People rag on XP and it's multiple bugs all the time. But what about OSX??
Number of releases of XP/32bit: three. (Original, SP1, SP2).
Number of releases of OSX: thirty. From original 10.0 to the latest 10.3.8 there have been thirty versions - over four years, that's an average of one release every seven weeks. Anyone tired of upgrading yet??
I'd have loved to be there during the meetings... one megalomaniac headstrong Brit and one megalomaniac headstrong Scot, in a room together, both thinking they're God. Wonderful. Odds on those two agreeing is so close to zero nobody's going to give you odds.
I get DirecTV HD, but there's no way I'm spending one dime on anything so close to bankruptcy as Tivo.
What gets me is - people actually PAY for ring tones.
Get a Nokia (which are pretty much the best phones anyway). Go to the Nokia web site, and download their software. Now you can create ANY ring tone from ANY CD you want. Soft Cell, Young Marble Giants, Converge.... you name it, you can do it. Alert tones, wallpapers, etc. too.
So you sail to Mars in a month, you solve the landing issue.... then how the #(*%^# do you get BACK?
Traditional sailboats can tack into the wind.... but that relies on friction between the boat and the water. There's not enough friction in space. Bringing enough rocket fuel along for the launch from the Martian surface would be tricky, and the many year voyage home isn't a welcome prospect.
Fact: pilots of commercial airliners do NOT look out the window.
First, the windows are too bloody high to see the ground anyway. On the crucial part of the journey - the landing - you're nose up, so all you can see out the window is sky and clouds. You can't legally land any Boeing/Airbus/etc. on VFR except in a (very dire) emergency.
So, simple solution? Paint the cockpit windows flat black. Over 90% of the crew wouldn't even notice. Unless the laser is strong enough to burn a hole in the 8" thick glass, it's no longer a problem.
How can this possibly be good news for nuclear energy? A nuclear reactor produces huge amounts of heat - hence the huge, highly visible cooling towers. This point generally gets ignored, since people are far more concerned with other side effects of nuclear power - but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear.
DirectX is an API. Supporting that API on your graphics says nothing about your performance level. I could write a driver to support the full DirectX API on a VGA; hopefully that's not the performance level of this new chipset.
And hopefully the chip doesn't directly support DirectX on chip... since DirectX (a) will be obsolete by the time the chip gets to market, and (b) is vastly inferior to OpenGL anyhow....
between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)
Digital versus analog is NOT the same as aspect ratio. The two concepts have little, if anything, to do with one another.
If your television screen's aspect ratio matches the aspect ratio of the program being broadcast, you will have no black bars. If the two do not match, you will have black bars, whether or not the broadcast is in an analog or digital form. I've got a Sony 36" HD set at home that has a 4:3 aspect ratio screen - no black bars when watching analog TV (or 4:3 digital broadcasts such as Fox).
Side rant: if you watch NBC digital, you get #(*&^%# annoying GREY bars on the sides. On dimly lit shows, those grey bars are much brighter than anything else in the room - annoying beyond belief.
Most TV stations aren't very profitable these days - and this proposal will cost a lot of money. For instance, here's a minimum setup for standard definition television:
Two digital betacam decks: $50,000 each.
90 days of tape @ $27/hour = $58,000.
That's $158,000 right there - not counting maintenance on the constantly used decks. If a station broadcasts in HD - like most do, because of another FCC rule - they would need to record that separately, and HD decks/tapes are much more expensive. Many HD stations are broadcasting multiple sub-channels - you'd need to record each one separately.
If you take a station like WGBH Boston, the PBS affiliate, the costs add up quickly. They run two standard analog channels (2 and 44), two digital HD channels (with multiple sub-channels in the evening), and three radio stations. The total cost could easily approach $1 million.
So, is the FCC proposing this new rule, or is it the Sony sales department??
So instead of supporting the evil empire of Bill Gates, you're supporting the evil empire of Mike Ramsey... interesting. Just because Bill's is bigger, doesn't mean that Mike is any less evil in his business practices.
The article says, "Of 1,056 WMI codes available to U.S. manufacturers, 594 remain, according to SAE.".
So the sum total of cars made in the USA to date has consumed LESS THAN HALF the available codes.
How about this: all non-gasoline vehicles get a new VIN scheme. Gasoline will run out in 20 years, so that leaves more than enough numbers for current dinosaur-based technology.
Exactly what is athletic about baseball? Stand around in a field for two hours, occasionally catching and throwing a ball.... kinda like playing with a three-year-old. Not exactly an Olympic event.
Pitching is just as athletic as darts, or bowling, or archery. It's an accuracy thing, a skill, not an athletic event.
Randy Johnson is probably in fairly good shape. But look at some of the stars of the game: Mark McGuire is listed as being 6' 5" and weighing 250 pounds when he played - a BMI of 29.6. Than's officially "overweight", and just a tiny hair below "obese", by government standards. That's probably why he used to hit home runs - then he can trot around the bases, instead of actually having to run.
One 35 GB cartridge: $60.
But: I can buy an entire 40GB ATA100 hard drive for $56 right now, and they're dropping daily. The Iomega requires a drive - the extra HDD for backups IS a drive, and requires no external electronics. Portable, and supremely compatible - I can use it on most computers on the planet, no extra parts required.
To be slightly practical, I could buy one of those slide-in hard drive mounts for a few more dollars, but I'd still come out way ahead.
This is exactly the same as the continent-versus-island debate in geography. Why isn't the United Kingdom considered a continent by anyone except the Brits? Why is one single monolithic land mass with a dotted line down the middle considered two continents, Europe and Asia? How is Australia not a continent?
In Arizona, there is the Titan Missile Museum. Since the Titan was nuclear-capable, and in the cold war era, they were very closely tracked. The museum claims to be the ONLY surviving launch facility; they even have a video presentation showing how they demolished the others, and (if I recall correctly) a map of all other locations. One of the conditions placed on keeping this location and not demolishing it was to permenantly wedge the silo door half open - in a position that they could be clearly seen from a spy satellite, but the missile could not be launched.
So, either this is a fake - or you'll need to send the museum a letter after you move in.
Digital television is a bitstream. The "broadcast flag" is one bit in that bitstream. A program to flip one single bit in a bitstream shouldn't be a difficult task for any competent programmer. (Yes, there's a checksum to consider, but it's still pretty darned easy).
Wasn't there a thread last week about hacking consumer devices??
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People rag on XP and it's multiple bugs all the time. But what about OSX??
Number of releases of XP/32bit: three. (Original, SP1, SP2).
Number of releases of OSX: thirty. From original 10.0 to the latest 10.3.8 there have been thirty versions - over four years, that's an average of one release every seven weeks. Anyone tired of upgrading yet??
I get DirecTV HD, but there's no way I'm spending one dime on anything so close to bankruptcy as Tivo.
Two buttons will be way too confusing for your average user.
The average PC user has a two-button-plus-scroll-wheel mouse, and knows how to use it just fine.
The average Mac user gets confused at more than one button on a mouse.
Now I think I understand why Mac users think that Macs are wonderful.....
What gets me is - people actually PAY for ring tones. Get a Nokia (which are pretty much the best phones anyway). Go to the Nokia web site, and download their software. Now you can create ANY ring tone from ANY CD you want. Soft Cell, Young Marble Giants, Converge.... you name it, you can do it. Alert tones, wallpapers, etc. too.
I'm going to go out and patent IsToo. Let the childish arguments begin!!
So you sail to Mars in a month, you solve the landing issue.... then how the #(*%^# do you get BACK?
Traditional sailboats can tack into the wind.... but that relies on friction between the boat and the water. There's not enough friction in space. Bringing enough rocket fuel along for the launch from the Martian surface would be tricky, and the many year voyage home isn't a welcome prospect.
Fact: pilots of commercial airliners do NOT look out the window.
First, the windows are too bloody high to see the ground anyway. On the crucial part of the journey - the landing - you're nose up, so all you can see out the window is sky and clouds. You can't legally land any Boeing/Airbus/etc. on VFR except in a (very dire) emergency.
So, simple solution? Paint the cockpit windows flat black. Over 90% of the crew wouldn't even notice. Unless the laser is strong enough to burn a hole in the 8" thick glass, it's no longer a problem.
How can this possibly be good news for nuclear energy? A nuclear reactor produces huge amounts of heat - hence the huge, highly visible cooling towers. This point generally gets ignored, since people are far more concerned with other side effects of nuclear power - but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear.
What the heck are "DirectX 9-class graphics"??
DirectX is an API. Supporting that API on your graphics says nothing about your performance level. I could write a driver to support the full DirectX API on a VGA; hopefully that's not the performance level of this new chipset.
And hopefully the chip doesn't directly support DirectX on chip... since DirectX (a) will be obsolete by the time the chip gets to market, and (b) is vastly inferior to OpenGL anyhow....
between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)
Digital versus analog is NOT the same as aspect ratio. The two concepts have little, if anything, to do with one another.
If your television screen's aspect ratio matches the aspect ratio of the program being broadcast, you will have no black bars. If the two do not match, you will have black bars, whether or not the broadcast is in an analog or digital form. I've got a Sony 36" HD set at home that has a 4:3 aspect ratio screen - no black bars when watching analog TV (or 4:3 digital broadcasts such as Fox).
Side rant: if you watch NBC digital, you get #(*&^%# annoying GREY bars on the sides. On dimly lit shows, those grey bars are much brighter than anything else in the room - annoying beyond belief.
"Sun is going to fail in this decade if ...."
Uh.... didn't Sun fail last decade??
Most TV stations aren't very profitable these days - and this proposal will cost a lot of money. For instance, here's a minimum setup for standard definition television:
Two digital betacam decks: $50,000 each.
90 days of tape @ $27/hour = $58,000.
That's $158,000 right there - not counting maintenance on the constantly used decks. If a station broadcasts in HD - like most do, because of another FCC rule - they would need to record that separately, and HD decks/tapes are much more expensive. Many HD stations are broadcasting multiple sub-channels - you'd need to record each one separately.
If you take a station like WGBH Boston, the PBS affiliate, the costs add up quickly. They run two standard analog channels (2 and 44), two digital HD channels (with multiple sub-channels in the evening), and three radio stations. The total cost could easily approach $1 million.
So, is the FCC proposing this new rule, or is it the Sony sales department??
So instead of supporting the evil empire of Bill Gates, you're supporting the evil empire of Mike Ramsey... interesting. Just because Bill's is bigger, doesn't mean that Mike is any less evil in his business practices.
So, I'm curious: how did they KNOW that you had a USB watch in the first place?
The article says, "Of 1,056 WMI codes available to U.S. manufacturers, 594 remain, according to SAE.". So the sum total of cars made in the USA to date has consumed LESS THAN HALF the available codes. How about this: all non-gasoline vehicles get a new VIN scheme. Gasoline will run out in 20 years, so that leaves more than enough numbers for current dinosaur-based technology.
Isn't it ironic that a Sony device won't work because your language is set to Japanese??
So I stole one of these t-shirts, hooked up my portable DVD player, and started watching.... the damned display is upside down! What's with that??
Exactly what is athletic about baseball? Stand around in a field for two hours, occasionally catching and throwing a ball.... kinda like playing with a three-year-old. Not exactly an Olympic event.
Pitching is just as athletic as darts, or bowling, or archery. It's an accuracy thing, a skill, not an athletic event.
Randy Johnson is probably in fairly good shape. But look at some of the stars of the game: Mark McGuire is listed as being 6' 5" and weighing 250 pounds when he played - a BMI of 29.6. Than's officially "overweight", and just a tiny hair below "obese", by government standards. That's probably why he used to hit home runs - then he can trot around the bases, instead of actually having to run.
One 35 GB cartridge: $60. But: I can buy an entire 40GB ATA100 hard drive for $56 right now, and they're dropping daily. The Iomega requires a drive - the extra HDD for backups IS a drive, and requires no external electronics. Portable, and supremely compatible - I can use it on most computers on the planet, no extra parts required. To be slightly practical, I could buy one of those slide-in hard drive mounts for a few more dollars, but I'd still come out way ahead.
This is exactly the same as the continent-versus-island debate in geography. Why isn't the United Kingdom considered a continent by anyone except the Brits? Why is one single monolithic land mass with a dotted line down the middle considered two continents, Europe and Asia? How is Australia not a continent?
In Arizona, there is the Titan Missile Museum. Since the Titan was nuclear-capable, and in the cold war era, they were very closely tracked. The museum claims to be the ONLY surviving launch facility; they even have a video presentation showing how they demolished the others, and (if I recall correctly) a map of all other locations. One of the conditions placed on keeping this location and not demolishing it was to permenantly wedge the silo door half open - in a position that they could be clearly seen from a spy satellite, but the missile could not be launched.
So, either this is a fake - or you'll need to send the museum a letter after you move in.
Digital television is a bitstream. The "broadcast flag" is one bit in that bitstream. A program to flip one single bit in a bitstream shouldn't be a difficult task for any competent programmer. (Yes, there's a checksum to consider, but it's still pretty darned easy).
Wasn't there a thread last week about hacking consumer devices??
How come a google search of "Larry Ellison harassment" turns up so many hits, then??
Imagine the horror movies you can make now, when your television screen can literally come alive....
They've got the world's densest CEO, after all.....