Funny you should mention that. I just came back from the rental store and while I was there, I saw a stand for "Passion of the Christ" that said, "Own it forever."..or five years at least, three if it's dual layer (most certainly is).
"When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies,"
That nice, except Cognac doesn't make sunglasses for toddlers. Many DVDs, on the other hand, are aimed towards children despite the discs being quite fragile.
If your kid's big wheel breaks after only minutes of riding it, I'm sure Fisher Price has a replacement plan for it.
Didn't Willie Nelson do a series of commercials for XM a while back about how it allowed him to listen to music freely whenever and wherever he wanted?
Here's a major setback to that freedom. What would Willie think?
The RIAA, it should be noted, claims that they weren't "behind the discontinuation of the PCR"
Well, maybe not directly, but from XM's perpective, the possible threat of the RIAA coming to get them sure did.
Re:Quietly being Useless
on
Where's Alviso?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
it seems that most of the technologies the new laptop chipset will enable are grossly overrated, wildly overpriced, and won't generally be worthwhile for laptop owners not running Longhorn
There is no purpose to running a mouse at a sample rate higher than your monitor's refresh. If you're using an LCD screen, set your PS/2 refresh rate to 60 Hz to match the monitor. For CRT screens set higher, set it to the rate that matches it the closest, 80 Hz mouse for 75 Hz or 85 Hz monitors for example. At 125 Hz, USB mice just look plain jittery when you move the cursor around.
Also, what is more pointless is worrying about mouse refresh being too low in games like Doom 3, which probably run from 15-40 fps depending on your computer. The worst it has been is 40 Hz in Windows 3.1/95/98 by default, and even that could be adjusted via a tool called PS/2Rate. The default in 2000/XP is 60 Hz if your monitor is also set to that rate, and 100 Hz if it's set higher. As said before, I'd recommend 80 Hz for CRT monitors.
If you're having mouse lag issues in games, but not the desktop, I'm thinking it might be because of mouse smoothing being enabled (and averaging samples 3 back or so) and/or triple buffering, which buffers three frames of video and draws the video three frames behind, which is unnoticable at high frame rates, but causes big lag at lower rates. Triple buffering is pointless at low frame rates anyway, as it's only really good for acheiving VSync since it manages to do so more often than waiting for VBlank when the framerate is close to monitor refresh.
I'd have to agree with that. On a similar note, what's the point in super-high resolution when the mouse is at an ideal refresh rate of 80 Hz (closest I can manage to set PS/2 refresh rates in relation to my monitor's refresh, 75 Hz). When you're moving the mouse across the screen at a moderate rate, it's actually jumping about 20 or so pixels per update. Most mice I've used, to exclude some really old ones, which coincidentally had really fat rollers, are accurate down to the pixel and the only problems I've seen are when the mouse sticks to the pad and it jumps a bit too far in the direction you mean to move it. If you want to help sensitivity, use a cloth mouse pad and a mouse with clean, smooth feet.
25 years = 35 metric years is +3 Insightful? Hope it's a Funny w/karma style moderation.
I did, however, find this, which compares Julian years (365.25 days) in relation to different physical references of a year (time between two winter soltices is different than the time between two vernal equinoxes). Someone want to calculate the Internet's age in anomalistic years? My head's spinning from all the 1 decimal values.
What's the average life of a (40GB) drive, and should I be thinking about replacing it?
Here is a good place to start looking. There are way too many factors to determine its life expectancy besides whether or not you have a DeathStar or otherwise prematurely death disk. Some disks last one week, others last decades.
Wow, the Slashdot editors must really have a grudge against the masses today. I figured this would be the best way to justify killing everybody's karma through redundant mods.
Also, who would even be surprised anymore if they didn't even see as much as an acknowledgement of the mistake being corrected, just a quick change from "25" to "35"?
...but what would the point of recording frequencies at a rate higher than human hearing? It's the same with mouse rates. No matter how fast it updates, you're not going to see more than 75 or 85 of them per second on an accordingly tuned CRT monitor. (And no arguments about how 44.1 kHz distorts waves close to 22 kHz, any detail lost is harmonics way above the 22 kHz Nyquist ceiling)
I have tried USB mice and I don't like how I don't have any control over the refresh rate. The 125 Hz rate ends up being rather jittery and would probably look smooth at 62.5 Hz or 125 Hz, which is very uncommon. As for wireless mice, I'm not touching those with a ten foot pole. Most seem choppy as if they're being updated only around 40 Hz at the lens, they cut out, they're laggy, and they are too heavy because of batteries.
I'll stick with PS/2 mice. At least they don't have issues like forgetting to load the driver once in a while because the OS didn't include it in the PnP scan once every ten startups or so. At least with PS/2, it's the interface it's detected (and always properly connected), not the mouse.
USB mice only sample at 125hz. If you want real precision you go PS/2 and run at 200hz.
A lot of people who are even aware of mouse sampling rates seem to think that higher is better. What's the point if the refresh is higher than the monitor's refresh? (Which is even more negligible on LCD screens where anything above 30-40Hz is not visible) What I'd really like to see is mouse cursors achieve VSync with the monitor (which has been done on Macs since the beginning). For now, I use only PS/2 mice because I can adjust the refresh to 80 Hz because it's the closest I can get it to 75 Hz, and thus, the smoothest mouse movements result from it.
Of course, all this refresh business goes out the door for me because I just got an Intellimouse Explorer 4.0a, and to even get the scroll wheel to work right, you have to load the Intellipoint Drivers, which are only availible for 2000/XP. Once the drivers are loaded, the mouse movement gets all jittery, as if it were running at 200 Hz, whether you are running the mouse at 80 Hz or not. Even with that installed, the tilt wheel doesn't even work unless you have the point32.exe process running at all times.
I'm curious about this. There are a lot of accounts of theaters running gaming and such being posted on here. Of these, how many people are actually hooking the sound up to the theater system? As nice as it would be to see the game at theater size, it would be even cooler to hear it, provided it was hooked up in full surround, not just stereo, or upmixed 2 channel surround.
I remember something along the lines of a shareware version of Quake being released that could be unlocked to be the full version. Naturally, a crack was found for it. I think timing is everything for Half-Life 2, as the time window to do this is small before a potential crack.
Also, if you can "preload" the game, does that mean the game is finished and there's a product availible in theory?
Of course RIAA products aren't related to P2P. That is my point exactly when it comes to blaming P2P for lost sales being a little bit illogical.
Whatever little logic remains, their blaming of losses on P2P may not directly increase their sales, but it's their first step in making sure they at least hold on to their market share, with the most optimistic outcome in their perspective being that they restore their CD sales to something they accept.
Slashdot Mirror
A digital thing lasts forever.
..or five years at least, three if it's dual layer (most certainly is).
Funny you should mention that. I just came back from the rental store and while I was there, I saw a stand for "Passion of the Christ" that said, "Own it forever."
"When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies,"
That nice, except Cognac doesn't make sunglasses for toddlers. Many DVDs, on the other hand, are aimed towards children despite the discs being quite fragile.
If your kid's big wheel breaks after only minutes of riding it, I'm sure Fisher Price has a replacement plan for it.
Ah, yes, Sam Kinison jokes!
"It's taxes, brother, not Texans!"
Didn't Willie Nelson do a series of commercials for XM a while back about how it allowed him to listen to music freely whenever and wherever he wanted?
Here's a major setback to that freedom. What would Willie think?
The RIAA, it should be noted, claims that they weren't "behind the discontinuation of the PCR"
Well, maybe not directly, but from XM's perpective, the possible threat of the RIAA coming to get them sure did.
it seems that most of the technologies the new laptop chipset will enable are grossly overrated, wildly overpriced, and won't generally be worthwhile for laptop owners not running Longhorn
Naturally, Sony will be all over this one.
You must be thinking of someplace else. Bakersfield doesn't have a chipset named after it yet.
I've actually heard that come from somebody's phone before. That and one that goes, "Holy shit!"
There is no purpose to running a mouse at a sample rate higher than your monitor's refresh. If you're using an LCD screen, set your PS/2 refresh rate to 60 Hz to match the monitor. For CRT screens set higher, set it to the rate that matches it the closest, 80 Hz mouse for 75 Hz or 85 Hz monitors for example. At 125 Hz, USB mice just look plain jittery when you move the cursor around.
Also, what is more pointless is worrying about mouse refresh being too low in games like Doom 3, which probably run from 15-40 fps depending on your computer. The worst it has been is 40 Hz in Windows 3.1/95/98 by default, and even that could be adjusted via a tool called PS/2Rate. The default in 2000/XP is 60 Hz if your monitor is also set to that rate, and 100 Hz if it's set higher. As said before, I'd recommend 80 Hz for CRT monitors.
If you're having mouse lag issues in games, but not the desktop, I'm thinking it might be because of mouse smoothing being enabled (and averaging samples 3 back or so) and/or triple buffering, which buffers three frames of video and draws the video three frames behind, which is unnoticable at high frame rates, but causes big lag at lower rates. Triple buffering is pointless at low frame rates anyway, as it's only really good for acheiving VSync since it manages to do so more often than waiting for VBlank when the framerate is close to monitor refresh.
I'd have to agree with that. On a similar note, what's the point in super-high resolution when the mouse is at an ideal refresh rate of 80 Hz (closest I can manage to set PS/2 refresh rates in relation to my monitor's refresh, 75 Hz). When you're moving the mouse across the screen at a moderate rate, it's actually jumping about 20 or so pixels per update. Most mice I've used, to exclude some really old ones, which coincidentally had really fat rollers, are accurate down to the pixel and the only problems I've seen are when the mouse sticks to the pad and it jumps a bit too far in the direction you mean to move it. If you want to help sensitivity, use a cloth mouse pad and a mouse with clean, smooth feet.
So basically, not much has changed since Office 97?
25 years = 35 metric years is +3 Insightful? Hope it's a Funny w/karma style moderation.
I did, however, find this, which compares Julian years (365.25 days) in relation to different physical references of a year (time between two winter soltices is different than the time between two vernal equinoxes). Someone want to calculate the Internet's age in anomalistic years? My head's spinning from all the 1 decimal values.
What's the average life of a (40GB) drive, and should I be thinking about replacing it?
Here is a good place to start looking. There are way too many factors to determine its life expectancy besides whether or not you have a DeathStar or otherwise prematurely death disk. Some disks last one week, others last decades.
Wow, the Slashdot editors must really have a grudge against the masses today. I figured this would be the best way to justify killing everybody's karma through redundant mods.
Also, who would even be surprised anymore if they didn't even see as much as an acknowledgement of the mistake being corrected, just a quick change from "25" to "35"?
The Internet at 25. (1969)
Nice math there. It's 35.
...but what would the point of recording frequencies at a rate higher than human hearing? It's the same with mouse rates. No matter how fast it updates, you're not going to see more than 75 or 85 of them per second on an accordingly tuned CRT monitor. (And no arguments about how 44.1 kHz distorts waves close to 22 kHz, any detail lost is harmonics way above the 22 kHz Nyquist ceiling)
I have tried USB mice and I don't like how I don't have any control over the refresh rate. The 125 Hz rate ends up being rather jittery and would probably look smooth at 62.5 Hz or 125 Hz, which is very uncommon. As for wireless mice, I'm not touching those with a ten foot pole. Most seem choppy as if they're being updated only around 40 Hz at the lens, they cut out, they're laggy, and they are too heavy because of batteries.
I'll stick with PS/2 mice. At least they don't have issues like forgetting to load the driver once in a while because the OS didn't include it in the PnP scan once every ten startups or so. At least with PS/2, it's the interface it's detected (and always properly connected), not the mouse.
Hey, sure beats $9 per DVD-R9 plus whatever the rental cost is to get the movie (because just about every DVD on BitTorrent has been shrunk down).
USB mice only sample at 125hz. If you want real precision you go PS/2 and run at 200hz.
A lot of people who are even aware of mouse sampling rates seem to think that higher is better. What's the point if the refresh is higher than the monitor's refresh? (Which is even more negligible on LCD screens where anything above 30-40Hz is not visible) What I'd really like to see is mouse cursors achieve VSync with the monitor (which has been done on Macs since the beginning). For now, I use only PS/2 mice because I can adjust the refresh to 80 Hz because it's the closest I can get it to 75 Hz, and thus, the smoothest mouse movements result from it.
Of course, all this refresh business goes out the door for me because I just got an Intellimouse Explorer 4.0a, and to even get the scroll wheel to work right, you have to load the Intellipoint Drivers, which are only availible for 2000/XP. Once the drivers are loaded, the mouse movement gets all jittery, as if it were running at 200 Hz, whether you are running the mouse at 80 Hz or not. Even with that installed, the tilt wheel doesn't even work unless you have the point32.exe process running at all times.
I'm curious about this. There are a lot of accounts of theaters running gaming and such being posted on here. Of these, how many people are actually hooking the sound up to the theater system? As nice as it would be to see the game at theater size, it would be even cooler to hear it, provided it was hooked up in full surround, not just stereo, or upmixed 2 channel surround.
...don't browse Slashdot at -1 on the big screen, lest you get a ten foot gaping surprise.
"It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs).
Wow, for people this passionate about formats, it's a great thing that there aren't any links to PDF files to give us Slashdotters an aneurism.
...which will be running on the next iteration of Windows, which will have hardware ready to run it by 2016.
Why not Alpha Bits?
Peter Griffin: "Oh my god, Brian, there's a message in my Alpha Bits! It says, 'Oooooooooo!'"
Brian: "Peter, those are Cheerios."
I remember something along the lines of a shareware version of Quake being released that could be unlocked to be the full version. Naturally, a crack was found for it. I think timing is everything for Half-Life 2, as the time window to do this is small before a potential crack.
Also, if you can "preload" the game, does that mean the game is finished and there's a product availible in theory?
Of course RIAA products aren't related to P2P. That is my point exactly when it comes to blaming P2P for lost sales being a little bit illogical.
Whatever little logic remains, their blaming of losses on P2P may not directly increase their sales, but it's their first step in making sure they at least hold on to their market share, with the most optimistic outcome in their perspective being that they restore their CD sales to something they accept.