I haven't been to a movie theater in a few years. Here's what they'll have to do to get me to come back:
1. Clean the place up. The last time I went to a movie theater, it smelled of urine. That was exceptional, but almost every time I've gone, the floor's been sticky. Popcorn butter? Soda? I don't know, but it's everywhere, and it's disgusting.
2. Get rid of the ads. I actually like the trailers, but there's no excuse for any other kind of ad when we're paying to get in. And speaking of paying...
3. Cut the ticket price. Make it up in volume -- get everyone to come, instead of mostly teenagers. Or you could trim your insanely bloated movie budgets.
"You lose all the detail..." Do you know how hilarious that statement is? Even with a quarter of the screen black (and that's what it is on a standard 16:9 / 1.85:1 movie, a quarter), you still get more detail out of a DVD than from a full-screen, fuzzy VHS. More importantly, what about the quarter of the actual movie that's cut away (from the sides) on a pan-and-scan VHS? That's real missing detail.
But if you insist on pan-and-scan, there are DVD players to accommodate you -- they do the cropping themselves. And you can still find "full screen" DVDs. It even used to be Blockbuster's preferred format, until they realized that the public actually wanted letterbox.
As for "no-skip" commercials, I agree, they're reprehensible. But still, most of the time I can just pop the disc in and walk away for a minute; it'll stop on the main menu. Beyond that, I can copy the disc and remove the cruft. (You mention encryption, but I'm sure you know it's not a real barrier.) They copy much nicer than VHS.:-)
Scratches are annoying, but half the time, I can get rid of skips just by cleaning the disc. The other half the time, I can get a refund. (But it is a problem with subscription services like Netflix, because I can't get the time back.) Copying can also alleviate skipping (the copy programs try a little harder to reread than the player does).
DVDs are generally cheaper, and have been since their introduction. And DVD players are now available for less than the cheapest VCR.
The only real argument I've heard for VHS over DVD was from parents of young kids; the parents claimed that VHS was more durable against the kind of abuse kids dish out. I'm skeptical of that, but I haven't done the experiments.:-)
But I bet most VHS buyers are just too cheap to get a new player, don't care about or understand the improvements, or are technophones afraid to try hooking up a new device. Possibly all three.
About those prices: It used to be (maybe still is) that most VHS tapes were first sold for something in the range of $90 -- the "rental" price, where the tapes would sell mainly to video stores -- and then later, sometimes, dropped to a "sell-through" price around $20, for everyone to buy. DVDs (and Laser Discs before them) were always offered at the sell-through price, right from the start. I presume this is because DVDs were regarded as more collectible. But they're also cheaper to manufacture.
Nowadays, DVDs are frequently under $10, or even $5, and I see VHS mainly in clearance bins. But I admit, I don't follow the VHS situation too closely anymore.
You don't have to assume the density. They gave the mass and radius.
Mass 7.5x Radius 2x
Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so it's 7.5 *.25 = approximately 2G. (OK, 1.875.) You can also figure the density from those numbers.
On the other hand, it's not clear to me from TFAs how they measured the radius. It may be only an estimate based on the mass and an assumption of average density!
My thoughts exactly. The tape should've been on one of those armored trucks -- Wells Fargo, Brinks, etc. I guess they were looking at it as a redundant backup copy (low value), instead of looking at it as they should have: a target for identity theft (extremely high value).
Yeah, but Sony would probably regard that as grounds to quash the deal (if there is one? can't refer to the article anymore) and let the lawsuit proceed.
What he should've done was open-sourced it back at the beginning, so we wouldn't be facing a crisis now. It's not like he was trying to sell the damn thing, so what did he have to lose? Oh well.
I keep hearing that Sun is soon to dump Sparc, too. Certainly their AMD-based systems are more prominent on their web site now. But anyway, Sun was never in the same "consumer" category, which is why I added those qualifiers. I expect that non-x86 workstations will remain available... at steep premiums, for questionable performance. At least for a little while longer.
But it's tough to beat the economies of scale involved in x86, and there's now very little incentive for anyone to try and build a competitive non-x86 system. I realize that there are some advantages to this situation, too; but please, allow me a moment to mourn.
Of course, the problem with "survival of the fittest" is that it's a tautology: that which survives, survives. It says nothing about the quality of the ideas. People are also willing to die for complete bunk, like Christianity.
Enivronmentalism is compelling enough to devote one's life to it because, in principle, a poisoned environment could kill you. The same sort of thing can't really be said about DRM. But I do believe that the underlying issues are a lot more serious than most people realize, and I think we should be pressing the most extreme case we can make -- because the IP-mongers will certainly be (and have been) doing it from their side.
Here's the most extreme case I can make: The fight over "intellectual property" is nothing less than a war for the future of humanity. We are coming into an era where physical scarcity will effectively end. The only kind of trade left will be the trade in ideas -- this is what's meant by the "information economy". Only, there's a fundamental problem there: intellectual scarcity doesn't even exist, naturally. It can only be created through intellectual property law, restricting the legal right to copy information and ideas. And the laws work poorly, necessitating an ever-stricter regime of punishment and control if they're to be even partially effective. We've seen this already.
In the end, these will be our choices: Artificial scarcity, with a fascist state upholding elite privileges. Or... we let the old scarcity-based economy collapse, bid it good riddance, and welcome the new gift-based economy, where everyone is essentially rich, as well as free.
Of course, some reading this will think me mad. To explain why it's not madness would take a lot more paragraphs, so I'll save that for another time.
Even the concerns about things like endianness are not really a problem so long as the code was written the right way in the first place.
And one of the reasons why this change bothers me so much is exactly that there's now less incentive to do that. "Endian-neutral? What's that mean? Every mainstream computer in the world runs on x86 -- even Macs. So I'll just write for that."
But I suppose it could actually become a more pressing issue in the short term, as Mac software houses struggle to ensure that their code works on both PPC and x86.
Changing away from PPC now doesn't mean that adopting it eleven (?) years ago was a mistake. If I read the report of the keynote correctly, Jobs himself made the case that it was the right decision at the time. And heck, Jobs aside, there are even those who think abandoning PPC for x86 now is a mistake. A big one.
I'm not a fan of Intel. Of the last six computers I've bought, five ran AMD, and one, PPC. But who am I kidding? Those AMD procs are still x86es. Only the PPC was something truly different.
From the beginning, personal computers have mainly been powered by two great lines of processors: little-endian Intel and its clones, from the 8080 through the Z80, 8086, and on to the 386 and Pentium; and big-endian Motorola and its clones, from the 6502 through the 68000 and PowerPC. Now one of those lines is coming to an end. The Macintosh was the last general-purpose personal computer the average person could buy that wasn't powered by x86. The PowerPC will live on, but only in game consoles and embedded devices.
And it sucks, because the x86 was never all that good. I say this as an assembly language hacker. I never did get around to learning PPC code (and I guess there's no point learning it now), but I know x86 code, and most anything else has to be better.
I think this is a black day in the history of personal computing.
This could also mark the beginning of the end for Apple. Which would be terribly sad, but not as bad as the end of real choice in consumer hardware.
3. Well, having a different processor architecture makes things slightly harder for viruses... not that it's easy to write a cross-OS virus anyway, but having to target different architectures is just that much worse.
Plus, the x86 architecture sucks. Not a selling point for most, but some of us have noticed.
I concur, I had very high latency with Sprint PCS Vision. Plus... You could either pay $100 a month (IIRC) for their special PCMCIA card, OR you could just hook up a USB cable to your phone and use it as a modem, for no additional charge beyond Vision ($10 a month, at the time I signed up). Except, they decided you weren't supposed to do that anymore; except, they did nothing to prevent it, and told people it was OK as long as it wasn't "too much"; except "too much" was never defined.
If it's anything like Sprint, they want you to use their proxy server, which will automatically recompress JPEGs before sending them to you (similar to those "dialup accelerator" services). Presumably, this uses a lot of the server's resources, so they'd like to limit it. On Sprint, it was possible to avoid the proxy; I dunno about Cingular.
No examples, eh? I thought not. Every real example I've seen offered by creationists has already been debunked. Sorry, you can't argue this in generalities.
You appear to be confusing "Muslim" with "anti-Christian". That's a list of Muslim IDists, all right, but I see no evidence that they're anti-Christian. One is described as "active in the interfaith community"; another even writes "From the Muslim point of view, in fact, Christians are the closest friends and allies in the world." So, try again.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Family Guy's revival had more to do with it being picked up by Cartoon Network for Adult Swim. I know that's where I started watching it.
I haven't been to a movie theater in a few years. Here's what they'll have to do to get me to come back:
1. Clean the place up. The last time I went to a movie theater, it smelled of urine. That was exceptional, but almost every time I've gone, the floor's been sticky. Popcorn butter? Soda? I don't know, but it's everywhere, and it's disgusting.
2. Get rid of the ads. I actually like the trailers, but there's no excuse for any other kind of ad when we're paying to get in. And speaking of paying...
3. Cut the ticket price. Make it up in volume -- get everyone to come, instead of mostly teenagers. Or you could trim your insanely bloated movie budgets.
"You lose all the detail..." Do you know how hilarious that statement is? Even with a quarter of the screen black (and that's what it is on a standard 16:9 / 1.85:1 movie, a quarter), you still get more detail out of a DVD than from a full-screen, fuzzy VHS. More importantly, what about the quarter of the actual movie that's cut away (from the sides) on a pan-and-scan VHS? That's real missing detail.
:-)
But if you insist on pan-and-scan, there are DVD players to accommodate you -- they do the cropping themselves. And you can still find "full screen" DVDs. It even used to be Blockbuster's preferred format, until they realized that the public actually wanted letterbox.
As for "no-skip" commercials, I agree, they're reprehensible. But still, most of the time I can just pop the disc in and walk away for a minute; it'll stop on the main menu. Beyond that, I can copy the disc and remove the cruft. (You mention encryption, but I'm sure you know it's not a real barrier.) They copy much nicer than VHS.
Scratches are annoying, but half the time, I can get rid of skips just by cleaning the disc. The other half the time, I can get a refund. (But it is a problem with subscription services like Netflix, because I can't get the time back.) Copying can also alleviate skipping (the copy programs try a little harder to reread than the player does).
DVDs are generally cheaper, and have been since their introduction. And DVD players are now available for less than the cheapest VCR.
:-)
The only real argument I've heard for VHS over DVD was from parents of young kids; the parents claimed that VHS was more durable against the kind of abuse kids dish out. I'm skeptical of that, but I haven't done the experiments.
But I bet most VHS buyers are just too cheap to get a new player, don't care about or understand the improvements, or are technophones afraid to try hooking up a new device. Possibly all three.
About those prices: It used to be (maybe still is) that most VHS tapes were first sold for something in the range of $90 -- the "rental" price, where the tapes would sell mainly to video stores -- and then later, sometimes, dropped to a "sell-through" price around $20, for everyone to buy. DVDs (and Laser Discs before them) were always offered at the sell-through price, right from the start. I presume this is because DVDs were regarded as more collectible. But they're also cheaper to manufacture.
Nowadays, DVDs are frequently under $10, or even $5, and I see VHS mainly in clearance bins. But I admit, I don't follow the VHS situation too closely anymore.
I dunno about Zeta, but BeOS doesn't. Virtual PC, neither. And I no longer have any hardware that can run it directly.
QEMU, maybe? The website says "Install begins, but never tried all install." But I can get that far on VMware and VPC.
You don't have to assume the density. They gave the mass and radius.
.25 = approximately 2G. (OK, 1.875.) You can also figure the density from those numbers.
Mass 7.5x
Radius 2x
Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance, so it's 7.5 *
On the other hand, it's not clear to me from TFAs how they measured the radius. It may be only an estimate based on the mass and an assumption of average density!
My thoughts exactly. The tape should've been on one of those armored trucks -- Wells Fargo, Brinks, etc. I guess they were looking at it as a redundant backup copy (low value), instead of looking at it as they should have: a target for identity theft (extremely high value).
Yeah, but Sony would probably regard that as grounds to quash the deal (if there is one? can't refer to the article anymore) and let the lawsuit proceed.
What he should've done was open-sourced it back at the beginning, so we wouldn't be facing a crisis now. It's not like he was trying to sell the damn thing, so what did he have to lose? Oh well.
I keep hearing that Sun is soon to dump Sparc, too. Certainly their AMD-based systems are more prominent on their web site now. But anyway, Sun was never in the same "consumer" category, which is why I added those qualifiers. I expect that non-x86 workstations will remain available... at steep premiums, for questionable performance. At least for a little while longer.
But it's tough to beat the economies of scale involved in x86, and there's now very little incentive for anyone to try and build a competitive non-x86 system. I realize that there are some advantages to this situation, too; but please, allow me a moment to mourn.
Cute, but Jobs was out of Apple at the time of the 68k -> PPC transition. So, it's not a question of him saying that he was right to go that way.
Of course, the problem with "survival of the fittest" is that it's a tautology: that which survives, survives. It says nothing about the quality of the ideas. People are also willing to die for complete bunk, like Christianity.
Enivronmentalism is compelling enough to devote one's life to it because, in principle, a poisoned environment could kill you. The same sort of thing can't really be said about DRM. But I do believe that the underlying issues are a lot more serious than most people realize, and I think we should be pressing the most extreme case we can make -- because the IP-mongers will certainly be (and have been) doing it from their side.
Here's the most extreme case I can make: The fight over "intellectual property" is nothing less than a war for the future of humanity. We are coming into an era where physical scarcity will effectively end. The only kind of trade left will be the trade in ideas -- this is what's meant by the "information economy". Only, there's a fundamental problem there: intellectual scarcity doesn't even exist, naturally. It can only be created through intellectual property law, restricting the legal right to copy information and ideas. And the laws work poorly, necessitating an ever-stricter regime of punishment and control if they're to be even partially effective. We've seen this already.
In the end, these will be our choices: Artificial scarcity, with a fascist state upholding elite privileges. Or... we let the old scarcity-based economy collapse, bid it good riddance, and welcome the new gift-based economy, where everyone is essentially rich, as well as free.
Of course, some reading this will think me mad. To explain why it's not madness would take a lot more paragraphs, so I'll save that for another time.
They understand, which is why they're trying to get DRM into your motherboard, so you won't have access to the key.
Please. Itanium is dead.
P.S. Of course this is a good reason for them to emphasize Dashboard -- no porting issues there. :)
But I suppose it could actually become a more pressing issue in the short term, as Mac software houses struggle to ensure that their code works on both PPC and x86.
Changing away from PPC now doesn't mean that adopting it eleven (?) years ago was a mistake. If I read the report of the keynote correctly, Jobs himself made the case that it was the right decision at the time. And heck, Jobs aside, there are even those who think abandoning PPC for x86 now is a mistake. A big one.
I'm not a fan of Intel. Of the last six computers I've bought, five ran AMD, and one, PPC. But who am I kidding? Those AMD procs are still x86es. Only the PPC was something truly different.
From the beginning, personal computers have mainly been powered by two great lines of processors: little-endian Intel and its clones, from the 8080 through the Z80, 8086, and on to the 386 and Pentium; and big-endian Motorola and its clones, from the 6502 through the 68000 and PowerPC. Now one of those lines is coming to an end. The Macintosh was the last general-purpose personal computer the average person could buy that wasn't powered by x86. The PowerPC will live on, but only in game consoles and embedded devices.
And it sucks, because the x86 was never all that good. I say this as an assembly language hacker. I never did get around to learning PPC code (and I guess there's no point learning it now), but I know x86 code, and most anything else has to be better.
I think this is a black day in the history of personal computing.
This could also mark the beginning of the end for Apple. Which would be terribly sad, but not as bad as the end of real choice in consumer hardware.
3. Well, having a different processor architecture makes things slightly harder for viruses... not that it's easy to write a cross-OS virus anyway, but having to target different architectures is just that much worse.
Plus, the x86 architecture sucks. Not a selling point for most, but some of us have noticed.
The link works if you take off the extraneous slash from the end.
I concur, I had very high latency with Sprint PCS Vision. Plus... You could either pay $100 a month (IIRC) for their special PCMCIA card, OR you could just hook up a USB cable to your phone and use it as a modem, for no additional charge beyond Vision ($10 a month, at the time I signed up). Except, they decided you weren't supposed to do that anymore; except, they did nothing to prevent it, and told people it was OK as long as it wasn't "too much"; except "too much" was never defined.
If it's anything like Sprint, they want you to use their proxy server, which will automatically recompress JPEGs before sending them to you (similar to those "dialup accelerator" services). Presumably, this uses a lot of the server's resources, so they'd like to limit it. On Sprint, it was possible to avoid the proxy; I dunno about Cingular.
I had this happen too, but it went away by itself. I never found out the station (other than that it was in Spanish).
Blind faith is not a virtue.
No examples, eh? I thought not. Every real example I've seen offered by creationists has already been debunked. Sorry, you can't argue this in generalities.
You appear to be confusing "Muslim" with "anti-Christian". That's a list of Muslim IDists, all right, but I see no evidence that they're anti-Christian. One is described as "active in the interfaith community"; another even writes "From the Muslim point of view, in fact, Christians are the closest friends and allies in the world." So, try again.