I wish the creators of DVD had required players to support converting from 24 frames per second non-interlaced to 60 fields per second interlaced on the fly, rather than the current standard of the movie being converted when the disk is mastered.
What are you talking about? Movies are mastered to DVD at 24fps and the player does indeed perform the 3/2 pulldown process to produce the 60 fields per second NTSC TV requires. Progressive scan DVD players can directly output the 24fps non-interlaced image to a suitable TV/projection system which gets rid of any nasty judder.
You shouldn't be seeing interlace artefacts when playing DVD on a computer unless the original source material was interlaced such as live TV recordings.
The real question will just be how much effort MS puts into keeping the definitions and program updated as new types of spyware come down the pipeline. As effective as the program is right now, it is how effective it will remain in the ever changing world of spyware that is what really matters.
I expect they will keep it up to date and bundle it with future versions of Windows until all the competitors apart from a few small die hard open source programs are left at which point they will get bored and let it languish for five years or so all the time telling people that if they wait until the release of Windows MassiveCock 2012 Professional they will get the new version.
I'm sure there is a precedent to this but for the moment I can't quite remember the details.....
One thing I never hear mentioned is the state of play in the UK. Is the TiVo here or coming here at all? What about this one? (Didn't RTFA, getting ready for work...)
TiVo was here in the UK before Sky+ and was in fact recommended by Sky for a time. I bought my TiVo in the first week that they were available and love it. My sister has Sky+ and it isn't a patch on TiVo. Sky+ doesn't have the full season pass feature, it has series link which only works on some channels, it doesn't learn what you like so it only records what you tell it rather than recording stuff it thinks you might like based on your viewing preferences like TiVo does. Granted the Sky+ box has two tuners and as it records the digital bitstream directly the picture quality of Sky+ is identical to the original broadcast. However, TiVo can be upgraded to huge capacity and fitted with ethernet to allow all sorts of neat features like programming it over the web or extracting programs it has recorded.
While you can no longer buy a UK spec TiVo brand new you can still pick them up on ebay and TiVo continues to support their UK subscribers. I don't know how I would survive without mine. Sky+ is certainly a poor substitute.
On one hand, it makes sense; all *known* Mac development on OO is at a halt and it offers more credibility than being suite #4. But on the other hand, the reasons for stopping development seem to be more related to the code within OO itself and Apple would be unlikely to take on such a daunting cleanup task.
I think the majority of the problems with OpenOffice on the mac are to do with the graphical toolkit and user interface. It may be possible to extract the filters and use them with a completely new wordprocessor frontend. If Apple were really smart they would make it able to read and write OpenOffice docs too as it looks like the EU will want that as the standard doc format.
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
I have Office X on my Mac and Office 2K on my PC. I can share documents fairly well between them but there have been several times when the conversion has really screwed things up for me. Word is pretty bad for it, powerpoint is far worse, excel I haven't used enough to really see problems but I expect they are there.
If I really need to share documents reliably I have to use OpenOffice and its native formats. On my mac I run Neooffice/j which works better than the X11 version of OpenOffice but I can't wait for the native 2.0 version of OOo.
From my testing so far the 2.0 filters are also much better at interacting with MS Office than the 1.x versions were and may even be better than Office X. I wonder if Apple is using the OOo filters? It would make sense for them to do so but write a completely new application on top of them like they did with Safari and KHTML.
Of all the great features that Firefox has over IE, the best has to be the adblock extension. I defy anyone who has seen a page rendered by Firefox with adblock installed versus IE not to pick Firefox. Install it and go to some of those obnoxious pages with loads of flashing ads and then show him how to remove them.
You are right to be wary. I have been through this myself and a lot depends on timing and structure.
If you can raise money from friends and family then that is a good way to start. It depends on your technology but since you are already making some money it doesn't look like you need a massive investment. If you have a lot of friends and family then you might be able to raise a significant amount of cash. You are better off having control distributed among more people than having a large sum come from one investor or group. As others have said you can raise money from angels (or groups of angels who act as one) but these bodies often push very hard deals and frequently want control for a small amount of cash. They will also certainly want to put someone (or more) on your board of directors.
That gets me to one of my pet hates, boards. A huge amount of time can be wasted with people trying to push a small venture up scale before it is time. Early investors can want to grow the company quickly so they can get out early and move on. These people can have very short term views and this can cause problems if things are growing more slowly or organically than they think it should.
In the end, you need to decide what size your company should get to and bring people and their money in accordingly. The advantage of VCs is that they can afford to bring in very good people who know their stuff. Some of the lower value end of the market people are rather less useful, especially if they have no really idea about the technology. This will not stop them wanting to control things and make decisions they are not qualified to make. This is why you must retain control for it to be a success, or be sure that the people who are taking over really are able to make the correct decisions.
This is likely to be a learning experience, you will probably be able to come up with new technologies which will be successful after this, that is certainly my experience. Everything I learned from my first venture has been rolled into my future plans and my approach is much more cautious but I believe I am on the right track this time and the technology I am developing is far more mature than previous work, and above all it is all under my control.
Final thought, be sure that you trust your partner. He is the most important person, other than you, to the business.
Dual video cards... soon dual-core CPUs, is it a sign that we're slowly approaching the Moores Law limit? The 'dual' strategy allow for further performance gains
I don't think so. Quoting from Intel's web site:
"Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue." Many people assume Moores Law states that speed of processors will double every 18 months and that the fact that it is becoming difficult to increase clock speed now means that Moores Law is finished. However, increasing speed is a consequence of higher clock speeds and higher transistor counts. Dual cores means you can increase the number of transistors per IC more and actually use them to do real work rather than simply adding a huge cache (as was done with the latest Itanic). End result, more speed, higher transistor count, and Moores Law still fine. In fact, dual cores could mean that the transistor count increases at greater than Moores Law in the near term. Of course some might question whether a siamesed pair of processors actually constitutes a single IC.....
Although it is possible to run photoshop 7 under Codeweavers Crossover I don't think this is ideal. There was a UNIX version of Photoshop years back, I used it on an SGI Indigo system, so they could probably dust off that code. If they have been smart, they have been keeping the code relatively cross platform anyway but maybe not.
Either way, I agree that PS on Linux would be a great boost, especially given how popular Linux is getting for graphical workstations.
For those of us forced to use Windows at work and who are using anything other than XP SP2 this is an issue. There is no fix for Win98, ME, or 2K despite the fact that these are all in heavy use still and likely to continue for the moment. I have actually installed Firefox on this machine despite the fact that I am not supposed to for the simple reason that I just can't trust IE and I have to use the web to perform my job.
Just sticking your head in the sand and saying people should patch their systems is not going to help when MS has decided that the features of IE on XP SP2 are not going to be back ported to IE on other platforms. If anything, this can only drive more people into the arms of Firefox et al.
I have a copy of the European Route 2000 from Route 66 and it runs pretty well under Crossover Office. It would probably also run well under generic WINE. I know it isn't Linux native software but the fact that it runs is something and I found it pretty decent when planning my trip to Austria a few years back.
Can't vouch for the current 2004 edition unfortunately but if they haven't made too many changes it should still work.
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video. No desktop spanning. The Radeon chipsets they use do support it, but Apple reserves that feature for the Powerbooks.
You can update the flash memory on the iBook to allow dual screen support. I was torn between a powerbook and my iBook but in the end I decided that the difference in price for the dual screen capability wasn't worth it. Then I found you could patch the iBook to support the feature and I have been extremely happy as a result.
My iBook is one of the first G4s (933Mhz 14") which I upgraded to 640MB RAM and airport extreme. The new ones look like a great deal but I would still recommend more memory, 256 is simply not enough. A non Apple upgrade is available and does the job for half the price. Battery life is excellent and the build quality destroys equivalent PC laptops
How'd you work the BS->couple years->MS sequence? I've considered doing the same thing, but I'm worried that I'm too far gone from undergrad and won't be able to get the requisite academic reference letters. (that and I was rather quiet at the time)
When I finished my BSc I had no idea what I wanted to do. The field I was in was in serious decline rather suddenly so I ended up drifting about trying various jobs. I hadn't done well enough at my BSc to qualify for a grant to go onto postgraduate work so I had a problem.
A couple of years of work gave me a strong work ethic I hadn't had as an undergrad and I also had enough of a credit history that I could qualify for a loan to pay for my MSc myself. It was still a struggle but I managed it and really enjoyed it. The MSc got me back on the academic track and got me a research assistant job at a really good university. A couple of years working there plus the MSc finally qualified me for a grant to get on a PhD and by this point I knew I really enjoyed doing research and (I hate to say this) found the PhD surprisingly enjoyable and easy.
I postdoc'd for a couple of years afterwards and then went into industry where I discovered that a PhD was required but also those who didn't have one but had a business background looked down on me as a bit of a dangerous egghead. Another industry downturn and I am looking at getting back into academia again. I know this looks like I am a terminal drifter but the moves have always been forced on me and I have always taken them as a challenge to expand my capabilities.
Funny thing about when I tried to get back into academia originally, I had two references, one academic and one from my previous boss. The academic one basically said I was a waster and they shouldn't take me on. The reference from my previous boss which was of course based on an older wiser me said I was very hard working and they wouldn't hesitate to employ me again. I got in on the basis of that although they did comment on the academic reference being so bad. I would be surprised if only your academic references mattered.
First off, let me say that I have a PhD. However, I didn't do it straight out of my BSc, I took a couple of years out, did an MSc, took a couple more years and then did my PhD. Even then I was only persuaded to do the PhD because it was clear I was suited to it, something I didn't know when I did my BSc. I think too many people go straight into a PhD from their undergraduate work and these people can often struggle. I have seen a number of students who did well at their BSc but who didn't fit into the PhD style of work.
Is it worth having a PhD? I did mine because I was told by someone I respected that if I didn't do it then I would always be someone's assistant rather than ever get to lead my own research. This is true within academia but is less true in the commercial world. If anything, a PhD can make you less employable because you may be seen as too expensive, too 'brainy' or too much of a threat to the higher ups. If you think about getting into management the MBA people are likely to look down on you as a PhD because they will think you are far too interested in research and less interested in making money. This is a sweeping statement I know but it does come from my personal experience.
So, a PhD is hard work, the effect on your pay and job prospects is likely to be minimal unless you want to stay in academia, and people who don't have one will consider you a threat and you may have to hide the fact that you have it. IMHO.
I have become a very vocal supporter of Apple laptops given my experience with my last three Intel laptops. The iBook I bought is far cheaper than any of the Intel lappys were and yet it appears so much better designed for the purpose. The battery life is excellent, it doesn't get painfully hot, doesn't have a noisy fan that is constantly reving on and off and the materials are clearly more able to take the use. I thought the iBook was going to be a pain because it has a shiny finish and is white. Yes, it has picked up a few sratches but those are easily polished over and the white gets a little dirty but again it cleans away nicely. Compare this to the Toshiba which cracked and broke. Also, the Tosh had silver paint on the palm rest and within weeks this had rubbed away leaving two large black hand prints which looked rotten. I see a lot of Intel laptops like this. OK, IBM Thinkpads seem well made albeit in a somewhat industrial way compared with the elegance of the iBook, but most Intel laptops appear to be designed for very casual use whereas I use my iBook every day. The really scary thing is I could sell it on Ebay after a year of hard use and still get about 60% of my money back! Its like buying a BMW versus buying a Ford, only in this case the BMW is cheaper than the Ford too!
I had pretty much given up on FPSs for my PS2 in favour of using my Windows PC. However, the PC is aging now and the cost of upgrading it is worrying me but the latest games are really starting to crawl. I can just about play Doom 3 on the thing but have to have the graphics are the lowest res and with all the nice effects turned off just to get a decent frame rate. The advantage of games on the PS2 or XBox is that you know the game will run well on the hardware. With the ability to use a keyboard and mouse I think this will give FPSs a much better shot (slight pun). I expect I will even go back to a number of games I gave up on because I just couldn't stand the joypad having got used to the keyboard and mouse.
For some games the joypad is great, I found GTAIII on the PS2 much better with a joypad than the same game on the PC with keyboard and mouse (and no way to map a joypad on the PC to match the PS2 which is doubly annoying). Best tool for the job and the keyboard and mouse is better for FPSs. The annoying bit is the PS2 has USB ports already and some games support a keyboard and mouse through those but really, all games should have the option. This is a hack but if it works gimme gimme gimme!
I did just this when my 18 month old Toshiba Satellite Pro 3000 partially died making it useless for its primary purpose because the LCD backlight failed. I had only just replaced the battery because that had died and the case was made from a brittle plastic that left it prone to cracks and chipping. Basically, Toshiba isn't getting any more of my money, I bought an iBook G4 instead and it is coming up to 12 months old now and is in perfect condition despite the daily use that wrecked the Toshiba in a similar amount of time.
Anyway, the Tosh does have a few redeeming features, it has built in 10/100 ethernet fully supported under Linux, 1Ghz PIII CPU and a 20GB disc. With a new battery and no backlight it will run for over four hours without power so it made sense to make it a server. Currently it has an HP laserjet 1200 hanging off it, served with Samba to support printing from Windows, Linux and OS X, it has network shares (Samba and NFS), DNS (using dnsmasq, much easier to set up than bind), DHCP, squid web proxy (including wpad.dat configuration for automatic detection by IE and Firefox), IMAPS for serving e-mail with fetchmail to pull it down from my pop accounts, Openwebmail to allow me to send and receive mail from anywhere in the world using ipcheck to update my dyndns records so I don't have to remember my specific IP address, spamassassin to filter all the crap about viagra etc, and clamwin antivirus before mail ever hits a Windows box (yeah yeah, I shouldn't use Windows for e-mail and browsing, but I have thunderbird and firefox as defaults and I only really use Windows for games but it is still nice to feel I can read mail and browse a little with some level of safety).
Actually, now I feel less bothered about the £1500 the laptop cost me because with all it is now doing as a server I feel like I can get several more years use out of it. Although, compared with the £1000 the iBook cost I still think Toshiba blows.
In the end, setting up this machine as a server has been great experience, I have got it interacting with my heterogenous environment and it does a lot for such a little machine. Oh, and the lack of fan noise and small size is also a real bonus.
I also return very nearly every piece of junk mail with a note to remove me from their mailing list. This is a lot of work, and it takes consistency and stamps (for example, telling companies that I actually *do* business with to stop sending me their fricking catalog). Eventually, it works pretty well. I never get telemarketing calls (just stupid surveys sometimes, or charities), and get very little junk mail.
Fortunately for us the most common junk mail we now get includes a prepaid envelope. We send back the material that came with the envelope with "take us off your list" written all over it. The offending company gets to pay the cost of having the useless material sent back to them. I don't know if this works very well, but if most people did this the marketers would soon be out of business.
I have subscribed to every possible method of stopping the buggers calling me. I'm on the UK equivalent DNC list, I have also registered my postal address in the same way. I bought a TiVO so I wouldn't have to watch the adverts on telly and I use firefox with adblock to clean up my web browsing. Finally, I run spamassassin and thunderbird which clears out SPAM. I wonder how long it will be before the advertisers realise that I don't actually want anything to do with them. More to the point, those that get through my defenses go onto my "do not ever buy anything from these jerks" list so they really should learn to leave me alone. I suspect many others are of the same opinion.
In the UK there is an interesting get-out for the telemarketers - while they cannot call to sell me something there is a provision that allows them to do market research. Now, every single call I get is from some company asking me if I were to replace my kitchen or bathroom etc, which would it be? This is not market research, it is just a slimey way around the legislation. Thankfully, it is rare that I get these calls compared with before I joined the telephone preference service but it is still annoying. Advertisers need to understand that I am making a definite decision to have nothing to do with them and they should just stay away. I would love to say "or else" but have no idea what the "else" would be.
They're just trying to hide the fact that they are shit scared that machines sold with Linux preinstalled WON'T end up with a pirate copy of Windows. The only thing worse than MS not getting paid for a copy of Windows is for a user to stick with the copy of Linux that comes with their machine. That is a sale MS will never get back.
Do you watch 4x3 TV in Stretchvision or vertical letterbox? If you watch it in Stretchvision, WHY!?
No, I watch in whatever shape is appropriate. This comes from years of letterboxed LDs. I also get annoyed when all these people who buy widescreen TVs insist on 'filling the screen' even when watching 4:3 material. I have noticed many sets in pubs showing football (soccer) matches in the wrong shape and it really bugs me.
I think a lot of the problem is that people feel that the screen is wasted if they aren't using all of it. It is the same argument as was used against letterboxed LDs in the past. People just seem to have such a hard time understanding that films come in a variety of shapes.
One thing that does bug me about DVDs is that they assume the screen is 1.85:1 for subtitles even if the film is 2.35:1 so the subtitles hang off the picture. With my projector I have variable mattes so I can make the screen exactly the right shape, but with subtitles they often hang off the screen. Yuck!
I'm a bit of a videophile (audiophile too but lets not get into that).
Currently, the best available picture quality for direct view is still the venerable CRT. LCD and Plasma screens need video scalers to map the input signal to the display and these are rarely any good, certainly not in the consumer level equipment. Also, LCDs have very poor black level so the picture often looks rather grey. Plasma screens often have poor colour characteristics and also suffer from short lifespans. If you are considering one though, make sure you buy the Video Essentials DVD and learn how to use it so you can test any prospective purchase.
For projection systems the situation is somewhat different, a CRT projector while often capable of staggering picture quality is much harder to set up than an LCD or DLP projector and vastly more expensive. LCDs are generally less good than a DLP projector. DLP has better contrast ratio but may suffer from rainbow fringing if you get a single chip example. Correct calibration will fix this. LCDs have been much harder to calibrate well compared with a DLP in my experience and often suffer from uneven colour: several examples I tested looked slightly green on one side of the screen and blue on the other. Yuck.
There are other technologies coming along (OLED for instance) that look likely to change the landscape dramatically. I certainly wouldn't plunk down any money on an LCD TV. A plasma screen would also not be on my list as the picture just isn't big enough for movies IMHO. A good DLP based front projector supplemented by a standard CRT for normal TV will be far cheaper, and likely better quality than a plasma screen of half the size. The video scaler (Faroudja DDI) in my little DLP projector is much better quality than any of those I have seen in LCD or plasma screens and the projector cost a fraction of the price of the 40" examples.
I would certainly recommend buying a 16:9 set though (I got my first one back in '92 and people thought I was mad) but look at direct view CRT or rear/front projection DLP for the best bang for the buck I think.
celebrate the X-box because of Halo and some other mediocre games?
You know, I agree. I played Halo right through and it was just so damn repetitive I almost went insane. Some features were nice but it really lacked imagination. It just felt like it was over long. Compare that with something like Call of duty on the PC which was a hell of a game but felt very very short. Thank goodness for the expansion pack.
I just don't get why so many people rave about Halo like it alone justifies getting an Xbox. Of course, lets see how people feel about their Xboxes when the next version of GTA appears in a few weeks only for the PS2.
I think that we will have the same situation as with the current DVD release. DVD first appeared in, what, 1997, and here we are seven years later and just getting the trilogy on the format. This pattern may well repeat with blu ray or HD-DVD which is why I said it wouldn't be an issue for another half decade.
Back when the Star Wars Definitive Collection LD set came out I bought them as they were simply the best way to see the original films. They were far better quality than the previous widescreen LD releases and the extras were pretty cool too. Then the SE versions appeared and I went to the cinema to see them and while it was nice to see the film at 35mm resolution, the new digital effects really didn't work for me. I couldn't see what was wrong with the original effects. They were great for the time and even today I think they still look pretty impressive. However, I did end up buying a cheap copy of the boxed set of SE LDs as they were in CLV mode giving an hour per side compared with the 25 mins or so for the THX LDs. Still, I watch the original versions more often than the SEs. They just seem much purer.
So, these new DVDs, well the picture isn't that much better than the LD releases really. They're still standard definition and they're still not the originals. If they release these in HD I might plunk some cash down but that clearly isn't going to be an issue for another half decade I expect. But really George. Give people the choice to see the new cut and the original.
I think the original in the context of the time it was made is much more powerful as a piece of cinema, these bastardised versions look far less impressive because it is obvious that they are using 21st century effects but that makes them seem less special as many other films look as impressive. Compare the original cut to films of the same time or shortly afterwards and it really stands out.
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What are you talking about? Movies are mastered to DVD at 24fps and the player does indeed perform the 3/2 pulldown process to produce the 60 fields per second NTSC TV requires. Progressive scan DVD players can directly output the 24fps non-interlaced image to a suitable TV/projection system which gets rid of any nasty judder.
You shouldn't be seeing interlace artefacts when playing DVD on a computer unless the original source material was interlaced such as live TV recordings.
I expect they will keep it up to date and bundle it with future versions of Windows until all the competitors apart from a few small die hard open source programs are left at which point they will get bored and let it languish for five years or so all the time telling people that if they wait until the release of Windows MassiveCock 2012 Professional they will get the new version.
I'm sure there is a precedent to this but for the moment I can't quite remember the details.....
TiVo was here in the UK before Sky+ and was in fact recommended by Sky for a time. I bought my TiVo in the first week that they were available and love it. My sister has Sky+ and it isn't a patch on TiVo. Sky+ doesn't have the full season pass feature, it has series link which only works on some channels, it doesn't learn what you like so it only records what you tell it rather than recording stuff it thinks you might like based on your viewing preferences like TiVo does. Granted the Sky+ box has two tuners and as it records the digital bitstream directly the picture quality of Sky+ is identical to the original broadcast. However, TiVo can be upgraded to huge capacity and fitted with ethernet to allow all sorts of neat features like programming it over the web or extracting programs it has recorded.
While you can no longer buy a UK spec TiVo brand new you can still pick them up on ebay and TiVo continues to support their UK subscribers. I don't know how I would survive without mine. Sky+ is certainly a poor substitute.
I think the majority of the problems with OpenOffice on the mac are to do with the graphical toolkit and user interface. It may be possible to extract the filters and use them with a completely new wordprocessor frontend. If Apple were really smart they would make it able to read and write OpenOffice docs too as it looks like the EU will want that as the standard doc format.
I have Office X on my Mac and Office 2K on my PC. I can share documents fairly well between them but there have been several times when the conversion has really screwed things up for me. Word is pretty bad for it, powerpoint is far worse, excel I haven't used enough to really see problems but I expect they are there.
If I really need to share documents reliably I have to use OpenOffice and its native formats. On my mac I run Neooffice/j which works better than the X11 version of OpenOffice but I can't wait for the native 2.0 version of OOo.
From my testing so far the 2.0 filters are also much better at interacting with MS Office than the 1.x versions were and may even be better than Office X. I wonder if Apple is using the OOo filters? It would make sense for them to do so but write a completely new application on top of them like they did with Safari and KHTML.
Of all the great features that Firefox has over IE, the best has to be the adblock extension. I defy anyone who has seen a page rendered by Firefox with adblock installed versus IE not to pick Firefox. Install it and go to some of those obnoxious pages with loads of flashing ads and then show him how to remove them.
You are right to be wary. I have been through this myself and a lot depends on timing and structure.
If you can raise money from friends and family then that is a good way to start. It depends on your technology but since you are already making some money it doesn't look like you need a massive investment. If you have a lot of friends and family then you might be able to raise a significant amount of cash. You are better off having control distributed among more people than having a large sum come from one investor or group. As others have said you can raise money from angels (or groups of angels who act as one) but these bodies often push very hard deals and frequently want control for a small amount of cash. They will also certainly want to put someone (or more) on your board of directors.
That gets me to one of my pet hates, boards. A huge amount of time can be wasted with people trying to push a small venture up scale before it is time. Early investors can want to grow the company quickly so they can get out early and move on. These people can have very short term views and this can cause problems if things are growing more slowly or organically than they think it should.
In the end, you need to decide what size your company should get to and bring people and their money in accordingly. The advantage of VCs is that they can afford to bring in very good people who know their stuff. Some of the lower value end of the market people are rather less useful, especially if they have no really idea about the technology. This will not stop them wanting to control things and make decisions they are not qualified to make. This is why you must retain control for it to be a success, or be sure that the people who are taking over really are able to make the correct decisions.
This is likely to be a learning experience, you will probably be able to come up with new technologies which will be successful after this, that is certainly my experience. Everything I learned from my first venture has been rolled into my future plans and my approach is much more cautious but I believe I am on the right track this time and the technology I am developing is far more mature than previous work, and above all it is all under my control.
Final thought, be sure that you trust your partner. He is the most important person, other than you, to the business.
I don't think so. Quoting from Intel's web site: "Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue." Many people assume Moores Law states that speed of processors will double every 18 months and that the fact that it is becoming difficult to increase clock speed now means that Moores Law is finished. However, increasing speed is a consequence of higher clock speeds and higher transistor counts. Dual cores means you can increase the number of transistors per IC more and actually use them to do real work rather than simply adding a huge cache (as was done with the latest Itanic). End result, more speed, higher transistor count, and Moores Law still fine. In fact, dual cores could mean that the transistor count increases at greater than Moores Law in the near term. Of course some might question whether a siamesed pair of processors actually constitutes a single IC.....
Although it is possible to run photoshop 7 under Codeweavers Crossover I don't think this is ideal. There was a UNIX version of Photoshop years back, I used it on an SGI Indigo system, so they could probably dust off that code. If they have been smart, they have been keeping the code relatively cross platform anyway but maybe not.
Either way, I agree that PS on Linux would be a great boost, especially given how popular Linux is getting for graphical workstations.
For those of us forced to use Windows at work and who are using anything other than XP SP2 this is an issue. There is no fix for Win98, ME, or 2K despite the fact that these are all in heavy use still and likely to continue for the moment. I have actually installed Firefox on this machine despite the fact that I am not supposed to for the simple reason that I just can't trust IE and I have to use the web to perform my job.
Just sticking your head in the sand and saying people should patch their systems is not going to help when MS has decided that the features of IE on XP SP2 are not going to be back ported to IE on other platforms. If anything, this can only drive more people into the arms of Firefox et al.
I have a copy of the European Route 2000 from Route 66 and it runs pretty well under Crossover Office. It would probably also run well under generic WINE. I know it isn't Linux native software but the fact that it runs is something and I found it pretty decent when planning my trip to Austria a few years back.
Can't vouch for the current 2004 edition unfortunately but if they haven't made too many changes it should still work.
You can update the flash memory on the iBook to allow dual screen support. I was torn between a powerbook and my iBook but in the end I decided that the difference in price for the dual screen capability wasn't worth it. Then I found you could patch the iBook to support the feature and I have been extremely happy as a result.
My iBook is one of the first G4s (933Mhz 14") which I upgraded to 640MB RAM and airport extreme. The new ones look like a great deal but I would still recommend more memory, 256 is simply not enough. A non Apple upgrade is available and does the job for half the price. Battery life is excellent and the build quality destroys equivalent PC laptops
A couple of years of work gave me a strong work ethic I hadn't had as an undergrad and I also had enough of a credit history that I could qualify for a loan to pay for my MSc myself. It was still a struggle but I managed it and really enjoyed it. The MSc got me back on the academic track and got me a research assistant job at a really good university. A couple of years working there plus the MSc finally qualified me for a grant to get on a PhD and by this point I knew I really enjoyed doing research and (I hate to say this) found the PhD surprisingly enjoyable and easy.
I postdoc'd for a couple of years afterwards and then went into industry where I discovered that a PhD was required but also those who didn't have one but had a business background looked down on me as a bit of a dangerous egghead. Another industry downturn and I am looking at getting back into academia again. I know this looks like I am a terminal drifter but the moves have always been forced on me and I have always taken them as a challenge to expand my capabilities.
Funny thing about when I tried to get back into academia originally, I had two references, one academic and one from my previous boss. The academic one basically said I was a waster and they shouldn't take me on. The reference from my previous boss which was of course based on an older wiser me said I was very hard working and they wouldn't hesitate to employ me again. I got in on the basis of that although they did comment on the academic reference being so bad. I would be surprised if only your academic references mattered.
First off, let me say that I have a PhD. However, I didn't do it straight out of my BSc, I took a couple of years out, did an MSc, took a couple more years and then did my PhD. Even then I was only persuaded to do the PhD because it was clear I was suited to it, something I didn't know when I did my BSc. I think too many people go straight into a PhD from their undergraduate work and these people can often struggle. I have seen a number of students who did well at their BSc but who didn't fit into the PhD style of work.
Is it worth having a PhD? I did mine because I was told by someone I respected that if I didn't do it then I would always be someone's assistant rather than ever get to lead my own research. This is true within academia but is less true in the commercial world. If anything, a PhD can make you less employable because you may be seen as too expensive, too 'brainy' or too much of a threat to the higher ups. If you think about getting into management the MBA people are likely to look down on you as a PhD because they will think you are far too interested in research and less interested in making money. This is a sweeping statement I know but it does come from my personal experience.
So, a PhD is hard work, the effect on your pay and job prospects is likely to be minimal unless you want to stay in academia, and people who don't have one will consider you a threat and you may have to hide the fact that you have it. IMHO.
I have become a very vocal supporter of Apple laptops given my experience with my last three Intel laptops. The iBook I bought is far cheaper than any of the Intel lappys were and yet it appears so much better designed for the purpose. The battery life is excellent, it doesn't get painfully hot, doesn't have a noisy fan that is constantly reving on and off and the materials are clearly more able to take the use. I thought the iBook was going to be a pain because it has a shiny finish and is white. Yes, it has picked up a few sratches but those are easily polished over and the white gets a little dirty but again it cleans away nicely. Compare this to the Toshiba which cracked and broke. Also, the Tosh had silver paint on the palm rest and within weeks this had rubbed away leaving two large black hand prints which looked rotten. I see a lot of Intel laptops like this. OK, IBM Thinkpads seem well made albeit in a somewhat industrial way compared with the elegance of the iBook, but most Intel laptops appear to be designed for very casual use whereas I use my iBook every day. The really scary thing is I could sell it on Ebay after a year of hard use and still get about 60% of my money back! Its like buying a BMW versus buying a Ford, only in this case the BMW is cheaper than the Ford too!
I had pretty much given up on FPSs for my PS2 in favour of using my Windows PC. However, the PC is aging now and the cost of upgrading it is worrying me but the latest games are really starting to crawl. I can just about play Doom 3 on the thing but have to have the graphics are the lowest res and with all the nice effects turned off just to get a decent frame rate. The advantage of games on the PS2 or XBox is that you know the game will run well on the hardware. With the ability to use a keyboard and mouse I think this will give FPSs a much better shot (slight pun). I expect I will even go back to a number of games I gave up on because I just couldn't stand the joypad having got used to the keyboard and mouse.
For some games the joypad is great, I found GTAIII on the PS2 much better with a joypad than the same game on the PC with keyboard and mouse (and no way to map a joypad on the PC to match the PS2 which is doubly annoying). Best tool for the job and the keyboard and mouse is better for FPSs. The annoying bit is the PS2 has USB ports already and some games support a keyboard and mouse through those but really, all games should have the option. This is a hack but if it works gimme gimme gimme!
I did just this when my 18 month old Toshiba Satellite Pro 3000 partially died making it useless for its primary purpose because the LCD backlight failed. I had only just replaced the battery because that had died and the case was made from a brittle plastic that left it prone to cracks and chipping. Basically, Toshiba isn't getting any more of my money, I bought an iBook G4 instead and it is coming up to 12 months old now and is in perfect condition despite the daily use that wrecked the Toshiba in a similar amount of time.
Anyway, the Tosh does have a few redeeming features, it has built in 10/100 ethernet fully supported under Linux, 1Ghz PIII CPU and a 20GB disc. With a new battery and no backlight it will run for over four hours without power so it made sense to make it a server. Currently it has an HP laserjet 1200 hanging off it, served with Samba to support printing from Windows, Linux and OS X, it has network shares (Samba and NFS), DNS (using dnsmasq, much easier to set up than bind), DHCP, squid web proxy (including wpad.dat configuration for automatic detection by IE and Firefox), IMAPS for serving e-mail with fetchmail to pull it down from my pop accounts, Openwebmail to allow me to send and receive mail from anywhere in the world using ipcheck to update my dyndns records so I don't have to remember my specific IP address, spamassassin to filter all the crap about viagra etc, and clamwin antivirus before mail ever hits a Windows box (yeah yeah, I shouldn't use Windows for e-mail and browsing, but I have thunderbird and firefox as defaults and I only really use Windows for games but it is still nice to feel I can read mail and browse a little with some level of safety).
Actually, now I feel less bothered about the £1500 the laptop cost me because with all it is now doing as a server I feel like I can get several more years use out of it. Although, compared with the £1000 the iBook cost I still think Toshiba blows.
In the end, setting up this machine as a server has been great experience, I have got it interacting with my heterogenous environment and it does a lot for such a little machine. Oh, and the lack of fan noise and small size is also a real bonus.
Fortunately for us the most common junk mail we now get includes a prepaid envelope. We send back the material that came with the envelope with "take us off your list" written all over it. The offending company gets to pay the cost of having the useless material sent back to them. I don't know if this works very well, but if most people did this the marketers would soon be out of business.
I have subscribed to every possible method of stopping the buggers calling me. I'm on the UK equivalent DNC list, I have also registered my postal address in the same way. I bought a TiVO so I wouldn't have to watch the adverts on telly and I use firefox with adblock to clean up my web browsing. Finally, I run spamassassin and thunderbird which clears out SPAM. I wonder how long it will be before the advertisers realise that I don't actually want anything to do with them. More to the point, those that get through my defenses go onto my "do not ever buy anything from these jerks" list so they really should learn to leave me alone. I suspect many others are of the same opinion.
In the UK there is an interesting get-out for the telemarketers - while they cannot call to sell me something there is a provision that allows them to do market research. Now, every single call I get is from some company asking me if I were to replace my kitchen or bathroom etc, which would it be? This is not market research, it is just a slimey way around the legislation. Thankfully, it is rare that I get these calls compared with before I joined the telephone preference service but it is still annoying. Advertisers need to understand that I am making a definite decision to have nothing to do with them and they should just stay away. I would love to say "or else" but have no idea what the "else" would be.
They're just trying to hide the fact that they are shit scared that machines sold with Linux preinstalled WON'T end up with a pirate copy of Windows. The only thing worse than MS not getting paid for a copy of Windows is for a user to stick with the copy of Linux that comes with their machine. That is a sale MS will never get back.
No, I watch in whatever shape is appropriate. This comes from years of letterboxed LDs. I also get annoyed when all these people who buy widescreen TVs insist on 'filling the screen' even when watching 4:3 material. I have noticed many sets in pubs showing football (soccer) matches in the wrong shape and it really bugs me.
I think a lot of the problem is that people feel that the screen is wasted if they aren't using all of it. It is the same argument as was used against letterboxed LDs in the past. People just seem to have such a hard time understanding that films come in a variety of shapes.
One thing that does bug me about DVDs is that they assume the screen is 1.85:1 for subtitles even if the film is 2.35:1 so the subtitles hang off the picture. With my projector I have variable mattes so I can make the screen exactly the right shape, but with subtitles they often hang off the screen. Yuck!
I'm a bit of a videophile (audiophile too but lets not get into that).
Currently, the best available picture quality for direct view is still the venerable CRT. LCD and Plasma screens need video scalers to map the input signal to the display and these are rarely any good, certainly not in the consumer level equipment. Also, LCDs have very poor black level so the picture often looks rather grey. Plasma screens often have poor colour characteristics and also suffer from short lifespans. If you are considering one though, make sure you buy the Video Essentials DVD and learn how to use it so you can test any prospective purchase.
For projection systems the situation is somewhat different, a CRT projector while often capable of staggering picture quality is much harder to set up than an LCD or DLP projector and vastly more expensive. LCDs are generally less good than a DLP projector. DLP has better contrast ratio but may suffer from rainbow fringing if you get a single chip example. Correct calibration will fix this. LCDs have been much harder to calibrate well compared with a DLP in my experience and often suffer from uneven colour: several examples I tested looked slightly green on one side of the screen and blue on the other. Yuck.
There are other technologies coming along (OLED for instance) that look likely to change the landscape dramatically. I certainly wouldn't plunk down any money on an LCD TV. A plasma screen would also not be on my list as the picture just isn't big enough for movies IMHO. A good DLP based front projector supplemented by a standard CRT for normal TV will be far cheaper, and likely better quality than a plasma screen of half the size. The video scaler (Faroudja DDI) in my little DLP projector is much better quality than any of those I have seen in LCD or plasma screens and the projector cost a fraction of the price of the 40" examples.
I would certainly recommend buying a 16:9 set though (I got my first one back in '92 and people thought I was mad) but look at direct view CRT or rear/front projection DLP for the best bang for the buck I think.
You know, I agree. I played Halo right through and it was just so damn repetitive I almost went insane. Some features were nice but it really lacked imagination. It just felt like it was over long. Compare that with something like Call of duty on the PC which was a hell of a game but felt very very short. Thank goodness for the expansion pack.
I just don't get why so many people rave about Halo like it alone justifies getting an Xbox. Of course, lets see how people feel about their Xboxes when the next version of GTA appears in a few weeks only for the PS2.
I think that we will have the same situation as with the current DVD release. DVD first appeared in, what, 1997, and here we are seven years later and just getting the trilogy on the format. This pattern may well repeat with blu ray or HD-DVD which is why I said it wouldn't be an issue for another half decade.
Back when the Star Wars Definitive Collection LD set came out I bought them as they were simply the best way to see the original films. They were far better quality than the previous widescreen LD releases and the extras were pretty cool too. Then the SE versions appeared and I went to the cinema to see them and while it was nice to see the film at 35mm resolution, the new digital effects really didn't work for me. I couldn't see what was wrong with the original effects. They were great for the time and even today I think they still look pretty impressive. However, I did end up buying a cheap copy of the boxed set of SE LDs as they were in CLV mode giving an hour per side compared with the 25 mins or so for the THX LDs. Still, I watch the original versions more often than the SEs. They just seem much purer.
So, these new DVDs, well the picture isn't that much better than the LD releases really. They're still standard definition and they're still not the originals. If they release these in HD I might plunk some cash down but that clearly isn't going to be an issue for another half decade I expect. But really George. Give people the choice to see the new cut and the original.
I think the original in the context of the time it was made is much more powerful as a piece of cinema, these bastardised versions look far less impressive because it is obvious that they are using 21st century effects but that makes them seem less special as many other films look as impressive. Compare the original cut to films of the same time or shortly afterwards and it really stands out.