I can see OTA TV going away (ATSC is horrible for mobile reception and cable/satellite work for almost all other purposes) but I predict an uprising if analog FM radio is ever taken away. Right now if you go to any dollar store you will probably find at least 1 FM radio. My car, alarm clock, emergency flashlight, MP3 players, (dumb last-gen) cellphone, and home theater receiver all have FM radios built in. It is possibly the most ubiquitous mass communications medium if you go by the number of receivers per capita.
The technology is extremely mature, very inexpensive, not (currently) patented, about as portable as it gets and it doesn't require a $50 monthly subscription to use. Sure *you* might not listen to FM radio but I and millions of other people do every day. Every car built since the 70s has an FM radio and people still listen to it every day when they drive. I get my news, in real time, from public radio between classes on my MP3 player's built-in FM tuner. Other technologies might be able to partially replace FM, but they will be massively more expensive and they will probably never achieve the reach FM has today.
Bottom line: because of the built-up infrastructure, FM is here to stay.
Try paying less than 30$ a month for a cell phone service. i'd LOVE to have a service that charges me based on my use. i make two or three calls a WEEK, all to my girlfriend and all about 1 minute long. "I'm ready", "OK, i'm on my way". i send a text message every two or three days. i'm not a twelve year old girl who has to yammer constantly.
I live in the US and I pay $6.67 a month for cellular service.
I have pretty much the same usage patterns you do so like you a contract plan didn't/doesn't make sense for me. I looked at prepaid plans and also like you I was dismayed to see that all of them had expiring minutes, usually after 30 or 90 days. Then I found that T-Mobile has a "Gold Rewards" program for their prepaid service where if you get your account to $100 worth of minutes they don't expire for a full year. I went ahead and bought their cheapest handset and a $100 refill card right away, a $140 up-front investment but so far I've only had to buy two other $10 refill cards to keep my minutes and rewards membership from expiring which gets me to $6.67/mo (including the cost of my handset) for my service to date.
I've just calculated that at my current rate of use I have about 18 months of service left (including the refill card I will need to buy next year) by which time I will probably be ready to move to a contract plan. At that time my service will have cost $4.72/mo, or $3.61/mo excluding the cost of the handset.
That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS, Hugo, AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.
Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp and the Spring Thing). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive has an extensive collection of these games, and there are severalreviewsites that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.
I don't have any experience with Sprint but T-Mobile is probably the best in terms of being "open" of the big four mobile operators in the US. For example, until a few years ago you could get free web browsing through them by exploiting a hole in their free WAP access service. Instead of just shutting the hole and ignoring the people who didn't want to pay for a full Internet plan, they decided to shut it while transitioning to tiered Internet plans so people who didn't need to tether could still get the full web on their phones at a reduced price. Most phones also apparently will still let you tether with their cheap service, though T-Mobile will cut off your access if you use too much bandwidth while doing this.
They use GSM which is a big plus if you want to buy your own phone. I haven't yet needed to because, while all of their phones that I've owned were locked and had T-Mobile logos and "premium services" everywhere, none of them were in any way crippled like Verizon is infamous for doing. I even added a custom ringtone to one of my phones using only a standard USB cable and the manufacturer's ringtone transfer software. Their coverage is pretty good, the only time I've had trouble with it was when I was traveling through West Virginia which is a hard area to cover with cell phone service anyways. Their biggest problem is that they don't yet have any 3G service available anywhere (they're waiting for the spectrum they bought for it to become available for their use) and their customer service is nothing to write home about, but that's pretty much par for the course in this industry.
I've had the exact opposite experience with my month-old 6030. It's a fantastic basic phone for what I paid for it ($40). The signal signal strength is very good (it's consistently was much better than my dad's Samsung flip phone) and I usually get a least a week out of the battery before it needs to be recharged (granted I hardly talk on it, so YMMV). Voice quality is okay: not bad but not that great either. The phone seems very sturdy and the finish on mine still looks brand new even though I've had it in my pants pocket nearly constantly. My only complaints are that the interface is noticeably laggy (especially the main menu), the phone itself is a bit big, the FM radio is only mono, and the screen is impossible to read without the backlight, but those are more minor annoyances in an otherwise good product.
If you follow the link trail back to AVS Forum (and from there to the original press release in Chinese) it is clear that the press release, in fact, talks about HD DVD and not Blu-Ray. This has been confirmed by at least one person who knows Chinese who says the phrase translates to "blue laser HD DVD." An explanation for the awkward phrasing is offered in this post which says that there is an HD format in China that uses a red-diode laser, hence the specification of the laser being blue-diode.
A solution to this problem would be a dual-layer screen with an ePaper layer and a traditional (monochromatic) LCD layer. Annotations would be displayed on the LCD layer with the actual text on the ePaper layer. This also gives the advantage of being able to turn on an off annotations without having to update the ePaper display. I don't know how feasible this is to implement, but it seems like a fairly straightforward solution. I would personally love something like this.
I don't believe companies with more than 120-150 people are stable - once they breach this range empire building occurs and massive uncontrollable monsters result. If a company truly needs more than 150 people it should split into two and partner on the project at hand. I believe this is a human condition - humans work best in tribes where they can personally know all of the members.
All of this might be completely and utterly wrong. But it's my hypothesis.
It's interesting that you should choose that number, because that's the number of people we can keep in our Monkeysphere.
http://www.wwltv.com/ (a New Orleans TV station) is webcasting live streaming video of their newsfeed, and http://www.somethingawful.com/ (a very large humor website & forum), which is hosted in downtown NO, is still operational. I guess that in this case the Internet is working as designed, and routing around damaged nodes (however I've heard the bandwidth in and out of NO is much lower than normal due to damaged/destroyed/inoperable routers, switches, cables, etc.).
As a young person (16 y/o) interested in programming I'd very much be interested in hearing about what kinds of mistakes you see new programmers making, especially with reguards to C programming.
Most cigarette lighter outlets in cars are limited to 15 amps, or 180 watts @ 12VDC, which is not sufficient to power even the lowest-powered consumer microwave ovens even with the most efficient alternaters available. That's not to say that you couldn't wire the alternater directly into the car's power systems, bypassing the cigarette lighter socket, but that would take a lot more work.
True, but you do have to admit it is ironic that one of the main points of your post is to critize the spelling and grammar of younger generations (which I am a member of at 15 years old) and then misspell the word "grammar." I do agree with your post in general though, there isn't enough focus on grammar and spelling in english classes today.
Most of the video stuff in Winamp is based on Microsoft's DirectShow technology and so you'd essentially have to re-write it. You'd probably be better off just adding video support to an already mature linux-naitive audio player, like XMMS or AmaroK.
I don't know where you get your information, but that is wrong. The lowest impedance I've seen in headphones is 16-ohms. Most portable headphones are 32 ohms to 120 ohms. The iPod earbuds are about 80 ohms. Also, not all high end headphones are the same impedance. Some are as high as 600 ohms, though those are mainly older models. Sennheiser's HD-650, their top-of-the-line dynamic headphone, are 300 ohms, Beyerdynamic's flagship DT880 is 250 ohms, Etymotic's flagship model, the ER4S, is 100 ohms. Grado Lab's high-end headphones (including their $700 flagship model, the RS-1) are all 32 ohms. Sennheiser's earbuds (considered by most audiophiles to be some of the best cheap earbuds currently on the market) are 32 ohms (MX-x00 series).
Also, lower resistance does not necessarily equal less power because while it does take less voltage to drive lower impedance headphones, it require more current. Really low impedance headphones start running into problems with portable players not being able to supply enough current, and most moderate to high impedance headphones run into the problem of not getting enough voltage from portable players.
With PCI Express, video cards will finally become true read/write devices and not just write like with AGP. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of PCI-E graphics cards start advertising features like "Physics Acellerator" on the consumer cards and "Render Assist" on the pro versions. GPUs would also make killer co-processors for running things like Folding@Home.
Re:Did you have to be under 15 to vote?
on
Top 50 DVDs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's not on the list because the DVD edition of Blade Runner SUCKS! It's double sided, but one side is the full-screen version of the directors cut and the other is the wide-screen version of the directors cut (when I don't even think they had a VHS full-screen version of the directors cut). If they were going to make it double-sided they should've at least included the theatrical edition on one side. Also, the menus sucked (it was just some generic WB menu), only 2.0 Dolby Surround (no 5.1 mix?!), no special features (not even the obligatory theatrical trailer), and a "collectors edition" that was nothing more than the regular DVD with some extra posters thrown in for only $55 more. If there's any DVD the list is missing it's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eigth Dimension, which has got to be one of the most impressive DVD releases I've seen.
It looks like it's been/.'ed so here's the full article text (sans images). --------------- Does Linux Have Game
Introduction
[IMAGE] Live out your Unreal 2004 midnight adventures on Linux.
Earlier this year, our Linux Comes to the Desktop article caused a stir, when we stated that gaming on a Linux platform remained a limited proposition. Now it is time to detail why this is the case. We will explore what is the best you can hope for when you opt for the penguin to play Unreal and Doom III. We will also look at why Linux lovers must be contented with the state of things -- for the time being, that is, because things are looking up for the Linux gaming crowd.
So why is wide-scale gaming support for Linux not 100% there? A better question may be: why would game developers spend the money to add Linux functionality to games for a limited number of users? The answer is not that simple, especially since Linux desktop use continues to grow.
There are many reasons why you might want to shift from Windows to a Linux OS. We won't cover what those reasons might be in detail here, but will note that users routinely complain of Windows instability, high prices and many layers of software that impede performance. For others, there are ethical considerations for avoiding Windows, such as decisions by courts of law in the U.S. and Europe holding that Microsoft has illegally wielded its monopolistic influence in the marketplace. On the other hand, there are magazines out there, backed by now-a-word-from-our-sponsor Microsoft ads, that claim Windows XP deserves your money.
According to a report issued this month by analyst firm IDC, Linux "is no longer a niche phenomenon." The overall Linux marketplace revenues for server and PC hardware and packaged software are expected to reach $35.7 billion by 2008, IDC says. Packaged software revenue is the fastest growing market segment within the Linux marketplace, growing 44% annually to over $14 billion in 2008.
On the desktop, IDC says Linux PC shipments are expected to almost triple from six million units this year to 17 million units in 2008. Percentages of PCs shipped with Linux increase from about 3.8% in 2004 to about 7% in 2008. However, these numbers do not take into account the PC units shipped with Windows, to which Linux is subsequently added.
As you can see, the evidence suggests that Linux on the desktop is growing, and that means more PC gamers who will want to be able to frag at will in Linux. In the game console sector, hackers already know that Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation II also support Linux.
Until Linux does become as pervasive as IDC and other analysts claim it will, what is a gamer who wants to play Halo on a Linux platform do? And why is it such an issue to begin with? Without detailing differences based on benchmarks, we offer a look at the connection between graphics card drivers and the APIs that developers use for their games, and how the interface between the two works and doesn't work with Linux.
Direct3D Vs. OpenGL
[IMAGE] Doom III shows OpenGL can rock
Whether game developers use Direct3D or OpenGL as their API is the main determinant of whether a game will run on Linux or not. Both APIs are used to create games' 3D imagery, including lines and other shapes, smoke, shadows and all the other good imagery games offer. It has been said that Direct3D is superior to OpenGL, but this is not really the case. While Direct3D is indeed the predominant game API, superior graphics have more to do with the creative skills of the game developers than the choice of API.
Direct3D falls under the brought-to-you-by-Microsoft umbrella, and is geared for the Windows-only world. Because Windows is the main OS in the PC world, graphics card makers have only one OS with which to contend when configuring their drivers for Direct3D games.
OpenGL, meanwhile, is everywhere - it is compatible with Linux, Windows, Unix and Mac OS. But
You don't need a 1100 watt PSU, just a 500+ watt one that can output the amount it claims to (like the Antec TrueControl 550, the Fortron/Sparkle* FSP550-60PLN, the OCZ PowerStream 520, or the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 Deluxe). Most PSUs don't live up to the "ratings" quoted on their stickers in real-world scenarios.
*Sparkle products are rebranded Fortron ones with the only difference being the name on the sticker and the price (Sparkle branded Fortrons tend to sell for less than Fortron branded Fortrons).
If a means becomes available to use Winamp 5's skinning system with Foobar (as an alternative to the lightweight default GUI, of course) I think that Foobar2000 could quickly become the audio player.
Slashdot Mirror
... it's probably a race condition causing the problem.
I can see OTA TV going away (ATSC is horrible for mobile reception and cable/satellite work for almost all other purposes) but I predict an uprising if analog FM radio is ever taken away. Right now if you go to any dollar store you will probably find at least 1 FM radio. My car, alarm clock, emergency flashlight, MP3 players, (dumb last-gen) cellphone, and home theater receiver all have FM radios built in. It is possibly the most ubiquitous mass communications medium if you go by the number of receivers per capita.
The technology is extremely mature, very inexpensive, not (currently) patented, about as portable as it gets and it doesn't require a $50 monthly subscription to use. Sure *you* might not listen to FM radio but I and millions of other people do every day. Every car built since the 70s has an FM radio and people still listen to it every day when they drive. I get my news, in real time, from public radio between classes on my MP3 player's built-in FM tuner. Other technologies might be able to partially replace FM, but they will be massively more expensive and they will probably never achieve the reach FM has today.
Bottom line: because of the built-up infrastructure, FM is here to stay.
Try paying less than 30$ a month for a cell phone service. i'd LOVE to have a service that charges me based on my use. i make two or three calls a WEEK, all to my girlfriend and all about 1 minute long. "I'm ready", "OK, i'm on my way". i send a text message every two or three days. i'm not a twelve year old girl who has to yammer constantly.
I live in the US and I pay $6.67 a month for cellular service.
I have pretty much the same usage patterns you do so like you a contract plan didn't/doesn't make sense for me. I looked at prepaid plans and also like you I was dismayed to see that all of them had expiring minutes, usually after 30 or 90 days. Then I found that T-Mobile has a "Gold Rewards" program for their prepaid service where if you get your account to $100 worth of minutes they don't expire for a full year. I went ahead and bought their cheapest handset and a $100 refill card right away, a $140 up-front investment but so far I've only had to buy two other $10 refill cards to keep my minutes and rewards membership from expiring which gets me to $6.67/mo (including the cost of my handset) for my service to date.
I've just calculated that at my current rate of use I have about 18 months of service left (including the refill card I will need to buy next year) by which time I will probably be ready to move to a contract plan. At that time my service will have cost $4.72/mo, or $3.61/mo excluding the cost of the handset.
That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS, Hugo, AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.
Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp and the Spring Thing). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several review sites that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.
I don't have any experience with Sprint but T-Mobile is probably the best in terms of being "open" of the big four mobile operators in the US. For example, until a few years ago you could get free web browsing through them by exploiting a hole in their free WAP access service. Instead of just shutting the hole and ignoring the people who didn't want to pay for a full Internet plan, they decided to shut it while transitioning to tiered Internet plans so people who didn't need to tether could still get the full web on their phones at a reduced price. Most phones also apparently will still let you tether with their cheap service, though T-Mobile will cut off your access if you use too much bandwidth while doing this.
They use GSM which is a big plus if you want to buy your own phone. I haven't yet needed to because, while all of their phones that I've owned were locked and had T-Mobile logos and "premium services" everywhere, none of them were in any way crippled like Verizon is infamous for doing. I even added a custom ringtone to one of my phones using only a standard USB cable and the manufacturer's ringtone transfer software. Their coverage is pretty good, the only time I've had trouble with it was when I was traveling through West Virginia which is a hard area to cover with cell phone service anyways. Their biggest problem is that they don't yet have any 3G service available anywhere (they're waiting for the spectrum they bought for it to become available for their use) and their customer service is nothing to write home about, but that's pretty much par for the course in this industry.
I've had the exact opposite experience with my month-old 6030. It's a fantastic basic phone for what I paid for it ($40). The signal signal strength is very good (it's consistently was much better than my dad's Samsung flip phone) and I usually get a least a week out of the battery before it needs to be recharged (granted I hardly talk on it, so YMMV). Voice quality is okay: not bad but not that great either. The phone seems very sturdy and the finish on mine still looks brand new even though I've had it in my pants pocket nearly constantly. My only complaints are that the interface is noticeably laggy (especially the main menu), the phone itself is a bit big, the FM radio is only mono, and the screen is impossible to read without the backlight, but those are more minor annoyances in an otherwise good product.
If you follow the link trail back to AVS Forum (and from there to the original press release in Chinese) it is clear that the press release, in fact, talks about HD DVD and not Blu-Ray. This has been confirmed by at least one person who knows Chinese who says the phrase translates to "blue laser HD DVD." An explanation for the awkward phrasing is offered in this post which says that there is an HD format in China that uses a red-diode laser, hence the specification of the laser being blue-diode.
A solution to this problem would be a dual-layer screen with an ePaper layer and a traditional (monochromatic) LCD layer. Annotations would be displayed on the LCD layer with the actual text on the ePaper layer. This also gives the advantage of being able to turn on an off annotations without having to update the ePaper display. I don't know how feasible this is to implement, but it seems like a fairly straightforward solution. I would personally love something like this.
The compiler generates header files from source files with the -H option. It can decide what code is necessary and what code isn't.
As for mixins, you can get the full scoop and some simple examples in the language spec, specifically the portion on Mixins.
You are in a twisty maze of dupes... all alike.
http://www.wwltv.com/ (a New Orleans TV station) is webcasting live streaming video of their newsfeed, and http://www.somethingawful.com/ (a very large humor website & forum), which is hosted in downtown NO, is still operational. I guess that in this case the Internet is working as designed, and routing around damaged nodes (however I've heard the bandwidth in and out of NO is much lower than normal due to damaged/destroyed/inoperable routers, switches, cables, etc.).
As a young person (16 y/o) interested in programming I'd very much be interested in hearing about what kinds of mistakes you see new programmers making, especially with reguards to C programming.
I'm getting less than 1 kBps from that link, and the other one (linked in another post further down) simply stopped working altogether.
Most cigarette lighter outlets in cars are limited to 15 amps, or 180 watts @ 12VDC, which is not sufficient to power even the lowest-powered consumer microwave ovens even with the most efficient alternaters available. That's not to say that you couldn't wire the alternater directly into the car's power systems, bypassing the cigarette lighter socket, but that would take a lot more work.
Most of the video stuff in Winamp is based on Microsoft's DirectShow technology and so you'd essentially have to re-write it. You'd probably be better off just adding video support to an already mature linux-naitive audio player, like XMMS or AmaroK.
I don't know where you get your information, but that is wrong. The lowest impedance I've seen in headphones is 16-ohms. Most portable headphones are 32 ohms to 120 ohms. The iPod earbuds are about 80 ohms. Also, not all high end headphones are the same impedance. Some are as high as 600 ohms, though those are mainly older models. Sennheiser's HD-650, their top-of-the-line dynamic headphone, are 300 ohms, Beyerdynamic's flagship DT880 is 250 ohms, Etymotic's flagship model, the ER4S, is 100 ohms. Grado Lab's high-end headphones (including their $700 flagship model, the RS-1) are all 32 ohms. Sennheiser's earbuds (considered by most audiophiles to be some of the best cheap earbuds currently on the market) are 32 ohms (MX-x00 series).
Also, lower resistance does not necessarily equal less power because while it does take less voltage to drive lower impedance headphones, it require more current. Really low impedance headphones start running into problems with portable players not being able to supply enough current, and most moderate to high impedance headphones run into the problem of not getting enough voltage from portable players.
With PCI Express, video cards will finally become true read/write devices and not just write like with AGP. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of PCI-E graphics cards start advertising features like "Physics Acellerator" on the consumer cards and "Render Assist" on the pro versions. GPUs would also make killer co-processors for running things like Folding@Home.
It's not on the list because the DVD edition of Blade Runner SUCKS! It's double sided, but one side is the full-screen version of the directors cut and the other is the wide-screen version of the directors cut (when I don't even think they had a VHS full-screen version of the directors cut). If they were going to make it double-sided they should've at least included the theatrical edition on one side. Also, the menus sucked (it was just some generic WB menu), only 2.0 Dolby Surround (no 5.1 mix?!), no special features (not even the obligatory theatrical trailer), and a "collectors edition" that was nothing more than the regular DVD with some extra posters thrown in for only $55 more. If there's any DVD the list is missing it's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eigth Dimension, which has got to be one of the most impressive DVD releases I've seen.
It looks like it's been /.'ed so here's the full article text (sans images).
---------------
Does Linux Have Game
Introduction
[IMAGE]
Live out your Unreal 2004 midnight adventures on Linux.
Earlier this year, our Linux Comes to the Desktop article caused a stir, when we stated that gaming on a Linux platform remained a limited proposition. Now it is time to detail why this is the case. We will explore what is the best you can hope for when you opt for the penguin to play Unreal and Doom III. We will also look at why Linux lovers must be contented with the state of things -- for the time being, that is, because things are looking up for the Linux gaming crowd.
So why is wide-scale gaming support for Linux not 100% there? A better question may be: why would game developers spend the money to add Linux functionality to games for a limited number of users? The answer is not that simple, especially since Linux desktop use continues to grow.
There are many reasons why you might want to shift from Windows to a Linux OS. We won't cover what those reasons might be in detail here, but will note that users routinely complain of Windows instability, high prices and many layers of software that impede performance. For others, there are ethical considerations for avoiding Windows, such as decisions by courts of law in the U.S. and Europe holding that Microsoft has illegally wielded its monopolistic influence in the marketplace. On the other hand, there are magazines out there, backed by now-a-word-from-our-sponsor Microsoft ads, that claim Windows XP deserves your money.
According to a report issued this month by analyst firm IDC, Linux "is no longer a niche phenomenon." The overall Linux marketplace revenues for server and PC hardware and packaged software are expected to reach $35.7 billion by 2008, IDC says. Packaged software revenue is the fastest growing market segment within the Linux marketplace, growing 44% annually to over $14 billion in 2008.
On the desktop, IDC says Linux PC shipments are expected to almost triple from six million units this year to 17 million units in 2008. Percentages of PCs shipped with Linux increase from about 3.8% in 2004 to about 7% in 2008. However, these numbers do not take into account the PC units shipped with Windows, to which Linux is subsequently added.
As you can see, the evidence suggests that Linux on the desktop is growing, and that means more PC gamers who will want to be able to frag at will in Linux. In the game console sector, hackers already know that Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation II also support Linux.
Until Linux does become as pervasive as IDC and other analysts claim it will, what is a gamer who wants to play Halo on a Linux platform do? And why is it such an issue to begin with? Without detailing differences based on benchmarks, we offer a look at the connection between graphics card drivers and the APIs that developers use for their games, and how the interface between the two works and doesn't work with Linux.
Direct3D Vs. OpenGL
[IMAGE]
Doom III shows OpenGL can rock
Whether game developers use Direct3D or OpenGL as their API is the main determinant of whether a game will run on Linux or not. Both APIs are used to create games' 3D imagery, including lines and other shapes, smoke, shadows and all the other good imagery games offer. It has been said that Direct3D is superior to OpenGL, but this is not really the case. While Direct3D is indeed the predominant game API, superior graphics have more to do with the creative skills of the game developers than the choice of API.
Direct3D falls under the brought-to-you-by-Microsoft umbrella, and is geared for the Windows-only world. Because Windows is the main OS in the PC world, graphics card makers have only one OS with which to contend when configuring their drivers for Direct3D games.
OpenGL, meanwhile, is everywhere - it is compatible with Linux, Windows, Unix and Mac OS. But
What's wrong with US Dollars? They're just as worthless these days.
You don't need a 1100 watt PSU, just a 500+ watt one that can output the amount it claims to (like the Antec TrueControl 550, the Fortron/Sparkle* FSP550-60PLN, the OCZ PowerStream 520, or the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 Deluxe). Most PSUs don't live up to the "ratings" quoted on their stickers in real-world scenarios.
*Sparkle products are rebranded Fortron ones with the only difference being the name on the sticker and the price (Sparkle branded Fortrons tend to sell for less than Fortron branded Fortrons).
If a means becomes available to use Winamp 5's skinning system with Foobar (as an alternative to the lightweight default GUI, of course) I think that Foobar2000 could quickly become the audio player.