipers as visible through the wheels, and throw in the valve stem while you're at it. Model the interior, since it's visible in some shots. Model the actual internal exhaust pipe as separate from the chrome cover around it. Model rubber seals at edges, and so forth. At that point, you're back to having to brute force the problem, although I'm sure the speed jumps on the dev workstations help a bit.
I like the idea of 3D scanners, and I think that those combined with stuff like Apple's new lower-cost motion capture systems (obviously not for cars, but you get the idea) will help speed up the work. We have to remember, though, that you can't 3D scan a hell-demon, elf-warrior with full armor set, or 30th century spacecraft, which all feeds back to my earlier point.
You know what? I hope it doesn't get too much better than this.
I'm no technical luddite, but to me, the current graphical position we're in is, I feel, sufficient to do almost anything a game creator would want to do. Realistic shadow and light effects, faces that look realistic enough to convey who the character is supposed to be (in the case of a game like Buffy where the character is supposed to be Sarah Michelle Gellar), explosion and fire effects that actually look convincing, etc.
Would I like more? Eh, I guess it would be cool if a face really could be made up of 15,000 polygons instead of the entire model of the body. The downside is the amount of time and effort required at that point. Gran Turismo 2 had something on the order of 600 cars, each of which were made up of ~350 polygons. Now many of these were nothing more than pallette swaps, with nothing more than a graphics set and spoiler added onto the base car, but many were unique vehicales that had a distinct manner of driving that would interest some people. Gran Turismo 3 bumped the number of polys per car up to ~3,000 (IIRC), and thus bumped the number of cars down to 150, because there simply wasn't enough time for the team of artists to create more than that.
And therein lies the rub: Ever-expanding graphics place a burden on smaller dev teams that will eventually become too large to bear. Gran Turismo's popularity lies in (at least as far as I'm concerned) its realistic (sans damage) physics, almost RPG-ish approach to car collection/upgrading, and the "real" cars. Arguably, such a game could be done 10 years from now in HD with all kinds of crazy effects, and legitimately, the game was done 6 years ago on a 33mhz MIPS processor. But 10 years from now, when someone wants to create something that captures a similar subset of cool features (maybe a fun arcade-y dogfighting game a la Crimson Skies, maybe the new and revolutionary fighting game that introduces some unique quirk to make things fun), they're going to have a hell of a time competing visually in a market where 1,000,000 poly models require a single artist to work for almost a month to make a single character look halfway decent.
My point, thusly, is that we've reached a plateau in graphics similar to movie effects. Lord of the Rings, or X-Men, or Spiderman would suck 10 years ago because of the lack of effects houses and hardware capable of doing justice to the storylines. That burden is off of the film producer, and now they can legitimately tell any fanciful story they wish. The same holds for game developers; outside of being limited to 64 simulataneous players for want of RAM/processor cycles, a game developer isn't really heavily limited in the graphics/physics/speed department from telling his or her story, or producing his or her experience. But at the rate things continue, that developer may be limited in the monetary department because of the expenditures necessary for future games.
The name is not describing hobbyisits or professionals, it's describing the product. It's implying that there's a difference between consumer-line equipment (usually cheaper-built and lacking features that most consumers would ignore anyway) and professional-line equipment (stuff for people who make their money with the product, and thus see that huge price tag as a business expense, not a luxury item; incidentally these sorts of people usually expect better-built equipment, since it's used more frequently).
Example: Canon's EOS Rebel Digital is $1,000 with a simple lens. It uses the same 6.2 megapixel sensor as the higher-end EOS 10D. It's a true SLR-style camera, with the same EOS lens mount. But it lacks some of the features that the ~$1,500 EOS 10D does. The rebel digital has a partially plastic instead of totally metal body, lower amount of frames capturable in burst mode, etc.
And thus we arrive to the "Prosumer" wording. A simple professional (a wedding photographer, as someone else mentioned, or a photography student who needs digital) could use this camera without hurting too much for some of the missing features. In reality, though, many camera companies realize that a bigger market is consumers who are wealthy gadget geeks and could justify the $1,000 of the camera as compared to the higher-end consumer models, but not the $1,500 of the 10D.
For alternate examples, see Photoshop LE ($100, and lacking the features that most semi-skilled PS users don't touch anyway), or mid-range to high-end triple-CCD DV cameras (occasionally used in Hollywood, but only for specific reasons, but heavily used by local video production houses and the occasional wealthy camera geek).
I would challenge you to come up with a single word, already in common circulation in the English language, that could effectively say, "hey, this is not quite as good as that really high-end equipment, but it's definitely much better than that stuff over there". Also, remeber that for marketing reasons this word needs to carry no real negative connotation.
Get a Linksys 802.11g Wireless router. Because the firmware is just a customized linux kernel, and Linksys finally GPLed out their code, there's a fairly active community that's into hacking the firmware code to add all sorts of functionality that Linksys never considered, including QoS and Packet Shaping.
Just lock the ports for all of the popular P2P apps that have fixed ports down to 50kbps up and down, and call it a day. If I was on a shared DSL, I'd completely understand this, and even appreciate that a way to stop stepping on my neighbors toes had been implemented FOR me. If this guy's a jack-ass and he starts playing games futzing with ports on the apps that allow it, kick his ass to the curb and tell him that he can get his own service if he needs that sort of bandwidth.
That's a great joke, but actually, people come to the US from mexico to buy laptops. See, you aren't taking advantage of the weak dollar, you're taking advantage of the fact that since a company (in this case Dell) is producing their product (in the engineering and marketing sense, it's probably actually built in China) in the US, they don't have to tack on money to account for economy of scale, different tax setups, etc.
Think about it. Dell is in Texas. Their logical first step is to sell product in the US. They're already familiar with US tax laws, liability, etc. They already have a business presence in the US. The cost for them to abide by those restrictions and maintain a warranty infrastructure and business presence is next to nothing, other than the few states or localities that have peculiar warranty restrictions (Florida for example, is very weird about what extended warranties can and can't do).
Now, to sell their product in the UK, Dell has to setup a business presence there. They have to localize their product (the keyboard, probably certain spelling changes in documetation, probably a localized version of windows for UK). They have to setup a warranty infrastructure, particularly if they want to offer the in-home service that they offer in the US. They need to abide by local laws and tax regulations. AND they're selling in a smaller market, so the cost for abiding by those rules goes up by a big amount, because they need to make that much more per computer to justify doing business in the UK. After all of that, THEN he'll be taking advantage of the weaker currency and his heightened purchasing power.
Go price out what notebooks cost in Mexico, for example, and you'll find that it's about the same increase as what you're looking at. You're not taking advantage of currency differences, you're taking advantage of arguably the biggest market for consumer electronics.
I didn't mean to actually pull a fully-terminated-terminated-with-DB-9-connectors cable, just something that can usefully propgate a 232 signal over about 300' (the longest run a typical house under 4000 sq. ft. will have). Most of the time that does mean a proper 9 conductor cable, though (unless you're absolutely sure that every device you're ever going to use will only need to see a certain pin for data, and then you can ghetto-rig your crimp).
I would probably disagree hairs with you about the idea of structured cabling. Arguably, it's not to do the most with the least cable, it's to do your best to plan for what you might want to do 5 or 10 years down the road, and try to wire in an infrastructure that will support it). While there are home automation systems that will operate over CAT-5, you'd still need to pull it to any outlets or trigger devices, and your home thearer gear; even then, 232-based gear is way cheaper.
Go price a 1000' spool of 9-conductor cabling. It's cheap, not even $40 when we used to buy it (It's been about 2 years since I was in that line of work). If you get Automated light switches, they'll provide you with any and all serial codes. If you get higher-end home theater receivers or video sources, they'll have a DB-9 connection, and the manufacturer will provide you codes if you email them or write them. Getting a front projector? A lot of projectors will do the same thing, ditto for the motorized screens.
The whole RS-232 suggestion was just that, a suggestion. I do see reasonably frequent ask slashdots about home automation, and they almost always mention X10, which the only feasible route for people who don't have the necessary cabling in the wall. But programming serial-based automation systems can be very fun, and is one of those things that I think a lot of geeks would really enjoy if given the opportunity. Getting a phone call? PBX triggers the system to pause your MythTV show automatically, bring up lights in home theater (if they are down), lower music volume (if up), and so forth. Or how about if you have one of your machines trigger if you receive an email from a person on a whitelist, have it switch the audio equipment over to an input from the computer, text-to-speech the subject and sender, and prompt you to speak into on of the rooms' mics if you'd like it to read the email aloud (if you wanted to get really fancy, a nicer audio distribution system would be 232 switchable as well, and you could see where the mic pickup was and read to that room only). Both of these scenarios would be pretty easily implemented with the proper cabling in place, and a minimum of hardware investment (assuming you had the foresight to buy HT gear with serial control when you went to outfit your home theater), and maybe an hour of programming.
Some light controls can be triggered over a single pair, but most other stuff you might want to automate (motorized awnings, audio gear, computers, phone stuff, etc.) will probably want traditional RS-232, and if it's not $15 more to run that, what the hell difference does it make?
I once worked for a company who worked exclusively with low-voltage systems like you are describing; essentially, we ignored electrical systems and focused on networking, home theater, automation, etc. My advice would be the following:
Ignore fiber for now. Consider that CAT-6 has a reliable throughput at 1000Mbps. Cat-5e will allegedly also do 1Gbps, but CAT-6 is now almost as cheap, so I would definitely run with CAT-6. Now consider that unless you're running some sort of ludicrous colo system from your house, the most stressful load you'll put on that infrastructure is probably streaming HDTV. Over-the-air HD is ~27mbps, D-Theater (the stuff recorded on D-VHS tapes) is about 37mbps, so even at that we're talking about well over 20 simultaneous streams moving out of a central file server, assuming you have something that can sustain 1Gbps reliably. Run plenum-coated cabling, even if it isn't required in your area; again, it isn't too terribly much more expensive, but the safety issues aren't worth saving $200 on your project.
The second problem with fiber is that you won't really know what type to run or how to terminate it. Unless we're talking about doing 1000 base-FX connections for existing equipment, do you run glass or plastic fiber? Multi-mode? Perhaps 1394b? What sort of connection should you terminate it with? Without any sort of consumer equipment to even build towards, your guess about any of those questions is as good as mine or anyone else on/. For these reasons, any suggestion that pushes you towards running conduit with pull string is one that needs to be modded up.
One other recommendation about the CAT-6 or CAT-5e : Run way more than you think you'll need. In addition to serving as POTS pairs, lots of cool, esoteric devices out there can use CAT-5 for things you might want further down the road. I've seen KVM over Cat-5 systems, video distribution over CAT-5 (essentially, feeding a single video output from, say, a DVD carousel to a crapload of non HTPC-equipped TVs), and audio distribution systems (same idea as the video, but for whole-house audio). Using CAT-5 for some of that isn't the best solution by any stretch, but if you decide 5 years down the road that you really, really want whole-house audio and decide not to go conduit-pulling, it may make your life easy. Additionally, if you decide to do a PBX-style system (they have a lot of nice benefits, and there are some cool OSS implementations), most PBXes will need to use star topology systems like an ethernet setup, rather than daisy-chained systems like most POTS will be run.
Pull some RS-232 to video source locations (ie. where you might put all your home theatre equipment), lightswitch boxes, and computer locations. X10 is some bootleg home automation equipment, but some of the serial controlled stuff isn't actually all that expensive, and setting up a home automation system is a really fun geek project.
I would also recommend that you not neglect good quality Coax layout and runs in your eagerness for CAT-5 and Fiber fun. Satellite and OTA HDTV will both be easier to setup and rearrange if coax is home-run to the same point as everything else. Use RG-6, preferably Tri- or Quad-shielded cabling. Consider devoting a large-ish closet or basement area (if your region has basements). If the HVAC guys haven't come through yet, try to get them to put an AC and return air to a closet if that's where you want to put some stuff; that nice linux firewall box, mythTV server, networking equipment, and Home theater gear (if you decide to hide it) will thank you later.
Someone else mentioned the issue of doing it yourself, and that's definitely one to be aware of. If you are buying your house from a large production builder (Pulte, David Weekley, etc.) they will not let you do any of this. You don't own that house until you close on it, and they can't risk your stuff not being up to code, or you suing further down the road. They WILL tear your work out. If you're usi
Sega had a testmarket for SegaTV out of Chattanooga, TN, a little different, but similar in some ways. Had a gizmo that hooked up to a Sega Genesis and you could download games off of the cable straight into the box. At the time, it wasn't that cool cause you were limited by the number of titles and the cost.
What you speak of was eventually marketed nationwide as the sega channel. While the test market may have shown it to be "not so cool", it actually had a reasonably succesful run, and I have some fond memories of playing Sega channel when I was younger.
The box had the same amount of Flash RAM as your higher-end Genesis cart, and you had about 50 games to choose from each month. If I recall correctly, it added $10 to our cable bill monthly, with no charge for the equipment, which really made for a pretty reasonable expense when you consider that game rentals were already running close to the $4 mark at that time.
You're correct, though, the reason sega channel succeeded was because of the cartridge based system it was used for. Neraly every game could fit in a 3MB flash ram area. The genesis had an established market and plenty of games already. I wouldn't ever see it being a viable solution as a stand-alone product, but every once in a while I kind of miss those days.
Posting a bit late, but yes, it is possible. A friend of mine has an M4A2 (a slightly shorter version of the M4 assault rifle). It is extremely lightweight. It has almost no recoil. He can indeed hold two of them and fire, although I doubt it's as accurate as holding one.
Most people aren't aware, but a lot of components in cars change year-to-year, even on what is ostensibly the same "model". It isn't major stuff, but a fuel pump, for example, can be obtained from a different vendor for a lesser price, and that's just smart business.
Anyway, in the '98 or '99 model year (I can't remember which), the SVT mustang was "firmware updated", so to speak. A bunch of people who were buying them were noticing that the performance wasn't near what it was supposed to be. Dynos were showing a 280hp instead of 305 hp turnout. Ford took a bunch of them back from their owners and "updated" them to get them to the point they were supposed to be at, then promptly discontinued the model altogether for the year while they determined what had actually caused the cars to be underpowered.
I don't remember reading what it was, but it was a case of Ford not really knowing what had happened in the beginning, either. If I recall, the engineers whipped up a quick solution (probably some airbox replacement, or something) for the few "repairs" to get them to their rated number.
No, but these guys do. All different kinds. If I may recommend, Baltika is some of the best tasting beer I've ever had (unless you're a real dark-beer fanatic).
If you live in a small town, and the only local liquor stores don't carry what you want, bite the bullet and order a lot to make up for the shipping charge.
I did reseat the cable and clean the contacts of the weird-ass connector, just to make sure, but even if it had been the cable I would've had to get bootleg and splice some crap to fix it. While I'd happily try it for my sister's machine, that's not something I'll do in a professional environment.
Picture the mainboard, sitting under an RF shield, with just a male pin connector sticking up (the connector looks similar to a section of an ISA card connection). This connection jacks into the CRT portion of the computer when you lower it onto the top and screw them together. The Power Supply is in the CRT portion. On the underside of this male pin connection is an ATX-style connector (it looked slightly different) that runs to the mobo, a couple of 4-pin molexes for the drives, and the floppy connection. The DB-15 connection jacks into the mainboard, runs as a standard cable for about 4", then breaks out into the individual conductors, which are tied up into this connection. So the connection transfers power from the PSU in the monitor, down to the mainboard and drives, and from a DB-15 on the mainboard up into the monitor. A poor design, since it could have lent itself to cable degradation, but from the standpoint of someone who's not going to break out a soldering iron to "repair" a device that I then have to warranty, it's not something that I could replace. The sad part is that because of the assembly of the unit, I couldn't power it while running VGA to an outboard monitor to test the functionality without cutting into the case, so really had my hands tied behind my back on that one.
No, I don't expect them to give out extended warranties. I was referring to technical support, which Apple considers a different thing.
You get 1 year of actual warranty against defect. But if a user needs tech support, they get 90 days (unless the poster above is correct about it being one year if the problem is hardware related).
So your iBook has 1 year of warranty. But if for some weird-ass reason your software update isn't working properly, you only have 90 days of support from apple for that particular aspect (unless it happens to be something relating to a failure of your NIC, for example).
Tech support isn't something most/.ers ever really have to use, but it something that a lot of the non-techy world does occasionally need; unfortunately, most of the time it's piss poor.
Interesting similarity: fencing. As a sport, it's almost entirely non-gender biased. Contrary to what most movies show, fencing (the sport) is entirely centered around two things: strategy and fine-motor skills. There's no need to make an enormous, rapid swipe when a 1/4 turn of the wrist puts you blade on the good side of your opponents'. When your blade has more flexibility than a car antenna, the few brief times when you lock foils against eachother come down to manipulating mechanical advantage, not strength.
I mostly fence foil, and at my university, that puts me fencing against a lot of women in practices (most of the guys favor epee). About the only substantial advantage I have over them is the fact that I'm 6', and thus have a slightly better reach. But, honestly, I'd have the same advantage against a 5'7" guy. The only other physical factor to the sport is enough endurance to stay quick after a few matches, but that's not something that belongs to either gender, really.
Yet fencing, in competition, is separated by gender. We go to a competition where there might be 100 guys fencing Sabre, and one of our women wins because she has a field of 8 to fence against.
It sounds a bit too much like some triumphing, girl-power movement, but I honestly think it falls into the same category that this gaming competition does: on some deep-seated level, far too many guys fear losing to a woman.
The worst part of this whole setup is the poor, clueless end-user, who actually thinks tech support knows what they're doing.
I work in the repair department at a large electronics store. One of my duties (other than actually repairing or upgrading computers) is "inspecting" equipment such as wireless routers to make sure that we aren't getting scammed. It burns me up when someone brings in their 3rd unit in as many days, saying, "wow, what's wrong with you guys? I've been on the phone with D-Link all day, and this is the third bad unit I've gotten". I just want to yell out, "no sir, you've been on the phone with an outsourced guy in Manilla who may or may not have ever even seen a picture of your product, and he says it's faulty because his only concern is getting you off the phone in less than fifteen minutes."
I had a young woman come in the other day with some random Gateway desktop that looked like a CRT iMac knock-off (an all-in-one design where the mainboard and drives were installed in a section below the monitor). She plunks it down on my desk, and says, "The guy at Gateway's tech support says it needs a new video card." I took one look at this obviously completely integrated computer, and said (without thinking), "Are you sure he said that?" "Of course he said that," I thought immediately afterward, "he's tech support. He has no idea what that product even looks like. He doesn't know that the video is integrated." Just for grins I opened it up, on the off chance that there was some ghetto six-inch VGA cable that ran to an actual card. Interestingly, there actually was, but it ran from a proprietary pinout that allowed video to flow up to the monitor to a DB-15 connection on the motherboard, and power to flow down from the single AC jack that was located in the monitor . I showed the connection to the woman, then showed her a couple of video cards, and explained why they were wrong and what she could do (basically nothing, as she was outside of warranty). The funny part about the whole thing was that it looked like it was actually the CRT that was damaged, as it was exhibiting that "missing one part of the color spectrum" bit that is more often than not a CRT defect.
It's a shame, but I don't know of any consumer computer manufacturer that has what I would call "good" tech support anymore, with the exception of Apple (and then you only get 90 days unless you spring for Applecare).
Others have said basically the same thing, but as someone who's just wrapping up his college career, I can basically second this: Don't bother.
I have a laptop. An honest to goodness, actually portable, quiet enough to use in class laptop. This is an important point, because everyone at universities nowadays has a laptop, but most of them are of the ~8lbs./non-mobileCPU/1.5 hr battery life flavor. My handwriting is atrocious, and I'm an English major. Those two things together meant that I could actually read my notes (in classes where the class structure lent itself to massive notes on some days), and I could work on papers during the hour or so between classes that I might have otherwise wasted. To be brutally honest, I never, ever wished that I had a tablet, mostly because they don't seem to have any redeeming features for people other than comic artists.
Get a decent desktop. Something small enough to bring into the dorms, maybe one of those Small Form Factor machines, or a mini-tower. Get a nice, 17" flat panel monitor to go with it. Unless you want an uber-gaming machine, you should be able to do this pretty easily for about $1,200. If you really want a laptop, might I suggest an iBook. The 12" models are light enough to carry around (5lbs., which is pretty close to my ceiling for what I will carry around in addition to the big-ass book that that one professor will always want you to bring), they get a good 4 hours or so in the real world (provided you aren't hitting the hard drive or optical drive too frequently; make sure to load it with RAM), and while the polycarbonate finish will get minor scratches, they're very durable notebooks. You can (at least last I checked) get the G3 models with few frills (CD-ROM, 30GB Drive) for $800. Toss in another $125 or so to max it out with RAM, and I managed to get my airport card for $50. At $1,000, it is ever so slightly more expensive than the ludicrously cheap after Mail-in-rebate jobs at some of the retail stores, but it is significantly more lightweight and significantly less noisy.
Honestly, though, outside of a few classes (generally the giant lecture hall ones), I rarely used my notebook. It was mostly for time between classes, but that was only because I lived off-campus and couldn't get home to work on my desktop. If you are absolutely positive that you need a tablet, go ahead and snag one, but I'd otherwise recommend grabbing a desktop and waiting to see if a notebook is something you really want after you've been there for a few months.
OS X (and OS 9, as well, if that's your cup of tea) wakes from sleep in less than a second (to displaying the desktop), and is usable (as in actually responsive and opening a program) in maybe 3 seconds. It's one of the reasons why Apple notebooks are so highly prized. Shut the lid, and it's asleep in less than two seconds. Open the lid, and it's awake in less than three.
On desktop machines, it's equally as functional. Plus, it's always cool to see the pulsating (snoring) "sleep" light, since a lot of Macs are basically dead silent when "asleep"; it saves you from the idiot who wants to press the power button on your machine.
Highest rated does not mean it stays
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WB Cancels Angel
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· Score: 5, Insightful
As the name implies, being the highest rated doesn't always mean that a show is going to stay. Two things can affect a show at that point to make it be cancelled.
Costs. This is what actually happened with Buffy that forced the move to UPN. Although it was a very highly-rated show for WB, the per episode cost had gotten to be in the (IIRC) $2.2 million range. If we assume that, say, Everwood generates $1.2 million on a budget of $300,000, and (in this peculiar example), Buffy generates $2.9 million, then we realize that ratings aren't what it's all about.
Who is watching? This feeds into the above, because certain fan-bases aren't as profitable as others. Way back in the day, CBS cancelled "The Beverly Hillbillies" because (despite high ratings) the only people actually providing the high ratings were older, rural people (Surprise!), and advertisers don't like them as much. Now, I would assume Angel's target and bulk of viewership is a younger, teen and twentysomething crowd, but I might be entirely wrong.
Or it could just be "creative differences". Maybe Joss is a bastard to work with. Maybe some new exec came on board who has a different, not so sci-fi direction for the network. Maybe Boreanaz had made some secretive noise about being sick of playing the same characters for 7 some-odd years. But more likely, I'd peg it to one of the above theories.
Re:As funny as that is
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Friday Apple Fun
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· Score: 2, Informative
At least one Marylin Manson album(Antichrist Superstar) has 99 tracks, the maximum allowable under the CD audio standard. The album cover only lists tracks that are actual songs.
Not to nitpick, but the album cover doesn't list one song. Track 99 is a hidden track. Every track between 16 or 17 (whichever is the "final" track) and 99 is a 3 or 4 second blank, which serves to make track 99 that much more jarring (it's loud as hell right from the get-go, and has an extremely eerie sound to it).
Sidenote: this setup is why I hate car CD players (Sony, for instance) that won't skip backwards from track 1 to the final track in the album.
Feudal lords were the warrior class of the middle ages. Essentially, the social contract worked out such that a select group of people (the lords) spent the vast majority of their time training in greco-roman wrestling, riding, and of course, their weapons training. Even up through the 1300s, it was still very common for Kings to ride onto the battlefield and actually do battle. The concept of "divine right of kings" didn't really arise until the 1500s at the earliest (at least that I'm aware of). Prior to that, Kings were the best warriors: the guys who could fight well and lead well enough to earn the respect of a group of people. Of course, the mantel then passed to their offspring, but in the years before actual nation-states, it didn't take a huge amount of change for another guy to come in and be King.
Now, up into the Renaissance era, things started change, and that was when the lords started to become the more decadent, "boss-men" figures that a lot of medieval movies tend to depict.
One more random fact: The avergae person living in the dark ages or midieval times was about 5'5" (for a man), and at about 5' for a woman. Of course, that's a mode, and it's thrown off by the huge numbers of peasants. The feudal lords, by virtue of the fact that they could eat meat (nowhere near common in a peasant diet) and basically spent their days working out, wouldn't be at all distinguishable from a modern man, height or strength-wise.
Firewire (a 100 mbps implementation, not the IEEE 1394-certified flavor we know today) first shipped on Mac Quadros (sort of the back-in-the-day version of the powermac) in 1991. Yes, 1991. It was intended to eventually replace SCSI, although at the time there were only a tiny amount of peripherals that used it, mostly scanners and minor video devices IIRC. But it was, essentially, firewire as it is today, they simply hadn't ratcheted the speed up to todays 400 mbps "standard (in quotation marks because firewire is available in a variety of speeds from 100 to 3200mbps; it's actually a protocol). The actual certification and full-line implementation of Firewire didn't really catch on until DV camcorders started to hit the prosumer market, but it was there, a full 12.5 or so years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is Lady Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer?
She wrote a functional program for a later, base-10 analog version of Babbage's differential engine. The catch was that the device had plans, but was never actually constructed. Years later, when they actually got around to building (or emulating, I'm not sure) the beast, Ada's software ran correctly.
Anyone else care to claim that they could step up to that challenge. Write a program in what would essentially be assembly, for a computer that's never been built, and you're the first one to ever write a program.
Incidentally, she has been honored by having a lesser-used language named after her (Ada, obviously).
I suppose I should've added in further elaboration. I do PC repair, so I see XP all day long, in various stages from freshly installed to spyware and virus-riddled. I do plenty enough with the OS to know what the differences are, and if I've overlooked some I invite you to elaborate on them for me.
Because of my job, I am given several opportunities each year to purchase legitimate OEM copies of XP Pro for as low as $7 or $8. I assure you, it's not the cost that's preventing me from upgrading. I haven't upgraded because I haven't seen anything sustantially different from 2000 to XP, and honestly, that seems to be the consensus with a lot of people. It's why XP is NT 5.1 to 2000's NT 5.0; it's a fairly minor upgrade in everything other than the marketing/OEM support sense. This is not to be confused with Apple's model, where 10.2 could legitimately have been named 11, although in fairness 10.3 would probably have been considered an "11.1". 2000 had shitty driver support when it first shipped, but that issue has long since been corrected (and doesn't count as an upgrade, IMHO, since it was mostly a case of manufacturers being pushed into improvements). Other than that, XP is very, very similar.
10.0 was awful, no doubt. It was a beta that apple chose to ship along with their computers as a sort of "demo" software. It was even referred to as "public beta". 10.1 was completely useable for me, and I installed it without any classic support on both of my macs at the time. I simply took the speed improvements as nice upgrades. But Apple took an alternate, and in my opinion, logical tack with the OS. They made sure shit was set in place before they worried about ratcheting the speed, and it has paid off quite well with the later versions. Windows is nice and fast, no doubt, but we're just now getting to the point where security exploits are in obscure services or apps, and not services that shouldn't have been on in the first place. To each his own "improvements".
OS 10.3 will install on anything G3 or up (excluding the original, weird B&W G3s sans USB) with a sufficient amount of RAM (128MB minimum) and sufficient hard drive space. In order to find non-capable hardware, you're talking about ca. 1997 powermacs, and even then it CAN be installed if you're willing to tinker with some of the installation processes. Of course at that point, you'd have had to upgrade RAM and probably HDD anyway, so it's not as though using a different install program is some out-of-the-blue expectation. At that point, I'd say you're definitely talking about legacy equipment. Of course, I'd like you to show me the ca 1997 PC (we'd be talking somewhere in the late Pentium/early PII era) that even has any business running XP, which has a minimum system requirement of 450 PII and 128MB of RAM, IIRC. I might also point out that there are plenty of pieces of PC software that are ME/2K/XP, and even more recently, 2k/XP only, so it's not as though this whole idea of "forced" upgrades is exclusive to Apple, or even remotely new in the computer world. If I want the new version of iMovie, that's using APIs that call for Quartz Extreme, then I need the OS that has Quartz Extreme. That doesn't mean that my OS 9 version of iMovie 2 doesn't work anymore, nor does it mean that my office 2001 is non-functional. Part of the reason for adding those new features is to allow developers to take advantage of them.
Or, compare this to Windows. I have a copy of Windows 2000 from early 2000, as in right around when they released it. Retailed for $300 (OEMed for about $180, if I remember right). And that's right about the time of OS 10.0 (a little before, actually). So for $300 for 2000, and another $200 for XP Pro (the actually comparable upgrade) in that span, I would really have gained very little.
2000's updates were mostly security issues, a few Direct X upgrades (not something I consider an added value, but definitely important for games), Windows Media 9 which I actively work to keep away from everything, and some Journal Reader add-ins.
Had I decided to upgrade to XP, I would've gained an eye-bleed inducing green and blue color scheme by default, system restore, and...? As far as I can tell, with the exception of some bluetooth products and a few system hack-type programs (stuff to change the UI and so forth), XP would've been 2000 pretty edition (hence the NT 5.1). So in these accumulated 4 years and some change, I'd have paid somewhere between $350 and $500, depending on how I valued support and whether I felt it necessary to upgrade to XP (I don't). I'm sure some harder-core windows historians could tell me a few of the other things introduced, so feel free.
On my macs, I got 10.0 included with an iMac, and 10.1 for free (the free upgrade offer), but we'll call it $150 there to be fair (assuming that I bought 10.1 retail). I paid $129 for 10.2 and $129 for 10.3, which puts me in essentially the same price category. I've seen substantial speed improvements, particularly on my older hardware (a 450mhz g3 iMac and a 500mhz iBook), which alone makes upgrading even more worthwhile (in stark contrast to XP's potnetial to run slower on a given system out of the box). I've seen quartz extreme, encrypted filesystems, easier integration of X11, fast user switching, and expose all introduced in that span, as well.
Honestly, to me, it's worth the cash. I'll need to see what Tiger brings to the forefront, although I suspect that theories about heavy G5 optimizations are probably true. If it turns out that people start noticing it running faster on their older hardware, which is entirely possible given the track record, I'll drop my $129 again.
See my above post for a further expression of the issues with raising polys.
Do they create them from scratch? Highly doubtful. I would be imminently surprised if the art team on GT3 started out by deleting every model from GT2 and beginning anew, but several magazine articles and interviews indicated that each model took 3 weeks of man hours to produce. Don't forget that the model also has to be textured, another thing which can't just magically happen.
Do I think that it's going to come crashing down? No. I saw a presentation given by an engine designer at Origin about 4 or 5 years ago. Apparently, a modeler makes a single model, then produces 5 or 6 versions of it (depending on the target platform) in various poly levels, so that a tank out on the horizon is made of 50 polys (since you can't see the detail anyway), rather than bogging the system down by drawing 5,000 polygons that you can't see. This Origin guy's engine culled polys down in realtime, fast enough for the system to continue playing the game at normal framerates, while making continual steps up and down. I don't know if such a system is currently in use, or if it's already become almost industry standard, or what. I could imagine a sort of reverse intelligent culling (adding?), but as I indicated in another response, past a certain number, you need to start adding actual detail to make a 40,000 poly model worth having 40,000 polys. And you need to texture it. And that takes time.
My concern is not that people can't do it; it's that a graphical precedent will be set so high that smaller games that could be great end up not even being made.
Agreed, up to a point (although from what I understand, making low poly models is more difficult, because it still needs to look fairly close to the original). The problem is that past about 10,000 or so polys, more work needs to be done to justify the number of primitives.
To continue with the Gran Turismo example, take an Acura NSX. The difference between a 300 poly model and a 3,000 poly model is pretty significant. Less seaming on the high poly model, curved surfaces actually look curved. You can even get cool and toss in a simple 8 poly raised Honda or Acura Badge.
Once you get to a certain point, though, you have diminishing returns. The curved surfaces aren't going to be more curved, and things like bezier curves (that was what Carmack used in Q3, right?) do away with a lot of those issues anyway. What you have to do at that point is add detail. Model the brake disks and calipers as visible through the wheels, and throw in the valve stem while you're at it. Model the interior, since it's visible in some shots. Model the actual internal exhaust pipe as separate from the chrome cover around it. Model rubber seals at edges, and so forth. At that point, you're back to having to brute force the problem, although I'm sure the speed jumps on the dev workstations help a bit.
I like the idea of 3D scanners, and I think that those combined with stuff like Apple's new lower-cost motion capture systems (obviously not for cars, but you get the idea) will help speed up the work. We have to remember, though, that you can't 3D scan a hell-demon, elf-warrior with full armor set, or 30th century spacecraft, which all feeds back to my earlier point.
You know what? I hope it doesn't get too much better than this.
I'm no technical luddite, but to me, the current graphical position we're in is, I feel, sufficient to do almost anything a game creator would want to do. Realistic shadow and light effects, faces that look realistic enough to convey who the character is supposed to be (in the case of a game like Buffy where the character is supposed to be Sarah Michelle Gellar), explosion and fire effects that actually look convincing, etc.
Would I like more? Eh, I guess it would be cool if a face really could be made up of 15,000 polygons instead of the entire model of the body. The downside is the amount of time and effort required at that point. Gran Turismo 2 had something on the order of 600 cars, each of which were made up of ~350 polygons. Now many of these were nothing more than pallette swaps, with nothing more than a graphics set and spoiler added onto the base car, but many were unique vehicales that had a distinct manner of driving that would interest some people. Gran Turismo 3 bumped the number of polys per car up to ~3,000 (IIRC), and thus bumped the number of cars down to 150, because there simply wasn't enough time for the team of artists to create more than that.
And therein lies the rub: Ever-expanding graphics place a burden on smaller dev teams that will eventually become too large to bear. Gran Turismo's popularity lies in (at least as far as I'm concerned) its realistic (sans damage) physics, almost RPG-ish approach to car collection/upgrading, and the "real" cars. Arguably, such a game could be done 10 years from now in HD with all kinds of crazy effects, and legitimately, the game was done 6 years ago on a 33mhz MIPS processor. But 10 years from now, when someone wants to create something that captures a similar subset of cool features (maybe a fun arcade-y dogfighting game a la Crimson Skies, maybe the new and revolutionary fighting game that introduces some unique quirk to make things fun), they're going to have a hell of a time competing visually in a market where 1,000,000 poly models require a single artist to work for almost a month to make a single character look halfway decent.
My point, thusly, is that we've reached a plateau in graphics similar to movie effects. Lord of the Rings, or X-Men, or Spiderman would suck 10 years ago because of the lack of effects houses and hardware capable of doing justice to the storylines. That burden is off of the film producer, and now they can legitimately tell any fanciful story they wish. The same holds for game developers; outside of being limited to 64 simulataneous players for want of RAM/processor cycles, a game developer isn't really heavily limited in the graphics/physics/speed department from telling his or her story, or producing his or her experience. But at the rate things continue, that developer may be limited in the monetary department because of the expenditures necessary for future games.
The name is not describing hobbyisits or professionals, it's describing the product. It's implying that there's a difference between consumer-line equipment (usually cheaper-built and lacking features that most consumers would ignore anyway) and professional-line equipment (stuff for people who make their money with the product, and thus see that huge price tag as a business expense, not a luxury item; incidentally these sorts of people usually expect better-built equipment, since it's used more frequently).
Example: Canon's EOS Rebel Digital is $1,000 with a simple lens. It uses the same 6.2 megapixel sensor as the higher-end EOS 10D. It's a true SLR-style camera, with the same EOS lens mount. But it lacks some of the features that the ~$1,500 EOS 10D does. The rebel digital has a partially plastic instead of totally metal body, lower amount of frames capturable in burst mode, etc.
And thus we arrive to the "Prosumer" wording. A simple professional (a wedding photographer, as someone else mentioned, or a photography student who needs digital) could use this camera without hurting too much for some of the missing features. In reality, though, many camera companies realize that a bigger market is consumers who are wealthy gadget geeks and could justify the $1,000 of the camera as compared to the higher-end consumer models, but not the $1,500 of the 10D.
For alternate examples, see Photoshop LE ($100, and lacking the features that most semi-skilled PS users don't touch anyway), or mid-range to high-end triple-CCD DV cameras (occasionally used in Hollywood, but only for specific reasons, but heavily used by local video production houses and the occasional wealthy camera geek).
I would challenge you to come up with a single word, already in common circulation in the English language, that could effectively say, "hey, this is not quite as good as that really high-end equipment, but it's definitely much better than that stuff over there". Also, remeber that for marketing reasons this word needs to carry no real negative connotation.
Get a Linksys 802.11g Wireless router. Because the firmware is just a customized linux kernel, and Linksys finally GPLed out their code, there's a fairly active community that's into hacking the firmware code to add all sorts of functionality that Linksys never considered, including QoS and Packet Shaping.
Just lock the ports for all of the popular P2P apps that have fixed ports down to 50kbps up and down, and call it a day. If I was on a shared DSL, I'd completely understand this, and even appreciate that a way to stop stepping on my neighbors toes had been implemented FOR me. If this guy's a jack-ass and he starts playing games futzing with ports on the apps that allow it, kick his ass to the curb and tell him that he can get his own service if he needs that sort of bandwidth.
That's a great joke, but actually, people come to the US from mexico to buy laptops. See, you aren't taking advantage of the weak dollar, you're taking advantage of the fact that since a company (in this case Dell) is producing their product (in the engineering and marketing sense, it's probably actually built in China) in the US, they don't have to tack on money to account for economy of scale, different tax setups, etc.
Think about it. Dell is in Texas. Their logical first step is to sell product in the US. They're already familiar with US tax laws, liability, etc. They already have a business presence in the US. The cost for them to abide by those restrictions and maintain a warranty infrastructure and business presence is next to nothing, other than the few states or localities that have peculiar warranty restrictions (Florida for example, is very weird about what extended warranties can and can't do).
Now, to sell their product in the UK, Dell has to setup a business presence there. They have to localize their product (the keyboard, probably certain spelling changes in documetation, probably a localized version of windows for UK). They have to setup a warranty infrastructure, particularly if they want to offer the in-home service that they offer in the US. They need to abide by local laws and tax regulations. AND they're selling in a smaller market, so the cost for abiding by those rules goes up by a big amount, because they need to make that much more per computer to justify doing business in the UK. After all of that, THEN he'll be taking advantage of the weaker currency and his heightened purchasing power.
Go price out what notebooks cost in Mexico, for example, and you'll find that it's about the same increase as what you're looking at. You're not taking advantage of currency differences, you're taking advantage of arguably the biggest market for consumer electronics.
I didn't mean to actually pull a fully-terminated-terminated-with-DB-9-connectors cable, just something that can usefully propgate a 232 signal over about 300' (the longest run a typical house under 4000 sq. ft. will have). Most of the time that does mean a proper 9 conductor cable, though (unless you're absolutely sure that every device you're ever going to use will only need to see a certain pin for data, and then you can ghetto-rig your crimp).
I would probably disagree hairs with you about the idea of structured cabling. Arguably, it's not to do the most with the least cable, it's to do your best to plan for what you might want to do 5 or 10 years down the road, and try to wire in an infrastructure that will support it). While there are home automation systems that will operate over CAT-5, you'd still need to pull it to any outlets or trigger devices, and your home thearer gear; even then, 232-based gear is way cheaper.
Go price a 1000' spool of 9-conductor cabling. It's cheap, not even $40 when we used to buy it (It's been about 2 years since I was in that line of work). If you get Automated light switches, they'll provide you with any and all serial codes. If you get higher-end home theater receivers or video sources, they'll have a DB-9 connection, and the manufacturer will provide you codes if you email them or write them. Getting a front projector? A lot of projectors will do the same thing, ditto for the motorized screens.
The whole RS-232 suggestion was just that, a suggestion. I do see reasonably frequent ask slashdots about home automation, and they almost always mention X10, which the only feasible route for people who don't have the necessary cabling in the wall. But programming serial-based automation systems can be very fun, and is one of those things that I think a lot of geeks would really enjoy if given the opportunity. Getting a phone call? PBX triggers the system to pause your MythTV show automatically, bring up lights in home theater (if they are down), lower music volume (if up), and so forth. Or how about if you have one of your machines trigger if you receive an email from a person on a whitelist, have it switch the audio equipment over to an input from the computer, text-to-speech the subject and sender, and prompt you to speak into on of the rooms' mics if you'd like it to read the email aloud (if you wanted to get really fancy, a nicer audio distribution system would be 232 switchable as well, and you could see where the mic pickup was and read to that room only). Both of these scenarios would be pretty easily implemented with the proper cabling in place, and a minimum of hardware investment (assuming you had the foresight to buy HT gear with serial control when you went to outfit your home theater), and maybe an hour of programming.
Some light controls can be triggered over a single pair, but most other stuff you might want to automate (motorized awnings, audio gear, computers, phone stuff, etc.) will probably want traditional RS-232, and if it's not $15 more to run that, what the hell difference does it make?
I once worked for a company who worked exclusively with low-voltage systems like you are describing; essentially, we ignored electrical systems and focused on networking, home theater, automation, etc. My advice would be the following:
/. For these reasons, any suggestion that pushes you towards running conduit with pull string is one that needs to be modded up.
Ignore fiber for now. Consider that CAT-6 has a reliable throughput at 1000Mbps. Cat-5e will allegedly also do 1Gbps, but CAT-6 is now almost as cheap, so I would definitely run with CAT-6. Now consider that unless you're running some sort of ludicrous colo system from your house, the most stressful load you'll put on that infrastructure is probably streaming HDTV. Over-the-air HD is ~27mbps, D-Theater (the stuff recorded on D-VHS tapes) is about 37mbps, so even at that we're talking about well over 20 simultaneous streams moving out of a central file server, assuming you have something that can sustain 1Gbps reliably. Run plenum-coated cabling, even if it isn't required in your area; again, it isn't too terribly much more expensive, but the safety issues aren't worth saving $200 on your project.
The second problem with fiber is that you won't really know what type to run or how to terminate it. Unless we're talking about doing 1000 base-FX connections for existing equipment, do you run glass or plastic fiber? Multi-mode? Perhaps 1394b? What sort of connection should you terminate it with? Without any sort of consumer equipment to even build towards, your guess about any of those questions is as good as mine or anyone else on
One other recommendation about the CAT-6 or CAT-5e : Run way more than you think you'll need. In addition to serving as POTS pairs, lots of cool, esoteric devices out there can use CAT-5 for things you might want further down the road. I've seen KVM over Cat-5 systems, video distribution over CAT-5 (essentially, feeding a single video output from, say, a DVD carousel to a crapload of non HTPC-equipped TVs), and audio distribution systems (same idea as the video, but for whole-house audio). Using CAT-5 for some of that isn't the best solution by any stretch, but if you decide 5 years down the road that you really, really want whole-house audio and decide not to go conduit-pulling, it may make your life easy. Additionally, if you decide to do a PBX-style system (they have a lot of nice benefits, and there are some cool OSS implementations), most PBXes will need to use star topology systems like an ethernet setup, rather than daisy-chained systems like most POTS will be run.
Pull some RS-232 to video source locations (ie. where you might put all your home theatre equipment), lightswitch boxes, and computer locations. X10 is some bootleg home automation equipment, but some of the serial controlled stuff isn't actually all that expensive, and setting up a home automation system is a really fun geek project.
I would also recommend that you not neglect good quality Coax layout and runs in your eagerness for CAT-5 and Fiber fun. Satellite and OTA HDTV will both be easier to setup and rearrange if coax is home-run to the same point as everything else. Use RG-6, preferably Tri- or Quad-shielded cabling. Consider devoting a large-ish closet or basement area (if your region has basements). If the HVAC guys haven't come through yet, try to get them to put an AC and return air to a closet if that's where you want to put some stuff; that nice linux firewall box, mythTV server, networking equipment, and Home theater gear (if you decide to hide it) will thank you later.
Someone else mentioned the issue of doing it yourself, and that's definitely one to be aware of. If you are buying your house from a large production builder (Pulte, David Weekley, etc.) they will not let you do any of this. You don't own that house until you close on it, and they can't risk your stuff not being up to code, or you suing further down the road. They WILL tear your work out. If you're usi
Sega had a testmarket for SegaTV out of Chattanooga, TN, a little different, but similar in some ways. Had a gizmo that hooked up to a Sega Genesis and you could download games off of the cable straight into the box. At the time, it wasn't that cool cause you were limited by the number of titles and the cost.
What you speak of was eventually marketed nationwide as the sega channel. While the test market may have shown it to be "not so cool", it actually had a reasonably succesful run, and I have some fond memories of playing Sega channel when I was younger.
The box had the same amount of Flash RAM as your higher-end Genesis cart, and you had about 50 games to choose from each month. If I recall correctly, it added $10 to our cable bill monthly, with no charge for the equipment, which really made for a pretty reasonable expense when you consider that game rentals were already running close to the $4 mark at that time.
You're correct, though, the reason sega channel succeeded was because of the cartridge based system it was used for. Neraly every game could fit in a 3MB flash ram area. The genesis had an established market and plenty of games already. I wouldn't ever see it being a viable solution as a stand-alone product, but every once in a while I kind of miss those days.
Posting a bit late, but yes, it is possible. A friend of mine has an M4A2 (a slightly shorter version of the M4 assault rifle). It is extremely lightweight. It has almost no recoil. He can indeed hold two of them and fire, although I doubt it's as accurate as holding one.
Funny you should mention the SVT mustang.
Most people aren't aware, but a lot of components in cars change year-to-year, even on what is ostensibly the same "model". It isn't major stuff, but a fuel pump, for example, can be obtained from a different vendor for a lesser price, and that's just smart business.
Anyway, in the '98 or '99 model year (I can't remember which), the SVT mustang was "firmware updated", so to speak. A bunch of people who were buying them were noticing that the performance wasn't near what it was supposed to be. Dynos were showing a 280hp instead of 305 hp turnout. Ford took a bunch of them back from their owners and "updated" them to get them to the point they were supposed to be at, then promptly discontinued the model altogether for the year while they determined what had actually caused the cars to be underpowered.
I don't remember reading what it was, but it was a case of Ford not really knowing what had happened in the beginning, either. If I recall, the engineers whipped up a quick solution (probably some airbox replacement, or something) for the few "repairs" to get them to their rated number.
No, but these guys do. All different kinds. If I may recommend, Baltika is some of the best tasting beer I've ever had (unless you're a real dark-beer fanatic).
If you live in a small town, and the only local liquor stores don't carry what you want, bite the bullet and order a lot to make up for the shipping charge.
I did reseat the cable and clean the contacts of the weird-ass connector, just to make sure, but even if it had been the cable I would've had to get bootleg and splice some crap to fix it. While I'd happily try it for my sister's machine, that's not something I'll do in a professional environment.
Picture the mainboard, sitting under an RF shield, with just a male pin connector sticking up (the connector looks similar to a section of an ISA card connection). This connection jacks into the CRT portion of the computer when you lower it onto the top and screw them together. The Power Supply is in the CRT portion. On the underside of this male pin connection is an ATX-style connector (it looked slightly different) that runs to the mobo, a couple of 4-pin molexes for the drives, and the floppy connection. The DB-15 connection jacks into the mainboard, runs as a standard cable for about 4", then breaks out into the individual conductors, which are tied up into this connection. So the connection transfers power from the PSU in the monitor, down to the mainboard and drives, and from a DB-15 on the mainboard up into the monitor. A poor design, since it could have lent itself to cable degradation, but from the standpoint of someone who's not going to break out a soldering iron to "repair" a device that I then have to warranty, it's not something that I could replace. The sad part is that because of the assembly of the unit, I couldn't power it while running VGA to an outboard monitor to test the functionality without cutting into the case, so really had my hands tied behind my back on that one.
No, I don't expect them to give out extended warranties. I was referring to technical support, which Apple considers a different thing.
/.ers ever really have to use, but it something that a lot of the non-techy world does occasionally need; unfortunately, most of the time it's piss poor.
You get 1 year of actual warranty against defect. But if a user needs tech support, they get 90 days (unless the poster above is correct about it being one year if the problem is hardware related).
So your iBook has 1 year of warranty. But if for some weird-ass reason your software update isn't working properly, you only have 90 days of support from apple for that particular aspect (unless it happens to be something relating to a failure of your NIC, for example).
Tech support isn't something most
Interesting similarity: fencing. As a sport, it's almost entirely non-gender biased. Contrary to what most movies show, fencing (the sport) is entirely centered around two things: strategy and fine-motor skills. There's no need to make an enormous, rapid swipe when a 1/4 turn of the wrist puts you blade on the good side of your opponents'. When your blade has more flexibility than a car antenna, the few brief times when you lock foils against eachother come down to manipulating mechanical advantage, not strength.
I mostly fence foil, and at my university, that puts me fencing against a lot of women in practices (most of the guys favor epee). About the only substantial advantage I have over them is the fact that I'm 6', and thus have a slightly better reach. But, honestly, I'd have the same advantage against a 5'7" guy. The only other physical factor to the sport is enough endurance to stay quick after a few matches, but that's not something that belongs to either gender, really.
Yet fencing, in competition, is separated by gender. We go to a competition where there might be 100 guys fencing Sabre, and one of our women wins because she has a field of 8 to fence against.
It sounds a bit too much like some triumphing, girl-power movement, but I honestly think it falls into the same category that this gaming competition does: on some deep-seated level, far too many guys fear losing to a woman.
The worst part of this whole setup is the poor, clueless end-user, who actually thinks tech support knows what they're doing.
I work in the repair department at a large electronics store. One of my duties (other than actually repairing or upgrading computers) is "inspecting" equipment such as wireless routers to make sure that we aren't getting scammed. It burns me up when someone brings in their 3rd unit in as many days, saying, "wow, what's wrong with you guys? I've been on the phone with D-Link all day, and this is the third bad unit I've gotten". I just want to yell out, "no sir, you've been on the phone with an outsourced guy in Manilla who may or may not have ever even seen a picture of your product, and he says it's faulty because his only concern is getting you off the phone in less than fifteen minutes."
I had a young woman come in the other day with some random Gateway desktop that looked like a CRT iMac knock-off (an all-in-one design where the mainboard and drives were installed in a section below the monitor). She plunks it down on my desk, and says, "The guy at Gateway's tech support says it needs a new video card." I took one look at this obviously completely integrated computer, and said (without thinking), "Are you sure he said that?" "Of course he said that," I thought immediately afterward, "he's tech support. He has no idea what that product even looks like. He doesn't know that the video is integrated." Just for grins I opened it up, on the off chance that there was some ghetto six-inch VGA cable that ran to an actual card. Interestingly, there actually was, but it ran from a proprietary pinout that allowed video to flow up to the monitor to a DB-15 connection on the motherboard, and power to flow down from the single AC jack that was located in the monitor . I showed the connection to the woman, then showed her a couple of video cards, and explained why they were wrong and what she could do (basically nothing, as she was outside of warranty). The funny part about the whole thing was that it looked like it was actually the CRT that was damaged, as it was exhibiting that "missing one part of the color spectrum" bit that is more often than not a CRT defect.
It's a shame, but I don't know of any consumer computer manufacturer that has what I would call "good" tech support anymore, with the exception of Apple (and then you only get 90 days unless you spring for Applecare).
Others have said basically the same thing, but as someone who's just wrapping up his college career, I can basically second this: Don't bother.
I have a laptop. An honest to goodness, actually portable, quiet enough to use in class laptop. This is an important point, because everyone at universities nowadays has a laptop, but most of them are of the ~8lbs./non-mobileCPU/1.5 hr battery life flavor. My handwriting is atrocious, and I'm an English major. Those two things together meant that I could actually read my notes (in classes where the class structure lent itself to massive notes on some days), and I could work on papers during the hour or so between classes that I might have otherwise wasted. To be brutally honest, I never, ever wished that I had a tablet, mostly because they don't seem to have any redeeming features for people other than comic artists.
Get a decent desktop. Something small enough to bring into the dorms, maybe one of those Small Form Factor machines, or a mini-tower. Get a nice, 17" flat panel monitor to go with it. Unless you want an uber-gaming machine, you should be able to do this pretty easily for about $1,200. If you really want a laptop, might I suggest an iBook. The 12" models are light enough to carry around (5lbs., which is pretty close to my ceiling for what I will carry around in addition to the big-ass book that that one professor will always want you to bring), they get a good 4 hours or so in the real world (provided you aren't hitting the hard drive or optical drive too frequently; make sure to load it with RAM), and while the polycarbonate finish will get minor scratches, they're very durable notebooks. You can (at least last I checked) get the G3 models with few frills (CD-ROM, 30GB Drive) for $800. Toss in another $125 or so to max it out with RAM, and I managed to get my airport card for $50. At $1,000, it is ever so slightly more expensive than the ludicrously cheap after Mail-in-rebate jobs at some of the retail stores, but it is significantly more lightweight and significantly less noisy.
Honestly, though, outside of a few classes (generally the giant lecture hall ones), I rarely used my notebook. It was mostly for time between classes, but that was only because I lived off-campus and couldn't get home to work on my desktop. If you are absolutely positive that you need a tablet, go ahead and snag one, but I'd otherwise recommend grabbing a desktop and waiting to see if a notebook is something you really want after you've been there for a few months.
Ridiculously well.
OS X (and OS 9, as well, if that's your cup of tea) wakes from sleep in less than a second (to displaying the desktop), and is usable (as in actually responsive and opening a program) in maybe 3 seconds. It's one of the reasons why Apple notebooks are so highly prized. Shut the lid, and it's asleep in less than two seconds. Open the lid, and it's awake in less than three.
On desktop machines, it's equally as functional. Plus, it's always cool to see the pulsating (snoring) "sleep" light, since a lot of Macs are basically dead silent when "asleep"; it saves you from the idiot who wants to press the power button on your machine.
As the name implies, being the highest rated doesn't always mean that a show is going to stay. Two things can affect a show at that point to make it be cancelled.
Costs. This is what actually happened with Buffy that forced the move to UPN. Although it was a very highly-rated show for WB, the per episode cost had gotten to be in the (IIRC) $2.2 million range. If we assume that, say, Everwood generates $1.2 million on a budget of $300,000, and (in this peculiar example), Buffy generates $2.9 million, then we realize that ratings aren't what it's all about.
Who is watching? This feeds into the above, because certain fan-bases aren't as profitable as others. Way back in the day, CBS cancelled "The Beverly Hillbillies" because (despite high ratings) the only people actually providing the high ratings were older, rural people (Surprise!), and advertisers don't like them as much. Now, I would assume Angel's target and bulk of viewership is a younger, teen and twentysomething crowd, but I might be entirely wrong.
Or it could just be "creative differences". Maybe Joss is a bastard to work with. Maybe some new exec came on board who has a different, not so sci-fi direction for the network. Maybe Boreanaz had made some secretive noise about being sick of playing the same characters for 7 some-odd years. But more likely, I'd peg it to one of the above theories.
At least one Marylin Manson album(Antichrist Superstar) has 99 tracks, the maximum allowable under the CD audio standard. The album cover only lists tracks that are actual songs.
Not to nitpick, but the album cover doesn't list one song. Track 99 is a hidden track. Every track between 16 or 17 (whichever is the "final" track) and 99 is a 3 or 4 second blank, which serves to make track 99 that much more jarring (it's loud as hell right from the get-go, and has an extremely eerie sound to it).
Sidenote: this setup is why I hate car CD players (Sony, for instance) that won't skip backwards from track 1 to the final track in the album.
Um, actually, that was their purpose in life.
Feudal lords were the warrior class of the middle ages. Essentially, the social contract worked out such that a select group of people (the lords) spent the vast majority of their time training in greco-roman wrestling, riding, and of course, their weapons training. Even up through the 1300s, it was still very common for Kings to ride onto the battlefield and actually do battle. The concept of "divine right of kings" didn't really arise until the 1500s at the earliest (at least that I'm aware of). Prior to that, Kings were the best warriors: the guys who could fight well and lead well enough to earn the respect of a group of people. Of course, the mantel then passed to their offspring, but in the years before actual nation-states, it didn't take a huge amount of change for another guy to come in and be King.
Now, up into the Renaissance era, things started change, and that was when the lords started to become the more decadent, "boss-men" figures that a lot of medieval movies tend to depict.
One more random fact: The avergae person living in the dark ages or midieval times was about 5'5" (for a man), and at about 5' for a woman. Of course, that's a mode, and it's thrown off by the huge numbers of peasants. The feudal lords, by virtue of the fact that they could eat meat (nowhere near common in a peasant diet) and basically spent their days working out, wouldn't be at all distinguishable from a modern man, height or strength-wise.
Firewire (a 100 mbps implementation, not the IEEE 1394-certified flavor we know today) first shipped on Mac Quadros (sort of the back-in-the-day version of the powermac) in 1991. Yes, 1991. It was intended to eventually replace SCSI, although at the time there were only a tiny amount of peripherals that used it, mostly scanners and minor video devices IIRC. But it was, essentially, firewire as it is today, they simply hadn't ratcheted the speed up to todays 400 mbps "standard (in quotation marks because firewire is available in a variety of speeds from 100 to 3200mbps; it's actually a protocol). The actual certification and full-line implementation of Firewire didn't really catch on until DV camcorders started to hit the prosumer market, but it was there, a full 12.5 or so years ago.