LG GGC-H20L: PC drive that Plays both Bluray and HD-DVD discs, burns DVD's. Costs about $250
The catch? You need a decent PC to stick it in. (i.e. Either a very beefy CPU or a recent video card with hardware acceleration for HD codecs.)
The other catch? PC software support is still on the ragged bleeding edge. Linux currently can handle *some* high def codecs, but not all. In Windows, PowerDVD remains the only bit of software that can handle pretty much everything. (Other players can be made to work, with hacks, but they almost always run into problems)
The big reason why PC playback currently sucks is DRM. AACS and HDCP to be precise. My projector is supposed to be HDCP compliant, but it isn't, and it's barely two years old! When I first tried to play a disc I got about 5 seconds of glorious high-def over HDMI and then a popup saying, "Your display isn't HDCP compliant bitch! No more high-def for you unless you rip out your swank HDMI cables and go back to analogue like a caveman! How are them apples you thieving pirate!" I had to install software which removes AACS and HDCP enforcement with it before I could use my HDCP "compliant" projector. (Said software can be found with minimal googling.)
So, let's sum up the fancy pants DRM on HD-DVD and Bluray. While it lasted, it prevented people from playing HD-DVD's and Bluray discs on hardware both of these formats were supposed to run on, and now it's broken wide open less than 18 months after the formats first rolled out. What a monumental waste. All they've done is shoot themselves in the foot by making the new formats hard to use.
All that being said, HD-DVD and Bluray are freakin' sweet once you get them working. I was previously running a quadcore to provide me with enough power to massage the heck out of DVD's with ffdshow. A good high-def disc blows that away without any processing applied at all, and on a 720P display! Seriously, find a friend with a high-def display and make them play the new version of Blade Runner on it. You'll be sold on high-def unless you hate blade runner, in which case you should probably stick to Jane Austen novels anyways.
What I would like to see from Sony and Microsoft are some friggin' HD-DVD and Bluray API's released so Linux players and kick-ass Windows players like Zoom Player can properly support these formats. If this was done for just one of these formats, that would be enough for me to start buying that format over the other whenever possible. Seriously boys, if you want to win this format war, you need to just give up on the DRM and start making your stuff as easy to use as possible.
Many/. readers have already experienced the future of music distribution. Imagine a system where high quality digital music (in both lossless and lossy formats) could be found for all but the most obscure artists, and even many of them as well! All indexed and searchable by genre, likeness, etc.. All with download speeds high enough to max out whatever fat pipe to the nets you happened to be sitting on. That system was Oink.
I have subsequently gone to concerts, bought a fair bit of merchandise and even the occasional CD from the artists I discovered through Oink. I discovered a distressingly large proportion of my current playlist through Oink. I say distressingly because the fellow running Oink was located in a country with copyright laws as messed up as the U.S. (U.K) and he was shut down. Oink is now, sadly, dead.
Let me make this clear. Oink was not legit. However, it was *better* than any legit music store in existence, and not because it was free. If the labels could get their act together and offer a service like Oink for a monthly fee, I'd pay through the nose for it. However, the labels simply don't understand the new music consumer. We don't want to pay $10 per lossy album when we have digital players that would take in excess of $30000 to fill at those rates. Some of us (although certainly not all) want to be able to download high quality lossless tracks that are as good as physical CD's so we can enjoy them on high quality audio rigs. As for DRM, none of us want anything to do with that BS.
If the labels give us what we want and we'll gladly tithe 20, 30, 40 dollars a month of absolutely rock-steady continual income to them on perpetual basis. If they ignore us, we'll just wind up on Oink's successor, whenever one finally rises to dominance in the gaping hole formerly filled by Oink. Maybe it will be in a country where they can squish it, and maybe it won't. One thing is certain though, eventually the Oink model is going to take over. Having used it, I just can't imagine going back to the legitimate alternatives.
First, there was the paper ballot. Make your mark and shove it in the box. Labor intensive, but it worked. It still works in many countries, such as Canada. Then came the mechanical card punch. It removed some of the work, but still killed a whole lotta trees. It mostly worked. Then came the electronic voting machine. For the first time since the dawn of democracy the trees could breathe easy! Unfortunately, without all the dead trees nobody trusted these marvels of modern "security". So, they added a paper trail that, in addition to putting the trees back on the hook, made secret ballots not so secret.
Might I make a simple suggestion.
Make your mark. Stuff the ballot in the box. Do that for at least a little while to scare the companies making the voting machines out of their blatant cycle of planned obsolecence. Do you really believe these people are as dumb as they look? How many batches of voting machines has the government ordered in the last few years compared to what was average while mechanical punches were the weapon of choice?
To all the religious nutjobs out there I have one thing to say:
You were shoved headfirst through someone's vagina. Why are you acting so dignified? (source: xkcd)
But seriously, think of it this way.
On TV, children will see many thousands of simulated murders long before they're old enough to buy porn. If they copy what they see on TV, it means death for someone and jail for the kids.
It is illegal for children to see even just one simulated sex act before they're of age. If they do manage to get their hands on some and copy what they see, the worst thing that can happen is that they pick up a couple STD's and have a kid.
Now, which of these things have the bible thumpers made their top priority?
The whole point of being a CEO is that you can loot the company for your bonus, cook the books, slash R&D, outsource/downsize a few workers and then move on to the next company with glowing credits you obtained by making the last company's quarterly report show a short-term profit at the expense it's future.
Very few people own music systems capable of revealing the difference between a well encoded lossy track and a CD, let alone the difference between identical recordings on CD and HD formats. Even then, the differences are subtle when played on the same system. If you think you are hearing an enormous and obvious difference, it is probably the result of a different mix. Don't get me wrong. HD recordings can sound great. They can also sound like crap if mastered poorly, just like any other format.
This, however, is a pointless conversation. DVD-A and SACD are not totally dead, but they're not exactly on their way to widespread acceptance either. I see them as a transitional format for the audiophile, sort of like Laserdiscs were for the videophile. CD's will be around for quite some time yet, just as VHS lived on long after Laserdisc died. The question is, what are we transitioning to? I think the answer is high quality lossless files. I have some FLAC encoded rips of HD music and they sound great, but they're currently not very common. (Bloody freaking rare is more like it!) However, I can see this as becomming the audiophile's preferred format of the future. Computers and media hardware are converging, and these HD files offer all the advantages of other music files. You can have your entire music collection in one device so that you can queue up weeks if not months of continuous high quality music and access anything you own nearly instantly. This beats the pants off of getting up and trying to find that SACD you bought years ago to physically stick it in the player. The only thing missing is that you can't really buy tracks like this yet.
The masses, of course, don't give a rats ass about quality. They could set up a decent home listening rig, but instead buy the latest crappy iPod dock/speaker combo. Who cares if it will be useless junk within a year or two when apple changes their dock connector design? The quality of sound on these docks typically isn't anywhere near being good enough to reveal the difference between a 128 kps AAC file and a lossless file anyways. Ergo, these people can get all their music off of iTunes. Yum! In almost all respects a CD would be better, but being able to order it from the comfort of your chair trumps all for most people.
No, the CD is not dead. SACD and DVD-A aren't going to kill it, just like laserdisc never killed VHS. Lossy file downloads won't kill it either because the quality just isn't as good. CD will live on just fine until high quality lossless downloads become common, rather than the very rare exception.
This incident highlights what is, perhaps, the biggest reason why RIAA has already lost their battle against piracy and the imminent danger the MPAA faces. RIAA could have limited their depredations to only those pirates who mass produce bootlegs for profit. Instead, they went after the blood of their own customers and employed methods that make the pirates look like the good guys. Root kits, law suits, entrapment, price fixing, you name it. The icing on the cake was the knowledge that the only people they screwed over more than the customer was the artists!
Here in Canada, we have CRIA, which actually managed to get a tax slapped on all recordable media, mp3 players, etc.. Ostensibly, the money collected form this tax is supposed to go to the artists whose incomes are reduced by the evils of all Canadians. It's anyone's guess what CRIA actually does with the loot. Their books are not public. The last time I checked, they weren't paying out bupkiss to indie artists, but aren't they our victims too? As a Canadian, all I see is my money being taken away because I'm a criminal by default and given to the buisness equivalent of the mafia. Bravo!
I've been boycotting all RIAA/CRIA affiliated labels for years. The way I see it, every penny spent on one of their artist delays the inevitable and gives them another opportunity to do irreparable harm to our laws. However, I still go to the cinema and buy DVD's. Why am I not as concerned about the MPAA? Perhaps it's because they have, to date, not stooped to quite the same levels as RIAA in going after their own customers, even though they're already the scum of the Earth behind the scenes.
Here's a word to the MPAA. Take a look at the mess RIAA has made of its affairs. You don't want to go down that road.
You don't have to go all the way to Europe to find an example of socialized health care. Try up North in Canada. Canadians generally like to complain about the short comings of medicare. The popular perception amongst Canadians and Americans alike seems to be that, if you're able to afford it, care in the U.S. is better. However, some studies have shown that this isn't the case at all, and the quality of care is actually about equal or even better in Canada in some areas. This seems difficult to believe when you consider how much less Canada spends per capita on healthcare than the U.S., and even more so when you consider that, for that money, they cover everyone. However, bear in mind that, in addition to the advantages mentioned above, we don't have an entire industry of insurance-men and lawyers riding piggy-back on top of our hospitals the way they do in the U.S..
Socialized healthcare works. I'm glad we use it up here and will never vote for a politician that even dares to dream dismantling it. That being said, Canada's system has some drawbacks which you should study and try to avoid. It's a tad off topic, so I won't go into too much depth. However, one of the biggest problems with socialized healthcare is drawing the line between necessary procedures/drugs that everyone is entitled to and procedures which they have to pay for themselves, while at the same time not making it inordinantly difficult to pay for those procedures.
If you want perfect teeth in Canada, you pay for it. Braces are not deemed a medical necessity. However, private dentist clinics are everywhere so this is not a problem. Lots of companies offer dental plans, and you can also buy private insurance very similar to medical insurance in the U.S.. Finding a place that will do esoteric cosmetic surgery that has no non-frivolous applications can be difficult. Facial reconstruction? No problem. Labia sculpting? Good luck. Also, good luck finding a company plan that includes boob-jobs. (To be totally honest, there is one bar in town that has gained notoriety for it's policy of funding breast augmentations for employees. Let's consider them an exception to the rule.)
Another, somewhat chilling aspect of socialized medicine is that the state has to do cost/benefit analysis when deciding what procedures to perform. If an ninety-year-old in the U.S. can pay for hip replacement surgery he or she will get it if it kills them. In Canada, the cost of the operation, the risk to the patient, and the low benefit (a ninety-year-old is statistically unlikely to get much use out of a new hip) may mean that the patient won't get anything other than a wheelchair. This is not a system in which the patient is always right.
Top 100 lists are something that are pretty open to criticism. Nobody's top 100 is the same, nor should they be. However, this particular list fails to mention an unsettlingly large number of the "obligatories" that all top 100 lists should have at least a few of. While this is evidence that the author didn't just troll other top 100 lists and cherry pick the titles he had played, it's also evidence that his gaming experience has some rather gaping holes.
Obligatories from the RPG category: - *Anything* from the Baldur's Gate series? - Planescape: Torment? - Knights of the Old Republic? - Dragon Warrior?
From Strategy: - Some of the Civ sequels show up, but where's the original? - Master of Orion?
Other must-haves in any top 100: - Tie Fighter - Privateer, or at least *something* from the Wing Commander world? - Grim Fandango? (The list is in dire need of more classic lucasarts adventure games)
There are plenty more, but this is the point at which I get lazy.:p I'll leave it to others to list off other "obligatories".
Isn't nitpicking top 100's fun on a slow news day?
The battery is not replaceable by design.
on
Apple iPhone Dissected
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Have you ever changed the battery in an iPod? It's possible, but a royal nuisance. Anyone who has done so probably realizes that Apple never really intended it to be possible. With the iPhone they've taken it a step further by soldering the battery directly to the board. I think that says it all. The only question is whether or not the battery will live up to daily use long enough to last out the contracts people are signing themselves into.
From the pictures on anandtech, it appears that the iPhone uses a Li-poly battery. That's an interesting choice, but a concerning one. Those typically do not last for as many charges as a plain old lithium ion battery. Apple is probably counting on the fact that the people who will lay out the kind of money the iPhone costs are the sort who won't try to nurse a device on for years, but rather, are the sort that will bin said device as soon as the next greatest thing (Hopefully the next generation of iPhone) comes along.
I suppose in this light it's not really planned obsolescence. Apple just built the iPhone to the minimum specs of the fickle trendy gadget crowd.
Funnily enough, one of the most hardassed profs I ever had also taught the introductory assembler class. (except for us it was PDP-11 and 68K) His tests were legendary for their difficulty, and the average was somewhere in the 20-30% range. However, it was curved after the fact and was a perfectly valid exam since there was absolutely no opportunity to guess. He gave us self-modifying assembler code too, without telling us such a thing was possible in advance! He also had a unique way of assigning readings. He would say, "Have you read chapter X yet? If you haven't, you're screwed!" Still, despite his apparent sadism we did learn a lot in his class.
In a later course I had a prof who would run our class through proofs that would span 3 or 4 lectures. If you fell asleep once in that period of time you'd be utterly lost. At the end of his proofs he would often say, "Does this make sense? Does everybody get this? If not, you had better think about dropping the course!" (Somehow it was hilarious in his thick indian accent. He really rolled the 'r' in dropping too.)
That was so fast you have to wonder if this isn't blatant self-promotion combined with a hoax. That or a con job. I'm sure they'll drum up a healthy bit of ad revenue from this little tease.
Same story, minus the input from Geist or anything that even remotely questions the veracity of Warner's claims.
What did you expect? If you follow the money, the Globe has more in common with the american media conglomerates than the interests of Canadian citizens. I'm afraid Canadian citizens are pretty much on their own when it comes to fighting "lawbook terrorism" like we're seeing here. The sad fact of the manner is that our media won't tell the whole truth because its not in their own self interest. Heavily paid lobbyists will con, bribe, or outright lie to our politicians until they try to pass the kind of legislation Warners and the MPAA watches. With our own media utterly failing to inform us, most Canadian citizens will be subject to new laws that are not in their own best interest before they hear a word about it.
Thankyou, american megacorps and media conglomerates, for destroying journalistic integrity around the world and undermining democracy everywhere.
If Raymond had broken U.S. law while in the U.S. then I would have no problem with this extradition. When you travel to another country you must abide by its laws. This was not the case however. This extradition sets the precedent of a citizen of a sovereign nation committing a crime on the soil of his own nation and being extradited and tried according to the laws of a foreign nation.
What is wrong with this? What's wrong is wrong, right? Well, the problem is that, in a democracy, citizens need to have a say in how they are governed. The law is not an absolute and universal code. It is there to serve the people, and the people are therefore responsible for writing the laws they are governed by. With these extraditions, suddenly citizens can be governed by laws they had no say or representation in writing.
If these extraditions are allowed to continue, citizens may face penalties for things that are legal in their own country, or penalties far harsher than their country would normally permit. As a ridiculous example, say that the U.S. signed such an extradition treaty with an asian nation where drug running was punishable by death. (Yes, this example is ridiculous because, as others have pointed out, the U.S. tends to be "more equal" than other nations in this sort of treaty.) Say that a U.S. citizen who never left U.S. soil masterminded a drug ring which was responsible for sending large ammounts of drugs to this asian country, so that asian country requested his extradition, got it, tried him, and executed him. (Again, I admit this example is ridiculous. I merely use it to convey the principle of my argument.)
This extradition sets a dangerous precedent, and I sincerely hope that the Australian government comes to its senses before it's too late. Protecting IP just isn't worth this kind of legal fascism.
hi-fi doesn't really exist in today's marketplace?
on
Return of the Vinyl Album
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I once read a review of a McLaren F1 that included a phrase that stuck in my head ever since, even though it's turned up in countless sports car reviews over the years.
"Getting into and out of the cockpit of this beast requires the kind of agility that almost nobody capable of affording it possesses."
Likewise, by the time you're old enough to both care about audio and afford a decent stereo, your hearing will already have deteriorated to the point where you simply can't hear much of what you're obsessing over.
A young (i.e. under 20 years old) person with both excellent and absolutely undamaged hearing might be able to hear some output about 20KHz, but not much, and not loudly. (The falloff is quite steep.) The average teenager won't. A teenager who has been listening to his iPod/stereo for most of his life won't. Somebody in their twenties almost certainly won't, let alone thirties or forties.
Now, that's hearing above 20KHz. Hearing above 22Khz is an even taller order. This is one of the reasons why CD's were designed as they are. The engineers did their homework and decided that, even with moderately crappy filters that don't fall off nearly as fast as they could, a low-pass at 22.05KHz would be inaudible. I'm sure that with the wide range of human variability there are a small number of people gifted with exceptional hearing who are able to just barely hear output above 22KHz, and perhaps even a small number of these people will retain that ability past their teens. This, of course, is all when we're talking about test sine-waves. I wish any of these gifted listeners luck in picking out >22KHz details in a musical recording!
Statistics allow me to say with near absolute confidence that you, yes you, cannot hear the effect of the "brick wall" of CD's. Your dog might. Your paperboy is a remote possibility. You can't. I would happily slap down money on the table to bet that you could not tell the difference in a blind test between music that has been low-passed at 22KHz versus 40KHz. The effects of the "brick wall" are merely psychoacoustic.
As for the high-end audio market... What city do you live in? I live in a Canadian city of about a million people. (Calgary) This is not exactly LA, but we have at least half a dozen audio stores where you can sit down and listen to $30K+ systems. (Some that cost *much* more.) Everything from high end B&W to local-grown goodies like Totem acoustic. Yes, the audiophile market is not a high-volume one these days, but it never was. Also, the best sounding rigs I've heard have not been analogue. Some audiophiles really like the sound of vinyl playing through the grandiose euphonic distortion of a SET tube amp. My tastes tend towards something more... neutral. If I really wanted to add that much "color" to my music I'd feed it through an audio editor and apply some filters. I suggest you take a listen to a well recorded SACD or DVD-A album. (i.e. Not yet another #$@%ing remaster of a 30-year old Eagles album.) It's a shame neither format is doing very well because both formats can sound superb.
Anyways, whatever gets your rocks off, I wish you plenty of aural pleasure.
A lot of vinyl-philes have this strange notion that an analogue recording is somehow capable of storing a perfectly accurate continuous waveform that is superior to digital media precisely becasue it is continuous rather than discrete. In a perfect world that might be true. In reality, it is not.
Four basic things contribute to the fidelity of all recording formats:
1. The tolerances of recording equipment. (e.g. How closely the signal produced by a microphone resembles the soundwave that generated that signal.) 2. Generational loss in mastering 3. Manufacturing tolerances that affect playback 4. Tolerances of reproduction equipment.
All formats are limited by #1, and #4 is in the hands of each individual end-user. (i.e. If your stereo sucks, what format you prefer won't matter much.) However, number 2 and 3 are biggies.
Generational loss means that if you want to do anything more than slap a live recording onto a LP with no post-production whatsover, the quality will suck. Nobody masters albums in analogue these days. 99.9% of the vinyl being released was mastered digitally and then dumped back to analogue, so kiss that analogue "magic" goodbye.
The manufacturing tolerances of LP's are also a huge issue. When was the last time you picked up a micrometer made out of vinyl? It's not exactly the most ideal material for making something that has to have hyper accurate spatial dimensions. It's easy to scratch, and has a large coefficient of thermal expansion. Just play it back at a different temperature than it was cut at and you're already pretty badly off. The tolerances of a pressed vinyl disk are also larger than you might think, and have the effect of greatly reducing the practical information capacity. (i.e. In theory, analogue recordings contain infinite infomation. If you could record a waveform with even just very very large precision in vinyl, digital media would be useless because you could pack much more data into an analogue pressing. Digital media dominates today. Guess why? The precision of vinyl sucks dingo balls.) Everything that can go wrong with vinyl will have a direct impact on the sound. The lowly CD, by comparison, has built in parity information that allow any decent CD-reader to extract bit-perfect copies that would be identical to the master.
That being said, many CD recordings do suck, but that's the fault of mixing engineers who want to push it to 11 instead of mastering at an appropriate volume that won't clip the waveform. If a recording is mangled in this manner it's going to sound like crap no matter what you record it on.
1. Libs introduce bill that is bad for privacy. 2. Libs lose an election and the Cons take over. 3. A liberal reintroduces said bad bill as a private members bill. 4. We should fear the backwards conservatives?
One thing we've seen a lot of in american politics lately is unreasoning partisanship. If it's bad, stupid, evil, etc. it's something the "other party" would do, never yours. I really hope this sort of thinking doesn't become too prevalent in Canada. We certainly watch our Southern neighbors enough to learn from their mistakes rather than repeating them.
Perhaps a better question to ask is why the mod's didn't immediately flag the original post as flamebait? If you replace liberals and conservatives with Democrats and Republicans it would have been a no-brainer for them.
David Brin is one of the very rare sci-fi authors out there who actually has the background to deal with hard science and the ability to write compelling characters and plots. He has several award winning books (Hugos, Nebulas, etc.) under his belt, but even his lesser works are good reads. While "Startide Rising" is a classic and an absolute no-brainer, a lesser work like "Glory Season" might hold special interest for an all-girl class. (The book is set on a isolated colony where humans tinkered with biology a little and created a female dominated society, but it's done a bit differently than most other attempts at the same sort of story.)
"Beaming an encrypted version of a digital film directly to the theater should also cut down on film piracy and bootlegging, Antonellis said, by eliminating the number of opportunities for people to get their hands on the movie as it is transit."
I find this line humourous. In one sentance they simultaneously assume that their encryption will not be broken or circumvented while at the same time blaming piracy on the mailman!
I whole-heartedly hope this system is implemented and suceeds since it offers obvious benefits to the consumer. However, I also hope the MPAA has realistic expections and doesn't play the scapegoat game when their own employees leak keys so that pirates can decrypt the satellite feeds and distribute the results. People with Camcorders in Montreal... Now the mailman! Who are they going to blame for this one? NASA?
"Putting your own computer together these days with all the options, choices to make, etc. is getting harder than it was 10 years ago."
Think back to what computer hardware was *actually* like 10 years ago. PNP was well established on the desktop, but ISA cards were still in use and there was still the occasional oddball card around that you had to mess around with IRQ,DMA, etc. settings for. (i.e. dipswitches/jumpers on the cards) Linux was a little late to the PNP party too, so you could expect a little difficulty in getting everything to work. There were also a good deal of device conflicts in those days. (e.g. I had a Diamond SCSI card and a Creative soundcard that I never did get to coexist peacefully... Both companies were "aware of the problem" but assigned responsibility to the other party.) Today, you can plug things together and reasonably expect them to just work. How is that harder?
Choice of components wasn't all that much different 10 years ago either. For gaming cards, your choices were 3Dfx or one of several competitors jockeying for second place. You actually had to worry a little about 2D performance in those days too, although that was rapidly becoming a non-issue. Today, if you go with either ATI or NVidia you're pretty safe. (Choose wrong, and you're obsolete one month sooner. Oh no!) You don't even need to buy a soundcard these days since practically every motherboard has onboard sound. You can still buy a creative card and enjoy their crappy drivers and support though. (That hasn't changed much really) Or you can buy a decent audio card. (Why is it that makers of decent, well-supported, sound cards die out so fast while Creative has been with us since the days of the Soundblaster?) There are, admittedly, too many flavors of RAM on the market, but it's not that hard to figure out what is appropriate for a given CPU. There are two choices for CPU's these days, which is truly a blessing. One generally has the edge at any given time, but if you pick the wrong brand your computer isn't going to burst into flames and kill your children with toxic smoke.
Choosing components for an "optimal" price-performance computer might still be challenging, but assembling a working machine is definitely not harder than it was 10 years ago.
I'm not going to claim that Star Trek was the most original piece of entertainment ever conceived. (They could have called it The Forbidden Planet: Weekly) However, it was at least somewhat fresh since nobody had made a TV show quite like it before. (just movies) Some of the subsequent spinoffs managed to carve out their own niches, but the last couple (i.e. Voyager and Enterprise) were unabashedly formulaic retreads. Boldly going where no man had gone before somehow became little more than cashing in on an old idea. Safe Trek. Safe Trek became marginally profitable Trek and eventually TV ratings rat poison.
So what does the franchise need? A couple years of laying fallow after the abysmmal Nemesis? (I am one of the few nuts who dutifully went to see that flick in theaters. I wanted to like it very badly. It was an even numbered Trek episode after all! But what did they give us? Picard expounding upon the appreciation of finer things in life, such as joy-ridding through pre-contact societies in a monster truck.) Well, Nemesis did suck, but its Enterprise that really killed Trek off. Sure, maybe it got better in its third season, but who was watching after the first two seasons?
Now, I'm sure we could debate the finer points of why Enterprise lost its audience for days. However, I would contend that there was one insurmmountable problem with the show that made it a sure fire failure.
TV Series #3 aboard the freakin' Star Ship Enterprise.
The Star Trek universe is vast and filled with limitless possibilities. Why keep going back to the same bloody ship? Give us a border-patrol ship with the rejects and misfits of the acadamy instead of a bunch of the same boringly perfect people. Heck, dive into the seedier side of the Trek universe. Give us a show about the orion syndicate or privateers. Heck, even Maquis terrorists would be a change. (Voyagers crew didn't really count since they were perfectly assimilated into perfect star trek life from day #1.)
Is this against Gene Roddenberry's vision? It's against his vision for the *first* Star Trek show. However, if the fellow were alive today I'm sure he'd realize it's time to move on and open up other aspects of the Trek universe instead of retreading the Enterprise yet again. Just because the setting is less than ideal doesn't mean your characters can't tell inspirational tales. (Likewise, despite its "perfect" setting one could easily critisize Enterprise for turning the Vulcans into hypocritical pricks and relentlessly extolling superiority of mankind like aryan suprecists.)
That being said, not only are we going back to the Enterprise (If not in this movie, certainly in the sequels, profits allowing), we're retreading the same characters! It's possible J.J. could make a good movie, but frankly, be choosing to do yet another retread of the same tired old Trek he's really making things more difficult for himself.
It seems fairly obvious to me. Rap stars need to have "street cred" in order to rise into the upper echelons of rap stardom. That means a criminal record. Say you were a unscrupulous record producer who had a hot new talent on his hands. Say that the talent happens to be a squeaky clean wannabe thug from the 'burbs. Once your man has recorded a record all you have to do is plant some evidence/drugs and make an anonymous phone-call. Heck, if you're lucky those cops might be the trigger happy sort and you'll wind up with the next Tupac on your hands. (Not to mention the fact that your "client"'s contract probably cedes all royalties to the record company upon death...)
It sounds far-fetched, I know. However, one really does have to wonder if the majority of hardened criminals driving the rap industry are actually the sort that wears three-piece suits.
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LG GGC-H20L: PC drive that Plays both Bluray and HD-DVD discs, burns DVD's. Costs about $250
The catch? You need a decent PC to stick it in. (i.e. Either a very beefy CPU or a recent video card with hardware acceleration for HD codecs.)
The other catch? PC software support is still on the ragged bleeding edge. Linux currently can handle *some* high def codecs, but not all. In Windows, PowerDVD remains the only bit of software that can handle pretty much everything. (Other players can be made to work, with hacks, but they almost always run into problems)
The big reason why PC playback currently sucks is DRM. AACS and HDCP to be precise. My projector is supposed to be HDCP compliant, but it isn't, and it's barely two years old! When I first tried to play a disc I got about 5 seconds of glorious high-def over HDMI and then a popup saying, "Your display isn't HDCP compliant bitch! No more high-def for you unless you rip out your swank HDMI cables and go back to analogue like a caveman! How are them apples you thieving pirate!" I had to install software which removes AACS and HDCP enforcement with it before I could use my HDCP "compliant" projector. (Said software can be found with minimal googling.)
So, let's sum up the fancy pants DRM on HD-DVD and Bluray. While it lasted, it prevented people from playing HD-DVD's and Bluray discs on hardware both of these formats were supposed to run on, and now it's broken wide open less than 18 months after the formats first rolled out. What a monumental waste. All they've done is shoot themselves in the foot by making the new formats hard to use.
All that being said, HD-DVD and Bluray are freakin' sweet once you get them working. I was previously running a quadcore to provide me with enough power to massage the heck out of DVD's with ffdshow. A good high-def disc blows that away without any processing applied at all, and on a 720P display! Seriously, find a friend with a high-def display and make them play the new version of Blade Runner on it. You'll be sold on high-def unless you hate blade runner, in which case you should probably stick to Jane Austen novels anyways.
What I would like to see from Sony and Microsoft are some friggin' HD-DVD and Bluray API's released so Linux players and kick-ass Windows players like Zoom Player can properly support these formats. If this was done for just one of these formats, that would be enough for me to start buying that format over the other whenever possible. Seriously boys, if you want to win this format war, you need to just give up on the DRM and start making your stuff as easy to use as possible.
Many /. readers have already experienced the future of music distribution. Imagine a system where high quality digital music (in both lossless and lossy formats) could be found for all but the most obscure artists, and even many of them as well! All indexed and searchable by genre, likeness, etc.. All with download speeds high enough to max out whatever fat pipe to the nets you happened to be sitting on. That system was Oink.
I have subsequently gone to concerts, bought a fair bit of merchandise and even the occasional CD from the artists I discovered through Oink. I discovered a distressingly large proportion of my current playlist through Oink. I say distressingly because the fellow running Oink was located in a country with copyright laws as messed up as the U.S. (U.K) and he was shut down. Oink is now, sadly, dead.
Let me make this clear. Oink was not legit. However, it was *better* than any legit music store in existence, and not because it was free. If the labels could get their act together and offer a service like Oink for a monthly fee, I'd pay through the nose for it. However, the labels simply don't understand the new music consumer. We don't want to pay $10 per lossy album when we have digital players that would take in excess of $30000 to fill at those rates. Some of us (although certainly not all) want to be able to download high quality lossless tracks that are as good as physical CD's so we can enjoy them on high quality audio rigs. As for DRM, none of us want anything to do with that BS.
If the labels give us what we want and we'll gladly tithe 20, 30, 40 dollars a month of absolutely rock-steady continual income to them on perpetual basis. If they ignore us, we'll just wind up on Oink's successor, whenever one finally rises to dominance in the gaping hole formerly filled by Oink. Maybe it will be in a country where they can squish it, and maybe it won't. One thing is certain though, eventually the Oink model is going to take over. Having used it, I just can't imagine going back to the legitimate alternatives.
First, there was the paper ballot. Make your mark and shove it in the box. Labor intensive, but it worked. It still works in many countries, such as Canada. Then came the mechanical card punch. It removed some of the work, but still killed a whole lotta trees. It mostly worked. Then came the electronic voting machine. For the first time since the dawn of democracy the trees could breathe easy! Unfortunately, without all the dead trees nobody trusted these marvels of modern "security". So, they added a paper trail that, in addition to putting the trees back on the hook, made secret ballots not so secret.
Might I make a simple suggestion.
Make your mark. Stuff the ballot in the box. Do that for at least a little while to scare the companies making the voting machines out of their blatant cycle of planned obsolecence. Do you really believe these people are as dumb as they look? How many batches of voting machines has the government ordered in the last few years compared to what was average while mechanical punches were the weapon of choice?
To all the religious nutjobs out there I have one thing to say:
You were shoved headfirst through someone's vagina. Why are you acting so dignified? (source: xkcd)
But seriously, think of it this way.
On TV, children will see many thousands of simulated murders long before they're old enough to buy porn. If they copy what they see on TV, it means death for someone and jail for the kids.
It is illegal for children to see even just one simulated sex act before they're of age. If they do manage to get their hands on some and copy what they see, the worst thing that can happen is that they pick up a couple STD's and have a kid.
Now, which of these things have the bible thumpers made their top priority?
The whole point of being a CEO is that you can loot the company for your bonus, cook the books, slash R&D, outsource/downsize a few workers and then move on to the next company with glowing credits you obtained by making the last company's quarterly report show a short-term profit at the expense it's future.
Very few people own music systems capable of revealing the difference between a well encoded lossy track and a CD, let alone the difference between identical recordings on CD and HD formats. Even then, the differences are subtle when played on the same system. If you think you are hearing an enormous and obvious difference, it is probably the result of a different mix. Don't get me wrong. HD recordings can sound great. They can also sound like crap if mastered poorly, just like any other format.
This, however, is a pointless conversation. DVD-A and SACD are not totally dead, but they're not exactly on their way to widespread acceptance either. I see them as a transitional format for the audiophile, sort of like Laserdiscs were for the videophile. CD's will be around for quite some time yet, just as VHS lived on long after Laserdisc died. The question is, what are we transitioning to? I think the answer is high quality lossless files. I have some FLAC encoded rips of HD music and they sound great, but they're currently not very common. (Bloody freaking rare is more like it!) However, I can see this as becomming the audiophile's preferred format of the future. Computers and media hardware are converging, and these HD files offer all the advantages of other music files. You can have your entire music collection in one device so that you can queue up weeks if not months of continuous high quality music and access anything you own nearly instantly. This beats the pants off of getting up and trying to find that SACD you bought years ago to physically stick it in the player. The only thing missing is that you can't really buy tracks like this yet.
The masses, of course, don't give a rats ass about quality. They could set up a decent home listening rig, but instead buy the latest crappy iPod dock/speaker combo. Who cares if it will be useless junk within a year or two when apple changes their dock connector design? The quality of sound on these docks typically isn't anywhere near being good enough to reveal the difference between a 128 kps AAC file and a lossless file anyways. Ergo, these people can get all their music off of iTunes. Yum! In almost all respects a CD would be better, but being able to order it from the comfort of your chair trumps all for most people.
No, the CD is not dead. SACD and DVD-A aren't going to kill it, just like laserdisc never killed VHS. Lossy file downloads won't kill it either because the quality just isn't as good. CD will live on just fine until high quality lossless downloads become common, rather than the very rare exception.
This incident highlights what is, perhaps, the biggest reason why RIAA has already lost their battle against piracy and the imminent danger the MPAA faces. RIAA could have limited their depredations to only those pirates who mass produce bootlegs for profit. Instead, they went after the blood of their own customers and employed methods that make the pirates look like the good guys. Root kits, law suits, entrapment, price fixing, you name it. The icing on the cake was the knowledge that the only people they screwed over more than the customer was the artists!
Here in Canada, we have CRIA, which actually managed to get a tax slapped on all recordable media, mp3 players, etc.. Ostensibly, the money collected form this tax is supposed to go to the artists whose incomes are reduced by the evils of all Canadians. It's anyone's guess what CRIA actually does with the loot. Their books are not public. The last time I checked, they weren't paying out bupkiss to indie artists, but aren't they our victims too? As a Canadian, all I see is my money being taken away because I'm a criminal by default and given to the buisness equivalent of the mafia. Bravo!
I've been boycotting all RIAA/CRIA affiliated labels for years. The way I see it, every penny spent on one of their artist delays the inevitable and gives them another opportunity to do irreparable harm to our laws. However, I still go to the cinema and buy DVD's. Why am I not as concerned about the MPAA? Perhaps it's because they have, to date, not stooped to quite the same levels as RIAA in going after their own customers, even though they're already the scum of the Earth behind the scenes.
Here's a word to the MPAA. Take a look at the mess RIAA has made of its affairs. You don't want to go down that road.
You don't have to go all the way to Europe to find an example of socialized health care. Try up North in Canada. Canadians generally like to complain about the short comings of medicare. The popular perception amongst Canadians and Americans alike seems to be that, if you're able to afford it, care in the U.S. is better. However, some studies have shown that this isn't the case at all, and the quality of care is actually about equal or even better in Canada in some areas. This seems difficult to believe when you consider how much less Canada spends per capita on healthcare than the U.S., and even more so when you consider that, for that money, they cover everyone. However, bear in mind that, in addition to the advantages mentioned above, we don't have an entire industry of insurance-men and lawyers riding piggy-back on top of our hospitals the way they do in the U.S..
Socialized healthcare works. I'm glad we use it up here and will never vote for a politician that even dares to dream dismantling it. That being said, Canada's system has some drawbacks which you should study and try to avoid. It's a tad off topic, so I won't go into too much depth. However, one of the biggest problems with socialized healthcare is drawing the line between necessary procedures/drugs that everyone is entitled to and procedures which they have to pay for themselves, while at the same time not making it inordinantly difficult to pay for those procedures.
If you want perfect teeth in Canada, you pay for it. Braces are not deemed a medical necessity. However, private dentist clinics are everywhere so this is not a problem. Lots of companies offer dental plans, and you can also buy private insurance very similar to medical insurance in the U.S.. Finding a place that will do esoteric cosmetic surgery that has no non-frivolous applications can be difficult. Facial reconstruction? No problem. Labia sculpting? Good luck. Also, good luck finding a company plan that includes boob-jobs. (To be totally honest, there is one bar in town that has gained notoriety for it's policy of funding breast augmentations for employees. Let's consider them an exception to the rule.)
Another, somewhat chilling aspect of socialized medicine is that the state has to do cost/benefit analysis when deciding what procedures to perform. If an ninety-year-old in the U.S. can pay for hip replacement surgery he or she will get it if it kills them. In Canada, the cost of the operation, the risk to the patient, and the low benefit (a ninety-year-old is statistically unlikely to get much use out of a new hip) may mean that the patient won't get anything other than a wheelchair. This is not a system in which the patient is always right.
Top 100 lists are something that are pretty open to criticism. Nobody's top 100 is the same, nor should they be. However, this particular list fails to mention an unsettlingly large number of the "obligatories" that all top 100 lists should have at least a few of. While this is evidence that the author didn't just troll other top 100 lists and cherry pick the titles he had played, it's also evidence that his gaming experience has some rather gaping holes.
:p I'll leave it to others to list off other "obligatories".
Obligatories from the RPG category:
- *Anything* from the Baldur's Gate series?
- Planescape: Torment?
- Knights of the Old Republic?
- Dragon Warrior?
From Strategy:
- Some of the Civ sequels show up, but where's the original?
- Master of Orion?
Other must-haves in any top 100:
- Tie Fighter
- Privateer, or at least *something* from the Wing Commander world?
- Grim Fandango? (The list is in dire need of more classic lucasarts adventure games)
There are plenty more, but this is the point at which I get lazy.
Isn't nitpicking top 100's fun on a slow news day?
If you must play Quicktime Files, don't install Apple Quicktime! Try Quicktime Alternative instead.
e rnative.htm
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alt
Have you ever changed the battery in an iPod? It's possible, but a royal nuisance. Anyone who has done so probably realizes that Apple never really intended it to be possible. With the iPhone they've taken it a step further by soldering the battery directly to the board. I think that says it all. The only question is whether or not the battery will live up to daily use long enough to last out the contracts people are signing themselves into.
From the pictures on anandtech, it appears that the iPhone uses a Li-poly battery. That's an interesting choice, but a concerning one. Those typically do not last for as many charges as a plain old lithium ion battery. Apple is probably counting on the fact that the people who will lay out the kind of money the iPhone costs are the sort who won't try to nurse a device on for years, but rather, are the sort that will bin said device as soon as the next greatest thing (Hopefully the next generation of iPhone) comes along.
I suppose in this light it's not really planned obsolescence. Apple just built the iPhone to the minimum specs of the fickle trendy gadget crowd.
Funnily enough, one of the most hardassed profs I ever had also taught the introductory assembler class. (except for us it was PDP-11 and 68K) His tests were legendary for their difficulty, and the average was somewhere in the 20-30% range. However, it was curved after the fact and was a perfectly valid exam since there was absolutely no opportunity to guess. He gave us self-modifying assembler code too, without telling us such a thing was possible in advance! He also had a unique way of assigning readings. He would say, "Have you read chapter X yet? If you haven't, you're screwed!" Still, despite his apparent sadism we did learn a lot in his class.
In a later course I had a prof who would run our class through proofs that would span 3 or 4 lectures. If you fell asleep once in that period of time you'd be utterly lost. At the end of his proofs he would often say, "Does this make sense? Does everybody get this? If not, you had better think about dropping the course!" (Somehow it was hilarious in his thick indian accent. He really rolled the 'r' in dropping too.)
...since your answer, while being technically correct, is completely and utterly useless.
That was so fast you have to wonder if this isn't blatant self-promotion combined with a hoax. That or a con job. I'm sure they'll drum up a healthy bit of ad revenue from this little tease.
Here's the one they actually link to on their front page, and the one they will most likely print.
M .20070508.wpreviews0508/BNStory/Entertainment/home
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA
Same story, minus the input from Geist or anything that even remotely questions the veracity of Warner's claims.
What did you expect? If you follow the money, the Globe has more in common with the american media conglomerates than the interests of Canadian citizens. I'm afraid Canadian citizens are pretty much on their own when it comes to fighting "lawbook terrorism" like we're seeing here. The sad fact of the manner is that our media won't tell the whole truth because its not in their own self interest. Heavily paid lobbyists will con, bribe, or outright lie to our politicians until they try to pass the kind of legislation Warners and the MPAA watches. With our own media utterly failing to inform us, most Canadian citizens will be subject to new laws that are not in their own best interest before they hear a word about it.
Thankyou, american megacorps and media conglomerates, for destroying journalistic integrity around the world and undermining democracy everywhere.
If Raymond had broken U.S. law while in the U.S. then I would have no problem with this extradition. When you travel to another country you must abide by its laws. This was not the case however. This extradition sets the precedent of a citizen of a sovereign nation committing a crime on the soil of his own nation and being extradited and tried according to the laws of a foreign nation.
What is wrong with this? What's wrong is wrong, right? Well, the problem is that, in a democracy, citizens need to have a say in how they are governed. The law is not an absolute and universal code. It is there to serve the people, and the people are therefore responsible for writing the laws they are governed by. With these extraditions, suddenly citizens can be governed by laws they had no say or representation in writing.
If these extraditions are allowed to continue, citizens may face penalties for things that are legal in their own country, or penalties far harsher than their country would normally permit. As a ridiculous example, say that the U.S. signed such an extradition treaty with an asian nation where drug running was punishable by death. (Yes, this example is ridiculous because, as others have pointed out, the U.S. tends to be "more equal" than other nations in this sort of treaty.) Say that a U.S. citizen who never left U.S. soil masterminded a drug ring which was responsible for sending large ammounts of drugs to this asian country, so that asian country requested his extradition, got it, tried him, and executed him. (Again, I admit this example is ridiculous. I merely use it to convey the principle of my argument.)
This extradition sets a dangerous precedent, and I sincerely hope that the Australian government comes to its senses before it's too late. Protecting IP just isn't worth this kind of legal fascism.
I once read a review of a McLaren F1 that included a phrase that stuck in my head ever since, even though it's turned up in countless sports car reviews over the years.
"Getting into and out of the cockpit of this beast requires the kind of agility that almost nobody capable of affording it possesses."
Likewise, by the time you're old enough to both care about audio and afford a decent stereo, your hearing will already have deteriorated to the point where you simply can't hear much of what you're obsessing over.
A young (i.e. under 20 years old) person with both excellent and absolutely undamaged hearing might be able to hear some output about 20KHz, but not much, and not loudly. (The falloff is quite steep.) The average teenager won't. A teenager who has been listening to his iPod/stereo for most of his life won't. Somebody in their twenties almost certainly won't, let alone thirties or forties.
Now, that's hearing above 20KHz. Hearing above 22Khz is an even taller order. This is one of the reasons why CD's were designed as they are. The engineers did their homework and decided that, even with moderately crappy filters that don't fall off nearly as fast as they could, a low-pass at 22.05KHz would be inaudible. I'm sure that with the wide range of human variability there are a small number of people gifted with exceptional hearing who are able to just barely hear output above 22KHz, and perhaps even a small number of these people will retain that ability past their teens. This, of course, is all when we're talking about test sine-waves. I wish any of these gifted listeners luck in picking out >22KHz details in a musical recording!
Statistics allow me to say with near absolute confidence that you, yes you, cannot hear the effect of the "brick wall" of CD's. Your dog might. Your paperboy is a remote possibility. You can't. I would happily slap down money on the table to bet that you could not tell the difference in a blind test between music that has been low-passed at 22KHz versus 40KHz. The effects of the "brick wall" are merely psychoacoustic.
As for the high-end audio market... What city do you live in? I live in a Canadian city of about a million people. (Calgary) This is not exactly LA, but we have at least half a dozen audio stores where you can sit down and listen to $30K+ systems. (Some that cost *much* more.) Everything from high end B&W to local-grown goodies like Totem acoustic. Yes, the audiophile market is not a high-volume one these days, but it never was. Also, the best sounding rigs I've heard have not been analogue. Some audiophiles really like the sound of vinyl playing through the grandiose euphonic distortion of a SET tube amp. My tastes tend towards something more... neutral. If I really wanted to add that much "color" to my music I'd feed it through an audio editor and apply some filters. I suggest you take a listen to a well recorded SACD or DVD-A album. (i.e. Not yet another #$@%ing remaster of a 30-year old Eagles album.) It's a shame neither format is doing very well because both formats can sound superb.
Anyways, whatever gets your rocks off, I wish you plenty of aural pleasure.
A lot of vinyl-philes have this strange notion that an analogue recording is somehow capable of storing a perfectly accurate continuous waveform that is superior to digital media precisely becasue it is continuous rather than discrete. In a perfect world that might be true. In reality, it is not.
Four basic things contribute to the fidelity of all recording formats:
1. The tolerances of recording equipment. (e.g. How closely the signal produced by a microphone resembles the soundwave that generated that signal.)
2. Generational loss in mastering
3. Manufacturing tolerances that affect playback
4. Tolerances of reproduction equipment.
All formats are limited by #1, and #4 is in the hands of each individual end-user. (i.e. If your stereo sucks, what format you prefer won't matter much.) However, number 2 and 3 are biggies.
Generational loss means that if you want to do anything more than slap a live recording onto a LP with no post-production whatsover, the quality will suck. Nobody masters albums in analogue these days. 99.9% of the vinyl being released was mastered digitally and then dumped back to analogue, so kiss that analogue "magic" goodbye.
The manufacturing tolerances of LP's are also a huge issue. When was the last time you picked up a micrometer made out of vinyl? It's not exactly the most ideal material for making something that has to have hyper accurate spatial dimensions. It's easy to scratch, and has a large coefficient of thermal expansion. Just play it back at a different temperature than it was cut at and you're already pretty badly off. The tolerances of a pressed vinyl disk are also larger than you might think, and have the effect of greatly reducing the practical information capacity. (i.e. In theory, analogue recordings contain infinite infomation. If you could record a waveform with even just very very large precision in vinyl, digital media would be useless because you could pack much more data into an analogue pressing. Digital media dominates today. Guess why? The precision of vinyl sucks dingo balls.) Everything that can go wrong with vinyl will have a direct impact on the sound. The lowly CD, by comparison, has built in parity information that allow any decent CD-reader to extract bit-perfect copies that would be identical to the master.
That being said, many CD recordings do suck, but that's the fault of mixing engineers who want to push it to 11 instead of mastering at an appropriate volume that won't clip the waveform. If a recording is mangled in this manner it's going to sound like crap no matter what you record it on.
1. Libs introduce bill that is bad for privacy.
2. Libs lose an election and the Cons take over.
3. A liberal reintroduces said bad bill as a private members bill.
4. We should fear the backwards conservatives?
One thing we've seen a lot of in american politics lately is unreasoning partisanship. If it's bad, stupid, evil, etc. it's something the "other party" would do, never yours. I really hope this sort of thinking doesn't become too prevalent in Canada. We certainly watch our Southern neighbors enough to learn from their mistakes rather than repeating them.
Perhaps a better question to ask is why the mod's didn't immediately flag the original post as flamebait? If you replace liberals and conservatives with Democrats and Republicans it would have been a no-brainer for them.
David Brin is one of the very rare sci-fi authors out there who actually has the background to deal with hard science and the ability to write compelling characters and plots. He has several award winning books (Hugos, Nebulas, etc.) under his belt, but even his lesser works are good reads. While "Startide Rising" is a classic and an absolute no-brainer, a lesser work like "Glory Season" might hold special interest for an all-girl class. (The book is set on a isolated colony where humans tinkered with biology a little and created a female dominated society, but it's done a bit differently than most other attempts at the same sort of story.)
"Beaming an encrypted version of a digital film directly to the theater should also cut down on film piracy and bootlegging, Antonellis said, by eliminating the number of opportunities for people to get their hands on the movie as it is transit."
I find this line humourous. In one sentance they simultaneously assume that their encryption will not be broken or circumvented while at the same time blaming piracy on the mailman!
I whole-heartedly hope this system is implemented and suceeds since it offers obvious benefits to the consumer. However, I also hope the MPAA has realistic expections and doesn't play the scapegoat game when their own employees leak keys so that pirates can decrypt the satellite feeds and distribute the results. People with Camcorders in Montreal... Now the mailman! Who are they going to blame for this one? NASA?
"Putting your own computer together these days with all the options, choices to make, etc. is getting harder than it was 10 years ago."
Think back to what computer hardware was *actually* like 10 years ago. PNP was well established on the desktop, but ISA cards were still in use and there was still the occasional oddball card around that you had to mess around with IRQ,DMA, etc. settings for. (i.e. dipswitches/jumpers on the cards) Linux was a little late to the PNP party too, so you could expect a little difficulty in getting everything to work. There were also a good deal of device conflicts in those days. (e.g. I had a Diamond SCSI card and a Creative soundcard that I never did get to coexist peacefully... Both companies were "aware of the problem" but assigned responsibility to the other party.) Today, you can plug things together and reasonably expect them to just work. How is that harder?
Choice of components wasn't all that much different 10 years ago either. For gaming cards, your choices were 3Dfx or one of several competitors jockeying for second place. You actually had to worry a little about 2D performance in those days too, although that was rapidly becoming a non-issue. Today, if you go with either ATI or NVidia you're pretty safe. (Choose wrong, and you're obsolete one month sooner. Oh no!) You don't even need to buy a soundcard these days since practically every motherboard has onboard sound. You can still buy a creative card and enjoy their crappy drivers and support though. (That hasn't changed much really) Or you can buy a decent audio card. (Why is it that makers of decent, well-supported, sound cards die out so fast while Creative has been with us since the days of the Soundblaster?) There are, admittedly, too many flavors of RAM on the market, but it's not that hard to figure out what is appropriate for a given CPU. There are two choices for CPU's these days, which is truly a blessing. One generally has the edge at any given time, but if you pick the wrong brand your computer isn't going to burst into flames and kill your children with toxic smoke.
Choosing components for an "optimal" price-performance computer might still be challenging, but assembling a working machine is definitely not harder than it was 10 years ago.
P.S. I'm posting about Star Trek while sloshed. Life can sink no lower.
I'm not going to claim that Star Trek was the most original piece of entertainment ever conceived. (They could have called it The Forbidden Planet: Weekly) However, it was at least somewhat fresh since nobody had made a TV show quite like it before. (just movies) Some of the subsequent spinoffs managed to carve out their own niches, but the last couple (i.e. Voyager and Enterprise) were unabashedly formulaic retreads. Boldly going where no man had gone before somehow became little more than cashing in on an old idea. Safe Trek. Safe Trek became marginally profitable Trek and eventually TV ratings rat poison.
So what does the franchise need? A couple years of laying fallow after the abysmmal Nemesis? (I am one of the few nuts who dutifully went to see that flick in theaters. I wanted to like it very badly. It was an even numbered Trek episode after all! But what did they give us? Picard expounding upon the appreciation of finer things in life, such as joy-ridding through pre-contact societies in a monster truck.) Well, Nemesis did suck, but its Enterprise that really killed Trek off. Sure, maybe it got better in its third season, but who was watching after the first two seasons?
Now, I'm sure we could debate the finer points of why Enterprise lost its audience for days. However, I would contend that there was one insurmmountable problem with the show that made it a sure fire failure.
TV Series #3 aboard the freakin' Star Ship Enterprise.
The Star Trek universe is vast and filled with limitless possibilities. Why keep going back to the same bloody ship? Give us a border-patrol ship with the rejects and misfits of the acadamy instead of a bunch of the same boringly perfect people. Heck, dive into the seedier side of the Trek universe. Give us a show about the orion syndicate or privateers. Heck, even Maquis terrorists would be a change. (Voyagers crew didn't really count since they were perfectly assimilated into perfect star trek life from day #1.)
Is this against Gene Roddenberry's vision? It's against his vision for the *first* Star Trek show. However, if the fellow were alive today I'm sure he'd realize it's time to move on and open up other aspects of the Trek universe instead of retreading the Enterprise yet again. Just because the setting is less than ideal doesn't mean your characters can't tell inspirational tales. (Likewise, despite its "perfect" setting one could easily critisize Enterprise for turning the Vulcans into hypocritical pricks and relentlessly extolling superiority of mankind like aryan suprecists.)
That being said, not only are we going back to the Enterprise (If not in this movie, certainly in the sequels, profits allowing), we're retreading the same characters! It's possible J.J. could make a good movie, but frankly, be choosing to do yet another retread of the same tired old Trek he's really making things more difficult for himself.
It seems fairly obvious to me. Rap stars need to have "street cred" in order to rise into the upper echelons of rap stardom. That means a criminal record. Say you were a unscrupulous record producer who had a hot new talent on his hands. Say that the talent happens to be a squeaky clean wannabe thug from the 'burbs. Once your man has recorded a record all you have to do is plant some evidence/drugs and make an anonymous phone-call. Heck, if you're lucky those cops might be the trigger happy sort and you'll wind up with the next Tupac on your hands. (Not to mention the fact that your "client"'s contract probably cedes all royalties to the record company upon death...)
It sounds far-fetched, I know. However, one really does have to wonder if the majority of hardened criminals driving the rap industry are actually the sort that wears three-piece suits.