But being a "yank," and no disrespect to the Europeans, I like this [dodge.com] better. And yeah, it's got a real clutch.:-D
No disrespect to the Yanks, but I've noticed that europeans are much more likely to buy a car with a manual transmition. The top three reasons for this: price, fuel consumption and control. Cars are dirt cheap in the states, gas is next to free and... well... we like the control.;) It might have something to do with the fact that distances in the USA are *huge* compared to the relatively compact cities of Europe.
It's not only CAD. I use the left-hand-on-keyboard right-hand-on-mouse position in almost all the soft I use: Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash. The only time I take my hands off is to type in something. Each of these programs has almost every function accessible from the keyboard - usually via a hotkey, sometimes I have to alt-letter to get a menu option, but I still get it done.
Two things made me realize how dependent I was on my keystroke/mouse configuration. (1) I was showing two friends how to do some stuff in Photoshop and they kept saying 'how'd you do that', and I kept explaning that I hit a key-combo. (2) The beta of Flash 6 came out, but it had no keyboard shortcuts. It was totaly unusable to me. Still haven't gotten into FlashMX because of it...
My family has owned about half a dozen HP LaserJets (we've had 2 printers outside of the LJs) and we actually purchased 2 5Ls, remembering the excellent experience we had with the IIIP and II. Those 2 5Ls went through 10-15 repairs and they STILL sucked. Finally sold them off.
The IIIP we own, on the other hand, is 10 years old and has been repaired once, for $20.
fluoride (note the spelling please, previous posters) makes your teeth crumble and fall out, and discolours them.
Ten years growing up stateside I drank a lot of water, mostly boiled tapwater. One small cavity over 10 years. Ten years in Europe, I've had to have 3 root canals and a wisdom tooth pulled.
Yeah, that flouride really sucks.
BTW, you want short, fat and ignorant? Check out british and german tourists at your European summer resort of choice.
Re:Sigh... I want a *cooler* processor...
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
·
· Score: 2
I still don't understand people's facination with speed (especially the 5% or so we see in these benchmarks reported in the article), outside of the researching domain.
I didn't... but now I do. The faster Intel and AMD rev up their chips, the cheaper their old chips will be. I bought my last processor - actually a pair of c366s - some 30 months ago. At the same price, I can today get a pair of Athlon XP 1900s today. That's a clock rate jump of 500%. The performance gain is even higher when we calculate in all the other technological advances (pipelines, faster FSB, etc). So while I don't really care about the latest and greatest myself, I'm happy that Intel and AMD are pushing them.
(also the home of arj and other odd archivers that are still not as good or just as good as gzip+tar, too bad they've never heard of bzip2).
Yeah... nothing like stereotypes or popular thought to cloud hard facts, eh?
In the Sound (WAV) Compression Test on compression.ca the GZip 1.2.4 + TAR combo comes in at 7.29b/B (91%), bzip2 0.9.5d + TAR is at 7.01b/B (87%). RAR on the other hand, comes in at 5.65b/B (70%) and Monkey's Audio 3.96 rocks in at 5.01b/B (62%).
So my 10mb of WAV takes up 9.1MB after being GZiped and 7.0MB after compressing it with that odd archive that [is] still not as good or just as good.
GZip and bzip are *excellent* compression tools. But they are not - and have not been for a long time - the kings of the hill.
I'm not going to define because I have *no* rythm and even talking about 4/4 and 4/3 and so on will have me looking like an ass. Anyway, in layman terms, 2step is a form of house (what my dj friends tell me) that's really big in the UK right now. Borrowing from hiphop, R&B and ragga it is to England what hiphop was to the states at the beginning of the '90s - something fresh and new (even though it's been around for a couple of years). Started pretty much by the DJs of London's pirate radio stations (and there are a few dozen? hundred? of those) it's seeping into every form of British music. 2step/garage can also be split up into 2step - which is usually lighter and more vocal and garage which is usually grungier and more ragga.
Of course, I could be talking out my ass.
A sampling of performers: The Artful Dodger (All About the Stragglers is my favorite album of the last 2 years), So Solid Crew, Shanks and Bigfoot, Craig David's 'Fill Me In', MJ Cole.
I think it's great. I used to have a computer (I'll put it back together again soon) that served as station to play DVD/VCD and MP3, and also served as a CD burning and scanning (as in scanning photos or documents) station. All of this in a P166MMX.
There's no way I could have gotten DVD playback without the RealMagic Hollywood+. But thanks to that card I pulled an old computer out from under my TV (m TV stands on 3 old [486] computers as it is). I would *love* to do the same with DivX, as most of the movies I download are in that format*. The H+ has pretty good TV out quality, and I'd love to be able to just offload everything onto the MMX and my 28" and be able to watch movies and... oh... play TO:AoT at the same time.
* I also own some 60+ movies on DVD, but prefer to preview movies I plan on buying rather than smack down 120zl on a movie I might not like.
Gone are the days that we drool over our friend's new rig with oodles of megahertz and megabytes. A 400 MHz machine with 128 MB of RAM and a 15 GB hard drive will run pretty much anything a consumer requires, save for games. Before everybody you know had a computer, the machine you bought two years ago isn't fast enough now (meaning 2 years after you bought it) to run those productivity apps that really would make a difference in the way you work.
Exactly.
My mother's been using a dual celeron 366, a hand-me-down after I got my P3-866. It's enough for her to do everything she wants (MS Office, surfing, email, IM). It's a 3 or 4 year old machine hooked up to a 10 year old laser printer and a new monitor. She doesn't plan on upgrading it anytime soon, and neither do I.
I run a P3-866. I do web graphics, DTP, animations, NLE, etc. on it and find it only lags while working on full pal dv clips. I plan on upgrading it to a dual athlon setup sometime within the next 18 months.
Computers are powerful enough, really. Hell, I bought the P3 used, payed about 3/5ths of what I paid for the dual celeron 18 months earlier and it came with a larger HD, twice the ram, a better gfx card and so on. If I hadn't gotten into NLE I wouldn't even be thinking about an upgrade.
Games run fine, I can work. What more do I need? It's the same question everyone asks. And it's about time. Not many people switch up their car every 18 months because there's a newer, faster one out. Hell, almost nobody buys a new TV every year because of some new features. It shouldn't be that way with computers either.
Europeans and Asians aren't confused by the monochrome quality of US currency, they are confused by a different values of the currency! A "10" in the US is different than a "10" in Mexico which is different than a "10" in Germany which is different than a "10" in Thailand...
That's a cheap shot and it's totally wrong. Most europeans and asians that I know that travel can convert currency in their head, on the fly. Euros to dollars to yen to pesos like that (snaps fingers). On the other hand, most of the american tourists I meet when moving around europe are paralyzed by the thought that they have to use something other than american dollars. It's usually John and Martha from Nebraska, not Hans and Anna, who are confused that their $10 is not 10E or 10GBP.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, I recall that it's illegal just to make the paper (which is actually more like cotton cloth).
As for bitching about a lack of security measures and counterfiting... In my 10 years in Europe I've run into about half a dozen counterfit bills. Compare that to the zero (0) bills I encountered during my 10 years in the states. The US Secret Service *really* takes counterfiting seriously, they don't fuck arround. Remember: security is a process, not a feature.
(A bit OT, but I've noticed britons really go for security 'toys' when guarding something. For example: German train yards don't use a lot of cameras and such, but they're well guarded by people - including security that 'camps out' in some trains. British train yards are covered with cameras, laser trip wires, motion detectors... but it's enough to go in, bust the equipment and it's pretty much clear for the week till they come in to repair everything.)
I paid a 25% premium on my DVD-ROM to get it RF right out of the box. In fact, living in Europe, I will *not* buy a DVD player that doesn't allow me to switch regions. No way in hell!
I used to use it before I started using putty, back in my old job (2 jobs back to be exact). All the servers were locked down except for httpd and sshd, so I'd just SSH in and 'rz' to upload files.
Yeah. So does production, distribution and marketing.
These are movies, they're not Linux distributions. The production cycle is long, the time between the movie getting to the final edit and it's premiere is counted in months. There is more than ample time in between to get a final transcript off to be translated. Look at AotC - they managed to pull it off. Subtitling is process that takes a couple of days, maybe two weeks. With the advent of digital cinemas it's going to be even faster.
The reasons behind staggered premiere dates is a strictly political one.
Re:Just a data point on recording expenses..
on
CDs Want To Be Free
·
· Score: 2
How muc does genius that allows you to record an album in 2 three hours sessions?
Next thing you know, somebody will be bitching that Picasso's pencils only cost a couple cents a pop.
Of course, if you were smart, you'd shut off javascript all together
Hm... blocking all of javascript to disable only some of it's functions. That's actually pretty stupid, not smart. The smart thing is to configure your client to selectively block behavior that offends you.
Just because people don't do what you do doesn't mean they lack wisdom or intelligence.
Telesyncing is actually a pretty 'offical' process, it's one of the more popular ways to convert film to video (where the main problem is the FPS conversion). A pretty standard procedure, but quite a specialized one. In a closed space you project the picture onto a screen and film it off the screen with a camera (like a good Betacam or something).
Of course, in the pirate world, this just means you stick the camera onto a tripod, hook it up to the sound system and roll.
I've seen a bootleg Lord of the Rings that's a screener. DVD-quality audio and video
That's because it was a DVD. A *lot* of Academy members and movie reviewers don't actually go to the cinema, they just sit at home and watch screeners on TV. Now, for years screeners have been VHSes - mainly because... well, that's how it's always been done. Most popular format, and all.
A year (or two) ago this started changing. Studios realized that most Academy members/reviewers probably have DVD players and would apreciate a DVD more than a VHS tape. So many top oscar contenders (like LotR) came out as DVD screeners.
I'm sure that there's more than one Academy member ready to make an extra couple of hundred bucks every now and then by letting some guys copy one or two of his tapes. Or borrow his DVDs.
A bootleg's quality is directly proportional to the time spent creating it.
A bootleg's quality is directly proportional to the media being copied. You will not make a DVDRip like DivX out of a screener even if you capture each frame by hand. High quality DVDRips take a few hours to do, even if you run a double pass codec on them.
I just wanted to say 'Amen!'. Everyone's always bitching about how hard computers are to set up, but does anyone remember how it was nay 7-8 years ago? Setting up computer under DOS required the following: * A mouse driver, specificaly for your mouse. * A CDROM driver, also specific to your CDROM model. If you wanted to use extended graphics modes (more than 320x200x8b) in a game your game had to be written for that card. If you wanted sound in your game, well, it had to be coded for that card too. Not to mention every other peripheral.
There's stuff I hate about Windows, but I'm glad that it brought a driver layer to the desktop. No more making sure that the game I want will run on my brand of graphics card.
Slashdot Mirror
In some countries if you pass your test on a manual you may then drive auto or manual. If you pass on an auto car you can only drive an auto.
In some countries (like Poland) you can't take the driving exam on a auto, only on manual.
But being a "yank," and no disrespect to the Europeans, I like this [dodge.com] better. And yeah, it's got a real clutch. :-D
;) It might have something to do with the fact that distances in the USA are *huge* compared to the relatively compact cities of Europe.
No disrespect to the Yanks, but I've noticed that europeans are much more likely to buy a car with a manual transmition. The top three reasons for this: price, fuel consumption and control. Cars are dirt cheap in the states, gas is next to free and... well... we like the control.
Or I could be talking out my ass.
It's not only CAD. I use the left-hand-on-keyboard right-hand-on-mouse position in almost all the soft I use: Maya, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash. The only time I take my hands off is to type in something. Each of these programs has almost every function accessible from the keyboard - usually via a hotkey, sometimes I have to alt-letter to get a menu option, but I still get it done.
Two things made me realize how dependent I was on my keystroke/mouse configuration. (1) I was showing two friends how to do some stuff in Photoshop and they kept saying 'how'd you do that', and I kept explaning that I hit a key-combo. (2) The beta of Flash 6 came out, but it had no keyboard shortcuts. It was totaly unusable to me. Still haven't gotten into FlashMX because of it...
Buy a phone (Ericsson, Siemens and Sony all have this function) that will... automatically block your keypad after a few minutes of non-use.
Technology actually making life easier... whudathunkit.
My family has owned about half a dozen HP LaserJets (we've had 2 printers outside of the LJs) and we actually purchased 2 5Ls, remembering the excellent experience we had with the IIIP and II. Those 2 5Ls went through 10-15 repairs and they STILL sucked. Finally sold them off.
The IIIP we own, on the other hand, is 10 years old and has been repaired once, for $20.
They don't make 'em like they used to.
[obvious troll, still biting]
fluoride (note the spelling please, previous posters) makes your teeth crumble and fall out, and discolours them.
Ten years growing up stateside I drank a lot of water, mostly boiled tapwater. One small cavity over 10 years. Ten years in Europe, I've had to have 3 root canals and a wisdom tooth pulled.
Yeah, that flouride really sucks.
BTW, you want short, fat and ignorant? Check out british and german tourists at your European summer resort of choice.
I still don't understand people's facination with speed (especially the 5% or so we see in these benchmarks reported in the article), outside of the researching domain.
I didn't... but now I do. The faster Intel and AMD rev up their chips, the cheaper their old chips will be. I bought my last processor - actually a pair of c366s - some 30 months ago. At the same price, I can today get a pair of Athlon XP 1900s today. That's a clock rate jump of 500%. The performance gain is even higher when we calculate in all the other technological advances (pipelines, faster FSB, etc). So while I don't really care about the latest and greatest myself, I'm happy that Intel and AMD are pushing them.
(also the home of arj and other odd archivers that are still not as good or just as good as gzip+tar, too bad they've never heard of bzip2).
Yeah... nothing like stereotypes or popular thought to cloud hard facts, eh?
In the Sound (WAV) Compression Test on compression.ca the GZip 1.2.4 + TAR combo comes in at 7.29b/B (91%), bzip2 0.9.5d + TAR is at 7.01b/B (87%). RAR on the other hand, comes in at 5.65b/B (70%) and Monkey's Audio 3.96 rocks in at 5.01b/B (62%).
So my 10mb of WAV takes up 9.1MB after being GZiped and 7.0MB after compressing it with that odd archive that [is] still not as good or just as good.
GZip and bzip are *excellent* compression tools. But they are not - and have not been for a long time - the kings of the hill.
I'm replying because I couldn't find the -1 Shitty Humor or -1 Clueless moderation options.
2-step / garage
I'm not going to define because I have *no* rythm and even talking about 4/4 and 4/3 and so on will have me looking like an ass. Anyway, in layman terms, 2step is a form of house (what my dj friends tell me) that's really big in the UK right now. Borrowing from hiphop, R&B and ragga it is to England what hiphop was to the states at the beginning of the '90s - something fresh and new (even though it's been around for a couple of years). Started pretty much by the DJs of London's pirate radio stations (and there are a few dozen? hundred? of those) it's seeping into every form of British music. 2step/garage can also be split up into 2step - which is usually lighter and more vocal and garage which is usually grungier and more ragga.
Of course, I could be talking out my ass.
A sampling of performers: The Artful Dodger (All About the Stragglers is my favorite album of the last 2 years), So Solid Crew, Shanks and Bigfoot, Craig David's 'Fill Me In', MJ Cole.
I think it's great. I used to have a computer (I'll put it back together again soon) that served as station to play DVD/VCD and MP3, and also served as a CD burning and scanning (as in scanning photos or documents) station. All of this in a P166MMX.
There's no way I could have gotten DVD playback without the RealMagic Hollywood+. But thanks to that card I pulled an old computer out from under my TV (m TV stands on 3 old [486] computers as it is). I would *love* to do the same with DivX, as most of the movies I download are in that format*. The H+ has pretty good TV out quality, and I'd love to be able to just offload everything onto the MMX and my 28" and be able to watch movies and... oh... play TO:AoT at the same time.
* I also own some 60+ movies on DVD, but prefer to preview movies I plan on buying rather than smack down 120zl on a movie I might not like.
Gone are the days that we drool over our friend's new rig with oodles of megahertz and megabytes. A 400 MHz machine with 128 MB of RAM and a 15 GB hard drive will run pretty much anything a consumer requires, save for games. Before everybody you know had a computer, the machine you bought two years ago isn't fast enough now (meaning 2 years after you bought it) to run those productivity apps that really would make a difference in the way you work.
Exactly.
My mother's been using a dual celeron 366, a hand-me-down after I got my P3-866. It's enough for her to do everything she wants (MS Office, surfing, email, IM). It's a 3 or 4 year old machine hooked up to a 10 year old laser printer and a new monitor. She doesn't plan on upgrading it anytime soon, and neither do I.
I run a P3-866. I do web graphics, DTP, animations, NLE, etc. on it and find it only lags while working on full pal dv clips. I plan on upgrading it to a dual athlon setup sometime within the next 18 months.
Computers are powerful enough, really. Hell, I bought the P3 used, payed about 3/5ths of what I paid for the dual celeron 18 months earlier and it came with a larger HD, twice the ram, a better gfx card and so on. If I hadn't gotten into NLE I wouldn't even be thinking about an upgrade.
Games run fine, I can work. What more do I need? It's the same question everyone asks. And it's about time. Not many people switch up their car every 18 months because there's a newer, faster one out. Hell, almost nobody buys a new TV every year because of some new features. It shouldn't be that way with computers either.
Europeans and Asians aren't confused by the monochrome quality of US currency, they are confused by a different values of the currency! A "10" in the US is different than a "10" in Mexico which is different than a "10" in Germany which is different than a "10" in Thailand...
That's a cheap shot and it's totally wrong. Most europeans and asians that I know that travel can convert currency in their head, on the fly. Euros to dollars to yen to pesos like that (snaps fingers). On the other hand, most of the american tourists I meet when moving around europe are paralyzed by the thought that they have to use something other than american dollars. It's usually John and Martha from Nebraska, not Hans and Anna, who are confused that their $10 is not 10E or 10GBP.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, I recall that it's illegal just to make the paper (which is actually more like cotton cloth).
As for bitching about a lack of security measures and counterfiting... In my 10 years in Europe I've run into about half a dozen counterfit bills. Compare that to the zero (0) bills I encountered during my 10 years in the states. The US Secret Service *really* takes counterfiting seriously, they don't fuck arround. Remember: security is a process, not a feature.
(A bit OT, but I've noticed britons really go for security 'toys' when guarding something. For example: German train yards don't use a lot of cameras and such, but they're well guarded by people - including security that 'camps out' in some trains. British train yards are covered with cameras, laser trip wires, motion detectors... but it's enough to go in, bust the equipment and it's pretty much clear for the week till they come in to repair everything.)
Oh yeah... and that's also the reason it's going to take up 4.5GB.
To remove a digimarc watermark:
rotate the image 1deg. resize to 99%. rotate 1deg back. resize to 101%.
of course, this doesn't work well with 400x300 web graphics but in the print world it's easy.
I paid a 25% premium on my DVD-ROM to get it RF right out of the box. In fact, living in Europe, I will *not* buy a DVD player that doesn't allow me to switch regions. No way in hell!
THG - The Humble Guys (or 'THuG if you're nasty') - was a warez group, just like Farlight, Myth or whatever.
But yeah, I remember all that crap. I've been at 2400+ since 1988.
I used to use it before I started using putty, back in my old job (2 jobs back to be exact). All the servers were locked down except for httpd and sshd, so I'd just SSH in and 'rz' to upload files.
Great stuff, seeing ZModem going over a LAN.
Hm... after seeing this article me and my friend started checking out processor prices at one of Poland's top 3 wholesalers.
This is the deal: the Athlon XP 1800 costs as much as a P3-866. A Celeron 1.3/100 costs a bit more than a Athlon Thunderbird 1.4/266 chip.
There is absolutely no reason for me to pay that price difference. None.
Yeah. So does production, distribution and marketing.
These are movies, they're not Linux distributions. The production cycle is long, the time between the movie getting to the final edit and it's premiere is counted in months. There is more than ample time in between to get a final transcript off to be translated. Look at AotC - they managed to pull it off. Subtitling is process that takes a couple of days, maybe two weeks. With the advent of digital cinemas it's going to be even faster.
The reasons behind staggered premiere dates is a strictly political one.
How muc does genius that allows you to record an album in 2 three hours sessions?
Next thing you know, somebody will be bitching that Picasso's pencils only cost a couple cents a pop.
Of course, if you were smart, you'd shut off javascript all together
Hm... blocking all of javascript to disable only some of it's functions. That's actually pretty stupid, not smart. The smart thing is to configure your client to selectively block behavior that offends you.
Just because people don't do what you do doesn't mean they lack wisdom or intelligence.
TS (Telesync). Handheld cam for video
Telesyncing is actually a pretty 'offical' process, it's one of the more popular ways to convert film to video (where the main problem is the FPS conversion). A pretty standard procedure, but quite a specialized one. In a closed space you project the picture onto a screen and film it off the screen with a camera (like a good Betacam or something).
Of course, in the pirate world, this just means you stick the camera onto a tripod, hook it up to the sound system and roll.
I've seen a bootleg Lord of the Rings that's a screener. DVD-quality audio and video
That's because it was a DVD. A *lot* of Academy members and movie reviewers don't actually go to the cinema, they just sit at home and watch screeners on TV. Now, for years screeners have been VHSes - mainly because... well, that's how it's always been done. Most popular format, and all.
A year (or two) ago this started changing. Studios realized that most Academy members/reviewers probably have DVD players and would apreciate a DVD more than a VHS tape. So many top oscar contenders (like LotR) came out as DVD screeners.
I'm sure that there's more than one Academy member ready to make an extra couple of hundred bucks every now and then by letting some guys copy one or two of his tapes. Or borrow his DVDs.
A bootleg's quality is directly proportional to the time spent creating it.
A bootleg's quality is directly proportional to the media being copied. You will not make a DVDRip like DivX out of a screener even if you capture each frame by hand. High quality DVDRips take a few hours to do, even if you run a double pass codec on them.
I just wanted to say 'Amen!'. Everyone's always bitching about how hard computers are to set up, but does anyone remember how it was nay 7-8 years ago? Setting up computer under DOS required the following:
* A mouse driver, specificaly for your mouse.
* A CDROM driver, also specific to your CDROM model.
If you wanted to use extended graphics modes (more than 320x200x8b) in a game your game had to be written for that card. If you wanted sound in your game, well, it had to be coded for that card too. Not to mention every other peripheral.
There's stuff I hate about Windows, but I'm glad that it brought a driver layer to the desktop. No more making sure that the game I want will run on my brand of graphics card.