The reason I asked in the first place is that I have many friends that are graphic designers. They are currently using g5s for their work and they do not want to use windows based laptops. They tried the same tasks on the g4 powerbooks and they seemed sluggish compared to the g5 counterpart. I am personally in science and there is a major lack of support for many software titles outside of windows. I do not think an OS update will change the ability to work with large graphic files (not without a hardware update to go with it). I should have made myself clearer in the first post. I was not talking about web browsing listenting to music and watchign dvds. I am talking about more intensive things.
Why would you buy a laptop with just an OS update. This is so strange about MAC fans. I would refuse to buy it until they get a g5 in it as well as the new OS.
Why is the white cool? I dont get it. White gets dirty very quickly. If you really use your computer rather than just open it in coffee shops to show off how much you spent on your mac, it will show dirt and look very uncool. Its why I switched to a black keyboard from the old light grey one I had, not becasue the black one was more cool.
This is somehting that pops up everytime someone posts anything regardig multi-cpu setups. The Quake 3 engine made use of multi-cpu technology. It ran very smoothly on a nice dual athlon system. However, the real benefit comes in video editing and compression. Try it and you will see the benefit. Dont just ask why.
Here is what TiVo needs to survive. What follows can all be bundled under innovation, but in reality none of it is really innovation at all, just support of what already exists, but noone has chosen to support for whatever reason.
Support of generic hard drives for upgrades (I realize this is already supported, but it should be expoited. I find it crazy that some HDD based recorders are much more in cost for a few more gigs. The one I have even has a format HDD button built in!!!)
Support of DVD recording (blueray would be much better here -- Check out this --http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/BD/index.ht ml I realize its japanese, but it is available already in Japan -- why not everywhere else -- you should take the lead)
Real support of High Definition -- By this I dont mean just tuning it and displaying it. We really want to record it. Allow us to output the signal to DVI and component with TOS link and PCM sound. But in addition allow us to transfer the content to other devices via firewire. This can be done. I am doing it already with my Motorola DCT-6200 and some DVHS capture software. Its kind of a hack, but it works fine. The main complaint is that the files are stored as.ts This is hard to deal with as far as converting to divx or mpeg or what ever. You should make this step easy for us. I know there is mandated copy protection on the firewire cable connection, but for the sake of god -- just make software that is compatable with the law. I mean everyone is going to try to hack it anyway, just make the software so it fits the law, then you did your job.)
Make a pci card (computer based) version of the box. This fixes all the things I said above. This will take care of everything. Allow for over the air tuning, satellite tuning, and digital cable tuning. Get your act togetehr and allow us to use our computers to be the PVR they can.
I am currently of the belief that pop-ups are 100% associated with a scam. I assume many other/.ers are as well. What needs to be done is to convince marketers that EVERYONE associates popups with a scam. Therefore they will never get anyone to click on the links. We all need to learn that CTRL+W shortcut, or at least the ALT+F4. If you know someone who doesnt know these, please teach them. It will help alot.
I totally agree on this. I have a NetMD and I love it. The cost of the discs and the battery life make the unit much more cost effective than any ipod or flash memory product. It does work great once you have the music on it. All Sony had to do was make the thing accessible as a windows drive and drag and drop mp3s with play lists and it would have had ipod status before the ipod. Here is an interesting point. For years everyone called portable music devices "walkmans". Sony trademarked this word, but now since the ipod has taken over as the most popular music device, will the word walkman be subsequently dropped from common usage? This could really be the thing that kills sony. They had always been associated with inventing the idea of portable music players, but now they have lost this. All they really need to do is use the new High NetMD players as I stated. Plug them in to the computer via usb2.0 or firewire -- drag and drop mp3s (ogg would be nice) to the folder (in wondows or mac or linux) and the music is there. NO FREAKING CONVERSION STEP or stupid software. This could have been done easily the first time around, but for whatever reason sony chose to use ATRAC??!?!?!? Anyway, here is hoping they make a High NetMD player which is drag and drop and supports natively (not with hacking) normal formats. This will allow the masses to use these devices, unlike the current batch of NetMD (which are good devices by the way -- just mildly retarted in transferring music to them)
I have travelled to Japan 3 times now. And I have a rudimentary at best understanding of the language. However, this is what makes it so fun to travel there, it is a totally immersive foreign experience. To me, it is much more fun than travelling to Europe, where virtually everyone can speak english (unless they find out you are an American, then you just get treated rudely, becasue we have a dipshit as a president).
This is a topic which has been brought up on/. before, however, I think it is important as the US dollar is currently tanking. I always hear about sending jobs to China and India, but really, why not West Virginia.
I am orignially from a medium town in WV. It is rather poor, but there is a University , we have highways and a small airport. Columbus, Cincinatti, Lexington, Pittsburgh, and a number or cities in North Carolina are not that far away.
We have all the same stores in the Mall that bigger cities do, and we can get stuff shipped from newegg.com just as fast as anyone else. There are virtually NO taxes and the air is relatively clean. There is a low crime rate, you can build a mansion for the same price as a shack in larger cities, and you can camp in your back yard (literally depending on where you live). The water tastes good out of the faucet, the education system is decent (low numbers of students per teacher as well). You can even invest your money in the same stock market as people in larger metropolitian areas if you are so inclined.
Sure you will make less money per hour, but who cares....In the end you will have more. I say tax the shit out of companies that outsource to other countries and even better make them pay American minimum wages to workers there. After all they are working for an American company, dont they deserve to make at least an American wage?
Skype has always been spyware free as far as I know. It works well, and their business model to make money is legit. I use the skpye out all the time to call China and Japan and USA from Canada. I paid 10$ USD and havent used all my time in over 3 months. What cell service can compete with that? I use the service with my pcoket pc and it works great. Sounds much better than my cell.
no problem. my work actually focuses on the adult derived variety. I do want to find that the adult cells are capable of the same things as the embryonic. However, unless the studies are done on the embryonic cells as a control its hard to tell.
These techniques have already been used to try to treat SCI. There has been limited success. However, the fact remains that it is unknown if adult derived proginetor cells can produce functional recovery in an adult chronic SCI patient. I am talking spinal cord injury here, not brain disorders. There are major differences between the brain and the spinal cord that are mostly not understood at the current state. On another note, there are certain drugs that are thought to have the ability to drive hippocampal derived cells into becoming cells that express neuronal markers when grafted into the injured adult spinal cord, but it is TOTALLY unknown if these cells are functional or if they are even truely neurons. Olfactory Ensheathing Cells (OECs) are used in a number of cell replacment therapies, but I know of no published reports that shows that they can differentiate into neurons in the chronic injured ADULT spinal cord.
This is not a peer reviewed article. I am hesitant to believe anything unless it is from a peer reviewed source. You should be too.
To elaborate from my statement above. There is no evidence that adult derived stem cells have the ability to form neurons in an injured spinal cord. Embryonic cells have been shown previously to form neurons in an injured cord. The important thing here is the injured cord. Adult derived cells CAN form neurons in an uninjured cord. There are factors present in the injured spinal cord that seem to keep adult derived cells from differentiating.
These factors do not seem to have the same effects on embryonic cells. Goto Pubmed and look up stem cells. There are a few Japanese groups working on this. In addition, a recent paper has been published in a Chinese Military Medical Journal describing the outcome of 70 brain and spinal injury patients that recieved embryonic stem cells as treatment. There were little problems in the patients and most showed some type of recovery. I am very interested in reading this article. But I can not find an English translation of it.
Here is the abstract:
Di Yi Jun Yi Da Xue Xue Bao. 2004 Oct;24(10):1207-9. Related Articles, Links
[Neural stem cell transplantation and postoperative management: report of 70 cases.]
[Article in Chinese]
Zhou Q, Zhang SZ, Xu RX, Xu K.
Institute of Neuroscience of PLA, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510282, China.
OBJECTIVE: To review the operations of neural stem cells transplantation in patients with brain trauma or spinal cord injury and their postoperative management. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was conducted in 70 cases of brain trauma or paraplegia treated with neural stem cell transplantation in the recent two years. RESULTS: All patients were smoothly discharged except for 3 who developed intracraninal infection corrected with antibiotics via the vertebral canal. Another 3 patients with total loss of sexual function after spinal cord injury for over 1 year recovered sexual function after neural stem cell transplantation. CONCLUSION Neural stem cell transplantation can promote the functional recovery of the brain and spinal cord in patients with brain trauma or spinal cord injury. Proper postoperative management for the patients is crucial to ensure favorable prognosis.
PMID: 15485802 [PubMed - in process]
If anyone has this, please let me know.
Ok here it is. I hope this can influence some voters in the coming election. The debate over human stem cell usage is not a debate over stem cells, it is a debate over where the stem cells are derived from. This is the debate. Here is what is being argued. President bush says that adult derived stem cells can be used in place of embryonic stem cells. Senator Kerry says that this is not the case and embryonic stem cells have greater potential. Here is a bit of research i have done from reading papers found on medline. Noone to date has shown that adult derived stem cells are capable of producing neurons in an injured spinal cord. It has been shown that embroyonic derived stem cells can however. This is the problem. I have very much oversimplfied this as I am not sure that most of you want to read the details, but the fact is that if you listen to President Bush, you might think that adult cells can be used to cure spinal injury. There is no current evidence for this. There is evidence that embryonic cells can be used to do it. President Bush is not telling the public the whole truth. I do not know the ins and outs of war and I do not want to pretend to be an expert on the subject of war so I do not know how much he is lying to us or not, but I do know that he has not told us the truth on this subject (I am currently doing some of these studies in rats) and I find myself having quite a bit of distrust for anything he says becasue of it and the way he presents himself. Please, if you are American and want to further advance science, do not let him get re-elected. He is hindering the advance of a field and many people may benefit from the research if it can be conducted. Go and vote!!!
Are you kidding? Have you seen return policies these days. 14 days for most electronics!!!! Thats not even enough time for a working person to make sure something works properly. I dont mean a toaster -- I mean a fancy Amp or a HDTV. XBOX is no different. The DVD-Rom is well known to be crappy and it does fail fairly regularly. The trick is with the xbox is that even though it is just a regular computer with extra protections the DVD-ROM cannot be purchased and replaced. I had the same problem, the XBOX just stops reading DVDs (games and movies) after a while. I know of many other people that have had this problem as well. If the drive was replaceable, I wouldnt care. I would just replace it, but its NOT thats the point.
I hear this argument alot. If you read above the argument from the other point has been made nicely. The OS is multithread and it is fairly obvious when you just sit down and use a multi-CPU system you will quickly see the benefits. Sure applications written for multi-cpu systems are even better, but I NEVER notice any lag on my Dual Athlon system. All I can say is try it before you knock it.
This is a major issue for many of us. Recording the HD signals is a major pain. I would like to bring up some issues here. Hopefully some of you that are in the know will see what I have to say here and spread the word. I get HD signals over air (antenna) DirectTV, and Cable (adelphia in WV and shaw in canada). I have tried various methods to record HD and I have found one major issue coming up every time --- the 5c copy protection. This is also known as the broadcast flag. It is the main roadblock as far as I can tell to recording HD boradcasts. We have the ability to use DVHS and various Tivo units but these systems are very expensive and are really not worth the cost. What I have found with the HD cable systems is that it is 100% perfectly possible to record the HD signal via firewire (ilink IEEE-1394, etc) to a standard computer. This can be accomplished using freeware and is very easy to set up. The problem arises is that the driver for the cable box (motorolla 6200) is not 5c friendly. This shows the box as being unknown and does not allow for any recording at all. The motorolla 6208 has an internal hard drive which does record the HD signal, but its only 80 gig. 80 gig does not allow for much HD recording as 1 minute takes up a around 150 meg. From my estimates this would give us roughly 500 minutes or roughly 8 hours of HD television. This is only enough space for 2 football games! Now I assume that the drive can be replaced with a larger one, however a much simpler way to do things would be to connect the firewire cable between the box and the computer and transfer the data either in raw format or compressed to divx (which does a pretty nice job with HD). However, this is all disabled becasue of the broadcast flag. I find this annoying. The components are perfectly capable of doing what I want, but I am not allowed to. I do not want to share a HD NFL football game on the internet. The file is too big and besides, how many people are gonna waste their bandwidth to download such a thing. I have heard that there is no 5c friendly driver in the works either. This seems like such a common sense thing, but yet it is seemingly illegal. This is my rant on the subject.
I used to sell computers at Office Depot and they really pushed us to sell the PPP's (product protection plans). They went so far as to give us bonuses if we sold the most of any store in our region. The is pure corporate greed. The plans rarely cover anything and if you buy things with a Gold credit card you usually get the same added warrenty for free. Here is another scam that Best Buy and others are using. Floor models -- The sales people are told to only sell floor models with a PPP this is how they can knock down the price and not lose any money. The PPP's are pure profit for the company as they rarely cover anything. Do not buy these plans no matter how good they sound. There is a reason they offer such a good sounding plan -- it makes them money.
Stores do not give up shelf space. They are paid for it. Whoever pays the most gets the space. I was working at Office Depot and back in the day there was a pretty heated battle between HP and Compaq for the coveted "endcaps". This makes stores a good income. Same thing goes for grocery stores and potato chips.
That is not true, it is not supported in 98/ME. It does work fine in most instances though. I chat with many friends in China and Japan who use older "unsupported" OSes. Try it.
I have a dual athlon system with an ATI All in Wonder 9800 Pro. I use the DVI/VGA output to my 21 inch Trinitron CRT. I use the component output to my Sony KP51WS500 (51 inch HDTV). I live in an apartment so I have my living room and workspace in a shared area. I have eliminated all of my stereo components and tivo and everything else except the AMP to my speakers. I use a creative Audigy 2 ZX with optical cables running to the amp for DTS/DD (this also can be downsampled to analog). I also have regular analog speakers directly connected to the computer for the desk area. I can run the 2 monitors in multiple configurations which are easily set in the ATI control panel. I also have found that spanning the desktop is pretty good when friends are over for watching DVDs/divx movies etc. Looks fabulous with winamp plugins -- especially milk drop. Now lastly games -- at first I had some experimenting to do. Which combination of mice/keyboards to use was my big question. I eventlually went with a 2 keyboard/3 mice system. The main mouse is a logitech mx700 (wireless) and I have 1 wired and 1 wireless keyboard (i like ms natural -- but I cant find a wireless version). In addition to this i bought some USB extension cables for my MS feedback steering wheel and my dualshock->usb adapters. This effectively gives me everyting I will ever need, and I dont have to settle at all. Games on the bigscreen run beautifully and everything in the last 2 years has the abliltiy to run in widescreen. Unreal2 and Far Cry are particularly good looking on the TV running at 1280X720 (or higher). I get excellent frame rates on either setup and I have a PVR that has access to close to a terabyte of storage. AIW's can record beautifully in divx and I can even play some games while it is recording, as I run windows, games, and video storage on separate hard drives (attached to separate controllers). I have found that zoom player is about the best thing going for this type of setup as it is very flexible and it integrates well with the ATI remote wonder. There are countless other things I can do with this system that I can not do with any of my consoles. Only the XBOX comes close and it is just really a stripped down computer. I dont understand why so many people dont make a rig like this. I built it myself and although it was expensive, it is readily upgradeable, but I havent found a need to yet (I'll see how it can handle Doom3).
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The reason I asked in the first place is that I have many friends that are graphic designers. They are currently using g5s for their work and they do not want to use windows based laptops. They tried the same tasks on the g4 powerbooks and they seemed sluggish compared to the g5 counterpart. I am personally in science and there is a major lack of support for many software titles outside of windows. I do not think an OS update will change the ability to work with large graphic files (not without a hardware update to go with it). I should have made myself clearer in the first post. I was not talking about web browsing listenting to music and watchign dvds. I am talking about more intensive things.
Why would you buy a laptop with just an OS update. This is so strange about MAC fans. I would refuse to buy it until they get a g5 in it as well as the new OS.
Anyword on a G5 Powerbook? A dual core G5 Powerbook perhaps?
Why is the white cool? I dont get it. White gets dirty very quickly. If you really use your computer rather than just open it in coffee shops to show off how much you spent on your mac, it will show dirt and look very uncool. Its why I switched to a black keyboard from the old light grey one I had, not becasue the black one was more cool.
This is somehting that pops up everytime someone posts anything regardig multi-cpu setups. The Quake 3 engine made use of multi-cpu technology. It ran very smoothly on a nice dual athlon system. However, the real benefit comes in video editing and compression. Try it and you will see the benefit. Dont just ask why.
Here is what TiVo needs to survive. What follows can all be bundled under innovation, but in reality none of it is really innovation at all, just support of what already exists, but noone has chosen to support for whatever reason.
t ml
.ts This is hard to deal with as far as converting to divx or mpeg or what ever. You should make this step easy for us. I know there is mandated copy protection on the firewire cable connection, but for the sake of god -- just make software that is compatable with the law. I mean everyone is going to try to hack it anyway, just make the software so it fits the law, then you did your job.)
Support of generic hard drives for upgrades (I realize this is already supported, but it should be expoited. I find it crazy that some HDD based recorders are much more in cost for a few more gigs. The one I have even has a format HDD button built in!!!)
Support of DVD recording (blueray would be much better here -- Check out this --http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/BD/index.h
I realize its japanese, but it is available already in Japan -- why not everywhere else -- you should take the lead)
Real support of High Definition -- By this I dont mean just tuning it and displaying it. We really want to record it. Allow us to output the signal to DVI and component with TOS link and PCM sound. But in addition allow us to transfer the content to other devices via firewire. This can be done. I am doing it already with my Motorola DCT-6200 and some DVHS capture software. Its kind of a hack, but it works fine. The main complaint is that the files are stored as
Make a pci card (computer based) version of the box. This fixes all the things I said above. This will take care of everything. Allow for over the air tuning, satellite tuning, and digital cable tuning. Get your act togetehr and allow us to use our computers to be the PVR they can.
I am currently of the belief that pop-ups are 100% associated with a scam. I assume many other /.ers are as well. What needs to be done is to convince marketers that EVERYONE associates popups with a scam. Therefore they will never get anyone to click on the links. We all need to learn that CTRL+W shortcut, or at least the ALT+F4. If you know someone who doesnt know these, please teach them. It will help alot.
Hope you dont plan on running multiple CPUs with only 350 watts....
I totally agree on this. I have a NetMD and I love it. The cost of the discs and the battery life make the unit much more cost effective than any ipod or flash memory product. It does work great once you have the music on it. All Sony had to do was make the thing accessible as a windows drive and drag and drop mp3s with play lists and it would have had ipod status before the ipod. Here is an interesting point. For years everyone called portable music devices "walkmans". Sony trademarked this word, but now since the ipod has taken over as the most popular music device, will the word walkman be subsequently dropped from common usage? This could really be the thing that kills sony. They had always been associated with inventing the idea of portable music players, but now they have lost this. All they really need to do is use the new High NetMD players as I stated. Plug them in to the computer via usb2.0 or firewire -- drag and drop mp3s (ogg would be nice) to the folder (in wondows or mac or linux) and the music is there. NO FREAKING CONVERSION STEP or stupid software. This could have been done easily the first time around, but for whatever reason sony chose to use ATRAC??!?!?!? Anyway, here is hoping they make a High NetMD player which is drag and drop and supports natively (not with hacking) normal formats. This will allow the masses to use these devices, unlike the current batch of NetMD (which are good devices by the way -- just mildly retarted in transferring music to them)
I have travelled to Japan 3 times now. And I have a rudimentary at best understanding of the language. However, this is what makes it so fun to travel there, it is a totally immersive foreign experience. To me, it is much more fun than travelling to Europe, where virtually everyone can speak english (unless they find out you are an American, then you just get treated rudely, becasue we have a dipshit as a president).
This is a topic which has been brought up on /. before, however, I think it is important as the US dollar is currently tanking. I always hear about sending jobs to China and India, but really, why not West Virginia.
I am orignially from a medium town in WV. It is rather poor, but there is a University , we have highways and a small airport. Columbus, Cincinatti, Lexington, Pittsburgh, and a number or cities in North Carolina are not that far away.
We have all the same stores in the Mall that bigger cities do, and we can get stuff shipped from newegg.com just as fast as anyone else. There are virtually NO taxes and the air is relatively clean. There is a low crime rate, you can build a mansion for the same price as a shack in larger cities, and you can camp in your back yard (literally depending on where you live). The water tastes good out of the faucet, the education system is decent (low numbers of students per teacher as well). You can even invest your money in the same stock market as people in larger metropolitian areas if you are so inclined.
Sure you will make less money per hour, but who cares....In the end you will have more. I say tax the shit out of companies that outsource to other countries and even better make them pay American minimum wages to workers there. After all they are working for an American company, dont they deserve to make at least an American wage?
Skype has always been spyware free as far as I know. It works well, and their business model to make money is legit. I use the skpye out all the time to call China and Japan and USA from Canada. I paid 10$ USD and havent used all my time in over 3 months. What cell service can compete with that? I use the service with my pcoket pc and it works great. Sounds much better than my cell.
You should look into how much research done by private companies is actually funded in some part by the NIH.
no problem. my work actually focuses on the adult derived variety. I do want to find that the adult cells are capable of the same things as the embryonic. However, unless the studies are done on the embryonic cells as a control its hard to tell.
These techniques have already been used to try to treat SCI. There has been limited success. However, the fact remains that it is unknown if adult derived proginetor cells can produce functional recovery in an adult chronic SCI patient. I am talking spinal cord injury here, not brain disorders. There are major differences between the brain and the spinal cord that are mostly not understood at the current state. On another note, there are certain drugs that are thought to have the ability to drive hippocampal derived cells into becoming cells that express neuronal markers when grafted into the injured adult spinal cord, but it is TOTALLY unknown if these cells are functional or if they are even truely neurons. Olfactory Ensheathing Cells (OECs) are used in a number of cell replacment therapies, but I know of no published reports that shows that they can differentiate into neurons in the chronic injured ADULT spinal cord.
This is not a peer reviewed article. I am hesitant to believe anything unless it is from a peer reviewed source. You should be too. To elaborate from my statement above. There is no evidence that adult derived stem cells have the ability to form neurons in an injured spinal cord. Embryonic cells have been shown previously to form neurons in an injured cord. The important thing here is the injured cord. Adult derived cells CAN form neurons in an uninjured cord. There are factors present in the injured spinal cord that seem to keep adult derived cells from differentiating. These factors do not seem to have the same effects on embryonic cells. Goto Pubmed and look up stem cells. There are a few Japanese groups working on this. In addition, a recent paper has been published in a Chinese Military Medical Journal describing the outcome of 70 brain and spinal injury patients that recieved embryonic stem cells as treatment. There were little problems in the patients and most showed some type of recovery. I am very interested in reading this article. But I can not find an English translation of it. Here is the abstract: Di Yi Jun Yi Da Xue Xue Bao. 2004 Oct;24(10):1207-9. Related Articles, Links [Neural stem cell transplantation and postoperative management: report of 70 cases.] [Article in Chinese] Zhou Q, Zhang SZ, Xu RX, Xu K. Institute of Neuroscience of PLA, Zhujiang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510282, China. OBJECTIVE: To review the operations of neural stem cells transplantation in patients with brain trauma or spinal cord injury and their postoperative management. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was conducted in 70 cases of brain trauma or paraplegia treated with neural stem cell transplantation in the recent two years. RESULTS: All patients were smoothly discharged except for 3 who developed intracraninal infection corrected with antibiotics via the vertebral canal. Another 3 patients with total loss of sexual function after spinal cord injury for over 1 year recovered sexual function after neural stem cell transplantation. CONCLUSION Neural stem cell transplantation can promote the functional recovery of the brain and spinal cord in patients with brain trauma or spinal cord injury. Proper postoperative management for the patients is crucial to ensure favorable prognosis. PMID: 15485802 [PubMed - in process] If anyone has this, please let me know.
I actually wanted to, but I dont know how to edit my posts on /.
Ok here it is. I hope this can influence some voters in the coming election. The debate over human stem cell usage is not a debate over stem cells, it is a debate over where the stem cells are derived from. This is the debate. Here is what is being argued. President bush says that adult derived stem cells can be used in place of embryonic stem cells. Senator Kerry says that this is not the case and embryonic stem cells have greater potential. Here is a bit of research i have done from reading papers found on medline. Noone to date has shown that adult derived stem cells are capable of producing neurons in an injured spinal cord. It has been shown that embroyonic derived stem cells can however. This is the problem. I have very much oversimplfied this as I am not sure that most of you want to read the details, but the fact is that if you listen to President Bush, you might think that adult cells can be used to cure spinal injury. There is no current evidence for this. There is evidence that embryonic cells can be used to do it. President Bush is not telling the public the whole truth. I do not know the ins and outs of war and I do not want to pretend to be an expert on the subject of war so I do not know how much he is lying to us or not, but I do know that he has not told us the truth on this subject (I am currently doing some of these studies in rats) and I find myself having quite a bit of distrust for anything he says becasue of it and the way he presents himself. Please, if you are American and want to further advance science, do not let him get re-elected. He is hindering the advance of a field and many people may benefit from the research if it can be conducted. Go and vote!!!
Are you kidding? Have you seen return policies these days. 14 days for most electronics!!!! Thats not even enough time for a working person to make sure something works properly. I dont mean a toaster -- I mean a fancy Amp or a HDTV. XBOX is no different. The DVD-Rom is well known to be crappy and it does fail fairly regularly. The trick is with the xbox is that even though it is just a regular computer with extra protections the DVD-ROM cannot be purchased and replaced. I had the same problem, the XBOX just stops reading DVDs (games and movies) after a while. I know of many other people that have had this problem as well. If the drive was replaceable, I wouldnt care. I would just replace it, but its NOT thats the point.
I hear this argument alot. If you read above the argument from the other point has been made nicely. The OS is multithread and it is fairly obvious when you just sit down and use a multi-CPU system you will quickly see the benefits. Sure applications written for multi-cpu systems are even better, but I NEVER notice any lag on my Dual Athlon system. All I can say is try it before you knock it.
This is a major issue for many of us. Recording the HD signals is a major pain. I would like to bring up some issues here. Hopefully some of you that are in the know will see what I have to say here and spread the word. I get HD signals over air (antenna) DirectTV, and Cable (adelphia in WV and shaw in canada). I have tried various methods to record HD and I have found one major issue coming up every time --- the 5c copy protection. This is also known as the broadcast flag. It is the main roadblock as far as I can tell to recording HD boradcasts. We have the ability to use DVHS and various Tivo units but these systems are very expensive and are really not worth the cost. What I have found with the HD cable systems is that it is 100% perfectly possible to record the HD signal via firewire (ilink IEEE-1394, etc) to a standard computer. This can be accomplished using freeware and is very easy to set up. The problem arises is that the driver for the cable box (motorolla 6200) is not 5c friendly. This shows the box as being unknown and does not allow for any recording at all. The motorolla 6208 has an internal hard drive which does record the HD signal, but its only 80 gig. 80 gig does not allow for much HD recording as 1 minute takes up a around 150 meg. From my estimates this would give us roughly 500 minutes or roughly 8 hours of HD television. This is only enough space for 2 football games! Now I assume that the drive can be replaced with a larger one, however a much simpler way to do things would be to connect the firewire cable between the box and the computer and transfer the data either in raw format or compressed to divx (which does a pretty nice job with HD). However, this is all disabled becasue of the broadcast flag. I find this annoying. The components are perfectly capable of doing what I want, but I am not allowed to. I do not want to share a HD NFL football game on the internet. The file is too big and besides, how many people are gonna waste their bandwidth to download such a thing. I have heard that there is no 5c friendly driver in the works either. This seems like such a common sense thing, but yet it is seemingly illegal. This is my rant on the subject.
I used to sell computers at Office Depot and they really pushed us to sell the PPP's (product protection plans). They went so far as to give us bonuses if we sold the most of any store in our region. The is pure corporate greed. The plans rarely cover anything and if you buy things with a Gold credit card you usually get the same added warrenty for free. Here is another scam that Best Buy and others are using. Floor models -- The sales people are told to only sell floor models with a PPP this is how they can knock down the price and not lose any money. The PPP's are pure profit for the company as they rarely cover anything. Do not buy these plans no matter how good they sound. There is a reason they offer such a good sounding plan -- it makes them money.
Stores do not give up shelf space. They are paid for it. Whoever pays the most gets the space. I was working at Office Depot and back in the day there was a pretty heated battle between HP and Compaq for the coveted "endcaps". This makes stores a good income. Same thing goes for grocery stores and potato chips.
That is not true, it is not supported in 98/ME. It does work fine in most instances though. I chat with many friends in China and Japan who use older "unsupported" OSes. Try it.
I have a dual athlon system with an ATI All in Wonder 9800 Pro. I use the DVI/VGA output to my 21 inch Trinitron CRT. I use the component output to my Sony KP51WS500 (51 inch HDTV). I live in an apartment so I have my living room and workspace in a shared area. I have eliminated all of my stereo components and tivo and everything else except the AMP to my speakers. I use a creative Audigy 2 ZX with optical cables running to the amp for DTS/DD (this also can be downsampled to analog). I also have regular analog speakers directly connected to the computer for the desk area. I can run the 2 monitors in multiple configurations which are easily set in the ATI control panel. I also have found that spanning the desktop is pretty good when friends are over for watching DVDs/divx movies etc. Looks fabulous with winamp plugins -- especially milk drop. Now lastly games -- at first I had some experimenting to do. Which combination of mice/keyboards to use was my big question. I eventlually went with a 2 keyboard/3 mice system. The main mouse is a logitech mx700 (wireless) and I have 1 wired and 1 wireless keyboard (i like ms natural -- but I cant find a wireless version). In addition to this i bought some USB extension cables for my MS feedback steering wheel and my dualshock->usb adapters. This effectively gives me everyting I will ever need, and I dont have to settle at all. Games on the bigscreen run beautifully and everything in the last 2 years has the abliltiy to run in widescreen. Unreal2 and Far Cry are particularly good looking on the TV running at 1280X720 (or higher). I get excellent frame rates on either setup and I have a PVR that has access to close to a terabyte of storage. AIW's can record beautifully in divx and I can even play some games while it is recording, as I run windows, games, and video storage on separate hard drives (attached to separate controllers). I have found that zoom player is about the best thing going for this type of setup as it is very flexible and it integrates well with the ATI remote wonder. There are countless other things I can do with this system that I can not do with any of my consoles. Only the XBOX comes close and it is just really a stripped down computer. I dont understand why so many people dont make a rig like this. I built it myself and although it was expensive, it is readily upgradeable, but I havent found a need to yet (I'll see how it can handle Doom3).