So? Being somebody with a better education than a hair stylist, you could have politely told her that you wanted a little less than half an inch taken off, and moved on with life.
I assumed that she knew how long a centimeter was. I clarified it as about a half an inch.
The amazing thing is not that the English System has lasted so long in the US, but that Napoleon's system was adopted so quickly in Europe. The reason is simple: until the early 20th Century, most of Europe was ruled by dictators and monarchs, who could tell you to use their chosen measuring system and like it. In the US, the system which would get used is the one which the most people were using, and nobody really had enough power to change it.
Good point, but the only the U.S. and some country in Africa still use the English system. All other societies have switched.
I am still continually amazed that the English System is still used at all. I can somewhat understand NASA needing to use some english measures for old lathes and such. But for our entire country to still use the english system for all applications is ridiculous.
I was getting a haircut the other day. I didn't want a whole inch off. So I asked for a centimeter taken off. The stylist had to ask me how long a centimeter was.
Then you'd better hope that you don't run into someone who thinks murder is ok...
Indeed, but the grandparent poster is still correct. We are socialized into certain morals. Some morals, such as murder being wrong, are held almost universally. Yet, there have been cultures such as the Romans with their gladiators that have somewhat trumped this moral law. Morals help glue society together, but they are never absolute, and are ultimately determined by the individual.
that tells me that the men are finding the better deals.
Yeah, no kidding. About a year ago for Chritmas, my brother's girlfriend bought an eMachines computer for her family for $1200. The amazing thing about this computer, is that despite being bought only a year ago, it cannot run Windows XP without taking 5 minutes to boot up and 15 seconds to open a right-click menu. I have a 5 year old machine that was bought for $700 that is perfectly capable of running XP.
And last month I built a far superior system for them for the meager price of $250. Some people, especially women, just have no sense when it comes to buying computers. For such a large purchase, it seems like even a totally computer illiterate individual would at least put some research into it.
You have a point. The religious symbolism in Evangelion is overratted. One must remember that Japan is less than 1% Christian, and the creators of the show only had a weak understanding of Kabbalism. The show's creators just thought it would be cool.
However, I do somewhat like Evangelion. The story towards the end does get quite intense and interesting.
If they sell these fish, once they die, what do you think people will do with their dead fish? Not all people will be responsible about disposal--one flush down the toilet, or one dumping into a creek, and this genetic modification is now in the environment. Bigger fish comes by and eats it. Now what?
Wow. Sorry, but you are amazingly ignorant. When you eat cow, do you sprout hooves and start eating grass? No. The DNA can't somehow magically spice itself into another organism's DNA, all on its own. Also, GM food dna isn't some kind of magical DNA that transcends the laws of physics and the abilities of normal DNA. GM DNA is the same adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine bases as all other DNA.
Ignorance like this ruins the prospects of potentially useful technology.
Why don't you just use your own computer and printer? Doesn't make any sense to go to Walmart. To me, one of the main advantages of digital cameras is the fact that you don't have to go to a photo shop.
Chernobyl? No cause for alarm... Three Mile Island? Hiroshima anyone? What about a "dirty bomb?"
Quite irrational. Chernobyl was an inherently flawed reactor design. It can't happen in our superior reactors. Anyway, it didn't kill all that many people. TMI didn't kill or injure anyone. And a dirty bomb's radiation wouldn't cause very much harm. The blast would be the main thing. And hiroshima. Fuck. That's a bomb designed to kill people! Of course its dangerous.
Oh, and once you're done telling me how safe modern nuclear reactors are, let's go on the tour of Hanford together, okay? I'm counting on you to hold my hand during the scary parts, like when the nuclear waste enters the water table.
I live just a few miles away from Hanford. I don't know where the fuck you get your news, but the radiation at Hanford isn't harming anything. The place is a wildlife preserve, one of the best shrub-steppe desert habitats in the wast. The radiation from the waste leakage is inconsequential compared to what you get from the sun every day.
Nuclear power, historically, has been very safe. Certainly compared to coal power, with its smog and mountains of toxic coal waste. Don't listen to idiotic ultra environmentalists.
The original version of Blade Runner sucked. The idiot movie execs made Ford do a voicover after the fact because they thought the audience would be too dumb to follow the movie. They also added a ridiculous happy ending.
Yeah, but the wireless Gateway model only supports 802.11b. I hear that streaming videos suck. The Linksys is exactly what I've been waiting for...if it's under $300 and will play DVD+RW, I'll get it the day it's released.
Nah. You are probably thinking of streaming video over the internet, which nearly always, buffering... buffering...buffering... sucks. With things like Real Video, most people's internet connection isn't nearly fast enough to stream anything remotely resembling good quality. Over a LAN, however, those concerns are unfounded.
Tip top, exceedingly high dvd quality divx or xvid is only about 1500 kbps bitrate. Plus 160 kbps audio and you only have 1.7 megabits. Far under the speed of 100 mbps LAN, although it may test the speed of 802.11b, which has about a 5 mbps real world speed, I've heard. Keep in mind that that example was really high quality divx. Most divx video has bitrates of a megabit or less.
DVD MPEG2 video is of course much harder, as you have video bitrates of 6, 8 or more megabits. But you don't get DVD video over the internet, so you might as well just play it on the Linksys' dvd player.
The vast majority of people would be using this device with a ethernet connection. That would stream any video you could throw at at. And an 802.11B connection would handle divx just fine.
I got the same burner on the weekend after Thanksgiving, my drive HATES -R media and loves +R/RW media. Unfortunately -R media is much cheaper where I live.
That's really weird. If I were you, I'd switch burning programs. Maybe try Nero. Or try a different brand of media. Some brands of media are horribly unreliable, such as Princo. Failing all of that, exchange your drive.
I've burned about 15 dvd-r's since I got it very recently. It hasn't made a coaster yet.
It's possible to buy a dual format burner for under $100, so the "format war" is largely irrelevant now.
I wish I could agree with you, but I can't. I've got a 4x Lite On dual format burner, which I got for only $80. Dual format is the only way to go. But I know several people that got single format +R burners, which usually cost slightly less. I doubt either format will ever completely die, but I can definitely see -R single format burners and -R media getting a little harder to find a few years down the road.
I've never tried Virtual Dub, but I'm sure it's a fine program. The fact that you mention it as comparable to iMovie, though, makes me wonder what sort of crunch you're smoking, and where can I get some?
I won't make the claim that Virtual Dub Mod is easier to use than iMovie, because it isn't. But feature-wise, it is excellent. It has numerous built in video filters, and hundreds more are available as plugins on the internet. It can capture video through a TV-IN card. It has full OGM and Matroska container support, which allows you do have things like multiple audio streams and subtitles. It lets you edit individual streams, encode MP3, Ogg, or other audio formats, correct audio skew, etc. You can demux individual streams or save audio streams as WAV files. It can read VOB files.
Uh, they'll have DVDs that won't work on other people's computers. It's not really that big a deal. This is a weird story.
The vast majority of DVD drives (all?) will read both +R and -R, as well as most set top box players. Writing is a different matter, of course. I myself have a dual format Lite On 4x burner, so I'm covered no matter what format wins out.
Right now, +R definitely seems to be dominating. That is kind of sad. -R media is much cheaper, and it is compatible on a slightly higher percentage of set top boxes.
Possibly among free encoders, but what about "official" ones? Apple licensed the Fraunhofer codec for Quicktime, which is the engine that runes iTunes.
The Fraunhofer codec is definitely better than most codecs out there. But it is a distant second to LAME, which is constantly being improved all of the time. In addition, LAME is completely open source.
Like what. The free PC software sucks, and the good ones are very expensive. I doubt your "perfectly good PC equivalents" exist, at least as far as video editing goes.
Adobe Premiere and After Effects some good video editing solutions. Yes, they are expensive. But the money I save by buying a PC far outweighs the cost. Also, the Apple equivalent of Premiere, Final Cut Pro, costs $250 dollars more than Premiere. So by using Premiere on a PC, I save over $1000 dollars in software and hardware costs. I really can't see why Apple is the better option here.
If you are thinking about iMovie, is not what I'd call a professional video editing tool. It's great for amateurs. But it is totally and wholly beaten out by open source windows video editing programs such as Virtual Dub Mod.
Right, but to encode with it uses way more juice than some of the inferior ones to play them. If I can get double battery life to have songs with a slight (and I do mean slight) hit in quality, I'm all over it.
No, that's incorrect. They will use the same amount of battery life. LAME throws away some parts, Bladeenc throws away other parts. At a given bitrate, like 128, they will both be throwing away exactly the same amount of data. The difference in quality depends on what the encoders throw away. It doesn't affect battery life. At all.
Nobody else sells the same hardware and OS. It's only Apple. Also, most of the content creation software, such as iMovie, have perfectly good PC equivalents.
Ok, I'll give you that, but (I don't exacty know what I am talking about here, so please feel free to enlighten me) isn't MP3 encoding done via the same algorighm/codec no matter who writes the wrapper?
Nope. The LAME encoder is different and far superior to other encoders. Different encoders use different psychoacoustic models to determin which parts to throw away. Quality varies greatly between encoders. There are terrible ones like Bladeenc and Xing, which have quality more on par with Real Audio, and superior encoders like LAME which have quality more on par with Ogg Vorbis.
LAME is the only good way to encode. Anything else will produce inferior MP3s.
Could have fooled me. Apple's prices are among the best in the industry if you match the same hardware and software.
Really? That's weird. Because G4s are far lower performance than most low end PCs sold today. Yet they are far more expensive than low end PCs. G5s are high performance, but they are still beaten out by Athlon 64s. You can get a computer with an Athlon 64, a Radeon 9700, and other ultra high performance hardware for far less than the cost of a G5. Looks like you are firmly in the grasp of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field.
When you can get me a DVD recorder/MP3 player that fits in my pocket, costs $100, and is super simple to use via iTunes, then sure, I'm all over it.
What is so wonderful about iTunes? I don't want to use any program to transfer songs to my MP3 player. I want it to mount as an external drive so I can transfer any song, MP3 or otherwise, onto the player. I don't see a reason to use iTunes. You certainly shouldn't encode with it. LAME is a far superior encoder.
The Archos and many other players do this. Although a $120 HD MP3 player is a killer deal, the current iPods are just beat out in features by the competition. A 20gb Archos AV 120 is slightly cheaper than an iPod, and it has a small but high resolution color LCD display. It can play back divx and xvid files at near dvd quality. It can even record divx video through RCA or composite. It also has TV-out. Quite a bit more features than the iPod. It also mounts as an external hard drive
I'd take a mini-dvd based MP3 player any day over an iPod. It would be tiny and hold a few hundred songs per disc. Transferring songs would be easy enough with Nero or something. I'm surprised nobody has done something like that.
TO be fair bukkake isn't a real word; it just sounds japanese.
Bukkake is the name of the soup. The name comes from the fact that the female in a bukkake tape looks as if she accidentally spilled the soup all over her face.
Re:The U.S. is a major exporter of culture as well
on
Japan's Empire of Cool
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· Score: 1
Japanese children don't dream of becoming firefighters, doctors, and astronauts-- they just know they will turn into a jimun, or office worker, when they grow up. Japan sucks.
Anime is cool, but Japan is not a place I would like to live. A terribly homogenous culture, with everyone pointed in the same direction in life. It is a country that discourages nonconformity of any kind. Also, you are right, the marketing in Japan is ridiculous.
And I'm picky. MPEG2, DVCAM, and whatever the utter crap codec satellite TV uses don't cut it. But some ultra-nice compression is better than uncompressed because you get a pristine image for less space. Even with some great new storage medium with vast, nearly limitless capacities, it will still run out.
For very large media, HuffYUV would work well. It is a lossless codec primarily used for video capture. You can get about a 2:1 reduction over uncompressed. Of course, there are lossy codecs as well that would preserve near perfect image quality for a fraction of the size of HuffYUV.
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So? Being somebody with a better education than a hair stylist, you could have politely told her that you wanted a little less than half an inch taken off, and moved on with life.
I assumed that she knew how long a centimeter was. I clarified it as about a half an inch.
The amazing thing is not that the English System has lasted so long in the US, but that Napoleon's system was adopted so quickly in Europe. The reason is simple: until the early 20th Century, most of Europe was ruled by dictators and monarchs, who could tell you to use their chosen measuring system and like it. In the US, the system which would get used is the one which the most people were using, and nobody really had enough power to change it.
Good point, but the only the U.S. and some country in Africa still use the English system. All other societies have switched.
I am still continually amazed that the English System is still used at all. I can somewhat understand NASA needing to use some english measures for old lathes and such. But for our entire country to still use the english system for all applications is ridiculous.
I was getting a haircut the other day. I didn't want a whole inch off. So I asked for a centimeter taken off. The stylist had to ask me how long a centimeter was.
Then you'd better hope that you don't run into someone who thinks murder is ok...
Indeed, but the grandparent poster is still correct. We are socialized into certain morals. Some morals, such as murder being wrong, are held almost universally. Yet, there have been cultures such as the Romans with their gladiators that have somewhat trumped this moral law. Morals help glue society together, but they are never absolute, and are ultimately determined by the individual.
that tells me that the men are finding the better deals.
Yeah, no kidding. About a year ago for Chritmas, my brother's girlfriend bought an eMachines computer for her family for $1200. The amazing thing about this computer, is that despite being bought only a year ago, it cannot run Windows XP without taking 5 minutes to boot up and 15 seconds to open a right-click menu. I have a 5 year old machine that was bought for $700 that is perfectly capable of running XP.
And last month I built a far superior system for them for the meager price of $250. Some people, especially women, just have no sense when it comes to buying computers. For such a large purchase, it seems like even a totally computer illiterate individual would at least put some research into it.
You have a point. The religious symbolism in Evangelion is overratted. One must remember that Japan is less than 1% Christian, and the creators of the show only had a weak understanding of Kabbalism. The show's creators just thought it would be cool.
However, I do somewhat like Evangelion. The story towards the end does get quite intense and interesting.
If they sell these fish, once they die, what do you think people will do with their dead fish? Not all people will be responsible about disposal--one flush down the toilet, or one dumping into a creek, and this genetic modification is now in the environment. Bigger fish comes by and eats it. Now what?
Wow. Sorry, but you are amazingly ignorant. When you eat cow, do you sprout hooves and start eating grass? No. The DNA can't somehow magically spice itself into another organism's DNA, all on its own. Also, GM food dna isn't some kind of magical DNA that transcends the laws of physics and the abilities of normal DNA. GM DNA is the same adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine bases as all other DNA.
Ignorance like this ruins the prospects of potentially useful technology.
Why don't you just use your own computer and printer? Doesn't make any sense to go to Walmart. To me, one of the main advantages of digital cameras is the fact that you don't have to go to a photo shop.
Chernobyl? No cause for alarm... Three Mile Island? Hiroshima anyone? What about a "dirty bomb?"
Quite irrational. Chernobyl was an inherently flawed reactor design. It can't happen in our superior reactors. Anyway, it didn't kill all that many people. TMI didn't kill or injure anyone. And a dirty bomb's radiation wouldn't cause very much harm. The blast would be the main thing. And hiroshima. Fuck. That's a bomb designed to kill people! Of course its dangerous.
Oh, and once you're done telling me how safe modern nuclear reactors are, let's go on the tour of Hanford together, okay? I'm counting on you to hold my hand during the scary parts, like when the nuclear waste enters the water table.
I live just a few miles away from Hanford. I don't know where the fuck you get your news, but the radiation at Hanford isn't harming anything. The place is a wildlife preserve, one of the best shrub-steppe desert habitats in the wast. The radiation from the waste leakage is inconsequential compared to what you get from the sun every day.
Nuclear power, historically, has been very safe. Certainly compared to coal power, with its smog and mountains of toxic coal waste. Don't listen to idiotic ultra environmentalists.
The original version of Blade Runner sucked. The idiot movie execs made Ford do a voicover after the fact because they thought the audience would be too dumb to follow the movie. They also added a ridiculous happy ending.
Yeah, but the wireless Gateway model only supports 802.11b. I hear that streaming videos suck. The Linksys is exactly what I've been waiting for...if it's under $300 and will play DVD+RW, I'll get it the day it's released.
Nah. You are probably thinking of streaming video over the internet, which nearly always, buffering... buffering...buffering... sucks. With things like Real Video, most people's internet connection isn't nearly fast enough to stream anything remotely resembling good quality. Over a LAN, however, those concerns are unfounded.
Tip top, exceedingly high dvd quality divx or xvid is only about 1500 kbps bitrate. Plus 160 kbps audio and you only have 1.7 megabits. Far under the speed of 100 mbps LAN, although it may test the speed of 802.11b, which has about a 5 mbps real world speed, I've heard. Keep in mind that that example was really high quality divx. Most divx video has bitrates of a megabit or less.
DVD MPEG2 video is of course much harder, as you have video bitrates of 6, 8 or more megabits. But you don't get DVD video over the internet, so you might as well just play it on the Linksys' dvd player.
The vast majority of people would be using this device with a ethernet connection. That would stream any video you could throw at at. And an 802.11B connection would handle divx just fine.
I got the same burner on the weekend after Thanksgiving, my drive HATES -R media and loves +R/RW media. Unfortunately -R media is much cheaper where I live.
That's really weird. If I were you, I'd switch burning programs. Maybe try Nero. Or try a different brand of media. Some brands of media are horribly unreliable, such as Princo. Failing all of that, exchange your drive.
I've burned about 15 dvd-r's since I got it very recently. It hasn't made a coaster yet.
It's possible to buy a dual format burner for under $100, so the "format war" is largely irrelevant now.
I wish I could agree with you, but I can't. I've got a 4x Lite On dual format burner, which I got for only $80. Dual format is the only way to go. But I know several people that got single format +R burners, which usually cost slightly less. I doubt either format will ever completely die, but I can definitely see -R single format burners and -R media getting a little harder to find a few years down the road.
I've never tried Virtual Dub, but I'm sure it's a fine program. The fact that you mention it as comparable to iMovie, though, makes me wonder what sort of crunch you're smoking, and where can I get some?
I won't make the claim that Virtual Dub Mod is easier to use than iMovie, because it isn't. But feature-wise, it is excellent. It has numerous built in video filters, and hundreds more are available as plugins on the internet. It can capture video through a TV-IN card. It has full OGM and Matroska container support, which allows you do have things like multiple audio streams and subtitles. It lets you edit individual streams, encode MP3, Ogg, or other audio formats, correct audio skew, etc. You can demux individual streams or save audio streams as WAV files. It can read VOB files.
It is an excellent, fully featured program.
Uh, they'll have DVDs that won't work on other people's computers. It's not really that big a deal. This is a weird story.
The vast majority of DVD drives (all?) will read both +R and -R, as well as most set top box players. Writing is a different matter, of course. I myself have a dual format Lite On 4x burner, so I'm covered no matter what format wins out.
Right now, +R definitely seems to be dominating. That is kind of sad. -R media is much cheaper, and it is compatible on a slightly higher percentage of set top boxes.
Possibly among free encoders, but what about "official" ones? Apple licensed the Fraunhofer codec for Quicktime, which is the engine that runes iTunes.
The Fraunhofer codec is definitely better than most codecs out there. But it is a distant second to LAME, which is constantly being improved all of the time. In addition, LAME is completely open source.
Like what. The free PC software sucks, and the good ones are very expensive. I doubt your "perfectly good PC equivalents" exist, at least as far as video editing goes.
Adobe Premiere and After Effects some good video editing solutions. Yes, they are expensive. But the money I save by buying a PC far outweighs the cost. Also, the Apple equivalent of Premiere, Final Cut Pro, costs $250 dollars more than Premiere. So by using Premiere on a PC, I save over $1000 dollars in software and hardware costs. I really can't see why Apple is the better option here.
If you are thinking about iMovie, is not what I'd call a professional video editing tool. It's great for amateurs. But it is totally and wholly beaten out by open source windows video editing programs such as Virtual Dub Mod.
Right, but to encode with it uses way more juice than some of the inferior ones to play them. If I can get double battery life to have songs with a slight (and I do mean slight) hit in quality, I'm all over it.
No, that's incorrect. They will use the same amount of battery life. LAME throws away some parts, Bladeenc throws away other parts. At a given bitrate, like 128, they will both be throwing away exactly the same amount of data. The difference in quality depends on what the encoders throw away. It doesn't affect battery life. At all.
Nobody else sells the same hardware and OS. It's only Apple. Also, most of the content creation software, such as iMovie, have perfectly good PC equivalents.
Ok, I'll give you that, but (I don't exacty know what I am talking about here, so please feel free to enlighten me) isn't MP3 encoding done via the same algorighm/codec no matter who writes the wrapper?
Nope. The LAME encoder is different and far superior to other encoders. Different encoders use different psychoacoustic models to determin which parts to throw away. Quality varies greatly between encoders. There are terrible ones like Bladeenc and Xing, which have quality more on par with Real Audio, and superior encoders like LAME which have quality more on par with Ogg Vorbis.
LAME is the only good way to encode. Anything else will produce inferior MP3s.
Could have fooled me. Apple's prices are among the best in the industry if you match the same hardware and software.
Really? That's weird. Because G4s are far lower performance than most low end PCs sold today. Yet they are far more expensive than low end PCs. G5s are high performance, but they are still beaten out by Athlon 64s. You can get a computer with an Athlon 64, a Radeon 9700, and other ultra high performance hardware for far less than the cost of a G5. Looks like you are firmly in the grasp of Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field.
When you can get me a DVD recorder/MP3 player that fits in my pocket, costs $100, and is super simple to use via iTunes, then sure, I'm all over it.
What is so wonderful about iTunes? I don't want to use any program to transfer songs to my MP3 player. I want it to mount as an external drive so I can transfer any song, MP3 or otherwise, onto the player. I don't see a reason to use iTunes. You certainly shouldn't encode with it. LAME is a far superior encoder.
The Archos and many other players do this. Although a $120 HD MP3 player is a killer deal, the current iPods are just beat out in features by the competition. A 20gb Archos AV 120 is slightly cheaper than an iPod, and it has a small but high resolution color LCD display. It can play back divx and xvid files at near dvd quality. It can even record divx video through RCA or composite. It also has TV-out. Quite a bit more features than the iPod. It also mounts as an external hard drive
I'd take a mini-dvd based MP3 player any day over an iPod. It would be tiny and hold a few hundred songs per disc. Transferring songs would be easy enough with Nero or something. I'm surprised nobody has done something like that.
Bukkake Noodles.
Bukkake does refer to the action of pouring the noodles over the soup.
TO be fair bukkake isn't a real word; it just sounds japanese.
Bukkake is the name of the soup. The name comes from the fact that the female in a bukkake tape looks as if she accidentally spilled the soup all over her face.
Japanese children don't dream of becoming firefighters, doctors, and astronauts-- they just know they will turn into a jimun, or office worker, when they grow up. Japan sucks.
Anime is cool, but Japan is not a place I would like to live. A terribly homogenous culture, with everyone pointed in the same direction in life. It is a country that discourages nonconformity of any kind. Also, you are right, the marketing in Japan is ridiculous.
And I'm picky. MPEG2, DVCAM, and whatever the utter crap codec satellite TV uses don't cut it. But some ultra-nice compression is better than uncompressed because you get a pristine image for less space. Even with some great new storage medium with vast, nearly limitless capacities, it will still run out.
For very large media, HuffYUV would work well. It is a lossless codec primarily used for video capture. You can get about a 2:1 reduction over uncompressed. Of course, there are lossy codecs as well that would preserve near perfect image quality for a fraction of the size of HuffYUV.