Linux is probably over 50% American.... by functionality, it's probably mostly written by "dirty foreigners", but the American contributors, following their "bigger is better" mentality contributed most of the bloat.:)
Don't take the Nazi comment too seriously; it was a lame joke at the expense of the rumours that Hitler was alive and living in South America for years after his 'death'...
That's not to say I'd be too impressed if I found out Argentina really *had* been harbouring senior Nazis, but the comment wasn't intended in such a heavy spirit.
And yeah, I *do* know the difference between Argentina and Uruguay.
Uruguay is the *capital* of Argentina; isn't it?;-)
Argentina is a great place to live.
There are some places with serious security issues
Yeah, well that's what you get for giving protection to those 'dead' Axis leaders after WWII. Wouldn't want to be anywhere near the families of those guys:)
Damn, you could have a twisted form of European royalty hidden away inside your country... Hitler's great granddaughter marries Mussolini's great great nephew at the society wedding of the year.
Argentinian 'Hello' magazine features photos of Tojo's family at the wedding, happily chatting away with the Goerings
> >The problem, Gates said, is that the information exists, but it is not
> >in one place and cannot be easily viewed in a meaningful way using today's software.
> And, of course Microsoft will sell you their new improved office suite, >MSN search, yada yada, to fill this "perceived" need.
Heck, Microsoft will dis their own software once a few years have passed. Ad in yesterday's Independent for the latest version of Office had people in an office wearing various dinosaur masks; one dinosaur had just forwarded everyone's salary to the whole company; end of the "cartoon" said that "The WE CAN'T GET A GRIP ON OUR DATA era is over".
Two smaller dinosaurs at the bottom of the page, beside the blurb and Office logo were saying "We're still using Office 2000", "Talk about old school".
I'm sure it would be possible to take the mick out of this advert with another guy in a silly Firefox mask making sarcastic remarks about how the MS-using dinosaurs were still MS-using dinosaurs once they'd upgraded.
OTOH, someone probably thinks that sounds like a good idea for a Firefox ad or something; I'm not convinced. Geeks come up with ideas for ads all the time; most of them are rubbish, because they're pandering to *their* ideas of what would be cool, not necessarily persuading the people who need persuading. And I think my idea falls into the same category...
I know ST:TNG was filmed; that's why I said "mastered" on video. I assume that many of the effects shots were done direct to video (albeit at 30fps, not 60 half-frames per second, as it would have looked obviously superimposed if the effects had greater temporal resolution than the underlying film).
I know full well that quality will suffer in cross-format conversion. For example, I don't blame the horrible juddering in pans/credit sequences in US TV shows on NTSC; that's obviously a 30fps->25fps artifact.
I don't know what your PAL-->NTSC setup was, so I don't really want to comment, as I would have several different answers depending on how it was connected (signals, material, yadda yadda). But I'll say this; if you convert from PAL to (true) NTSC signal, you're going to get all the disadvantages of NTSC *plus* (bad) on-the-fly conversion artifacts.
My justification for the suckiness of old NTSC is this; I have a digital TV receiver (DVB-T, not PAL), and the more recent US stuff show on TV is *much* better. Where there is slight softness, it's probably down to the interpolation due to the different number of lines. PAL shouldn't enter the equation here (although the resolution/frame rate of DVB-T is the same, the encoding isn't).
There still seems to be some variation in quality (maybe some is US HDTV sourced, giving more leeway to conversion), but *nothing* I see nowadays is as bad as 1980s/early-mid 1990s US TV shows.
And yeah, you're right about the frame rate in PAL; it's low once you've noticed it. (I watch DVDs on my computer, and my TV is a small portable thing- flicker's generally a bigger problem on large TVs). If I was buying a large CRT, I'd definitely get one that 'doubles' the frames to 100Hz. But with other technologies (e.g. LCD), flicker doesn't exist; and 24/25fps is enough if you don't have to worry about flicker.
FWIW, I've seen some older PAL material, and it *does* look less than brilliant on (e.g.) DVD. But not to the same extent as old NTSC.
Anyway, I bet it'll be possible to process old video and improve the colour quite soon. I wouldn't push the process too far though; TV shows were made with the limitations of broadcast in mind, and who wants to see the joins in the set on an ultra-high resolution version of ST:TNG?
Doesn't surprise me if it was Java code... Java seems to bitch about everything, even if *you* know that the variable will always be initialised (or bail out before it gets there).
NTSC Fuzziness on Blu Ray will still suck
on
Blu-Ray DVDs Hit 100 GB
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Finally..I can have every episode of Baby Loony Toons in HD quality! Thanx Japan!
Heh... seriously, that reminds me of catching a glimpse of the horrid "Tom and Jerry Kids" cartoon on the TV the other day.
Ignoring the quality of the animation (who cares, the show is vile anyway), what struck me was how soft and horrible the picture quality is. And the problem, it seems is... it was mastered on NTSC video.
Now, no-one gives a monkeys about Tom and Jerry Kids or Baby Looney Tunes, but... they will care about ST:TNG.
I had that on DVD recently; it looked really bad. Thing is, I live in the UK, and even when I was young I thought that US TV shows looked weird; the picture was soft and the colour was... not great.
Some of this may have come down to so-so conversion at the time, but as shown by the ST DVD (which I assume would have been re-converted from scratch and would not have gone through an intermediate PAL stage), the problem seems to be with the source material. Even when I first saw ST:TNG 15 years ago, I thought the picture was lousy.
Of course, since the US was the main market, I'd guess they figured it didn't need to be better than NTSC broadcast standard. Nowadays it looks horrible, unfortunately.
(A major irony is that 60s and 70s US shows shot on film usually seem to look better)
The picture quality on US shows seems to have improved massively over the past 5 years (I assume there's been a switch to higher-quality RGB recording formats); which means that Americans are going to start noticing how bad archive footage looks.
And believe me, there's no point putting stuff like that on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they can remaster it to look a heck of a lot better.
Joe Six-Pack might not notice he was listening to mono, but he'd probably feel less immersed by it and at some level feel something was missing.
Then he'd figure out what it was when you switched to stereo... trust me, I'm no surround-sound afficionado, but I can still tell the difference, no problem.
As for the left/right problem; pretty much nothing released from the mid-1970s onwards suffered from that. It was done that way because a lot of older record decks had integrated speakers close to each other. If it's really that big a problem for you, I'm sure there's a stereo->mono headphone adaptor available for a couple of dollars or so.
One strange thing about Neverwhere; it was shot as PAL video and transmitted in this form. I found this surprising; it was pretty rare by the mid-1990s to have unfiltered video for non-comedy drama.
I later found out that they had intended processing the video to look more like film; part of video's distinctive look is the 2x50 fields per second (2x60 for NTSC) which gives higher temporal resolution than film. Around this time, the BBC started messing around with an effect which (I believe) simulated film by giving 25 frames per second instead of 50.
They used it on Red Dwarf series 7; unfortunately, to filter the video to pseudo-film 25 fps, it was necessary to repeat the line above on the previous (interlaced) frame; resulting in *very* noticeable stepping. I hated it; it looked "kind of" like film, but with some of the "clean" look of video remaining- but it was the loss of vertical resolution that was the killer.
They seem to do this more nowadays, but without the loss of vertical resolution (lots of drama- the new Doctor Who included- seems to have a 'film' look- but without noticeable graininess or film-marks; I assume it is processed video).
Anyway, to cut to the point; I believe Nevermore was shot with the intention of receiving the (crude) 'film effect' processing, which is why some people have complained it is darkly lit.
I also believe the negative response to ordinary video may have led some people to have a less favourable response to it than they otherwise would have had; fairly or not, video has the associations of 'low budget early 80s scifi' and childrens TV.
Most of my debt is interest on my computer purchaces from 8-10 years ago.
Did you actually *need* any of that stuff?! No offence, but if you didn't, still being in debt over some toys you bought a decade back is kind of... well, 'nuff said.
I spent $1000 on a scanner because the $500 one I got first gave me slight image doubling.
Image doubling? Sounds like a good deal; scan one image and get one free! It's like you're getting a scanner for $250!
I should be selling useless techno-garbage to gullible members of the public at my local Curry's...
Re:Billie's "odd" use of f and v in place of 'th'.
I don't have a lot of bovver understanding it, but I'm used to them fings anyway...:)
It's part of the working-class London accent. I'd guess that includes the modern cockney accent, but I'm not a linguist nor a Londoner, so don't ask me.
If you want to hear more of it, watch 'EastEnders', if you can. But not for too long, because EastEnders is bloody 'orrible:-6
Strangely enough, most geeks do in fact reject designs that cost more merely because they're fashionable. When building my computer, I hardly ever feel the need to be able to say "mine's cranberry". But I guess tastes vary.
Most geeks? Most geeks want to have their cake and eat it; they want to look down their noses at the superficial Mac-buying aesthetes and think that they're above that.
Yet, I can't think of *anything* more geeky AND superficial than those stupid sticks of RAM with the scrolling LEDs along the top; oh, yeah... I bet they bought them for functional reasons (*snicker*) And that requires the modded case with transparent sides so that you can read what they say, right?
And I'm sure there's a good reason for all the pretty lights inside too...
Look, I'm not having a go at you personally; I believe what you said about *your* computer is true. But in general, geeks can be *just* as superficial as your average Mac fiend; they just happen to like a different flavour of superficiality (Star Wars modded case, anyone?)
Personally, I consider myself a geek (not particularly hardcore, but still a geek), and I'd have no qualms about paying more for a case I thought looked nice- up to a point.
I even remember thinking my beige-box PC looked much nicer with the side panel off, and wanting to leave it like that; but in my defence, this was before the 'rice-boy' case-modding craze had hit, and I've thoroughly gone off the idea now:)
2002 isn't 2005. The XBox is based on PC technology, which has fallen in price a lot since then. It is selling in far larger numbers nowadays, which will also have a significant downward effect on the cost of manufacture.
I'm quite happy to believe that manufacturers may be prepared to subsidise the console when it first comes out, simply to break the market. I'm also quite happy to believe that the profit they make on established consoles is fairly small.
But the 'fact' that MS is losing money on the XBox (and other similar storys about Sony and Nintendo) seem to float around, detached from their sources; which is normally speculation on such-and-such a console from a few years back.
Anyway, *you're* the one who quoted it as fact; why do you expect me to back up your arguments for you?
Which, if we remember the lessons of Osborne, could blow up in their face. They announced the successors to the Osborne 1 way too early--people stopped buying Osborne 1s because they wanted to wait for the "just around the corner" Osborne 2. They eventually got the Osborne 2 out the door, but by then, the company had pretty much run out of money.
Was that before or after Ozzy bit the head off a bat and got heavily into drugs?
With management like that, no wonder they went down the tubes...
Calvin: Well, Hobbes, I guess we learned a valuable lesson from this duplicating mess.
Hobbes: And that is?
Calvin: And that is, um... it's that, well..... Ok, so we didn't learn any big lesson. Sue me.
Hobbes: Live and don't learn, that's us.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is probably over 50% American.... by functionality, it's probably mostly written by "dirty foreigners", but the American contributors, following their "bigger is better" mentality contributed most of the bloat. :)
Okay, only teasing...
No commercials, new episodes, no network censors. I'll be the first in line
"I'll buy that for a dollar!"
Or else I'll download it from Bittorrent like a good Slashdotter if they charge any more than that...
AOL has always been the lamer service for computer morons
AOL's gravestone: "They made every month September on Usenet."
Doesn't look like 'Ninja Burger' do pizza though :)
Anyhow, if they *do* commit seppuku, I hope it's after they've delivered my food, but before they collect the charge...
I still maintain they should call it GNUlix :)
Perhaps not....
Anyhow, what about all the non-GNU software included with the average Linux distro?
Don't take the Nazi comment too seriously; it was a lame joke at the expense of the rumours that Hitler was alive and living in South America for years after his 'death'...
;-)
That's not to say I'd be too impressed if I found out Argentina really *had* been harbouring senior Nazis, but the comment wasn't intended in such a heavy spirit.
And yeah, I *do* know the difference between Argentina and Uruguay.
Uruguay is the *capital* of Argentina; isn't it?
Argentina is a great place to live. There are some places with serious security issues
Yeah, well that's what you get for giving protection to those 'dead' Axis leaders after WWII. Wouldn't want to be anywhere near the families of those guys:)
Damn, you could have a twisted form of European royalty hidden away inside your country... Hitler's great granddaughter marries Mussolini's great great nephew at the society wedding of the year.
Argentinian 'Hello' magazine features photos of Tojo's family at the wedding, happily chatting away with the Goerings
> >High-speed Pizza delivery
:)
> Watch it, the Japaneese are moving into that field. And they have
> a pretty hard to beat guarantee.
I bet the Japanese can't deliver pizza to Buttfsck, Idaho faster than the local Domino's can, though.
> >The problem, Gates said, is that the information exists, but it is not
> >in one place and cannot be easily viewed in a meaningful way using today's software.
> And, of course Microsoft will sell you their new improved office suite,
>MSN search, yada yada, to fill this "perceived" need.
Heck, Microsoft will dis their own software once a few years have passed. Ad in yesterday's Independent for the latest version of Office had people in an office wearing various dinosaur masks; one dinosaur had just forwarded everyone's salary to the whole company; end of the "cartoon" said that "The WE CAN'T GET A GRIP ON OUR DATA era is over".
Two smaller dinosaurs at the bottom of the page, beside the blurb and Office logo were saying "We're still using Office 2000", "Talk about old school".
I'm sure it would be possible to take the mick out of this advert with another guy in a silly Firefox mask making sarcastic remarks about how the MS-using dinosaurs were still MS-using dinosaurs once they'd upgraded.
OTOH, someone probably thinks that sounds like a good idea for a Firefox ad or something; I'm not convinced. Geeks come up with ideas for ads all the time; most of them are rubbish, because they're pandering to *their* ideas of what would be cool, not necessarily persuading the people who need persuading. And I think my idea falls into the same category...
I know ST:TNG was filmed; that's why I said "mastered" on video. I assume that many of the effects shots were done direct to video (albeit at 30fps, not 60 half-frames per second, as it would have looked obviously superimposed if the effects had greater temporal resolution than the underlying film).
I know full well that quality will suffer in cross-format conversion. For example, I don't blame the horrible juddering in pans/credit sequences in US TV shows on NTSC; that's obviously a 30fps->25fps artifact.
I don't know what your PAL-->NTSC setup was, so I don't really want to comment, as I would have several different answers depending on how it was connected (signals, material, yadda yadda). But I'll say this; if you convert from PAL to (true) NTSC signal, you're going to get all the disadvantages of NTSC *plus* (bad) on-the-fly conversion artifacts.
My justification for the suckiness of old NTSC is this; I have a digital TV receiver (DVB-T, not PAL), and the more recent US stuff show on TV is *much* better. Where there is slight softness, it's probably down to the interpolation due to the different number of lines. PAL shouldn't enter the equation here (although the resolution/frame rate of DVB-T is the same, the encoding isn't).
There still seems to be some variation in quality (maybe some is US HDTV sourced, giving more leeway to conversion), but *nothing* I see nowadays is as bad as 1980s/early-mid 1990s US TV shows.
And yeah, you're right about the frame rate in PAL; it's low once you've noticed it. (I watch DVDs on my computer, and my TV is a small portable thing- flicker's generally a bigger problem on large TVs). If I was buying a large CRT, I'd definitely get one that 'doubles' the frames to 100Hz. But with other technologies (e.g. LCD), flicker doesn't exist; and 24/25fps is enough if you don't have to worry about flicker.
FWIW, I've seen some older PAL material, and it *does* look less than brilliant on (e.g.) DVD. But not to the same extent as old NTSC.
Anyway, I bet it'll be possible to process old video and improve the colour quite soon. I wouldn't push the process too far though; TV shows were made with the limitations of broadcast in mind, and who wants to see the joins in the set on an ultra-high resolution version of ST:TNG?
Doesn't surprise me if it was Java code... Java seems to bitch about everything, even if *you* know that the variable will always be initialised (or bail out before it gets there).
Finally..I can have every episode of Baby Loony Toons in HD quality! Thanx Japan!
Heh... seriously, that reminds me of catching a glimpse of the horrid "Tom and Jerry Kids" cartoon on the TV the other day.
Ignoring the quality of the animation (who cares, the show is vile anyway), what struck me was how soft and horrible the picture quality is. And the problem, it seems is... it was mastered on NTSC video.
Now, no-one gives a monkeys about Tom and Jerry Kids or Baby Looney Tunes, but... they will care about ST:TNG.
I had that on DVD recently; it looked really bad. Thing is, I live in the UK, and even when I was young I thought that US TV shows looked weird; the picture was soft and the colour was... not great.
Some of this may have come down to so-so conversion at the time, but as shown by the ST DVD (which I assume would have been re-converted from scratch and would not have gone through an intermediate PAL stage), the problem seems to be with the source material. Even when I first saw ST:TNG 15 years ago, I thought the picture was lousy.
Of course, since the US was the main market, I'd guess they figured it didn't need to be better than NTSC broadcast standard. Nowadays it looks horrible, unfortunately.
(A major irony is that 60s and 70s US shows shot on film usually seem to look better)
The picture quality on US shows seems to have improved massively over the past 5 years (I assume there's been a switch to higher-quality RGB recording formats); which means that Americans are going to start noticing how bad archive footage looks.
And believe me, there's no point putting stuff like that on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they can remaster it to look a heck of a lot better.
Joe Six-Pack might not notice he was listening to mono, but he'd probably feel less immersed by it and at some level feel something was missing.
Then he'd figure out what it was when you switched to stereo... trust me, I'm no surround-sound afficionado, but I can still tell the difference, no problem.
As for the left/right problem; pretty much nothing released from the mid-1970s onwards suffered from that. It was done that way because a lot of older record decks had integrated speakers close to each other. If it's really that big a problem for you, I'm sure there's a stereo->mono headphone adaptor available for a couple of dollars or so.
Oh... and re: the parent post. That was me; I meant to check the karma-bonus (off) box, not the AC box.
Takashi Miike gets my vote
WTF? 'Kiri kiri kiri!'
Princess Leia keeps sits alone in a bare room, with Chewbacca tied up inside a bag in the corner.
Later, she cuts off Han Solos leg with some piano wire.
I'd *love* to see the fan's reaction to that one.
One strange thing about Neverwhere; it was shot as PAL video and transmitted in this form. I found this surprising; it was pretty rare by the mid-1990s to have unfiltered video for non-comedy drama.
I later found out that they had intended processing the video to look more like film; part of video's distinctive look is the 2x50 fields per second (2x60 for NTSC) which gives higher temporal resolution than film. Around this time, the BBC started messing around with an effect which (I believe) simulated film by giving 25 frames per second instead of 50.
They used it on Red Dwarf series 7; unfortunately, to filter the video to pseudo-film 25 fps, it was necessary to repeat the line above on the previous (interlaced) frame; resulting in *very* noticeable stepping. I hated it; it looked "kind of" like film, but with some of the "clean" look of video remaining- but it was the loss of vertical resolution that was the killer.
They seem to do this more nowadays, but without the loss of vertical resolution (lots of drama- the new Doctor Who included- seems to have a 'film' look- but without noticeable graininess or film-marks; I assume it is processed video).
Anyway, to cut to the point; I believe Nevermore was shot with the intention of receiving the (crude) 'film effect' processing, which is why some people have complained it is darkly lit.
I also believe the negative response to ordinary video may have led some people to have a less favourable response to it than they otherwise would have had; fairly or not, video has the associations of 'low budget early 80s scifi' and childrens TV.
If Linus Torvalds is Fidel Castro, does that mean Alan Cox is Che Guevara?
Well, he's got the beard anyway.... I'm now accepting orders for the poster; will dispatch to geeky student bedsits all over the world.
Most of my debt is interest on my computer purchaces from 8-10 years ago.
Did you actually *need* any of that stuff?! No offence, but if you didn't, still being in debt over some toys you bought a decade back is kind of... well, 'nuff said.
I spent $1000 on a scanner because the $500 one I got first gave me slight image doubling.
Image doubling? Sounds like a good deal; scan one image and get one free! It's like you're getting a scanner for $250!
I should be selling useless techno-garbage to gullible members of the public at my local Curry's...
Re:Billie's "odd" use of f and v in place of 'th'.
:)
:-6
I don't have a lot of bovver understanding it, but I'm used to them fings anyway...
It's part of the working-class London accent. I'd guess that includes the modern cockney accent, but I'm not a linguist nor a Londoner, so don't ask me.
If you want to hear more of it, watch 'EastEnders', if you can. But not for too long, because EastEnders is bloody 'orrible
Strangely enough, most geeks do in fact reject designs that cost more merely because they're fashionable. When building my computer, I hardly ever feel the need to be able to say "mine's cranberry". But I guess tastes vary.
:)
Most geeks? Most geeks want to have their cake and eat it; they want to look down their noses at the superficial Mac-buying aesthetes and think that they're above that.
Yet, I can't think of *anything* more geeky AND superficial than those stupid sticks of RAM with the scrolling LEDs along the top; oh, yeah... I bet they bought them for functional reasons (*snicker*) And that requires the modded case with transparent sides so that you can read what they say, right?
And I'm sure there's a good reason for all the pretty lights inside too...
Look, I'm not having a go at you personally; I believe what you said about *your* computer is true. But in general, geeks can be *just* as superficial as your average Mac fiend; they just happen to like a different flavour of superficiality (Star Wars modded case, anyone?)
Personally, I consider myself a geek (not particularly hardcore, but still a geek), and I'd have no qualms about paying more for a case I thought looked nice- up to a point.
I even remember thinking my beige-box PC looked much nicer with the side panel off, and wanting to leave it like that; but in my defence, this was before the 'rice-boy' case-modding craze had hit, and I've thoroughly gone off the idea now
2002 isn't 2005. The XBox is based on PC technology, which has fallen in price a lot since then. It is selling in far larger numbers nowadays, which will also have a significant downward effect on the cost of manufacture.
I'm quite happy to believe that manufacturers may be prepared to subsidise the console when it first comes out, simply to break the market. I'm also quite happy to believe that the profit they make on established consoles is fairly small.
But the 'fact' that MS is losing money on the XBox (and other similar storys about Sony and Nintendo) seem to float around, detached from their sources; which is normally speculation on such-and-such a console from a few years back.
Anyway, *you're* the one who quoted it as fact; why do you expect me to back up your arguments for you?
Meanwhile, the Xbox current costs a measely $150. The kicker here is that it costs $150 to YOU. To Microsoft, it costs a hell of a lot more.
Can you cite a reputable source that shows that MS are making a loss- let alone a significant loss, as you mention- selling the XBox at $150?
Which, if we remember the lessons of Osborne, could blow up in their face. They announced the successors to the Osborne 1 way too early--people stopped buying Osborne 1s because they wanted to wait for the "just around the corner" Osborne 2. They eventually got the Osborne 2 out the door, but by then, the company had pretty much run out of money.
Was that before or after Ozzy bit the head off a bat and got heavily into drugs?
With management like that, no wonder they went down the tubes...
We [Australians] have bubbles, not krispies, you insensitive clod.
For those in the northern hemisphere unable to find those Australian "Rice Bubbles" to try out, fear not.
I've been reliably informed that you can make your own by turning a box of Rice Krispies upside down.
> > You live and learn!
> Well, you live anyway.
Calvin: Well, Hobbes, I guess we learned a valuable lesson from this duplicating mess.
Hobbes: And that is?
Calvin: And that is, um... it's that, well..... Ok, so we didn't learn any big lesson. Sue me.
Hobbes: Live and don't learn, that's us.