Doubtless people are going to be having a lot of fun at MTV and Microsoft's expense, and a lot of good points will be made. But personally I think this is a reasonably solid business model if the selection is decent, and ultimately I think it'd be good for the market if this were widely adopted. I don't have moral objections to paying for music I like (necessarily), but even iTunes is IMHO a somewhat expensive proposition--I could likely rattle off 20 songs I like in 20 seconds, and there's $20 right there. It's great for individual songs, but it just can't hope to compete with the size of music library I'd personally like to accumulate. However, when you take off the song cap for a reasonable price (and I think 33 cents a day is pretty reasonable), you've piqued my interest pretty well. In essence, I think that this represents a reasonable lowering of prices to a point where I can actually get all the music I want as a consumer at a price that I don't consider absurd (goodness knows the RIAA has seemed reluctant enough to compromise on that last point).
My guess is this won't be perfect--I have certain reservations about MTV as a distributor, inasmuch as I have no basis for assuming that they'll be competent and, given the performance of other services (a la Napster) the burden of proof is on them. Nevertheless, despite points to the contrary, I believe that this is unquestionably a step in the right direction. It represents a value to the consumer and, moreover, some real competition in the ITMS/iPod dominated digital music market--who knows, it might even persuade people that there are reasonable alternatives to a $400 piece of music-playing hardware(not that I'm claiming the iPod is a bad product, but it's Apple--charing a premium for hardware is what they DO).
Having taken an intro java course stressing IDE use (it focused entirely on Eclipse from start to run, and the entire course was taught using a reference graphics library provided), I definitely agree that stressing an IDE and only an IDE is not the way to get people to understand compiling and linking--I never even knew about javac until my second intro java course (these were at different schools, and the latter was a prereq. Plus it had been a year and there were a couple things we hadn't covered in the first course). However, although the second course stressed using JEdit, I spent the entire course writing my code in Eclipse for convenience. The difference? everything was compiled, linked, and run from the CLI. Frankly, I think it was a pretty effective paradigm--Eclipse is an amazing tool, but when you use it only for the editing, it just becomes an amazingly convenient text editor. Essentially, one isn't required to use all of the tremendously advanced features of an IDE in order to reap the benefits of knowing when you've made trivial (that is, the only kind that can be caught by an IDE) errors like misspelling as opposed to fundamental logic errors--the latter are meaningful, the former are inconveniences that slow down everything else.
This isn't to say that I necessarily have anything against using a more basic text editor--using xemacs (or, rather, JEdit, because xemacs is painfully slow over SSH) for C coding has definitely helped me write tighter and above all more compiletime (and runtime) error-free code, and there's that angle to it, but for an intro course, where you're presumably trying to teach the fundamentals of logic over the nitty-gritty of syntax, having an IDE can, I think, be made into a convenience without having it become a crutch, so long as you're able to make clear that the actual coding is only part of a process of programming. Make it clear that the IDE is not the language itself, that a few basic steps will compile code whether it was written in vi, emacs, Notepad, or an IDE. Perhaps try mandating that "Hello, World!" be done in a basic text editor and then make some recommendations for other editing programs afterwards....
Although I Think Spore is in all likelihood a novel and original experience, your description makes it sound suspiciously like a rehash of "Katamari Damacy"
Wouldn't Bill Gates prefer to buy something that represented a product that was actually better than his? Has he ever USED OO.org? Try typing in special characters using the keypad some time. Will it shift the cursor back and print nothing? print the character and delete the one before it? Work as planned? Do nothing at all? Call the space-aliens and tell them earth is ripe for the plucking as everyone struggles to use the bloated file formats? It's a mystery!
I'm familiar with the assertion of 11 basic (non-synthetic) color categories, English being comparatively unique inasmuch as it utilizes all of them, and the fascinating generalization that human languages tend to follow this order. As another poster pointed out, however, with the example of the green/blue (comparatively rare, but extant) grouping instead of yellow/blue, these are only useful generalizations, and, as with almost all such linguistic generalizations, there are exceptions (given the sheer number of languages available to humans, this is hardly suprising).
What I do wonder, however, is how to handle color words that are arguably nonprimary (in terms of frequency) but nevertheless in common parlance and not synthesized from objects that share their color. The word "Teal" in particular comes to mind--it applies uniquely to a color, and is used when it would be more accurate than saying just "blue" or "green" and avoids the construction blue-green or green-blue (which I believe disqualify a color-term from being basic). After all, if "pink" which is easily described as a mixture of white and red, is primary, why not a mix of green and blue?
Admittedly, no other examples come immediately to mind--some other words unique to colors like "mauve" and "chartreuse" arguably describe shades as opposed to ranges, unlike the basic color terms, and are presumably used much less frequently. But what criterion excludes "teal" or similiar words from being basic color categories?
Disclaimer: This is a very thinly veiled request for tech support
I've had Ubuntu installed for ages--installation went smooth as butter--on a second 250GB hard drive with 200G of NTFS scratch space (for use by my first hard drive's Windows installation). I've heard some very good things about Debian and, as I've had a few issues with Ubuntu (can't seem to install the video drivers correctly, though I've heard this is a problem specifically with the Hoary release--stuck at a blurry non-native resolution--largely I just want something somewhat more bare bones), I've spent some time trying to overwrite the existing Linux installation with Sarge Debian, only to find that it just. will. not. do. it. The installer can't mount the second hard drive. period. It'll mount the first and primary (NTFS-formatted, Windows booting) hard drive just fine and offer to overwrite the whole shebang, but even disconnecting that hard drive and connecting the second as the only and primary device, it can't mount the thing. Googling, reading TFM, etc. all seem to provide some promising leads as far boot paramters, etc.,but nothing seems to pan out. My working theory is that the 2.4 kernel just can't mount a drive of that size (there seems to be evidence to support this on older versions of 2.4, 2.4.12 and earlier, I belive, though I imagine that Sarge would be using the latest available release), and that this explains the disparity between the 2.6-based Ubuntu installation and the 2.4 Debian non-installation. Although I'd really like to give this "dream OS" a shot, I'm very tempted to skip it and just go with Gentoo, especially since it's alleged to have a very good build for AMD64. Insight from the/. community?
Frankly, the feel of actually holding a book one's hand, being able to carry it around, pick it up and put it down at leisure, is a lot of what makes books worth reading. Additionally, not having to worry about whether it will actually "work" (let alone trouble from any kind of protection that might prevent you from accessing it short of the language its written in), just makes books a no brainer. There's just something pleasant about having a stack of books (not to mention its easier on the eyes to have pages to flip), and I for one am perfectly happy with the current system and would not mind seeing it continue in perpetuity.
You're quite right about the distinction between semantics and sytnax. I honestly don't know enough about Chinese to knwo whether or not different tones actually represent different parts of speech (as in English "thought" the noun and "thought" the verb conjugation), in which case they would be syntactically significant. However, like I said, I don't know enough about Chinese to know whether or not this actually happens.
I'll be honest, I wasn't aware of the existence of Firewire 800, and that does reduce my confusion somewhat, certainly (that and that I *think* there are older Macs with Firewire but not USB2.0, in which case the former would have better data transfer rates). So yes, it certainly warrants mention by Ars, and they were right to point it out in the review. One thing I would point out, though, is that after what will prbably be an initial massive file transfer, songs will be being added single-by-single or album-by-album, which probably wouldn't tax either Firewire 800 or USB2.0's throughput overmuch (though the former would again be faster). In that case I think that Apple can probably justify the sacrifice of FW for USB (so they don't have to worry about PCs without FW compatibility) if adding FW would increase the size or cost of the nano beyond acceptable margins.
While overall I thought the article was informative, amusing, and well-written, I don't know why Ars brings up the issue of compatibity with FireWire as a reason to downgrade the nano's score (except perhaps for Apple's perennial refusal to put more than about 3 USB ports on its machines). The throughput on USB2.0 is 480Mbps as opposed to Firewire's 400MBps, and USB compatibility is all that's really needed to make the nano work with both Macs and even older PCS (although such models might not have USB2.0, they probably won't have IEEE 1394 ports either. Heck, I've got 3 on my desktop that I don't think have ever been put to good use). It seems like adding Firewire would essentially be redundant from a data transfer perspective and potentially increase the size of a devize of which part of the appeal springs from its ability to fit in a coin pocket. I'm not saying it's a bad review by any means, I'm just somewhat confused as to why Firewire--which has now been eclipsed by USB2.0 in terms of throughput--should remain a point of contention.
I took a linguistics class this previous year with a professor who absolutely disagreed with the Chomskyan view of linguistics (though she did acknowledge that he had contributed a great deal to the field). Some of the arguments against Chomsky include objections to the Chomskyan view of "universal grammar"--that essentially a series of nerual "switches" determine what language a person knows and that these in turn are purely grammatical in nature (the lexicon of different languages qualifying as "superficial"--in and of itself a somewhat tenable argument). While this holds reasonably well for English and closely related languages (English grammar in particular depends a tremendous amount upon word order and syntax, and thus lends itself well to this sort of computational model), in many languages the lines between nominally "superficial" categories--e.g. phonology, lexicon and syntax--become blurred, especially in, for instance, case languages. Whereas you can break down the grammatical elements of an English sentence fairly easily into "verb phrases" "noun phrases" and so on, this is largely because of English syntactical conventions. When a system of prefixes and suffixes can turn a base morpheme from a noun phrase to a verb phrase or any of various parts of speech, the kind of categories to which English morphemes and phrases lend themselves become much harder to apply. Add to this the fact that there exist languages (e.g. Chinese) in which grammatically superficial categories (in English) like phonology become syntactically and grammatically significant, and the sheer variety of lingiustic grammars either seriously undermines the theory in general or forces upon one the Socratic assumption that everyone knows every language and every possible grammar from birth and simply need to be exposed to the rules of whatever their native language is and to pickup superficialities like lexicon to become a fluent speaker. It's not all complete nonsense, but if it were truly correct then presumably computerized translation software (with the aid of large dictionary files for lexicons) would have been perfected some time ago).
Sorry about the rant, but like I said, my prof did *not* like the Chomskyan view of linguistics.
Oh, and as far as the notion of the "language module" goes, it might be premature to call it a module, but there *is* neurophysiological evidence to suggest that humans are physically predisposed towards learning language from birth, so that much at the very least is tenable.
I did in fact miss that article, so my apologies for the rudeness. Nevertheless the point about processing soidum remains valid: the stuff's just really hard to get into its raw form because it's so very reactive. The article itself remains somewhat suspect as far as I'm concerned (that guy claiming hydrogen is a a greenhouse gas is absurd. The earth has *no* atmospheric hydrogen because it's too light to stay in the atmosphere). It looks to me more like shameless self-promotion.
Using sodium? Well I'm glad that you were able to watch at least one demonstration in chemistry. Sodium is an extraordinarily reactive metal that is *never* found in its natural state and, furthermore, is difficult to process by virtue of its high electropositivity (as with all akali/alkaline earth metals). The way to extract hydrogen from water is through electrolysis and furthermore the extraction takes energy to perform. Hydrogen is a potential energy carrying medium, not a net source of energy. And high hydrogen density requires storing it in some sort of organic compound (like methanol) because metals tend to become brittle when large amounts of hydrogen pass through them (hence limiting its compressibility). Please don't allege the possibility of easy through sodium or some other equally absurd magic bullet lest we be unable to persuade people of the actual merits of its use.
The fact is MS just got it so completely wrong with the original Xbox that they will probably never recover there. They paid absolutely no attention to the wants of Japanese gamers at first - they do have different tastes, and they have different wants and needs as far as the design of the console itself goes. The system was not what they wanted, the games were not what they wanted.
Even ignoring that, though, I'm not convinced the Xbox 360 has overcome all of the original Xbox's issues. It is still big. It is still not styled the way the Japanese expect a console to be styled.
certainly "racism" is too harsh but I think your own contentions support the idea that there is just some inherent resistance to Western notions of videogaming in Japan. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with this kind of attitude; People like what they like, but as a matter of cultural difference yes, Microsoft is facing an uphill battle. The XBox is hardly what I would call "big" considering the kind of hardware in it (that is, relative to the size of my desktop), and frankly I think white looks ugly on hardware (IMHO! I am NOT trying to take a stab at Apple). But if these sorts of considerations are inverted in a foreign market, then albeit "protectionism" or "racism" may be an incorrect moniker, but cultural resistance definitely may hurt the 360 in Japan.
And that's very interesting that Sony has such a good rep in Japan. My own experience with / perception of Sony products has always been that there are a few products that actually see a great deal of quality control (the PSP, Trinitron monitors, etc.), but that part of the tradeoff of Sony's ubiquitous presence in electronics is a certain lack of quality and reliability relative to other or more specialized brands. I may be wholly incorrect about this but I usually passively avoid Sony products all things being equal (though not to the extent I'll turn down a well-reviewed product or a good price advantage).
But some of the Doom zombies don't even have heads, they just rise headless off the floor. Therefore it stands to reason that the head is a non-critical part of a Doom zombie.
Some good points about the linearity of the engine. On a personal note: remember the part in Nova Prospekt with the "set up the guns and survive" motif? Though it wasn't too difficult by setting up blocxking boxes, what I really wanted to do was get up on the railing above the hole thing--which, using every single available barrel and box, was possible by building a tall (if rickety) pyramid. After doing all that work, that invisible wall up there remains the most frustrating one I have ever encountered. I realize we can't expect every game to be Deus Ex, and for the most part linearity is helpful in a game with expansive environments--anyone remember looking around frantically for the next way to go in Dark Forces?--but when they place such an emphasis on physics and environment manipulation, and then do their best to limit what you can do with it, it makes you lose a great deal of faith.
which is nonsense, of course. Americans actually enunciate the letters of the English language better than the English ever do. Is it really so difficult to pronounce the second "r" in "rather," or any other such word with a final "r?" If push comes to shove, I think I'll accept the elongation of short as simply a regional phenomenon (America too, of course, possesses a variety of different accents, and I'm naturally biased towards the variety spoken on the East and West coasts), but this constant omission of voiced consonants (what's the pronunciation difference between "barth" and "bath?" is there one?) truly represents a serious breach of the rules of spoken English. Are the English more articulate and does an English accent often convey a sense of education and culture? Indubitably. Can Churchill reasonably claim that his English better represents the language. Not at all.
Thanks for the clarification on that. I've noticed them on my school's CRTs as well (and of course always heard that CRTs have the 3 e- guns, but naturally I didn't bother to do any actual research, this is after all/.), and don't know if they're trinitrons (which I'd always heard touted as decent CRTs, and I find the lines kinda of a pain), hence I made some poor assumptions. ah well.
I've found that I much prefer my LCd for gaming (less eyestrain, no noticeable ghosting, just all around better look. And what do I care about color reproduction in an action game? It's more than close enough). However, people will argue about issues like these for decades, so let me be more specific: Many CRTS, including the 21" Trinitron I'm using right now, have clearly visible black lines where the different electron gun beams don't overlap, that persist throughout all applications and seriously cheapen the look of the image. Latency gets to be less and less of an issue all the time (and I'd call it done with), but stuff like this persists indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
and here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_beha viour_order
My guess is this won't be perfect--I have certain reservations about MTV as a distributor, inasmuch as I have no basis for assuming that they'll be competent and, given the performance of other services (a la Napster) the burden of proof is on them. Nevertheless, despite points to the contrary, I believe that this is unquestionably a step in the right direction. It represents a value to the consumer and, moreover, some real competition in the ITMS/iPod dominated digital music market--who knows, it might even persuade people that there are reasonable alternatives to a $400 piece of music-playing hardware(not that I'm claiming the iPod is a bad product, but it's Apple--charing a premium for hardware is what they DO).
This isn't to say that I necessarily have anything against using a more basic text editor--using xemacs (or, rather, JEdit, because xemacs is painfully slow over SSH) for C coding has definitely helped me write tighter and above all more compiletime (and runtime) error-free code, and there's that angle to it, but for an intro course, where you're presumably trying to teach the fundamentals of logic over the nitty-gritty of syntax, having an IDE can, I think, be made into a convenience without having it become a crutch, so long as you're able to make clear that the actual coding is only part of a process of programming. Make it clear that the IDE is not the language itself, that a few basic steps will compile code whether it was written in vi, emacs, Notepad, or an IDE. Perhaps try mandating that "Hello, World!" be done in a basic text editor and then make some recommendations for other editing programs afterwards....
anyway, my $.02
P.S. Keep Mum about chapter 376 or the lads'll have yer guts fer garters
Jae + i + ex
= J i x. Wouldn't this most likely be the key, whatever the encryption form?
just sayin', is all...
But does it play .ogg?
Wouldn't Bill Gates prefer to buy something that represented a product that was actually better than his? Has he ever USED OO.org? Try typing in special characters using the keypad some time. Will it shift the cursor back and print nothing? print the character and delete the one before it? Work as planned? Do nothing at all? Call the space-aliens and tell them earth is ripe for the plucking as everyone struggles to use the bloated file formats? It's a mystery!
What I do wonder, however, is how to handle color words that are arguably nonprimary (in terms of frequency) but nevertheless in common parlance and not synthesized from objects that share their color. The word "Teal" in particular comes to mind--it applies uniquely to a color, and is used when it would be more accurate than saying just "blue" or "green" and avoids the construction blue-green or green-blue (which I believe disqualify a color-term from being basic). After all, if "pink" which is easily described as a mixture of white and red, is primary, why not a mix of green and blue?
Admittedly, no other examples come immediately to mind--some other words unique to colors like "mauve" and "chartreuse" arguably describe shades as opposed to ranges, unlike the basic color terms, and are presumably used much less frequently. But what criterion excludes "teal" or similiar words from being basic color categories?
I've had Ubuntu installed for ages--installation went smooth as butter--on a second 250GB hard drive with 200G of NTFS scratch space (for use by my first hard drive's Windows installation). I've heard some very good things about Debian and, as I've had a few issues with Ubuntu (can't seem to install the video drivers correctly, though I've heard this is a problem specifically with the Hoary release--stuck at a blurry non-native resolution--largely I just want something somewhat more bare bones), I've spent some time trying to overwrite the existing Linux installation with Sarge Debian, only to find that it just. will. not. do. it. The installer can't mount the second hard drive. period. It'll mount the first and primary (NTFS-formatted, Windows booting) hard drive just fine and offer to overwrite the whole shebang, but even disconnecting that hard drive and connecting the second as the only and primary device, it can't mount the thing. Googling, reading TFM, etc. all seem to provide some promising leads as far boot paramters, etc.,but nothing seems to pan out. My working theory is that the 2.4 kernel just can't mount a drive of that size (there seems to be evidence to support this on older versions of 2.4, 2.4.12 and earlier, I belive, though I imagine that Sarge would be using the latest available release), and that this explains the disparity between the 2.6-based Ubuntu installation and the 2.4 Debian non-installation. Although I'd really like to give this "dream OS" a shot, I'm very tempted to skip it and just go with Gentoo, especially since it's alleged to have a very good build for AMD64. Insight from the
Frankly, the feel of actually holding a book one's hand, being able to carry it around, pick it up and put it down at leisure, is a lot of what makes books worth reading. Additionally, not having to worry about whether it will actually "work" (let alone trouble from any kind of protection that might prevent you from accessing it short of the language its written in), just makes books a no brainer. There's just something pleasant about having a stack of books (not to mention its easier on the eyes to have pages to flip), and I for one am perfectly happy with the current system and would not mind seeing it continue in perpetuity.
You're quite right about the distinction between semantics and sytnax. I honestly don't know enough about Chinese to knwo whether or not different tones actually represent different parts of speech (as in English "thought" the noun and "thought" the verb conjugation), in which case they would be syntactically significant. However, like I said, I don't know enough about Chinese to know whether or not this actually happens.
...and credit to the GGP (sorry. I'll stop spamming the thread now).
....With Credit to the GP
I'll be honest, I wasn't aware of the existence of Firewire 800, and that does reduce my confusion somewhat, certainly (that and that I *think* there are older Macs with Firewire but not USB2.0, in which case the former would have better data transfer rates). So yes, it certainly warrants mention by Ars, and they were right to point it out in the review. One thing I would point out, though, is that after what will prbably be an initial massive file transfer, songs will be being added single-by-single or album-by-album, which probably wouldn't tax either Firewire 800 or USB2.0's throughput overmuch (though the former would again be faster). In that case I think that Apple can probably justify the sacrifice of FW for USB (so they don't have to worry about PCs without FW compatibility) if adding FW would increase the size or cost of the nano beyond acceptable margins.
While overall I thought the article was informative, amusing, and well-written, I don't know why Ars brings up the issue of compatibity with FireWire as a reason to downgrade the nano's score (except perhaps for Apple's perennial refusal to put more than about 3 USB ports on its machines). The throughput on USB2.0 is 480Mbps as opposed to Firewire's 400MBps, and USB compatibility is all that's really needed to make the nano work with both Macs and even older PCS (although such models might not have USB2.0, they probably won't have IEEE 1394 ports either. Heck, I've got 3 on my desktop that I don't think have ever been put to good use). It seems like adding Firewire would essentially be redundant from a data transfer perspective and potentially increase the size of a devize of which part of the appeal springs from its ability to fit in a coin pocket. I'm not saying it's a bad review by any means, I'm just somewhat confused as to why Firewire--which has now been eclipsed by USB2.0 in terms of throughput--should remain a point of contention.
Sorry about the rant, but like I said, my prof did *not* like the Chomskyan view of linguistics.
Oh, and as far as the notion of the "language module" goes, it might be premature to call it a module, but there *is* neurophysiological evidence to suggest that humans are physically predisposed towards learning language from birth, so that much at the very least is tenable.
I did in fact miss that article, so my apologies for the rudeness. Nevertheless the point about processing soidum remains valid: the stuff's just really hard to get into its raw form because it's so very reactive. The article itself remains somewhat suspect as far as I'm concerned (that guy claiming hydrogen is a a greenhouse gas is absurd. The earth has *no* atmospheric hydrogen because it's too light to stay in the atmosphere). It looks to me more like shameless self-promotion.
Using sodium? Well I'm glad that you were able to watch at least one demonstration in chemistry. Sodium is an extraordinarily reactive metal that is *never* found in its natural state and, furthermore, is difficult to process by virtue of its high electropositivity (as with all akali/alkaline earth metals). The way to extract hydrogen from water is through electrolysis
and furthermore the extraction takes energy to perform. Hydrogen is a potential energy carrying medium, not a net source of energy. And high hydrogen density requires storing it in some sort of organic compound (like methanol) because metals tend to become brittle when large amounts of hydrogen pass through them (hence limiting its compressibility). Please don't allege the possibility of easy through sodium or some other equally absurd magic bullet lest we be unable to persuade people of the actual merits of its use.
Even ignoring that, though, I'm not convinced the Xbox 360 has overcome all of the original Xbox's issues. It is still big. It is still not styled the way the Japanese expect a console to be styled.
certainly "racism" is too harsh but I think your own contentions support the idea that there is just some inherent resistance to Western notions of videogaming in Japan. There's nothing inherently "wrong" with this kind of attitude; People like what they like, but as a matter of cultural difference yes, Microsoft is facing an uphill battle. The XBox is hardly what I would call "big" considering the kind of hardware in it (that is, relative to the size of my desktop), and frankly I think white looks ugly on hardware (IMHO! I am NOT trying to take a stab at Apple). But if these sorts of considerations are inverted in a foreign market, then albeit "protectionism" or "racism" may be an incorrect moniker, but cultural resistance definitely may hurt the 360 in Japan.
And that's very interesting that Sony has such a good rep in Japan. My own experience with / perception of Sony products has always been that there are a few products that actually see a great deal of quality control (the PSP, Trinitron monitors, etc.), but that part of the tradeoff of Sony's ubiquitous presence in electronics is a certain lack of quality and reliability relative to other or more specialized brands. I may be wholly incorrect about this but I usually passively avoid Sony products all things being equal (though not to the extent I'll turn down a well-reviewed product or a good price advantage).
But some of the Doom zombies don't even have heads, they just rise headless off the floor. Therefore it stands to reason that the head is a non-critical part of a Doom zombie.
Some good points about the linearity of the engine. On a personal note: remember the part in Nova Prospekt with the "set up the guns and survive" motif? Though it wasn't too difficult by setting up blocxking boxes, what I really wanted to do was get up on the railing above the hole thing--which, using every single available barrel and box, was possible by building a tall (if rickety) pyramid. After doing all that work, that invisible wall up there remains the most frustrating one I have ever encountered. I realize we can't expect every game to be Deus Ex, and for the most part linearity is helpful in a game with expansive environments--anyone remember looking around frantically for the next way to go in Dark Forces?--but when they place such an emphasis on physics and environment manipulation, and then do their best to limit what you can do with it, it makes you lose a great deal of faith.
which is nonsense, of course. Americans actually enunciate the letters of the English language better than the English ever do. Is it really so difficult to pronounce the second "r" in "rather," or any other such word with a final "r?" If push comes to shove, I think I'll accept the elongation of short as simply a regional phenomenon (America too, of course, possesses a variety of different accents, and I'm naturally biased towards the variety spoken on the East and West coasts), but this constant omission of voiced consonants (what's the pronunciation difference between "barth" and "bath?" is there one?) truly represents a serious breach of the rules of spoken English. Are the English more articulate and does an English accent often convey a sense of education and culture? Indubitably. Can Churchill reasonably claim that his English better represents the language. Not at all.
Thanks for the clarification on that. I've noticed them on my school's CRTs as well (and of course always heard that CRTs have the 3 e- guns, but naturally I didn't bother to do any actual research, this is after all /.), and don't know if they're trinitrons (which I'd always heard touted as decent CRTs, and I find the lines kinda of a pain), hence I made some poor assumptions. ah well.
I've found that I much prefer my LCd for gaming (less eyestrain, no noticeable ghosting, just all around better look. And what do I care about color reproduction in an action game? It's more than close enough). However, people will argue about issues like these for decades, so let me be more specific: Many CRTS, including the 21" Trinitron I'm using right now, have clearly visible black lines where the different electron gun beams don't overlap, that persist throughout all applications and seriously cheapen the look of the image. Latency gets to be less and less of an issue all the time (and I'd call it done with), but stuff like this persists indefinitely.