5400 may be enough to simply record. But it's not enough to record and watch at the same time.
The TiVo 10-250 comes with a 5400 rpm drive, and is able to record two high definition streams simultaneously while watching at the same time. The Mac Mini is clearly not designed primarily as a PVR, and is no match for a HDTiVo. But that has nothing to do with drive speed. Moreover, one of the strengths of the Mini is its quietness. 5400 rpm drives tend to make less noise than faster drives.
I think they'll do OK on the boom box because it is Apple-branded. But I don't think it will be a huge seller; Apple is really a bit late moving into this market. Many other manufacturers have iPod dock/speaker combos out now, some pretty good. Apple really should have released this thing a year ago.
What if the culture is already violent, so such things seem routinely normal?
Causation is not concerned with how things "seem." However, it can depend upon other factors. It is certainly conceivable that violent entertainments might have little effect upon somebody from our culture, who is accustomed to such things, but alter the behavior of somebody from a more peaceful culture who has not been previously exposed to such entertainments.
These arguments seem kind of stupid in the light of the fact that the incidence of violence has been steadily decreasing as videogames have gotten more realistically violent, and decreasing particularly sharply in precisely the age group that most plays videogames. So on the level of society, there is a negative correlation between violent games and real-world violence.
So while we can't say for sure whether or not video games actually increase propensity for violence, what we can say is that any such effect--if it exists at all--must be small relative to other social, cultural, and demographic factors that impact violent behavior.
Actually, if you know your Kant, you know that causality can never be proven. This is beaten into every psychology grad student. Consider a man who lights a match in a gas-filled room. Was the explosion caused by: The match, the man, the gas, the oxygen in the room, the laws of thermodynamics, or any of the other countless variables that went into this event?
Causality does not imply a single cause--it is possible to have a chain of causation, in which every single step is causal.
Thus, science never looks for causality. The best we can do is say what variables correlate with the event.
As a scientist, I most certainly look for causation, and so does every scientist I know. Maybe this is something people tell themselves in "soft" sciences like psychology?
And correlation isn't so bad. If you find that X and Y directly correlate, and you want to decrease Y, and it happens that you can deliberately decrease X, you have thus discovered a new technique.
Actually, this is what scientists mean by "causation." On the other hand, if X and Y correlate, but altering X does not alter Y, then the hypothesis of causality is disproved, and you have mere correlation.
Nor does it imply the absence of causation, which is the unspoken subtext behind the "correlation != causation" posts which invariably spring up whenever this subject surfaces. What correlation undoubtedly does do, unless you have a total lack of curiosity about the nature of the world, is to suggest interesting avenues of research.
However, it only does this if the correlation is in some sense surprising or counterintuitive. But we expect that people who are inclined to engage in violence will also tend to enjoy violent behavior. So this is a correlation that tells us nothing. The only interesting question is which way the causal link goes.
There has been some research that has attempted to address the question of causality, but the work that I've read has been of astonishingly low quality, scientifically speaking. The biggest problem I've seen is failure to control for nonspecific arousal. In other words, if people play an exciting game, are they more likely to be aggressive (nobody seems to really measure violence; aggression is generally taken as a surrogate for violence, which is another serious flaw) because of the violence in the game, or because they are generally excited? A real scientific study would have a nonviolent but equally exciting control stimulus (maybe a sports event), and would verify equivalent levels of arousal by monitoring heart rate and blood pressure. My impression is that the people who do this kind of research have already made up their minds, and are not seriously trying to test the hypothesis.
Well, causation is not the proper word. Is the experience of many violent games a contributing factor to violence in later years? Does it predispose a person to violence? Does it make a person more tolerant of violence? More apathetic regarding violence? more accepting of violence?
Actually, "causation" is the proper word. If playing a video game or watching pro football increases the probability that somebody will engage in violence, then that is causation. Absolute certainty is not required.
On the other hand, if violent people happen to enjoy violent videogames and sports, but don't show any increase in their already-high probability of engaging in violence after enjoying these entertainments, then that is correlation without causality
The scientific method is not true in any real absolute sense. It is a popular methodology - admittedly, a pretty damned useful one - but it cannot be said to be universally applicable
Perhaps not; it certainly make no claim to be. But it is the appropriate methodology to study in a course on science, for the same reason that courses on automotive repair tend to focus on cars rather than, say, methods of landscaping.
It's all a waste. Slashdot is news for nerds. This is really a US centric debate, and quite a lot of the slashdot readership is simply not in any way interested in the current US culture war.
Actually, I've found that even though I live in the US, there are quite a few threads on Slashdot that do not interest me. I've come up with a unique solution: I don't read them.
n light of my open-mindedness and thirst for scientific possibilities, I would like the religious right to accept the possibility that, instead of some omnicient being intelligently constructing the universe, it might have been a giant 3 headed alien working on his or her 3rd grade science project.
From what I understand from the article, the bill had already been amended from its original form and only would have required teachers to state that "not all scientists agree about evolution or the origin of species" (which is technically true, though potentially misleading).
"Technically true" is not good enough. Judge Jones in the Dover case did a rather good job of explaining why selective use of a "technically true" disclaimer is impermissible.
This paragraph singles out evolution from the rest of the science curriculum and informs students that evolution, unlike anything else that they are learning, is "just a theory," which plays on the "colloquial or popular understanding of the term ['theory'] and suggest[ing] to the informed, reasonable observer that evolution is only a highly questionable 'opinion' or a 'hunch.'" [....] this paragraph is both misleading and creates misconceptions in students about evolutionary theory by misrepresenting the scientific status of evolution and by telling students that they should regard it as singularly unreliable, or on shaky ground.
It would be hard to find anything that absolutely all scientists agree upon. So if this sort of a statement is attached to natural selection, it needs to also be attached to virtually every other statement in every single science textbook.
Since VHS was cheaper, porn movies were available on it faster. Once VHS became the format on which you could get porn, the battle was over.
This is another popular myth. As it happens, I remember visiting an early video store in Times Square (this was a video sales store; rental had not yet begun to take off) in New York at a time when beta and VHS were still close to neck and neck. It had a huge porn section, extensively stocked with titles in VHS and beta. Beta held out pretty well against the cheaper VHS, trailing in market share by maybe 10% or so, until rental shops started to take off. Because VHS had the larger market share, rental shops tended to stock it better, which led people to favor VHS, which led the shops to further increase the VHS bias. Porn may have been a factor at this stage, but not because it was unavailable on beta--the shops were just catering to the greater demand for VHS.
Yes, every time some potential vulnerability for the Mac turns up, the journalists always call the anitvirus software makers, who always say the same the same thing, "See, you Mac users are going to need our product any day now! Buy today so you'll be ready!"
What they don't say is this: Currently Mac problems caused by antivirus software far outnumber problems caused by viruses, spyware, root kits, and trojan horses put together.
Mostly false. For example, beta introduced 2 hour recording within a few months of VHS, long before VHS obtained market dominance. And I well remember buying my first VHS recorder, again well before the beta-VHS battle was resolved. I ended up returning it because I was unbhappy with the slow transport controls and the low quality picture on pause. I exchanged it for a Sony with much faster transport and a better picture on pause.
For a much more balanced account of the competition, see this reference
Basically, beta mostly had the lead on features and quality, but only by a few months. VHS had the advantage of lower price. This did not trouble Sony, because Sony had traditionally offered high-end, high-margin products rather than trying to dominate market share. But Sony had imagined that the primary use of the VCR would be time-shifting.
In the United States, in the late 1970s, three-quarters of all VCR owners bought no pre-recorded tapes. [15] 9/9/78, 10/16/78, 4/12/79. In 1983, several years after the beginning of the tape-rental business, 40% of VCR owners never used such tapes and only 8% identified them as "important."
What Sony failed to anticipate was the emergence of the rental market. Rental shops tended to favor the system with greater market share--which led people to buy more VHS machines--which increased the preference of rental shops for the VHS format. As documented in the reference above, the failure of beta in the marketplace coinceded with the explosion of the video rental market.
Or maybe, because Betamax didn't offer somthing that VHS did at the beginning - Betamax only had one hour tapes to (home) record on. By the time it had longer, VHS had too big a market to be stopped.
This is a misreading of what happened with Betamax. IIRC, the marketshare figures went something like this:
Year 1: 40% VHS 60% Beta (Beta was out first) Year 2: 50% VHS 50% Beta (Tie -- either format could win!) Year 3: 90% VHS 10% Beta (Cheap VHS players destroy Beta quickly)
No, they didn't. It was a slow slide for beta, with VHS gaining a bit every year. Here are the real sales percentages by year year beta VHS 1975 100 -- 1976 61 39 1977 56 44 1978 40 60 1979 39 61 1980 34 66 1981 32 68 1982 28 72 1983 25 75 1984 20 80
has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological protection measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title
The problem is that industry lawyers will doubtless be able to present statistics showing that most HD-capable TVs have HDCP-capable TVs (because with HD dropping in price, older TVs will quickly be swamped), and will argue in addition that the device provides only a "limited" improvement in picture quality.
But the rightful recipient of an encrypted message is entitled by virtue of being the person to whom the message is addressed to decrypt that message. So it would be up to the courts to prove that the owner of a HD-DVD was not the rightful recipient of the encrypted movie stored on the disc.
Absolutely. According to the DMCA, you are perfectly entitled to decrypt for personal use the information of a HD-DVD that you own. You just aren't allowed to tell anybody else how to do it, or to give or sell them anything to help them do it, or even to tell them where to look to find information about how to do it.
What I find most interesting is that watching a computer animation of a caveman being stomped by a giant dinosaur foot still fires off the "threat-detector" in the amygdala. It would be interesting to see what happens in the amygdala in response to even less realistic "violence," say a Road Runner cartoon.
Does slapstick humor require amygdala activation to be funny?
The HDCP requirement is very old news. Upsampling DVD players have the same requirement so it isn't a surpise that the HD media would have it.
Which is even more ridiculous, because upsampling DVD players don't add any actual information to the signal. The last thing a pirate would want would be an upsampled DVD signal, because it would just increase the file size.
This is annoying because even TVs that have HDCP compliant inputs generally have only one of them, and HDCP compliant switchboxes are pricey.
You are right; this is not the comic book generation, it's their kids. The people who grew up reading comic books write pretty well. Comic books have some slang, but the spelling and grammar aren't bad. More importantly, they are clear and comprehensible.
A lot of parents these days would be grateful if they could get their kids to read comic books. When it comes to learning to write, it is far more important to read a lot than to read quality literature.
Actually, the article cited does not really substantiate this; indeed, there is very little real information. It tries to make a great deal out of statements by Sony that Sony makes money on every PS2 sold--but that likely includes income from game sales over the life of the unit, not just profits on the hardware itself.
Slashdot Mirror
5400 may be enough to simply record. But it's not enough to record and watch at the same time.
The TiVo 10-250 comes with a 5400 rpm drive, and is able to record two high definition streams simultaneously while watching at the same time. The Mac Mini is clearly not designed primarily as a PVR, and is no match for a HDTiVo. But that has nothing to do with drive speed. Moreover, one of the strengths of the Mini is its quietness. 5400 rpm drives tend to make less noise than faster drives.
I think they'll do OK on the boom box because it is Apple-branded. But I don't think it will be a huge seller; Apple is really a bit late moving into this market. Many other manufacturers have iPod dock/speaker combos out now, some pretty good. Apple really should have released this thing a year ago.
What if the culture is already violent, so such things seem routinely normal?
Causation is not concerned with how things "seem." However, it can depend upon other factors. It is certainly conceivable that violent entertainments might have little effect upon somebody from our culture, who is accustomed to such things, but alter the behavior of somebody from a more peaceful culture who has not been previously exposed to such entertainments.
These arguments seem kind of stupid in the light of the fact that the incidence of violence has been steadily decreasing as videogames have gotten more realistically violent, and decreasing particularly sharply in precisely the age group that most plays videogames. So on the level of society, there is a negative correlation between violent games and real-world violence.
So while we can't say for sure whether or not video games actually increase propensity for violence, what we can say is that any such effect--if it exists at all--must be small relative to other social, cultural, and demographic factors that impact violent behavior.
Actually, if you know your Kant, you know that causality can never be proven. This is beaten into every psychology grad student. Consider a man who lights a match in a gas-filled room. Was the explosion caused by:
The match,
the man,
the gas,
the oxygen in the room,
the laws of thermodynamics, or
any of the other countless variables that went into this event?
Causality does not imply a single cause--it is possible to have a chain of causation, in which every single step is causal.
Thus, science never looks for causality. The best we can do is say what variables correlate with the event.
As a scientist, I most certainly look for causation, and so does every scientist I know. Maybe this is something people tell themselves in "soft" sciences like psychology?
And correlation isn't so bad. If you find that X and Y directly correlate, and you want to decrease Y, and it happens that you can deliberately decrease X, you have thus discovered a new technique.
Actually, this is what scientists mean by "causation." On the other hand, if X and Y correlate, but altering X does not alter Y, then the hypothesis of causality is disproved, and you have mere correlation.
Nor does it imply the absence of causation, which is the unspoken subtext behind the "correlation != causation" posts which invariably spring up whenever this subject surfaces. What correlation undoubtedly does do, unless you have a total lack of curiosity about the nature of the world, is to suggest interesting avenues of research.
However, it only does this if the correlation is in some sense surprising or counterintuitive. But we expect that people who are inclined to engage in violence will also tend to enjoy violent behavior. So this is a correlation that tells us nothing. The only interesting question is which way the causal link goes.
There has been some research that has attempted to address the question of causality, but the work that I've read has been of astonishingly low quality, scientifically speaking. The biggest problem I've seen is failure to control for nonspecific arousal. In other words, if people play an exciting game, are they more likely to be aggressive (nobody seems to really measure violence; aggression is generally taken as a surrogate for violence, which is another serious flaw) because of the violence in the game, or because they are generally excited? A real scientific study would have a nonviolent but equally exciting control stimulus (maybe a sports event), and would verify equivalent levels of arousal by monitoring heart rate and blood pressure. My impression is that the people who do this kind of research have already made up their minds, and are not seriously trying to test the hypothesis.
Well, causation is not the proper word.
Is the experience of many violent games a contributing factor to violence in later years? Does it predispose a person to violence? Does it make a person more tolerant of violence? More apathetic regarding violence? more accepting of violence?
Actually, "causation" is the proper word. If playing a video game or watching pro football increases the probability that somebody will engage in violence, then that is causation. Absolute certainty is not required.
On the other hand, if violent people happen to enjoy violent videogames and sports, but don't show any increase in their already-high probability of engaging in violence after enjoying these entertainments, then that is correlation without causality
The scientific method is not true in any real absolute sense. It is a popular methodology - admittedly, a pretty damned useful one - but it cannot be said to be universally applicable
Perhaps not; it certainly make no claim to be. But it is the appropriate methodology to study in a course on science, for the same reason that courses on automotive repair tend to focus on cars rather than, say, methods of landscaping.
It's all a waste. Slashdot is news for nerds. This is really a US centric debate, and quite a lot of the slashdot readership is simply not in any way interested in the current US culture war.
Actually, I've found that even though I live in the US, there are quite a few threads on Slashdot that do not interest me. I've come up with a unique solution: I don't read them.
n light of my open-mindedness and thirst for scientific possibilities, I would like the religious right to accept the possibility that, instead of some omnicient being intelligently constructing the universe, it might have been a giant 3 headed alien working on his or her 3rd grade science project.
Sounds like a potential convert to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!"
"Technically true" is not good enough. Judge Jones in the Dover case did a rather good job of explaining why selective use of a "technically true" disclaimer is impermissible.
It would be hard to find anything that absolutely all scientists agree upon. So if this sort of a statement is attached to natural selection, it needs to also be attached to virtually every other statement in every single science textbook.
Since VHS was cheaper, porn movies were available on it faster. Once VHS became the format on which you could get porn, the battle was over.
This is another popular myth. As it happens, I remember visiting an early video store in Times Square (this was a video sales store; rental had not yet begun to take off) in New York at a time when beta and VHS were still close to neck and neck. It had a huge porn section, extensively stocked with titles in VHS and beta. Beta held out pretty well against the cheaper VHS, trailing in market share by maybe 10% or so, until rental shops started to take off. Because VHS had the larger market share, rental shops tended to stock it better, which led people to favor VHS, which led the shops to further increase the VHS bias. Porn may have been a factor at this stage, but not because it was unavailable on beta--the shops were just catering to the greater demand for VHS.
Yes, every time some potential vulnerability for the Mac turns up, the journalists always call the anitvirus software makers, who always say the same the same thing, "See, you Mac users are going to need our product any day now! Buy today so you'll be ready!"
What they don't say is this: Currently Mac problems caused by antivirus software far outnumber problems caused by viruses, spyware, root kits, and trojan horses put together.
For a much more balanced account of the competition, see this reference
Basically, beta mostly had the lead on features and quality, but only by a few months. VHS had the advantage of lower price. This did not trouble Sony, because Sony had traditionally offered high-end, high-margin products rather than trying to dominate market share. But Sony had imagined that the primary use of the VCR would be time-shifting.
What Sony failed to anticipate was the emergence of the rental market. Rental shops tended to favor the system with greater market share--which led people to buy more VHS machines--which increased the preference of rental shops for the VHS format. As documented in the reference above, the failure of beta in the marketplace coinceded with the explosion of the video rental market.
Or maybe, because Betamax didn't offer somthing that VHS did at the beginning - Betamax only had one hour tapes to (home) record on. By the time it had longer, VHS had too big a market to be stopped.
This is a popular myth, but false. Beta matched VHS for length within 5 months. Beta's loss to VHs was a gradual slide over years
This is a misreading of what happened with Betamax. IIRC, the marketshare figures went something like this:
Year 1: 40% VHS 60% Beta (Beta was out first)
Year 2: 50% VHS 50% Beta (Tie -- either format could win!)
Year 3: 90% VHS 10% Beta (Cheap VHS players destroy Beta quickly)
No, they didn't. It was a slow slide for beta, with VHS gaining a bit every year. Here are the real sales percentages by year
year beta VHS
1975 100 --
1976 61 39
1977 56 44
1978 40 60
1979 39 61
1980 34 66
1981 32 68
1982 28 72
1983 25 75
1984 20 80
has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological protection measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title
The problem is that industry lawyers will doubtless be able to present statistics showing that most HD-capable TVs have HDCP-capable TVs (because with HD dropping in price, older TVs will quickly be swamped), and will argue in addition that the device provides only a "limited" improvement in picture quality.
But the rightful recipient of an encrypted message is entitled by virtue of being the person to whom the message is addressed to decrypt that message. So it would be up to the courts to prove that the owner of a HD-DVD was not the rightful recipient of the encrypted movie stored on the disc.
Absolutely. According to the DMCA, you are perfectly entitled to decrypt for personal use the information of a HD-DVD that you own. You just aren't allowed to tell anybody else how to do it, or to give or sell them anything to help them do it, or even to tell them where to look to find information about how to do it.
What I find most interesting is that watching a computer animation of a caveman being stomped by a giant dinosaur foot still fires off the "threat-detector" in the amygdala. It would be interesting to see what happens in the amygdala in response to even less realistic "violence," say a Road Runner cartoon.
Does slapstick humor require amygdala activation to be funny?
The HDCP requirement is very old news. Upsampling DVD players have the same requirement so it isn't a surpise that the HD media would have it.
Which is even more ridiculous, because upsampling DVD players don't add any actual information to the signal. The last thing a pirate would want would be an upsampled DVD signal, because it would just increase the file size.
This is annoying because even TVs that have HDCP compliant inputs generally have only one of them, and HDCP compliant switchboxes are pricey.
Such an adapter would have to break the encryption--which is, of course, a violation of DMCA.
You are right; this is not the comic book generation, it's their kids. The people who grew up reading comic books write pretty well. Comic books have some slang, but the spelling and grammar aren't bad. More importantly, they are clear and comprehensible.
A lot of parents these days would be grateful if they could get their kids to read comic books. When it comes to learning to write, it is far more important to read a lot than to read quality literature.
Actually, the article cited does not really substantiate this; indeed, there is very little real information. It tries to make a great deal out of statements by Sony that Sony makes money on every PS2 sold--but that likely includes income from game sales over the life of the unit, not just profits on the hardware itself.
I can't find anything on Amazon except those stupid bundles where you have to buy a bunch of crappy games and other stuff you don't want.
Could that be because the Xbox360 actually exists, and isn't just an idea.
Can't prove it by me; I've been on a waiting list since before release.