You do know that the coffee in *that* case (you are referring to the McDonalds vs old lady case, right?) was being served *way* hotter than normal?
I'm not going to repeat the details; they're mentioned elsewhere in the discussion if you actually want to check your facts.
Or maybe you *do* think it's acceptable to serve incredibly hot coffee. In which case, I'd love to see the expression on your face after eating a freshly-made liquid nitrogen ice cream, and then see if you followed the same logic. Ice cream is *meant* to be cold, right?
and not just going to be easily swayed because of a chemical in their brain.
Whereas with most guys, from the age of 12 or so, we have this chemical in our brain that makes us easily swayed when it comes to sex. All the damn time.
Maybe that's why I never get laid. Hmm. Nice guys finish last.. *Sigh*
Finishing last is definitely A Good Thing when it comes to sex...
Doesn't celery require more calories to digest than it contains?
Shame it tastes bloody horrible.
Tomatoes are one of those foods that supermarkets rip you off on. I've had the "ordinary" ones (not all that cheap) that vary from poor to offensively hard and tasteless. The "luxury" ones can be very nice, but are usually horrendously priced (UKP 1.80 for 7-8 on the vine).
Try Quorn cold-meat imitations. They are tasty and fairly low calory too.
I realised that the reason Quorn does a good imitation of "meat" is that the "meat" it is imitating is usually over-processed and stripped of personality in the first place. I mean, I've tasted "real" sausage rolls (sausagemeat in puff pastry) with a filling that was supposedly meat, but could have been anything.
Yogurt - healthy food? Again, around a 100 calories for a LOW FAT yogurt.
Yeah, but that's still just over a third of a Mars bar; if you eat one instead of a creamy desert, *that's* when the benefit kicks in.
The 19p ($0.34) yoghurts I buy are pretty damn nice for the price and calories. You seem to assume that you can gorge yourself on "healthy" food.
While I think this is a novel idea, for most people, carrying around a boom box went out in the eighties
Yep. And now the eighties are back.
Specifically, that style of boombox is more early-'80s, not circa 1990-91 (when MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were around). In other words, at least 20 years old, and cool if you like that sort of retro.
That's right. Anyone who tells you it existed before that is lying.
Those fish that give you electric shocks only evolved the skill after stealing the idea from the Brits.
Mother Nature, you owe UK plc humungous amounts of money for your unauthorised use of electricity in your 'thunder' and 'lightning' services.
Your type of thinking is the reason you guys are currently up to your ass in the Iraq quagmire
Yeah, I'm glad that there aren't any British troops in Iraq too. *cough*
that and the fact that your incompetent "President" got taken by a ride by Iranian intelligence.
Call me a sceptic, but I see this as more like the WMD thing "not being as good an excuse to invade Iraq as we'd hoped".
And I can't be arsed going into much depth about Tony Blair, save that he either believes the bullshit put out before, during and "after" the war, which makes him an idiot. Or alternatively, that he previously went along with the Iraq thing to preserve Britain's influence with the US; except that it's obvious now that Britain only has influence when they do what the US want them to do- i.e. they *don't* have any influence, and Tony Blair is still behaving like the US's dementedly loyal poodle.
Being a sceptic, I went along with the second explanation, and it's only recently dawned on me how incompetent and one-dimensional Tony Blair is.
Oh, and I am a "Brit" too if you want to call me that.
My scale weight is still about the same, but I've added some muscle mass, so it means something must've been eliminated, right? Maybe it was fat!
Hope you weren't using steroids to gain that muscle; otherwise I'd guess the weight loss came from your penis shrinking...
Agree with your comment about gyms; what I'd like is some sort of device I could use whilst running for playing games, learning stuff etc; the screen should be reversible (for viewing in the mirror in front of the treadmill) and the controlling device should be able to be held (and controlled) in the hand whilst running at high speed.
Secondly, China remains a totalitarian country which has only adopted capitalistic market as a stepping stone on its way back to pure communism.
I don't think that anything approaching "pure" communism has ever been implemented anywhere in the world.
I also think that you're reading too much into this. China is a dictatorship, and my guess is that there is nothing particularly complex going on. Anything that would be considered likely to increase the likelihood of the ruling elite retaining and consolidating their power and privilege will be favoured; anything in the opposite direction will not.
Policy might differ from some other countries in the same or similar positions because the background and experience of those in power, and current position of the country is different; but the aim is the same, and although there may be some in the party elite still keen to return to "communism", I don't see that this is likely to happen.
When I was in college, several of my hallmates installed an alarm clock in a dead squirrel. Said squirrel was left on my hall by a guy's hall, so we kindly returned it with an alarm clock set to go off at 3:00AM. Didn't think it possible, but yes, a girl's hall grossed out a bunch of guys with our fusion of road kill and electronics.
So near, and yet so far. You should have installed a radio receiver inside the thing and have it make freaky noises... nothing too obvious (making it talk would likely give you away), but enough to freak the guys out.
Tux was always so innocent in my eyes. He's like a nice wholesome character you can get all your friends to worship. I had no idea he was a necrophile.
Don't blame Tux- he was sacrificed by Linus in a bizarre pagan^h^h^h^h^hpenguin ritual in the mid-1990s. Nowadays, Linus and senior figures in the Linux community use Tux's corpse in photographs, as a front for their sick activities.
Ever wondered why all pictures of Tux are the same pose? Simple. It's a stuffed penguin corpse. For the variants where (eg) Tux is holding a mobile phone and a briefcase, they place the phone in the corpse's hand and the briefcase in front of him.
As I understand it, a Hollywood dramatisation of these events is in the final stages of production;
Christopher Lee is Linus Torvalds in "Weekend at Tux's".
Does it have a built-in Internet connection that orders more food when you're running out? Does it heck.
It doesn't even have a built-in automatic ice-dispenser. What a piece of crap.
In fact, what is this doing on Slashdot anyway? Which would you rather see- a case-modded fridge with transparent sides, cold-cathode lighting and the ability to download new screensavers from goatse.cx, or a simple device that's going to give the poorest people in the world a better chance of feeding themselves?
Yeah. I know what's important. That glow-in-the-dark pump sure looks cool.
You can feel free to live in your one size fits all soylent world. Go to your car dealership, and say like a simpleton, "I WANT A CAR". I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige you, and fill you out with a nice payment plan that suits your needs without you even having to read the fine print.
Wasn't it Seymour Cray or someone similar who came up with the algorithm for choosing a car which went something like:-
Go to the nearest car dealership. Choose the car nearest the entrance.
IANASOMOW (I am not a statistician or mathematician or whatever), and have not spent hours verifying this answer- *but*...
It sounds like you *don't* want a random selection, it sounds like you want a good mixture from a relatively small numbers of groups containing a small number of songs.
My guess- your selection was random (to all intents and purposes(*)), but if you investigated this phenomenon mathematically, you'd find your unsatisfactory 'clusters' were likely to occur quite often given a restricted selection.
'Intelligent' randomization is an oxymoron surely? That having been said, the (*) above was acknowledging that computers can only ever do pseudo-random number generation, and I suppose it could be taken to mean a better pseudo-random number generator. However, I don't think that's what you meant... what you really want *isn't* entirely random, since you don't want the random choices that cluster a group's songs together, etc...
Crime in England then was a fraction of what it is now. Those were good times.
Have you any evidence to back that up? I was never under the impression that Victorian England was a particularly great or crime-free place to live unless you happened to be rich.
Then, were any footpad or highwayman so foolish as to attempt a robbery or other attack on one's person, he could be shot dead without the slightest risk of consequences (other than a pat on the back from the police.)
Translation: If you were rich, you could shoot anyone under the pretence of self-defence and get away with it. If you were poor, you were likely to get hanged anyway, if you could actually afford a gun and the licence.
Most criminals really ought to be killed by honest citizens, or by the state if necessary.
Yeah, the justice system is reliable enough that we can do that.
BTW, could we have anyone involved in (for example) forging evidence that resulted in someone being executed also be sentenced to death?
Re:Let it be, let it be. My Amiga works for me.
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Also, US DTV is/will be very compressed (with many artifacts) due to the fact that each company will be able to cram up to 15 stations on one channel
When you say channel, do you mean the bandwidth taken up by one existing analogue station?
BTW, there *are* some compression artifacts with UK digital, especially on poor-quality analogue-sourced material. My DVB-T aeriel box *is* better than I remember digital cable being circa 2 years ago, but I don't know how much of that is down to the DVB-T system itself, and how much is down to the box's decoding (you probably know that, for example, PowerDVD gives a *much* better picture than Windows Media Player on DVDs, even though the source is the same).
And yes, there *are* delays compared with the analogue signal, but I'm not sure what can be done about that. The less the delay, the less possibility there is for exploiting differential compression (think about it), and I'm sure that some of the artifacts you see (particularly with fades) could be reduced if the delay was increased. This assumes that encoding is done on the fly; for prerecorded material, it might be possible to use pre-encoded material, but this would have to be mixed with live announcements, etc.
The UK is much better off with their old analog 'High Definition Television System' [PAL] and their new Digital TV system.
Yep.. I have to say that from what I've heard, PAL is better than NTSC- but IIRC PAL was designed with the failings of NTSC in mind and didn't include backward-compatibility (would it be accurate to call it an improved NTSC? I don't know).
I can't fairly compare NTSC to PAL, as I've never seen an NTSC program on an NTSC system. It's often hard to know how much quality was lost in the NTSC->PAL conversion process and how much is due to NTSC itself, but I do remember seeing American programs when I was fairly young and noticing that they looked quite "fuzzy" with weird colours.
Re:Let it be, let it be. My Amiga works for me.
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There is no dirt-cheap PC card to do this.
Of course, when I said "dirt cheap" , it was meant to be relative... It's pretty surprising though, I'd assume that someone could have done it at a decent price.
Television is an analog system, why would you use a digital PC generation method and convert it when the Amiga has analog generation built in?
Don't know what like the US is, but in the UK, all new cable and satellite systems are digital, and free-to-view DVB (digital-terrestrial) TV (through your aerial/antenna) is becoming very common (got it myself).
Now, you *do* notice the quality difference between different sources, and I wonder how much of it is down to analogue conversion. Of course, US programs have to be converted to different frame rates and resolutions, so the loss could be occurring there, but some recent US stuff I've seen appears to be *way* better than I'd assume NTSC-sourced material would be (cf. some stuff that still displays fuzziness and analogue artifacts). This may be because it remained digital.
OTOH, I doubt this is an issue for the average US cable operator yet, since they won't be requiring the same standards as a major network.
I totally agree that Microsoft *and Intel* have retarded the state of the art by at least 15 years. There have been so many other worthwhile, efficient CPU architectures (MIPS, Alpha, 680x0) that have gone by the wayside, while the bloated hulk of x86 keeps rolling on.
Absolutely; but do Intel have a real choice? Even if you accept the argument that Itanium was obselete on release and has design-by-committee-itis, would its being better have allowed it to see off AMD's x86-64 CPUs?
All I can say is that Intel must have some incredible engineers working for them, to keep cranking out improved performance from the x86 architecture whilst still maintaining compatibility with the old stuff.
That having been said, why don't they just include the deprecated x86 instructions for compatibility, but not worry about the performance? In other words, "If your compiler is stupid enough to use these instructions, your program will work, but the performance will suck."
Ten, fifteen, twenty year-old code will run way faster than it was originally intended (or required) to, and modern code shouldn't be using it anyway.
Having thought about this, I guess one major problem with the x86 is the unwieldy instruction formats themselves; the problem having spread through the architecture, the new instructions would have to have an entirely new format, and code would not be able to use the old instructions for fear of messing up the pipelining. But this would effectively entail replacing all the existing x86 instructions. And including support for the new instructions, no matter how good, would probably require sacrificing some performance on existing code using the old instructions. The 'new' chip would appear to suck in benchmarks, and get trounced by an x86-with-ten-more-variable-length instructions when running existing code; which is to say *all* x86 code currently out there.
Get a reputation for bundling nice things and I'd subscribe for 30-40 a year with no troubles. GIve me a few well written articles, throw a few quid at some OSS dev teams from time to time and the fluffiness gets even better.
You had noticed that the UK Linux mags are already 6 quid for a slim magazine with one or two (IIRC) coverdiscs, right? Even with the subscriber discount, that's likely to be more than your "30-40 quid", and I can't see anyone doing a Linux mag for much less.
One other thing; why do UK computer mags charge so much more for the DVD edition? A lot of the time they seem to charge UKP 2.00 ($3.50 or so) more and simply add on some trial/freely-available software jumble; or, even more pointless, include a single "classic" episode of Thunderbirds or something. I've had a DVD drive for ages, and I've only ever bought the DVD edition of a magazine once- and that was because it had Red Hat Linux 9 on it.
At least fairies have some form of defined meaning. The problem I have with arguments about the existence of God in general is when they start taking on a pseudo-scientific tone. I say pseudo-scientific, because for all the "logic" in these discussions, I don't think I've ever heard someone define exactly what 'God' is when they ask "Do you believe in God?", or even "Do you believe in a higher being?"
That's a seriously fundamental flaw from a scientific point-of-view, don't you think?
Do I believe in what? A more intelligent form of life? A more powerful form of life? One that has our interests at heart, or one that controls us? What?
I can't deny that one or any of those things might exist, but that's not what was usually asked.
And yes, Dawkin's argument is still very good; if God exists in any one of those "scientific" definitions I gave above, then I'm an agnostic. In a scientific sense of course; and the Dawkins argument still applies.
But really, to say you're "agnostic" usually means that you're an agnostic in the I-just-feel-there-might-be-someone-out-there sense, and in that sense, science doesn't enter into it. I love (cough) all the touchy-feely "scientific" arguments that say the universe is so wonderful that it couldn't have existed without some guiding force, so there must be a God. Pseudo-science at its worst.
supposing that we get some svg version of asteroids shipping with those new o/s installs... nice!
No. Asteroids is great, but Atari/Infogrames will sue the ass off anyone who puts out an authentic copy, and very few not-quite-Asteroids clones do anything except look third-rate and suck.
Well, certainly movie DVDs are that way - I'd imagine they'll get around to the double-sided burnable variety soon enough, but having to turn over a disc to use the other side went out of favour back in the old days of 5.25" floppies.
I've had a fantastic idea; maybe it's already possible to use both sides of writable CDs and DVDs in the same way that you could do it with 5.25" floppies- you cut a great big notch at the edge.
I definitely think that you should try this excellent tip on your collection of "backed up" movies and MP3s this instant (*).
A great idea in theory, but how would they track the amount of help that you did in a way that would be one hundred percent hack proof?
Obfuscate the work being done and insert test/checking operations between the 'real' work operations. Verify that the results of the test operations were what would be expected if they had been carried out.
Do not reveal what the test operations are (or even what the 'real' work is). Do not reveal what percentage of operations are test operations. Change the test operations arbitrarily. Note any discrepancies immediately, and check recent results supplied from that source.
It wouldn't be 100% hack-proof, but it would be a major PITA to hack; since you are only being asked to carry out a set of operations without knowing what they are, the payers can change obfuscation algorithms, and the nature/quantity of test/check routines around any time they like, *without notice*.
If this is done, the major weakness would be payers getting lazy; i.e. not altering the nature of the check routines, or using weak/consistent obfuscation.
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I didn't know the coffee was hot
You do know that the coffee in *that* case (you are referring to the McDonalds vs old lady case, right?) was being served *way* hotter than normal?
I'm not going to repeat the details; they're mentioned elsewhere in the discussion if you actually want to check your facts.
Or maybe you *do* think it's acceptable to serve incredibly hot coffee. In which case, I'd love to see the expression on your face after eating a freshly-made liquid nitrogen ice cream, and then see if you followed the same logic. Ice cream is *meant* to be cold, right?
and not just going to be easily swayed because of a chemical in their brain.
Whereas with most guys, from the age of 12 or so, we have this chemical in our brain that makes us easily swayed when it comes to sex. All the damn time.
Maybe that's why I never get laid. Hmm. Nice guys finish last.. *Sigh*
Finishing last is definitely A Good Thing when it comes to sex...
But having done the sums I know I *can* gorge myself on healthy food like salad.
Yeah, but so long as you stay away from those nice-but-fatty dressings, bacon bits, croutons, etc. etc.
Which I guess means you *can* still gorge yourself on lettuce. Mmmmm... yum yum! Oddly, I've never had the desire to do that.
The same goes for... celery
Doesn't celery require more calories to digest than it contains?
Shame it tastes bloody horrible.
Tomatoes are one of those foods that supermarkets rip you off on. I've had the "ordinary" ones (not all that cheap) that vary from poor to offensively hard and tasteless. The "luxury" ones can be very nice, but are usually horrendously priced (UKP 1.80 for 7-8 on the vine).
Try Quorn cold-meat imitations. They are tasty and fairly low calory too.
I realised that the reason Quorn does a good imitation of "meat" is that the "meat" it is imitating is usually over-processed and stripped of personality in the first place. I mean, I've tasted "real" sausage rolls (sausagemeat in puff pastry) with a filling that was supposedly meat, but could have been anything.
Yogurt - healthy food? Again, around a 100 calories for a LOW FAT yogurt.
Yeah, but that's still just over a third of a Mars bar; if you eat one instead of a creamy desert, *that's* when the benefit kicks in.
The 19p ($0.34) yoghurts I buy are pretty damn nice for the price and calories. You seem to assume that you can gorge yourself on "healthy" food.
Yes it does run Linux - and plays your old cassette tapes as well!!
I'm having disturbing flashbacks of trying to load programs from cassette on my Atari 800XL.
"Load Error - Please Try Other Side". Nooo... someone please, make it stop.
Wouldn't it be sick if they made you boot Linux from a cassette drive- at 600 baud?
Sod that- I'm saving my pennies for the 120KB-capacity floppy drive...
While I think this is a novel idea, for most people, carrying around a boom box went out in the eighties
Yep. And now the eighties are back.
Specifically, that style of boombox is more early-'80s, not circa 1990-91 (when MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice were around). In other words, at least 20 years old, and cool if you like that sort of retro.
And we Brits invented electricity
That's right. Anyone who tells you it existed before that is lying.
Those fish that give you electric shocks only evolved the skill after stealing the idea from the Brits.
Mother Nature, you owe UK plc humungous amounts of money for your unauthorised use of electricity in your 'thunder' and 'lightning' services.
Your type of thinking is the reason you guys are currently up to your ass in the Iraq quagmire
Yeah, I'm glad that there aren't any British troops in Iraq too. *cough*
that and the fact that your incompetent "President" got taken by a ride by Iranian intelligence.
Call me a sceptic, but I see this as more like the WMD thing "not being as good an excuse to invade Iraq as we'd hoped".
And I can't be arsed going into much depth about Tony Blair, save that he either believes the bullshit put out before, during and "after" the war, which makes him an idiot. Or alternatively, that he previously went along with the Iraq thing to preserve Britain's influence with the US; except that it's obvious now that Britain only has influence when they do what the US want them to do- i.e. they *don't* have any influence, and Tony Blair is still behaving like the US's dementedly loyal poodle.
Being a sceptic, I went along with the second explanation, and it's only recently dawned on me how incompetent and one-dimensional Tony Blair is.
Oh, and I am a "Brit" too if you want to call me that.
My scale weight is still about the same, but I've added some muscle mass, so it means something must've been eliminated, right? Maybe it was fat!
Hope you weren't using steroids to gain that muscle; otherwise I'd guess the weight loss came from your penis shrinking...
Agree with your comment about gyms; what I'd like is some sort of device I could use whilst running for playing games, learning stuff etc; the screen should be reversible (for viewing in the mirror in front of the treadmill) and the controlling device should be able to be held (and controlled) in the hand whilst running at high speed.
Secondly, China remains a totalitarian country which has only adopted capitalistic market as a stepping stone on its way back to pure communism.
I don't think that anything approaching "pure" communism has ever been implemented anywhere in the world.
I also think that you're reading too much into this. China is a dictatorship, and my guess is that there is nothing particularly complex going on. Anything that would be considered likely to increase the likelihood of the ruling elite retaining and consolidating their power and privilege will be favoured; anything in the opposite direction will not.
Policy might differ from some other countries in the same or similar positions because the background and experience of those in power, and current position of the country is different; but the aim is the same, and although there may be some in the party elite still keen to return to "communism", I don't see that this is likely to happen.
Giving it a catchy name doesn't make it any more fashionable or acceptable.
The fact that there are whole swathes of the advertising industry devoted to just that would suggest that this is untrue.
OTOH, given some of the bullshit names and terms they come out with, I wish it weren't.
You have to go pretty far to shock or gross out that hall
So you reckon that if they'd crossed the mafia, the horse's head would be taken as a gross-out prank?
When I was in college, several of my hallmates installed an alarm clock in a dead squirrel. Said squirrel was left on my hall by a guy's hall, so we kindly returned it with an alarm clock set to go off at 3:00AM. Didn't think it possible, but yes, a girl's hall grossed out a bunch of guys with our fusion of road kill and electronics.
So near, and yet so far. You should have installed a radio receiver inside the thing and have it make freaky noises... nothing too obvious (making it talk would likely give you away), but enough to freak the guys out.
Tux was always so innocent in my eyes. He's like a nice wholesome character you can get all your friends to worship. I had no idea he was a necrophile.
Don't blame Tux- he was sacrificed by Linus in a bizarre pagan^h^h^h^h^hpenguin ritual in the mid-1990s. Nowadays, Linus and senior figures in the Linux community use Tux's corpse in photographs, as a front for their sick activities.
Ever wondered why all pictures of Tux are the same pose? Simple. It's a stuffed penguin corpse. For the variants where (eg) Tux is holding a mobile phone and a briefcase, they place the phone in the corpse's hand and the briefcase in front of him.
As I understand it, a Hollywood dramatisation of these events is in the final stages of production;
Christopher Lee is Linus Torvalds in "Weekend at Tux's".
Does it have a built-in Internet connection that orders more food when you're running out? Does it heck.
It doesn't even have a built-in automatic ice-dispenser. What a piece of crap.
In fact, what is this doing on Slashdot anyway? Which would you rather see- a case-modded fridge with transparent sides, cold-cathode lighting and the ability to download new screensavers from goatse.cx, or a simple device that's going to give the poorest people in the world a better chance of feeding themselves?
Yeah. I know what's important. That glow-in-the-dark pump sure looks cool.
You can feel free to live in your one size fits all soylent world. Go to your car dealership, and say like a simpleton, "I WANT A CAR". I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige you, and fill you out with a nice payment plan that suits your needs without you even having to read the fine print.
Wasn't it Seymour Cray or someone similar who came up with the algorithm for choosing a car which went something like:-
Go to the nearest car dealership. Choose the car nearest the entrance.
Whoever it was, it wasn't a Joe Sixpack.
IANASOMOW (I am not a statistician or mathematician or whatever), and have not spent hours verifying this answer- *but*...
It sounds like you *don't* want a random selection, it sounds like you want a good mixture from a relatively small numbers of groups containing a small number of songs.
My guess- your selection was random (to all intents and purposes(*)), but if you investigated this phenomenon mathematically, you'd find your unsatisfactory 'clusters' were likely to occur quite often given a restricted selection.
'Intelligent' randomization is an oxymoron surely? That having been said, the (*) above was acknowledging that computers can only ever do pseudo-random number generation, and I suppose it could be taken to mean a better pseudo-random number generator. However, I don't think that's what you meant... what you really want *isn't* entirely random, since you don't want the random choices that cluster a group's songs together, etc...
Crime in England then was a fraction of what it is now. Those were good times.
Have you any evidence to back that up? I was never under the impression that Victorian England was a particularly great or crime-free place to live unless you happened to be rich.
Then, were any footpad or highwayman so foolish as to attempt a robbery or other attack on one's person, he could be shot dead without the slightest risk of consequences (other than a pat on the back from the police.)
Translation: If you were rich, you could shoot anyone under the pretence of self-defence and get away with it. If you were poor, you were likely to get hanged anyway, if you could actually afford a gun and the licence.
Most criminals really ought to be killed by honest citizens, or by the state if necessary.
Yeah, the justice system is reliable enough that we can do that.
BTW, could we have anyone involved in (for example) forging evidence that resulted in someone being executed also be sentenced to death?
Also, US DTV is/will be very compressed (with many artifacts) due to the fact that each company will be able to cram up to 15 stations on one channel
When you say channel, do you mean the bandwidth taken up by one existing analogue station?
BTW, there *are* some compression artifacts with UK digital, especially on poor-quality analogue-sourced material. My DVB-T aeriel box *is* better than I remember digital cable being circa 2 years ago, but I don't know how much of that is down to the DVB-T system itself, and how much is down to the box's decoding (you probably know that, for example, PowerDVD gives a *much* better picture than Windows Media Player on DVDs, even though the source is the same).
And yes, there *are* delays compared with the analogue signal, but I'm not sure what can be done about that. The less the delay, the less possibility there is for exploiting differential compression (think about it), and I'm sure that some of the artifacts you see (particularly with fades) could be reduced if the delay was increased. This assumes that encoding is done on the fly; for prerecorded material, it might be possible to use pre-encoded material, but this would have to be mixed with live announcements, etc.
The UK is much better off with their old analog 'High Definition Television System' [PAL] and their new Digital TV system.
Yep.. I have to say that from what I've heard, PAL is better than NTSC- but IIRC PAL was designed with the failings of NTSC in mind and didn't include backward-compatibility (would it be accurate to call it an improved NTSC? I don't know).
I can't fairly compare NTSC to PAL, as I've never seen an NTSC program on an NTSC system. It's often hard to know how much quality was lost in the NTSC->PAL conversion process and how much is due to NTSC itself, but I do remember seeing American programs when I was fairly young and noticing that they looked quite "fuzzy" with weird colours.
There is no dirt-cheap PC card to do this.
Of course, when I said "dirt cheap" , it was meant to be relative... It's pretty surprising though, I'd assume that someone could have done it at a decent price.
Television is an analog system, why would you use a digital PC generation method and convert it when the Amiga has analog generation built in?
Don't know what like the US is, but in the UK, all new cable and satellite systems are digital, and free-to-view DVB (digital-terrestrial) TV (through your aerial/antenna) is becoming very common (got it myself).
Now, you *do* notice the quality difference between different sources, and I wonder how much of it is down to analogue conversion. Of course, US programs have to be converted to different frame rates and resolutions, so the loss could be occurring there, but some recent US stuff I've seen appears to be *way* better than I'd assume NTSC-sourced material would be (cf. some stuff that still displays fuzziness and analogue artifacts). This may be because it remained digital.
OTOH, I doubt this is an issue for the average US cable operator yet, since they won't be requiring the same standards as a major network.
I totally agree that Microsoft *and Intel* have retarded the state of the art by at least 15 years. There have been so many other worthwhile, efficient CPU architectures (MIPS, Alpha, 680x0) that have gone by the wayside, while the bloated hulk of x86 keeps rolling on.
Absolutely; but do Intel have a real choice? Even if you accept the argument that Itanium was obselete on release and has design-by-committee-itis, would its being better have allowed it to see off AMD's x86-64 CPUs?
All I can say is that Intel must have some incredible engineers working for them, to keep cranking out improved performance from the x86 architecture whilst still maintaining compatibility with the old stuff.
That having been said, why don't they just include the deprecated x86 instructions for compatibility, but not worry about the performance? In other words, "If your compiler is stupid enough to use these instructions, your program will work, but the performance will suck."
Ten, fifteen, twenty year-old code will run way faster than it was originally intended (or required) to, and modern code shouldn't be using it anyway.
Having thought about this, I guess one major problem with the x86 is the unwieldy instruction formats themselves; the problem having spread through the architecture, the new instructions would have to have an entirely new format, and code would not be able to use the old instructions for fear of messing up the pipelining. But this would effectively entail replacing all the existing x86 instructions. And including support for the new instructions, no matter how good, would probably require sacrificing some performance on existing code using the old instructions. The 'new' chip would appear to suck in benchmarks, and get trounced by an x86-with-ten-more-variable-length instructions when running existing code; which is to say *all* x86 code currently out there.
Get a reputation for bundling nice things and I'd subscribe for 30-40 a year with no troubles. GIve me a few well written articles, throw a few quid at some OSS dev teams from time to time and the fluffiness gets even better.
You had noticed that the UK Linux mags are already 6 quid for a slim magazine with one or two (IIRC) coverdiscs, right? Even with the subscriber discount, that's likely to be more than your "30-40 quid", and I can't see anyone doing a Linux mag for much less.
One other thing; why do UK computer mags charge so much more for the DVD edition? A lot of the time they seem to charge UKP 2.00 ($3.50 or so) more and simply add on some trial/freely-available software jumble; or, even more pointless, include a single "classic" episode of Thunderbirds or something. I've had a DVD drive for ages, and I've only ever bought the DVD edition of a magazine once- and that was because it had Red Hat Linux 9 on it.
At least fairies have some form of defined meaning. The problem I have with arguments about the existence of God in general is when they start taking on a pseudo-scientific tone. I say pseudo-scientific, because for all the "logic" in these discussions, I don't think I've ever heard someone define exactly what 'God' is when they ask "Do you believe in God?", or even "Do you believe in a higher being?"
That's a seriously fundamental flaw from a scientific point-of-view, don't you think?
Do I believe in what? A more intelligent form of life? A more powerful form of life? One that has our interests at heart, or one that controls us? What?
I can't deny that one or any of those things might exist, but that's not what was usually asked.
And yes, Dawkin's argument is still very good; if God exists in any one of those "scientific" definitions I gave above, then I'm an agnostic. In a scientific sense of course; and the Dawkins argument still applies.
But really, to say you're "agnostic" usually means that you're an agnostic in the I-just-feel-there-might-be-someone-out-there sense, and in that sense, science doesn't enter into it. I love (cough) all the touchy-feely "scientific" arguments that say the universe is so wonderful that it couldn't have existed without some guiding force, so there must be a God. Pseudo-science at its worst.
supposing that we get some svg version of asteroids shipping with those new o/s installs... nice!
No. Asteroids is great, but Atari/Infogrames will sue the ass off anyone who puts out an authentic copy, and very few not-quite-Asteroids clones do anything except look third-rate and suck.
Well, certainly movie DVDs are that way - I'd imagine they'll get around to the double-sided burnable variety soon enough, but having to turn over a disc to use the other side went out of favour back in the old days of 5.25" floppies.
I've had a fantastic idea; maybe it's already possible to use both sides of writable CDs and DVDs in the same way that you could do it with 5.25" floppies- you cut a great big notch at the edge.
I definitely think that you should try this excellent tip on your collection of "backed up" movies and MP3s this instant (*).
(*) The MPAA paid me to say that.
A great idea in theory, but how would they track the amount of help that you did in a way that would be one hundred percent hack proof?
Obfuscate the work being done and insert test/checking operations between the 'real' work operations. Verify that the results of the test operations were what would be expected if they had been carried out.
Do not reveal what the test operations are (or even what the 'real' work is). Do not reveal what percentage of operations are test operations. Change the test operations arbitrarily. Note any discrepancies immediately, and check recent results supplied from that source.
It wouldn't be 100% hack-proof, but it would be a major PITA to hack; since you are only being asked to carry out a set of operations without knowing what they are, the payers can change obfuscation algorithms, and the nature/quantity of test/check routines around any time they like, *without notice*.
If this is done, the major weakness would be payers getting lazy; i.e. not altering the nature of the check routines, or using weak/consistent obfuscation.