I don't have the details handy, but running a swap, even if RAM is bountiful and plenty is always a good idea. It's something to the effect of the system really likes seeing the swap there, even if you technically don't need it.
It's more that it's good to have it there just in case, because you never know when you will need it (even with 2GB, you can multi-task yourself straight to hell if you're doing image editing, watching videos, and running crap in the background all at the same time), and it doesn't hurt anything to have it enabled. If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it. But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.
There's something of a myth that some people believe in that Windows is constantly accessing your swap file even with loads of RAM, and that turning the swap off will force Windows to use your RAM. Well, a) Windows XP is pretty good with memory management, and doesn't use swap when it doesn't have to, and b) even if it did use swap too much, turning it off isn't going to "teach" the OS to use memory properly. It either needs the swap file or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, what do you have to lose by leaving it on?
No matter which HD brand you recommend SOMEONE is going to tell you they had bad luck with them. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor.
Ditto. I've got two Maxtors running right now with no problems whatsoever - neither even gets warm to the touch, and they are both inaudible to boot.
Like you, I have had one go bad on me in the past, but then I've also had two WD's and a Seagate go bad on me, and know numerous people who've had IBM's, Samsungs, and other drives go bad too. It's sort of a badge of honor to have a drive go bad - you're not a real geek if it hasn't happened to you yet. But it really doesn't matter who makes the drive; their failure rates are pretty similar (with a few notable and notorious exceptions - the IBM DeathStar drives, for example, though these were simply defective).
I don't think anybody who saw my house, with its four networked PC's, two of which are scratch-built (one of which is technically 15 years old!), one of which is controlling all my media viewing, would question my geek credentials, and I've got no problem with Maxtor at all. It's almost like a form of nerd prejudice if you really think one drive maker is significantly worse than any other - it can't be based on anything real.
Eventually the price might come down enough for one to use this service recreationally without wincing at the price.
When did people become so friggin' cheap when it comes to air travel? It's thirty dollars. When you're flying 10 or more hours, I would not even think twice about paying that amount for a guarantee that I would never be wanting for something to do.
You must be the kind of guy who's responsible for the lack of meal service on domestic flights these days - who needs to pay an extra five bucks, right? "I never pay more than 99 cents for my food!"
How much do you pay for a transatlantic plane ticket? It's usually between $300-$500, depending on where you're going. Trans-Pacific from somewhere like New York to Tokyo, you're lucky if you can hit $500 (you can, but you need to know a good travel agent) - it's usually $1,000 or more depending on the season. You're "wincing" at thirty dollars tacked on to that? You'd rather sit and watch badly edited, b-grade, second-run Hollywood movies?
I'd gladly pay for this, and I hope more airlines offer it in the future (ANA or JAL, please - those are the two airlines I fly most often).
DUH the test was a waste of time and everyone here already knew it was BS, but people, have you SEEN the "cow taser" page linked to from the review article?!! I think I just pissed myself from laughing so hard.
Then it wasn't exactly a waste of time, was it?
Part of the reason people read Dan's stuff (just in case anyone missed the main link to his site) is his entertaining writing style. I almost always learn something from his articles, even if it's got nothing to do with what the article's supposedly about. Dan is obviously fully in on the joke himself or he wouldn't even be linking to things like cow tasers in his articles. It's people like you - who think reviews have to be a "waste of time" simply because the products in question are such obvious bunk - who don't seem to quite get it.
In a world where product reviews often offer little or not information at all, and where the strongest and most specific statement you might read is how one product or another is vaguely "generally good", writers like Dan are a refreshing change - he writes pieces that are always entertaining in and of themselves, often more informative than they need to be, and with plenty of useless but interesting trivia to keep you interested when the product in question is less than worthwhile. I only wish he'd review more stuff that I'm actually interested in buying (though I've become interested in buying a few things I would never have even known about but for his review).
As for this particular review, I think it's worth reminding the Slashdot crowd of the dangers of pseudo-science every now and again - pseudo-scientific articles do occasionally slip through the editing process here, and are often accepted as fact.
Not too long ago I could do a search on google and actually find something that was usually close to what I wanted. These days I get bogged down on the sites advertising there services and links to ebay.
I've noticed this too, and it really is amazing how quickly Google's become nearly useless for most searches. Picking relevant search terms that will cut the crap out has become something of a fine art.
What I have always wished Google would do would be to have an option (even just on their "advanced search" page) that you could separate out e-commerce sites. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but maybe just a mirror image of Froogle would do the trick. This would seriously cut out about 95% of all the search engine spam, because these sites are always selling you something. If you just want information, Google is almost impossible for a lot of things.
Of course, the other amazing thing is that people continue to use Google over other search engines despite this issue (and it is an issue that goes to the heart of what they do). I haven't used many other search engines lately - are any of them really any better?
hooookay, how about on the order of magnitude more sales they make nowadays.
Atari 2600 units sold worldwide: 29 million.
Nintendo 64 units sold worldwide: 36 million.
Xbox units sold worldwide: Under 20 million.
Console sales have hardly changed at all in the last 25 years. Game sales have increased, but so has the number of game developers. (Remember, in the early Atari days, there was no such thing as a third-party developer. In fact, Atari sued Activision - the first-ever third party developer - to try to kill that entire industry.) So there is more competition, the rate of inflation has far and away outpaced game prices (look up $29.99 - the standard price for a new Atari 2600 game - in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1977 to now), and development teams have increased in size from in many cases one person to in some cases more than one thousand. Many more games are coming out - a greater percentage increase than the increase in sales - and costs have skyrocketed.
I'd say publishers are justified in a $10 price increase. Does that mean I'll pay it? Maybe not - there are literally hundreds of current, great games out right now for all systems at $20 or less, and I'm sure the same will be true for next-gen consoles after the initial rush wears off. But if they feel they need to make an extra $10 per new game in order to hire a few more coders to get the workload down to a reasonable level (remember how we've all been talking about how overworked everyone is in the game industry?), then more power to them.
Of course, that's assuming they don't just pocket the money as extra profit, but honestly, the gaming industry is running at bare minimum right now in terms of manpower, so at some point a price increase was pretty inevitable.
Apple, usually called "Cmd", short for "command", by longtime users (that's what the four-leaf clover is, I don't know why)
Not for nothing, but "longtime" Apple users actually would know this better as the Apple key. That's what it was officially called in the Apple II days (there were two separate keys back then; one an outline of an apple called "Open-Apple", one a filled-in apple called "Closed-Apple"), and even the early Mac days. Old-school Apple guys still use the term "Apple key", unless they're talking to people they know are relative n00bs.
I switched to PC after the Apple II and for the longest time I had no friggin' idea what modern Mac guys were talking about whenever they'd tell me to press the "command" key on a Mac. I'd try to do something at work and they'd say "oh, just press command-control-comma" and I'd be like "huh? Command Control? Goddamn kids today..." Then I'd put in my dentures and tell those little whippersnappers to get the hell off my lawn.
Just goes to show, though, that Apple's keyboard layouts and one-button mice are no less confusing than what's used in the x86 world. There's nothing any more intuitive about either approach (though I do despise the Windows key - I still use an IBM Model M at home, which helps me avoid it).
Is there anywhere you can get charts showing future share prices? I'm curious to see exactly how long it will take for TIVO to rise on future news--it seems to have happened before the market opened.
I'm gathering two things from your post, correct me if I'm wrong on either/both:
a) You think there was some insider trading going on, and b) You think all trading happens during regular trading hours.
The latter is certainly not true, the former is doubtful. The rumors about this deal started circulating early this morning - at least, that's the first I heard them just reading blog sites, people who are really well connected probably heard them sooner. That does not imply inside sources (though the primary source may have been an insider, once a rumor is public, it's no longer inside info).
And stocks can really be traded at any time. All it really takes is a buyer and a seller to meet up. The stock market is just a big swap meet; those swaps don't have to happen only while the market's open, though (I believe there are still regulations as to how early and/or late trades can be recorded, but it's not just between the bells). Brokers generally only trade during official hours but even many discount brokers these days will do pre-open and post-close trades.
I honestly wish I'd gotten in on this the first I heard of it this morning at around 7 AM EST. Trouble is, these rumors come around almost every day, and you never really know what to believe and what not to. I didn't give it much credence initially; I certainly didn't think anything would happen today. Obviously, other investors have more money than me with which to speculate, so either they believed the rumor more strongly than I did or they make a living on trading off rumors, with the idea being one right guess more than pays for 10 wrong guesses.
Either way, I doubt there was anything untoward going on in this stock upturn.
btw, it finished the day almost 75% higher (sheesh!), though it's down a tick in after-hours trading. What you won't hear about is the profit-taking that goes on over the next couple weeks; my bet is the stock will settle in to a more reasonable percentage over where it was yesterday (even if it goes up a bit more over the next few days). This is likely only temporary euphoria - you rarely hear about the hangover afterwards.
Sir, did you read the article? This is for your LAN, not for broadband to the home.
Apparently you've never heard of apartment buildings, where the electrical lines are shared among many residents.
If max bandwidth is 170mb/s, and you've got fifty residents with fifty "LANs" in that building, you've got about 2.5mb/s bandwidth for each. Simple, eh? And that's not counting overhead and delays due to collisions.
Nevermind the security issues. You're talking basically about one big shared LAN, not fifty separate ones.
I can see this being useful in houses, but it seems basically useless in apartments. Which means probably 90% of Japan and a pretty large percentage of the US too.
At the same time, though, I felt a lot more hopeful listening to President Iwata than I did listening to Allard.
This is the way it always is at industry trade shows. Nintendo always has the fun press conference, MS always has that "nerdy kid trying desperately hard to be cool" feel, and Sony is always just a complete snooze-fest of dry facts and figures.
I've been to about ten of these industry events over the years and the pattern is always the same, but in the end it means nothing in the marketplace. The press always seems excited about Nintendo after a big speech or press event, because they have some extremely engaging speakers - Iwata's one, Miyamoto's another. Neither MS nor Sony have anybody like this. Nintendo also generally ignores the business side of things in press events and either just talks about video games or has someone up there demonstrating them (usually Miyamoto, who will be cracking self-deprecating jokes about how bad he is at playing games all the while).
I've gotten caught up in it myself; I came out of my last E3 (a couple years ago, I guess) thinking Nintendo would just be unstoppable. The energy in the room at the Nintendo press conference was just so palpable; there were several standing ovations, there was constant applause and laughter, there was a feeling like big things were happening, like Nintendo really "got it". By contrast, MS was just a bunch of flashing lights and sirens wailing away at you to PLEASE BE EXCITED about their games, and Sony was basically just a big 2 hour PowerPoint presentation. Nintendo always comes off as the only company that actually cares about creating good games.
If only Nintendo could really turn that energy into something the marketplace wants to buy. They know PR, but they've lost touch with what consumers actually want. I'm hearing a lot of the same predictable stuff about this keynote speech - namely, that those who were there are really excited about Nintendo again - but objectively speaking, and as someone who was not there this time, I don't see anything that Iwata said that's all that revolutionary or even unexpected. It seems like people are getting caught up in the Nintendo mystique again (it's easy to do when you're there), but the reality of what was actually said doesn't really jibe with the hype that it's getting.
Maybe the solution is for Nintendo to just do constant roving press conferences around the world, and invite the public in to see them:)
You really do get a different feeling listening to these guys in person than you do reading about them afterwards. There is a major disconnect between public perception of this company and how they see themselves (and how they talk and act in person). I think more people would buy into their philosophy if they could see and hear it explained first-hand. But then again, I'm never really sure if there actually is anything to that philosophy, or if it's just the cult of personality that makes you think there is when you see it live.
That's interesting because I have a Barracuda and it's probably the loudest drive that I've ever owned...
It depends on the model. I have a 7100.7 (or whatever it's called) and it does not support acoustic management. It has noticeable seek noise. The versions that became famous for quietness (the IV and V) were the previous versions to mine - these did support AM.
Meanwhile, all other manufacturers have started using FDB motors just like Seagate does, so the whine is gone, and if your drive supports acoustic management (almost all do, though you may need to download a utility to access it), then it very likely can be virtually silent too. There is no inherent advantage that the Barracuda models have in acoustics.
In addition to my Barracuda, I also have two Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9's and a Western Digital Performer 40 (this came with my TiVo but has been repurposed in my PC - you can't buy this drive separately). All three of these drives are quieter than my Barracuda with acoustic management set to "quiet" - in fact, one of the Maxtors is dead silent, and the other is so quiet I have to put my ear right up next to it to hear seeks. (There is a slight variation between the two units, even though they are the same model and capacity.)
I will say that one of my Maxtors was ear-splittingly loud when I first purchased it - ironically (or maybe not), it was the retail version. My other Maxtor was OEM. The retail drive was set to "performance" out of the box, whereas the OEM drive was already set to "quiet". Maybe this is by design, as Maxtor is obviously positioning these drives for different markets, but it has obviously led to a different reputation for Maxtor than Seagate has, despite Maxtor's drives being capable (like almost everybody else) of total silence.
The loudest part of most PC's other than the hard drive (which doesn't need to be loud at all) is the power supply. I've gone through a half dozen PSU's looking for a quiet one that's also beefy enough for my systems - I finally ordered an ironically-named Seasonic Super Tornado 350 today. Most people don't consider the PSU as a major source of noise - or if they do, they don't think they can do anything about it - but having swapped out enough of these things for one reason or another, I can vouch for the fact that not only is there a significant variation between PSU's in the volume of noise, they also can significantly affect the quality of noise from your PC. Right now I am using an Enermax PSU in one system and an Antec in another - both highly-rated PSU's from a power and build quality standpoint - but they both sound awful. They are not particularly loud (though they're louder than any other component I have), but they both emit sort of a low-pitched "buzzing" noise (it's not case vibration - I've checked - it's just the sound of the fans they're using), which I find extremely annoying. If you're looking to silence your PC, I'd recommend starting with the PSU.
Of course, most hardcore PC users really go overboard with fans too - I admit to having six case fans in one of my PC's (mainly for show, they're LED fans), but they're almost always turned down to minimum with a fan controller. Not silent, but not loud either. In my HTPC, I have three 80mm fans, one of which is disconnected, the others turned down to minimum using built-in manual fan controls. I have no stability or temperature problems with this machine at all, and except for the PSU (that's being replaced), it's very quiet.
Much the same way as there's a certain intrinsic value in real estate. You need to remember that part of real estate is all about location, which is not intrinsic.
Uh, last I checked, you buy a property in Manhattan, whatever happens to the real estate market, your property is still in Manhattan.
Location is intrinsic. The value of that location is not intrinsic, but that value itself is linked to intrinsic, er, properties (for lack of a better word). For example, New York was built where it is because it is on top of one of the greatest natural harbors in the world. That is never going to change, so the value of a particular property in New York will likely not fluctuate all that wildly - it does have a certain intrinsic value based on physical properties of the location that will never be altered.
Beyond that, I just don't think there is any comparison between real estate and stocks. When you buy a stock you are buying a piece of paper - you're no longer even buying the promise of dividends (which is why people used to buy stock), because most technology companies have chosen to forego dividends and instead reinvest that money into company growth. The unspoken expectation between company and investor is that eventually there will be a dividend payout and all that investing will have counted for something, but this expectation was sort of turned on its ear during the dot-com bubble and people started investing instead with nothing but the expectation that the stock would go up. They had no idea why they were actually doing it; it was not based on anything.
Then we had the crash, which knocked some sense back into these people. Those who argued that you buy stock based on company fundamentals and not speculation were vindicated. Something similar could happen in real estate, but never on that scale because after all, when you buy real estate you are buying a tangible asset, not a piece of paper that is already priced based on the expected position of the company five, ten, even twenty years in the future.
In both cases, the price you pay is the intrinsic value of the item, plus all of the abstract hard-to-quantify stuff.
This is not at all true. When you buy stock you are not paying for the intrinsic value of anything. You are paying for the expected future intrinsic value of a company, based on its P/E ratio.
To make stocks and real estate equivalent, a seller of a home or a piece of land would have to say to you "this home may only be worth $300,000, but I am going to charge you $2.4 million because that is what I believe it will be worth 20 years from now." Obviously, nobody buys real estate like this, but it is exactly the way people buy stocks. Stocks have a certain level of inherent speculation (even if you're buying "value" stocks, the P/E ratios are rarely less than 8 or so... with tech stocks they're usually more like 60 or 70), whereas real estate is always sold for what it's valued at today.
So the prices of real estate can go up and down, but because there is little speculation involved (unless you're buying undeveloped land in the hope that it will eventually be developed), there is little risk of a sharp downturn. That's as true now as it ever was. I mean, people have been saying for 100 years that real estate is overpriced, but how much do you think an average home built in 1900 costs today compared to what it cost at that time? Real estate prices will only continue to rise over time because there are only so many places to live in this country and a lot more people both being born and moving in every day.
Stock prices are really anybody's guess. They've trended upwards over time just as real estate has, but they've always been subject to severe corrections, bubbles and overall fluctuations than real estate has.
You clearly don't work in the field yet. Trust me, no employer will complain if you log some extra hours because you're in Deep Hack Mode. The problem is that you'll be asked to be working 12 hours days when you're not.
Not to mention that if your employer gets the idea that you "want to" work all those extra hours, they'll cheerily push you even further than they would have before. Employees train their employers in what to expect from them, and while it can be tricky to do, you ideally want to let your employer know that while you're flexible, you also have limits. Sitting and working 12 hours a day without being asked to tells your employer "I have no life, and I enjoy being here, and I enjoy doing work" - forget about ever leaving that office once your employer figures this out.
I worked for a major game publisher in New York for several years, and there was this constant push-pull between employees and bosses. Both sides would be trying to stake a few extra minutes out on either side of working longer vs. leaving early. Of course, in the game industry when I say "early" I mean around 8PM. We'd constantly be trying to sneak out around 7:55 or 7:50, and in turn our bosses would routinely throw four hours worth of critical work our way at 7:30 in order to keep us there, when they could have given us that same work at any time earlier in the day. I became convinced that it was done on purpose to get us accustomed to long hours.
Over a period of time, I saw my earliest clock-out hour move, on a permanent basis, from a fairly consistent 7PM to an optimistic 9PM even during non-crunch times, with many nights during crunches much later than that. It happened over several years. Before I was hired, I was told "sometimes we work until 7 or 8", and when I first started there, indeed we all left at 7 on the dot. Then during crunch times it would be 7:30, then 8, and a "two steps forward, one step back" pattern emerged, where we'd never quite go back to the way it was before when the crunch was over. After you've been working until 8 for a while, 7:30 no longer seems so bad... similarly, after working until midnight for two weeks on end, leaving at 10PM feels almost like a break. Of course it wasn't, and everybody at the company broke down after a while - the turnover rate was conservatively around 50% from the time I was hired to the time I left. Almost nobody at the company I worked for was over 30.
This is the reality of the industry, and it's causing problems beyond simply a lack of productivity. You've got an entire industry of people who work at one company for a couple of years and then move on. Nobody ever develops a sense of loyalty, or history; people work on game sequels without ever having even played the original, they come up with new game designs and concepts that they don't even realize have been done a thousand times before. It's part of the reason for the buggy games, the lack of original concepts, it's why a one-time great company like Acclaim can fall so hard, so fast. (For the record, Acclaim is not who I worked for.) It is seriously hurting the industry as a whole and has definitely had a hand in bringing down several publishers. It's partially responsible for the consolidation we've seen in the industry over the past 5 years or so. (Of course, many other factors are involved in that too, but the lack of experience throughout the industry coupled with a high turnover rate and low productivity from unhappy, disloyal workers does not help.)
People who are outside the industry seem to have a hard time understanding how pervasive a problem this is. It isn't just some companies and it isn't just some jobs. It's all game developers and publishers, and every position, from the company CEO's on down to the product managers on down to the designers, coders, and illustrators. It's everybody, in the entire industry. And it's an industry that's losing a lot of good people every single day because of it, who are then replaced by young
His insights are correct. And his insights on guns are correct as well.
Educate yourself. The statistics speak for themselves. The fact is gun control works, in many, many countries throughout the world.
If you don't believe the numbers in the article, just do a Google search yourself. You'll find plenty of "official" sources that list the exact same numbers.
Burning massive karma here, but it boggles my mind how people can plainly ignore or dispute facts that are right there in front of them.
Or are his insights into the world being flat correct as well?
Insightful? I would ask how many years you have been doing this for.
I've been doing it for around 20 years, myself (since my first mouse on my Apple II). At least 8 hours a day, every day, and on weekends too. No RSI here.
Everybody develops their own habits as far as how they sit, how they type, how they mouse around. Some people develop good habits, some develop bad ones. I certainly don't conform to the highest standards of ergonomics myself, but I apparently have found a set of habits that work for me.
The way I type (I'm not a touch typist, though I do type at over 90wpm), my arms are always straight - angled towards the keyboard. My chair is at a height so that my wrists are also vertically straight both on the keyboard and mouse. I keep my keyboard flat - not angled with the feet (keeping it flat is what you're supposed to do; in fact, ideally it should be angled downward). I try to keep my hand flat on the mouse, and when I move it, I usually use small "pivot" type movements from the heel of my hand - my wrist and shoulder are generally not involved at all. Most of this is not conscious, it's just the way I work, but it's kept me from getting RSI.
I do occasionally get a sore index finger (the one pressing the left mouse button), but not often, and it goes away after about 15 minutes of rest. That's about the extent of my "RSI" and that's after many, many thousands of hours of mousing over more than two decades.
I'm convinced that there's nothing inherent in mice or keyboards that causes RSI. People need to take a holistic approach to the way they work; how they sit, the height of their chair, their posture, how their hands rest on their tools, etc. That's true regardless of what tools they're using, however, be it a mouse or some sort of "mouse replacement". (In other words, simply switching to a more "ergonomic" tool is not going to help if you don't change your underlying RSI-inducing behavior.)
Uh, first, we have to have private spacecraft. Burt Rutan's project is about at the level of the second Mercury flight, which was suborbital.
Not to mention 40 years in the past.
The private sector still has a lot of work to do before it can really play with the big boys (in this case, government space agencies). It will catch up, but it's kinda like saying you're ready to start carrying passengers between New York and Tokyo because you can fold a piece of paper and make it fly. You may have re-discovered for yourself the principles of flight, but it takes a bit more expertise and experience than that to do anything meaningful with it. You're not quite ready to challenge Boeing or Airbus if all you've got are paper airplanes.
A lot of people fail to appreciate the difference between what Rutan has done and what world government space agencies (not just NASA) do every day. It's not just about rocketing a guy to the edge of space and back again. It's about getting meaningful work done, which means the ability to carry large payloads to precise areas in orbit, then make it back again to a precise area on the ground. When you start talking about orbiting the Earth 100 miles up with a payload of 40,000 pounds, then you've got all sorts of issues to deal with. The private sector hasn't even started tackling those issues yet.
Luckily, NASA and other space agencies have done most of the work for them already. But that doesn't mean they won't have to re-learn and experience everything for themselves - it just hopefully won't take quite as long to do it.
(btw, this is not to take away from what Rutan has done - it was a great accomplishment. But it needs a sense of perspective - there is still a ton of work to do, and what NASA does is different by an order of magnitude.)
If you want to get really fancy, you can look at the arrangement of the crystals, try to reverse-engineer the light as it struck the film, and virtually re-expose the image by plotting a new grain map on film.
I don't see why some of what you suggest wouldn't work (you're basically just talking super-high res scans, for the most part), but it's incredibly wasteful. Plotting the shape of each individual film grain, on a per-frame basis? First of all, it would take forever to do this. Second of all, visible film grain is usually something you want to eliminate during the restoration process, or at least cut back (eliminating it entirely can look a little unnatural, but reducing it can improve things quite a bit). So you're not really gaining anything by your suggestion.
I suppose this brings up another point, which is that "restoration" is kind of a misnomer in film. The idea isn't usually to restore the film to the way it used to look; the idea is usually to make it better than it ever looked. It's not always the case, but generally the restoration process includes color correction that can remove some of the character of the original film stock (for better or worse... some restorations have really been hack jobs that destroyed the look of the original), it includes grain reduction that reduces visible film grain, it includes scratch reduction that eliminates flaws that may have been present on the original negative, it often includes artificial sharpening (again, for better or worse), contrast enhancement, brightness mid-point adjustment, and a host of other image enhancements that anyone who's worked on still images will be familiar with.
This may be why Warner calls what they're doing "remastering" rather than "restoring" films. If you use the word "restore", you're bound to piss off some purists when they see the final result, whether it looks better than it ever did or not.
A bonus of this technique is that it would allow for near-perfect analogue re-creation of the original film by plotting grains for exposure on new film.
Well, see, this wouldn't work. You can't position film crystals wherever you want on a piece of celluloid; they are where they are. And as they are what carry the actual picture information, you can't just start with a blank gel and start adding crystals one by one. (I suppose someone could invent some kind of new printing process to do this using new materials that mimic film - maybe with a kind of precisely controlled ink whose droplet size and shape could be controlled - but what would be the point?)
Regardless, once you get to that point I don't much see the advantage over just projecting digitally from the high-resolution digital copy. A standard high-res scan will pick up the film grain as it is, so providing the resolution really is high enough, once you project it it will look indistinguishable from the original analog source. This is what we're moving towards. There's no point in starting analog, scanning into digital, then re-printing into analog.
btw, I just RTFA, and Slate makes a big deal about "Technicolor" prints being less prone to fading. This is wrong. There's nothing special about Technicolor prints - the company is still in business and prints about 80% of all commercial Hollywood films today, most of which will fade to red within 20 years. There's a big difference between "three strip" Technicolor and the one-strip process that Technicolor uses today, and it's not differentiated clearly in this article at all. The three strip process used three individual film strips sensitive to one light wavelength each - the current process uses three layers of crystals on one film strip. Both are Technicolor processes, though.
Before going neon to match the trendy VW Bugs, did you notice that Apple went thin and silver/white to mimic the Sony Vaio? All good ideas have been done. What's next, a lava-lamp computer case?
Not sure it qualifies as a "good idea" that's been done, but it hasbeen done...
(For extra fun, make sure you've got a mouth full of your favorite beverage before clicking that link.)
Buf if you have car payments, credit car payments, a wife, then you put that yoke on yourself and its your responsibility to do that...
You know, people keep saying this, and I think it's completely, completely wrong.
A year ago at this time I was working at a game publisher, making decent money. But I was stuck there 12 or more hours a day, almost every day. I just got married 2 years ago and I could never even see my wife - even on weekends, I was so tired that I'd sleep until around 4 PM on Saturdays, then I'd have basically one evening to relax and it was all I could do to just maintain my life on Sundays (you know, regular stuff like cleaning the house, balancing the checkbook, paying bills, etc.). We had practically no time together whatsoever, and I was killing myself with stress - literally. I was in and out of the doctors' office pretty regularly with chest pains and heart palpitations from the stress.
So I quit. I didn't have anything lined up - I really couldn't, because I didn't have time to look before. I tried to, and I did apply to as many jobs as I could find, but I didn't really have time to go on interviews and I obviously didn't have time to make looking for a job my full time job, which is what you really need to do to find something. So I knew I had to quit - I saved up a bit of money (not a lot, but some), and I gave my notice.
It took me eight months to find a job. The first few months were great - we had enough money to live on, and we finally had time to be together. The last few months were pretty stressful, as the money got really tight.
But in the end I found something, and I'm now making more money than I did, I'm working 10-6 and in a much more professional and relaxed environment (funny how efficiency lowers stress and reduces the work load, isn't it?). I now have both time and money.
But the point I'm trying to make is that there are more important things to life than work. I mean there are different types of work, and some work is more important than other work, and maybe some types of work are more important than almost anything (doctors, firefighters, etc.). But if you're a worker drone sitting in a cube writing code until 2 AM, and you've got a family at home waiting for you, jesus christ, go home. If your boss tells you to stay, tell him to fuck himself (nicely). Get another job; one that isn't so unreasonable, however long it takes. Take a pay cut if you have to - I was prepared to, if it meant more time with my wife.
And if you need to quit before finding another job, then do it. Be smart about it - save a little money first, and plan how you're going to survive for a while - but if you need to do it, do it. It is just not worth being a slave when you've got people you love sitting at home alone waiting for you.
A little tip: some states will give you unemployment even if you quit, if your situation was such that any other "reasonable" person would have done the same. (This is called quitting with "good cause" - the technical requirement for receiving unemployment.) I got unemployment after sending a letter of explanation to my state's unemployment office (a requirement; I didn't do anything special), and that helped my wife and I a lot. I live in New York. Look up your own state's laws if you're contemplating such a move to see if you might be eligible to receive unemployment after quitting.
Half-Life 2 won six awards, including best game and best online game. No Katamari Damacy mentioned, Burnout 3 won three awards, and some plucky little upstart called 'Halo 2' won the prize for best Xbox game."
So, two derivative first-person shooters and a driving game - all sequels, mind you, however good they may be - beat out a wholly original, innovative, and fun concept in Katamari Damacy. I don't know what I can really take from this, except to say that gaming sure has changed a lot since I was a kid. And not really for the better.
Personally, I would like to see approaches such as Namco took in Katamari Damacy better rewarded. I would like to see approaches such as most developers take in producing sequel after sequel in well-worn genres rewarded quite a bit less often.
And also routers that can do this? Its a cool feature that i'd like to have but dont want to switch to macs
I don't know about routers, but you can do what I and a lot of others do and have a media server hooked up to your home theater setup through either wireless or (preferably) wired ethernet (still better than wireless for speed and stability). I'm sure there are probably some NAS devices that can act similarly at a lower cost than a full-fledged PC. I admit that I don't quite "get" what's so special about AirPort Express because it seems to actually do quite a bit less than what I'm used to, but maybe it's just the convenience of having this thing that's "always on", I don't know. And of course it's sort of cheap (though not that cheap).
But if you're bent on using Windows and/or Linux and you don't mind paying a little more for actually greater functionality, then get a cheap little server box, stick a good sound card in there and hook it up to your stereo. I've got mine running iTunes, which I can then pipe either to my laptops around the house or through my main stereo speakers. (It'll obviously work in reverse too, pulling any music I've got on my laptops and playing it through the stereo speakers.) Of course, it also streams video and whatever else I want to throw at it, and displays it all on my TV.
I can control it through Windows Remote Desktop Connection, so I have no need for a separate monitor. If you're running Linux, you can do the same with a VNC client (though VNC is a lot slower and is harder to deal with as a real remote desktop).
Don't the different iPod models have different docks? So you could have a one-size-fits-all dock, but when you put a mini in it, there would be a gap around the edges, and Apple just wouldn't let that happen.
I'm not saying this was definitely a dock connector in the making here, but people are missing the obvious:
Replaceable plastic covers. Seriously. This thing has 'em, why not the Mac Mini? They can't cost more than about 3 cents each to make, and Apple could make 'em look better than these do. For those who don't want a dock port, just have the standard cover that the Mini's got right now. The only difference is you sell these snap-on dock port covers separately.
Maybe Apple considered something like this (it's the only way to make an integrated dock work) and then decided it was too unelegant, or that they didn't want users replacing the whole top of the Mac mini, or that having only the dock port itself be replaceable would leave an ugly hole in the system top normally (or a split off extra bit that would detract from the cosmetic appearance even if a dock connector was not attached by the user).
Personally, I'd probably rather just buy a separate dock anyway...
If this is true, it sounds like a recipe for rushing Bungie (by, in effect, letting Sony set the release date) and getting another game without an ending, or worse.
Come on, say it - it sounds to me like a recipe for disaster on MS's part, not just a recipe for rushing.
Seriously, does MS expect that they're actually going to make a dent in PS3 sales on launch day? These are by nature early adopters, people who are willing to sit in lines for hours on end, willing to pay $300-$400 for a system just so they can hit the internet and tell everybody how l33t they are.
At best, MS can hope for some residual sales from PS3 buyers who will also pick up Halo 3. But beyond that, a lot of Xbox-only owners will simply stay home on the PS3 launch day rather than deal with the crowds (those who really want Halo 3 can just order it online, and many will). The end result is going to be that the Halo 3 release will just get lost in the shuffle; can you remember what PS2 games were released on the day of the Xbox launch, or what Xbox games were released on the day of the GameCube launch? Every time a console is launched, one or another competitor (usually whoever's newest in the industry, and/or the most desperate) tries to pull out their big guns, and every time they fail miserably.
MS is still learning. They're making all the same mistakes that their predecessors did before them. You don't try to take on a competitor directly on launch day. Not with a game, that's for sure, no matter how big of a game it is. For the experienced players in the market (which includes Sony now), a competitors' launch day is a time to lay low... everybody's gonna have their day in the sun, and there's really nothing you can do about it. It's in everybody's best interests to let a launch day be a launch day.
The only way MS could hope to slow down PS3 launch day sales would be to launch Xbox 2 on the same day (though that's just robbing Peter to pay Paul, since it'd cut into their own sales too). Short of that and they're just committing market suicide with whatever they put out that week.
Burning karma here, but ffs why are you putting an apostrophe on cds?
Burning my own karma, but he's probably doing it because it is an acceptable and in some cases encouraged use of an apostrophe in English.
It's a myth that apostrophes always denote possession or contraction. They don't. (In fact, there is no apostrophe in the possessive "its", which should tell you something.) Their purpose is to add visual information so you know what it is you're reading (i.e. "wont" vs. "won't"). To that end, putting an apostrophe in the plural "CD's" makes perfect sense and is acceptable usage.
CD's vs. CDs is an ongoing debate but there is no rule in English that says you cannot have an apostrophe there (in fact, even if there was, many apostrophe rules are broken all the time in standard English). The New York Times style guide says to always use an apostrophe when pluralizing abbreviated letters or numbers. The Chicago style guide says the opposite, but with some exceptions. From what I recall, the AP style guide also allows it.
Just as you can write "CD's", so you can also write "1980's" and nobody ever complains about that. If I say "I remember the 1980's - that was a crappy decade", nobody is going to be confused and think I meant the 1980's possessively.
Apostrophes are like commas - in many cases, there are no hard and fast rules on their usage, but it's usually better to be safe (and not use one) than sorry (and use one). In this case, most grammar nazis will tell you not to use one, but there's no rule that says you can't and if it adds clarity to a word ("CD'S" is clearer than "CDS", for example) then you may as well use it.
If you shoot 35mm film, you get your negative, you cut the negative, you create a duplicate of the negative, then you create more duplicate negatives from that, then you finally create prints from those duplicate negatives. So by the time it gets to the cinema screen it's not unusual for a 35mm print to have gone through four or five _analogue_ copying stages from the original film negative.
Er, ignoring digital editing systems that cut at least one step out of that process, I'm not sure where you're getting "four or five" analogue copying stages even out of your own example.
"You get your negative" - this is the original film. "You cut your negative" - this is still the original film. "You create a duplicate of the negative" - ok, this is copy 1. "You create more duplicate negatives" - this is copy 2. You're not making copies of copies, you're making a bunch of copies from one original. "You finally create prints from those duplicate negatives" - this is copy 3. So, only three copies are made through the most laborious process possible - and digital editing systems cut one copy out of that.
Not to mention that film has been around for more than 100 years and so much R&D and technological advancement has gone into it over that time that the quality loss is really minimal through every stage. Sure, if you kept making copies of copies of copies of copies, eventually you'd see a real resolution difference from the original; but you won't in any commercial film.
As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080, whereas digital holds that resolution from start to finish (absent crappy compression schemes).
Different film stocks have different grain properties, and it's the size and distribution of the grains (the crystals) that hold the detail in analog film. Some film stocks have more than 3,000 crystals per inch, some have less. But all would be significantly and noticeably higher in resolution and detail than 2048x1080 digital resolution even after the production process was complete and all copies made.
I have seen several commercial films shot, edited and projected digitally - including Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and the last Star Wars. They looked good - cleaner than film prints, surely - but there was noticeable and obvious (to me) pixelization and aliasing throughout the films. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed and/or cared, especially in the absence of the analog "noise" caused by film grain, but it was clear to me that either the projection system or the films themselves did not have the actual resolution of their film counterparts. I don't know what the resolution of the projection systems used in the US is, but I doubt it's much (if at all) lower than 2048x1080.
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I don't have the details handy, but running a swap, even if RAM is bountiful and plenty is always a good idea. It's something to the effect of the system really likes seeing the swap there, even if you technically don't need it.
It's more that it's good to have it there just in case, because you never know when you will need it (even with 2GB, you can multi-task yourself straight to hell if you're doing image editing, watching videos, and running crap in the background all at the same time), and it doesn't hurt anything to have it enabled. If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it. But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.
There's something of a myth that some people believe in that Windows is constantly accessing your swap file even with loads of RAM, and that turning the swap off will force Windows to use your RAM. Well, a) Windows XP is pretty good with memory management, and doesn't use swap when it doesn't have to, and b) even if it did use swap too much, turning it off isn't going to "teach" the OS to use memory properly. It either needs the swap file or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, what do you have to lose by leaving it on?
No matter which HD brand you recommend SOMEONE is going to tell you they had bad luck with them. I've actually had fairly GOOD luck with Maxtor.
Ditto. I've got two Maxtors running right now with no problems whatsoever - neither even gets warm to the touch, and they are both inaudible to boot.
Like you, I have had one go bad on me in the past, but then I've also had two WD's and a Seagate go bad on me, and know numerous people who've had IBM's, Samsungs, and other drives go bad too. It's sort of a badge of honor to have a drive go bad - you're not a real geek if it hasn't happened to you yet. But it really doesn't matter who makes the drive; their failure rates are pretty similar (with a few notable and notorious exceptions - the IBM DeathStar drives, for example, though these were simply defective).
I don't think anybody who saw my house, with its four networked PC's, two of which are scratch-built (one of which is technically 15 years old!), one of which is controlling all my media viewing, would question my geek credentials, and I've got no problem with Maxtor at all. It's almost like a form of nerd prejudice if you really think one drive maker is significantly worse than any other - it can't be based on anything real.
Eventually the price might come down enough for one to use this service recreationally without wincing at the price.
When did people become so friggin' cheap when it comes to air travel? It's thirty dollars. When you're flying 10 or more hours, I would not even think twice about paying that amount for a guarantee that I would never be wanting for something to do.
You must be the kind of guy who's responsible for the lack of meal service on domestic flights these days - who needs to pay an extra five bucks, right? "I never pay more than 99 cents for my food!"
How much do you pay for a transatlantic plane ticket? It's usually between $300-$500, depending on where you're going. Trans-Pacific from somewhere like New York to Tokyo, you're lucky if you can hit $500 (you can, but you need to know a good travel agent) - it's usually $1,000 or more depending on the season. You're "wincing" at thirty dollars tacked on to that? You'd rather sit and watch badly edited, b-grade, second-run Hollywood movies?
I'd gladly pay for this, and I hope more airlines offer it in the future (ANA or JAL, please - those are the two airlines I fly most often).
DUH the test was a waste of time and everyone here already knew it was BS, but people, have you SEEN the "cow taser" page linked to from the review article?!! I think I just pissed myself from laughing so hard.
Then it wasn't exactly a waste of time, was it?
Part of the reason people read Dan's stuff (just in case anyone missed the main link to his site) is his entertaining writing style. I almost always learn something from his articles, even if it's got nothing to do with what the article's supposedly about. Dan is obviously fully in on the joke himself or he wouldn't even be linking to things like cow tasers in his articles. It's people like you - who think reviews have to be a "waste of time" simply because the products in question are such obvious bunk - who don't seem to quite get it.
In a world where product reviews often offer little or not information at all, and where the strongest and most specific statement you might read is how one product or another is vaguely "generally good", writers like Dan are a refreshing change - he writes pieces that are always entertaining in and of themselves, often more informative than they need to be, and with plenty of useless but interesting trivia to keep you interested when the product in question is less than worthwhile. I only wish he'd review more stuff that I'm actually interested in buying (though I've become interested in buying a few things I would never have even known about but for his review).
As for this particular review, I think it's worth reminding the Slashdot crowd of the dangers of pseudo-science every now and again - pseudo-scientific articles do occasionally slip through the editing process here, and are often accepted as fact.
Not too long ago I could do a search on google and actually find something that was usually close to what I wanted. These days I get bogged down on the sites advertising there services and links to ebay.
I've noticed this too, and it really is amazing how quickly Google's become nearly useless for most searches. Picking relevant search terms that will cut the crap out has become something of a fine art.
What I have always wished Google would do would be to have an option (even just on their "advanced search" page) that you could separate out e-commerce sites. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but maybe just a mirror image of Froogle would do the trick. This would seriously cut out about 95% of all the search engine spam, because these sites are always selling you something. If you just want information, Google is almost impossible for a lot of things.
Of course, the other amazing thing is that people continue to use Google over other search engines despite this issue (and it is an issue that goes to the heart of what they do). I haven't used many other search engines lately - are any of them really any better?
>They have to make the costs up somewhere.
hooookay, how about on the order of magnitude more sales they make nowadays.
Atari 2600 units sold worldwide: 29 million.
Nintendo 64 units sold worldwide: 36 million.
Xbox units sold worldwide: Under 20 million.
Console sales have hardly changed at all in the last 25 years. Game sales have increased, but so has the number of game developers. (Remember, in the early Atari days, there was no such thing as a third-party developer. In fact, Atari sued Activision - the first-ever third party developer - to try to kill that entire industry.) So there is more competition, the rate of inflation has far and away outpaced game prices (look up $29.99 - the standard price for a new Atari 2600 game - in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1977 to now), and development teams have increased in size from in many cases one person to in some cases more than one thousand. Many more games are coming out - a greater percentage increase than the increase in sales - and costs have skyrocketed.
I'd say publishers are justified in a $10 price increase. Does that mean I'll pay it? Maybe not - there are literally hundreds of current, great games out right now for all systems at $20 or less, and I'm sure the same will be true for next-gen consoles after the initial rush wears off. But if they feel they need to make an extra $10 per new game in order to hire a few more coders to get the workload down to a reasonable level (remember how we've all been talking about how overworked everyone is in the game industry?), then more power to them.
Of course, that's assuming they don't just pocket the money as extra profit, but honestly, the gaming industry is running at bare minimum right now in terms of manpower, so at some point a price increase was pretty inevitable.
Apple, usually called "Cmd", short for "command", by longtime users (that's what the four-leaf clover is, I don't know why)
Not for nothing, but "longtime" Apple users actually would know this better as the Apple key. That's what it was officially called in the Apple II days (there were two separate keys back then; one an outline of an apple called "Open-Apple", one a filled-in apple called "Closed-Apple"), and even the early Mac days. Old-school Apple guys still use the term "Apple key", unless they're talking to people they know are relative n00bs.
I switched to PC after the Apple II and for the longest time I had no friggin' idea what modern Mac guys were talking about whenever they'd tell me to press the "command" key on a Mac. I'd try to do something at work and they'd say "oh, just press command-control-comma" and I'd be like "huh? Command Control? Goddamn kids today..." Then I'd put in my dentures and tell those little whippersnappers to get the hell off my lawn.
Just goes to show, though, that Apple's keyboard layouts and one-button mice are no less confusing than what's used in the x86 world. There's nothing any more intuitive about either approach (though I do despise the Windows key - I still use an IBM Model M at home, which helps me avoid it).
Is there anywhere you can get charts showing future share prices? I'm curious to see exactly how long it will take for TIVO to rise on future news--it seems to have happened before the market opened.
I'm gathering two things from your post, correct me if I'm wrong on either/both:
a) You think there was some insider trading going on, and
b) You think all trading happens during regular trading hours.
The latter is certainly not true, the former is doubtful. The rumors about this deal started circulating early this morning - at least, that's the first I heard them just reading blog sites, people who are really well connected probably heard them sooner. That does not imply inside sources (though the primary source may have been an insider, once a rumor is public, it's no longer inside info).
And stocks can really be traded at any time. All it really takes is a buyer and a seller to meet up. The stock market is just a big swap meet; those swaps don't have to happen only while the market's open, though (I believe there are still regulations as to how early and/or late trades can be recorded, but it's not just between the bells). Brokers generally only trade during official hours but even many discount brokers these days will do pre-open and post-close trades.
I honestly wish I'd gotten in on this the first I heard of it this morning at around 7 AM EST. Trouble is, these rumors come around almost every day, and you never really know what to believe and what not to. I didn't give it much credence initially; I certainly didn't think anything would happen today. Obviously, other investors have more money than me with which to speculate, so either they believed the rumor more strongly than I did or they make a living on trading off rumors, with the idea being one right guess more than pays for 10 wrong guesses.
Either way, I doubt there was anything untoward going on in this stock upturn.
btw, it finished the day almost 75% higher (sheesh!), though it's down a tick in after-hours trading. What you won't hear about is the profit-taking that goes on over the next couple weeks; my bet is the stock will settle in to a more reasonable percentage over where it was yesterday (even if it goes up a bit more over the next few days). This is likely only temporary euphoria - you rarely hear about the hangover afterwards.
Sir, did you read the article? This is for your LAN, not for broadband to the home.
Apparently you've never heard of apartment buildings, where the electrical lines are shared among many residents.
If max bandwidth is 170mb/s, and you've got fifty residents with fifty "LANs" in that building, you've got about 2.5mb/s bandwidth for each. Simple, eh? And that's not counting overhead and delays due to collisions.
Nevermind the security issues. You're talking basically about one big shared LAN, not fifty separate ones.
I can see this being useful in houses, but it seems basically useless in apartments. Which means probably 90% of Japan and a pretty large percentage of the US too.
At the same time, though, I felt a lot more hopeful listening to President Iwata than I did listening to Allard.
:)
This is the way it always is at industry trade shows. Nintendo always has the fun press conference, MS always has that "nerdy kid trying desperately hard to be cool" feel, and Sony is always just a complete snooze-fest of dry facts and figures.
I've been to about ten of these industry events over the years and the pattern is always the same, but in the end it means nothing in the marketplace. The press always seems excited about Nintendo after a big speech or press event, because they have some extremely engaging speakers - Iwata's one, Miyamoto's another. Neither MS nor Sony have anybody like this. Nintendo also generally ignores the business side of things in press events and either just talks about video games or has someone up there demonstrating them (usually Miyamoto, who will be cracking self-deprecating jokes about how bad he is at playing games all the while).
I've gotten caught up in it myself; I came out of my last E3 (a couple years ago, I guess) thinking Nintendo would just be unstoppable. The energy in the room at the Nintendo press conference was just so palpable; there were several standing ovations, there was constant applause and laughter, there was a feeling like big things were happening, like Nintendo really "got it". By contrast, MS was just a bunch of flashing lights and sirens wailing away at you to PLEASE BE EXCITED about their games, and Sony was basically just a big 2 hour PowerPoint presentation. Nintendo always comes off as the only company that actually cares about creating good games.
If only Nintendo could really turn that energy into something the marketplace wants to buy. They know PR, but they've lost touch with what consumers actually want. I'm hearing a lot of the same predictable stuff about this keynote speech - namely, that those who were there are really excited about Nintendo again - but objectively speaking, and as someone who was not there this time, I don't see anything that Iwata said that's all that revolutionary or even unexpected. It seems like people are getting caught up in the Nintendo mystique again (it's easy to do when you're there), but the reality of what was actually said doesn't really jibe with the hype that it's getting.
Maybe the solution is for Nintendo to just do constant roving press conferences around the world, and invite the public in to see them
You really do get a different feeling listening to these guys in person than you do reading about them afterwards. There is a major disconnect between public perception of this company and how they see themselves (and how they talk and act in person). I think more people would buy into their philosophy if they could see and hear it explained first-hand. But then again, I'm never really sure if there actually is anything to that philosophy, or if it's just the cult of personality that makes you think there is when you see it live.
That's interesting because I have a Barracuda and it's probably the loudest drive that I've ever owned...
It depends on the model. I have a 7100.7 (or whatever it's called) and it does not support acoustic management. It has noticeable seek noise. The versions that became famous for quietness (the IV and V) were the previous versions to mine - these did support AM.
Meanwhile, all other manufacturers have started using FDB motors just like Seagate does, so the whine is gone, and if your drive supports acoustic management (almost all do, though you may need to download a utility to access it), then it very likely can be virtually silent too. There is no inherent advantage that the Barracuda models have in acoustics.
In addition to my Barracuda, I also have two Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9's and a Western Digital Performer 40 (this came with my TiVo but has been repurposed in my PC - you can't buy this drive separately). All three of these drives are quieter than my Barracuda with acoustic management set to "quiet" - in fact, one of the Maxtors is dead silent, and the other is so quiet I have to put my ear right up next to it to hear seeks. (There is a slight variation between the two units, even though they are the same model and capacity.)
I will say that one of my Maxtors was ear-splittingly loud when I first purchased it - ironically (or maybe not), it was the retail version. My other Maxtor was OEM. The retail drive was set to "performance" out of the box, whereas the OEM drive was already set to "quiet". Maybe this is by design, as Maxtor is obviously positioning these drives for different markets, but it has obviously led to a different reputation for Maxtor than Seagate has, despite Maxtor's drives being capable (like almost everybody else) of total silence.
The loudest part of most PC's other than the hard drive (which doesn't need to be loud at all) is the power supply. I've gone through a half dozen PSU's looking for a quiet one that's also beefy enough for my systems - I finally ordered an ironically-named Seasonic Super Tornado 350 today. Most people don't consider the PSU as a major source of noise - or if they do, they don't think they can do anything about it - but having swapped out enough of these things for one reason or another, I can vouch for the fact that not only is there a significant variation between PSU's in the volume of noise, they also can significantly affect the quality of noise from your PC. Right now I am using an Enermax PSU in one system and an Antec in another - both highly-rated PSU's from a power and build quality standpoint - but they both sound awful. They are not particularly loud (though they're louder than any other component I have), but they both emit sort of a low-pitched "buzzing" noise (it's not case vibration - I've checked - it's just the sound of the fans they're using), which I find extremely annoying. If you're looking to silence your PC, I'd recommend starting with the PSU.
Of course, most hardcore PC users really go overboard with fans too - I admit to having six case fans in one of my PC's (mainly for show, they're LED fans), but they're almost always turned down to minimum with a fan controller. Not silent, but not loud either. In my HTPC, I have three 80mm fans, one of which is disconnected, the others turned down to minimum using built-in manual fan controls. I have no stability or temperature problems with this machine at all, and except for the PSU (that's being replaced), it's very quiet.
Much the same way as there's a certain intrinsic value in real estate. You need to remember that part of real estate is all about location, which is not intrinsic.
Uh, last I checked, you buy a property in Manhattan, whatever happens to the real estate market, your property is still in Manhattan.
Location is intrinsic. The value of that location is not intrinsic, but that value itself is linked to intrinsic, er, properties (for lack of a better word). For example, New York was built where it is because it is on top of one of the greatest natural harbors in the world. That is never going to change, so the value of a particular property in New York will likely not fluctuate all that wildly - it does have a certain intrinsic value based on physical properties of the location that will never be altered.
Beyond that, I just don't think there is any comparison between real estate and stocks. When you buy a stock you are buying a piece of paper - you're no longer even buying the promise of dividends (which is why people used to buy stock), because most technology companies have chosen to forego dividends and instead reinvest that money into company growth. The unspoken expectation between company and investor is that eventually there will be a dividend payout and all that investing will have counted for something, but this expectation was sort of turned on its ear during the dot-com bubble and people started investing instead with nothing but the expectation that the stock would go up. They had no idea why they were actually doing it; it was not based on anything.
Then we had the crash, which knocked some sense back into these people. Those who argued that you buy stock based on company fundamentals and not speculation were vindicated. Something similar could happen in real estate, but never on that scale because after all, when you buy real estate you are buying a tangible asset, not a piece of paper that is already priced based on the expected position of the company five, ten, even twenty years in the future.
In both cases, the price you pay is the intrinsic value of the item, plus all of the abstract hard-to-quantify stuff.
This is not at all true. When you buy stock you are not paying for the intrinsic value of anything. You are paying for the expected future intrinsic value of a company, based on its P/E ratio.
To make stocks and real estate equivalent, a seller of a home or a piece of land would have to say to you "this home may only be worth $300,000, but I am going to charge you $2.4 million because that is what I believe it will be worth 20 years from now." Obviously, nobody buys real estate like this, but it is exactly the way people buy stocks. Stocks have a certain level of inherent speculation (even if you're buying "value" stocks, the P/E ratios are rarely less than 8 or so... with tech stocks they're usually more like 60 or 70), whereas real estate is always sold for what it's valued at today.
So the prices of real estate can go up and down, but because there is little speculation involved (unless you're buying undeveloped land in the hope that it will eventually be developed), there is little risk of a sharp downturn. That's as true now as it ever was. I mean, people have been saying for 100 years that real estate is overpriced, but how much do you think an average home built in 1900 costs today compared to what it cost at that time? Real estate prices will only continue to rise over time because there are only so many places to live in this country and a lot more people both being born and moving in every day.
Stock prices are really anybody's guess. They've trended upwards over time just as real estate has, but they've always been subject to severe corrections, bubbles and overall fluctuations than real estate has.
You clearly don't work in the field yet. Trust me, no employer will complain if you log some extra hours because you're in Deep Hack Mode. The problem is that you'll be asked to be working 12 hours days when you're not.
Not to mention that if your employer gets the idea that you "want to" work all those extra hours, they'll cheerily push you even further than they would have before. Employees train their employers in what to expect from them, and while it can be tricky to do, you ideally want to let your employer know that while you're flexible, you also have limits. Sitting and working 12 hours a day without being asked to tells your employer "I have no life, and I enjoy being here, and I enjoy doing work" - forget about ever leaving that office once your employer figures this out.
I worked for a major game publisher in New York for several years, and there was this constant push-pull between employees and bosses. Both sides would be trying to stake a few extra minutes out on either side of working longer vs. leaving early. Of course, in the game industry when I say "early" I mean around 8PM. We'd constantly be trying to sneak out around 7:55 or 7:50, and in turn our bosses would routinely throw four hours worth of critical work our way at 7:30 in order to keep us there, when they could have given us that same work at any time earlier in the day. I became convinced that it was done on purpose to get us accustomed to long hours.
Over a period of time, I saw my earliest clock-out hour move, on a permanent basis, from a fairly consistent 7PM to an optimistic 9PM even during non-crunch times, with many nights during crunches much later than that. It happened over several years. Before I was hired, I was told "sometimes we work until 7 or 8", and when I first started there, indeed we all left at 7 on the dot. Then during crunch times it would be 7:30, then 8, and a "two steps forward, one step back" pattern emerged, where we'd never quite go back to the way it was before when the crunch was over. After you've been working until 8 for a while, 7:30 no longer seems so bad... similarly, after working until midnight for two weeks on end, leaving at 10PM feels almost like a break. Of course it wasn't, and everybody at the company broke down after a while - the turnover rate was conservatively around 50% from the time I was hired to the time I left. Almost nobody at the company I worked for was over 30.
This is the reality of the industry, and it's causing problems beyond simply a lack of productivity. You've got an entire industry of people who work at one company for a couple of years and then move on. Nobody ever develops a sense of loyalty, or history; people work on game sequels without ever having even played the original, they come up with new game designs and concepts that they don't even realize have been done a thousand times before. It's part of the reason for the buggy games, the lack of original concepts, it's why a one-time great company like Acclaim can fall so hard, so fast. (For the record, Acclaim is not who I worked for.) It is seriously hurting the industry as a whole and has definitely had a hand in bringing down several publishers. It's partially responsible for the consolidation we've seen in the industry over the past 5 years or so. (Of course, many other factors are involved in that too, but the lack of experience throughout the industry coupled with a high turnover rate and low productivity from unhappy, disloyal workers does not help.)
People who are outside the industry seem to have a hard time understanding how pervasive a problem this is. It isn't just some companies and it isn't just some jobs. It's all game developers and publishers, and every position, from the company CEO's on down to the product managers on down to the designers, coders, and illustrators. It's everybody, in the entire industry. And it's an industry that's losing a lot of good people every single day because of it, who are then replaced by young
His insights are correct. And his insights on guns are correct as well.
Educate yourself. The statistics speak for themselves. The fact is gun control works, in many, many countries throughout the world.
If you don't believe the numbers in the article, just do a Google search yourself. You'll find plenty of "official" sources that list the exact same numbers.
Burning massive karma here, but it boggles my mind how people can plainly ignore or dispute facts that are right there in front of them.
Or are his insights into the world being flat correct as well?
Insightful? I would ask how many years you have been doing this for.
I've been doing it for around 20 years, myself (since my first mouse on my Apple II). At least 8 hours a day, every day, and on weekends too. No RSI here.
Everybody develops their own habits as far as how they sit, how they type, how they mouse around. Some people develop good habits, some develop bad ones. I certainly don't conform to the highest standards of ergonomics myself, but I apparently have found a set of habits that work for me.
The way I type (I'm not a touch typist, though I do type at over 90wpm), my arms are always straight - angled towards the keyboard. My chair is at a height so that my wrists are also vertically straight both on the keyboard and mouse. I keep my keyboard flat - not angled with the feet (keeping it flat is what you're supposed to do; in fact, ideally it should be angled downward). I try to keep my hand flat on the mouse, and when I move it, I usually use small "pivot" type movements from the heel of my hand - my wrist and shoulder are generally not involved at all. Most of this is not conscious, it's just the way I work, but it's kept me from getting RSI.
I do occasionally get a sore index finger (the one pressing the left mouse button), but not often, and it goes away after about 15 minutes of rest. That's about the extent of my "RSI" and that's after many, many thousands of hours of mousing over more than two decades.
I'm convinced that there's nothing inherent in mice or keyboards that causes RSI. People need to take a holistic approach to the way they work; how they sit, the height of their chair, their posture, how their hands rest on their tools, etc. That's true regardless of what tools they're using, however, be it a mouse or some sort of "mouse replacement". (In other words, simply switching to a more "ergonomic" tool is not going to help if you don't change your underlying RSI-inducing behavior.)
Uh, first, we have to have private spacecraft. Burt Rutan's project is about at the level of the second Mercury flight, which was suborbital.
Not to mention 40 years in the past.
The private sector still has a lot of work to do before it can really play with the big boys (in this case, government space agencies). It will catch up, but it's kinda like saying you're ready to start carrying passengers between New York and Tokyo because you can fold a piece of paper and make it fly. You may have re-discovered for yourself the principles of flight, but it takes a bit more expertise and experience than that to do anything meaningful with it. You're not quite ready to challenge Boeing or Airbus if all you've got are paper airplanes.
A lot of people fail to appreciate the difference between what Rutan has done and what world government space agencies (not just NASA) do every day. It's not just about rocketing a guy to the edge of space and back again. It's about getting meaningful work done, which means the ability to carry large payloads to precise areas in orbit, then make it back again to a precise area on the ground. When you start talking about orbiting the Earth 100 miles up with a payload of 40,000 pounds, then you've got all sorts of issues to deal with. The private sector hasn't even started tackling those issues yet.
Luckily, NASA and other space agencies have done most of the work for them already. But that doesn't mean they won't have to re-learn and experience everything for themselves - it just hopefully won't take quite as long to do it.
(btw, this is not to take away from what Rutan has done - it was a great accomplishment. But it needs a sense of perspective - there is still a ton of work to do, and what NASA does is different by an order of magnitude.)
If you want to get really fancy, you can look at the arrangement of the crystals, try to reverse-engineer the light as it struck the film, and virtually re-expose the image by plotting a new grain map on film.
I don't see why some of what you suggest wouldn't work (you're basically just talking super-high res scans, for the most part), but it's incredibly wasteful. Plotting the shape of each individual film grain, on a per-frame basis? First of all, it would take forever to do this. Second of all, visible film grain is usually something you want to eliminate during the restoration process, or at least cut back (eliminating it entirely can look a little unnatural, but reducing it can improve things quite a bit). So you're not really gaining anything by your suggestion.
I suppose this brings up another point, which is that "restoration" is kind of a misnomer in film. The idea isn't usually to restore the film to the way it used to look; the idea is usually to make it better than it ever looked. It's not always the case, but generally the restoration process includes color correction that can remove some of the character of the original film stock (for better or worse... some restorations have really been hack jobs that destroyed the look of the original), it includes grain reduction that reduces visible film grain, it includes scratch reduction that eliminates flaws that may have been present on the original negative, it often includes artificial sharpening (again, for better or worse), contrast enhancement, brightness mid-point adjustment, and a host of other image enhancements that anyone who's worked on still images will be familiar with.
This may be why Warner calls what they're doing "remastering" rather than "restoring" films. If you use the word "restore", you're bound to piss off some purists when they see the final result, whether it looks better than it ever did or not.
A bonus of this technique is that it would allow for near-perfect analogue re-creation of the original film by plotting grains for exposure on new film.
Well, see, this wouldn't work. You can't position film crystals wherever you want on a piece of celluloid; they are where they are. And as they are what carry the actual picture information, you can't just start with a blank gel and start adding crystals one by one. (I suppose someone could invent some kind of new printing process to do this using new materials that mimic film - maybe with a kind of precisely controlled ink whose droplet size and shape could be controlled - but what would be the point?)
Regardless, once you get to that point I don't much see the advantage over just projecting digitally from the high-resolution digital copy. A standard high-res scan will pick up the film grain as it is, so providing the resolution really is high enough, once you project it it will look indistinguishable from the original analog source. This is what we're moving towards. There's no point in starting analog, scanning into digital, then re-printing into analog.
btw, I just RTFA, and Slate makes a big deal about "Technicolor" prints being less prone to fading. This is wrong. There's nothing special about Technicolor prints - the company is still in business and prints about 80% of all commercial Hollywood films today, most of which will fade to red within 20 years. There's a big difference between "three strip" Technicolor and the one-strip process that Technicolor uses today, and it's not differentiated clearly in this article at all. The three strip process used three individual film strips sensitive to one light wavelength each - the current process uses three layers of crystals on one film strip. Both are Technicolor processes, though.
Before going neon to match the trendy VW Bugs, did you notice that Apple went thin and silver/white to mimic the Sony Vaio? All good ideas have been done. What's next, a lava-lamp computer case?
Not sure it qualifies as a "good idea" that's been done, but it has been done...
(For extra fun, make sure you've got a mouth full of your favorite beverage before clicking that link.)
Buf if you have car payments, credit car payments, a wife, then you put that yoke on yourself and its your responsibility to do that ...
You know, people keep saying this, and I think it's completely, completely wrong.
A year ago at this time I was working at a game publisher, making decent money. But I was stuck there 12 or more hours a day, almost every day. I just got married 2 years ago and I could never even see my wife - even on weekends, I was so tired that I'd sleep until around 4 PM on Saturdays, then I'd have basically one evening to relax and it was all I could do to just maintain my life on Sundays (you know, regular stuff like cleaning the house, balancing the checkbook, paying bills, etc.). We had practically no time together whatsoever, and I was killing myself with stress - literally. I was in and out of the doctors' office pretty regularly with chest pains and heart palpitations from the stress.
So I quit. I didn't have anything lined up - I really couldn't, because I didn't have time to look before. I tried to, and I did apply to as many jobs as I could find, but I didn't really have time to go on interviews and I obviously didn't have time to make looking for a job my full time job, which is what you really need to do to find something. So I knew I had to quit - I saved up a bit of money (not a lot, but some), and I gave my notice.
It took me eight months to find a job. The first few months were great - we had enough money to live on, and we finally had time to be together. The last few months were pretty stressful, as the money got really tight.
But in the end I found something, and I'm now making more money than I did, I'm working 10-6 and in a much more professional and relaxed environment (funny how efficiency lowers stress and reduces the work load, isn't it?). I now have both time and money.
But the point I'm trying to make is that there are more important things to life than work. I mean there are different types of work, and some work is more important than other work, and maybe some types of work are more important than almost anything (doctors, firefighters, etc.). But if you're a worker drone sitting in a cube writing code until 2 AM, and you've got a family at home waiting for you, jesus christ, go home. If your boss tells you to stay, tell him to fuck himself (nicely). Get another job; one that isn't so unreasonable, however long it takes. Take a pay cut if you have to - I was prepared to, if it meant more time with my wife.
And if you need to quit before finding another job, then do it. Be smart about it - save a little money first, and plan how you're going to survive for a while - but if you need to do it, do it. It is just not worth being a slave when you've got people you love sitting at home alone waiting for you.
A little tip: some states will give you unemployment even if you quit, if your situation was such that any other "reasonable" person would have done the same. (This is called quitting with "good cause" - the technical requirement for receiving unemployment.) I got unemployment after sending a letter of explanation to my state's unemployment office (a requirement; I didn't do anything special), and that helped my wife and I a lot. I live in New York. Look up your own state's laws if you're contemplating such a move to see if you might be eligible to receive unemployment after quitting.
Half-Life 2 won six awards, including best game and best online game. No Katamari Damacy mentioned, Burnout 3 won three awards, and some plucky little upstart called 'Halo 2' won the prize for best Xbox game."
So, two derivative first-person shooters and a driving game - all sequels, mind you, however good they may be - beat out a wholly original, innovative, and fun concept in Katamari Damacy. I don't know what I can really take from this, except to say that gaming sure has changed a lot since I was a kid. And not really for the better.
Personally, I would like to see approaches such as Namco took in Katamari Damacy better rewarded. I would like to see approaches such as most developers take in producing sequel after sequel in well-worn genres rewarded quite a bit less often.
And also routers that can do this? Its a cool feature that i'd like to have but dont want to switch to macs
I don't know about routers, but you can do what I and a lot of others do and have a media server hooked up to your home theater setup through either wireless or (preferably) wired ethernet (still better than wireless for speed and stability). I'm sure there are probably some NAS devices that can act similarly at a lower cost than a full-fledged PC. I admit that I don't quite "get" what's so special about AirPort Express because it seems to actually do quite a bit less than what I'm used to, but maybe it's just the convenience of having this thing that's "always on", I don't know. And of course it's sort of cheap (though not that cheap).
But if you're bent on using Windows and/or Linux and you don't mind paying a little more for actually greater functionality, then get a cheap little server box, stick a good sound card in there and hook it up to your stereo. I've got mine running iTunes, which I can then pipe either to my laptops around the house or through my main stereo speakers. (It'll obviously work in reverse too, pulling any music I've got on my laptops and playing it through the stereo speakers.) Of course, it also streams video and whatever else I want to throw at it, and displays it all on my TV.
I can control it through Windows Remote Desktop Connection, so I have no need for a separate monitor. If you're running Linux, you can do the same with a VNC client (though VNC is a lot slower and is harder to deal with as a real remote desktop).
Don't the different iPod models have different docks? So you could have a one-size-fits-all dock, but when you put a mini in it, there would be a gap around the edges, and Apple just wouldn't let that happen.
I'm not saying this was definitely a dock connector in the making here, but people are missing the obvious:
Replaceable plastic covers. Seriously. This thing has 'em, why not the Mac Mini? They can't cost more than about 3 cents each to make, and Apple could make 'em look better than these do. For those who don't want a dock port, just have the standard cover that the Mini's got right now. The only difference is you sell these snap-on dock port covers separately.
Maybe Apple considered something like this (it's the only way to make an integrated dock work) and then decided it was too unelegant, or that they didn't want users replacing the whole top of the Mac mini, or that having only the dock port itself be replaceable would leave an ugly hole in the system top normally (or a split off extra bit that would detract from the cosmetic appearance even if a dock connector was not attached by the user).
Personally, I'd probably rather just buy a separate dock anyway...
If this is true, it sounds like a recipe for rushing Bungie (by, in effect, letting Sony set the release date) and getting another game without an ending, or worse.
Come on, say it - it sounds to me like a recipe for disaster on MS's part, not just a recipe for rushing.
Seriously, does MS expect that they're actually going to make a dent in PS3 sales on launch day? These are by nature early adopters, people who are willing to sit in lines for hours on end, willing to pay $300-$400 for a system just so they can hit the internet and tell everybody how l33t they are.
At best, MS can hope for some residual sales from PS3 buyers who will also pick up Halo 3. But beyond that, a lot of Xbox-only owners will simply stay home on the PS3 launch day rather than deal with the crowds (those who really want Halo 3 can just order it online, and many will). The end result is going to be that the Halo 3 release will just get lost in the shuffle; can you remember what PS2 games were released on the day of the Xbox launch, or what Xbox games were released on the day of the GameCube launch? Every time a console is launched, one or another competitor (usually whoever's newest in the industry, and/or the most desperate) tries to pull out their big guns, and every time they fail miserably.
MS is still learning. They're making all the same mistakes that their predecessors did before them. You don't try to take on a competitor directly on launch day. Not with a game, that's for sure, no matter how big of a game it is. For the experienced players in the market (which includes Sony now), a competitors' launch day is a time to lay low... everybody's gonna have their day in the sun, and there's really nothing you can do about it. It's in everybody's best interests to let a launch day be a launch day.
The only way MS could hope to slow down PS3 launch day sales would be to launch Xbox 2 on the same day (though that's just robbing Peter to pay Paul, since it'd cut into their own sales too). Short of that and they're just committing market suicide with whatever they put out that week.
Burning karma here, but ffs why are you putting an apostrophe on cds?
Burning my own karma, but he's probably doing it because it is an acceptable and in some cases encouraged use of an apostrophe in English.
It's a myth that apostrophes always denote possession or contraction. They don't. (In fact, there is no apostrophe in the possessive "its", which should tell you something.) Their purpose is to add visual information so you know what it is you're reading (i.e. "wont" vs. "won't"). To that end, putting an apostrophe in the plural "CD's" makes perfect sense and is acceptable usage.
CD's vs. CDs is an ongoing debate but there is no rule in English that says you cannot have an apostrophe there (in fact, even if there was, many apostrophe rules are broken all the time in standard English). The New York Times style guide says to always use an apostrophe when pluralizing abbreviated letters or numbers. The Chicago style guide says the opposite, but with some exceptions. From what I recall, the AP style guide also allows it.
Just as you can write "CD's", so you can also write "1980's" and nobody ever complains about that. If I say "I remember the 1980's - that was a crappy decade", nobody is going to be confused and think I meant the 1980's possessively.
Apostrophes are like commas - in many cases, there are no hard and fast rules on their usage, but it's usually better to be safe (and not use one) than sorry (and use one). In this case, most grammar nazis will tell you not to use one, but there's no rule that says you can't and if it adds clarity to a word ("CD'S" is clearer than "CDS", for example) then you may as well use it.
If you shoot 35mm film, you get your negative, you cut the negative, you create a duplicate of the negative, then you create more duplicate negatives from that, then you finally create prints from those duplicate negatives. So by the time it gets to the cinema screen it's not unusual for a 35mm print to have gone through four or five _analogue_ copying stages from the original film negative.
Er, ignoring digital editing systems that cut at least one step out of that process, I'm not sure where you're getting "four or five" analogue copying stages even out of your own example.
"You get your negative" - this is the original film. "You cut your negative" - this is still the original film. "You create a duplicate of the negative" - ok, this is copy 1. "You create more duplicate negatives" - this is copy 2. You're not making copies of copies, you're making a bunch of copies from one original. "You finally create prints from those duplicate negatives" - this is copy 3. So, only three copies are made through the most laborious process possible - and digital editing systems cut one copy out of that.
Not to mention that film has been around for more than 100 years and so much R&D and technological advancement has gone into it over that time that the quality loss is really minimal through every stage. Sure, if you kept making copies of copies of copies of copies, eventually you'd see a real resolution difference from the original; but you won't in any commercial film.
As a result, the resolution of a final 35mm print is almost certainly substantially less than 2048x1080, whereas digital holds that resolution from start to finish (absent crappy compression schemes).
Different film stocks have different grain properties, and it's the size and distribution of the grains (the crystals) that hold the detail in analog film. Some film stocks have more than 3,000 crystals per inch, some have less. But all would be significantly and noticeably higher in resolution and detail than 2048x1080 digital resolution even after the production process was complete and all copies made.
I have seen several commercial films shot, edited and projected digitally - including Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and the last Star Wars. They looked good - cleaner than film prints, surely - but there was noticeable and obvious (to me) pixelization and aliasing throughout the films. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed and/or cared, especially in the absence of the analog "noise" caused by film grain, but it was clear to me that either the projection system or the films themselves did not have the actual resolution of their film counterparts. I don't know what the resolution of the projection systems used in the US is, but I doubt it's much (if at all) lower than 2048x1080.