So what's the difference between CS and CoE?
What's the difference between Computer Science and The Church of England?!
Well, for one thing, Henry VIII wasn't responsible for the creation of Computer Science...
Can't say without seeing it, but are you sure it's fading, or is it just tiny particles of loose skin and grease embedded where you're resting your wrists? The same thing happened to my wrist-rest... (eww..)
Read the article. It's not cigarette smoke; no-one in my family smoked, and my computer actually yellowed more after it was packed away. Similarly, the floppy disk drive which appeared identical and was exposed to near-identical conditions hasn't yellowed.
I noticed a while back that (amongst other things) my Atari 800XL (not my photo) had yellowed badly, but that the 1050 disk drive (again, not mine), which was part of the same bundle and appeared to use the same beige plastic still looked "as new". I doubt varying exposure to daylight could account for all of this.
No, AFAIK most modern TVs can handle 30fps, 480-line video. I think it's possible to get the DVD player to crudely convert, but this isn't always necessary.
Note that the output (AFAIK) is still PAL colour-encoded; that is, the players output 30fps, 480-line PAL, not "true" NTSC.
Bob = informal name for a Shilling. Although no longer used (*) (since 1971, when British money went decimal), the shilling was worth 1/20 of a pound; that is, 5p in post-decimalisation money (**)
So the original poster was claiming we can buy DVDs for £0.30; he was quite definitely being tongue-in-cheek, unless he meant blank ones:-)
(*) Fascinating facts #1! Although the concept of a shilling disappeared in 1971, the one and two shilling coins remained in circulation until the early 1990s, as they were identical in size, composition and value to the new 5p and 10p coins. They disappeared when the 5 and 10p coins were reduced in size. (*) Fascinating facts #2!!!!! That was 12 old pennies (12d)... pre-decimalisation there were 240 pence in the pound. No, I don't remember any of this, I'm not that old:-)
The redistribution of land was simply an excuse for Mugabe to attack his political opponents. By number, the vast majority of those discriminated against by Mugabe were black. His actions, such as destroying housing (Operation Murambatsvina) under a flimsy environmental/social pretext, have little to do with the redistribution of land and everything to do with destroying those in the population most opposed to his rule.
I would go further than suggesting that Mugabe does not care about the country's economy; I suggest that he is intentionally destroying parts of the economy and infrastructure in an attempt to hurt his opponents and cement power.
I disagree; IMHO there's potential for confusion between a product based around TV and a TV channel. I don't consider the two to be "very different domains".
More significantly, there was ITV plc's digital terrestrial TV service, "ITV Digital", which used set-top boxes. Although this was disastrous and went bankrupt, I suspect most people still remember of it (it was the basis of Freeview).
Plus, ITV plc seem to be keen on leveraging the ITV brand, and I doubt they'd take kindly to something which *is* broadly in the same domain using their name.
If MS had actually bought Sega outright and used that name, they would still have run the risk of the company (via its new owners) being perceived as American.
At least teaming up with a "real" Japanese company would avoid this, although it would certainly reduce profits.
Now, next round, what do you think the odds are that one of these three companies will fail, or that a newcomer will push one of them out of the top three? Is the next Nokia going to "N Gage" gamers and knock off Sony? Will Nintendo's "It's the gameplay, stupid" philosophy wear out? Will Microsoft decide to stop hemorraging cash, or *gasp* manage to make a profit? Turn in 2009 to find out!
Do we have to wait until then to find out who shot Bill Gates?
"Cultural Xenophobia" or just a loyalty to their own companies combined with a (possibly inaccurate, I don't know) perception that the PSs have more games to suit Japanese tastes? Who knows.
But there is some truth that the Japanese are biased towards Japanese companies. I've already said that MS probably made a mistake when they entered the Japanese market; they allowed themselves to be perceived as "foreign".
What they should have done (for the first XBox) would be to partner with a reasonably well-known Japanese company, and (a) Have them do some token development on the system hardware and (b) Joint-market the system with the Japanese company's name on it. (For the sake of argument, let's say Panasonic).
Firstly, they talk up Panasonic's development effort, so that it's perceived as at least as much a Japanese system as a Western one. Secondly, by marketing it as "XBox from Panasonic" and omitting MS's name as much as possible, it draws people's attention away from the reality of the situation- that it's basically an American system.
The brand emphasis still has to be on the XBox name, not Panasonic's. Otherwise Panasonic hold the cards if they decide to go their own way for the next gen system- people should want "the new XBox", not the "new Panasonic console". (By this stage the XBox name should be established and able to stand on its own anyway).
This would, of course, require MS to give Panasonic a generous share of the Japanese XBox profits in exchange for the use of their name as a Trojan Horse into that market. But let's be honest, two-thirds of a very large pie would still be better than all of next-to-nothing, which is what actually happened.
And yeah, I realise that this is moot, since the XBox has been and gone, and the 360 is out now; it's too late. But it would have been a thought...
PlayStation sounds more like a videogame console because it's embedded in the consciousness now. As someone said, if you take that association away, it sounds more like a Fisher Price kids' activity centre...
That having been said, I still prefer the name to XBox (sounds a bit too much like the original XBox looked) and Wii, which *still* sounds awful to me.
Ah, that rings a bell... oddly, I used cdparanoia to rip, and it must have been its FAQ I read it in. Had totally forgotten it though; like I said, I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff.
Sorry, I should have made clear that this *implies* that we don't know if we're getting "perfect" PCM (i.e. the PCM which was originally encoded/written to the disc) or PCM with error interpolation.
I also don't know how much hidden information isn't ripped, nor if a "perfect" CD may return different PCM (other than that which was originally written) in any particular drive.
Even if it were theoretically possible to extract all the relevant, unmodified bits from the CD, another issue is that the pits/lands in audio CD-Rs burned at high speed may have poorly-defined edges (due to the speed the laser has to turn on/off), and thus some CD players may have more trouble reading them back, giving more errors, more interpolation and lower audio quality.
No. I understand what you meant, and that was the point I made regarding CD/DVD-ROM filesystems.
With audio CDs one can't guarantee an exact copy of the PCM audio because the lowest-level info we can extract may already have been *transparently interpolated* at a lower level.
I've ripped audio tracks via the two different DVD drives in my PC, and they came out very slightly differently. (Can't remember if the length was different, but the md5 sum definitely would have been). Clearly, one or both was not retrieving the exact information and interpolating.
Intrinsic to a Red Book Audio CD is the ability to extract the audio in its pristine digital form.
(Disclaimer: I am not an audio or CD technology expert. Take the following with a pinch of salt.)
My understanding is that audio CDs can't be copied exactly because the lowest-level information stored on the CD cannot be returned directly by existing recorders.
Bear in mind that the files which *can* be copied exactly to and from CD-ROMs sit on top of several layers of encoding. Even though you can make a copy which is identical at the filesystem level (which is all you care about in most cases), AFAIK the lowest-level bits (i.e. those actually stamped/burned onto the disc) may not be identical. Multiple layers of encoding and corrections mean that this isn't a problem.
IIRC audio CDs include fewer encoding levels, and whilst most players can read and extract the audio information from the raw bits, I believe that some corrections and "fixing" of damaged audio data (*) occur at a lower level than that of any data the CD-ROM is able to return. In other words, the "rawest" audio data you can get your hands on may already have been processed and "fixed" at a lower level.
(*) Not counting mathematical algorithms which exploit clever encoding techniques so that you can still retrieve the uncorrupted info if (e.g.) 3 or fewer out of 10 bits are damaged. (I just made that up, but you get the broad idea...) What I mean is actual unrepairable damage that the CD player interpolates before you ever get it.
Your personal opinion- that is, a self-selecting, non-randomly-chosen sample of size *1*- is hardly sufficient grounds to rebut a comment about consumer opinion in general.
Turn in your geek card if you don't want the fastest, coolest, not necessarily worth the money but if I was rich I'd have it, gadgets?
Depends what you mean by 'geek'; personally, I consider myself a geek, but that doesn't apply to me in a number of cases. In fact, it can also apply to a number of people (mainly men) who aren't "geeks" by any real measure.
Your view is very consumerist and reminds me of "Think Geek", who sell "stuff for smart masses" by flattering those who like to assert their geek identity. Stuff consisting generally of overpriced gadgets and toys which- let's be honest- are often no more than gimmicks. That bloody "Das Keyboard" thing was a triumph of this sort of marketing.
Fun if you like that sort of thing? Yeah. I'm not immune to buying tech stuff because it looked interesting, but I'm not that much into overpriced boys' toys. Those who kid themselves that buying that sets them apart from uber-consumers in other fields need their heads looked at. This sort of geek "identity" is just consumerism, plain and simple.
It all depends how you want to define "geek" though. If you consider that "geek" includes some hacker-ish traits, then (for example) buying a pretty computer case or some new Star Wars stuff doesn't make you a geek in itself. More importantly, if comparing that case with the type of guy who doesn't feel the need to buy lots of SHINY, NEW techno-stuff, but will do original things with old computers, network them together, write his own software, yadda yadda; the latter guy is far more a "geek" IMHO than the former.
Of course, real "geeks" are a mixture of both. Just don't tell me that being a geek is primarily defined by how much money you spend on gadgets.
The Atari 5200 might have been close to a lose but only after sales where so slow and of course the controllers failed all the time. The Commodore 64 really killed it since you could buy a computer for just a little more than a game machine.
Stupid thing was, the 5200 was just a tweaked version of the Atari 400/800/XL computer series (the C64's competitors at the time), but with some minor changes in ROM, custom chips, carts and ports such that they weren't directly compatible.
And then later on they released the XE Games System which was basically a 65XE (newer version of the 400/800/XL) without a keyboard, so although it was similar to the 5200, it wasn't compatible with that. This was probably because (in the UK, and probably several other countries), the 8-bit computers still had reasonable support which was easier to build on than their other current console, the 7800 (not 400/800-derived, but 2600 compatible). The 5200 meanwhile, was dead by that time, though the 2600 Jr was still being sold on the UK market.
Then I saw them selling the 7800 in the UK anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the difference between CS and CoE? What's the difference between Computer Science and The Church of England?! Well, for one thing, Henry VIII wasn't responsible for the creation of Computer Science...
"I hear there's an Easter Egg in the new Solitaire which causes the Queens to expose their tits."
Is this the sort of pawnography that'll have users bashing the bishop all knight?
*21st Century* FOSS?
Hmm... what happened to all the people who learned COBOL circa 1999 to earn Big $$$$$$ from work on the Y2K bug? I bet they've all forgotten it now.
Can't say without seeing it, but are you sure it's fading, or is it just tiny particles of loose skin and grease embedded where you're resting your wrists? The same thing happened to my wrist-rest... (eww..)
Read the article. It's not cigarette smoke; no-one in my family smoked, and my computer actually yellowed more after it was packed away. Similarly, the floppy disk drive which appeared identical and was exposed to near-identical conditions hasn't yellowed.
I noticed a while back that (amongst other things) my Atari 800XL (not my photo) had yellowed badly, but that the 1050 disk drive (again, not mine), which was part of the same bundle and appeared to use the same beige plastic still looked "as new". I doubt varying exposure to daylight could account for all of this.
Interestingly, my year-old keyboard has a white plastic case and keys. However, plastics that appear identical to the naked eye, aren't always so similar when viewed with IR.
No, AFAIK most modern TVs can handle 30fps, 480-line video. I think it's possible to get the DVD player to crudely convert, but this isn't always necessary. Note that the output (AFAIK) is still PAL colour-encoded; that is, the players output 30fps, 480-line PAL, not "true" NTSC.
Bob = informal name for a Shilling. Although no longer used (*) (since 1971, when British money went decimal), the shilling was worth 1/20 of a pound; that is, 5p in post-decimalisation money (**)
:-)
:-)
So the original poster was claiming we can buy DVDs for £0.30; he was quite definitely being tongue-in-cheek, unless he meant blank ones
(*) Fascinating facts #1! Although the concept of a shilling disappeared in 1971, the one and two shilling coins remained in circulation until the early 1990s, as they were identical in size, composition and value to the new 5p and 10p coins. They disappeared when the 5 and 10p coins were reduced in size.
(*) Fascinating facts #2!!!!! That was 12 old pennies (12d)... pre-decimalisation there were 240 pence in the pound. No, I don't remember any of this, I'm not that old
The redistribution of land was simply an excuse for Mugabe to attack his political opponents. By number, the vast majority of those discriminated against by Mugabe were black. His actions, such as destroying housing (Operation Murambatsvina) under a flimsy environmental/social pretext, have little to do with the redistribution of land and everything to do with destroying those in the population most opposed to his rule.
I would go further than suggesting that Mugabe does not care about the country's economy; I suggest that he is intentionally destroying parts of the economy and infrastructure in an attempt to hurt his opponents and cement power.
It's also clear that the Chinese government are supporting Mugabe (see http://www.google.com/search?q=zimbabwe+china and http://news.google.co.uk/news?q=zimbabwe%20china as a starting point). His loyalty is more likely to be to them; not the poor in his own country.
I disagree; IMHO there's potential for confusion between a product based around TV and a TV channel. I don't consider the two to be "very different domains". More significantly, there was ITV plc's digital terrestrial TV service, "ITV Digital", which used set-top boxes. Although this was disastrous and went bankrupt, I suspect most people still remember of it (it was the basis of Freeview). Plus, ITV plc seem to be keen on leveraging the ITV brand, and I doubt they'd take kindly to something which *is* broadly in the same domain using their name.
The problem with HD DVD for porn is that it's only one mis-spacing away from becoming HDD VD, a nasty computer-related sexual infection.
By contrast, Blew..., er Blu Ray sounds *exactly* like a porn flick.
If MS had actually bought Sega outright and used that name, they would still have run the risk of the company (via its new owners) being perceived as American. At least teaming up with a "real" Japanese company would avoid this, although it would certainly reduce profits.
Now, next round, what do you think the odds are that one of these three companies will fail, or that a newcomer will push one of them out of the top three? Is the next Nokia going to "N Gage" gamers and knock off Sony? Will Nintendo's "It's the gameplay, stupid" philosophy wear out? Will Microsoft decide to stop hemorraging cash, or *gasp* manage to make a profit? Turn in 2009 to find out!
Do we have to wait until then to find out who shot Bill Gates?
"Cultural Xenophobia" or just a loyalty to their own companies combined with a (possibly inaccurate, I don't know) perception that the PSs have more games to suit Japanese tastes? Who knows.
But there is some truth that the Japanese are biased towards Japanese companies. I've already said that MS probably made a mistake when they entered the Japanese market; they allowed themselves to be perceived as "foreign".
What they should have done (for the first XBox) would be to partner with a reasonably well-known Japanese company, and (a) Have them do some token development on the system hardware and (b) Joint-market the system with the Japanese company's name on it. (For the sake of argument, let's say Panasonic).
Firstly, they talk up Panasonic's development effort, so that it's perceived as at least as much a Japanese system as a Western one. Secondly, by marketing it as "XBox from Panasonic" and omitting MS's name as much as possible, it draws people's attention away from the reality of the situation- that it's basically an American system.
The brand emphasis still has to be on the XBox name, not Panasonic's. Otherwise Panasonic hold the cards if they decide to go their own way for the next gen system- people should want "the new XBox", not the "new Panasonic console". (By this stage the XBox name should be established and able to stand on its own anyway).
This would, of course, require MS to give Panasonic a generous share of the Japanese XBox profits in exchange for the use of their name as a Trojan Horse into that market. But let's be honest, two-thirds of a very large pie would still be better than all of next-to-nothing, which is what actually happened.
And yeah, I realise that this is moot, since the XBox has been and gone, and the 360 is out now; it's too late. But it would have been a thought...
PlayStation sounds more like a videogame console because it's embedded in the consciousness now. As someone said, if you take that association away, it sounds more like a Fisher Price kids' activity centre... That having been said, I still prefer the name to XBox (sounds a bit too much like the original XBox looked) and Wii, which *still* sounds awful to me.
Ah, that rings a bell... oddly, I used cdparanoia to rip, and it must have been its FAQ I read it in. Had totally forgotten it though; like I said, I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff.
Sorry, I should have made clear that this *implies* that we don't know if we're getting "perfect" PCM (i.e. the PCM which was originally encoded/written to the disc) or PCM with error interpolation.
I also don't know how much hidden information isn't ripped, nor if a "perfect" CD may return different PCM (other than that which was originally written) in any particular drive.
Even if it were theoretically possible to extract all the relevant, unmodified bits from the CD, another issue is that the pits/lands in audio CD-Rs burned at high speed may have poorly-defined edges (due to the speed the laser has to turn on/off), and thus some CD players may have more trouble reading them back, giving more errors, more interpolation and lower audio quality.
No. I understand what you meant, and that was the point I made regarding CD/DVD-ROM filesystems.
With audio CDs one can't guarantee an exact copy of the PCM audio because the lowest-level info we can extract may already have been *transparently interpolated* at a lower level.
I've ripped audio tracks via the two different DVD drives in my PC, and they came out very slightly differently. (Can't remember if the length was different, but the md5 sum definitely would have been). Clearly, one or both was not retrieving the exact information and interpolating.
You bought a DVD recorder simply to rip copy-protected CDs or were you buying one anyway? That having been said, out of curiosity, what was the drive?
Intrinsic to a Red Book Audio CD is the ability to extract the audio in its pristine digital form.
5 &lastnode_id=918089 2 /
(Disclaimer: I am not an audio or CD technology expert. Take the following with a pinch of salt.)
My understanding is that audio CDs can't be copied exactly because the lowest-level information stored on the CD cannot be returned directly by existing recorders.
Bear in mind that the files which *can* be copied exactly to and from CD-ROMs sit on top of several layers of encoding. Even though you can make a copy which is identical at the filesystem level (which is all you care about in most cases), AFAIK the lowest-level bits (i.e. those actually stamped/burned onto the disc) may not be identical. Multiple layers of encoding and corrections mean that this isn't a problem.
IIRC audio CDs include fewer encoding levels, and whilst most players can read and extract the audio information from the raw bits, I believe that some corrections and "fixing" of damaged audio data (*) occur at a lower level than that of any data the CD-ROM is able to return. In other words, the "rawest" audio data you can get your hands on may already have been processed and "fixed" at a lower level.
(*) Not counting mathematical algorithms which exploit clever encoding techniques so that you can still retrieve the uncorrupted info if (e.g.) 3 or fewer out of 10 bits are damaged. (I just made that up, but you get the broad idea...) What I mean is actual unrepairable damage that the CD player interpolates before you ever get it.
See also:-
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=94461
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/cdrom/cd-recordable/part
Yeah? Well what are you going to tell the grandkids when they ask what you did in the Great HD Wars of 2005-2008?
Your personal opinion- that is, a self-selecting, non-randomly-chosen sample of size *1*- is hardly sufficient grounds to rebut a comment about consumer opinion in general.
Turn in your geek card if you don't want the fastest, coolest, not necessarily worth the money but if I was rich I'd have it, gadgets?
Depends what you mean by 'geek'; personally, I consider myself a geek, but that doesn't apply to me in a number of cases. In fact, it can also apply to a number of people (mainly men) who aren't "geeks" by any real measure.
Your view is very consumerist and reminds me of "Think Geek", who sell "stuff for smart masses" by flattering those who like to assert their geek identity. Stuff consisting generally of overpriced gadgets and toys which- let's be honest- are often no more than gimmicks. That bloody "Das Keyboard" thing was a triumph of this sort of marketing.
Fun if you like that sort of thing? Yeah. I'm not immune to buying tech stuff because it looked interesting, but I'm not that much into overpriced boys' toys. Those who kid themselves that buying that sets them apart from uber-consumers in other fields need their heads looked at. This sort of geek "identity" is just consumerism, plain and simple.
It all depends how you want to define "geek" though. If you consider that "geek" includes some hacker-ish traits, then (for example) buying a pretty computer case or some new Star Wars stuff doesn't make you a geek in itself. More importantly, if comparing that case with the type of guy who doesn't feel the need to buy lots of SHINY, NEW techno-stuff, but will do original things with old computers, network them together, write his own software, yadda yadda; the latter guy is far more a "geek" IMHO than the former.
Of course, real "geeks" are a mixture of both. Just don't tell me that being a geek is primarily defined by how much money you spend on gadgets.
The Atari 5200 might have been close to a lose but only after sales where so slow and of course the controllers failed all the time. The Commodore 64 really killed it since you could buy a computer for just a little more than a game machine.
Stupid thing was, the 5200 was just a tweaked version of the Atari 400/800/XL computer series (the C64's competitors at the time), but with some minor changes in ROM, custom chips, carts and ports such that they weren't directly compatible.
And then later on they released the XE Games System which was basically a 65XE (newer version of the 400/800/XL) without a keyboard, so although it was similar to the 5200, it wasn't compatible with that. This was probably because (in the UK, and probably several other countries), the 8-bit computers still had reasonable support which was easier to build on than their other current console, the 7800 (not 400/800-derived, but 2600 compatible). The 5200 meanwhile, was dead by that time, though the 2600 Jr was still being sold on the UK market.
Then I saw them selling the 7800 in the UK anyway.