Actually the cable seems quite safe even if part of it "falls"
I hear this all the time. It's simply not true. The FAQ you reference has an important qualifier:
"The majority, the long end out in space, gains enough speed that it burns up in the atmosphere, with the lower portion falling into the sea"
That means that in order to be harmless, it'd have to be built out in the middle of the sea. They're actually seriously suggesting they use a ship/platform as the base.
The fact remains that there are numerous, numerous nearly impossible technical challenges. For example- "Objects larger than about 10 cm have a finite possibility of destroying the ribbon". Nobody has the capability to track objects that small. They are "seeking" radar that can track objects that small- ie, they haven't found one yet.
Further:
One of the nice things about our anchor site is that it is in the middle of nowhere, approximately 650 km from shipping or plane routes.
If it's so goddamn far from everything else, it's not going to make for a very efficient means of getting stuff from "civilization" to space, now is it?
I'm so sick of hearing about space elevators. It's a technology dreamt up by science fiction writers who do not have to deal with reality beyond a level the reader expects, and Space Fetishists have become obsessed by the concept, despite numerous obvious problems. They dismiss such problems with a wave of the hand, with solutions qualified with "eventually", "we can", "we might be able to", and "we think". They're entirely serious when they say, "Oh, we won't have to worry about the part that doesn't fly off into orbit, because we'll put it in the middle of the ocean." Right. That doesn't create its own problems, no, not at all.
When will you people get it through your heads that space elevators won't work?
Which is legal in Hungary. Welcome to the internet, son.
The original poster said "H.264 is not free", implying that's why it shouldn't be implemented in mplayer.
Further- just because it's legal in Hungary doesn't mean it is legal anywhere else- which is why mplayer isn't distributed with, for example, Debian. I don't believe it is, in fact, distributed with any major Linux distribution.
I can't help but wonder just how YOU came to know about them
I judge them by how they speak and represent themselves. They were total assholes about distros distributing binaries of mplayer, as well as compiler problems- they're such bad coders, their shit broke faster than a piece of china near a bull, and they would happily point a finger anybody they could. "Oh, the software crashes because Redhat didn't build it properly". Or, "oh, you didn't compile it with this one specific version of GCC." Except most of the rest of the world seemed to do pretty OK whenever a new version of GCC rolled around; everyone else's problems seemed to be "my stuff doesn't compile because gcc no longer likes that technically-invalid-but-previously-forgiven practice". Mplayer's problems always seemed to be "mplayer crashes when built with anything but this version of GCC".
I also remember some very nasty "news items" posted on the mplayer website amounting to a flame war over licensing issues.
It's bloated. On both linux and MacOS X, it consumes considerable CPU resources- and that's with the fancy interpolation it supposedly does turned off. My Powerbook G4, for example- mplayer consumes about 60% CPU, enough to bake my lap and turn on the fan after a while. VLC, on the other hand- needs about 20%, keeping my lap happy.
I had a similar experience with Xine- it would take up only a few percent of my athlon's CPU time, but mplayer would practically throttle the system...and Xine supported on the fly variable speed playback(ala VCR jog control).
Mplayer has been under "development" for several years. It hasn't seen any major or even minor feature additions. The user interface sucks, especially on OS X. For the most part, the only thing it can do is play video- on a very, very basic level; case and point, once it gets out of sync, it stays out of sync. About its only good quality is that its seeking is very fast and quite good- VLC's seeking sucks (takes forever, sometimes knocks video/audio out of sync for a few seconds- it recovers though, by scaling either the video or audio for a few seconds until they match again).
Bullshit. Every MPEG standard implementor is -supposed- to pay royalties. But I don't see any projects which support mpeg video and audio- doing so. I also don't see anyone chasing them down for the royalties. The general consensus is that if you don't make money off it, nobody will chase you down for the royalties; they're happy with the revenue stream from commercial software.
Further, if you bothered to read up, you'd note that there's a reference implementation with downloadable source code, and documents on the (ahem) ISO standard.
Also, listening to someone complain about proprietary technology and "openness" being a hinderance is pretty funny in the context of Mplayer, considering that the developers distribute codec packs consisting of commercial software (specifically DLL files) they're -not allowed to distribute- from Microsoft, Real, Apple, Intel, and many others. Dozens of proprietary video and audio formats are included.
Further, VERY early digital SLRs such as the ones made by Kodak(the ones with the giant packs underneath the Nikon body) had means of recording GPS coordinates with the image.
Far as I know, nobody ever cared to actually use it, which is why only a handful of cameras even claim to do it in their specs, and even if they do, there's no way to actually use it (no cables available, no software or instructions, etc).
I doubt that will ever change much. Yeah, it's a toy. Yeah, cameraphones have GPS and cameras now. But will anyone save a few 'bloggers' actually use it? Nope. Will those that do use it, do so for anything truly useful? Nope.
when you can bribe the user to tell you the password with a chocolate bar!
Nobody ever pointed out the main problem with that study- I bet 99% of the people played along to a)find out who it was to report it to their employer/the cops or b)to get a chocolate bar out of it.
I'm sure the same 99% had absolutely no intention of actually giving the person their REAL password. "For a candy bar? Sure, "uRaSucker".
"Keep the gun in a location where it cannot be stolen and cannot be used by your 12 year old to shoot his best friend or himself in the face while playing with it". IE, in a gun safe, or with a trigger lock, etc.
I used to drive by a billboard every day that had about 12 pictures of kids, all who shot themselves or were shot by a friend, playing with a parent's gun.
If you don't have any pets, consider getting a dog.
Be -extremely- careful here. Encouraging any type of violent behavior in a companion animal is likely to get you in serious shit with your neighbors, family, friends- maybe even your town. People you know will simply stop coming if they find your dog too dangerous or threatening, especially if they have children. If neighbors complain, you could find the SPCA or local dog officer investigating you.
If your dog attacks anyone, fully expect a lawsuit, and fully expect to loose it. More and more dog attacks are occurring, and the public's pretty pissed off- if it ever went to a jury, you'd almost certainly loose everything you owned. In Boston, for example, we've had several -fatal- dog attacks over the last year or two, ranging from a 14 year old girl to a full grown woman whose dog attacked her throat and crushed it. Dogs are killing machines- NEVER forget that.
If -you- have any small children, you're pretty much guaranteeing an dog attack if the dog isn't very patient or you've encouraged any aggressive behavior; older dogs are VERY poor choices unless they're the super-friendly breeds and quiet; older dogs have little patience/tolerance for pain, and just like people can go bonkers- such as not recognizing family members anymore. Ask a trainer to evaluate a dog before you consider bringing it into your home, or learn how to do "the tests". PBS's "Uncle Matty" show is full of good information, and one of his shows is about evaluating puppies to make sure they're kid proof/friendly.
At the very least, select a breed which is faultlessly obedient (Airedales for example, while very friendly and loving, are almost cat-like in terms of obeying commands- they do it when it suits them) and go through obedience school with the dog. The dog should stop dead in its tracks and follow any command from any family member.
There were looters with guns and machetes threatening students
Is it just me, or did this poster sound like some 1930's colonialist complaining about how 'the natives' got out of control?
You want to go to play-school and take advantage of incredibly low living costs due to enormous depravity between what you hold in your wallet and what the average local makes- you'd better not complain when law breaks down and you suddenly find yourself more wanted than a sugar cookie next to an ant mount.
Funny thing- when one of your two laptops is worth several times more than what the average Grenadan makes in a year, and law breaks down- all those people who smiled at you every day suddenly want to beat you for your money and any food you might have. Huh. Interesting.
We chartered our own jet out of Grenada yesterday to Barbados
Wow. Too bad you took all that medical knowledge that could have been used to help people, and skipped the fuck outta town. So you can afford to charter your own jet- and you want sympathy from people? Did you happen to notice the thousands of tin huts smashed flat (or missing entirely) through your plane window? They're going to have massive problems with disease and famine- and you all just left, despite having medical training that could have saved lives.
Yep. Just what we need. Someone making fun of a very, very serious issue.
Why am I very uneasy about this, and extremely doubtful it will do anything to help, instead making concerns about voting machines seem to the average person more like paranoia?
However PayPal is actually fining the PayPal user, not the sites.
RTFA.
"The new policy, which takes effect Sept. 24 and applies to both buyers and sellers,"
This is a pure money-grab by Paypal; they're doing it to sites they think support piracy as well. This profiteering off illegal activity, in many cases(not for legitimate porn and legal gambling, but certainly for piracy)- and I can't wait for a US attorney to fire up an investigation against them, because the scumbags deserve it. Among other things, by seizing the money, they're proving they knew it was obtained illegally. Posession of stolen funds, anyone?
Not really. The Digital Rebel and 10D both get about 500-600 shots out of the battery if you don't use the flash, AF in servo mode(ie continuous refocusing) or use a lens with image stabilization a lot. Canon and Nikon both make vertical grips for their cameras which hold two standard battery packs.
I've gone to motorsport events and taken 2-3GB of RAW photos on one battery pack, and I use both image stabilization and AI servo focus mode. I have two packs, and I've almost never needed the second one in my year of ownership thus far.
I have an older 330MB microdrive. It's slow as shit. CF cards used to be slower, now it's completely the opposite. Compared to my Sandisk Extreme and Ultra II cards, the microdrive takes 4x longer to offload photos from the buffer.
When you've been shooting pictures of every 4th car going by you and then one of them locks up the rear and starts to spin, you want as many shots out of the 9-shot camera buffer as possible. Shoot continuous at 3fps for 3 seconds and sort the good from the bad on the laptop later.
Most pros don't use anything over 1GB. Why? Because 1GB is almost 120 photos for a 10D- a shitload. So you're not swapping that often. By using 4 1GB cards- if one gets erased, stepped on, lost, or dies on you- you're only out 1/4 of your photos, instead of ALL of them. Furthermore- 1 can be in your 'digital wallet' widget or laptop, while the other is in your camera. Oh, and it's hideously expensive for a 4GB card versus a 1GB card or a bunch of 512's, just like those super-huge memory dimms cost much more per MB than a 512 or 1GB stick.
You can already get 14 megapixel cameras from Kodak. And as other people have said, the pixels aren't important, it's the sensor and the lenses you use.
What are -you- talking about? Leaf makes units that are 22mpixel, and since they go on medium-format and large format cameras which use larger and vastly more expensive/better/simpler optics, the image is often vastly superior. They also use 16 bit per channel color; the Canon 10D for example, is only 10-12(I forget which).
The Kodak 14n is an atrocious camera- the body is horrible and the sensor is so noisy Kodak had to come out with custom noise supression software that is widely regarded as the worst in the industry; up close, images look like an impressionist painting. Kodak simply smudged the image, thus negating the whole point of having a 14 megapixel sensor. The best high-pixel-count 35mm camera is the Canon 1Ds (S = studio).
The 8 megapixel consumer cameras are virtually worthless. Sensor pixel size is so small, the antialias-lens-array filter can't do a very good job and gain has to be cranked up. The Sony F828 produces images at 100 ISO that look worse than my Canon 10D at 800 ISO, and costs almost as much as the Digital Rebel, which is virtually the same as the 10D.
It's exactly what consumers deserve for being too stupid to actually look at image quality- manufactures figured out a long time ago that all the magazines were saying "more megapixels are better! Get the most you can!" That was true when cameras were 1-2mpixel. Anything over 3 is more than plenty for almost any consumer's needs. 8mpixel is gross overkill even for an 8x10 print.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is now available in bad quality on everybodies favorite trackers
"bad quality" is a compliment; the group that did it was a manga group and it shows; they suck. I'd say 25% or more of the lines are untranslated. There are numerous mistakes. "notes" sometimes FILL the screen and are put above AND below simultaneously. The subs are not timed correctly so long sentences often flash away because they were not put up slightly before dialog actually starts. Togusa's name is mistranslated- how the fuck do you screw up that?
Oh, and it's a cam, so the audio is atrocious and the video is so blurry it's almost hopeless. Dynamic range is also poor, which is pretty important considering the whole movie is set at night.
The movie itself was a gross disappointment. I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say the plot will, towards the last 20 minutes, seem shockingly familiar. What a fucking ripoff. Togusa's even dumber than his usual self and partnered with Batou, something that seems highly unlikely given he was the Major's partner, and Togusa is a complete rookie. Meh.
Know that new T-Mobile Sidekick II that Paris Hilton and Derek Jeter have been totin' around town?
No, I don't. Paris Hilton is a basketcase attention whore who redefines the term "spoiled rich brat", and Derek Jeter is an asshole on and off the field; he beat the shit out of a Special Ed teacher moonlighting as a Fenway groundskeeper, and had some rather unsympathetic things to say about the Devil Rays when they chose to stay in Florida until their families were out of the path of the hurricane.
Furthermore, I'm not stupid enough to fall for celebrity endorsements, because I actually have a brain. This is also why I want a cell phone that doesn't have a camera. Just bluetooth, good signal, good address book, quality construction, and a simple, easy to use interface.
Before you mod me off-topic or flamebait, consider that the article was one giant piece of astroturf- as another poster noted, the story submitter has never made a single comment on slashdot.
Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images."
AHA! CONSPIRACY! This also means we didn't actually land on the moon, and lends credence to my little-green-men-at-roswell theory. Not the alien autopsy though, that was just nonsense.
On top of the webDAV server support Sunbird saves its files to Apple's open iCal standard which allows for a degree of interoperability between the two applications and platforms.
That's new, because a few months ago, Mozilla wouldn't even show the TITLE or TIME AND DATE of a calendar entry created with iCal and published to a webDAV server, or vise-versa. It was pretty pathetic that compatibility was broken on such a basic level between two apps which claimed to be using the same standard. If things have changed, I applaud it sincerely.
Also, if something happens that is severe enough to destroy the disk, it will probably also kill you, so you won't be needing that data backup anymore.
Great, until you trip over something on the floor in the dark at the shelter because the power's out, trip, and fall flat on your face, with the disk in your jacket pocket.
DVD-R's and CD-Rs are remarkably fragile.
US currency Legal Tender
on
Make Money Fast
·
· Score: 4, Informative
businesses to stop accepting $100CDN bills, thus affecting literally millions of people
I was under the impression that doing so at least in the US was illegal, until I actually (gasp!) googled it to make sure I was.
First link was to the US Treasury Department's FAQ on just that subject: Legal Tender Status.
I always thought it was illegal to refuse currency, but that nobody enforced it. Learn something every day. Honestly- it should be illegal for businesses to refuse currency; I don't care about the inconvenience of them having to change a $50 or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it. It's very easy for it to be an issue of safety, and absurd to have money in your pocket in the industrialized world and not be able to use it. Nevermind that it should not be compulsory to use plastic.
Jokes about gentoo aside, the source tarballs are cached in/var, and only removed when they exceed configured limits for max disk space. Patches are contained in the portage tree, along with the "ebuild" files which are the build instruction files.
If the update is just a patch to the source, there's sometimes a minor revision made and an updated gentoo ebuild file and source code patch added to the portage tree, which is of course done via rsync. All in all, it's decently efficient. This mostly(I think) happens with unstable package versions, where a security update may make it into portage before the official project bumps their release, but that's not the case with stable stuff.
I think for basic systems, compile time complaints are slightly exaggerated. My -original- celeron 450 isn't shabby at all at compiling most of the more basic system packages and server apps. Even glibc and gcc build with relative ease, and when I set up distcc amongst my three systems, it became even less of a hassle. Even without distcc, the time to clear out 50 packages of updates on a mail server is surprisingly low on a low-powered system.
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I hear this all the time. It's simply not true. The FAQ you reference has an important qualifier: "The majority, the long end out in space, gains enough speed that it burns up in the atmosphere, with the lower portion falling into the sea"
That means that in order to be harmless, it'd have to be built out in the middle of the sea. They're actually seriously suggesting they use a ship/platform as the base.
The fact remains that there are numerous, numerous nearly impossible technical challenges. For example- "Objects larger than about 10 cm have a finite possibility of destroying the ribbon". Nobody has the capability to track objects that small. They are "seeking" radar that can track objects that small- ie, they haven't found one yet.
Further:
One of the nice things about our anchor site is that it is in the middle of nowhere, approximately 650 km from shipping or plane routes.
If it's so goddamn far from everything else, it's not going to make for a very efficient means of getting stuff from "civilization" to space, now is it?
I'm so sick of hearing about space elevators. It's a technology dreamt up by science fiction writers who do not have to deal with reality beyond a level the reader expects, and Space Fetishists have become obsessed by the concept, despite numerous obvious problems. They dismiss such problems with a wave of the hand, with solutions qualified with "eventually", "we can", "we might be able to", and "we think". They're entirely serious when they say, "Oh, we won't have to worry about the part that doesn't fly off into orbit, because we'll put it in the middle of the ocean." Right. That doesn't create its own problems, no, not at all.
When will you people get it through your heads that space elevators won't work?
The original poster said "H.264 is not free", implying that's why it shouldn't be implemented in mplayer.
Further- just because it's legal in Hungary doesn't mean it is legal anywhere else- which is why mplayer isn't distributed with, for example, Debian. I don't believe it is, in fact, distributed with any major Linux distribution.
I can't help but wonder just how YOU came to know about them
I judge them by how they speak and represent themselves. They were total assholes about distros distributing binaries of mplayer, as well as compiler problems- they're such bad coders, their shit broke faster than a piece of china near a bull, and they would happily point a finger anybody they could. "Oh, the software crashes because Redhat didn't build it properly". Or, "oh, you didn't compile it with this one specific version of GCC." Except most of the rest of the world seemed to do pretty OK whenever a new version of GCC rolled around; everyone else's problems seemed to be "my stuff doesn't compile because gcc no longer likes that technically-invalid-but-previously-forgiven practice". Mplayer's problems always seemed to be "mplayer crashes when built with anything but this version of GCC".
I also remember some very nasty "news items" posted on the mplayer website amounting to a flame war over licensing issues.
Who cares about mplayer support?
It's bloated. On both linux and MacOS X, it consumes considerable CPU resources- and that's with the fancy interpolation it supposedly does turned off. My Powerbook G4, for example- mplayer consumes about 60% CPU, enough to bake my lap and turn on the fan after a while. VLC, on the other hand- needs about 20%, keeping my lap happy.
I had a similar experience with Xine- it would take up only a few percent of my athlon's CPU time, but mplayer would practically throttle the system...and Xine supported on the fly variable speed playback(ala VCR jog control).
Mplayer has been under "development" for several years. It hasn't seen any major or even minor feature additions. The user interface sucks, especially on OS X. For the most part, the only thing it can do is play video- on a very, very basic level; case and point, once it gets out of sync, it stays out of sync. About its only good quality is that its seeking is very fast and quite good- VLC's seeking sucks (takes forever, sometimes knocks video/audio out of sync for a few seconds- it recovers though, by scaling either the video or audio for a few seconds until they match again).
Bullshit. Every MPEG standard implementor is -supposed- to pay royalties. But I don't see any projects which support mpeg video and audio- doing so. I also don't see anyone chasing them down for the royalties. The general consensus is that if you don't make money off it, nobody will chase you down for the royalties; they're happy with the revenue stream from commercial software.
Further, if you bothered to read up, you'd note that there's a reference implementation with downloadable source code, and documents on the (ahem) ISO standard.
Also, listening to someone complain about proprietary technology and "openness" being a hinderance is pretty funny in the context of Mplayer, considering that the developers distribute codec packs consisting of commercial software (specifically DLL files) they're -not allowed to distribute- from Microsoft, Real, Apple, Intel, and many others. Dozens of proprietary video and audio formats are included.
Further, VERY early digital SLRs such as the ones made by Kodak(the ones with the giant packs underneath the Nikon body) had means of recording GPS coordinates with the image.
Far as I know, nobody ever cared to actually use it, which is why only a handful of cameras even claim to do it in their specs, and even if they do, there's no way to actually use it (no cables available, no software or instructions, etc).
I doubt that will ever change much. Yeah, it's a toy. Yeah, cameraphones have GPS and cameras now. But will anyone save a few 'bloggers' actually use it? Nope. Will those that do use it, do so for anything truly useful? Nope.
Boy, would that be a great practical joke on your stoned roommates.
Pot plant: "Hey. I think you've had enough, eh?"
Stoned roommate: "HOLY SHIT!"
If he/she thinks the pot plant was actually talking to them, they just might take it as a sign they need to stop smoking pot :-)
Nobody ever pointed out the main problem with that study- I bet 99% of the people played along to a)find out who it was to report it to their employer/the cops or b)to get a chocolate bar out of it.
I'm sure the same 99% had absolutely no intention of actually giving the person their REAL password. "For a candy bar? Sure, "uRaSucker".
And it would do this how, considering that any bank in the world using online account stuff also uses SSL?
A better question is "why is RedHat STILL not using the current stable kernel series?"
2.6 has been out for how long, folks?
Oh, you mean like DHCP and BootP?
Yeah, that's been a REAL disaster. Encumbered by patents, not cross platform, very secretive...
Christ- I hate MS as much as the next guy, but chill out.
Nowhere in your article did I see:
"Keep the gun in a location where it cannot be stolen and cannot be used by your 12 year old to shoot his best friend or himself in the face while playing with it". IE, in a gun safe, or with a trigger lock, etc.
I used to drive by a billboard every day that had about 12 pictures of kids, all who shot themselves or were shot by a friend, playing with a parent's gun.
Be -extremely- careful here. Encouraging any type of violent behavior in a companion animal is likely to get you in serious shit with your neighbors, family, friends- maybe even your town. People you know will simply stop coming if they find your dog too dangerous or threatening, especially if they have children. If neighbors complain, you could find the SPCA or local dog officer investigating you.
If your dog attacks anyone, fully expect a lawsuit, and fully expect to loose it. More and more dog attacks are occurring, and the public's pretty pissed off- if it ever went to a jury, you'd almost certainly loose everything you owned. In Boston, for example, we've had several -fatal- dog attacks over the last year or two, ranging from a 14 year old girl to a full grown woman whose dog attacked her throat and crushed it. Dogs are killing machines- NEVER forget that.
If -you- have any small children, you're pretty much guaranteeing an dog attack if the dog isn't very patient or you've encouraged any aggressive behavior; older dogs are VERY poor choices unless they're the super-friendly breeds and quiet; older dogs have little patience/tolerance for pain, and just like people can go bonkers- such as not recognizing family members anymore. Ask a trainer to evaluate a dog before you consider bringing it into your home, or learn how to do "the tests". PBS's "Uncle Matty" show is full of good information, and one of his shows is about evaluating puppies to make sure they're kid proof/friendly.
At the very least, select a breed which is faultlessly obedient (Airedales for example, while very friendly and loving, are almost cat-like in terms of obeying commands- they do it when it suits them) and go through obedience school with the dog. The dog should stop dead in its tracks and follow any command from any family member.
Is it just me, or did this poster sound like some 1930's colonialist complaining about how 'the natives' got out of control?
You want to go to play-school and take advantage of incredibly low living costs due to enormous depravity between what you hold in your wallet and what the average local makes- you'd better not complain when law breaks down and you suddenly find yourself more wanted than a sugar cookie next to an ant mount.
Funny thing- when one of your two laptops is worth several times more than what the average Grenadan makes in a year, and law breaks down- all those people who smiled at you every day suddenly want to beat you for your money and any food you might have. Huh. Interesting.
We chartered our own jet out of Grenada yesterday to Barbados
Wow. Too bad you took all that medical knowledge that could have been used to help people, and skipped the fuck outta town. So you can afford to charter your own jet- and you want sympathy from people? Did you happen to notice the thousands of tin huts smashed flat (or missing entirely) through your plane window? They're going to have massive problems with disease and famine- and you all just left, despite having medical training that could have saved lives.
Yep. Just what we need. Someone making fun of a very, very serious issue.
Why am I very uneasy about this, and extremely doubtful it will do anything to help, instead making concerns about voting machines seem to the average person more like paranoia?
RTFA.
"The new policy, which takes effect Sept. 24 and applies to both buyers and sellers,"
This is a pure money-grab by Paypal; they're doing it to sites they think support piracy as well. This profiteering off illegal activity, in many cases(not for legitimate porn and legal gambling, but certainly for piracy)- and I can't wait for a US attorney to fire up an investigation against them, because the scumbags deserve it. Among other things, by seizing the money, they're proving they knew it was obtained illegally. Posession of stolen funds, anyone?
Not really. The Digital Rebel and 10D both get about 500-600 shots out of the battery if you don't use the flash, AF in servo mode(ie continuous refocusing) or use a lens with image stabilization a lot. Canon and Nikon both make vertical grips for their cameras which hold two standard battery packs.
I've gone to motorsport events and taken 2-3GB of RAW photos on one battery pack, and I use both image stabilization and AI servo focus mode. I have two packs, and I've almost never needed the second one in my year of ownership thus far.
I have an older 330MB microdrive. It's slow as shit. CF cards used to be slower, now it's completely the opposite. Compared to my Sandisk Extreme and Ultra II cards, the microdrive takes 4x longer to offload photos from the buffer.
When you've been shooting pictures of every 4th car going by you and then one of them locks up the rear and starts to spin, you want as many shots out of the 9-shot camera buffer as possible. Shoot continuous at 3fps for 3 seconds and sort the good from the bad on the laptop later.
Most pros don't use anything over 1GB. Why? Because 1GB is almost 120 photos for a 10D- a shitload. So you're not swapping that often. By using 4 1GB cards- if one gets erased, stepped on, lost, or dies on you- you're only out 1/4 of your photos, instead of ALL of them. Furthermore- 1 can be in your 'digital wallet' widget or laptop, while the other is in your camera. Oh, and it's hideously expensive for a 4GB card versus a 1GB card or a bunch of 512's, just like those super-huge memory dimms cost much more per MB than a 512 or 1GB stick.
What are -you- talking about? Leaf makes units that are 22mpixel, and since they go on medium-format and large format cameras which use larger and vastly more expensive/better/simpler optics, the image is often vastly superior. They also use 16 bit per channel color; the Canon 10D for example, is only 10-12(I forget which).
The Kodak 14n is an atrocious camera- the body is horrible and the sensor is so noisy Kodak had to come out with custom noise supression software that is widely regarded as the worst in the industry; up close, images look like an impressionist painting. Kodak simply smudged the image, thus negating the whole point of having a 14 megapixel sensor. The best high-pixel-count 35mm camera is the Canon 1Ds (S = studio).
The 8 megapixel consumer cameras are virtually worthless. Sensor pixel size is so small, the antialias-lens-array filter can't do a very good job and gain has to be cranked up. The Sony F828 produces images at 100 ISO that look worse than my Canon 10D at 800 ISO, and costs almost as much as the Digital Rebel, which is virtually the same as the 10D.
It's exactly what consumers deserve for being too stupid to actually look at image quality- manufactures figured out a long time ago that all the magazines were saying "more megapixels are better! Get the most you can!" That was true when cameras were 1-2mpixel. Anything over 3 is more than plenty for almost any consumer's needs. 8mpixel is gross overkill even for an 8x10 print.
"bad quality" is a compliment; the group that did it was a manga group and it shows; they suck. I'd say 25% or more of the lines are untranslated. There are numerous mistakes. "notes" sometimes FILL the screen and are put above AND below simultaneously. The subs are not timed correctly so long sentences often flash away because they were not put up slightly before dialog actually starts. Togusa's name is mistranslated- how the fuck do you screw up that?
Oh, and it's a cam, so the audio is atrocious and the video is so blurry it's almost hopeless. Dynamic range is also poor, which is pretty important considering the whole movie is set at night.
The movie itself was a gross disappointment. I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say the plot will, towards the last 20 minutes, seem shockingly familiar. What a fucking ripoff. Togusa's even dumber than his usual self and partnered with Batou, something that seems highly unlikely given he was the Major's partner, and Togusa is a complete rookie. Meh.
No, I don't. Paris Hilton is a basketcase attention whore who redefines the term "spoiled rich brat", and Derek Jeter is an asshole on and off the field; he beat the shit out of a Special Ed teacher moonlighting as a Fenway groundskeeper, and had some rather unsympathetic things to say about the Devil Rays when they chose to stay in Florida until their families were out of the path of the hurricane.
Furthermore, I'm not stupid enough to fall for celebrity endorsements, because I actually have a brain. This is also why I want a cell phone that doesn't have a camera. Just bluetooth, good signal, good address book, quality construction, and a simple, easy to use interface.
Before you mod me off-topic or flamebait, consider that the article was one giant piece of astroturf- as another poster noted, the story submitter has never made a single comment on slashdot.
"...and through the magic of the Enlarge-o-matic, Beaker can more easily study this common household germ."
"WRAAAAR!" "MEEEEEEEP!"
"...and vise-versa!"
AHA! CONSPIRACY! This also means we didn't actually land on the moon, and lends credence to my little-green-men-at-roswell theory. Not the alien autopsy though, that was just nonsense.
That's new, because a few months ago, Mozilla wouldn't even show the TITLE or TIME AND DATE of a calendar entry created with iCal and published to a webDAV server, or vise-versa. It was pretty pathetic that compatibility was broken on such a basic level between two apps which claimed to be using the same standard. If things have changed, I applaud it sincerely.
Great, until you trip over something on the floor in the dark at the shelter because the power's out, trip, and fall flat on your face, with the disk in your jacket pocket.
DVD-R's and CD-Rs are remarkably fragile.
I was under the impression that doing so at least in the US was illegal, until I actually (gasp!) googled it to make sure I was.
First link was to the US Treasury Department's FAQ on just that subject: Legal Tender Status.
I always thought it was illegal to refuse currency, but that nobody enforced it. Learn something every day. Honestly- it should be illegal for businesses to refuse currency; I don't care about the inconvenience of them having to change a $50 or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it. It's very easy for it to be an issue of safety, and absurd to have money in your pocket in the industrialized world and not be able to use it. Nevermind that it should not be compulsory to use plastic.
If the update is just a patch to the source, there's sometimes a minor revision made and an updated gentoo ebuild file and source code patch added to the portage tree, which is of course done via rsync. All in all, it's decently efficient. This mostly(I think) happens with unstable package versions, where a security update may make it into portage before the official project bumps their release, but that's not the case with stable stuff.
I think for basic systems, compile time complaints are slightly exaggerated. My -original- celeron 450 isn't shabby at all at compiling most of the more basic system packages and server apps. Even glibc and gcc build with relative ease, and when I set up distcc amongst my three systems, it became even less of a hassle. Even without distcc, the time to clear out 50 packages of updates on a mail server is surprisingly low on a low-powered system.