But did not have to use psycho-acoustics. And it did use two drivers, but not drivers in teh classic sense of the word.
Instead they used a special amplifier set and Two 2"diamter sets of specially angled arrays of sapphire crystals. How it worked was the amplfier (only about 1wrms) would feed a ultrasonic signal to the proper crystal set for the positional alignment of the sound. The collision of the two frequencies at the aligment point resulted in a sound being created at that exact point.
The system has true 20-20khz response and incredible surround experience, but at over $100,000 for a set was rather short lived, and didn't sell well even in audiophile circles.
Pity too, I would love to have seen where that technology would have went too...
Where the theater dosen't matter at all, but buying a silly platter of polycarbonate/aluminum substrate matters more than the age old theater trip?
If this is true, then we are victims of a scam, plain and simple. When you go to teh movie's you pay to see "A movie", not "part of a movie". Sure all movies have cuts, but you just ond't cut a major plot element just to throw it on your $100 "special edition" to make a few more bucks.
If I find this to be true, I will be advocating NOT watching it at the theaters and NOT buying the DVDs, with exception to the speical edition, and only when it has reached $25 at the stores. A book translation has to have certain elements intact, and I remeber as clear as day the first time I read that portion of the book, and at the least it deserves to be in the main film.
To cut it is like omitting the transmission from the Ferrari F-50, just to include it in a package that costs 10x more, or omitting the bacon from a bacon double cheeseburger and telling you to buy the bacon double cheeseburger SE...It's just plain retarded.
1) was pointing to how a peripheral to a PC is costing more than a PC can go for. It's like buying a cheap car (like a kia), and paying $10,000 for an in-dash CD player.
2) believe what you will, physics are physics. You drop something hard enough it will break, and the smaler the drive, whe smaller (and consequetially more fragile) the part.
3) no arguments here, playlists are a good thing
4) All I ask is what college you go to where you see so many kids walking around with $300 MP3 players? Do these kids drive $20,000 cars to school as well? Unlike the obscenely rich, some of use have to work rather hard for what we make, and pay in rent, bills, etc.
And as far as valuing time, balance what it takes to earn that $300 with the ACTUAL time savings you get...I bet in a year that saved time will be far less than the time it took to earn $300. Maybe a DJ or someone who uses it professionally will exceed the time to earn $300, but for a casual music listener, I doubt it.
Again, the iPod is merely an item for those who can afford to drop $300 on a MP3 player...calling those who don't buy one lazy or poor is inaccurate at best.
Good points, but you still need to look at it this way....
1) you can buy an entire PC for about what an iPod goes for
2) A hard disk is still a hard disk, and is prone to damage from physical shock. Doing anything that could mess with the linear rotation of the disk is a premature failure waiting to happen.
3) it may be nice, but you can still get a MP3 cd player that has the same level of quality, and the same if not slightly better resistance to mechanical shock damage for a 10ths of the cost.
4) and who would want to have their appointments on their iPod? A PDA definately, a cellphone...maybe, but on a "walkman"...I cannot see this happening really....OK maybe a teenage girl who's parents bought her an iPod, or a college student....but in corporate buisiness....I don't see it happening.
It IS an excellent device, i'll give it that credit...but it's just too expensive to be worth buying to the other 95% of the populace.
Now if they made a light version, with say a SD card slot, and does nothing but music for maybe $150...that would be a great idea.
MMORPGs aren't too bad really. It's never going to be "Just like AD&D", the sooner that is accepted, the sooner you will find the good in the given game.
All these games have one common point, friends. They all have a guild/clan system ingrained into it, and in many instances only groups of people can reach certain areas/deal with the big evil dragon/badass. It's not all about the loot, or the high levels, it's about the people you meet, and the things you do alongside them.
Sure it's nice to crag about your shiny mithril armor you just found in some dank cave off of a random corpse. There's nothing wrong with that. It's when a MMORPG player looks at ONLY loot and ignores the needs of others (most likely his own guildmates) that things will go wrong. In those events, people will fight and ultimately a portion of the membership in the guild may leave...never a good thing.
in all games you ahve your hardcore players.. in shooters like quake and counter-strike those are the guys who can snap around faster than you can even see and cap multiple people with unerring accuracy. The kind of acuracy you would call cheating, except he's sitting right next to you at a lan party, so you can see that he isn't using an aimbot.
In an MMORPG the hardcore are often "uber-guild" members. Every game has a few uber-guilds, and they are often very well known. They are the more extreme of the players, raiding dungeons that few others have, possessing the most powerful of each class, and also working their asses off to get all that. All to say they are the best.
But as far as MMORPG design, there is no right or wrongway to do it. It has to be fun enough to hook you for a few months, but have enough social aspects to get you staying on to help your friends. It is, after all a social game. If it wasn't, why have it online at all?
When I read articles like tis it makes me wonder why we are doing all this?
Massage shirts? I can't helpbut laugh at this thought...a chair sure..but a shirt is taking mobility for luxuries too far.
What's next....an in-dash microwave in your mercedes? since your too mobile to go home to make hot-pockets there?
Or is this just some high-tech way of dealing with people who are so massively overworked by their employers that they don't even go home until it's saturday night, and start this cycle over agian on sunday night? If so, I'd think it would be a good time for that individual to seek other places of employment.
I do see such gizmos as helping one who is in that state however.
These are just my preferences, and form a windows point of view. I haven't used linux for some time now, even though I should give it another go.
WEb browser: Mozilla
File compression: WinRAR, sure it's interface is odd, but it can do zip files as well.
Since you use XP, outlook express is a decent email client, so long as you disable any kind of preview pane or auto-preview function. Also it's ability as a usenet reader is somewhat adequate. There are better options, but I have yet to find a free or close to free one that is any better.
StarOffice was the last freely-availible office suite I have used (and that was years ago), but it was a reasonably acceptable replacement for office 97. If all you need is basic word processing in Windows, just use wordpad (wordpad is essentially a lite version of MSWord).
bah! if you really want to do something that will leave the Pc maker's RMA dept scratching their heads for a long long time, just fill a spray bottle (like a windex bottle) with industrial grade isopropyl alcohol and spray the ICs and smaller components while the PC is running...poof...problem solved, one less eMachine in the world (or replace eMachine iwth your least favorite brand of pre-built PC)
It's not about a total stop to their income, since that's just not oging to happen.
It's more about hurting their bottom line so badly that they either have to close shop and make money on lawsuits alone (and get sued to hell by investors, etc), or to drop all lawsuits and get back to making music.
Think of it as the proverbial smacking of the hand.
Re:Smarter Virus Writers
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
Bah!
YOu know the first person to get will throw it on Kazaa in about 15 seconds.
P2P > generic passwords.
Quality internals. Go open up your normal "freebie" power supply and look at it carefully. Is there a proper amount of ehatsinking to keep teh mosfets cool or is it just enough to keep them from burning out?
Are the capacitors of good quality and capacity, or just barely passable? Then look at the soldering jobs, has the pcb even been cleand of flux?
These premium power supplies are built to perform even when something goes slightly amiss, like a worn-out fan isn't putting out the airflow it used to, or the innards are dust caked from 500 days of non stop service in a home enivronment.
Once you see the build of a commercial grade supply (telecom equipment especially), you will start to see some similarities in build quality. Sure the pc supplies are all very crude technology in comparison, but the quality craftsmanship will show. This quality is a major part of reliability. Poor solder joints will only cause something to fail early, and recycling of mechanical parts (read: fans) is not going to help any either. I'm not saying all makers have done this, but I have opened up a brand new PSU before to find a fan 10 years older than it inside. It worked, but the only reason why is because of the 'fix' done to it's sleeve bearing...namely it had thick grease inside...not good.
Then there's how stable the voltage is, voltage spikes practically stab your components to death. You won't see it until something breaks though, so to most people it's "ok".
Another part is for gamers, gaming systems are their hardest on the 3.3 and 5v rails, actually extremely hard in many cases. Some modern AGP cards actually pull so much current that they have to have molex plugs on them since most mainboard's can't put that much out without risk of burning a trace. CPUs run off the 5v rail, and when a CPU can put out up to and maybe over 60w of heat, you can be assured over 100w is going into it...thus the need for a beefy power supply. That extra power guarantees you won't run over and posibly have your system lock-up.
I have been a fan of Antec supplies for years, even their cehap ones are very good quality. You can get a 300w for about $35 (I reccomend 300w miminmun for any modern ATX system), I use a truepower 380. It costed me about $75, and is by far the quietest psu I have ever owned. When a power supply puts out the same if not less noise than your hard drives it's a beautiful thing.
Slashdot Mirror
But did not have to use psycho-acoustics.
And it did use two drivers, but not drivers in teh classic sense of the word.
Instead they used a special amplifier set and Two 2"diamter sets of specially angled arrays of sapphire crystals. How it worked was the amplfier (only about 1wrms) would feed a ultrasonic signal to the proper crystal set for the positional alignment of the sound. The collision of the two frequencies at the aligment point resulted in a sound being created at that exact point.
The system has true 20-20khz response and incredible surround experience, but at over $100,000 for a set was rather short lived, and didn't sell well even in audiophile circles.
Pity too, I would love to have seen where that technology would have went too...
Where the theater dosen't matter at all, but buying a silly platter of polycarbonate/aluminum substrate matters more than the age old theater trip?
If this is true, then we are victims of a scam, plain and simple. When you go to teh movie's you pay to see "A movie", not "part of a movie". Sure all movies have cuts, but you just ond't cut a major plot element just to throw it on your $100 "special edition" to make a few more bucks.
If I find this to be true, I will be advocating NOT watching it at the theaters and NOT buying the DVDs, with exception to the speical edition, and only when it has reached $25 at the stores.
A book translation has to have certain elements intact, and I remeber as clear as day the first time I read that portion of the book, and at the least it deserves to be in the main film.
To cut it is like omitting the transmission from the Ferrari F-50, just to include it in a package that costs 10x more, or omitting the bacon from a bacon double cheeseburger and telling you to buy the bacon double cheeseburger SE...It's just plain retarded.
1) was pointing to how a peripheral to a PC is costing more than a PC can go for. It's like buying a cheap car (like a kia), and paying $10,000 for an in-dash CD player.
2) believe what you will, physics are physics. You drop something hard enough it will break, and the smaler the drive, whe smaller (and consequetially more fragile) the part.
3) no arguments here, playlists are a good thing
4) All I ask is what college you go to where you see so many kids walking around with $300 MP3 players? Do these kids drive $20,000 cars to school as well? Unlike the obscenely rich, some of use have to work rather hard for what we make, and pay in rent, bills, etc.
And as far as valuing time, balance what it takes to earn that $300 with the ACTUAL time savings you get...I bet in a year that saved time will be far less than the time it took to earn $300. Maybe a DJ or someone who uses it professionally will exceed the time to earn $300, but for a casual music listener, I doubt it.
Again, the iPod is merely an item for those who can afford to drop $300 on a MP3 player...calling those who don't buy one lazy or poor is inaccurate at best.
Good points, but you still need to look at it this way....
1) you can buy an entire PC for about what an iPod goes for
2) A hard disk is still a hard disk, and is prone to damage from physical shock. Doing anything that could mess with the linear rotation of the disk is a premature failure waiting to happen.
3) it may be nice, but you can still get a MP3 cd player that has the same level of quality, and the same if not slightly better resistance to mechanical shock damage for a 10ths of the cost.
4) and who would want to have their appointments on their iPod? A PDA definately, a cellphone...maybe, but on a "walkman"...I cannot see this happening really....OK maybe a teenage girl who's parents bought her an iPod, or a college student....but in corporate buisiness....I don't see it happening.
It IS an excellent device, i'll give it that credit...but it's just too expensive to be worth buying to the other 95% of the populace.
Now if they made a light version, with say a SD card slot, and does nothing but music for maybe $150...that would be a great idea.
MMORPGs aren't too bad really. It's never going to be "Just like AD&D", the sooner that is accepted, the sooner you will find the good in the given game.
All these games have one common point, friends. They all have a guild/clan system ingrained into it, and in many instances only groups of people can reach certain areas/deal with the big evil dragon/badass. It's not all about the loot, or the high levels, it's about the people you meet, and the things you do alongside them.
Sure it's nice to crag about your shiny mithril armor you just found in some dank cave off of a random corpse. There's nothing wrong with that. It's when a MMORPG player looks at ONLY loot and ignores the needs of others (most likely his own guildmates) that things will go wrong. In those events, people will fight and ultimately a portion of the membership in the guild may leave...never a good thing.
in all games you ahve your hardcore players.. in shooters like quake and counter-strike those are the guys who can snap around faster than you can even see and cap multiple people with unerring accuracy. The kind of acuracy you would call cheating, except he's sitting right next to you at a lan party, so you can see that he isn't using an aimbot.
In an MMORPG the hardcore are often "uber-guild" members. Every game has a few uber-guilds, and they are often very well known. They are the more extreme of the players, raiding dungeons that few others have, possessing the most powerful of each class, and also working their asses off to get all that. All to say they are the best.
But as far as MMORPG design, there is no right or wrongway to do it. It has to be fun enough to hook you for a few months, but have enough social aspects to get you staying on to help your friends. It is, after all a social game. If it wasn't, why have it online at all?
When I read articles like tis it makes me wonder why we are doing all this?
Massage shirts? I can't helpbut laugh at this thought...a chair sure..but a shirt is taking mobility for luxuries too far.
What's next....an in-dash microwave in your mercedes? since your too mobile to go home to make hot-pockets there?
Or is this just some high-tech way of dealing with people who are so massively overworked by their employers that they don't even go home until it's saturday night, and start this cycle over agian on sunday night? If so, I'd think it would be a good time for that individual to seek other places of employment.
I do see such gizmos as helping one who is in that state however.
These are just my preferences, and form a windows point of view. I haven't used linux for some time now, even though I should give it another go.
WEb browser: Mozilla
File compression: WinRAR, sure it's interface is odd, but it can do zip files as well.
Since you use XP, outlook express is a decent email client, so long as you disable any kind of preview pane or auto-preview function. Also it's ability as a usenet reader is somewhat adequate. There are better options, but I have yet to find a free or close to free one that is any better.
StarOffice was the last freely-availible office suite I have used (and that was years ago), but it was a reasonably acceptable replacement for office 97. If all you need is basic word processing in Windows, just use wordpad (wordpad is essentially a lite version of MSWord).
Well good luck on your software hunts,
Little Johnny might just find Suzie's daddy waiting shotgun in hand when he arrives home....electronic pants paged him...
Here is the link (prolly /.'ed to heck and back by now, but give it a try!)
:) (Don't try it at home...the cat likes not being crispy on the outside)
Microwave gun
http://www.powerlabs.org/uwavexp.htm
SCO has recently announced a lawsuit against major keyboard makers on ground that they have proof of having pateneted the spacebar.
s to fthispost.Thankyou.
TocomplywiththisIshallnolongerusespacesforthere
Step 1: put all evidence on websites so it can plainly be found
Step 2: get it linked on slashdot
Step 3: laugh as the defense lawyers commit seppuku when they find out the server will be down for the next month
bah! if you really want to do something that will leave the Pc maker's RMA dept scratching their heads for a long long time, just fill a spray bottle (like a windex bottle) with industrial grade isopropyl alcohol and spray the ICs and smaller components while the PC is running...poof...problem solved, one less eMachine in the world (or replace eMachine iwth your least favorite brand of pre-built PC)
Seriously I can probably safely bet it's been here before.
The RIAA has just announced it's new plan:
Confuse the hell out of the country to the point that it's painful...then claim the pain is just an aftershock of Napster.
It's not about a total stop to their income, since that's just not oging to happen. It's more about hurting their bottom line so badly that they either have to close shop and make money on lawsuits alone (and get sued to hell by investors, etc), or to drop all lawsuits and get back to making music. Think of it as the proverbial smacking of the hand.
Bah! YOu know the first person to get will throw it on Kazaa in about 15 seconds. P2P > generic passwords.
--Swiftech announces their new liquid cooling system that uses coffee instead of water. Now geeks can have their cooling and drink it too..
hmm, I had this all formated out, but it got screwed up in posting.. =/ Guess I have to use preview more often.
Quality internals. Go open up your normal "freebie" power supply and look at it carefully. Is there a proper amount of ehatsinking to keep teh mosfets cool or is it just enough to keep them from burning out? Are the capacitors of good quality and capacity, or just barely passable? Then look at the soldering jobs, has the pcb even been cleand of flux? These premium power supplies are built to perform even when something goes slightly amiss, like a worn-out fan isn't putting out the airflow it used to, or the innards are dust caked from 500 days of non stop service in a home enivronment. Once you see the build of a commercial grade supply (telecom equipment especially), you will start to see some similarities in build quality. Sure the pc supplies are all very crude technology in comparison, but the quality craftsmanship will show. This quality is a major part of reliability. Poor solder joints will only cause something to fail early, and recycling of mechanical parts (read: fans) is not going to help any either. I'm not saying all makers have done this, but I have opened up a brand new PSU before to find a fan 10 years older than it inside. It worked, but the only reason why is because of the 'fix' done to it's sleeve bearing...namely it had thick grease inside...not good. Then there's how stable the voltage is, voltage spikes practically stab your components to death. You won't see it until something breaks though, so to most people it's "ok". Another part is for gamers, gaming systems are their hardest on the 3.3 and 5v rails, actually extremely hard in many cases. Some modern AGP cards actually pull so much current that they have to have molex plugs on them since most mainboard's can't put that much out without risk of burning a trace. CPUs run off the 5v rail, and when a CPU can put out up to and maybe over 60w of heat, you can be assured over 100w is going into it...thus the need for a beefy power supply. That extra power guarantees you won't run over and posibly have your system lock-up. I have been a fan of Antec supplies for years, even their cehap ones are very good quality. You can get a 300w for about $35 (I reccomend 300w miminmun for any modern ATX system), I use a truepower 380. It costed me about $75, and is by far the quietest psu I have ever owned. When a power supply puts out the same if not less noise than your hard drives it's a beautiful thing.