audiophiles (who really are just people with lots of disposable income and who think they have better hearing than anyone else)
How about the literal translation: people who really care about how music sounds? To start, spend an hour positioning your couch and speakers, which costs nothing.
I don't think these guys are entering [the audiophile market] correctly if they want to succeed there.
Linn has offered something similar in the Kivor range for a while, I don't think it's been very successful.
Every company who correctly foresaw a future of vast archives of digitized music and thought they could make money out of it, whether in the house or the car, has guessed wrong. For nearly everyone, the archive is your iPod!
You are about to remove the following bank account from your PayPal account...
Since this is your only confirmed bank account, if you remove it you will immediately become unverified, you will no longer be able to add funds via electronic funds transfer, your credit card charge limit will be reinstated, and you will no longer be protected by the Buyer and Seller Protection Policies.
Does any of this matter? Are the credit card's protections better than PayPal's?
There are so many beautiful little touches, things that one person in a hundred would never notice, but that add up to a great experience.
And Pat Lawlor's genius continued with Twilight Zone, which quotes his previous games. E.g. if you keep hitting the clock target during Clock Chaos, "Rudy" from Funhouse says "Quit playing with the clock". During Fast Lock, during the countdown the machine quotes "The Addams Family", "Whirlwind", and "Banzai Run".
I own a TZ, the moment I finally got Lost in the Zone 6-ball multiball as the arcade was closing and the machine went insane I bought it. It seemed crazy but I've never regretted it, and I've met enthusiasts with 6 or more machines.
It's a matter of taste whether you prefer TAF or TZ, or indeed the more hard-edged Steve Ritchie games. Pat Lawlor now has his own company, Pat Lawlor Design and has done several fine designs for Stern.
Answer: Your phone is also an iPod, stores 10GB, and you can buy from iTunes on it. Geeks will demand phones with removable SDIO cards or cables to jack into a PC, but most people won't care.
The PC bridges the connection between Internet and iPod.
Putting electronics into a phone also gives you an Internet connection.
A general computing device is what's going to make it happen,
Yes, and since there's value in carrying it with you, that general computing device is inexorably moving into a phone.
You'll always have something resembling a PC because of the screen and keyboard, but the center of your life will be your phone.
Damn Samsung and Sprint for cancelling the sph-i500, my would-be convergence super-device.
If it goes with you, it'll converge into your mobile phone. Most PDA's and cameras sold are now phones; likewise radios, remote controls, iPods, media players will all move into your phone.
It'll be a while before storage becomes compact enough, or network-accessible storage becomes fast enough, to carry YourLifeRecorded with you. Right now Tivo is a separate box with a big hard drive, a PC is a separate box with a big hard drive. But eventually (15 years?) your phone's SDIO slot capacity becomes big enough that you store everything on your phone, and occasionally plug it in to watch on a big screen or download through a fat pipe.
There will always be specialized devices, but just like digital cameras, the majority of every electronic function besides desktop work at a "PC" will live on your phone.
Solar is unsightly and takes up a lot of real estate, which makes local environmental lobbyists pissed
What are you on about?
Hundreds of thousands of acres of flat roofs are all around you, doing absolutely nothing. Name one environmentalist who's objected to putting the roof to use.
Maybe you'retalking about a set of mirrors powering a central steam-driven turbine, that's harder to do on existing roofs.
Everyone saying how the combined device is going to be huge and bloated is clueless! The Sanyo and Toshiba premium cellphone/camere/video camera combos are barely any bigger than other clamshell phones. Yes the multifunction device is a compromise but it's only an extra $5 a month over a two-year contract.
making it HUGGE (PDA phones? urg)
No. The Treo 600 PDA is pretty chunky and the Windows phones are bigger still, but the Samsung sph-i500 clamshell PalmOS PDA and the Sony-Ericsson P900 are a reasonable size. I don't need my phone to be any smaller, a smaller keypad is too fiddly. So as the electronics inevitably get more compact, you'll be offered even MORE features in a "typical-size" phone. Get used to it.
Hey..if they can make a Wireless phone/PDA/digicam/mp3 player that is the formfactor of my small Samsung flip phone, w/ a screen that somehow folds out to be the size of an Ipaq, a 3-4 megapixel cam, w/ a good DAC and mp3 decoding chipset...and also have very good battery life, doesn't weight a ton..I'd buy it...
They're really close. Samsung sph-i500 is a Wireless phone/PDA/digicam/mp3 player. Runs PalmOS and has an SDIO slot. By the time it's actually available in the USA (lazy-ass Sprint -- grrrr), multi-GB SD cards should be cheap, so it should be comparable to the Flash-based MP3 players. As other posters note, the camera quality will still be lame, but it's great to have a camera with you 24x7.
That leaves a better screen. I don't see a fold-out screen coming any time soon. I'd rather have a cyborg-style floating "eyepiece" display, but Microvision has promised one for over a decade.
there is no money in it for them when their customers can transfer mp3s from their PC's to their phones, and seeing that the phone manufacturers sell their phones to the Telco's (and not end users) the Telco's have significantly more control over the functionality (and therefore dysfunctionality) of phone devices than Microsoft will ever have in the PC world.
Indeed. I bought the kick-ass Sanyo SCP 5500 (Sprint's VM4500) phone with camera, video, ringtones, organizer, etc. for my SO. It's a fabulous phone for only $179 with rebates on a 2-year plan.
Sprint really really wants you to pay $15+/month for PCS Vision where you pay them for picture and video mail, and buy your ringtones and games from them. It's convenient and you can see Sprint PCS wanting to be like.mac for your phone, but the fees add up.
Meanwhile, in theory the phone is expandable. So you can go to Radio Shack and buy a USB cable, and then go to FutureDial and buy SnapSync and SnapMedia, and jack your phone into your PC, and transfer your contacts, pictures, and ring tones. In practice you've just spent more than the phone cost you to get some poorly-written Windows-only software with all kinds of limitations. Likewise, this phone runs Java so in theory you can download your own MIDlets. In practice, I've yet to figure out how, and Sprint has no interest in telling me.
As the parent posted, this situation is exactly how the telco wants it. Premium phones have the checkboxes for PC connectivity and Java, but in practice it's so painful most users will pay Sprint for their easy service, and Sprint only has to support a closed device.
I think the telcos' self-serving focus will actually save the PDA-phone market. If you buy a Treo 600 or a Samsung sph-i500, it is going to sync fine with your PC out of the box, and you can easily install third-party Palm software like media players, e-book readers, etc. But that expandability, media access, and user control makes PDA-phones a lot less appealing to telcos. Maybe that's why Sprint is dragging their feet on the greatest (for me) PDA-phone-camera-music player with SDIO expansion yet made, the Samsung sph-i550: announced in 2003, approved by the FCC early in 2004, but Sprint won't sell it in the USA until 2005.
He shows up in various articles at the right time as "vice president of Netscape's client products division", e.g.
Wired.
C'mon Mr. Hamerly, if you're the one then step forward, receive the gold-plated bathroom tissue statuette, and defend yourself in your acceptance speech!
I'm picturing someone walking into the audio store and saying "I'd like to make my system sound $2000 better today."
Here are some ideas.
If you have vinyl records, buy a Rega P3 turntable, Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge, and a phono stepup.
Please believe me, it will transform your record collection!
Buy better speakers. If you like the way they sound, the Magneplanar 1.6 QR is a fine, fine speaker, made in White Bear Minnesota.
"they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000." Gimme a break.
In my experience, that sounds about right. People who really care how music sounds often spend a lot of money on their audio systems, and most people who do so claim better systems are more revealing. I'll admit we could be fooling ourselves if you'll admit this could simply be true. I couldn't tell the difference between $200 CD players on my $2000 system, but on my $20,000 system (no blue LED's, no fancy faceplates, no bizarre theories, all from manufacturers who have been in business 10+ years), in blind A/B comparisons three people were consistently preferred a $2,500 CD player over a $1,100 CD player.
There's a lot of hype and hucksterism in high-end audio because these are subtle differences, but do you really think that long-term manufacturers' more expensive models don't sound better than their cheaper siblings?
I didn't open my wallet until I was knocked out by the sound I heard, and listening to music on my system gives me enormous pleasure. Even the most wild-eyed audiophile space cadet feels the same. <pathetic>Why do you hate us so?</pathetic>
above turntable (20 years old!)
Linn Genki CD
VTL 5.5 preamp
VTL MB-450 power amps
Magneplanar 3.6R speakers
Cardas cables
Indeed. I don't want to carry a phone and an iPod because I don't have three ears for two headsets. But I'd happily pay the money to put some decent storage on my next smartphone so I can listen to music on its hands-free headset.
The division between a high-end phone and a smartphone/PDA is becoming one of expandability. My spouse's excellent Sanyo VM 4500 plays sounds, pictures, and videos, but has no expandability: Sprint doesn't support the phone's built-in Java and PC docking capability because they want you to get media by paying them $15 a month. Meanwhile the promising Samsung SPH-i550 runs PalmOS and has the SD expansion slot and explicit docking. That's what I want.
Another amazing way to get your media on the go is using Rendezvous and Wi-Fi to share it from strangers. No memory card or phone network required.
A panel that is... used to cover vast tracts of unused land
Why do people keep coming up with this fallacy? I've never seen solar panels on the ground, you put them on the roof of the building that needs them.
There is disagreement on Slashdot over how much area you need to meet all energy needs, but to start there are a hell of a lot of flat roofs that could be generating electricity. Generating the power in the middle of nowhere to ship it back to the users makes no sense. (Which sadly means it's the only way big energy corporations will get behind solar, they're locked into the mindset of energy distribution as much as energy creation.)
[raising the ambient temperature of whatever area they are in] is a universal problem with ALL power generation and use.
Surely not with solar photovoltaics. Any sunlight falling on an area that isn't reflected is converted to heat. Solar takes some of that energy and converts it to electricity instead of heat.
If the area were white or a mirror, maybe it reflects more sunlight than the solar panel. Does anyone know if the difference is significant?
And to all the people complaining about the space solar power generation takes up... what is currently on the roof of your local Walmart, shopping center, warehouse, etc.?!
From the sidebar http://www.cio.com/archive/021504/edit.html
THE GUY IN THE SUV in front of us, stuck in Chicago traffic with about a million other cars, lives in Virginia, has not been arrested in the past several years, has one outstanding ticket for speeding (in Virginia), and is six months delinquent in renewing his registration.
I know this because I'm in a cop car, right on his tail. We've just entered his plate number into the MicroSlate notebook mounted on the center console of our unmarked cruiser.
Since patrol cops spend so much time running "make"s on license plates, I wonder if anyone has hooked cameras for red-light runners, speeding, and toll cheats up to a optical character recognition for license plates, and then onto the database. Instead of paying cops to harvest small amounts of data, pay them to act on automated data.
(I'm very aware of the potential for abuse in these systems if a cop wants to make your life hell; for a start, all data coming in and all queries need a full audit trail available to ombudsmen, police oversight boards, and defense lawyers.)
digital cameras still come nowhere near the resolution of regular film
Uh, no. 11 megapixels is higher resolution and overall much better quality than film.
The myth you're repeating was comprehensively shot down by the Canon 1Ds field report last year: "There is no area in which 35mm film scans are superior". Read the entire report, ignore the largely clueless commentary that greeted it on Slashdot. (Key point: yes, film is analog, but the grain of film causes worse artifacts than a high-res digital sensor.)
However, that particular camera still costs nearly $7000!
RTFP, some of the Sun researchers' improvements are brilliant. The subtle initiation, the intra-line feedback that shows if the other person is typing a response, the countdown to goodbye. Can't wait! Where's the URL to download the software:o)
I have exactly these issues when/msg-ing distant colleagues on our organization's IRC. No more "Can I ask you something?", "you there?", "Is that it?" "OK, bye then" just to frame the interaction.
I'm less sold on Rhythm Awareness, we just use/nick spagefood,/nick spage_mtg and/me Out on errands on group IRC channels to communicate status. Toss in a bot watching the channel and you can tell what people are doing. I have a hard time with IM services compared with IRC because they don't offer these "community communications" as well.
The LILSYS sensor integration to guess how amenable I am to interruption seems a ways off, but it would be nice if my chat client could tell if I'm editing in a code window or on the phone (not interruptible) vs. surfing and reading e-mail (interrupt away).
Macromedia has a historical record of making catastrophically bad user interfaces for their products
Hmm, compared to, say, Oracle Media Objects, MTropolis, Hypercard, Supercard, Asymmetrix Toolbook, and all the other Director competitors that died around 1998? Or compared to all the other lightweight animation formats for the Web that died around 2000?
Microsoft has its own set of subpar abandoned animation alternatives for the Web that utterly failed:
LiquidMotion (discussed in other replies here)
Chrome (3-D presentation/animation), exactly like Longhorn except for XAML
Microsoft animation controls in MSIE4, a bunch of ActiveX controls for timelines, sprites, animation paths, etc. (These are probably still present in the Windows MSIE code!)
Many many companies have been there before, the difference is MS has untold billions to spend trying, re-trying, and re-trying the market.
The compelling dream is that you laboriously load up a computer with enough facts so that it can glean understanding of what it's reading, and one glorious day the computer has enough smarts to make sense of things on its own, and two weeks after crawling the entire Internet, it knows everything.
Hence Doug Lenat's Cyc, now partly open source. Unfortunately that glorious day has been "a few years away" for over 13 years.
The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world.
But I haven't come across any postings from Cyc on Slashdot correcting misinformation and lies.
Clearly this is possible because all those darn human kids do it; maybe you have to use a more complex computer and leave it for a few years crawling on the floor putting things in its mouth.
If you're talking about the external JavaScript workaround, it does work on other browsers. Go to www.macromedia.com, if you see Flash then View > Source and note the <object> and <embed> tags have moved to an external JavaScript file.
Sony's own GDM-F series is far superior to the CPD-G series because of its finer dot pitch (GDM-F520 0.22mm aperture grill vs. 0.24mm for G- 520) and higher maximum refresh rate. Yes you can get 2048x1536 out of the G series but you'll have fuzzy dots.
As I wrote in my Guide for size queens, find a PHB with an F series monitor and do the midnight monitor swap with a generic 21-inch monitor. S/he'll never notice on her/his 1024x768 default desktop:o)
I have so-so eyesight and run my GDM-F400 at 1600x1200 and GDM-F500 at 1800x1440 or higher. It takes a lot of display appearance tweaking, Mozilla Ctrl-mousewheel to zoom sites, Apple [Cmd-shift-+] to enlarge apps, and bitching to sites and apps that don't scale, but it's well worth it.
[IBM T221 LCD] at
9.2 million pixels at 0.1245mm stripe pitch, 3840x2400
Yes the Quadro cards are designed to drive the IBM and Viewsonic "Quad Ultra XGA" LCD panels, but it appears you have to use an interleaving technique which reduces the refresh rate substantially. As I understand it, at that resolution you're pumping out more pixels than the DVI spec is capable, even with dual TMDS transmitters.
3840x2400 still sounds damn intriguing, but it's impossible to get a demo in the real world. Maybe Apple's rumored next-generation Cinema display will bring ultra-ultra-resolutions to end-users who don't have an assigned workstation sales rep.
I say, add touch sensitivity to an existing laptop design and you have a winner. Make the lid swivel so you can close it with the display on the outside, add some handwriting recognition software and you have effectively a "tablet PC".
Not only do several of the current machines do this, but back around 1993 when this was called "Windows for Pen Computing" there were such hybrid machines, including the Compaq Concerto, which still has a fan page. In fact the whole Tablet launch is completely deja vu all over again, right down to the alleged benefits of ink, and the alleged benefits of direct manipulation, and the alleged market of neophytes and CEO's who don't want a keyboard, all of which amounts to a tiny sliver of the PC market. Read this review from 1995.
Yes it's nice to directly interact with a screen. Back then it seemed like a no-brainer too, so why did the Concerto die a death along with most of the other pen computing platforms? I'm not sure, maybe it just doesn't get integrated into the mainstream so it doesn't ride the price-performance curves as well as a standard laptop. If Wacom Cintiq technology were a cheap $200 upgrade on every monitor I'd spring for it on laptops and even desktops, but clearly most customers don't perceive $200 of value in being able to interact and scribble on a screen. Meanwhile for nearly everything you do on a computer a pointing device and keyboard work just fine.
I worked at GO (later EO) on PenPoint (Byte's Magazine's operating system of the year!:o), and the MS pre-emptive announcement of Windows for Pen Computing was one of several nails in that coffin. (At least PenPoint really went for it with a gestural direct interaction UI, the original and still best implementation of gestures.) It's touching to see several die-hards from those efforts banging their heads against the same wall 10 years later, at least it's at Microsoft's expense.
All of the special stuff that specific vendors can do is in the hardware itself, while the drivers just provide an interface to that hardware.
Absolutely not true. NVIDIA's unified driver model is made possible by a lot of special driver software that virtualizes hardware, as well as their hardware itself. It's a significant chunk of their Intellectual Property, and their ability to ship a single driver for all their cards was an enormous competitive advantage.
Decide what size and resolution you want. I go for insane pixel counts (at least 1920x1440) and use Mozilla zoom and app font settings to make things visible, but if your apps are stuck at fixed pixel sizes and can't zoom (or you're too stupid to make the adjustments), it may be more trouble than it's worth and you'll be happier at 1024x768.
Then if you want higher res, figure out what refresh rate your video card can do at that resolution. Anything less than 72Hz is going to be miserable, and 85Hz is nicer. If you're willing to go with 16-bit color instead of 24-bit (thousands of colors instead of millions), you can get a higher refresh rate. Some video cards say they can do 2048x1536 at 85 Hz, but you find it's only in 8-bit color mode, which is useless these days.
Unless you have thousands to spend, your resolution quest takes you beyond LCD's, and you have to get a CRT.
All modern CRT monitors will claim they can do 2048x1536, but check the refresh rate as above. And then, check the dot pitch. Tiny pixels and big phosphor dots don't mix.
Buy your monitor, plug it in, screw in the cables to avoid interference, position your monitor away from stray electromagnetic fields. Go for the massive resolution, make sure you've got the plug'n'pray correctly identifying your monitor and letting you max out the refresh rate. Then spend quality time with all the setup controls. You need zone convergence to align the colors in each area of the screen, and full geometry controls to compensate for tilt, skew, barrel, etc. Displaymate has some nice test patterns, or you can create your own in a paint program.
Realize your video card is crap and at midnight unscrew a PHB's PC and swap your card with her 300+MHz RAMDAC 32MB model, then find you have to recalibrate all your settings.
Eventually give up on 2048x1536 because GIF images are just too damn tiny, and go for 1856x1392.
If you're going for high resolution, you have to go Sony GDM-F500R or the newer 520. To my knowledge nobody else has 0.22 mm dot pitch across the screen. I have that at work plus the GDM-F400 at home at 1600x1200. They're both fantastic and have been perfect for over three years. But again if you're happy at 1024x768 the extra money isn't worth it. The Sony E and G series are nearly as good and a lot less. You may find a PHB with a GDM series that's wasted running at 1024x768, so do the midnight monitor swap, she'll never notice. Yes occasionally the two wires on the Trinitron are right where you're looking, but it's not a big deal for me.
An LCD monitor with a DVI connection to your display card should let you bypass all the messing around with geometry and convergence, but you need to be careful. As I understand it, unless the DVI connector and your video card are engineered right with dual TMDS transmitters, you can't do super-high resolutions through the digital interface.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the literal translation: people who really care about how music sounds? To start, spend an hour positioning your couch and speakers, which costs nothing.
Linn has offered something similar in the Kivor range for a while, I don't think it's been very successful.
Every company who correctly foresaw a future of vast archives of digitized music and thought they could make money out of it, whether in the house or the car, has guessed wrong. For nearly everyone, the archive is your iPod!
And Pat Lawlor's genius continued with Twilight Zone, which quotes his previous games. E.g. if you keep hitting the clock target during Clock Chaos, "Rudy" from Funhouse says "Quit playing with the clock". During Fast Lock, during the countdown the machine quotes "The Addams Family", "Whirlwind", and "Banzai Run".
I own a TZ, the moment I finally got Lost in the Zone 6-ball multiball as the arcade was closing and the machine went insane I bought it. It seemed crazy but I've never regretted it, and I've met enthusiasts with 6 or more machines.
It's a matter of taste whether you prefer TAF or TZ, or indeed the more hard-edged Steve Ritchie games. Pat Lawlor now has his own company, Pat Lawlor Design and has done several fine designs for Stern.
Answer: Your phone is also an iPod, stores 10GB, and you can buy from iTunes on it. Geeks will demand phones with removable SDIO cards or cables to jack into a PC, but most people won't care.
Putting electronics into a phone also gives you an Internet connection.
Yes, and since there's value in carrying it with you, that general computing device is inexorably moving into a phone. You'll always have something resembling a PC because of the screen and keyboard, but the center of your life will be your phone.
Damn Samsung and Sprint for cancelling the sph-i500, my would-be convergence super-device.
If it goes with you, it'll converge into your mobile phone. Most PDA's and cameras sold are now phones; likewise radios, remote controls, iPods, media players will all move into your phone.
It'll be a while before storage becomes compact enough, or network-accessible storage becomes fast enough, to carry YourLifeRecorded with you. Right now Tivo is a separate box with a big hard drive, a PC is a separate box with a big hard drive. But eventually (15 years?) your phone's SDIO slot capacity becomes big enough that you store everything on your phone, and occasionally plug it in to watch on a big screen or download through a fat pipe.
There will always be specialized devices, but just like digital cameras, the majority of every electronic function besides desktop work at a "PC" will live on your phone.
What are you on about? Hundreds of thousands of acres of flat roofs are all around you, doing absolutely nothing. Name one environmentalist who's objected to putting the roof to use.
Maybe you'retalking about a set of mirrors powering a central steam-driven turbine, that's harder to do on existing roofs.
They're really close. Samsung sph-i500 is a Wireless phone/PDA/digicam/mp3 player. Runs PalmOS and has an SDIO slot. By the time it's actually available in the USA (lazy-ass Sprint -- grrrr), multi-GB SD cards should be cheap, so it should be comparable to the Flash-based MP3 players. As other posters note, the camera quality will still be lame, but it's great to have a camera with you 24x7.
That leaves a better screen. I don't see a fold-out screen coming any time soon. I'd rather have a cyborg-style floating "eyepiece" display, but Microvision has promised one for over a decade.
Indeed. I bought the kick-ass Sanyo SCP 5500 (Sprint's VM4500) phone with camera, video, ringtones, organizer, etc. for my SO. It's a fabulous phone for only $179 with rebates on a 2-year plan.
Sprint really really wants you to pay $15+/month for PCS Vision where you pay them for picture and video mail, and buy your ringtones and games from them. It's convenient and you can see Sprint PCS wanting to be like .mac for your phone, but the fees add up.
Meanwhile, in theory the phone is expandable. So you can go to Radio Shack and buy a USB cable, and then go to FutureDial and buy SnapSync and SnapMedia, and jack your phone into your PC, and transfer your contacts, pictures, and ring tones. In practice you've just spent more than the phone cost you to get some poorly-written Windows-only software with all kinds of limitations. Likewise, this phone runs Java so in theory you can download your own MIDlets. In practice, I've yet to figure out how, and Sprint has no interest in telling me. As the parent posted, this situation is exactly how the telco wants it. Premium phones have the checkboxes for PC connectivity and Java, but in practice it's so painful most users will pay Sprint for their easy service, and Sprint only has to support a closed device.
I think the telcos' self-serving focus will actually save the PDA-phone market. If you buy a Treo 600 or a Samsung sph-i500, it is going to sync fine with your PC out of the box, and you can easily install third-party Palm software like media players, e-book readers, etc. But that expandability, media access, and user control makes PDA-phones a lot less appealing to telcos. Maybe that's why Sprint is dragging their feet on the greatest (for me) PDA-phone-camera-music player with SDIO expansion yet made, the Samsung sph-i550: announced in 2003, approved by the FCC early in 2004, but Sprint won't sell it in the USA until 2005.
C'mon Mr. Hamerly, if you're the one then step forward, receive the gold-plated bathroom tissue statuette, and defend yourself in your acceptance speech!
I'm picturing someone walking into the audio store and saying "I'd like to make my system sound $2000 better today."
Here are some ideas.
"they only sound better in scenarios where a person has a stereo that runs more than about $1,000." Gimme a break.
In my experience, that sounds about right. People who really care how music sounds often spend a lot of money on their audio systems, and most people who do so claim better systems are more revealing. I'll admit we could be fooling ourselves if you'll admit this could simply be true. I couldn't tell the difference between $200 CD players on my $2000 system, but on my $20,000 system (no blue LED's, no fancy faceplates, no bizarre theories, all from manufacturers who have been in business 10+ years), in blind A/B comparisons three people were consistently preferred a $2,500 CD player over a $1,100 CD player.
There's a lot of hype and hucksterism in high-end audio because these are subtle differences, but do you really think that long-term manufacturers' more expensive models don't sound better than their cheaper siblings? I didn't open my wallet until I was knocked out by the sound I heard, and listening to music on my system gives me enormous pleasure. Even the most wild-eyed audiophile space cadet feels the same. <pathetic>Why do you hate us so?</pathetic>
above turntable (20 years old!)
Linn Genki CD
VTL 5.5 preamp
VTL MB-450 power amps
Magneplanar 3.6R speakers
Cardas cables
That should be "in-depth paper" to avoid ambiguity. More on compound words.
Indeed. I don't want to carry a phone and an iPod because I don't have three ears for two headsets. But I'd happily pay the money to put some decent storage on my next smartphone so I can listen to music on its hands-free headset.
The division between a high-end phone and a smartphone/PDA is becoming one of expandability. My spouse's excellent Sanyo VM 4500 plays sounds, pictures, and videos, but has no expandability: Sprint doesn't support the phone's built-in Java and PC docking capability because they want you to get media by paying them $15 a month. Meanwhile the promising Samsung SPH-i550 runs PalmOS and has the SD expansion slot and explicit docking. That's what I want.
Another amazing way to get your media on the go is using Rendezvous and Wi-Fi to share it from strangers. No memory card or phone network required.
Why do people keep coming up with this fallacy? I've never seen solar panels on the ground, you put them on the roof of the building that needs them.
There is disagreement on Slashdot over how much area you need to meet all energy needs, but to start there are a hell of a lot of flat roofs that could be generating electricity. Generating the power in the middle of nowhere to ship it back to the users makes no sense. (Which sadly means it's the only way big energy corporations will get behind solar, they're locked into the mindset of energy distribution as much as energy creation.)
Surely not with solar photovoltaics. Any sunlight falling on an area that isn't reflected is converted to heat. Solar takes some of that energy and converts it to electricity instead of heat.
If the area were white or a mirror, maybe it reflects more sunlight than the solar panel. Does anyone know if the difference is significant?
And to all the people complaining about the space solar power generation takes up... what is currently on the roof of your local Walmart, shopping center, warehouse, etc.?!
Indeed, where are the HMD's for a video iPod or other player? I don't want to crick my neck peering at a tiny display.
There's a list but nothing you can try and buy at the local computer store.
(I'm very aware of the potential for abuse in these systems if a cop wants to make your life hell; for a start, all data coming in and all queries need a full audit trail available to ombudsmen, police oversight boards, and defense lawyers.)
Uh, no. 11 megapixels is higher resolution and overall much better quality than film. The myth you're repeating was comprehensively shot down by the Canon 1Ds field report last year: "There is no area in which 35mm film scans are superior". Read the entire report, ignore the largely clueless commentary that greeted it on Slashdot. (Key point: yes, film is analog, but the grain of film causes worse artifacts than a high-res digital sensor.)
However, that particular camera still costs nearly $7000!
I have exactly these issues when /msg-ing distant colleagues on our organization's IRC. No more "Can I ask you something?", "you there?", "Is that it?" "OK, bye then" just to frame the interaction.
I'm less sold on Rhythm Awareness, we just use /nick spagefood, /nick spage_mtg and /me Out on errands on group IRC channels to communicate status. Toss in a bot watching the channel and you can tell what people are doing. I have a hard time with IM services compared with IRC because they don't offer these "community communications" as well.
The LILSYS sensor integration to guess how amenable I am to interruption seems a ways off, but it would be nice if my chat client could tell if I'm editing in a code window or on the phone (not interruptible) vs. surfing and reading e-mail (interrupt away).
Hmm, compared to, say, Oracle Media Objects, MTropolis, Hypercard, Supercard, Asymmetrix Toolbook, and all the other Director competitors that died around 1998? Or compared to all the other lightweight animation formats for the Web that died around 2000?
Microsoft has its own set of subpar abandoned animation alternatives for the Web that utterly failed:
Many many companies have been there before, the difference is MS has untold billions to spend trying, re-trying, and re-trying the market.
The compelling dream is that you laboriously load up a computer with enough facts so that it can glean understanding of what it's reading, and one glorious day the computer has enough smarts to make sense of things on its own, and two weeks after crawling the entire Internet, it knows everything.
Hence Doug Lenat's Cyc, now partly open source. Unfortunately that glorious day has been "a few years away" for over 13 years.
But I haven't come across any postings from Cyc on Slashdot correcting misinformation and lies.
Clearly this is possible because all those darn human kids do it; maybe you have to use a more complex computer and leave it for a few years crawling on the floor putting things in its mouth.
It's working for me in Mozilla and Safari.
As I wrote in my Guide for size queens, find a PHB with an F series monitor and do the midnight monitor swap with a generic 21-inch monitor. S/he'll never notice on her/his 1024x768 default desktop :o)
I have so-so eyesight and run my GDM-F400 at 1600x1200 and GDM-F500 at 1800x1440 or higher. It takes a lot of display appearance tweaking, Mozilla Ctrl-mousewheel to zoom sites, Apple [Cmd-shift-+] to enlarge apps, and bitching to sites and apps that don't scale, but it's well worth it.
[IBM T221 LCD] at 9.2 million pixels at 0.1245mm stripe pitch, 3840x2400
Yes the Quadro cards are designed to drive the IBM and Viewsonic "Quad Ultra XGA" LCD panels, but it appears you have to use an interleaving technique which reduces the refresh rate substantially. As I understand it, at that resolution you're pumping out more pixels than the DVI spec is capable, even with dual TMDS transmitters.
3840x2400 still sounds damn intriguing, but it's impossible to get a demo in the real world. Maybe Apple's rumored next-generation Cinema display will bring ultra-ultra-resolutions to end-users who don't have an assigned workstation sales rep.
Yes it's nice to directly interact with a screen. Back then it seemed like a no-brainer too, so why did the Concerto die a death along with most of the other pen computing platforms? I'm not sure, maybe it just doesn't get integrated into the mainstream so it doesn't ride the price-performance curves as well as a standard laptop. If Wacom Cintiq technology were a cheap $200 upgrade on every monitor I'd spring for it on laptops and even desktops, but clearly most customers don't perceive $200 of value in being able to interact and scribble on a screen. Meanwhile for nearly everything you do on a computer a pointing device and keyboard work just fine.
I worked at GO (later EO) on PenPoint (Byte's Magazine's operating system of the year! :o), and the MS pre-emptive announcement of Windows for Pen Computing was one of several nails in that coffin. (At least PenPoint really went for it with a gestural direct interaction UI, the original and still best implementation of gestures.) It's touching to see several die-hards from those efforts banging their heads against the same wall 10 years later, at least it's at Microsoft's expense.
Absolutely not true. NVIDIA's unified driver model is made possible by a lot of special driver software that virtualizes hardware, as well as their hardware itself. It's a significant chunk of their Intellectual Property, and their ability to ship a single driver for all their cards was an enormous competitive advantage.
Decide what size and resolution you want. I go for insane pixel counts (at least 1920x1440) and use Mozilla zoom and app font settings to make things visible, but if your apps are stuck at fixed pixel sizes and can't zoom (or you're too stupid to make the adjustments), it may be more trouble than it's worth and you'll be happier at 1024x768.
Then if you want higher res, figure out what refresh rate your video card can do at that resolution. Anything less than 72Hz is going to be miserable, and 85Hz is nicer. If you're willing to go with 16-bit color instead of 24-bit (thousands of colors instead of millions), you can get a higher refresh rate. Some video cards say they can do 2048x1536 at 85 Hz, but you find it's only in 8-bit color mode, which is useless these days.
Unless you have thousands to spend, your resolution quest takes you beyond LCD's, and you have to get a CRT.
All modern CRT monitors will claim they can do 2048x1536, but check the refresh rate as above. And then, check the dot pitch. Tiny pixels and big phosphor dots don't mix.
Buy your monitor, plug it in, screw in the cables to avoid interference, position your monitor away from stray electromagnetic fields. Go for the massive resolution, make sure you've got the plug'n'pray correctly identifying your monitor and letting you max out the refresh rate. Then spend quality time with all the setup controls. You need zone convergence to align the colors in each area of the screen, and full geometry controls to compensate for tilt, skew, barrel, etc. Displaymate has some nice test patterns, or you can create your own in a paint program.
Realize your video card is crap and at midnight unscrew a PHB's PC and swap your card with her 300+MHz RAMDAC 32MB model, then find you have to recalibrate all your settings.
Eventually give up on 2048x1536 because GIF images are just too damn tiny, and go for 1856x1392.
If you're going for high resolution, you have to go Sony GDM-F500R or the newer 520. To my knowledge nobody else has 0.22 mm dot pitch across the screen. I have that at work plus the GDM-F400 at home at 1600x1200. They're both fantastic and have been perfect for over three years. But again if you're happy at 1024x768 the extra money isn't worth it. The Sony E and G series are nearly as good and a lot less. You may find a PHB with a GDM series that's wasted running at 1024x768, so do the midnight monitor swap, she'll never notice. Yes occasionally the two wires on the Trinitron are right where you're looking, but it's not a big deal for me.
An LCD monitor with a DVI connection to your display card should let you bypass all the messing around with geometry and convergence, but you need to be careful. As I understand it, unless the DVI connector and your video card are engineered right with dual TMDS transmitters, you can't do super-high resolutions through the digital interface.