Yeah, the dorm networks here suck (I'm a grad student myself, just moved off campus after 4 years in the dorms, er, "residence halls")
It's not only a problem with the provider and the infrastructure, but also the management (EWU Department of Housing and Residential Life) not having a fsckin' clue how to manage a network of this size. I've looked into it on several occasions (from both the end-user and systems design perspectives). It's not pretty. Pretty fsckin' ugly, actually.
I don't have enough space here to even get started on the subject. Email me separately if you want to have a "friendly discussion" about the subject.
That said, I thought it was pretty cool to see my school on the front page of Slashdot. Will have to make sure my fellow CS students know about this.
So, where are my dilithium crystals, plasma coils, and warp cores? Oh, and subspace fields that we can use to alter the mass of an object and propel it to FTL speeds?
Bzzzzzz...wrong. Methinks you got your As and Bs confused.
The PowerBook (or, more correctly, Apple's AirPort Extreme MiniPCI card) supports 802.11b and 802.11g.
802.11g is backwards compatible with 802.11b (despite what I overheard some idiot salesman say to a customer at Best Buy once). You can use 802.11b cards with 802.11g access points and 802.11g cards with 802.11b access points. I do this al lthe time. Part of the reason this is possible is because 802.11b and 802.11g operate in the 2.4 GHz range. The backwards-compatibility is also built into the 802.11g spec (IIRC).
802.11a, on the other hand, is 54 Mbps (like 802.11g), but operates in the 5 GHz range and is not compatible with 802.11b or 802.11g.
Some manufacturers make combo cards that work with all three protocols. Apple is not one of them.
You bring up what I see as one of the major issues with software design: people don't know their target audience when designing software. I see so much software that is designed with geeks in mind (by geeks, for geeks...) that it is absolutely mindboggling for the average user.
I guess "lowest common denominator" isn't the best way to describe the situation. The average user wants to get stuff done with as little fuss as possible. The geek wants as much control over every little part of the process as possible. Most people would think that these two methods/desires are incompatible, but they really are not. It does, however, take effort to get right.
Users don't like to make choices: every time you give them an option in a piece of software, you are asking the user to make a choice. Often times, the user will not know for sure which choice is correct, and then gets frustrated since they don't know how to proceed. Presenting a user with a dialog box with 30 different checkboxes/radio buttons/etc overwhelms them and they tend to give up. (Spolsky and Norman discuss this in detail.) There's a fine line here that most designers end up on the wrong side of. I don't claim to always be on the right side of it myself, but I like to think that I can recognize when I'm on the wrong side of it, even if I can't change my position.
One relatively simply way to allow the new user and experienced user to use the same design/interface is to hide the advanced options unless the user specifically requests them. There are many ways of doing this. Read Norman's book for a lot more information on how to handle user options, choices, and decisions.
It's not being condescending, either, to take the average user into account when designing software. There's a big difference between easy to use and dumbed down (the two aren't even close--anyone who argues different doesn't really know anything about the design process).
Say you require a certain piece of knowledge to use your software. That'll give only the upper, say, 10% of the population the required skills to use your software. But what if you could double, even triple that number by avoiding that requirement? Isn't that worth the effort? Granted, this doesn't mean making nuclear reactor control software easy for a 6-year old to use, but it does mean you have to think hard about your design and the target users. (Keep those users in mind...it's all about them...they're the ones who are actually going to pay for the privelege of using your software!)
Couple more points I wanted to mention (even if noone reads my comments). Design is not something you can get right on the first try. It is an iterative process. You create a prototype design, test it out with real users, identify the flaws in the design, refine it, then test again. Repeat until you get as close to the perfect design as possible. It's not right to create a design, test it, find out it's bad, then scrap it all and start over from scratch. On the other hand, the very first prototype has to be close to the mark. You can't just take any old design and refine it over and over again--fundamental flaws are likely to remain.
It also doesn't take very much user testing to identify a bad design. Often 10 or fewer users will be enough...if it's bad design, it will be bad design to almost every one of them. This can even be done on the cheap...in a company, just grab a secretary or two to have them look at a prototype interface and see what they think. User testing...it works!
And last but not least, geeks and programmers and people like them are some of the most arrogant and stubborn people I have ever met. I should know. I'm one of them. (This is not directed at any one in particular, it's just a general sense I've picked up from reading Slashdot and conversing in various mediums with other people.)
Far too often I hear them say thinks like "it makes sense to me...why shouldn't it make sense to
User interface design is one of my pet-peeves about computers these days (be it Mac OS, Windows, or Linxu--I use all three regularly). Every where I look I see bad design that doesn't need to exist. And it annoys the crap out of me that people won't put forth the extra effort to get it right. So here's a little rant on the subject.
As a computer science graduate student, I recently took a course entitled "human-computer interface." This course (at Eastern Washington University) was not really about how to make a GUI "look good" but how to make an interface (from something as simple as the knobs for the burners on your stove to a modern web browser) actually usable. One of the things I learned is that no matter how good programmers like myself think they are, they really don't know much about designing interfaces. There's an intense amount of work involved with it, and a lot of it is outside the fields most programmers typically work in (in particular, there's quite a bit of psychology involved).
There's a lot more to the human-computer interface than just how the interface appears visually. You also have to consider things like the mappings between intended actions and actual results, how easy it is for a user to determine how to perform an action, how easy it is for a user to determine the state of the system, how easy it is for a user to determine the results of their actions, and so much more.
One of the things I see all the time is interfaces that are designed for programmers and other techie types. Just because I know how to write my own Linux kernel modules doesn't mean the typical user of Program X does, so don't make the program require that knowledge unless absolutely necessary. Design for the lowest common denominator, not the greatest. If you make a program easy to use for the average user, then it will be easier for everyone to use, even yourself. (Remember: think of the average computer user (or person in general) and remember that half of the population base is dumber than that average person.)
There are two books I think most people should check out for more information on design and :
The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN: 0-465-06710-7. Goes into much detail on design in general and why it is important, the process of good design, and offers great advice for improving designs and the design process.
User Interface Design for Programmers, Joel Spolsky, ISBN: 1-893115-94-1. Practical user interface design advice for programmers, for those too lazy to read Norman's book and learn more on your own (shame on those of you who would only read this book!). Also check out his blog "Joel on Software" at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/.
Finally, I'd just like to say that regardless of what most Slashdotters think of Apple, they tend to get the interface on their products right because they realize the importance of good design and are willing to spend the extra money, effort, and time to get it right. And this is a large part of the reason their products consistently win design awards and sell very well despite their market share. Look at the iPod for example, and compare it to any of the other hard drive-based MP3 players out there. Are any of them as easy to use? Don't think so. Are any of them as pleasing to look at? Again, didn't think so. Does it have the richest feature set out there (I'm looking at you, Ogg Vorbis supporters)? No, but it's still the largest in market share by a large margin. Because it's easy to use and you don't feel like beating it to a small pile of broken circuit boards at the end of the day because it was too frustrating to use. (No, Apple is not perfect and they do design bad interfaces and products, but they seem to be head and shoulders above most everyone else in their industry.)
Bzzt! Wrong again. The last few StyleWriters were Apple-labeled HP printers. Specifically, the Color StyleWriter 4100, CSW 4500, and CSW 6500. Like the Canon-based printers before them, they could use the equivalent HP ink cartridges instead of the Apple cartridges.
Interestingly, Apple still sells cartridges for nearly all their ink-jet and laser printers. I've noticed that (at least as far as MSRP goes), the Apple ink-jet carts are less expensive than their HP or Canon equivalents. I used to work at a campus bookstore where this was the case, and we'd sell the Apple carts to people looking for the Canons and save them 8 or 9 bucks a pop.
Later, closed apple was removed, and open-apple was renamed 'command' and given a stupid clover looking icon.
Not to be pedantic or anything, by the clover symbol came from a Swedish (?) trail guide and means "useful feature" or something similar. (At least, that's what I remember from reading a tips & tricks book for Mac OS a loooong time ago).
If i remember the story right, it was just the clover symbol on early Mac keyboards. It confused people so much, particularly those who had previously gotten used to the Apple key on the Apple II series that they had to add the Apple symbol back to the key (but still left the clover symbol, which is still there to this day and also shows up in menus and identifies keyboard shortcuts for menu items.
Is there anyone besides me who would like to see Paramount release the case separately for collectors who bought each season as it was released (or otherwise own all 7 seasons right now)?
Even though I have my box sets in 6- and 7-disc Alpha DVD cases (see http://www.inetdvd.com) using Ric Easton's excellent replacement cover art (see http://www.dvdcoverart.com), the novelty of having a Borg cube to hold the 48 discs is appealing to this Star Trek geek.
Replying to my own post, but the DVDs also have remastered 5.1 channel audio, a stereo audio track, and at least 2 subtitle tracks that I can recall off the top of my head.
Also, if you are like me, and hate the cases Paramount uses for the TNG and DS9 sets (DS9 is slightly better than TNG), then check out the 6- and 7-disc Alpha cases at http://www.inetdvd.com and replacement cover art created by Ric Easton at http://www.dvdcoverart.com. The seven case spines line up to form one compsite mural image. They're pretty sweet.
I agree with the other replies to this thread. 300MB is ridiculously low for about 45 minutes for the MPEG-2 codec used for DVD-Video.
Even the much-lauded Xvid, DivX, and other MPEG-4 codecs aren't terribly great at that bitrate, judging by the 350MB versions I have of various TNG and DS9 sets (which are being replaced by the real DVDs as I can afford them-I own DS9 Season 1 and all of TNG except Season 2).
Not to mention the fact that while the TNG and DS9 may have been shown on TV, they were shot on 35mm film, allowing for a pretty good telecine transfer for the DVD format. The episodes on DVD are dramatically better than they ever were when originally shown on DVD.
The Dual 500 G4s have Gigabit Ethernet. As do the 400 Mhz and Dual 450 machines that were released at the same time, at MacWorld New York 2000. I know. I own one.
Good thing I was too busy to get the 10.2.8 update when it first came out that I completely missed it.:)
Bzzztt! Quantum got bought (actually mostly bought out, IIRC) out by Maxtor a few years ago.
Reminds me of when i bought a 20 GB hard drive on sale for about $100 at CompUSA.
It was a CompUSA-branded drive. As many of you probably know, it's just a Maxtor drive with "CompUSA" instead of "Maxtor" on the box (do they still do that??). I took it home and inside I found a little note and a nice shiny new Quantum LCT 20 GB drive.
The professor of one of my anthropology courses mentioned that one of his colleagues has another theory for global warming.
If I remember correctly, it goes something like this:
Since about the 1960s or so, temperatures from monitoring stations in Siberia were no longer included in the figures uses to compute the average temperature of the Earth. Since it's cold there, those numbers would decrease the overall average. But since those numbers aren't being included, the average temperature appears to have risen.
Now this is just another possible explanation for global warming that I've heard. I've not looked into it myself to see if it has any basis in fact.
Personally, I don't dispute that global warming is happening. I do, however, strongly dispute the general idea that excess greenhouse gases generated by man are the sole cause of global warming. I think there just simply not enough evidence to draw any solid conclusions at this point; everything is just a guess.
I think I have even seen evidence based on rocks or some other geological evidence that suggest that variations in the Earth's temperature are normal over many thousands of years.
(My opinion: it's probably a combination of factors that is leading to global warming. Greenhouse gases, solar radiation, and a few other things).
(I got in an argument once with a professor about global warming and I ended up losing, mostly because he was stubborn and wouldn't accept any of the claims I was trying to present, most of which are on the list in the parent post. Pardon me if I sound a bit bitter because of that.)
That's an interesting way of doing it. Keeping an in-store database of what hasn't been sold, rather than a database of what has been sold. If you were to keep track of what's been sold, you'd need a massive infrastructure to coordinate that information (millions and millions of tags and thousands and thousands of retail locations).
Of course, I'd still prefer some sort of field-programmable device where a flag in the tag could be set to indicate that it's been bought (like demagnetizing the anti-theft Electronic Article Surveilance (EAS) tags).
Also good would be an option to have the tag disabled completely upon purchase, though that sort of defeats the purpose of having a washer that can automatically adjust the cycle for your laundry or a cupboard that can detect when you are getting low on Top Ramen and let you know.
And one thing people seem to always overlook: there's a difference between putting the tags in the packaging and in the product. Put it in the package, and the retailers still get to do all their fancy inventory tracking stuff, but once you buy it and take it home, you're likely to throw the package away and poof...RFID tag is gone.
Put it in the product, and it's likely usable for the lifetime of the product.
Oh, and some federal standards for privacy protection would be nice, too (not just in regards to RFID). And yes, I know that there is no guarantee of personal privacy in the US, Constitutional or otherwise.
Like many of the Slashdot crowd, I absolutely love Pixar's movies (and shorts). Not only for the visuals (which are always stunning) but also the great stories.
I recall seeing somewhere, many many months ago, a comment from someone at Pixar saying that part of the key to their success is that they take artists and teach them how to use computers, instead of taking computer people and teaching them how to be artists. Many of Pixar's best people are alums or the California Institute of Arts (including John Lasseter). [There are many in-jokes through Pixar's movies that are refernces to Cal Arts).
Can't wait for "Cars" or "The Incredibles" to hit theaters.
Interestingly, I've received a few emails from Best Buy over the last couple of days to a couple of addresses I've registered with them.
They are basically anti-fruad messages saying that those fraud alert emails are not from Best Buy, they are investigating them with law enforcement officials, reiterating that their online store is safe, etc.
The forthcoming IBM PowerPC 970 CPU is supposed to have a very sophisticated branch prediction unit. (I'm not sure how it compares to that of the POWER4, from which the PPC 970 was derived, or how it compares to other CPUs, though.)
(Disclaimer: recalling all of this from memory based on the paper I wrote a few weeks ago on the PPC 970. Forgive me if I over-simply or mis-state something.)
The PPC 970 hast three branch history tables (BHTs). Each one has 16k (2^14) entries of one bit each. One BHT follows the more or less traditional method of tracking whether or not the branch prediction from a previous execution of the instrution was successful. One BHT has its entries associated with an 11-bit vector which tracks the last 11 instructions executed by the CPU (and using this to determine if the branch prediction was successful. The third and final BHT is used to determine which BHT has been more successful for the corresonding instructions. For each individual branch instruction, the third BHT is used to determine which method has had better success in the past and then that BHT is used as the branch prediction method for this execution of the instruction.
Wasn't/Isn't MS "donating" (or trying to donate) zillions of copies of its bloatware to schools as part of some settlement, in place of some of the monetary cost?
As I recall, they tried to do exactly that and everyone screamed bloody murder that it would just be handing them another monopoly, since it would increase their presence in education (much to the dismay of Apple and others), an area where their monopoly is not nearly as strong as it is in other market segments.
Enough whining about RadioShack's stupidity and lack of cable modem service where you live. Can anyone actually provide any useful information on this cable modem? Specifically, what model is it? The really old DCM105? The slightly newer DCM 205? Or the new DCM225 or DCM226? That's what I want to know! My little rural town of 600 people is getting cable modem service, but we have to buy our own hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the dorm networks here suck (I'm a grad student myself, just moved off campus after 4 years in the dorms, er, "residence halls")
It's not only a problem with the provider and the infrastructure, but also the management (EWU Department of Housing and Residential Life) not having a fsckin' clue how to manage a network of this size. I've looked into it on several occasions (from both the end-user and systems design perspectives). It's not pretty. Pretty fsckin' ugly, actually.
I don't have enough space here to even get started on the subject. Email me separately if you want to have a "friendly discussion" about the subject.
That said, I thought it was pretty cool to see my school on the front page of Slashdot. Will have to make sure my fellow CS students know about this.
CyberDave
So, where are my dilithium crystals, plasma coils, and warp cores? Oh, and subspace fields that we can use to alter the mass of an object and propel it to FTL speeds?
Where the hell is the "-1, Just Plain Wrong..." moderation option?
It's the HP music player that's identical to the iPod, not Dell's.
I'd mod this comment down, but I wanted to correct such gross misinformation.
CyberDave
Bzzzzzz...wrong. Methinks you got your As and Bs confused.
The PowerBook (or, more correctly, Apple's AirPort Extreme MiniPCI card) supports 802.11b and 802.11g.
802.11g is backwards compatible with 802.11b (despite what I overheard some idiot salesman say to a customer at Best Buy once). You can use 802.11b cards with 802.11g access points and 802.11g cards with 802.11b access points. I do this al lthe time. Part of the reason this is possible is because 802.11b and 802.11g operate in the 2.4 GHz range. The backwards-compatibility is also built into the 802.11g spec (IIRC).
802.11a, on the other hand, is 54 Mbps (like 802.11g), but operates in the 5 GHz range and is not compatible with 802.11b or 802.11g.
Some manufacturers make combo cards that work with all three protocols. Apple is not one of them.
CyberDave
You bring up what I see as one of the major issues with software design: people don't know their target audience when designing software. I see so much software that is designed with geeks in mind (by geeks, for geeks...) that it is absolutely mindboggling for the average user.
I guess "lowest common denominator" isn't the best way to describe the situation. The average user wants to get stuff done with as little fuss as possible. The geek wants as much control over every little part of the process as possible. Most people would think that these two methods/desires are incompatible, but they really are not. It does, however, take effort to get right.
Users don't like to make choices: every time you give them an option in a piece of software, you are asking the user to make a choice. Often times, the user will not know for sure which choice is correct, and then gets frustrated since they don't know how to proceed. Presenting a user with a dialog box with 30 different checkboxes/radio buttons/etc overwhelms them and they tend to give up. (Spolsky and Norman discuss this in detail.) There's a fine line here that most designers end up on the wrong side of. I don't claim to always be on the right side of it myself, but I like to think that I can recognize when I'm on the wrong side of it, even if I can't change my position.
One relatively simply way to allow the new user and experienced user to use the same design/interface is to hide the advanced options unless the user specifically requests them. There are many ways of doing this. Read Norman's book for a lot more information on how to handle user options, choices, and decisions.
It's not being condescending, either, to take the average user into account when designing software. There's a big difference between easy to use and dumbed down (the two aren't even close--anyone who argues different doesn't really know anything about the design process).
Say you require a certain piece of knowledge to use your software. That'll give only the upper, say, 10% of the population the required skills to use your software. But what if you could double, even triple that number by avoiding that requirement? Isn't that worth the effort? Granted, this doesn't mean making nuclear reactor control software easy for a 6-year old to use, but it does mean you have to think hard about your design and the target users. (Keep those users in mind...it's all about them...they're the ones who are actually going to pay for the privelege of using your software!)
Couple more points I wanted to mention (even if noone reads my comments). Design is not something you can get right on the first try. It is an iterative process. You create a prototype design, test it out with real users, identify the flaws in the design, refine it, then test again. Repeat until you get as close to the perfect design as possible. It's not right to create a design, test it, find out it's bad, then scrap it all and start over from scratch. On the other hand, the very first prototype has to be close to the mark. You can't just take any old design and refine it over and over again--fundamental flaws are likely to remain.
It also doesn't take very much user testing to identify a bad design. Often 10 or fewer users will be enough...if it's bad design, it will be bad design to almost every one of them. This can even be done on the cheap...in a company, just grab a secretary or two to have them look at a prototype interface and see what they think. User testing...it works!
And last but not least, geeks and programmers and people like them are some of the most arrogant and stubborn people I have ever met. I should know. I'm one of them. (This is not directed at any one in particular, it's just a general sense I've picked up from reading Slashdot and conversing in various mediums with other people.)
Far too often I hear them say thinks like "it makes sense to me...why shouldn't it make sense to
User interface design is one of my pet-peeves about computers these days (be it Mac OS, Windows, or Linxu--I use all three regularly). Every where I look I see bad design that doesn't need to exist. And it annoys the crap out of me that people won't put forth the extra effort to get it right. So here's a little rant on the subject.
As a computer science graduate student, I recently took a course entitled "human-computer interface." This course (at Eastern Washington University) was not really about how to make a GUI "look good" but how to make an interface (from something as simple as the knobs for the burners on your stove to a modern web browser) actually usable. One of the things I learned is that no matter how good programmers like myself think they are, they really don't know much about designing interfaces. There's an intense amount of work involved with it, and a lot of it is outside the fields most programmers typically work in (in particular, there's quite a bit of psychology involved).
There's a lot more to the human-computer interface than just how the interface appears visually. You also have to consider things like the mappings between intended actions and actual results, how easy it is for a user to determine how to perform an action, how easy it is for a user to determine the state of the system, how easy it is for a user to determine the results of their actions, and so much more.
One of the things I see all the time is interfaces that are designed for programmers and other techie types. Just because I know how to write my own Linux kernel modules doesn't mean the typical user of Program X does, so don't make the program require that knowledge unless absolutely necessary. Design for the lowest common denominator, not the greatest. If you make a program easy to use for the average user, then it will be easier for everyone to use, even yourself. (Remember: think of the average computer user (or person in general) and remember that half of the population base is dumber than that average person .)
There are two books I think most people should check out for more information on design and :
The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman, ISBN: 0-465-06710-7. Goes into much detail on design in general and why it is important, the process of good design, and offers great advice for improving designs and the design process.
User Interface Design for Programmers, Joel Spolsky, ISBN: 1-893115-94-1. Practical user interface design advice for programmers, for those too lazy to read Norman's book and learn more on your own (shame on those of you who would only read this book!). Also check out his blog "Joel on Software" at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/.
Finally, I'd just like to say that regardless of what most Slashdotters think of Apple, they tend to get the interface on their products right because they realize the importance of good design and are willing to spend the extra money, effort, and time to get it right. And this is a large part of the reason their products consistently win design awards and sell very well despite their market share. Look at the iPod for example, and compare it to any of the other hard drive-based MP3 players out there. Are any of them as easy to use? Don't think so. Are any of them as pleasing to look at? Again, didn't think so. Does it have the richest feature set out there (I'm looking at you, Ogg Vorbis supporters)? No, but it's still the largest in market share by a large margin. Because it's easy to use and you don't feel like beating it to a small pile of broken circuit boards at the end of the day because it was too frustrating to use. (No, Apple is not perfect and they do design bad interfaces and products, but they seem to be head and shoulders above most everyone else in their industry.)
Oh, and let me
What? Even though Al Gore is on Apple's Board of Directors?
Oh, the irony. I think
CyberDave
ObFuturamaReference
"Welcome to the world of tomorrow!!"
CyberDave
Well, I think next year we might be having the 2004 Duke Nukem Awards. CyberDave
Bzzt! Wrong again. The last few StyleWriters were Apple-labeled HP printers. Specifically, the Color StyleWriter 4100, CSW 4500, and CSW 6500. Like the Canon-based printers before them, they could use the equivalent HP ink cartridges instead of the Apple cartridges.
Interestingly, Apple still sells cartridges for nearly all their ink-jet and laser printers. I've noticed that (at least as far as MSRP goes), the Apple ink-jet carts are less expensive than their HP or Canon equivalents. I used to work at a campus bookstore where this was the case, and we'd sell the Apple carts to people looking for the Canons and save them 8 or 9 bucks a pop.
CyberDave
Later, closed apple was removed, and open-apple was renamed 'command' and given a stupid clover looking icon.
Not to be pedantic or anything, by the clover symbol came from a Swedish (?) trail guide and means "useful feature" or something similar. (At least, that's what I remember from reading a tips & tricks book for Mac OS a loooong time ago).
If i remember the story right, it was just the clover symbol on early Mac keyboards. It confused people so much, particularly those who had previously gotten used to the Apple key on the Apple II series that they had to add the Apple symbol back to the key (but still left the clover symbol, which is still there to this day and also shows up in menus and identifies keyboard shortcuts for menu items.
CyberDave
Is there anyone besides me who would like to see Paramount release the case separately for collectors who bought each season as it was released (or otherwise own all 7 seasons right now)?
Even though I have my box sets in 6- and 7-disc Alpha DVD cases (see http://www.inetdvd.com) using Ric Easton's excellent replacement cover art (see http://www.dvdcoverart.com), the novelty of having a Borg cube to hold the 48 discs is appealing to this Star Trek geek.
CyberDave
Replying to my own post, but the DVDs also have remastered 5.1 channel audio, a stereo audio track, and at least 2 subtitle tracks that I can recall off the top of my head.
Also, if you are like me, and hate the cases Paramount uses for the TNG and DS9 sets (DS9 is slightly better than TNG), then check out the 6- and 7-disc Alpha cases at http://www.inetdvd.com and replacement cover art created by Ric Easton at http://www.dvdcoverart.com. The seven case spines line up to form one compsite mural image. They're pretty sweet.
CyberDave
I agree with the other replies to this thread. 300MB is ridiculously low for about 45 minutes for the MPEG-2 codec used for DVD-Video.
Even the much-lauded Xvid, DivX, and other MPEG-4 codecs aren't terribly great at that bitrate, judging by the 350MB versions I have of various TNG and DS9 sets (which are being replaced by the real DVDs as I can afford them-I own DS9 Season 1 and all of TNG except Season 2).
Not to mention the fact that while the TNG and DS9 may have been shown on TV, they were shot on 35mm film, allowing for a pretty good telecine transfer for the DVD format. The episodes on DVD are dramatically better than they ever were when originally shown on DVD.
CyberDave
The Dual 500 G4s have Gigabit Ethernet. As do the 400 Mhz and Dual 450 machines that were released at the same time, at MacWorld New York 2000. I know. I own one.
:)
Good thing I was too busy to get the 10.2.8 update when it first came out that I completely missed it.
CyberDave
Bzzztt! Quantum got bought (actually mostly bought out, IIRC) out by Maxtor a few years ago.
Reminds me of when i bought a 20 GB hard drive on sale for about $100 at CompUSA.
It was a CompUSA-branded drive. As many of you probably know, it's just a Maxtor drive with "CompUSA" instead of "Maxtor" on the box (do they still do that??). I took it home and inside I found a little note and a nice shiny new Quantum LCT 20 GB drive.
CyberDave
The professor of one of my anthropology courses mentioned that one of his colleagues has another theory for global warming.
If I remember correctly, it goes something like this:
Since about the 1960s or so, temperatures from monitoring stations in Siberia were no longer included in the figures uses to compute the average temperature of the Earth. Since it's cold there, those numbers would decrease the overall average. But since those numbers aren't being included, the average temperature appears to have risen.
Now this is just another possible explanation for global warming that I've heard. I've not looked into it myself to see if it has any basis in fact.
Personally, I don't dispute that global warming is happening. I do, however, strongly dispute the general idea that excess greenhouse gases generated by man are the sole cause of global warming. I think there just simply not enough evidence to draw any solid conclusions at this point; everything is just a guess.
I think I have even seen evidence based on rocks or some other geological evidence that suggest that variations in the Earth's temperature are normal over many thousands of years.
(My opinion: it's probably a combination of factors that is leading to global warming. Greenhouse gases, solar radiation, and a few other things).
(I got in an argument once with a professor about global warming and I ended up losing, mostly because he was stubborn and wouldn't accept any of the claims I was trying to present, most of which are on the list in the parent post. Pardon me if I sound a bit bitter because of that.)
CyberDave
That's an interesting way of doing it. Keeping an in-store database of what hasn't been sold, rather than a database of what has been sold. If you were to keep track of what's been sold, you'd need a massive infrastructure to coordinate that information (millions and millions of tags and thousands and thousands of retail locations).
Of course, I'd still prefer some sort of field-programmable device where a flag in the tag could be set to indicate that it's been bought (like demagnetizing the anti-theft Electronic Article Surveilance (EAS) tags).
Also good would be an option to have the tag disabled completely upon purchase, though that sort of defeats the purpose of having a washer that can automatically adjust the cycle for your laundry or a cupboard that can detect when you are getting low on Top Ramen and let you know.
And one thing people seem to always overlook: there's a difference between putting the tags in the packaging and in the product. Put it in the package, and the retailers still get to do all their fancy inventory tracking stuff, but once you buy it and take it home, you're likely to throw the package away and poof...RFID tag is gone.
Put it in the product, and it's likely usable for the lifetime of the product.
Oh, and some federal standards for privacy protection would be nice, too (not just in regards to RFID). And yes, I know that there is no guarantee of personal privacy in the US, Constitutional or otherwise.
That's my take on this stuff.
CyberDave
Like many of the Slashdot crowd, I absolutely love Pixar's movies (and shorts). Not only for the visuals (which are always stunning) but also the great stories.
I recall seeing somewhere, many many months ago, a comment from someone at Pixar saying that part of the key to their success is that they take artists and teach them how to use computers, instead of taking computer people and teaching them how to be artists. Many of Pixar's best people are alums or the California Institute of Arts (including John Lasseter). [There are many in-jokes through Pixar's movies that are refernces to Cal Arts).
Can't wait for "Cars" or "The Incredibles" to hit theaters.
CyberDave
Interestingly, I've received a few emails from Best Buy over the last couple of days to a couple of addresses I've registered with them.
They are basically anti-fruad messages saying that those fraud alert emails are not from Best Buy, they are investigating them with law enforcement officials, reiterating that their online store is safe, etc.
CyberDave
And IBM calls it VMX (Vector Multimedia Extensions, IIRC) because Motorola holds the trademark on the name "Altivec."
CyberDave
The forthcoming IBM PowerPC 970 CPU is supposed to have a very sophisticated branch prediction unit. (I'm not sure how it compares to that of the POWER4, from which the PPC 970 was derived, or how it compares to other CPUs, though.)
(Disclaimer: recalling all of this from memory based on the paper I wrote a few weeks ago on the PPC 970. Forgive me if I over-simply or mis-state something.)
The PPC 970 hast three branch history tables (BHTs). Each one has 16k (2^14) entries of one bit each. One BHT follows the more or less traditional method of tracking whether or not the branch prediction from a previous execution of the instrution was successful. One BHT has its entries associated with an 11-bit vector which tracks the last 11 instructions executed by the CPU (and using this to determine if the branch prediction was successful. The third and final BHT is used to determine which BHT has been more successful for the corresonding instructions. For each individual branch instruction, the third BHT is used to determine which method has had better success in the past and then that BHT is used as the branch prediction method for this execution of the instruction.
CyberDave
I sure hope you mean 1960, and not 1964. Wasn't Kennedy assassinated in 1963?
CyberDave
As I recall, they tried to do exactly that and everyone screamed bloody murder that it would just be handing them another monopoly, since it would increase their presence in education (much to the dismay of Apple and others), an area where their monopoly is not nearly as strong as it is in other market segments.
Enough whining about RadioShack's stupidity and lack of cable modem service where you live. Can anyone actually provide any useful information on this cable modem? Specifically, what model is it? The really old DCM105? The slightly newer DCM 205? Or the new DCM225 or DCM226? That's what I want to know! My little rural town of 600 people is getting cable modem service, but we have to buy our own hardware.
CyberDave