Just picked up an invite for Joost, guess it from the same guys that made Skype. It works very well, you can even watch all the NHL play off games to stay on topic.
It'll be entertaining to see when this takes off (It's not a matter of if, the beta is that good.) how loud the networks start screaming when these guys not only eat their lunch, but drink all their beer too.
Screw the Xbox and double screw AppleTV, I'm watching a NHL game on Joost right now for free at a surprisingly high level of quality. Sure it's a recorded game from, but at least I can watch all them in order when ever I want on demand. It'll be interesting too see if Joost takes off as big as Skype(same guys, same idea, but with TV) and how much "Live" content, or at least recent content they'll have.
Not cancer, just lots of little girls. An "old school" trick some of the maintainers I used to work for, was taking a florecent light bulb and go for a walk in front of an aircraft with it's forward radar on. It would light up. None of these guys ever got cancer, but we noticed they almost exclusively had nothing but girls for kids.
Proof positive in my book that women are the result of genetic damage.
I'm sure the power requirements are much lower, but yeah it's all about power level and exposure time. It could be handy for things that normally don't have anyone around, like runway lights that could light up with application forward looking radar or maybe something on the highway that could take advantage of the various auto-braking systems that are finding their way onto cars and trucks.
As on of the "Older" I don't mind paying for things as long as they are of decent quality. Of course other such business practices I still have the college mentality of "sticking it to The Man", since it seems The Man is forever trying to rip me off. I will go out of my way to short circuit the whole, sell it before anyone figures out it's crap mentality of the movie and software industry. My solution is to rent movies when I can but if I do buy I donate all my crap movies, unfortunately that seems to be about 80% of the DVD's these days, to the local library so that others can "rent" them for free, and refuse to buy any new software till it's been on the shelf for at least 6 months. (Ok I was weak, by jumping the gun on Vista and Supreme Commander, but I've learned my lesson, honest Injun.
Brand loyalty is another thing that with time I've managed to deprogram myself of. AMD/Intel, Nvidia/ATI, Pepsi/Coke, it's all the same, which ever one offers the best performance price for the best price gets my cash.
Yes and no, it is a scam, at least for the very low end printers, but there are much better products, but they do cost more. If you jump to a $300-700 price range on printers the inks steadily drop in price and the archive quality goes up by quite a few factors. At $300 you can expect about a hundred year lifespan of your photos if they are mounted behind glass. Around $400 you start seeing decent sun and water resistance. At $500 the life span jumps to somewhere around 200 years and the resistances improve even more. Of course all of this does require you to print on high quality paper, prices start around $.25 a sheet and work their way up to $1-2 for an 8x10 sheet of photopaper. It is fairly standard in the industry that as the quality of the printer goes up, the price of the ink per unit goes down by a good amount. The only downside is that the ink cartridges tend to be much larger so end up costing more. Of course if you don't do alot of printing then the ink eventually goes bad.
So back the ripp-off level, aka economical printing, a $50 printer printing on $10 per 100 count of white, kind of like photo paper, paper. Exactly what kind of quality are you expecting from that? Well all I can say is you get what you pay for.
Your best bet is to take your digital photos to a print shop, not the print kiosk at Wal-mart an actual photoprint shop, and have them print with archive quality ink and paper, if you are looking for a long lasting print. It'll cost you, but if you are only getting one done now and then it'll be a lot cheaper than buying your own printer set-up.
There's barely even any need to pirate that junk anymore. They'll play it on the radio on the hour, every hour, for a month. They might find they'd get better sales of music and have more radio time to play more music if they teased everyone with songs instead of bludgeoning us to death with them.
After building and rebuilding my home PC a six seven times and my left-over parts machine (aka the media center) now for the third time, I've come to a realization about my media, 90% of the music I'll never listen to and of movies and TV shows I'll never watch a second time. So I've become much looser in my requirements for redundancy. I gave up on backing things up on optical media a long time ago and triple redundancy with hard drives once my collection scooted on past 1TB. Once you come to terms with this, eventually you'll have too, you'll find your back-up requirements will be much more modest.
There is a strong desire to have that massive collection to show off to your friends, but much like moving the wall of CD's & DVD's before it, collecting, sorting, and backing up files became quite the pain in the ass and a RAID array will only exasperate the problem. Other than RAID 1, setting up a RAID or a JBOD puts you in a situation where you'll end up with a single drive that is larger than any one drive you may purchase later, unless you have an array made up of a bunch of 120gb drives. Personally I don't wait that long between upgrades. There is also the joy of losing your array when moving it from one motherboard to the next. With a single drive set-up you just take out the old one, and put it into an external kit, and pop in the new and transfer your files. You have an instant back-up till you sell it, just make sure to purge the embaressing stuff first!
My policy is that some sort of hard drive gets purchased every six months to a year and pushes the smallest one off onto Ebay. This helps me avoid crashes. If you insist on keeping 5+ year old harddrives around you are just asking for trouble, besides you want you collection to grow and for that you need new, bigger drives. The only use I have for a RAID is currently in my main computer as a RAID 0 just so things hum along with the quickness. Anything important gets backed-up on a second drive in the computer as well as a third copy on the media center and a fourth on an external drive that is in a closet and only hooked up to conduct a back-up. For must-never-lose things have I back-ups on several family members' and friends' computers located elsewhere which I update on my semi-annual laps to see everyone and do the same for them in turn. Just in case my house ever burns to the ground.
Unless you have a house-hold full of roommates that insist on streaming everything to their own computer, RAIDs for performance reasons is overkill. A single drive generally has enough bandwidth to handle a stream/filetransfer or two streams without a noticeable impact on someone trying to watch or listen from the same drive. A LAN party blows this out of the water, but then again those will cause a meltdown even to most RAID set-ups, so set some connection and bandwidth limits and you'll be fine. I sort out my media accordingly to take advantage of most people's habits. If someone is listening to music, they're probably not watching a movie or TV and vice versa.
So enough rambling, here is my current set-up
Media Center
40" Samsung 720p LCD TV hooked up with a DVI-HMDI cable
Nvidia 7800GT 256mb
AMD X2 3800
Windows Vista HP (yeah I jumped the gun a bit, it works fine, but drivers are still lagging and I am missing some of the soundcard functions.)
Winamp for music, there are many out there, I like this one.
Ripit4me/Fixit/DVD decrypter/DVD shrink for ripping DVD's
1 gb RAM
Creative X-fi plat sound card
200 gb MAIN drive partitioned into 40gb for Windows and programs and the rest as file storage and temp video storage.
300 gb MUSIC drive, it has 70gb of music on it, with the rest devoted to back-ups for my main computer. Drives that are more than one year old, but less than three, are your most trustworthy drives since they've survived the initial culling period and aren't too old. Of course you never 100% trust them.
320GB TV drive, for you guessed it TV shows. Mostly
Nothing wrong with a car analogy, it's just that you used the wrong one. Super Fetch is more like having magic gnomes that are constantly putting stuff in the trunk of your car that they think you might want to take with you, but they'll instantly take it all back out if that turns out to not be the case.
See car analogys can be good, but you have to have magic gnomes to make it work.
Before I began working on aircraft, I had maybe an event or two a year with things falling in the toilet. Seems like a tooth brush or maybe a stick of deoderant or very rarely the car keys would end up taking a dip. After that fatefull career change 12 years ago life and physics has never been the same.
I could blame it on the tiny British houses that I currently have to put up with, but a small bathroom is pretty much the same size no matter which country you live in. I suspect even if I had the bathroom out of my sister's Mc-mansion, my tooth brush would still manage to travel the fifteen feet from the sink, around the corner, through the door, and plunk straight into the toilet.
Err no, because the Aero using video ram, not system ram for the eye candy, and the requirements are extemely modest at it's worse. A $50 video card is pretty much over kill to take advantage of most of what Aero has to offer.
What we have here is a typical misunderstanding of why Vista is a memory Crack Whore. System RAM has little to do with Aero other than if you fall below the bare minimum system requirements everything will run crapy. Just like every other OS since the begining of time.
System RAM is needed for the Super Fetch function, which pre-caches commonly used programs. So if you have tons and tons of RAM during boot up you'll notice your harddrive spinning like mad for an extra few minutes, and if you look at your free Physical memory (RAM) it'll steadly drop until you only have less than 100mb free. The end result is your favorite programs actually start when you click on the icon, no waiting for it to load. Vista may be a Memory Crack Whore, but she is a Crack Whore who can kick the habit any time she wants. If you don't have a bunch of extra RAM in your system the Super Fetch function does nothing and Vista ends up behaiving just like XP in terms of program start times. Since your average computer user is well... average, they simply don't know any better hence the lack of interest in buying up vast amounts of RAM. There is also a few other trip-ups as well, motherboard chipset limitations along with 32bit OS limitations. Quite a few motherboards won't properly work with more than 3gb of ram unless you are running the 64bit version of Vista which is hardly being run yet even amongst enthusiasts.
The whole thing boils down to too much concentration of hype and not enough on customer education. Just like RAID arrays, your average user will eventually see how fast his computer nut friend's rig does it's thing and it'll go mainstream.
For now I'm just debating whether to jump over to 64bit Vista to use that 4th gig of RAM that is currently dormant in my system.
Internet has not destroyed the local business, State and City governments whoring themselves out to the Mega-chains have destroyed local business. You can't have a mom and pop in every small town when a giant box-mart plunks itself every 30 miles across the country.
There maybe a few exceptions where the internet is wiping them out, but for the most part I think the interent is the best hope for local business at least the truly good ones.
Of course after getting out of a shitty relationship and back into my own place I thought I was free to leave the toilet seat in any old position I like. It was pure joy while it lasted. Then a month later I was back to leaving it down.
I work in aircraft maintenance and it turns out we fall under a peculiar law of physics.
Any object dropped can and will fall into the most unlikely and most inconvenient place.
So in other words practically anything I dropped regardless of how many bizarre bounces or ricochets it would take, would land in the toilet from anywhere in the bathroom. Once exposed to this, it takes a long time for it to get it out of your life, much like a neurotic woman. I had never noticed it before because of the much stronger force, known as female OCD, altered the natural laws of space and time in my household. Once I resigned myself to leaving the toilet set back down, things stopped landing in the toilet, though they tried their damndest to do, and instead started landing in the trash can. Now I have to get into the habit of taking out the trash and putting a bag in the can.
No irony would have been a waste of time; most people don't get it unless you point it out to them. I was only pointing out the ignorance of the parent with my reply, the kind of over self-confident narrow minded ignorance that seems to flood your brain just about the time you enter college.
Of course there are those that immediately say wow you are so right and others that say you are so wrong. Those responses are a form of irony I guess, since both sides are both full of shit.
There is nothing new about the conflict in Iraq and the number of players involved, but there is far more to it than "unilateral US imperial aggression" and the "evil Islamic terrorists". Nothing is ever that cut and dried.
There are no such thing as one-sided facts. The facts are they facts, the only thing left to dissagree about is one's point of view and perception of the facts. Your snide remarks shows you to just as one-sided as you are accusing me to be.
And yes, most people are very ignorant of history, me, you, and the rest of the inmates here at/.
I love posts such as yours, because they seem to be missing a paragraph or two in order for it to make sense.
I'm assuming that you assumed that in my original post that I assumed that some how the US was entirely blameless in the current conflict. I made no such assumtion. My only real point was to point out to the parent of my original reply that the US is a Johnny come lately to a fight that has been going on for centuries. We were hardly the cause of it, but unfortunately we are the latest world power that thought we had the answer to all the problems and could end it.
Personally I think there is nothing shy of a carpeting the whole region with nukes that is going to end it, but that's not a very viable solution now is it?
Small-pox was one of them, but mostly it was all the various fever diseases that did the damage the people. Europe had already seen its population wiped out two or three times over during the plagues, so the Natives had little chance to recover and resist the intruders. Of course they returned the favor and gave them a wide range of STD's, syphilis being one of the fun ones that went back ran amok in Europe.
I love kid's skewed view of things. They think everything was invented just a few years ago. Now this "new vicious" animal, aka Islam terrorist/jihadists, that is part of the whole military-industrial conspiracy that the United States has just now "recently" provoked, has been on the warpath for over thirteen centuries now, that's 1300 years kidos. That's more than 1000 years longer than the US has even been around. Just because you, Hollywood, and 90% of Congress took till the late nineties to figure it out, doesn't make it new. Even the "current" mess in the middle east started before all of this during WW I after the British and the French divide up the spoils. Before them the Ottomans had it and before them the Persians. All through history, the locals have been rebelling and every single group in power has thrown troops at the problem. There is no conspiracy going on here. The only thing the US government is guilty of is ignoring history and being overly optimistic on the ability of Democracy/Republic style of governments being the solution to the problem.
They already get their check every month, now they are trying to milk out more. I have plenty of sympathy and outrage over the past of the way they were treated, but after living near a reservation for three years in the here and now I've let alot of that slide. A large chunk of these people are stuck in the welfare cycle and are just looking for handouts. This is just the latest in a long line of schemes they've been trying on the government to get back what was never taken from the living in the first place. Also it really depends on what ever agreement the particular reservation has with the federal government. They are not sovereign nations, nor are they exempt from federal law.
Yeah I know, it does take a while for them to grow, and I'd really hate to watch the summer drive send the price of my bag of Lays or french fries (chips) climbing, but really it all boils down to how hard is it to grow the biomass. Potatoes are pretty damn easy. The only downside is we'd have to keep an eye on Idaho. If they start acting up we may have to invade to secure our National interests (chips and gas).
Slashdot Mirror
Just being silly. I don't really think woman are genetic abnormalities, just insane.
It'll be entertaining to see when this takes off (It's not a matter of if, the beta is that good.) how loud the networks start screaming when these guys not only eat their lunch, but drink all their beer too.
Screw the Xbox and double screw AppleTV, I'm watching a NHL game on Joost right now for free at a surprisingly high level of quality. Sure it's a recorded game from, but at least I can watch all them in order when ever I want on demand. It'll be interesting too see if Joost takes off as big as Skype(same guys, same idea, but with TV) and how much "Live" content, or at least recent content they'll have.
Proof positive in my book that women are the result of genetic damage.
I'm sure the power requirements are much lower, but yeah it's all about power level and exposure time. It could be handy for things that normally don't have anyone around, like runway lights that could light up with application forward looking radar or maybe something on the highway that could take advantage of the various auto-braking systems that are finding their way onto cars and trucks.
Brand loyalty is another thing that with time I've managed to deprogram myself of. AMD/Intel, Nvidia/ATI, Pepsi/Coke, it's all the same, which ever one offers the best performance price for the best price gets my cash.
So back the ripp-off level, aka economical printing, a $50 printer printing on $10 per 100 count of white, kind of like photo paper, paper. Exactly what kind of quality are you expecting from that? Well all I can say is you get what you pay for.
Your best bet is to take your digital photos to a print shop, not the print kiosk at Wal-mart an actual photoprint shop, and have them print with archive quality ink and paper, if you are looking for a long lasting print. It'll cost you, but if you are only getting one done now and then it'll be a lot cheaper than buying your own printer set-up.
....yes true, but at 1/4 the price.
There's barely even any need to pirate that junk anymore. They'll play it on the radio on the hour, every hour, for a month. They might find they'd get better sales of music and have more radio time to play more music if they teased everyone with songs instead of bludgeoning us to death with them.
There is a strong desire to have that massive collection to show off to your friends, but much like moving the wall of CD's & DVD's before it, collecting, sorting, and backing up files became quite the pain in the ass and a RAID array will only exasperate the problem. Other than RAID 1, setting up a RAID or a JBOD puts you in a situation where you'll end up with a single drive that is larger than any one drive you may purchase later, unless you have an array made up of a bunch of 120gb drives. Personally I don't wait that long between upgrades. There is also the joy of losing your array when moving it from one motherboard to the next. With a single drive set-up you just take out the old one, and put it into an external kit, and pop in the new and transfer your files. You have an instant back-up till you sell it, just make sure to purge the embaressing stuff first!
My policy is that some sort of hard drive gets purchased every six months to a year and pushes the smallest one off onto Ebay. This helps me avoid crashes. If you insist on keeping 5+ year old harddrives around you are just asking for trouble, besides you want you collection to grow and for that you need new, bigger drives. The only use I have for a RAID is currently in my main computer as a RAID 0 just so things hum along with the quickness. Anything important gets backed-up on a second drive in the computer as well as a third copy on the media center and a fourth on an external drive that is in a closet and only hooked up to conduct a back-up. For must-never-lose things have I back-ups on several family members' and friends' computers located elsewhere which I update on my semi-annual laps to see everyone and do the same for them in turn. Just in case my house ever burns to the ground.
Unless you have a house-hold full of roommates that insist on streaming everything to their own computer, RAIDs for performance reasons is overkill. A single drive generally has enough bandwidth to handle a stream/filetransfer or two streams without a noticeable impact on someone trying to watch or listen from the same drive. A LAN party blows this out of the water, but then again those will cause a meltdown even to most RAID set-ups, so set some connection and bandwidth limits and you'll be fine. I sort out my media accordingly to take advantage of most people's habits. If someone is listening to music, they're probably not watching a movie or TV and vice versa.
So enough rambling, here is my current set-up
Media Center
40" Samsung 720p LCD TV hooked up with a DVI-HMDI cable
Nvidia 7800GT 256mb
AMD X2 3800
Windows Vista HP (yeah I jumped the gun a bit, it works fine, but drivers are still lagging and I am missing some of the soundcard functions.)
Winamp for music, there are many out there, I like this one. Ripit4me/Fixit/DVD decrypter/DVD shrink for ripping DVD's 1 gb RAM
Creative X-fi plat sound card
200 gb MAIN drive partitioned into 40gb for Windows and programs and the rest as file storage and temp video storage.
300 gb MUSIC drive, it has 70gb of music on it, with the rest devoted to back-ups for my main computer. Drives that are more than one year old, but less than three, are your most trustworthy drives since they've survived the initial culling period and aren't too old. Of course you never 100% trust them.
320GB TV drive, for you guessed it TV shows. Mostly
See car analogys can be good, but you have to have magic gnomes to make it work.
I could blame it on the tiny British houses that I currently have to put up with, but a small bathroom is pretty much the same size no matter which country you live in. I suspect even if I had the bathroom out of my sister's Mc-mansion, my tooth brush would still manage to travel the fifteen feet from the sink, around the corner, through the door, and plunk straight into the toilet.
What we have here is a typical misunderstanding of why Vista is a memory Crack Whore. System RAM has little to do with Aero other than if you fall below the bare minimum system requirements everything will run crapy. Just like every other OS since the begining of time.
System RAM is needed for the Super Fetch function, which pre-caches commonly used programs. So if you have tons and tons of RAM during boot up you'll notice your harddrive spinning like mad for an extra few minutes, and if you look at your free Physical memory (RAM) it'll steadly drop until you only have less than 100mb free. The end result is your favorite programs actually start when you click on the icon, no waiting for it to load. Vista may be a Memory Crack Whore, but she is a Crack Whore who can kick the habit any time she wants. If you don't have a bunch of extra RAM in your system the Super Fetch function does nothing and Vista ends up behaiving just like XP in terms of program start times. Since your average computer user is well... average, they simply don't know any better hence the lack of interest in buying up vast amounts of RAM. There is also a few other trip-ups as well, motherboard chipset limitations along with 32bit OS limitations. Quite a few motherboards won't properly work with more than 3gb of ram unless you are running the 64bit version of Vista which is hardly being run yet even amongst enthusiasts.
The whole thing boils down to too much concentration of hype and not enough on customer education. Just like RAID arrays, your average user will eventually see how fast his computer nut friend's rig does it's thing and it'll go mainstream.
For now I'm just debating whether to jump over to 64bit Vista to use that 4th gig of RAM that is currently dormant in my system.
There maybe a few exceptions where the internet is wiping them out, but for the most part I think the interent is the best hope for local business at least the truly good ones.
Of course after getting out of a shitty relationship and back into my own place I thought I was free to leave the toilet seat in any old position I like. It was pure joy while it lasted. Then a month later I was back to leaving it down.
I work in aircraft maintenance and it turns out we fall under a peculiar law of physics.
Any object dropped can and will fall into the most unlikely and most inconvenient place.
So in other words practically anything I dropped regardless of how many bizarre bounces or ricochets it would take, would land in the toilet from anywhere in the bathroom. Once exposed to this, it takes a long time for it to get it out of your life, much like a neurotic woman. I had never noticed it before because of the much stronger force, known as female OCD, altered the natural laws of space and time in my household. Once I resigned myself to leaving the toilet set back down, things stopped landing in the toilet, though they tried their damndest to do, and instead started landing in the trash can. Now I have to get into the habit of taking out the trash and putting a bag in the can.
A guy can't fucking win.
Of course there are those that immediately say wow you are so right and others that say you are so wrong. Those responses are a form of irony I guess, since both sides are both full of shit.
There is nothing new about the conflict in Iraq and the number of players involved, but there is far more to it than "unilateral US imperial aggression" and the "evil Islamic terrorists". Nothing is ever that cut and dried.
There are no such thing as one-sided facts. The facts are they facts, the only thing left to dissagree about is one's point of view and perception of the facts. Your snide remarks shows you to just as one-sided as you are accusing me to be.
And yes, most people are very ignorant of history, me, you, and the rest of the inmates here at /.
I'm assuming that you assumed that in my original post that I assumed that some how the US was entirely blameless in the current conflict. I made no such assumtion. My only real point was to point out to the parent of my original reply that the US is a Johnny come lately to a fight that has been going on for centuries. We were hardly the cause of it, but unfortunately we are the latest world power that thought we had the answer to all the problems and could end it.
Personally I think there is nothing shy of a carpeting the whole region with nukes that is going to end it, but that's not a very viable solution now is it?
But yea that's pretty much sums up how the world works.
At least one person has a strong grasp on history and reality here.
They already get their check every month, now they are trying to milk out more. I have plenty of sympathy and outrage over the past of the way they were treated, but after living near a reservation for three years in the here and now I've let alot of that slide. A large chunk of these people are stuck in the welfare cycle and are just looking for handouts. This is just the latest in a long line of schemes they've been trying on the government to get back what was never taken from the living in the first place. Also it really depends on what ever agreement the particular reservation has with the federal government. They are not sovereign nations, nor are they exempt from federal law.
No the fact that they were occupying the land we wanted that they weren't willing to part with led to their genocide.
Yeah I know, it does take a while for them to grow, and I'd really hate to watch the summer drive send the price of my bag of Lays or french fries (chips) climbing, but really it all boils down to how hard is it to grow the biomass. Potatoes are pretty damn easy. The only downside is we'd have to keep an eye on Idaho. If they start acting up we may have to invade to secure our National interests (chips and gas).