And in response to the article, I can't believe that they are theorizing that this "may" usher in an era of cheap-phones-but-expensive-plans. Excuse me? Has the author ever BEEN cell phone shopping? 99.99999% of the phones out there are dirt cheap, if not free-- as long as you sell your soul to the company store in the form of multi-year contracts loaded with exhorborant rates and a plethora of hidden user fees.
Seriously, cell phone companies will do anything short of offering you a blowjob to get you into a contract with a monthly fee (most of them lasting no less than a year). I bought my cellphone with a "prepaid" system - you buy a $X card containing a code, type it on a menu and the phone has $X available for using. It was more expensive, but in the long run i save money and i'm not tied to bullshit contracts.
As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.
Well, that's fine; i don't want the silicon blueprints for their beloved R&D. I just want specs on the interface which lets me use that particular hardware. As much as graphic vendors would like us to beleive, there's not much that can be "stolen" from gfx card specs. Don't take my word for it; just check the ones available for older cards and see how much you can get from there.
I think GFX vendors are reluctant of releasing specs for a number of reasons. One, it leaves them in a controlling position, since they dictate what you will and won't be able to do with your beloved card. Two, some parts of GFX cards might contain licenced technologies (stuff like MPEG decodig, perhaps? texture compression?), but still, we can do without. And three, almost every major GFX vendor has been caught cheating in their drivers (oh, oh, "optimizing"), which leads me to beleive more than one common GFX card might be software crippled. Hell, ATI had a card in which you could unlock four pipelines with a small program.
Desiging GFX hardware is hard, and writting driver is too. Yet, why can't you release specs for hardware we bought? There's an amount of zealotry to the OSS desire of open-source-for-everything, but if anything benefits from open source, that is system drivers. GFX cards or anything else.
Re:Probably offtopic, but very newsworthy IMHO...
on
US Stem Cells Contaminated
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...some Argentinian doctors are working on a diabetes treatment using adult stem cells (from the same patient) injected in the pancreas. Apparently a test patient pancreas' subjected to the procedure, which is said to be fairly simple, started to produce insulin again.
I submitted this twice and for some reason it wasn't accepted. Not that i'm holding a grudge, but i have diabetic friends and this is major news for me, and perhaps could change some people minds' about stem cell research (not embryonic stem cell research though, which is a more delicate subject).
Then use Firefox. It's not a pissing contest, *I* happen to like Opera better, for a number of reasons. Firefox is a terrific browser, don't get me wrong, but IMHO lacks the finesse Opera has.
Well, for me it does, mainly because the single user license now covers installations for all the (home) systems you might have, on all supported OSs. Great deal.
I guess you're a fan of spyware. Opera's Google text ads aren't harmless, you know.
You might want to pay for it. Not all software has to be free, you know. And Opera is IMHO the best browser available bar none - well worth it's price.
Very true, and one of the main reasons i care more about power consumption/heat dissipation that performance lately. For a x86 desktop, any modern offering from either AMD or Intel does an excellent job. Both VIA and Transmeta have some very nice low power x86 chips, but their performance leaves a bit to be desired. They do lovely cheap servers though:)
In any case, outside the P-M, Athlons completely blow Intel out of the water, in performance, price and power consumption. I'd love to get a P-M based system though, and i probably will if the prices drop.
Yes. Hell, i would put two, but they're still to damn expensive (and so are the motherboards for it). I hope that changes in the near future though, the P-M is a terrific processor.
Personally ATRAC is just fine for me, even more when considering it's a portable gadget. I can hear compression artifacts on some very dynamic material (notably, classic music) but for the rest it sounds quite ok. I'd compare it to a 128kbps MP3 stream, quality wise. But it's all subjective.
PS: There're several ATRAC revisions. My minidisc walkman uses the original algorithm. The latest revision compresses much better but it's said to sound awful, which i can't comment on since i never tried a player using it. Still, the only lossy compression formats i'd use at home would be MP3 above 192kbps or OGG-Vorbis above 128kbps.
Much agreed. Even more, most consumer grade DACs leave a lot to be desired when driving headphones by themselves, and even more when poorly (cheaply implemented) - low value coupling caps springs to mind.
Well, that's you. 99% of the i don't want EQ on my music, of any kind, not even a bass cut from a poor output DAC. Classical, metal, rock, and electronic music are all heavy on bass, and it's stuff i listen to most of the time. I don't want poor bass reproduction just like i don't want poor highs or mids.
By the way, if proper bass reproduction (not boombox-thumping bass like) makes you difficult to listen to the rest, your audio gear is poor. And not in the "it's not audiophile! get $1000 wires!" sense of poor.
Actually, there's a lot of earplug headphones that do a very fine work of reproducing bass. Of course, nowhere near a proper headphone set, but you can get a good bass kick from relatively cheap earplugs. I own a pair of el-cheapo TDK earplug spearkes that play metal, electronic and classical music just fine - all heavy-on-bass genres. I can't recall the model right now.
For some reason, a lot of portable devices have poor low frequency response. Most of the time is to save a few bucks in parts - i've seen a lot of onboard sound devices that are capacitor coupled to the output (there's a capacitor between the output and the speaker, which by itself or a few other components determine how low can the output go) with caps that cut the bass way above of what's desirable.
That's it. In this way you use every bit of charge there's avaiable on your batteries. Which once they fall below the minimum voltage threshold might not be much, but still, it all counts.
Actually, bass performance is one of the principal things i look for in portable devices when it comes to audio quality. In most music genres, if the bass "ooomph!" is lost the sound becomes lackluster, not to mention that good bass isolates you from outside sounds (for me, at least).
My Sony Minidisc does bass wonderfully, and even compensates a bit for it's limited maximum volume.
Evidently it's not the case in the US, but "amateur" servers are HUGE here (Argentina); cyber-cafes usually host their own for a lot of MMORPGs, for example MU Online. Most of them have only one server, but some host three or four, interconnected.
It can be done. But it's more convinient to charge for a service rather than a product.
... for not a much money, and after a good while i settled on a LG Flatron T710SH 17" flat CRT. Excellent image, great contrast, load of options, and puts to shame a lot of much more expensive LCDs regarding image quality (typical of Flatron tubes), which, combined with the dead pixels issue with LCDs, were the reasons i chosed it. It's not too bulky and fits nicely on my desk.
To be fair, LCDs have gotten much better lately, but when it boils down to bang for the buck a good CRT is still the way to go. No contest.
It's a pitty you posted anonymously. This was a terrfic response, and makes me feel even worst about my parents never buying me an Amiga - i had my C64, but mainly because they were very affordable where i live. The Amigas were a different story.
IIRC, OS/2 also had a Rexx intepreter which boosted the OS functionality as well.
Happened to me recently while looking for a cheap GSM cellphone. I bough the Siemens A56 phone, which i thought it was a pretty nice gadget, until i ran onto a site that described how to flash the firmware of the more expensive C56. So i thought 'what the hell'; brought a car adapter (for the data connector) and hacked myself a serial cable.
40 minutes later i have a phone sporting GPRS, Java, keyboard shortcuts, voice dialing, polyphony and sound recording/reproduction, hands free, voice commands, and more avaiable memory. The only thing it lacks it's a color screen, and all for the price of an entry level phone plus 10 bucks. I thought i was lucky, but later found out this is very common for cellphones. The phones are identical (you can even exchange their fronts!), with the difference that the A56 is software crippled.
Thinking it later, it kinda made sense. Suppose you sell the phone for $10; you sell five for $50. Now you introduce a cheaper model for $7 and a more expensive one for $12 (which are all the same internally, with practically zero cost to you other than repackaging). Now you sell three of each, covering more price segments; you made $57. It's a quick example, but it's how it works.
That's an incredible image. Most extraterrestrial pictures look sterile, like deserts, rocky planices or acid-loaded atmospheres, but that one really does look like a poorly filtered island shoreline.
It's not, don't get me wrong. If you have an Amiga lying arround, of course, more power to you:) I would set my C64 as a router if i could!
But the chores you mentioned are general, common uses for compueters nowadays, and kit reviewed in the article sells for $700. This is what i meant by saying "what does it offer that Linux doesnt?". It's great if you have an Amiga lying arround - and has a lot of geek factor to it. Yet i can't justify spending that amount for a new system.
I'm not trolling here, but Linux is useful. What are the real world modern uses for an Amiga machine? I recall they were used a lot on TV stations for titeling, but that was a while ago.
I always respected the Amiga a lot, and i still think it should have done better than it did, specially considering how advanced was in it's time. But other than the geek factor, what's the big deal over a new AmigaOS?
Slashdot Mirror
And in response to the article, I can't believe that they are theorizing that this "may" usher in an era of cheap-phones-but-expensive-plans. Excuse me? Has the author ever BEEN cell phone shopping? 99.99999% of the phones out there are dirt cheap, if not free-- as long as you sell your soul to the company store in the form of multi-year contracts loaded with exhorborant rates and a plethora of hidden user fees.
Seriously, cell phone companies will do anything short of offering you a blowjob to get you into a contract with a monthly fee (most of them lasting no less than a year). I bought my cellphone with a "prepaid" system - you buy a $X card containing a code, type it on a menu and the phone has $X available for using. It was more expensive, but in the long run i save money and i'm not tied to bullshit contracts.
As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.
Well, that's fine; i don't want the silicon blueprints for their beloved R&D. I just want specs on the interface which lets me use that particular hardware. As much as graphic vendors would like us to beleive, there's not much that can be "stolen" from gfx card specs. Don't take my word for it; just check the ones available for older cards and see how much you can get from there.
I think GFX vendors are reluctant of releasing specs for a number of reasons. One, it leaves them in a controlling position, since they dictate what you will and won't be able to do with your beloved card. Two, some parts of GFX cards might contain licenced technologies (stuff like MPEG decodig, perhaps? texture compression?), but still, we can do without. And three, almost every major GFX vendor has been caught cheating in their drivers (oh, oh, "optimizing"), which leads me to beleive more than one common GFX card might be software crippled. Hell, ATI had a card in which you could unlock four pipelines with a small program.
Desiging GFX hardware is hard, and writting driver is too. Yet, why can't you release specs for hardware we bought? There's an amount of zealotry to the OSS desire of open-source-for-everything, but if anything benefits from open source, that is system drivers. GFX cards or anything else.
More info here aswell.
I submitted this twice and for some reason it wasn't accepted. Not that i'm holding a grudge, but i have diabetic friends and this is major news for me, and perhaps could change some people minds' about stem cell research (not embryonic stem cell research though, which is a more delicate subject).
I'm in a similar position as you. PS: welcome to my friends list! :)
Then use Firefox. It's not a pissing contest, *I* happen to like Opera better, for a number of reasons. Firefox is a terrific browser, don't get me wrong, but IMHO lacks the finesse Opera has.
Well, for me it does, mainly because the single user license now covers installations for all the (home) systems you might have, on all supported OSs. Great deal.
I guess you're a fan of spyware. Opera's Google text ads aren't harmless, you know.
You might want to pay for it. Not all software has to be free, you know. And Opera is IMHO the best browser available bar none - well worth it's price.
I am an Opera fan, you insensitive clod! :)
Very true, and one of the main reasons i care more about power consumption/heat dissipation that performance lately. For a x86 desktop, any modern offering from either AMD or Intel does an excellent job. Both VIA and Transmeta have some very nice low power x86 chips, but their performance leaves a bit to be desired. They do lovely cheap servers though :)
In any case, outside the P-M, Athlons completely blow Intel out of the water, in performance, price and power consumption. I'd love to get a P-M based system though, and i probably will if the prices drop.
Yes. Hell, i would put two, but they're still to damn expensive (and so are the motherboards for it). I hope that changes in the near future though, the P-M is a terrific processor.
Personally ATRAC is just fine for me, even more when considering it's a portable gadget. I can hear compression artifacts on some very dynamic material (notably, classic music) but for the rest it sounds quite ok. I'd compare it to a 128kbps MP3 stream, quality wise. But it's all subjective.
PS: There're several ATRAC revisions. My minidisc walkman uses the original algorithm. The latest revision compresses much better but it's said to sound awful, which i can't comment on since i never tried a player using it. Still, the only lossy compression formats i'd use at home would be MP3 above 192kbps or OGG-Vorbis above 128kbps.
Great quote!
Much agreed. Even more, most consumer grade DACs leave a lot to be desired when driving headphones by themselves, and even more when poorly (cheaply implemented) - low value coupling caps springs to mind.
Well, that's you. 99% of the i don't want EQ on my music, of any kind, not even a bass cut from a poor output DAC. Classical, metal, rock, and electronic music are all heavy on bass, and it's stuff i listen to most of the time. I don't want poor bass reproduction just like i don't want poor highs or mids.
By the way, if proper bass reproduction (not boombox-thumping bass like) makes you difficult to listen to the rest, your audio gear is poor. And not in the "it's not audiophile! get $1000 wires!" sense of poor.
Actually, there's a lot of earplug headphones that do a very fine work of reproducing bass. Of course, nowhere near a proper headphone set, but you can get a good bass kick from relatively cheap earplugs. I own a pair of el-cheapo TDK earplug spearkes that play metal, electronic and classical music just fine - all heavy-on-bass genres. I can't recall the model right now.
For some reason, a lot of portable devices have poor low frequency response. Most of the time is to save a few bucks in parts - i've seen a lot of onboard sound devices that are capacitor coupled to the output (there's a capacitor between the output and the speaker, which by itself or a few other components determine how low can the output go) with caps that cut the bass way above of what's desirable.
That's it. In this way you use every bit of charge there's avaiable on your batteries. Which once they fall below the minimum voltage threshold might not be much, but still, it all counts.
Actually, bass performance is one of the principal things i look for in portable devices when it comes to audio quality. In most music genres, if the bass "ooomph!" is lost the sound becomes lackluster, not to mention that good bass isolates you from outside sounds (for me, at least).
My Sony Minidisc does bass wonderfully, and even compensates a bit for it's limited maximum volume.
Evidently it's not the case in the US, but "amateur" servers are HUGE here (Argentina); cyber-cafes usually host their own for a lot of MMORPGs, for example MU Online. Most of them have only one server, but some host three or four, interconnected.
It can be done. But it's more convinient to charge for a service rather than a product.
To be fair, LCDs have gotten much better lately, but when it boils down to bang for the buck a good CRT is still the way to go. No contest.
It's a pitty you posted anonymously. This was a terrfic response, and makes me feel even worst about my parents never buying me an Amiga - i had my C64, but mainly because they were very affordable where i live. The Amigas were a different story.
IIRC, OS/2 also had a Rexx intepreter which boosted the OS functionality as well.
Happened to me recently while looking for a cheap GSM cellphone. I bough the Siemens A56 phone, which i thought it was a pretty nice gadget, until i ran onto a site that described how to flash the firmware of the more expensive C56. So i thought 'what the hell'; brought a car adapter (for the data connector) and hacked myself a serial cable.
40 minutes later i have a phone sporting GPRS, Java, keyboard shortcuts, voice dialing, polyphony and sound recording/reproduction, hands free, voice commands, and more avaiable memory. The only thing it lacks it's a color screen, and all for the price of an entry level phone plus 10 bucks. I thought i was lucky, but later found out this is very common for cellphones. The phones are identical (you can even exchange their fronts!), with the difference that the A56 is software crippled.
Thinking it later, it kinda made sense. Suppose you sell the phone for $10; you sell five for $50. Now you introduce a cheaper model for $7 and a more expensive one for $12 (which are all the same internally, with practically zero cost to you other than repackaging). Now you sell three of each, covering more price segments; you made $57. It's a quick example, but it's how it works.
That's an incredible image. Most extraterrestrial pictures look sterile, like deserts, rocky planices or acid-loaded atmospheres, but that one really does look like a poorly filtered island shoreline.
I don't know, it's almost poetic.
It's not, don't get me wrong. If you have an Amiga lying arround, of course, more power to you :) I would set my C64 as a router if i could!
But the chores you mentioned are general, common uses for compueters nowadays, and kit reviewed in the article sells for $700. This is what i meant by saying "what does it offer that Linux doesnt?". It's great if you have an Amiga lying arround - and has a lot of geek factor to it. Yet i can't justify spending that amount for a new system.
I'm not trolling here, but Linux is useful. What are the real world modern uses for an Amiga machine? I recall they were used a lot on TV stations for titeling, but that was a while ago.
I always respected the Amiga a lot, and i still think it should have done better than it did, specially considering how advanced was in it's time. But other than the geek factor, what's the big deal over a new AmigaOS?