", but nobody would ever consider DVD quality to be blurry. "
I sure as hell would. I have a Sony 27" SDTV Trinitron Wega. My movies come into it via my component in cables. I'd love to see a black background that's not moving like a group of snakes on my TV. The only DVD I have which has a high enough quality (and low enough compression) to consistently look good is my DTS NiN concert DVD -- and you still see banding and dithering in places!
DVD movies are MPEG 2, and the max bitrate is 10Mbps. That's not enough for me! I still see all the silly little issues that MPEG2 has to offer. When you've worked with digital systems for a large portion of your life, you notice digital distortion really quickly....
And then there's the Xbox's music ripping. Way to rip to what sounds like 112Kbps with no quality setting!
The worst part is how the cable company is now using MPEG2 as the transport for even the analog cable channels. Now I get to see those awesome digital articfacts everywhere when I go to watch a saturday night movie, and some of the channels even have heavy audio artifacting!:(
You seem to have pretty rose coloured glasses for Win95. You talk about it like you used it in 1999, not 1995. Let me refresh your memory!
Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.
As for the Freeware, most of it was dreesed up Win32s apps or NT apps now able to be run (thanks to Win95 implementing full Win32). The MS Plus pack was a good example of the sillyness of the era: IE 1.0 came with it. That thing sucked. People were desperate for uninstallers that wouldn't hose the system (cleansweep, etc, came out around then). And the memory managers for DOS still sucked -- keeping QEMM 7 around was much better than using DOS 7's emm386/himem.sys!
If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Thankfully, Netscape 1.x was available and 32-bit then. Plus you could run it just as easily on an Indy or DECStation or Linux:)
The best thing about Win95 was that it included its own 32-bit Winsock implementation.
PS: System 7 came out in 1990! By the time Win95 was out, it'd been updated to 7.5ish (7.5.1 came out in March, 1995; 7.5.2 in August, 1995). This was a pretty decent OS for not having real guts to it -- Quicktime, Applescript, PowerPC support (for the "new" PowerPC CPUs), Powertalk, and easy to add/remove TTFs. Windows just barely got the TTF part with Win95. Windows Media Player in Win95 didn't come close to Quicktime!
The SNES is a 65C816, not a 68C618 (which does not exist!).
The SNES follows a design principle similar to the Amiga's. I find it interesting that the SNES had better sound technology onboard than any computer would for a very long time. The GUS was great, but it wasn't standard; most people had a terrible SB16, whose FM synth was as bad as the Genesis' Z80 sound!
For anecdotal evidence, I find that having lights on helps, because cars which have lights on and are moving are more obvious than cars which do not have lights on and are moving. Much like I notice cars that (while parked) have their lights on, and am prepared to see them pull out into traffic.
I still pay attention to the road otherwise, but this makes it easier for me to differentiate between non-objects (cars off to the side, parked, off), and important objects (cars which are traveling, active, on) on the roadway. Making my job easier is good.
I appreciate your effort to oust CmdrTaco as the #1 dupe poster, but this simple first-step is but a small part of a journey. CmdrTaco has done this for far longer than you.
He has also duped himself more than once, something you'll have to master before dethroning him.
Engine fuel consumption is based on displacement and load. To use less fuel, you need less of a load (weight), or reduce the time (final speed). If you are accelerating slowly to 50, you'll find it has the same load as accelerating quickly to 50. This is, if you integrate the fuel consumption curves for both, the area is very close (around 1-2%).
A better way to minimize load (since romping on the gas doesn't affect mileage nearly as much as people think it does) is to make your average speed higher. By having your average speed higher, you reduce the time you spend loading your engine with acceleration, and keep it in the nicer "maintain velocity" part of the curve. It's even better if you maintain velocity at a slower speed, so as to reduce wind resistance. Most cars have a pretty bad wind resistance, even today!
How do you keep a higher average speed? When you know a light is going red a couple of blocks ahead, let yourself coast to it, instead of gasing up to it. If you know the period of the light, slow down very early, coast in at the slower speed, and then arrive just as it's changing. You won't have to stop, and you'll not have to accelerate over whatever speed you kept! This is also good for winter driving (less braking = less chances to lose grip on the tires).
One thing you'll notice with this is that most people tend to gas as hard as they can, slam on the breaks, and then jack rabbit when the light changes. By slowing early, you'll end up next to them at the light for a second, but pass them because you'll still have all your momentum working for you!
Mainaining a higher speed in corners is good, too. Just make sure your tire pressures are correct (check every 2nd time you fill, depending on tire quality), and learn how to handle your car. Note that most SUVs are not stable at cornering above 17mph/27kph, but a car like a late-1980s Accord can do 90 degree turns at around 28mph/45kph!
"... signal-based synchronous software model. It would revolutionize computing and solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry: software unreliability."
Software would be reliable if we could produce 100% algorithms which are free from unconsidered and unhandled cases. It has nothing to do with the medium of execution, and everything to do with the design. This is why computer engineering needs to be a more popular topic.
Sounds like what you need to do is realize that the way your cities are constructed is untenable. The current modus operandi for personal transportation (not transportation of a group of people, or a set of materials) is broken.
"80 mpg for the first 20 miles is great for the stay at home mom that drive to the store or around a little bit. the majority of the american public lives more than that from work."
Shit. I live 2.5 miles from where I work. The entire city fits within a 20 mile radius, and this is a city of 300,000 people. What is wrong with your cities that they are so big and sprawly? Why are residential zones kept so far away from commercial zones (rather than mingled) to discourage alternative transportation?
".. to build insecure backdoors into their networks,..."
What if it means that the equipment will accept connections if it passes a rigerous sshv2-dsa key handshake, with a really, really big key size? I don't see that being insecure, setting aside concerns about the stupid feds being bitches in power games leaking the key. Technically, there's nothing stopping them from making it secure (as secure as you or I have our home systems, that is).
I don't think we can reasonably expect people off the street to be able to do that (discounting the effect of you actually distributing your compression codec without being sued).
And let's not forget: 14 hours of battery life with music playback, 8 with movies.
Seriously, if you were thinking about buying a PSP, expensive UMD movies (or clippled movie playback on Sony Pro Duo memory sticks), hacked emulators, and the 5-hour battery life, I think it's obvious that this is a much better choice. Not only does it lack a design that's likely to throw UMDs like Ninja stars, not only does it have great battery life, dual CPUs, and Linux, it also reads normal, sane SD cards.
The only thing that'd come close to this thing would be the rumoured video iPod, but this looks like it'll handled the wide-screen anime subs I watch better than the current iPod form factor.
Rent: 300$ Car payment: 0 (I buy cars for 1,000$ in cash transactions). Gas during the winter: 180$ (-40C means I drive everywhere) Gas during the summer: 50$ (I bike, only driving to get groceries and misc items). Car insurance: 50$ Internet and utils: 150$ Phone: 50$ (cell phone, no landline) Food: 120$
A bus pass is about 60$/month. The insurance is a fixed, base cost on a car, while the gas is usage based. This means my transportation is 200$/month in winter, or about 100$/month in summer. OTOH, I get to go where I want, when I want, with no nasty people along for the ride. It takes about 1/3rd the time to get there, and the biking helps keep me in shape.
Saskatoon is only ~300,000 people, though. I can cross the city on bike or car in 30 minutes.
It takes almost no time to load. KDE 3.4.x has made me really happy to interface with PDF files, because the PDF integration is fast and slick.
It beats the shit out of Postscript files (I shouldn't have to install 5 separate packages for 1 file format!), and is highly preferable to a powerpoint doc on the other end of the hyper link (which I wouldn't be able to read anyways).
Make the game fun, accesible, and re-using an existing universe that people love (it doesn't hurt that they are adding content at a decent rate, despite the odd hiccup), and you'll easily pass the "hardcore" MMOs whose modus operandi seems to be forcing the player to spend all their time in frivolity.
Everquest didn't peak near these numbers. Why? It's just not fun.
Slashdot Mirror
", but nobody would ever consider DVD quality to be blurry. "
:(
I sure as hell would. I have a Sony 27" SDTV Trinitron Wega. My movies come into it via my component in cables. I'd love to see a black background that's not moving like a group of snakes on my TV. The only DVD I have which has a high enough quality (and low enough compression) to consistently look good is my DTS NiN concert DVD -- and you still see banding and dithering in places!
DVD movies are MPEG 2, and the max bitrate is 10Mbps. That's not enough for me! I still see all the silly little issues that MPEG2 has to offer. When you've worked with digital systems for a large portion of your life, you notice digital distortion really quickly....
And then there's the Xbox's music ripping. Way to rip to what sounds like 112Kbps with no quality setting!
The worst part is how the cable company is now using MPEG2 as the transport for even the analog cable channels. Now I get to see those awesome digital articfacts everywhere when I go to watch a saturday night movie, and some of the channels even have heavy audio artifacting!
You seem to have pretty rose coloured glasses for Win95. You talk about it like you used it in 1999, not 1995. Let me refresh your memory!
:)
:-D
Win95 was terrible for games. None of my games worked with it. None! Not until DirectX 5 and 6 could DirectX be said to have matured enough for general use. Nothing really good came out until then, either. Quake was still something you'd "Exit into DOS mode" for.
As for the Freeware, most of it was dreesed up Win32s apps or NT apps now able to be run (thanks to Win95 implementing full Win32). The MS Plus pack was a good example of the sillyness of the era: IE 1.0 came with it. That thing sucked. People were desperate for uninstallers that wouldn't hose the system (cleansweep, etc, came out around then). And the memory managers for DOS still sucked -- keeping QEMM 7 around was much better than using DOS 7's emm386/himem.sys!
If you had 16mb of RAM, Win95 was noticably bitchy compared to Win3.1. You needed at least 32mb of RAM, and at least a Pentium 120 to really have it go decently. That was a top-of-the-line computer until fall 1996.
Thankfully, Netscape 1.x was available and 32-bit then. Plus you could run it just as easily on an Indy or DECStation or Linux
The best thing about Win95 was that it included its own 32-bit Winsock implementation.
PS: System 7 came out in 1990! By the time Win95 was out, it'd been updated to 7.5ish (7.5.1 came out in March, 1995; 7.5.2 in August, 1995). This was a pretty decent OS for not having real guts to it -- Quicktime, Applescript, PowerPC support (for the "new" PowerPC CPUs), Powertalk, and easy to add/remove TTFs. Windows just barely got the TTF part with Win95. Windows Media Player in Win95 didn't come close to Quicktime!
Mock mock mock mock mock mock mock
The SNES is a 65C816, not a 68C618 (which does not exist!).
The SNES follows a design principle similar to the Amiga's. I find it interesting that the SNES had better sound technology onboard than any computer would for a very long time. The GUS was great, but it wasn't standard; most people had a terrible SB16, whose FM synth was as bad as the Genesis' Z80 sound!
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/nbs/sabre/working_papers/05- 98.pdf
http://www.iihs.org/safety_facts/qanda/drl.htm (cites many sources).
For anecdotal evidence, I find that having lights on helps, because cars which have lights on and are moving are more obvious than cars which do not have lights on and are moving. Much like I notice cars that (while parked) have their lights on, and am prepared to see them pull out into traffic.
I still pay attention to the road otherwise, but this makes it easier for me to differentiate between non-objects (cars off to the side, parked, off), and important objects (cars which are traveling, active, on) on the roadway. Making my job easier is good.
I appreciate your effort to oust CmdrTaco as the #1 dupe poster, but this simple first-step is but a small part of a journey. CmdrTaco has done this for far longer than you.
He has also duped himself more than once, something you'll have to master before dethroning him.
Engine fuel consumption is based on displacement and load. To use less fuel, you need less of a load (weight), or reduce the time (final speed). If you are accelerating slowly to 50, you'll find it has the same load as accelerating quickly to 50. This is, if you integrate the fuel consumption curves for both, the area is very close (around 1-2%).
A better way to minimize load (since romping on the gas doesn't affect mileage nearly as much as people think it does) is to make your average speed higher. By having your average speed higher, you reduce the time you spend loading your engine with acceleration, and keep it in the nicer "maintain velocity" part of the curve. It's even better if you maintain velocity at a slower speed, so as to reduce wind resistance. Most cars have a pretty bad wind resistance, even today!
How do you keep a higher average speed? When you know a light is going red a couple of blocks ahead, let yourself coast to it, instead of gasing up to it. If you know the period of the light, slow down very early, coast in at the slower speed, and then arrive just as it's changing. You won't have to stop, and you'll not have to accelerate over whatever speed you kept! This is also good for winter driving (less braking = less chances to lose grip on the tires).
One thing you'll notice with this is that most people tend to gas as hard as they can, slam on the breaks, and then jack rabbit when the light changes. By slowing early, you'll end up next to them at the light for a second, but pass them because you'll still have all your momentum working for you!
Mainaining a higher speed in corners is good, too. Just make sure your tire pressures are correct (check every 2nd time you fill, depending on tire quality), and learn how to handle your car. Note that most SUVs are not stable at cornering above 17mph/27kph, but a car like a late-1980s Accord can do 90 degree turns at around 28mph/45kph!
It's safer. I'd much rather be alive, but short a buck of gas every month, than dead.
Why isn't there an easy way for people to contact their MPs online. I don't even know who's representing me, let alone how to get ahold of them.
Stuff like this will be unopposed because the people who can stop it can't respond.
That crack rock's gone to your head.
"... signal-based synchronous software model. It would revolutionize computing and solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry: software unreliability."
Software would be reliable if we could produce 100% algorithms which are free from unconsidered and unhandled cases. It has nothing to do with the medium of execution, and everything to do with the design. This is why computer engineering needs to be a more popular topic.
Who the hell won that thing?
:D
That has to have been the worst excess of the late 90s on this site
Sounds like what you need to do is realize that the way your cities are constructed is untenable. The current modus operandi for personal transportation (not transportation of a group of people, or a set of materials) is broken.
"80 mpg for the first 20 miles is great for the stay at home mom that drive to the store or around a little bit. the majority of the american public lives more than that from work."
Shit. I live 2.5 miles from where I work. The entire city fits within a 20 mile radius, and this is a city of 300,000 people. What is wrong with your cities that they are so big and sprawly? Why are residential zones kept so far away from commercial zones (rather than mingled) to discourage alternative transportation?
".. to build insecure backdoors into their networks, ..."
What if it means that the equipment will accept connections if it passes a rigerous sshv2-dsa key handshake, with a really, really big key size? I don't see that being insecure, setting aside concerns about the stupid feds being bitches in power games leaking the key. Technically, there's nothing stopping them from making it secure (as secure as you or I have our home systems, that is).
If you overflow the stack and overwrite a return value, or taint the variables to be doing what you want, you still get an exploit.
Yes, it's harder. No, it's not a panacea.
I don't think we can reasonably expect people off the street to be able to do that (discounting the effect of you actually distributing your compression codec without being sued).
This is still more homebrew friendly.
You can't encode video to the same quality as the UMD movies. That's crippled.
And it plays 720x480 at 30fps, Divx, etc?
And let's not forget: 14 hours of battery life with music playback, 8 with movies.
Seriously, if you were thinking about buying a PSP, expensive UMD movies (or clippled movie playback on Sony Pro Duo memory sticks), hacked emulators, and the 5-hour battery life, I think it's obvious that this is a much better choice. Not only does it lack a design that's likely to throw UMDs like Ninja stars, not only does it have great battery life, dual CPUs, and Linux, it also reads normal, sane SD cards.
The only thing that'd come close to this thing would be the rumoured video iPod, but this looks like it'll handled the wide-screen anime subs I watch better than the current iPod form factor.
I spent days trying to get stupid ATI 64-bit drivers working on AMD64 Linux. Don't bother. Just buy an nVidia card and be done with it.
the drunk person gives 5$ no a non-drunk person so that they can get them drinks from kegbot. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Until Kegbot can tell when someone is pulling, that's not going to be a very effective control.
I live in Saskatoon, Canada.
For me, it's roughly (monthly):
Rent: 300$
Car payment: 0 (I buy cars for 1,000$ in cash transactions).
Gas during the winter: 180$ (-40C means I drive everywhere)
Gas during the summer: 50$ (I bike, only driving to get groceries and misc items).
Car insurance: 50$
Internet and utils: 150$
Phone: 50$ (cell phone, no landline)
Food: 120$
A bus pass is about 60$/month. The insurance is a fixed, base cost on a car, while the gas is usage based. This means my transportation is 200$/month in winter, or about 100$/month in summer. OTOH, I get to go where I want, when I want, with no nasty people along for the ride. It takes about 1/3rd the time to get there, and the biking helps keep me in shape.
Saskatoon is only ~300,000 people, though. I can cross the city on bike or car in 30 minutes.
You post this piece by "WindozeSux"
You already posted this one in May.
Try this out, Zonk.
It takes almost no time to load. KDE 3.4.x has made me really happy to interface with PDF files, because the PDF integration is fast and slick.
It beats the shit out of Postscript files (I shouldn't have to install 5 separate packages for 1 file format!), and is highly preferable to a powerpoint doc on the other end of the hyper link (which I wouldn't be able to read anyways).
Domain. When you see a car go by advertising McDonald's and Home Depot, you know that they're not competing.
I have yet to see a car with Ford and Toyota on it, or a Microsoft/Sony co-branding. I don't see how this is any different.
Make the game fun, accesible, and re-using an existing universe that people love (it doesn't hurt that they are adding content at a decent rate, despite the odd hiccup), and you'll easily pass the "hardcore" MMOs whose modus operandi seems to be forcing the player to spend all their time in frivolity.
Everquest didn't peak near these numbers. Why? It's just not fun.
"I'd love to have an external LCD display showing the time,"
Is that like a PIN number, being built on NT technology, or one of them ATM machines?
I'm sure that there are plenty of people, like myself, who have deployed other IDS tools, but don't have time to re-write it :)