So you support gender or racially exclusive clubs? I don't support closing them down by force. I don't support making them illegal and hunting down or persecuting the people who would be members of such clubs. I support the freedom to establish and join such clubs, or not to. I'm pro-freedom. Exactly how does pro-freedom support anti-freedom entities? (I could delve very deep and fast into what would become mere mudslinging, but I'm trying to avoid that, so I'll keep it at this level)
The reason such clubs were outlawed as discriminatory is not purely because they are superficially discriminatory. After all, the girl scouts and boy scouts are gender specific and legal. These clubs are discriminatory in more than mere membership, as they were used as business avenues, gaining members valuable economic advantages over those not in the club. They were used to discriminate socially and economically for business purposes and thus were outlawed.
So you support gender or racially exclusive clubs? After all, we can choose to mingle with whom we want. Wait, we had that before the anti-bigot nazis.
No one said you can't smoke, what they're saying is you can't smoke where it will affect others. This is not unlike saying you can't shoot guns where it will affect others, spray pepper spray, fire off fireworks, etc. Oh, and you can still mingle with whom you wish, you just can't create a place of business that does that.
Not only does it smell bad, it actually causes acute reactions in people. (Not all, I know)
Now here's a relatively decent equivalence. I'll let you blow smoke my way if you'll let me spray pepper spray your way.
What?
You don't like that? But I like the smell of pepper spray...
Basically, here's the thing - you can go smoke in a closed room all you want, if we could put a globe around your head to hold in all your exhaust, I'd be all for you smoking 5 cartons an hour (hint - you'd be dead). I'm all for not allowing you to infringe on my right to breathe. That's what the whole Constitution was about. Freedom. As long as you don't reasonably infringe upon the freedoms of others. No one's preventing you from smoking at home alone.
Re:OS/2 was never the gaming platform of the futur
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Is Vista the New OS/2?
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Actually, IIRC, Windows 95 never got the window->FS->window switching to work well, and neither has any incarnation of NT/2K/XP, as I discovered recent with a game that supposedly supports switching. The reason I mentioned C&C was precisely because that never worked under any MS OS. You might get lucky and switch it once without BSODing or a complete crash, but the odds of doing it a second time were non-existant.
As for booting to DOS, OS/2 came with what is probably one of the best boot managers even for today that allowed you to multi-boot however you wanted. BTW, I ran OS/2 2.0 - 2.4 from 91-98, on everything from a 486 through a P-III. The only thing that you really needed was memory. Most of the rest of the machine could be standard parts.
As for Windows 95 and DirectX being the final nails in the coffin, for OS/2's gaming aspirations or otherwise, I'll disagree. W95 had massive issues initially. Witness the large number of helps boards at the time dedicated to getting games x, y, and z running on 95. OS/2 was effectively killed by Office 95 and the 1995 forced PC upgrade cycle. By the time that DirectX on W95 became anything remotely interesting, OS/2 was already heading towards being a footnote. (I should also note that I ran 95, 98, and NT 3.50 onward, among other OSes.
Your memory is a bit off. OS/2 was actually starting to encroach on the market until the forced Office95 upgrade. Once that happened, it was lights out for OS/2. Office 95's apps all requested memory at the 2GB location, which OS/2 couldn't deliver. The OS/2 VM (that's right - VM in 91!) had a hard limit of 512 MB. A truly underhanded bit of MS trickery that "won" them the market.
What features? Seriously. Most of those "features" are recreations of what existed 15 years ago. Windows Vista, if anything, is a retro OS. (Minus Aero, which is merely some eye-candy with nothing to add in an OS discussion)
Despite that, Vista will "succeed", much as any MS OS can succeed in the last 6 years.
Re:OS/2 was never the gaming platform of the futur
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Is Vista the New OS/2?
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· Score: 1
Evidently you never tried OS/2. As a gaming platform, it performed admirably, better than Windows of the time. Command & Conquer in a window (could be switched to Full Screen on the fly) with full sound while answering email? No problem.
Try the original Galactic Civilizations. Multi-threaded goodness.
I've visited a variation of them more than once. I was only looking for some discussion, not advice. Well-mastered CDs work for me just fine, badly mastered ones are, well, bad.
Since I tend to listen to most of my music in my car these days and road noise being what it is, that extra 0.05% quality in audio you can get above a well-mastered CD isn't noticeable anyways. (multi-channel and other gadgetry is pretty much out due to cost)
I really appreciate the details on formats though. It was interesting, to say the least. I'll stand by my statement on Nyquist frequencies. While that formula let's you recreate the frequency spectrum, it doesn't let you recreate the shape of the waveform(s).
The problem with a lot of CDs is not that the available resolution is so poor, or that they can't produce super high frequencies, but that they are mastered to maximize loudness at the expense of dynamic range. A movie soundtrack, however, is not mastered nearly so poorly--for cheap equipment, dolby supplies various dynamic compression algorithms. It's surround as well, which can add something. Maximizing loudness (thus reducing your dynamic range) is not solely the fate of CDs. It is, for some reason, more prevalent on CDs. It's also extremely annoying.
Regarding Nyquist, that works wonderfully if your waveforms are pure sine. If not, you'll need more points to approximate the shape.
I was under the impression that the DVD-Video audio section allowed you 5.1 near lossless CD quality plus audio, as a maximum? You would have to encode it specially for that, but it was possible.
dts claims that 1536 kbs rate is very close to lossless. The half bitrate (768 kbs) variety is used more often, though, and from what I've read, it's still lossy. When I talk about lossless, I'm only talking about losses as compared to the original recorded source. All recording technology I'm aware off have some losses and/or artifacts when recording (tape hiss, record hiss, roundings, etc.)
That said, I'd expect that the 1536kb/s sampling has a better approximation than 768kb/s as it's using the same technology. At some point though, the maximum audio resolution will be hit, and increasing the sampling rate beyond that will not improve the approximation.
The best analogy I can come up with is the old regularly spaced dots (the sampling rate) on a curve (original sound source). The more dots you have (the higher the sampling rate), the better you can approximate the curve (sound/music). The better your algorithm (MP3, Dolby Digital - AAC, DTS), the fewer dots you need (lower sampling rate) to approximate the curve. At some point, you will have enough dots that you cannot effectively approximate the curve any more accurrately, and that is the maximum audio resolution of a digital recording device.
In any case, both DD's AAC and DTS can be much better than CDs 44.1 kb/s assuming the recording equipment can exceed the 44.1 kb/s sampling rate of CDs, otherwise the best you can do is approximate the CD's quality. I also know that AAC can be worse, if you lower the sampling rate too much. For instance, iTunes files are generally 128 kb/s, which are worse than CD audio. To be fair, they're much much smaller file sizes than the uncompressed wav file would be.
Maybe you'd be happy with a Oppo 970hd-- sacd and dvd-audio, as well as decent, if not truly stellar dvd performance. I looked at a couple of Oppo's, but they didn't have the picture quality I wanted. Don't recall if the 970hd was in that lineup though. I was looking primarily for a progressive player for movies, with decoding capability for DTS for someone else. My personal DVD player is a Denon, which is more than adequate for what I want at the moment.
I was under the impression that the DVD-Video audio section allowed you 5.1 near lossless CD quality plus audio, as a maximum? You would have to encode it specially for that, but it was possible.
Doesn't DTS carry more information than the DD tracks? They're about double the size, and I recall, faintly through the haze of memory, that DTS had more range and signal to noise than DD.
I also thought that SACD was brought out specifically because it was backwards compatible with current CD players. The front right and left channels are on the CD layer, with the additional tracks on the SACD layer. Again, very hazy on the memory bit, as I haven't looked at one in years.
As for the digital connection, it's important if you want to create a lossless copy for backup/archiving/migration to another format. There's no technical reason for DVD-Audio or SACD to not be transmitted directly via SPDIF other than the manufacturer will violate the licensing terms for those two formats. DenonLink is a proprietary formatted link only compatible with Denon products, as of 3 years ago which, IIRC is also encrypted. I don't know of any players that will output across 1394. HDMI runs you right back into the proprietary encrypted format that is difficult to copy.
Lastly, only an extremely exclusive few players have bass management of which even fewer have decent bass management, and only innordinately expensive players, by todays standards, will even have the DACs nowadays. I was just recently looking, and most have punted on DACs, letting the receiver/TV handle it since they have HDMI outputs anyways. (I was just looking for a decently priced, roughly $100-160 dvd player that merely had built-in DACs for DD/DTS and didn't find any)
Pretty much the entire south from New Mexico east and eastern seaboard. Of course, many of those areas only have a maximum of two lanes. Areas that were intensely bad:
Texas - all of it with some restrictions just occurring against a huge outcry from truckers
Virginia
Maryland
DC - although I suppose they can be excused because the freeways dead end there in stoplights....
Georgia - this was years ago though
Additionally, I don't recall seeing any restrictions in California, Washington, Idaho, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, nor Illinois, but it's been years since I've travelled in many of those and things could have changed.
The original rear-projection TVs use individual CRTs for RGB. And yes, it weighs a significant amount. Old electronics generally do. It weighs in around 300#s. Here's a "recent" listing, and here's a write-up closer to what I have.
Seriously, one of the primary problems here is that trucks are allowed to go 75 mph or more and drive in any lane they please. Not only do they cause the aforementioned issues, but they also tend to wreck a lot - surprise, surprise, 80,000 #s can't stop as quickly as the five 4,000 # cars in front of them that they just demolished. And when they do wreck, it is usually a full freeway closure that results for hours. We have at least one a week in my city, and just a couple of weeks ago we had 2 a day for a week.
How about S-VHS? Remember that one? It was considerably better than VHS, was available, but really went nowhere, because VHS was truly "good enough" at the time. Then DVDs came out, and gee, they're great!
As for other unmentioned formats brought up by Quad, remember SACD and DVDAudio? Where are they? Especially when you consider that the DVD is perfectly capable of recording audio without going the draconian DVDAudio route. I have several DVDs with music that plays perfectly fine in my DVD player, complete with 5.1 sound. I don't own a DVDAudio disk. I do have one SACD, but it plays in normal CD players.
I'm sure there's plenty more, but that'll do for the recent past. The common thread in the failures I see was price and, for the content, more draconian DRM (SACD and DVDAudio players both have significant restrictions in place on playback options, DVD discs do not, so you get full digital output on DVD recorded discs, while you get analog only output on the other two)
I bought a 55" Mitsubishi CRT rear projection HDTV back in 2001 (yeah, that'd be pre DVI/HDMI days - yippee!).
These TVs came with options to stretch the entire SD picture, just the edges, or expand the picture losing a bit of the top and bottom. The edge stretch leaves most of the picture in the proper aspect ratio, but gives you some wierd effects occassionally on the edges. It's my preferred mode of watching, since the full stretch makes you think you're in a willy wonka world, and the expand option actually results in too much blockiness since the vertical resolution isn't as high as I'd like for regular TV.
Since I'm about to go fully HDTV, a lot of this will no longer matter, although even OTA HDTV broadcasts have a lot of content with bars, and these cannot be stretched by this TV unless that content is first scaled down to 480p. (I'm finally getting an HD DVR, which will free me from most SD channels)
There's no question that you have a ground with US plugs either. It's either 2-prong (no ground) or 3-prong (grounded). Of course, then there's the question of whether your outlet was installed properly....
The wonderful insanity continues in the US with polarized plugs - one blade larger than the other, but not all appliances use this. The European 2-prong plug reminds me of a fisher price toy, but they sure are easier to plug in and pull out.
Yes, they will tailgate you if you're in the left lane. (If you're in the right lane, you've done your job and they can suffer.)
The left lane is for passing.
Move over.
(Apparently the message was missed...)
As for people filling the gap, yes, they will. If you're in the right lane, they will because they're exiting, usually. This means you go slower. That's the nature of driving safely with a load.
Actually, with that kind of load, you should be driving right. You should also never be going 30 over - how long is it going to take you to slow down/stop? I ask, because a friend of my dad's once totalled 15 cars with his 18 wheeler as he came around a bend at 55 mph on I-10 in LA and came face to face with a dead-stopped freeway. He slammed on the brakes and went between 2 lanes in attempt to avoid killing anyone (the shoulders weren't options for him). He succeeded in his aim, although several were injured.
For further commentary that will probably ignite you, read this.
Actually, it's the fault of the moron that left his car in the road, most times. I've never figured out why a car is left in the lane, especially in an open road. I've seen this more than once, and almost hit an abandoned car in the left lane once with a perfectly available shoulder right next to it.
I've also been in an accident exactly like this - the van in front of me moved right - voila - about a 5 mph pickup in left lane, 18 wheeler right next to me - 55 mph smashup. It was a pretty hefty wreck, threw the pickup about 300 feet, totalled both vehicles. I was not found at fault, since it was a 55 mph road with no turns at that point, and pickup was moving far below stated and reasonable speeds. (FYI: No one was hurt in any meaningful way)
I've driven in the US, Canada, Mexico and a large segment of Europe, and by far, the best freeway drivers are in Europe. They drive right most of the time, trucks are limited to right lane(s) only and a max of 50 mph through large segments of freeway, and in general are far more considerate than the embecilic god-given left-lane road hogs in the US. (Then again, failure to drive right in Europe can result in incredibly horrible accidents - a mercedes plowing into a BMW launched over an Opel hatchback at a 100mph speed differential is not a sight you want to see. The Opel pulled into the left lane just in front of the BMW.)
Your largest problem on crowded US roads are trucks. Their braking/speedup times are significantly slower than cars, and will cause massive accordian effects the first time they brake. Move them to the right and limit their speed and following distances, and entire problem segments will dissappear. It may slow overall traffic but it will be a steady pace, which will be much faster than the accordian stops otherwise always experienced.
Should only the FIRST drug that lowers cholesterol be patentable? That's hardly the same thing. If it lowers it and is a different drug, that's fine. Should treatments with combinations of drugs be patentable? I don't think so. Would companies stop funding research on combinations? Maybe. I doubt it though, since if a combination of their drugs works better than either alone, they'll sell more of both. The same holds true if in combination with a third party drug improves their effectiveness, they'll promote that too, to sell more of their product. That's the driving force in capitalism.
If you get rid of the patents on me-too drugs then there won't be many of them, and you'll be stuck with lovastatin when you could have atorvastatin. I don't follow how two different drugs lowering cholesterol, for instance, need to reference each other at all in the brief description. (I'll admit I don't have time to do an in-depth bit of research on what these two drugs are, so I'm assuming they're 2 different chemicals) If it does what it does and does it more effectively, odds are that it has a different mechanism, and therefore is unique. My comment was more directed at things like the current brake pedal mechanism under fire for obviousness, as well as the slew of me-too software patents, or even the patenting of existing built in features. (one-click anyone?)
Two companies race to the market, one beats the other by two weeks - should the loser not get a patent at all and lose ALL of their investment? Yes, if they're essentially the same thing - only 1 patent. That's how it's supposed to work.
Patents should be harder to get. If everyone has a patent, then the net value of patents goes down. Witness the large amounts of "cross-licensing" schemes in the software world for an example of how patents are being devalued.
There's a difference there though. Quite a few Heavy Metal bands are touring. Speed metal or death metal? Not so many, in fact, I can't recall a single speed or death metal band playing it's original song set to a crowd of 40-50 year olds (or any age group). Then again, your definition of speed or death metal may be significantly different than mine.
And truth be told, even in the "Heavy Metal" segment, many of those that are currently doing reunion tours sound more pop than metal compared to today's music (KISS, for one). If you really start comparing the currently touring bands of yesterday's noise, you'll find that those that are touring shockingly turn out to have melodies in them! Distinguishable melodies, and unique sounds. You can pretty much ID a Judas Priest, ACDC, Scorpions, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Metallica, or Megadeath song in seconds, if you are familiar with their works of course. Oh, and their concerts aren't filled with just 40-50 year olds. Shockingly, a large group of teens and 20-somethings appear to have "discovered" these bands.
Compare that with some of today's tripe (yes, that's leading). There's a group of bands I can't tell apart unless I actually listen to the words and identify it by lyrics. I currently call them "Boy Bands with Guitars", in honor of those incredibly everlasting wunderkindren of yesteryears "Boy Bands", that will be as well-known and honored as Celine Dion in the coming years. This is for a genre that unfortunately has currently taken over airplay from my preferred musical artists. As for the Hip-Hop scene, what little I'm exposed to is either mind-numbingly uniform like club music, or mind-numbingly droll.
Great. I have a choice between TelCo A and Cable Co 1. My Cable Co was recently bought by TimeWarner, with their absolutely wonderful RoadRunner solution. So I'm down to just my Telco A option, which I'm taking, as they just ran fiber to my house. Now, about 1/2 mile down the road, there's TelCo B, with a different fiber solution that's actually preferable, but I can't get it because they don't serve Telco A's area and vice-versa. Where's TelCo's C, D, and E or Cable Co's 2, 3, and 4? Hint, they don't exist in the same area except for very very unusual areas that comprise less than 1% of the potential client base in the US due to monopoly franchises.
Having 2 monopolies start competing against each other still doesn't address the issue that each is a monopoly in the first place.
if you contrast my full statement and what CA did, you'll find the exact opposite situation in CA. CA is a prime example of how not to deregulate. I'd go so far as to state that CA deregulated electricity much as the fed deregulated AT&T. And look at that, the phone monopoly is effectively back together again. (ie - deregulation didn't work)
Look outside CA for instances where dergulation fomented competition but due to the market deregulation hasn't really realized large savings. However, there's no danger of the locked in monopoly coming back, because carriers and service providers are two separate entities.
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The reason such clubs were outlawed as discriminatory is not purely because they are superficially discriminatory. After all, the girl scouts and boy scouts are gender specific and legal. These clubs are discriminatory in more than mere membership, as they were used as business avenues, gaining members valuable economic advantages over those not in the club. They were used to discriminate socially and economically for business purposes and thus were outlawed.
That's great in theory.
So you support gender or racially exclusive clubs? After all, we can choose to mingle with whom we want. Wait, we had that before the anti-bigot nazis.
No one said you can't smoke, what they're saying is you can't smoke where it will affect others. This is not unlike saying you can't shoot guns where it will affect others, spray pepper spray, fire off fireworks, etc. Oh, and you can still mingle with whom you wish, you just can't create a place of business that does that.
Not only does it smell bad, it actually causes acute reactions in people. (Not all, I know)
Now here's a relatively decent equivalence. I'll let you blow smoke my way if you'll let me spray pepper spray your way.
What?
You don't like that? But I like the smell of pepper spray...
Basically, here's the thing - you can go smoke in a closed room all you want, if we could put a globe around your head to hold in all your exhaust, I'd be all for you smoking 5 cartons an hour (hint - you'd be dead). I'm all for not allowing you to infringe on my right to breathe. That's what the whole Constitution was about. Freedom. As long as you don't reasonably infringe upon the freedoms of others. No one's preventing you from smoking at home alone.
Actually, IIRC, Windows 95 never got the window->FS->window switching to work well, and neither has any incarnation of NT/2K/XP, as I discovered recent with a game that supposedly supports switching. The reason I mentioned C&C was precisely because that never worked under any MS OS. You might get lucky and switch it once without BSODing or a complete crash, but the odds of doing it a second time were non-existant.
As for booting to DOS, OS/2 came with what is probably one of the best boot managers even for today that allowed you to multi-boot however you wanted. BTW, I ran OS/2 2.0 - 2.4 from 91-98, on everything from a 486 through a P-III. The only thing that you really needed was memory. Most of the rest of the machine could be standard parts.
As for Windows 95 and DirectX being the final nails in the coffin, for OS/2's gaming aspirations or otherwise, I'll disagree. W95 had massive issues initially. Witness the large number of helps boards at the time dedicated to getting games x, y, and z running on 95. OS/2 was effectively killed by Office 95 and the 1995 forced PC upgrade cycle. By the time that DirectX on W95 became anything remotely interesting, OS/2 was already heading towards being a footnote. (I should also note that I ran 95, 98, and NT 3.50 onward, among other OSes.
Your memory is a bit off. OS/2 was actually starting to encroach on the market until the forced Office95 upgrade. Once that happened, it was lights out for OS/2. Office 95's apps all requested memory at the 2GB location, which OS/2 couldn't deliver. The OS/2 VM (that's right - VM in 91!) had a hard limit of 512 MB. A truly underhanded bit of MS trickery that "won" them the market.
What features? Seriously. Most of those "features" are recreations of what existed 15 years ago. Windows Vista, if anything, is a retro OS. (Minus Aero, which is merely some eye-candy with nothing to add in an OS discussion)
Despite that, Vista will "succeed", much as any MS OS can succeed in the last 6 years.
Evidently you never tried OS/2. As a gaming platform, it performed admirably, better than Windows of the time. Command & Conquer in a window (could be switched to Full Screen on the fly) with full sound while answering email? No problem.
Try the original Galactic Civilizations. Multi-threaded goodness.
I've visited a variation of them more than once. I was only looking for some discussion, not advice. Well-mastered CDs work for me just fine, badly mastered ones are, well, bad.
Since I tend to listen to most of my music in my car these days and road noise being what it is, that extra 0.05% quality in audio you can get above a well-mastered CD isn't noticeable anyways. (multi-channel and other gadgetry is pretty much out due to cost)
I really appreciate the details on formats though. It was interesting, to say the least. I'll stand by my statement on Nyquist frequencies. While that formula let's you recreate the frequency spectrum, it doesn't let you recreate the shape of the waveform(s).
Regarding Nyquist, that works wonderfully if your waveforms are pure sine. If not, you'll need more points to approximate the shape.
That said, I'd expect that the 1536kb/s sampling has a better approximation than 768kb/s as it's using the same technology. At some point though, the maximum audio resolution will be hit, and increasing the sampling rate beyond that will not improve the approximation.
The best analogy I can come up with is the old regularly spaced dots (the sampling rate) on a curve (original sound source). The more dots you have (the higher the sampling rate), the better you can approximate the curve (sound/music). The better your algorithm (MP3, Dolby Digital - AAC, DTS), the fewer dots you need (lower sampling rate) to approximate the curve. At some point, you will have enough dots that you cannot effectively approximate the curve any more accurrately, and that is the maximum audio resolution of a digital recording device.
In any case, both DD's AAC and DTS can be much better than CDs 44.1 kb/s assuming the recording equipment can exceed the 44.1 kb/s sampling rate of CDs, otherwise the best you can do is approximate the CD's quality. I also know that AAC can be worse, if you lower the sampling rate too much. For instance, iTunes files are generally 128 kb/s, which are worse than CD audio. To be fair, they're much much smaller file sizes than the uncompressed wav file would be.
Maybe you'd be happy with a Oppo 970hd-- sacd and dvd-audio, as well as decent, if not truly stellar dvd performance. I looked at a couple of Oppo's, but they didn't have the picture quality I wanted. Don't recall if the 970hd was in that lineup though. I was looking primarily for a progressive player for movies, with decoding capability for DTS for someone else. My personal DVD player is a Denon, which is more than adequate for what I want at the moment.
Very informative. A couple of questions, however:
I was under the impression that the DVD-Video audio section allowed you 5.1 near lossless CD quality plus audio, as a maximum? You would have to encode it specially for that, but it was possible.
Doesn't DTS carry more information than the DD tracks? They're about double the size, and I recall, faintly through the haze of memory, that DTS had more range and signal to noise than DD.
I also thought that SACD was brought out specifically because it was backwards compatible with current CD players. The front right and left channels are on the CD layer, with the additional tracks on the SACD layer. Again, very hazy on the memory bit, as I haven't looked at one in years.
As for the digital connection, it's important if you want to create a lossless copy for backup/archiving/migration to another format. There's no technical reason for DVD-Audio or SACD to not be transmitted directly via SPDIF other than the manufacturer will violate the licensing terms for those two formats. DenonLink is a proprietary formatted link only compatible with Denon products, as of 3 years ago which, IIRC is also encrypted. I don't know of any players that will output across 1394. HDMI runs you right back into the proprietary encrypted format that is difficult to copy.
Lastly, only an extremely exclusive few players have bass management of which even fewer have decent bass management, and only innordinately expensive players, by todays standards, will even have the DACs nowadays. I was just recently looking, and most have punted on DACs, letting the receiver/TV handle it since they have HDMI outputs anyways. (I was just looking for a decently priced, roughly $100-160 dvd player that merely had built-in DACs for DD/DTS and didn't find any)
Additionally, I don't recall seeing any restrictions in California, Washington, Idaho, South Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, nor Illinois, but it's been years since I've travelled in many of those and things could have changed.
The original rear-projection TVs use individual CRTs for RGB. And yes, it weighs a significant amount. Old electronics generally do. It weighs in around 300#s. Here's a "recent" listing, and here's a write-up closer to what I have.
I'm aware of that. :)
Seriously, one of the primary problems here is that trucks are allowed to go 75 mph or more and drive in any lane they please. Not only do they cause the aforementioned issues, but they also tend to wreck a lot - surprise, surprise, 80,000 #s can't stop as quickly as the five 4,000 # cars in front of them that they just demolished. And when they do wreck, it is usually a full freeway closure that results for hours. We have at least one a week in my city, and just a couple of weeks ago we had 2 a day for a week.
How about S-VHS? Remember that one? It was considerably better than VHS, was available, but really went nowhere, because VHS was truly "good enough" at the time. Then DVDs came out, and gee, they're great!
As for other unmentioned formats brought up by Quad, remember SACD and DVDAudio? Where are they? Especially when you consider that the DVD is perfectly capable of recording audio without going the draconian DVDAudio route. I have several DVDs with music that plays perfectly fine in my DVD player, complete with 5.1 sound. I don't own a DVDAudio disk. I do have one SACD, but it plays in normal CD players.
I'm sure there's plenty more, but that'll do for the recent past. The common thread in the failures I see was price and, for the content, more draconian DRM (SACD and DVDAudio players both have significant restrictions in place on playback options, DVD discs do not, so you get full digital output on DVD recorded discs, while you get analog only output on the other two)
I bought a 55" Mitsubishi CRT rear projection HDTV back in 2001 (yeah, that'd be pre DVI/HDMI days - yippee!).
These TVs came with options to stretch the entire SD picture, just the edges, or expand the picture losing a bit of the top and bottom. The edge stretch leaves most of the picture in the proper aspect ratio, but gives you some wierd effects occassionally on the edges. It's my preferred mode of watching, since the full stretch makes you think you're in a willy wonka world, and the expand option actually results in too much blockiness since the vertical resolution isn't as high as I'd like for regular TV.
Since I'm about to go fully HDTV, a lot of this will no longer matter, although even OTA HDTV broadcasts have a lot of content with bars, and these cannot be stretched by this TV unless that content is first scaled down to 480p. (I'm finally getting an HD DVR, which will free me from most SD channels)
There's no question that you have a ground with US plugs either. It's either 2-prong (no ground) or 3-prong (grounded). Of course, then there's the question of whether your outlet was installed properly....
The wonderful insanity continues in the US with polarized plugs - one blade larger than the other, but not all appliances use this. The European 2-prong plug reminds me of a fisher price toy, but they sure are easier to plug in and pull out.
Yes, they will tailgate you if you're in the left lane. (If you're in the right lane, you've done your job and they can suffer.)
The left lane is for passing.
Move over.
(Apparently the message was missed...)
As for people filling the gap, yes, they will. If you're in the right lane, they will because they're exiting, usually. This means you go slower. That's the nature of driving safely with a load.
Actually, with that kind of load, you should be driving right. You should also never be going 30 over - how long is it going to take you to slow down/stop? I ask, because a friend of my dad's once totalled 15 cars with his 18 wheeler as he came around a bend at 55 mph on I-10 in LA and came face to face with a dead-stopped freeway. He slammed on the brakes and went between 2 lanes in attempt to avoid killing anyone (the shoulders weren't options for him). He succeeded in his aim, although several were injured.
For further commentary that will probably ignite you, read this.
Actually, it's the fault of the moron that left his car in the road, most times. I've never figured out why a car is left in the lane, especially in an open road. I've seen this more than once, and almost hit an abandoned car in the left lane once with a perfectly available shoulder right next to it.
I've also been in an accident exactly like this - the van in front of me moved right - voila - about a 5 mph pickup in left lane, 18 wheeler right next to me - 55 mph smashup. It was a pretty hefty wreck, threw the pickup about 300 feet, totalled both vehicles. I was not found at fault, since it was a 55 mph road with no turns at that point, and pickup was moving far below stated and reasonable speeds. (FYI: No one was hurt in any meaningful way)
I've driven in the US, Canada, Mexico and a large segment of Europe, and by far, the best freeway drivers are in Europe. They drive right most of the time, trucks are limited to right lane(s) only and a max of 50 mph through large segments of freeway, and in general are far more considerate than the embecilic god-given left-lane road hogs in the US. (Then again, failure to drive right in Europe can result in incredibly horrible accidents - a mercedes plowing into a BMW launched over an Opel hatchback at a 100mph speed differential is not a sight you want to see. The Opel pulled into the left lane just in front of the BMW.)
Your largest problem on crowded US roads are trucks. Their braking/speedup times are significantly slower than cars, and will cause massive accordian effects the first time they brake. Move them to the right and limit their speed and following distances, and entire problem segments will dissappear. It may slow overall traffic but it will be a steady pace, which will be much faster than the accordian stops otherwise always experienced.
Patents should be harder to get. If everyone has a patent, then the net value of patents goes down. Witness the large amounts of "cross-licensing" schemes in the software world for an example of how patents are being devalued.
There's a difference there though. Quite a few Heavy Metal bands are touring. Speed metal or death metal? Not so many, in fact, I can't recall a single speed or death metal band playing it's original song set to a crowd of 40-50 year olds (or any age group). Then again, your definition of speed or death metal may be significantly different than mine.
And truth be told, even in the "Heavy Metal" segment, many of those that are currently doing reunion tours sound more pop than metal compared to today's music (KISS, for one). If you really start comparing the currently touring bands of yesterday's noise, you'll find that those that are touring shockingly turn out to have melodies in them! Distinguishable melodies, and unique sounds. You can pretty much ID a Judas Priest, ACDC, Scorpions, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Metallica, or Megadeath song in seconds, if you are familiar with their works of course. Oh, and their concerts aren't filled with just 40-50 year olds. Shockingly, a large group of teens and 20-somethings appear to have "discovered" these bands.
Compare that with some of today's tripe (yes, that's leading). There's a group of bands I can't tell apart unless I actually listen to the words and identify it by lyrics. I currently call them "Boy Bands with Guitars", in honor of those incredibly everlasting wunderkindren of yesteryears "Boy Bands", that will be as well-known and honored as Celine Dion in the coming years. This is for a genre that unfortunately has currently taken over airplay from my preferred musical artists. As for the Hip-Hop scene, what little I'm exposed to is either mind-numbingly uniform like club music, or mind-numbingly droll.
Great. I have a choice between TelCo A and Cable Co 1. My Cable Co was recently bought by TimeWarner, with their absolutely wonderful RoadRunner solution. So I'm down to just my Telco A option, which I'm taking, as they just ran fiber to my house. Now, about 1/2 mile down the road, there's TelCo B, with a different fiber solution that's actually preferable, but I can't get it because they don't serve Telco A's area and vice-versa. Where's TelCo's C, D, and E or Cable Co's 2, 3, and 4? Hint, they don't exist in the same area except for very very unusual areas that comprise less than 1% of the potential client base in the US due to monopoly franchises.
Having 2 monopolies start competing against each other still doesn't address the issue that each is a monopoly in the first place.
if you contrast my full statement and what CA did, you'll find the exact opposite situation in CA. CA is a prime example of how not to deregulate. I'd go so far as to state that CA deregulated electricity much as the fed deregulated AT&T. And look at that, the phone monopoly is effectively back together again. (ie - deregulation didn't work)
Look outside CA for instances where dergulation fomented competition but due to the market deregulation hasn't really realized large savings. However, there's no danger of the locked in monopoly coming back, because carriers and service providers are two separate entities.
Try "Symmetric Multiprocessing"