They only have so much space, so they add very small, very intense rides instead of grand staple rides.
Well, if you've ever been to GA, this doesn't really make sense. Now, I'm sure GA owns whatever land they own, and somebody else owns the land adjacent to the park, but all there is adjacent to the park is a bunch of forest for miles around. You'd think the suits at Six Flags could negotiate a fair price with some of these landowners, because it's really a little bit strange to see; at one part of the park there is a big pond where they do the water shows, and you'll have this huge mass of people on one side and just nothing whatsoever on the other.
I know there is an Air Force (or Air National Guard) base right near the park, but they can't own all that land. It's not directly adjacent; it's a few miles off in one direction. I'm sure GA could build larger rides if they wanted to, but they seem not to be too interested in expansion.
"we call it 'great adventure', *not* 'six flags' like the rest of the world.
Why? Because we freaken like it like that... got it?"
Is that the spindoctor way of making NJ sound like an exciting place that everyone just *has* to visit?
No, it comes from the days from before Six Flags even owned Great Adventure. And from the days even after they bought it, before the whole issue of "branding" became such a big thing and all amusement parks around the country were still known by their individual names.
You didn't used to go to "Six Flags Magic Mountain", you went to Magic Mountain. You didn't used to go to "Six Flags Great America", you went to Great America. And you didn't used to go to "Six Flags Great Adventure", you went to Great Adventure. New Jerseyans are probably just a little more stubborn in holding on to their old names than people are in other parts of the country. As someone who was born in NYC and has also lived in NJ, I think it's a regional thing - we don't call the amusement park on Coney Island "Astroland" either, we still just call it Coney Island.
When I lived in NJ everybody just called it Great Adventure. And everybody I know in NJ still just calls it Great Adventure. I still call it that too. Six Flags didn't build the park and they're just the parent company; I don't associate GA with Six Flags and I don't think many other people in NJ do either. I'm sure this gives the suits at Six Flags fits, but screw 'em.
Now, as for this roller coaster, I took the "virtual ride" they offer and it looks like nothing. I mean I don't see how roller coasters like this are fun. It goes up, it comes down, ride over. This is the kind of ride I get off and I think "I waited 2 hours in line for this?!" The Batman & Robin ride they already have is similar (though not as tall), so I know exactly what riding this is going to be like.
I'd rather ride the Great American Scream Machine sixteen times in the amount of time it'd probably take for me to get through the line once on this thing. The Scream Machine may be 20 years old but at least it lasts longer than five seconds and has more than one movement to it.
I'm sorry, WHY do you have to tell the difference between red, green, yellow blue and white lights?
You're a VFR pilot and you don't understand this concept? I recommend you read this accident report. This accident was caused in part because the flying pilot was color-blind, and could not differentiate properly between between the red and white of the PAPI lights in use at this particular airport. The same lighting system (where the proper glidepath is denoted by two red and two white lights on the ground) is used at many airports around the world.
Or even better, just home in on RNAV at the airport, then dial up the ILS and do a glideslope/localiser approach.
Well, when you graduate from being VFR-only, you'll realize that not every airport has an ILS, and even major airports do not have ILS on every runway.
As you'll see reading that accident report, even minor variations in color perception can make a major difference. The pilots on that flight thought the PAPI lights were "pink" - does that mean the light is really supposed to be red? Or is it white with a little red bleeding into it? This can mean the difference between a safe landing and a crash, as was the case in this FedEx accident.
Windshields need to appear completely clear to the pilot, and they need to allow the full color spectrum through without alteration. Now, I'm no expert on lasers, maybe there's some way of coating the glass that can only disturb certain wavelengths common to lasers, while allowing the colors a pilot often has to deal with get through. But it's something that would need a lot of study and testing before applying it to aircraft.
Nope. Even the high end DSRLs still have a small crop factor. I think the 1ds has a 1.3 crop factor, small, but still there.
First of all, it's not a "crop factor" - that's a misnomer. It's a focal length multiplier, or if you're Canon and want to be cute about it, a "conversion factor". There's an important difference there, which relates to the focal length of the lenses you're using.
The original 1DS had no focal multiplier - it used a full-size CMOS sensor just like the new one does. See here and here (see the focal length multiplier, which is "1").
Kodak also produces cameras with full-size CMOS sensors (see here; they make basically this same camera with both Canon and Nikon lens mounts). Keep in mind, though, that "full-size" is a relative term and is basically a misnomer just like "crop factor" is - the only reason it even matters is so that photographers can match the lenses already on the market to their new digital camera. Otherwise it doesn't matter if the CMOS is 37mm or 40mm or 32mm or whatever, as long as there's enough room for however many pixels you want to stuff into it.
The election system is broken. When people with a potential vested interest in the outcome of an election are charged with administering said election, things have gone wrong.
And yet it's been this way since this country was founded. Don't believe it? I suggest you Google yourself the search term "Tammany Hall" - or hell, just watch "Gangs of New York" if you'd rather get some entertainment out of it.
Things are better now than they used to be, when nearly every election was completely corrupt in most areas of the country. It wasn't just New York - it was Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and pretty much every other large city. There aren't many stories about the rural areas of the country simply because of the lower population density, but I'm sure there was just as much corruption out in the sticks as in the urban areas, it's just that nobody knew about it. There is an old saying in this country, "Vote Early, Vote Often!"
Which is not to say we shouldn't always be looking to improve. But I wonder where these Europeans were in the 1860's or the 1910's or the 1960's or the 1990's. What makes them such experts on running fair and honest elections today, and what puts them in a position to teach us anything? Do you honestly not believe they have an agenda of their own? They obviously do.
Election irregularities and outright fraud were rampant in this country 100 years ago. That fraud still exists but we have come a long way over the years. Are we perfect? No - no country is. But the OSCE isn't what got rid of Tammany Hall and I'm not sure how they're going to help us this time.
The bottom line is, do we need them? No. Can they help us? No. Are they doing this out of their own self-interests? Probably. Does Europe want to continue to alienate itself from America? Sure seems like it.
Note I'm about as anti-Bush as they come, and I do feel he stole the 2000 election (and not just because he lost the popular vote; that's the way our system of government is set up). I'm just saying this is nothing new, and he's certainly not the first President to steal an election (he just found a new way to do it). We need to continue to fix the issues that lead to this sort of thing, but we don't need the Europeans telling us how to do it.
So, as long as there are both instructors and pupils taking part in the production (getting "hands-on experience" would count), and it's done under the guise of education (as in learning how to act, etc), by a non-profit, it's okay to charge the public to see it.
Well, no, I think a) you're misinterpreting that law a bit, and b) I don't see how it applies in this case to begin with.
Now, IANAL, but one thing I know is if it specifically says something in a law, then that's part of the law. You yourself bolded the words "nonprofit educational institution" in the law you cited - it can't just be a non-profit "organization" like the Red Cross or a public theater company, it has to specifically be an educational institution, in other words a public school. (Private schools are for-profit.)
Second, I don't see that there's any education going on here. This is a company called Jet City Improv, which seems to specifically do this for entertainment. Look at their web site, there seems to be nothing educational about it. It's for entertainment.
So the law as you cited it is not relevant here.
Now, parody is generally protected under fair use laws. But part of what determines fair use is the extent of reproduction of the original copyrighted work. Simply showing a copyrighted work in its entirety and then making fun of it is not protected under fair use. Showing a copyrighted work in its entirety but replacing the soundtrack is a grey area to say the least - I couldn't predict how the legal chips would fall but it's probably not something I'd want to risk going to court over if I was Jet City Improv. There'd be a good chance they'd lose this one.
Woody Allen did the equivalent of what these guys are doing when he released What's Up Tiger Lily? He bought the rights to do that to that movie, even though it was a Japanese film, and even though the environment was much different in the 1960's. So that should tell you something. I don't think LucasFilm is really wrong in this case.
Are you mad because you feel taking the 10 seconds to read an article headline is too much of your precious time?
I'm sure he's "mad" because having nothing but a bunch of duplicate stories right on the front page of a site makes the site a lot less useful. And every story that's a dupe is another story that didn't get posted.
There are a lot of tech news sites and blogs out there - news.com, engadget.com, theregister.com, etc. Some of them overlap the content posted here, but there's generally a lot of info that only gets posted in one place, which makes each of those sites worth visiting on their own. But if one of those sites simply repeats the same story over and over, then it's not really providing you with news at all, which is the main purpose of their existence. I would think this would be of interest to the editors here; posting dupes very simply makes the site less useful and makes visitors less likely to keep visiting.
If you like visiting a site, and you suddenly see it become less useful than it used to be, then the natural human reaction would probably be disappointment and/or irritation. I don't think there's any reason for you to try to belittle those feelings among people who are just trying to get the editors to do a little better job for the good of the site as a whole.
They were largely the same except the Internet wasn't around to keep everyone apprised of all the corporations' shady dealings, so it was easier for crap like this to get perpetrated.
Well, if anything, the past was actually worse. The internet has not only allowed us to keep more apprised of what's going on, but it's also led to increased availability of bootlegs and other illicit material. It used to be that if you wanted a live recording of a show, and you didn't have the ability to go to the show yourself, you basically had to go to one of these little record stores in New York or some other big city and buy one. And of course, it was very easy for the feds to figure out where these dealers were and shut them down. (More would pop up later, but it wasn't this rising tide that the internet has now wrought.)
I used to work at one of these record stores - Zapp Records in New York. One day in the mid 90's I came in to work only to see a whole mess of US Customs agents rifling through our shelves. They ended up confiscating half of our inventory and the store shut down a month or two later after the owner fled to Germany to escape federal prosecution.
This is the way it used to be. What goes on now is no different, but because supply is now outstripping law enforcement's ability to deal with it, it's probably actually easier to get away with breaking bootlegging laws at this point.
My point being, there were no "good old days", as the original question seemed to be implying. These laws have always been enforced and in fact were probably easier to enforce before the internet became mainstream.
My question, as a tech, why did YOU want to keep the old part?
Maybe because his company owns it?
I always keep the old part as PART of the service of fixing.
I don't know if you quite read his post. He was buying a replacement. He wasn't asking to get the old one fixed. He wasn't asking for "service". He was buying a component. I don't care what your procedures are, Apple has no right to ask for a broken part in return.
I also may be able able to use "your broken unit" to repair other units and possibly resell on eBay or my website or in my store.
Apple used "trade ins/exchanges" to resell to parts dealers like Preowned Electronics and Sun Remarketing - so sources would be available for years to come for Apple parts and service sources.
And this explains what, exactly? If anything, this would convince me even more not to give them my broken part. It's not theirs to sell.
This isn't just Apple, some PC manufacturers do this as well. But they really have no right to; it's his broken part, and if he's paying for a new one out of warranty, they have no right to ask him for the old one back. They're not doing him any favors; he's giving them more money/profits by buying a replacement. He owes them nothing in return; they simply owe him a new part in exchange for his cash money.
For example, I've had this PowerBook for two years, and I've had to reinstall the Mac OS once and that's only because I wanted to start fresh... there was nothing wrong with it.
However, the reference-platform dual Xeon workstation that I have in my home office has had four reinstalls of Windows 2000 and XP during the same time period, due to irrecoverable failures of the OS.
See, I hear this kind of thing every once in a while too and it always makes me wonder. What exactly happened that forced you to re-install the OS? I have not ever heard of an unrecoverable Windows error that was not hardware-related (usually a failed hard drive), yet you're describing this as if Windows just up and committed suicide completely on its own. Recoverable Windows errors, sure, but unrecoverable? There has to be an underlying issue there, and since you've had to reinstall the OS four times, it sounds like it's not being addressed.
I've got two PC's that I've scratch-built myself, both of which are years old and have just been constantly upgraded (one is nearly 15 years old and is no longer really the same machine - the last vestige of the original, the floppy drive, was replaced about 4 years ago just because I wanted one in black). Both are on their original install of Windows XP. The really old one was running Windows 2000 previously, was upgraded to Windows XP as soon as it was released (as an "upgrade", not a clean install) and has been purring happily ever since. I do various things to maintain the OS (just basic stuff, defrag, chkdsk, etc.) but otherwise it's been fine since installing XP about 4 years ago.
In fact, I've never had to reinstall any Windows since Windows 95, on any machine, including three desktops and four laptops that I've owned since the release of Windows 2000. (Windows 95 did require reinstalls every year or two.) My work PC's have also been running their original install of Windows 2000 since, well, sometime around the year 2000.
It sounds like you probably just have an underlying hardware defect in your workstation, you might want to look further into it. There's nothing about Windows itself that requires it be reinstalled every once in a while, as seems to be a popular myth (probably perpetuated because of Windows 95, which definitely was an unreliable OS).
Apple makes very nice machines, but they are not the Holy Grail of quality.
Maybe not, but it's been a long time since you could buy an x86 machine that lasted as long.
When I read this, the little false logic detectors I have installed behind my left inner ear duct went off...
How do you know how long today's x86 machines will last? And how do you define this, anyway? The period of time before one single component fails? Or the period of time before the system becomes completely unusable?
How do you measure the actual lifespan of a PC you've just bought? Sure, the QA testers at Dell or HP or whatever do stress tests that are meant to simulate a period of years of normal use, but that doesn't always translate to the real world (as Apple, with all its defects and recalls, should know as well as anyone).
Right now I am typing on an IBM Thinkpad manufactured in 1999. That's five years, and I've beaten this thing to all hell and back. When, exactly, would you pinpoint as the time after which you could not purchase an x86 that lasted this long? 2001? How would you know yet? 1998? My PC's proved you wrong already, and anyway by implication you're saying that older x86 machines are built better. So your statement just isn't logical.
Today, every x86 machine I see is flimsy as hell.
Some are, some aren't. Apple loyalists generally seem to look at the lowest of the low and assume all PC's are built the same way. Thinkpads are tanks, including the new ones, and so are a lot of other PC laptops. I don't know why you'd need a desktop to be a tank but if you really care about a strong case, just buy a Falcon or any number of other brands using Coolermaster cases. One advantage you do usually get with a manufacturer like this is a good power supply, which is almost a universal issue among the major PC makers. But it's not hard to find a well-built desktop PC.
And since they all use pretty much standard components (just as Apple does), component life shouldn't really be more of an issue with one brand than any other.
People need to realize that Apple is one maker, and one brand. You can't compare "Macs" to "PCs" in terms of build quality. You can compare Apple to HP or IBM or Dell or Falcon or Alienware or the guy building white box PCs in his shop down the street. When you buy a PC, you're not buying a computer made by every PC manufacturer out there; you're buying a PC made by one manufacturer (albeit out of a lot of different parts from different manufacturers, but this is no different than Apple). Maybe Apple builds better products than some of those makers. But maybe some of those makers build better products than Apple.
Apple makes some decent hardware but so do a lot of x86 PC manufacturers. No, not all of them, but you don't have to buy from the bad ones.
Granted, it doesn't work *great* with eDonkey, but I've downloaded quite a few files from eDonkey users fine. And having one interface for Bittorrent and a normal P2P is nice.
You're right on both counts, but unfortunately performance is more important than a common interface. For another exampe, we all use Trillian (or jabber, or whatever) instead of individual IM apps, right? Well, what if you had to wait 5 minutes to receive an IM every time one of your friends sent you one? Would you still use it? That's Shareaza.
I'm hoping for big things out of the Shareaza project, especially since it's open-source now. It's a great-looking program - really slick interface (true professional quality), very easy to use, and very non-bloated. But do the test yourself - set up your network with the same settings in emule and Shareaza, then search for the same file on eDonkey and see which download completes first. eMule is about ten times faster in my experience (don't be fooled by the fact that Shareaza measures its download speeds in bits rather than bytes by default).
The same is true for bittorrent and gnutella2 files. The native clients just work a lot better.
It would be great if Shareaza would work out its performance problems, because I'd love to use it and it alone for my p2p needs. But it's not there yet.
I believe the first batch of japanese models had external BB units (ethernet/harddrive) to connect as the newer models have different expansion bus (dev9) verses the older models implementation of pciamca (or what ever that 'laptop' bus is called). In any case external expansion is possible if they have an external bus... Can anyone confirm that it indeed has one?
It does not. The interfaces it does have, from Sony's press release:
Controller Port x 2 MEMORY CARD slot x 2 USB connector x 2 NETWORK connector x 1 100BASE-TX/10BASE-T DC IN 8.5V connector x 1 AV MULTI OUT connector x 1 DIGITAL OUT OPTICAL connector x 1
That's everything the current model has except the IDE interface.
Regarding the early Japanese models, I have one of these and it does have a PCMCIA slot on the back, rather than a full-size IDE hard drive slot. The original idea was they'd use PCMCIA drives, which were thought at that time to be sort of the wave of the future - there were already 3-5GB PCMCIA drives for laptops (which was a decent size for a laptop in 1999), and Sony assumed the capacities would just continue to increase and costs would continue to drop. It became apparent pretty quickly that it wasn't going to happen, though, and Sony switched to a standard IDE interface for the US model release and then also changed the Japanese model to match.
So the external hard drive units released in Japan were sort of a kludge. The internal and external models were released there at the same time (the IDE version of the PS2 was already on sale). It wasn't the original plan; it was just Sony's way of keeping early adopters happy. IIRC, the external model actually connected through the Firewire port, which was also removed on later models of the PS2.
Of course, this newly announced PS2 redesign has no Firewire, no PCMCIA and no IDE. So no hard drive of any kind.
I'm actually hoping the PCMCIA version of the PS2 ends up as a collector's item someday:)
Does anybody else get a little annoyed by this kind of thing? 25% smaller, half the weight and an included Ethernet port... enough to be jealous when my brother buys one, but not enough to buy one myself.
Well, I get annoyed at faulty reporting, yes. It's 75% smaller, not 25%, and it's still called the PlayStation 2 (or "PS2" for short), not the "PStwo". There is no such thing as a "PStwo".
(People assume that PS2/PStwo would follow the same naming convention as PS1/PSone... the problem with that is there was no PS1, so there's no naming convention to follow here. And Sony is officially still calling this the PS2; it's printed right on the unit, and right on the new box.)
Not sure if it's been linked in another comment yet as I haven't read all of them, but you can read Sony's press release here.
Will anyone that owns a regular PS2 buy one of these?
I plan to, but then I'm a collector. I'll probably wait until the price drops to $50, though, as it will eventually. Of course, I'm still on a launch PS2, and it could go any moment, necessitating a replacement... or rather, giving me an excuse to buy a new, redesigned PS2 earlier than I'd planned.
And no, this thing does not support the hard drive. There's no interface for it.
You obviously have no QA or Development experience, do you? Maybe in your area coding for "all modern browsers" is trivial, but in many areas it is not. The changes just between versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 are fairly large from a design point of view. If you're throwing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc support, that adds a lot.
I couldn't agree more with this. A lot of people trivialize browser compatibility when it comes to web design - they either say "oh, just design to standards, and everything should work!" or they say "oh, just design to the lowest common denominator - if something doesn't work on one browser, just don't do it at all."
Well, the problem with the first approach is it just plainly doesn't work. Whether or not something should work a particular way in a particular browser doesn't matter - it's whether or not it does work that matters. Every browser renders CSS a little differently, for example; even the functions that actually do work across browsers just look different depending on which browser you're running.
The problem with the second approach is that it leaves you with basically HTML 2.0 to work with. And honestly, that's fine for some sites (it really is), but if you want to do anything at all interesting, it's just not workable.
So the only thing you can really do is just design and code a site for the most popular browser out there and then hope it works with the others. If it doesn't, you try to fix it so it does - but depending on what you're doing, it may not even be possible without tossing what you've done and starting over (and then when you're done re-doing everything, some other browser that worked before will probably be broken with the new implementation).
My last job was working in the new media division of a major game publisher (you can guess which one if I tell you it's the only one doing anything interesting on the web). We designed all of our sites in-house. We built for IE, because up until I left it was about 95% of our audience, and then we QA'd for other browsers (this was generally my job; I was the militant browser dude on staff). Invariably, there were things that either didn't work or worked differently than we'd intended on certain browsers. Most of the time these things could be fixed but it was not always trivial, and it was usually one of three things that caused the problem: CSS, JavaScript, or Flash action scripting.
At the end of any particular project we'd usually spend at minimum several days troubleshooting browser problems. Given that we were in-house you can't really put a dollar value on that, but if you just divided up all of our salaries for that time period I guarantee you're talking tens of thousands of dollars on every project. That's time we could otherwise be spending creating something new instead of stuck fixing something that's otherwise finished, or it's time we could have otherwise used for things we'd have to contract freelancers for (so it did directly cost us money in many cases, and way more than $100).
It's easy to say "well you should have just used standards" and it's easy to blame it all on IE but that's way too simplistic. Because for one thing, in marketing you're not just going to put up a site full of text, you need to use things for which there are no standards, such as Flash. Honestly, if somebody invented something open-source and standardized that does everything Flash can do, and then they managed to convince the world to run browsers supporting it, we'd have jumped all over it. But Flash is what it is; it's proprietary and unfortunately there's nothing else comparable that's popular. So you have to design in Flash, and when you've got, for example (and this actually happened to us), a button in your Flash that is supposed to open a file dialogue box on your machine and it works on IE and works on Firefox and works on Opera but doesn't work on Mozilla and doesn't work on Safari, what are you supposed to do? If you've got an inte
Absolutely wonderful customer relations... "You have a complaint, so instead of trying to fix the problem and get a few customers back, we're just going to remove you from this board and pretend it never happened."
Well, it brings up another issue too - which is whether or not he's actually been "unregistered" by EA. Are they going to delete his name/address/phone number/email address from their records, and give him verification that they've done so? If not, then I can't see how they have the right to revoke his posting privileges - he bought the game, he gave them the info they asked for, and they're probably not going to give it back to him.
So not only are they incompetent, not only are their copy-protection mechanisms idiotic, but their registration practices are apparently unethical too. It may be a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but it just busts my nuts whenever I see a company like this act so cavalierly with your personal info.
Good points-- my biggest problem with the special editions was the new effects being unnecessary or integrating poorly with the originals. The Jabba the Hutt in the first special edition was really poorly done, he looked all blurry and was a different shade of color than the Jedi Jabba the Hutt.
Well, and this brings up another problem with Lucas' logic. The SE's can't be what his "real" vision was even if that is his justification for them, because this scene was originally shot within the limitations that existed at the time. Jabba the Hutt was just some guy with a scraggly beard and a lot of weapons in the original scene; that's how the scene was shot, and the scene as it is on the DVD's is still the same scene.
Now, the problem is time marches on, people get old and their thinking changes as technology moves forward. So you really can't just go back and re-do everything exactly the way you wanted it. Maybe Lucas really did originally want Jabba the Hutt to be this big, ugly, worm-like thing - maybe the dude who played him in the original Star Wars scene really was a placeholder. I don't believe it - I believe he invented the current Jabba for the later films - but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. The fact remains you can't go back. Look at that scene today. It is still quite obviously a compromise because Harrison Ford is too old to re-shoot that scene (and I doubt he'd do it anyway), so you've got him interacting with this worm thing that was originally intended to be a man. Ford's standing too close to him, his arm seems to pass through him several times, and Jabba himself appears smaller than he does in Return of the Jedi.
What I'm saying is this is still not Lucas' original vision, whatever he says. It was a compromise to take that scene out and it's a compromise to put it back in the way it is today. Films are all about compromises; they're never 100% one person's vision because a) hundreds of people work on a film, many of which in creative positions, b) money is always an issue (there's no such thing as a movie that comes in "under-budget"; any film could benefit in some way from more money), and c) technical limitations (including optical limitations that are bound by the laws of physics) can make certain types of shots or scenes impossible. All Lucas has really done here is substitute one compromise for another.
The point being there are good reasons why most filmmakers don't constantly re-make their movies. At some point, you call it done, knowing full well that your thinking, the available technology, and the available money may change later. It doesn't matter, because at a certain point, you just cannot go back and re-do things the way you originally wanted them. Despite what he says about other filmmakers, George Lucas is one of the only people in Hollywood that seems not to understand this (he's apparently been hanging out with Spielberg a bit too much).
I also agree with those that say there was no technological reason for certain things that have been changed to have been the way they originally were. So he's really just making up new stuff as he goes along, he's rewriting the films based on how he feels today, not based on what he wanted at the time. There's no reason Greedo couldn't have shot first back then, and there's no reason a young actor couldn't have been inserted as Vader in the scene at the end of Jedi (of course, you wouldn't have recognized him, but that's not the point - the point is this was not a technological restraint, there's nothing about Lucas' "original vision" in the changed version. It's just a rewrite to get the original films to better mesh with the new ones, and it's unnecessary and distracting.)
What's the point of preventing people from copying shitty music?
It's what the people want.
Well, either you believe the RIAA's bullshit about music downloading eating into sales, or you believe that today's music is not at all what the people want.
Those are the only two possible explanations for the four-year drop in CD sales. And none of us reasonable people believe downloading has had any noticeable net effect on CD sales.
Personally, I've bought one new CD in the past two years. And I'm one of those guys that used to take pride in the size of his record/CD collection; I used to buy at least one or two CD's per week, usually more than that. I've also bought a couple of older catalog CD's in the past year but that's about it. People like me are the reason why the RIAA's sales numbers are down - we're the ones that used to spend all of our money on music, but a lot of us feel like we already own pretty much all the good music that we want, and new music is mostly a barren wasteland of talentless hacks. There most certainly is not anywhere close to 1-2 quality CD's worth of music coming out every week; nowhere close to enough good stuff to keep up my previous purchasing pace.
This is the RIAA's problem, and DRM in Longhorn is not going to fix it. I couldn't care less if I can't copy Britney Spears' next CD - that's not going to affect my life in the least bit. It's unfortunate that our rights are being taken away here but I'm sure like every other DRM scheme, it'll be cracked anyway for those that do find something new that they'd like to rip.
To me, though, there's enough good music already on the market that if I can't rip the one or two decent new releases per year, I've got more than enough to listen to for the rest of my life.
Uh, well, it's not really all that new. It came about with the inital advent of VCRs.
Well, not really. "Time-shifting", as a term, came about because there was something new about it, namely that you could watch what was being recorded while it was being recorded, but at a different point in time than what was recording at that moment. Obviously, that's a mouthful to say, hence the term "time-shifting". It was new to the digital world, and it's a big deal because it lets you, say, pause live TV and go make a sandwich, or start watching an 8 PM program at 8:03 without missing anything, or whatever. A VCR can't do that. (You'd have to record the entire show, then start watching at the beginning once it's over.)
"Time-shifting" is different than just recording and watching/listening later. So this iPodder thing may be a bit of a misnomer; it may not do true time-shifting. It has to be able to play the clips you're recording as you're recording them, at any point in the stream. Just "saving clips" to listen to later is not time-shifting.
That's what I was wondering. There are several episodes where they refer to the state, and even almost say the state name.
They don't only "almost" say it - in episode 248 they do say it. It's Kentucky.
In another episode there's a line about something being "south of the border", and Bart says "you mean Tennessee?" Which also supports the Kentucky answer - not that it needed to be, as again, it's specifically said in episode 248. But some people believe that episode to be entirely apocryphal - certainly some of it is (I mean the Simpsons are obviously not really a live-action, real-life family as the episode would have you believe), but it's just as obvious that some of it isn't. They did leave that opening for interpretation, but Kentucky is supported in other episodes.
There are definitely still other episodes that contradict this in various ways (Homer's driver's license lists his state abbreviation as "NT" in one episode, for example), but given that they actually say it in one episode, and support it in at least one other episode, I'm going to believe it really is supposed to be Kentucky.
There is a Shelbyville about 20 mi. north of Springfield in real-life Kentucky too, btw, which is more supporting evidence. So either the writers noticed this after the fact and finally settled on Kentucky as the series wore on, or it was the plan all along.
Since it will have a G5 and (if I'm not mistaken) and probably something from ATi or nVidia, so we can assume that it will be transformable into a Mac clone without too much effort.
This assumes, first of all, that you believe the specs that leaked out a while back. Whether you choose to believe me or not, I know they were real at least at that time... which doesn't mean they haven't changed or won't change before the system is released. But for now, we'll assume those specs were/are correct and current.
The problem is, just because it has "a" G5 doesn't mean it's a Mac. It has more than "a" G5 if you go by those leaked specs, it has three G5's, which each handle specific tasks (for example, half of the processing power on one of them is used for the audio decoding). It also has a custom DirectX-compatible graphics chip which may or may not support other API's - I'll bet it won't. And it's got a completely unique memory architecure that takes inspiration from the GameCube's use of 1T-SRAM as a sort of "in-between" cache.
Also, MS told game developers at the same meeting these specs came from not to expect a hard drive built into the system. It may be available as an option, but it won't be built into the system. I assume this is a) to save on costs, and b) to possibly discourage modding - at least making it a little harder and/or more expensive. But that's another barrier - there may not be a hard drive available at all at launch.
The Xbox 2 will be more proprietary than the current Xbox. The current model was designed very quickly to get something out there as fast as possible - hence its similarity to current PC's. The next Xbox has had a lot more time put into its design and will not be very similar to either PC's or Macs. It's true that there's nothing very proprietary about the Mac other than the G5, but there's nothing very similar about the Xbox 2 to the Mac except the G5.
It would be a huge coincidence for something like this to happen in a country we know is developing nuclear weapons, but coincidences are called coincidences for a reason...
The train explosion that happened in NK a few months back also reportedly created a large mushroom cloud and flattened an entire town. I had my suspicions about that being a nuke blast too, especially after seeing the before/after satellite pictures (the real ones, not the fake ones), but we'd have heard a lot more about it by now if that was the case. Anybody who'd walked through the area directly afterward would be dead by now. So there are large explosions that can create large mushroom clouds that aren't necessarily the result of nukes.
Um, guys.. North Korea hasn't attacked anyone, um, ever...
Jesus, how old are you? Maybe you'd better read up a little bit on a little thing called the Korean War.
The NK's are not going to commit suicide by taking on the U.S.
I'd hate to have listened to you on Dec. 6th, 1941. Or Sept. 10, 2001 for that matter.
I'm not agreeing with the guy who says we go in and nuke them first. But the alternative to that is not to deny that this is a real problem. This is a real problem. The North Koreans do act irrationally at times (especially with Kim Jong Il at the helm), they're very desperate, and there's at least a possibility they'll use their new nuke capability as a deterrent to our power, which will allow them to once again invade the south. They've been saying they want reunification ever since we pushed them back out in the 1950's. What they really want is the south's wealth. This is how wars start.
Technically, the Korean War is not over. This is why we have 37,000 (I guess now 25,000?) troops sitting in between the two countries - because they're two countries at war and we are under a UN mandate to keep them apart. At least until such time that they agree to formally end the war, or peacefully reunite. The North could do these things at any time. They choose not to, while still saying they want reunification. What do you think that means? It means they want reunification on their terms, with their system of government, and their leaders... and the only way they'll ever get that is through another invasion.
The South is in denial about this just like you are. But I don't know how many Pearl Harbors or World Trade Centers or Mauretanias or Archduke Ferdinands or whatever you want to come up with - I don't know how many of those you need before you realize that some countries in this world, and some people in power in very high places, are very dangerous and they will hit you and hit you hard when you least expect it. (Yes, I include George Bush in this statement - I'm not voting for him come November, and I didn't vote for him last time either. I'm no hypocrite, just being realistic here.)
So what should we do? Who the hell knows. It's fine for me to say that, but the problem is our government seems to be saying the same thing. We need some sort of strategy and we clearly have none now. Somehow, someway, we have to get these nukes out of NK's hands. Maybe eventually that does mean military action of some kind. Not yet, but it really depends on them. But this is a country with a bad history, with a tyrranical leader and in a current state of war with their nearest neighbor, which happens to be a US ally. Their nukes can already reach Alaska and soon will be able to reach California. We need to deal with this and not pretend the problem does not exist.
Don't you think, in the interest of fairness and justice, that Osama should be tried by an international court instead?
And how would an international court, made up of say, France, Libya, China, Germany, Turkey, Spain, Canada and Greece, be necessarily so much more impartial? I am certainly no Bushite, but even I, as a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, would find the idea of an international court to try bin Laden patently offensive. He committed a crime against me, in my territory and I deserve to have him tried in a court that follows my laws. The crime was committed here, and he should be tried here. Victims have rights too, you know, and that's why extradition treaties exist in the first place.
Trying him in the US would be like letting the victim of an alleged crime be the judge of the accused.
No, because he would not be tried for attacking the United States and he would not be judged by the American people - he would be tried for the murder of almost 3,000 people in the United States, and he would be judged by trained and experienced legal professionals just like every other case in this country.
Obviously, as in any other case, the judge would have to have had no personal involvement in the attacks. It's a judge's duty by law to be impartial; now, not all of them are, but I'd trust a US federal judge any day of the week over any international court, which these days would almost necessarily be comprised primarily of countries not friendly to us and in many cases openly sympathetic to bin Laden's cause.
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They only have so much space, so they add very small, very intense rides instead of grand staple rides.
Well, if you've ever been to GA, this doesn't really make sense. Now, I'm sure GA owns whatever land they own, and somebody else owns the land adjacent to the park, but all there is adjacent to the park is a bunch of forest for miles around. You'd think the suits at Six Flags could negotiate a fair price with some of these landowners, because it's really a little bit strange to see; at one part of the park there is a big pond where they do the water shows, and you'll have this huge mass of people on one side and just nothing whatsoever on the other.
I know there is an Air Force (or Air National Guard) base right near the park, but they can't own all that land. It's not directly adjacent; it's a few miles off in one direction. I'm sure GA could build larger rides if they wanted to, but they seem not to be too interested in expansion.
"we call it 'great adventure', *not* 'six flags' like the rest of the world.
Why? Because we freaken like it like that... got it?"
Is that the spindoctor way of making NJ sound like an exciting place that everyone just *has* to visit?
No, it comes from the days from before Six Flags even owned Great Adventure. And from the days even after they bought it, before the whole issue of "branding" became such a big thing and all amusement parks around the country were still known by their individual names.
You didn't used to go to "Six Flags Magic Mountain", you went to Magic Mountain. You didn't used to go to "Six Flags Great America", you went to Great America. And you didn't used to go to "Six Flags Great Adventure", you went to Great Adventure. New Jerseyans are probably just a little more stubborn in holding on to their old names than people are in other parts of the country. As someone who was born in NYC and has also lived in NJ, I think it's a regional thing - we don't call the amusement park on Coney Island "Astroland" either, we still just call it Coney Island.
When I lived in NJ everybody just called it Great Adventure. And everybody I know in NJ still just calls it Great Adventure. I still call it that too. Six Flags didn't build the park and they're just the parent company; I don't associate GA with Six Flags and I don't think many other people in NJ do either. I'm sure this gives the suits at Six Flags fits, but screw 'em.
Now, as for this roller coaster, I took the "virtual ride" they offer and it looks like nothing. I mean I don't see how roller coasters like this are fun. It goes up, it comes down, ride over. This is the kind of ride I get off and I think "I waited 2 hours in line for this?!" The Batman & Robin ride they already have is similar (though not as tall), so I know exactly what riding this is going to be like.
I'd rather ride the Great American Scream Machine sixteen times in the amount of time it'd probably take for me to get through the line once on this thing. The Scream Machine may be 20 years old but at least it lasts longer than five seconds and has more than one movement to it.
I'm sorry, WHY do you have to tell the difference between red, green, yellow blue and white lights?
You're a VFR pilot and you don't understand this concept? I recommend you read this accident report. This accident was caused in part because the flying pilot was color-blind, and could not differentiate properly between between the red and white of the PAPI lights in use at this particular airport. The same lighting system (where the proper glidepath is denoted by two red and two white lights on the ground) is used at many airports around the world.
Or even better, just home in on RNAV at the airport, then dial up the ILS and do a glideslope/localiser approach.
Well, when you graduate from being VFR-only, you'll realize that not every airport has an ILS, and even major airports do not have ILS on every runway.
As you'll see reading that accident report, even minor variations in color perception can make a major difference. The pilots on that flight thought the PAPI lights were "pink" - does that mean the light is really supposed to be red? Or is it white with a little red bleeding into it? This can mean the difference between a safe landing and a crash, as was the case in this FedEx accident.
Windshields need to appear completely clear to the pilot, and they need to allow the full color spectrum through without alteration. Now, I'm no expert on lasers, maybe there's some way of coating the glass that can only disturb certain wavelengths common to lasers, while allowing the colors a pilot often has to deal with get through. But it's something that would need a lot of study and testing before applying it to aircraft.
Nope. Even the high end DSRLs still have a small crop factor. I think the 1ds has a 1.3 crop factor, small, but still there.
First of all, it's not a "crop factor" - that's a misnomer. It's a focal length multiplier, or if you're Canon and want to be cute about it, a "conversion factor". There's an important difference there, which relates to the focal length of the lenses you're using.
The original 1DS had no focal multiplier - it used a full-size CMOS sensor just like the new one does. See here and here (see the focal length multiplier, which is "1").
Kodak also produces cameras with full-size CMOS sensors (see here; they make basically this same camera with both Canon and Nikon lens mounts). Keep in mind, though, that "full-size" is a relative term and is basically a misnomer just like "crop factor" is - the only reason it even matters is so that photographers can match the lenses already on the market to their new digital camera. Otherwise it doesn't matter if the CMOS is 37mm or 40mm or 32mm or whatever, as long as there's enough room for however many pixels you want to stuff into it.
The election system is broken. When people with a potential vested interest in the outcome of an election are charged with administering said election, things have gone wrong.
And yet it's been this way since this country was founded. Don't believe it? I suggest you Google yourself the search term "Tammany Hall" - or hell, just watch "Gangs of New York" if you'd rather get some entertainment out of it.
Things are better now than they used to be, when nearly every election was completely corrupt in most areas of the country. It wasn't just New York - it was Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and pretty much every other large city. There aren't many stories about the rural areas of the country simply because of the lower population density, but I'm sure there was just as much corruption out in the sticks as in the urban areas, it's just that nobody knew about it. There is an old saying in this country, "Vote Early, Vote Often!"
Which is not to say we shouldn't always be looking to improve. But I wonder where these Europeans were in the 1860's or the 1910's or the 1960's or the 1990's. What makes them such experts on running fair and honest elections today, and what puts them in a position to teach us anything? Do you honestly not believe they have an agenda of their own? They obviously do.
Election irregularities and outright fraud were rampant in this country 100 years ago. That fraud still exists but we have come a long way over the years. Are we perfect? No - no country is. But the OSCE isn't what got rid of Tammany Hall and I'm not sure how they're going to help us this time.
The bottom line is, do we need them? No. Can they help us? No. Are they doing this out of their own self-interests? Probably. Does Europe want to continue to alienate itself from America? Sure seems like it.
Note I'm about as anti-Bush as they come, and I do feel he stole the 2000 election (and not just because he lost the popular vote; that's the way our system of government is set up). I'm just saying this is nothing new, and he's certainly not the first President to steal an election (he just found a new way to do it). We need to continue to fix the issues that lead to this sort of thing, but we don't need the Europeans telling us how to do it.
So, as long as there are both instructors and pupils taking part in the production (getting "hands-on experience" would count), and it's done under the guise of education (as in learning how to act, etc), by a non-profit, it's okay to charge the public to see it.
Well, no, I think a) you're misinterpreting that law a bit, and b) I don't see how it applies in this case to begin with.
Now, IANAL, but one thing I know is if it specifically says something in a law, then that's part of the law. You yourself bolded the words "nonprofit educational institution" in the law you cited - it can't just be a non-profit "organization" like the Red Cross or a public theater company, it has to specifically be an educational institution, in other words a public school. (Private schools are for-profit.)
Second, I don't see that there's any education going on here. This is a company called Jet City Improv, which seems to specifically do this for entertainment. Look at their web site, there seems to be nothing educational about it. It's for entertainment.
So the law as you cited it is not relevant here.
Now, parody is generally protected under fair use laws. But part of what determines fair use is the extent of reproduction of the original copyrighted work. Simply showing a copyrighted work in its entirety and then making fun of it is not protected under fair use. Showing a copyrighted work in its entirety but replacing the soundtrack is a grey area to say the least - I couldn't predict how the legal chips would fall but it's probably not something I'd want to risk going to court over if I was Jet City Improv. There'd be a good chance they'd lose this one.
Woody Allen did the equivalent of what these guys are doing when he released What's Up Tiger Lily? He bought the rights to do that to that movie, even though it was a Japanese film, and even though the environment was much different in the 1960's. So that should tell you something. I don't think LucasFilm is really wrong in this case.
Are you mad because you feel taking the 10 seconds to read an article headline is too much of your precious time?
I'm sure he's "mad" because having nothing but a bunch of duplicate stories right on the front page of a site makes the site a lot less useful. And every story that's a dupe is another story that didn't get posted.
There are a lot of tech news sites and blogs out there - news.com, engadget.com, theregister.com, etc. Some of them overlap the content posted here, but there's generally a lot of info that only gets posted in one place, which makes each of those sites worth visiting on their own. But if one of those sites simply repeats the same story over and over, then it's not really providing you with news at all, which is the main purpose of their existence. I would think this would be of interest to the editors here; posting dupes very simply makes the site less useful and makes visitors less likely to keep visiting.
If you like visiting a site, and you suddenly see it become less useful than it used to be, then the natural human reaction would probably be disappointment and/or irritation. I don't think there's any reason for you to try to belittle those feelings among people who are just trying to get the editors to do a little better job for the good of the site as a whole.
They were largely the same except the Internet wasn't around to keep everyone apprised of all the corporations' shady dealings, so it was easier for crap like this to get perpetrated.
Well, if anything, the past was actually worse. The internet has not only allowed us to keep more apprised of what's going on, but it's also led to increased availability of bootlegs and other illicit material. It used to be that if you wanted a live recording of a show, and you didn't have the ability to go to the show yourself, you basically had to go to one of these little record stores in New York or some other big city and buy one. And of course, it was very easy for the feds to figure out where these dealers were and shut them down. (More would pop up later, but it wasn't this rising tide that the internet has now wrought.)
I used to work at one of these record stores - Zapp Records in New York. One day in the mid 90's I came in to work only to see a whole mess of US Customs agents rifling through our shelves. They ended up confiscating half of our inventory and the store shut down a month or two later after the owner fled to Germany to escape federal prosecution.
This is the way it used to be. What goes on now is no different, but because supply is now outstripping law enforcement's ability to deal with it, it's probably actually easier to get away with breaking bootlegging laws at this point.
My point being, there were no "good old days", as the original question seemed to be implying. These laws have always been enforced and in fact were probably easier to enforce before the internet became mainstream.
My question, as a tech, why did YOU want to keep the old part?
Maybe because his company owns it?
I always keep the old part as PART of the service of fixing.
I don't know if you quite read his post. He was buying a replacement. He wasn't asking to get the old one fixed. He wasn't asking for "service". He was buying a component. I don't care what your procedures are, Apple has no right to ask for a broken part in return.
I also may be able able to use "your broken unit" to repair other units and possibly resell on eBay or my website or in my store.
Apple used "trade ins/exchanges" to resell to parts dealers like Preowned Electronics and Sun Remarketing - so sources would be available for years to come for Apple parts and service sources.
And this explains what, exactly? If anything, this would convince me even more not to give them my broken part. It's not theirs to sell.
This isn't just Apple, some PC manufacturers do this as well. But they really have no right to; it's his broken part, and if he's paying for a new one out of warranty, they have no right to ask him for the old one back. They're not doing him any favors; he's giving them more money/profits by buying a replacement. He owes them nothing in return; they simply owe him a new part in exchange for his cash money.
For example, I've had this PowerBook for two years, and I've had to reinstall the Mac OS once and that's only because I wanted to start fresh... there was nothing wrong with it.
However, the reference-platform dual Xeon workstation that I have in my home office has had four reinstalls of Windows 2000 and XP during the same time period, due to irrecoverable failures of the OS.
See, I hear this kind of thing every once in a while too and it always makes me wonder. What exactly happened that forced you to re-install the OS? I have not ever heard of an unrecoverable Windows error that was not hardware-related (usually a failed hard drive), yet you're describing this as if Windows just up and committed suicide completely on its own. Recoverable Windows errors, sure, but unrecoverable? There has to be an underlying issue there, and since you've had to reinstall the OS four times, it sounds like it's not being addressed.
I've got two PC's that I've scratch-built myself, both of which are years old and have just been constantly upgraded (one is nearly 15 years old and is no longer really the same machine - the last vestige of the original, the floppy drive, was replaced about 4 years ago just because I wanted one in black). Both are on their original install of Windows XP. The really old one was running Windows 2000 previously, was upgraded to Windows XP as soon as it was released (as an "upgrade", not a clean install) and has been purring happily ever since. I do various things to maintain the OS (just basic stuff, defrag, chkdsk, etc.) but otherwise it's been fine since installing XP about 4 years ago.
In fact, I've never had to reinstall any Windows since Windows 95, on any machine, including three desktops and four laptops that I've owned since the release of Windows 2000. (Windows 95 did require reinstalls every year or two.) My work PC's have also been running their original install of Windows 2000 since, well, sometime around the year 2000.
It sounds like you probably just have an underlying hardware defect in your workstation, you might want to look further into it. There's nothing about Windows itself that requires it be reinstalled every once in a while, as seems to be a popular myth (probably perpetuated because of Windows 95, which definitely was an unreliable OS).
Apple makes very nice machines, but they are not the Holy Grail of quality.
Maybe not, but it's been a long time since you could buy an x86 machine that lasted as long.
When I read this, the little false logic detectors I have installed behind my left inner ear duct went off...
How do you know how long today's x86 machines will last? And how do you define this, anyway? The period of time before one single component fails? Or the period of time before the system becomes completely unusable?
How do you measure the actual lifespan of a PC you've just bought? Sure, the QA testers at Dell or HP or whatever do stress tests that are meant to simulate a period of years of normal use, but that doesn't always translate to the real world (as Apple, with all its defects and recalls, should know as well as anyone).
Right now I am typing on an IBM Thinkpad manufactured in 1999. That's five years, and I've beaten this thing to all hell and back. When, exactly, would you pinpoint as the time after which you could not purchase an x86 that lasted this long? 2001? How would you know yet? 1998? My PC's proved you wrong already, and anyway by implication you're saying that older x86 machines are built better. So your statement just isn't logical.
Today, every x86 machine I see is flimsy as hell.
Some are, some aren't. Apple loyalists generally seem to look at the lowest of the low and assume all PC's are built the same way. Thinkpads are tanks, including the new ones, and so are a lot of other PC laptops. I don't know why you'd need a desktop to be a tank but if you really care about a strong case, just buy a Falcon or any number of other brands using Coolermaster cases. One advantage you do usually get with a manufacturer like this is a good power supply, which is almost a universal issue among the major PC makers. But it's not hard to find a well-built desktop PC.
And since they all use pretty much standard components (just as Apple does), component life shouldn't really be more of an issue with one brand than any other.
People need to realize that Apple is one maker, and one brand. You can't compare "Macs" to "PCs" in terms of build quality. You can compare Apple to HP or IBM or Dell or Falcon or Alienware or the guy building white box PCs in his shop down the street. When you buy a PC, you're not buying a computer made by every PC manufacturer out there; you're buying a PC made by one manufacturer (albeit out of a lot of different parts from different manufacturers, but this is no different than Apple). Maybe Apple builds better products than some of those makers. But maybe some of those makers build better products than Apple.
Apple makes some decent hardware but so do a lot of x86 PC manufacturers. No, not all of them, but you don't have to buy from the bad ones.
Granted, it doesn't work *great* with eDonkey, but I've downloaded quite a few files from eDonkey users fine. And having one interface for Bittorrent and a normal P2P is nice.
You're right on both counts, but unfortunately performance is more important than a common interface. For another exampe, we all use Trillian (or jabber, or whatever) instead of individual IM apps, right? Well, what if you had to wait 5 minutes to receive an IM every time one of your friends sent you one? Would you still use it? That's Shareaza.
I'm hoping for big things out of the Shareaza project, especially since it's open-source now. It's a great-looking program - really slick interface (true professional quality), very easy to use, and very non-bloated. But do the test yourself - set up your network with the same settings in emule and Shareaza, then search for the same file on eDonkey and see which download completes first. eMule is about ten times faster in my experience (don't be fooled by the fact that Shareaza measures its download speeds in bits rather than bytes by default).
The same is true for bittorrent and gnutella2 files. The native clients just work a lot better.
It would be great if Shareaza would work out its performance problems, because I'd love to use it and it alone for my p2p needs. But it's not there yet.
I believe the first batch of japanese models had external BB units (ethernet/harddrive) to connect as the newer models have different expansion bus (dev9) verses the older models implementation of pciamca (or what ever that 'laptop' bus is called). In any case external expansion is possible if they have an external bus... Can anyone confirm that it indeed has one?
:)
It does not. The interfaces it does have, from Sony's press release:
Controller Port x 2
MEMORY CARD slot x 2
USB connector x 2
NETWORK connector x 1 100BASE-TX/10BASE-T
DC IN 8.5V connector x 1
AV MULTI OUT connector x 1
DIGITAL OUT OPTICAL connector x 1
That's everything the current model has except the IDE interface.
Regarding the early Japanese models, I have one of these and it does have a PCMCIA slot on the back, rather than a full-size IDE hard drive slot. The original idea was they'd use PCMCIA drives, which were thought at that time to be sort of the wave of the future - there were already 3-5GB PCMCIA drives for laptops (which was a decent size for a laptop in 1999), and Sony assumed the capacities would just continue to increase and costs would continue to drop. It became apparent pretty quickly that it wasn't going to happen, though, and Sony switched to a standard IDE interface for the US model release and then also changed the Japanese model to match.
So the external hard drive units released in Japan were sort of a kludge. The internal and external models were released there at the same time (the IDE version of the PS2 was already on sale). It wasn't the original plan; it was just Sony's way of keeping early adopters happy. IIRC, the external model actually connected through the Firewire port, which was also removed on later models of the PS2.
Of course, this newly announced PS2 redesign has no Firewire, no PCMCIA and no IDE. So no hard drive of any kind.
I'm actually hoping the PCMCIA version of the PS2 ends up as a collector's item someday
Does anybody else get a little annoyed by this kind of thing? 25% smaller, half the weight and an included Ethernet port... enough to be jealous when my brother buys one, but not enough to buy one myself.
Well, I get annoyed at faulty reporting, yes. It's 75% smaller, not 25%, and it's still called the PlayStation 2 (or "PS2" for short), not the "PStwo". There is no such thing as a "PStwo".
(People assume that PS2/PStwo would follow the same naming convention as PS1/PSone... the problem with that is there was no PS1, so there's no naming convention to follow here. And Sony is officially still calling this the PS2; it's printed right on the unit, and right on the new box.)
Not sure if it's been linked in another comment yet as I haven't read all of them, but you can read Sony's press release here.
Will anyone that owns a regular PS2 buy one of these?
I plan to, but then I'm a collector. I'll probably wait until the price drops to $50, though, as it will eventually. Of course, I'm still on a launch PS2, and it could go any moment, necessitating a replacement... or rather, giving me an excuse to buy a new, redesigned PS2 earlier than I'd planned.
And no, this thing does not support the hard drive. There's no interface for it.
You obviously have no QA or Development experience, do you? Maybe in your area coding for "all modern browsers" is trivial, but in many areas it is not. The changes just between versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 are fairly large from a design point of view. If you're throwing in Mozilla, Firefox, etc support, that adds a lot.
I couldn't agree more with this. A lot of people trivialize browser compatibility when it comes to web design - they either say "oh, just design to standards, and everything should work!" or they say "oh, just design to the lowest common denominator - if something doesn't work on one browser, just don't do it at all."
Well, the problem with the first approach is it just plainly doesn't work. Whether or not something should work a particular way in a particular browser doesn't matter - it's whether or not it does work that matters. Every browser renders CSS a little differently, for example; even the functions that actually do work across browsers just look different depending on which browser you're running.
The problem with the second approach is that it leaves you with basically HTML 2.0 to work with. And honestly, that's fine for some sites (it really is), but if you want to do anything at all interesting, it's just not workable.
So the only thing you can really do is just design and code a site for the most popular browser out there and then hope it works with the others. If it doesn't, you try to fix it so it does - but depending on what you're doing, it may not even be possible without tossing what you've done and starting over (and then when you're done re-doing everything, some other browser that worked before will probably be broken with the new implementation).
My last job was working in the new media division of a major game publisher (you can guess which one if I tell you it's the only one doing anything interesting on the web). We designed all of our sites in-house. We built for IE, because up until I left it was about 95% of our audience, and then we QA'd for other browsers (this was generally my job; I was the militant browser dude on staff). Invariably, there were things that either didn't work or worked differently than we'd intended on certain browsers. Most of the time these things could be fixed but it was not always trivial, and it was usually one of three things that caused the problem: CSS, JavaScript, or Flash action scripting.
At the end of any particular project we'd usually spend at minimum several days troubleshooting browser problems. Given that we were in-house you can't really put a dollar value on that, but if you just divided up all of our salaries for that time period I guarantee you're talking tens of thousands of dollars on every project. That's time we could otherwise be spending creating something new instead of stuck fixing something that's otherwise finished, or it's time we could have otherwise used for things we'd have to contract freelancers for (so it did directly cost us money in many cases, and way more than $100).
It's easy to say "well you should have just used standards" and it's easy to blame it all on IE but that's way too simplistic. Because for one thing, in marketing you're not just going to put up a site full of text, you need to use things for which there are no standards, such as Flash. Honestly, if somebody invented something open-source and standardized that does everything Flash can do, and then they managed to convince the world to run browsers supporting it, we'd have jumped all over it. But Flash is what it is; it's proprietary and unfortunately there's nothing else comparable that's popular. So you have to design in Flash, and when you've got, for example (and this actually happened to us), a button in your Flash that is supposed to open a file dialogue box on your machine and it works on IE and works on Firefox and works on Opera but doesn't work on Mozilla and doesn't work on Safari, what are you supposed to do? If you've got an inte
Absolutely wonderful customer relations... "You have a complaint, so instead of trying to fix the problem and get a few customers back, we're just going to remove you from this board and pretend it never happened."
Well, it brings up another issue too - which is whether or not he's actually been "unregistered" by EA. Are they going to delete his name/address/phone number/email address from their records, and give him verification that they've done so? If not, then I can't see how they have the right to revoke his posting privileges - he bought the game, he gave them the info they asked for, and they're probably not going to give it back to him.
So not only are they incompetent, not only are their copy-protection mechanisms idiotic, but their registration practices are apparently unethical too. It may be a minor point in the grand scheme of things, but it just busts my nuts whenever I see a company like this act so cavalierly with your personal info.
Good points-- my biggest problem with the special editions was the new effects being unnecessary or integrating poorly with the originals. The Jabba the Hutt in the first special edition was really poorly done, he looked all blurry and was a different shade of color than the Jedi Jabba the Hutt.
Well, and this brings up another problem with Lucas' logic. The SE's can't be what his "real" vision was even if that is his justification for them, because this scene was originally shot within the limitations that existed at the time. Jabba the Hutt was just some guy with a scraggly beard and a lot of weapons in the original scene; that's how the scene was shot, and the scene as it is on the DVD's is still the same scene.
Now, the problem is time marches on, people get old and their thinking changes as technology moves forward. So you really can't just go back and re-do everything exactly the way you wanted it. Maybe Lucas really did originally want Jabba the Hutt to be this big, ugly, worm-like thing - maybe the dude who played him in the original Star Wars scene really was a placeholder. I don't believe it - I believe he invented the current Jabba for the later films - but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. The fact remains you can't go back. Look at that scene today. It is still quite obviously a compromise because Harrison Ford is too old to re-shoot that scene (and I doubt he'd do it anyway), so you've got him interacting with this worm thing that was originally intended to be a man. Ford's standing too close to him, his arm seems to pass through him several times, and Jabba himself appears smaller than he does in Return of the Jedi.
What I'm saying is this is still not Lucas' original vision, whatever he says. It was a compromise to take that scene out and it's a compromise to put it back in the way it is today. Films are all about compromises; they're never 100% one person's vision because a) hundreds of people work on a film, many of which in creative positions, b) money is always an issue (there's no such thing as a movie that comes in "under-budget"; any film could benefit in some way from more money), and c) technical limitations (including optical limitations that are bound by the laws of physics) can make certain types of shots or scenes impossible. All Lucas has really done here is substitute one compromise for another.
The point being there are good reasons why most filmmakers don't constantly re-make their movies. At some point, you call it done, knowing full well that your thinking, the available technology, and the available money may change later. It doesn't matter, because at a certain point, you just cannot go back and re-do things the way you originally wanted them. Despite what he says about other filmmakers, George Lucas is one of the only people in Hollywood that seems not to understand this (he's apparently been hanging out with Spielberg a bit too much).
I also agree with those that say there was no technological reason for certain things that have been changed to have been the way they originally were. So he's really just making up new stuff as he goes along, he's rewriting the films based on how he feels today, not based on what he wanted at the time. There's no reason Greedo couldn't have shot first back then, and there's no reason a young actor couldn't have been inserted as Vader in the scene at the end of Jedi (of course, you wouldn't have recognized him, but that's not the point - the point is this was not a technological restraint, there's nothing about Lucas' "original vision" in the changed version. It's just a rewrite to get the original films to better mesh with the new ones, and it's unnecessary and distracting.)
What's the point of preventing people from copying shitty music?
It's what the people want.
Well, either you believe the RIAA's bullshit about music downloading eating into sales, or you believe that today's music is not at all what the people want.
Those are the only two possible explanations for the four-year drop in CD sales. And none of us reasonable people believe downloading has had any noticeable net effect on CD sales.
Personally, I've bought one new CD in the past two years. And I'm one of those guys that used to take pride in the size of his record/CD collection; I used to buy at least one or two CD's per week, usually more than that. I've also bought a couple of older catalog CD's in the past year but that's about it. People like me are the reason why the RIAA's sales numbers are down - we're the ones that used to spend all of our money on music, but a lot of us feel like we already own pretty much all the good music that we want, and new music is mostly a barren wasteland of talentless hacks. There most certainly is not anywhere close to 1-2 quality CD's worth of music coming out every week; nowhere close to enough good stuff to keep up my previous purchasing pace.
This is the RIAA's problem, and DRM in Longhorn is not going to fix it. I couldn't care less if I can't copy Britney Spears' next CD - that's not going to affect my life in the least bit. It's unfortunate that our rights are being taken away here but I'm sure like every other DRM scheme, it'll be cracked anyway for those that do find something new that they'd like to rip.
To me, though, there's enough good music already on the market that if I can't rip the one or two decent new releases per year, I've got more than enough to listen to for the rest of my life.
"Timeshifted" is the new "previously recorded".
Uh, well, it's not really all that new. It came about with the inital advent of VCRs.
Well, not really. "Time-shifting", as a term, came about because there was something new about it, namely that you could watch what was being recorded while it was being recorded, but at a different point in time than what was recording at that moment. Obviously, that's a mouthful to say, hence the term "time-shifting". It was new to the digital world, and it's a big deal because it lets you, say, pause live TV and go make a sandwich, or start watching an 8 PM program at 8:03 without missing anything, or whatever. A VCR can't do that. (You'd have to record the entire show, then start watching at the beginning once it's over.)
"Time-shifting" is different than just recording and watching/listening later. So this iPodder thing may be a bit of a misnomer; it may not do true time-shifting. It has to be able to play the clips you're recording as you're recording them, at any point in the stream. Just "saving clips" to listen to later is not time-shifting.
That's what I was wondering. There are several episodes where they refer to the state, and even almost say the state name.
They don't only "almost" say it - in episode 248 they do say it. It's Kentucky.
In another episode there's a line about something being "south of the border", and Bart says "you mean Tennessee?" Which also supports the Kentucky answer - not that it needed to be, as again, it's specifically said in episode 248. But some people believe that episode to be entirely apocryphal - certainly some of it is (I mean the Simpsons are obviously not really a live-action, real-life family as the episode would have you believe), but it's just as obvious that some of it isn't. They did leave that opening for interpretation, but Kentucky is supported in other episodes.
There are definitely still other episodes that contradict this in various ways (Homer's driver's license lists his state abbreviation as "NT" in one episode, for example), but given that they actually say it in one episode, and support it in at least one other episode, I'm going to believe it really is supposed to be Kentucky.
There is a Shelbyville about 20 mi. north of Springfield in real-life Kentucky too, btw, which is more supporting evidence. So either the writers noticed this after the fact and finally settled on Kentucky as the series wore on, or it was the plan all along.
Since it will have a G5 and (if I'm not mistaken) and probably something from ATi or nVidia, so we can assume that it will be transformable into a Mac clone without too much effort.
This assumes, first of all, that you believe the specs that leaked out a while back. Whether you choose to believe me or not, I know they were real at least at that time... which doesn't mean they haven't changed or won't change before the system is released. But for now, we'll assume those specs were/are correct and current.
The problem is, just because it has "a" G5 doesn't mean it's a Mac. It has more than "a" G5 if you go by those leaked specs, it has three G5's, which each handle specific tasks (for example, half of the processing power on one of them is used for the audio decoding). It also has a custom DirectX-compatible graphics chip which may or may not support other API's - I'll bet it won't. And it's got a completely unique memory architecure that takes inspiration from the GameCube's use of 1T-SRAM as a sort of "in-between" cache.
Also, MS told game developers at the same meeting these specs came from not to expect a hard drive built into the system. It may be available as an option, but it won't be built into the system. I assume this is a) to save on costs, and b) to possibly discourage modding - at least making it a little harder and/or more expensive. But that's another barrier - there may not be a hard drive available at all at launch.
The Xbox 2 will be more proprietary than the current Xbox. The current model was designed very quickly to get something out there as fast as possible - hence its similarity to current PC's. The next Xbox has had a lot more time put into its design and will not be very similar to either PC's or Macs. It's true that there's nothing very proprietary about the Mac other than the G5, but there's nothing very similar about the Xbox 2 to the Mac except the G5.
And not much else creates a 4km mushroom cloud.
Some things do.
It would be a huge coincidence for something like this to happen in a country we know is developing nuclear weapons, but coincidences are called coincidences for a reason...
The train explosion that happened in NK a few months back also reportedly created a large mushroom cloud and flattened an entire town. I had my suspicions about that being a nuke blast too, especially after seeing the before/after satellite pictures (the real ones, not the fake ones), but we'd have heard a lot more about it by now if that was the case. Anybody who'd walked through the area directly afterward would be dead by now. So there are large explosions that can create large mushroom clouds that aren't necessarily the result of nukes.
Um, guys.. North Korea hasn't attacked anyone, um, ever...
Jesus, how old are you? Maybe you'd better read up a little bit on a little thing called the Korean War.
The NK's are not going to commit suicide by taking on the U.S.
I'd hate to have listened to you on Dec. 6th, 1941. Or Sept. 10, 2001 for that matter.
I'm not agreeing with the guy who says we go in and nuke them first. But the alternative to that is not to deny that this is a real problem. This is a real problem. The North Koreans do act irrationally at times (especially with Kim Jong Il at the helm), they're very desperate, and there's at least a possibility they'll use their new nuke capability as a deterrent to our power, which will allow them to once again invade the south. They've been saying they want reunification ever since we pushed them back out in the 1950's. What they really want is the south's wealth. This is how wars start.
Technically, the Korean War is not over. This is why we have 37,000 (I guess now 25,000?) troops sitting in between the two countries - because they're two countries at war and we are under a UN mandate to keep them apart. At least until such time that they agree to formally end the war, or peacefully reunite. The North could do these things at any time. They choose not to, while still saying they want reunification. What do you think that means? It means they want reunification on their terms, with their system of government, and their leaders... and the only way they'll ever get that is through another invasion.
The South is in denial about this just like you are. But I don't know how many Pearl Harbors or World Trade Centers or Mauretanias or Archduke Ferdinands or whatever you want to come up with - I don't know how many of those you need before you realize that some countries in this world, and some people in power in very high places, are very dangerous and they will hit you and hit you hard when you least expect it. (Yes, I include George Bush in this statement - I'm not voting for him come November, and I didn't vote for him last time either. I'm no hypocrite, just being realistic here.)
So what should we do? Who the hell knows. It's fine for me to say that, but the problem is our government seems to be saying the same thing. We need some sort of strategy and we clearly have none now. Somehow, someway, we have to get these nukes out of NK's hands. Maybe eventually that does mean military action of some kind. Not yet, but it really depends on them. But this is a country with a bad history, with a tyrranical leader and in a current state of war with their nearest neighbor, which happens to be a US ally. Their nukes can already reach Alaska and soon will be able to reach California. We need to deal with this and not pretend the problem does not exist.
Hey I'm on the right. It wasn't because he was in Vietnam. It was because he voted for the parachute funding before he voted against it.
I'm on the left, and I say the accident occured because the first parachute was AWOL, and the backup parachute refused to report for duty when called.
(At least my metaphor is actually a metaphor.)
Don't you think, in the interest of fairness and justice, that Osama should be tried by an international court instead?
And how would an international court, made up of say, France, Libya, China, Germany, Turkey, Spain, Canada and Greece, be necessarily so much more impartial? I am certainly no Bushite, but even I, as a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, would find the idea of an international court to try bin Laden patently offensive. He committed a crime against me, in my territory and I deserve to have him tried in a court that follows my laws. The crime was committed here, and he should be tried here. Victims have rights too, you know, and that's why extradition treaties exist in the first place.
Trying him in the US would be like letting the victim of an alleged crime be the judge of the accused.
No, because he would not be tried for attacking the United States and he would not be judged by the American people - he would be tried for the murder of almost 3,000 people in the United States, and he would be judged by trained and experienced legal professionals just like every other case in this country.
Obviously, as in any other case, the judge would have to have had no personal involvement in the attacks. It's a judge's duty by law to be impartial; now, not all of them are, but I'd trust a US federal judge any day of the week over any international court, which these days would almost necessarily be comprised primarily of countries not friendly to us and in many cases openly sympathetic to bin Laden's cause.