Heck, I still use my 3G iPod. It works just as well as the modern iPods, and while replacing the battery was a PITA it was far from impossible and wasn't all that expensive.
IMHO, the biggest problem with iPods is that everybody has one now, and the new ones don't really offer any features that make me want to upgrade. Video-on-the-go almost always sucks and the music playing portion is basically unchanged from the first generation iPods. The market feels a lot like the PDA market 3 years ago, where everybody who wanted one finally had one and the bottom just fell out on the new unit sales, plus the PDA functionality on cell phones stopped sucking so bad.
I have to admit that I was considering upgrading my TV to a HD set and possibly start looking at Bluray/HD DVD players until I went into Best Buy and walked back to the HD lounge they had set up. The demo disc they were playing was trying to show off Bluray by playing a movie with a line down the middle, on one side of the line the movie was supposedly playing in SD, on the other side it was in HD. Watching the movie for a bit I could definatly see more detail on the HD side as long as I was standing reasonably close to it, but it in no way enhanced the experiance for me. The effect was surprisingly underwhelming actually. It pretty much killed my interest in HD for the time being, especially with all of the DRM crap you have to go through if you want to get the HD content.
As I've said before, it seems to me that HD DVD and Bluray are going down a path already well worn by the likes of DAT and SVHS. Customers don't seem interested in trading off convienence, price, and simplicity for modest quality improvements. You have to offer them something compelling if you want them to adopt a new technology.
I think his point was that you don't need 256MB of video memory to render a raster image 60 times a second. In fact I'm not sure exactly why you need such a beefy card, it's no like this is a polygon intensive operation, and even cheap cards are fine at blitting stuff to the screen. Does Cyberlink have some sort of processing for the HD-DVD and Bluray video offloaded to the video card? Granted you're going to need a card that can push a lot of pixels, but 1920x1080 @ 60Hz is something that any halfway decent card should be able to handle these days. I wouldn't try it on a Mach64 based card or something, but even a cheap Geforce 6200 shouldn't have any trouble blitting that.
The performance drop comes because they're putting a ton more eyecandy in the game. Normally the benchmarks are Normal mode vs. PhysX mode (which has considerably more physics enabled objects). Nobody benchmarks PhysX mode without the card because it would be a total slideshow.
On the other hand, the eyecandy usually doesn't come through much in the screenshots, and honestly even in person it's not that compelling, but that doesn't change the fact that the online speed benchmarks you're talking about are totally bogus. It's like saying a Geforce FX 5900GT is slower than a Geforce 4MX because the 4MX has higher FPS (at 640x480 no features) than the 5900 (at 1600x1200 16xAA full max detail).
Thing of it as life experiance. Those teachers schedule those classes early to teach you the value of not partying all night long when you have to go to work the next day.:)
Most of the podcasted lectures I've seen are from giant auditorium classes that discourage teacher-student interactivity in the first place. The only major loss I see is when the professor is pointing things out on a visual aid. While the student can try to keep along with posted slides, I find it fairly difficult to keep slides and audio synched up. If the student wants clarification, they'll have to do what students normally do in those auditorium classes and ask the TA.
From what I understand of EVE, trust is the only thing you have. That's why these scams work so well in the game, because when the only thing you have is trust that can't be backed up by anything then it's by definition a scammers paradise. At least in the real world you can turn to the authorities if you get scammed, which acts as a disincentive to scammers. In EVE the only thing you can do is to try to blow up their ship, and chances are if they're in a position to scam you then you stand no chance of that. Your in game choices end up being "do everything yourself" in which case you'll never get very far, or "trust someone, who may be a scammer that you can't do anything about because the world is without law". You can try to minimize your risk by only investing in people with a good reputation, but as the above mentioned scam clearly indicated, past performance is no indication of future performance.
I've refused to give my SSN to companies that want to perform a credit check before. I thought they might just take the extra effort to identify me, but instead they just refused to provide service or required a massive security deposit before they'd give me service. For instance, the power company wanted $500 (although they would take a credit card) security deposit because I refused to give them my SSN. They promised to return it if I wasn't late on any bills for a full year. It was clear to me that they were making it in my best interest to provide my SSN. It's not like they have competition or anything either.
It's 5 computers period. I'm right at the limit myself with a couple of computers up in the room (one is my wife's), the laptop, my work machine, and the media PC in the basement (just used to play music down there when we work out). We also have an Airport express hooked to the stereo, but fortunatly it doesn't count against the PC count. While I don't have plans to expand that anytime soon, it is a little worrying to know that if I wanted to authorize a different machine for whatever reason, something would have to go. Because of the "you can only deauthorize a couple of machines a year" policy, you can't even switch your licenses between them easily.
Or worse, you'll get that 6th computer and realize you can't register it with iTunes under your name unless you unregister an existing computer, and you can only unregister a few times a year.
Or you want to play the files under Linux/FreeBSD with the existing AAC library and just need to strip the crypto off to make it work.
10% savings is _huge_ when talking about the entire country. That's dozens of power plants and their pollution. It's not like the CFLs have big drawbacks that make them suck compared to regular bulbs. If you get good ones you won't be able to see the flicker (I've surprised several people by pointing out that my lamps are all fitted with CFLs, because they couldn't see any flicker at all and they came on right as soon as you flip the switch with full brightness). Plus, you don't have to change them nearly as often and they put out nice smooth light.
Your numbers a also a bit skewed because nobody uses electric heat in Ontario, it's all gas heat and thus the total energy consumed by a household is underreported when only looking at electricity. Granted the CFLs won't save you any gas, but they also mean that you could actually possibly get near that 10% savings because a large part of your electric bill is the lights.
Your Heat Pump is more efficent per watt at heating the house than a light bulb. If you're still using baseboard radiators it's a different story, but hopefully you're not. Granted, you're still going to see less savings with the CFLs in the winter than you do in the summer (where the heat pump has to work against the heat generated by your lighting), but it's still a savings. In the end though, it's savings either way. Even if your house has no heat pump and you're still just using resistive heaters, they're certainly no less efficent than a light bulb and you will still save energy in the summer when the windows are open and all of that heat is just waste.
I've discovered that quality matters a lot with CFLs, unlike regular light blubs where even the off brand guys do a reasonable job. For instance, the "America Something" brand that Wal*Mart sells is complete trash. Their colors are all over the map, they flicker, and they rarely last more than a couple of years. Half of the time the instant on stuff doesn't even work properly with them.
I have been very impressed with the Commercial Electric brand sold by Home Depot however. I installed a ton of them 5 years ago when I bought my house and thus far only one has failed. They aren't even all that expensive, you can sometimes find 6 packs of 15 watt bulbs for ~$10-$15 on sale. I redid my Mother-in-Laws place with a couple of those packs and saved her a bunch on her power bill because she has this annoying habit of never turning lights off. Plus, I was tired of changing half of her bulbs everytime we went over there.
I've also experimented with the GE brand and a few others, but that was back before isntant on was common and many of them take several seconds to light, which turned me off on them.
I actually liked Starcraft too, but with War3 you had to split your attention so much between your early hero clearing out the NPC mobs near the base for some XP and gold while building your base while remembering that if you're 5 seconds late on clicking that next building in your base you're probably going to be rushed and killed.
The thing that worries me is games that are set up such that whoever invests the most time in it is the most powerful (Ok, this isn't too bad in itself, and is sort of natural, but it guarentees that the crazy people with no life are the strongest in the game), and has little to no consequences for PK.
If you're playing the game, you're playing a fantasy. Eventually one of the stronger players will find you at just the right moment and wipe you out. Everyone who isn't the strongest is just bait. At some point the hundreds of hours you've invested in the game are going to be flushed away by one guy who just loves being an asshole, and there's nothing you can do about it.
On the other hand, that would create a good in-game limitation against getting too addicted. Nothing breaks the addiction like being dumped back on square 1. Heck, even if you are the strongest with the biggest guild, there's always the chance that a bunch of other guilds will band together and take you down, or they'll send in spies to destroy you from the inside. A wild west atmosphere means occasionally getting shot and dying.
Yeah, but that would require me to have actual talent or something. Although given a lot of the bands I've heard in bars, that's apparently not a very stringent requirement.
Yeah, I normally hate horror movies, doubly so for the ones that are watered down to a PG-13. Normally there is a long setup, then a really quick horror scene with a bit of splatter, then lots and lots of people running around screaming for no reason and perhaps acting in the dumbest way possible just to advance the plot.
Snakes on a Plane, although taking a bit longer than I would have liked to actually get to the Snakes did a very good job of keeping the action going and not making everyone dumber than a bag of rocks. While there are some parts that were a little hard to swallow (why is the plane so shaky when the autopilot is turned off?) there were no completely obvious gaping plot holes IMHO. There were also way more good one-liners than most horror movies manage. Sure there were lots of little plot holes, but if you're nitpicky enough that is true of most movies.
I was pleasantly surprised actually. I was expecting yet another crappy horror movie and instead was treated to a surprisingly well made thriller. I also think this movie would not have grossed nearly as much as it did without the Internet hype. I know I wouldn't have gone to see Pacific Air Whatever Something Something, even if it did have Samuel Jackson in it.
I wouldn't say AMD has better engineers per say. I think Intel just went down a marketing driven path with the Netburst architecture and in the end it hurt them. The Core2 chips seem to be a return to the good old Intel of solid engineering.
I'm not going to make any predictions at all until I personally try out the Wii. With the 360 and PS3 I have a good idea of what I'm getting, but with the Wii there is a lot of margin for error. Everyone says the remote just works fine, but all they had was the E3 demo and whatever closed door stuff Nintendo does. If my mom hooks up the Wii to her somewhat crappy TV in the sunlit family room, is it going to work as well? I hope so, but if it doesn't you could see a lot of wind fall out of Nintendo's sails. At this point I really don't have enough information to even make an educated guess.
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Heck, I still use my 3G iPod. It works just as well as the modern iPods, and while replacing the battery was a PITA it was far from impossible and wasn't all that expensive.
IMHO, the biggest problem with iPods is that everybody has one now, and the new ones don't really offer any features that make me want to upgrade. Video-on-the-go almost always sucks and the music playing portion is basically unchanged from the first generation iPods. The market feels a lot like the PDA market 3 years ago, where everybody who wanted one finally had one and the bottom just fell out on the new unit sales, plus the PDA functionality on cell phones stopped sucking so bad.
I have to admit that I was considering upgrading my TV to a HD set and possibly start looking at Bluray/HD DVD players until I went into Best Buy and walked back to the HD lounge they had set up. The demo disc they were playing was trying to show off Bluray by playing a movie with a line down the middle, on one side of the line the movie was supposedly playing in SD, on the other side it was in HD. Watching the movie for a bit I could definatly see more detail on the HD side as long as I was standing reasonably close to it, but it in no way enhanced the experiance for me. The effect was surprisingly underwhelming actually. It pretty much killed my interest in HD for the time being, especially with all of the DRM crap you have to go through if you want to get the HD content.
As I've said before, it seems to me that HD DVD and Bluray are going down a path already well worn by the likes of DAT and SVHS. Customers don't seem interested in trading off convienence, price, and simplicity for modest quality improvements. You have to offer them something compelling if you want them to adopt a new technology.
I think his point was that you don't need 256MB of video memory to render a raster image 60 times a second. In fact I'm not sure exactly why you need such a beefy card, it's no like this is a polygon intensive operation, and even cheap cards are fine at blitting stuff to the screen. Does Cyberlink have some sort of processing for the HD-DVD and Bluray video offloaded to the video card? Granted you're going to need a card that can push a lot of pixels, but 1920x1080 @ 60Hz is something that any halfway decent card should be able to handle these days. I wouldn't try it on a Mach64 based card or something, but even a cheap Geforce 6200 shouldn't have any trouble blitting that.
The performance drop comes because they're putting a ton more eyecandy in the game. Normally the benchmarks are Normal mode vs. PhysX mode (which has considerably more physics enabled objects). Nobody benchmarks PhysX mode without the card because it would be a total slideshow. On the other hand, the eyecandy usually doesn't come through much in the screenshots, and honestly even in person it's not that compelling, but that doesn't change the fact that the online speed benchmarks you're talking about are totally bogus. It's like saying a Geforce FX 5900GT is slower than a Geforce 4MX because the 4MX has higher FPS (at 640x480 no features) than the 5900 (at 1600x1200 16xAA full max detail).
Thing of it as life experiance. Those teachers schedule those classes early to teach you the value of not partying all night long when you have to go to work the next day. :)
Most of the podcasted lectures I've seen are from giant auditorium classes that discourage teacher-student interactivity in the first place. The only major loss I see is when the professor is pointing things out on a visual aid. While the student can try to keep along with posted slides, I find it fairly difficult to keep slides and audio synched up. If the student wants clarification, they'll have to do what students normally do in those auditorium classes and ask the TA.
From what I understand of EVE, trust is the only thing you have. That's why these scams work so well in the game, because when the only thing you have is trust that can't be backed up by anything then it's by definition a scammers paradise. At least in the real world you can turn to the authorities if you get scammed, which acts as a disincentive to scammers. In EVE the only thing you can do is to try to blow up their ship, and chances are if they're in a position to scam you then you stand no chance of that. Your in game choices end up being "do everything yourself" in which case you'll never get very far, or "trust someone, who may be a scammer that you can't do anything about because the world is without law". You can try to minimize your risk by only investing in people with a good reputation, but as the above mentioned scam clearly indicated, past performance is no indication of future performance.
I've refused to give my SSN to companies that want to perform a credit check before. I thought they might just take the extra effort to identify me, but instead they just refused to provide service or required a massive security deposit before they'd give me service. For instance, the power company wanted $500 (although they would take a credit card) security deposit because I refused to give them my SSN. They promised to return it if I wasn't late on any bills for a full year. It was clear to me that they were making it in my best interest to provide my SSN. It's not like they have competition or anything either.
It's 5 computers period. I'm right at the limit myself with a couple of computers up in the room (one is my wife's), the laptop, my work machine, and the media PC in the basement (just used to play music down there when we work out). We also have an Airport express hooked to the stereo, but fortunatly it doesn't count against the PC count. While I don't have plans to expand that anytime soon, it is a little worrying to know that if I wanted to authorize a different machine for whatever reason, something would have to go. Because of the "you can only deauthorize a couple of machines a year" policy, you can't even switch your licenses between them easily.
Senator Byrd is from WV, not VA.
Or worse, you'll get that 6th computer and realize you can't register it with iTunes under your name unless you unregister an existing computer, and you can only unregister a few times a year.
Or you want to play the files under Linux/FreeBSD with the existing AAC library and just need to strip the crypto off to make it work.
10% savings is _huge_ when talking about the entire country. That's dozens of power plants and their pollution. It's not like the CFLs have big drawbacks that make them suck compared to regular bulbs. If you get good ones you won't be able to see the flicker (I've surprised several people by pointing out that my lamps are all fitted with CFLs, because they couldn't see any flicker at all and they came on right as soon as you flip the switch with full brightness). Plus, you don't have to change them nearly as often and they put out nice smooth light.
Your numbers a also a bit skewed because nobody uses electric heat in Ontario, it's all gas heat and thus the total energy consumed by a household is underreported when only looking at electricity. Granted the CFLs won't save you any gas, but they also mean that you could actually possibly get near that 10% savings because a large part of your electric bill is the lights.
Your Heat Pump is more efficent per watt at heating the house than a light bulb. If you're still using baseboard radiators it's a different story, but hopefully you're not. Granted, you're still going to see less savings with the CFLs in the winter than you do in the summer (where the heat pump has to work against the heat generated by your lighting), but it's still a savings. In the end though, it's savings either way. Even if your house has no heat pump and you're still just using resistive heaters, they're certainly no less efficent than a light bulb and you will still save energy in the summer when the windows are open and all of that heat is just waste.
I've discovered that quality matters a lot with CFLs, unlike regular light blubs where even the off brand guys do a reasonable job. For instance, the "America Something" brand that Wal*Mart sells is complete trash. Their colors are all over the map, they flicker, and they rarely last more than a couple of years. Half of the time the instant on stuff doesn't even work properly with them.
I have been very impressed with the Commercial Electric brand sold by Home Depot however. I installed a ton of them 5 years ago when I bought my house and thus far only one has failed. They aren't even all that expensive, you can sometimes find 6 packs of 15 watt bulbs for ~$10-$15 on sale. I redid my Mother-in-Laws place with a couple of those packs and saved her a bunch on her power bill because she has this annoying habit of never turning lights off. Plus, I was tired of changing half of her bulbs everytime we went over there.
I've also experimented with the GE brand and a few others, but that was back before isntant on was common and many of them take several seconds to light, which turned me off on them.
Step 4 is obvious: Line the pockets of the buyout guys.
It's pretty weird to think about Microsoft as a Pump and Dump stock though.
I actually liked Starcraft too, but with War3 you had to split your attention so much between your early hero clearing out the NPC mobs near the base for some XP and gold while building your base while remembering that if you're 5 seconds late on clicking that next building in your base you're probably going to be rushed and killed.
Which was the main reason I hated War3. Too freaking much micromanagement. I was a huge Kohan fan when it was still played however.
The thing that worries me is games that are set up such that whoever invests the most time in it is the most powerful (Ok, this isn't too bad in itself, and is sort of natural, but it guarentees that the crazy people with no life are the strongest in the game), and has little to no consequences for PK.
If you're playing the game, you're playing a fantasy. Eventually one of the stronger players will find you at just the right moment and wipe you out. Everyone who isn't the strongest is just bait. At some point the hundreds of hours you've invested in the game are going to be flushed away by one guy who just loves being an asshole, and there's nothing you can do about it.
On the other hand, that would create a good in-game limitation against getting too addicted. Nothing breaks the addiction like being dumped back on square 1. Heck, even if you are the strongest with the biggest guild, there's always the chance that a bunch of other guilds will band together and take you down, or they'll send in spies to destroy you from the inside. A wild west atmosphere means occasionally getting shot and dying.
I thought EVE was a MMO designed to attract pricks like that. I really don't understand why people like that game.
I doubt the controller will change. There's really no reason to change it.
Yeah, but that would require me to have actual talent or something. Although given a lot of the bands I've heard in bars, that's apparently not a very stringent requirement.
Yeah, I normally hate horror movies, doubly so for the ones that are watered down to a PG-13. Normally there is a long setup, then a really quick horror scene with a bit of splatter, then lots and lots of people running around screaming for no reason and perhaps acting in the dumbest way possible just to advance the plot.
Snakes on a Plane, although taking a bit longer than I would have liked to actually get to the Snakes did a very good job of keeping the action going and not making everyone dumber than a bag of rocks. While there are some parts that were a little hard to swallow (why is the plane so shaky when the autopilot is turned off?) there were no completely obvious gaping plot holes IMHO. There were also way more good one-liners than most horror movies manage. Sure there were lots of little plot holes, but if you're nitpicky enough that is true of most movies.
I was pleasantly surprised actually. I was expecting yet another crappy horror movie and instead was treated to a surprisingly well made thriller. I also think this movie would not have grossed nearly as much as it did without the Internet hype. I know I wouldn't have gone to see Pacific Air Whatever Something Something, even if it did have Samuel Jackson in it.
I wouldn't say AMD has better engineers per say. I think Intel just went down a marketing driven path with the Netburst architecture and in the end it hurt them. The Core2 chips seem to be a return to the good old Intel of solid engineering.
What shouldn't happen and what doesn't happen aren't always the same thing.
I'm not going to make any predictions at all until I personally try out the Wii. With the 360 and PS3 I have a good idea of what I'm getting, but with the Wii there is a lot of margin for error. Everyone says the remote just works fine, but all they had was the E3 demo and whatever closed door stuff Nintendo does. If my mom hooks up the Wii to her somewhat crappy TV in the sunlit family room, is it going to work as well? I hope so, but if it doesn't you could see a lot of wind fall out of Nintendo's sails. At this point I really don't have enough information to even make an educated guess.