Yawn, another schmuck who has to convince himself that the money spent on his HD setup was worth it.
I've got a 1080p display, HDDVD (via laptop & HDMI) and BluRay (PS3), and ya know what? I don't give a damn about HD. The quality improvement (and yes, there is a difference) doesn't fucking matter to me. There's so little thats actually WORTH buying, that the quality of the picture is a moot point.
But go on with your elitist attitude about how fucking special you are and how anyone who doesn't agree that HD is the most amazing thing in the world is just a kid who doesn't know any better.
Of course, I'm also in the camp that thinks the Wii is every bit as as good as the PS3 and 360, because graphics don't matter as much to me as content, which pisses other elitists off as well. I'd guess from your posting that you see the Wii as a toy, and think that "real" gamers won't touch it.
RIAA: track record of suing their own customers, based on "evidence" gathered via pretty shady means MS: doesn't regularly sue their own customers (their competitors, sure, but not random joe off the street)
Failure of vista: Not the only money maker that MS has. Also not their only market. Failure of music sales: only thing the riaa has.
The local library has very little selection (part of being a small town). What selection they do have is very dated. So, I now just buy books rather than going to libraries. Over the years I've accumulated enough to fill a half-dozen bookshelves, almost all of which I've read, and am continually buying more. Several of my friends have similar sized libraries of their own, although most of their libraries dominated by science fiction.
Estate sales are fun, you can get boxes upon boxes of books really cheap, sort through them for the ones you want, and donate the rest to the local library to help them out, or sell them to a used book store and often break even.
I'm trying to find a small house: couple bedrooms (one for an office), kitchen (eat-in is fine, don't need a separate dining room), couple bathrooms, living room, and a 2 car garage (truck for when its cold, motorcycle when its not, and room for my woodworking hobby).
Can't be found around here. All the older, smaller homes have been bought by property management companies to use as rentals, while the builders have gone on to $180k+ 2500+ sq ft homes. Average income for the county? $27k. Average income for the town isn't much better at about $30k
And the builders are bitching that they're not selling houses anymore.
Hard to say. Vista box is core 2 duo, xp64 box is core duo, and difference in clock speed as well. That said, the vista machine didn't seem any faster than the older xp 64 machine, so I guess I'd interpret that to be noticeably slower.
I'd guess there'd be a quite a few members of the armed forces that would not blindly follow orders to kill their fellow citizens. The police, on the other hand, would probably see it as an excuse to finally play with all their toys.
Either way, I doubt any sort of armed revolt will happen in my lifetime, since the majority of my countrymen are happy as long as they can watch "reality" tv shows. Sure, there'll be the occasional localized riot, or the odd lunatic or two trying to blow stuff up, but I see my countrymen, in general, as too apathetic for any sort of nation-wide revolt -- which, my opinion, is a good thing, since there's a lot that can be done to fix our problems before resorting to that sort of violence. On the other hand, we've had a civil war before, so we're by no means immune from that sort of violence either.
The group of native americans withdrawing from treaties, rejecting US citizenship, and trying to form an actual nation (instead of just being a "nation" on paper) is far more interesting than those shows, but is getting very little media attention.
If you visit a few of the better US universities -- especially those with good science & engineering programs -- you'll find little of the fundamentalist "science-is-bad-everything-we-need-to-know-is-in-this-book-right-here" mentality. Its not really as prevalent as the media makes it out to be. My experience has been that the West coast and the North East have less of that nonsense than other places, while the South and Midwest have more of it (the section referred to as the "Bible Belt" especially). Those are generalities, and there are exceptions, of course. Huntsville, AL has a decent engineering university, and is basically a city full of engineers. Rolla, MO is squarely in the middle of the bible belt, but because of the engineering university there is fairly sane (just don't go too far out of town). I'd suggest visiting a few schools with your son, deciding if you like the area, and explaining to your son that the Americans you'll find at engineering / science universities aren't *quite* as crazy as the media makes the typical American appear. Besides which, better than half of the students at most science & engineering universities are foreign students as well - predominantly from China, Japan, India, former soviet-bloc countries, and of course other countries as well, although not nearly as many.
There's been a mass revolt in public opinion of this administration, and many people voted for democrats for the first time in their lives last year to give us a democrat-controlled congress with the hopes that they'd move towards impeachment and would use congress' power to put the brakes on Bush's policies and power grabs. What they received in return was a democrat controlled congress that's happy to continue to act as a rubber-stamp while making a few speeches to give the appearance of resistance.
At this point, I think most people are a) too scared of the government* to do anything and b) holding out some hope that there's only a few months left and we'll have someone else in charge before too much more damage can be done.
*"Too scared of the government" doesn't mean an armed uprising, but merely people are beginning to watch what they say, lest they be deemed an "extremest" and marked as a "potential domestic terrorist", since there have been bills passed to study the "problem" of dissenting opinion (although its phrased "radical extremism" it is fairly clearly an attempt to find way to hang the "domestic terrorist" label on those that disagree with the government). To me, that is far more troubling than the guy with his hunting rifle being afraid the police or army would kick his ass in an armed revolt. I won't make any tinfoil-hat claims that the government is going to be sending random people to Guantanamo because of what they posted on the internet, but they can make things like air travel virtually impossible for people, based on no evidence that would hold up in our courts, and no chance of a day in court ever happening because they won't answer to anyone about why someone's on the no-fly list, all in the name of "national security". While I have no personal experience with, nor have I heard any first-hand accounts of, life in the former Soviet Union, the squelching of dissent and the fear of being seen as "out of line" sounds as if we're heading towards a situation very much like what I was told the former Soviet Union was like.
DO NOT COPY US. It will take years to undo the damage this administration has done to the US, and most of the damage will likely never be completely undone. Point and mock if you must, but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.
I think thats the key. DDR (or the Wii, or whatever) can serve as the kick in the butt to get things going (even if just mentally). Once motivation is there, more traditional methods are probably more effective.
But the components all had their standard markings, and the kits provided actual schematics as well as the "this piece goes on the board at location A" instructions. If you wanted to learn as you went along, you could. If you didn't want to learn, you could get by with just blindly following the instructions.
I dabble in electronics as a hobby. I enjoy amateur radio, again, as a hobby. I do not have the knowledge to sit down and design a 1.5 KW CW & SSB HF amplifier starting from a blank sheet of paper. I CAN sit down with the old Heathkit & its instructions and figure out what the parts are doing enough to bring a dead kit back to life without resorting to the brute force method of blindly replacing components until it works.
Like most things in life, what you get out of your projects and hobbies is directly related to the amount of effort you put into them. If you put no effort into it, then a heathkit kit was probably pretty useless. But if you put effort into it, you could learn a lot from them.
As I said, My experiences with XP 64 were limited, and with systems that I did not set up or maintain. I suspect the instability was a result of bad drivers (probably beta / early-release drivers) but since I do not know 100% one way or the other what the cause of the instability was, I won't make any claims as to how usable XP 64 is.
I've just noticed that Vista 64 has been (again, my experience) much, much more stable than the 32 bit version.
The only commercial I've seen about it has been via Dish network, saying the switch is coming "but dish network subscribers won't notice any difference unless you're also using rabbit ears for local stations" and then goes on to try to sell their local channels (additional fee, of course) that are "available in most areas"
About the only time I watch something that isn't DVR'd though is the occasional football (american) or football (rest of the world) game. Since I usually skip commercials, maybe there have been more, but the dish network commercial seems to have been a recent thing -- last month or so.
Vista's 64 bit incarnation seems to be much, much, much better than its 32 bit sibling. Having two machines at home with Vista Ultimate (64 bit) and two at work (Ultimate, 32 bit) - the home machines, with more demands than Visual Studio and MS Office, and an oddball mix of hardware, have had nary a hiccup. The work machines, using MS Office, and Visual Sudio (compiling the same programs as the home machine, since I take work home with me), have performance and memory issues that cause a couple crashes a week, despite being much higher-end than my home machines, and having no strange hardware. 64 bit driver support is there for most components developed in the last couple of years, although some third parties (Logitech, I'm looking at you) were slow in releasing drivers.
If you're using critical hardware thats more than a couple years old, you should probably not move to vista -- but if you have hardware made by a major company within the last year or two, finding drivers shouldn't be much of an issue.
I can't say much about 64 bit XP - the few times I dealt with it were nightmares of instability, but since I didn't set those machines up or use them on a regular basis, I can't say if the cause was the OS or badly kludged together sets of drivers.
Very true. Boeing is going to get shafted on this, while companies that didn't spend the money to do the R&D will be able to price themselves low enough to get the production contracts while still making very nice product. Hopefully the bid writers at Boeing saw it coming and obtained enough funding that Boeing doesn't end up losing money on the R&D.
The shuttle isn't the only launch platform the US has. Its the only one for manned missions, yes, but for launching satellites, the air force has been fairly active over the years out at Vandenberg AFB. Just a guess, but I'd put money on the air force being able to launch most GPS, communications, or spy satellites.
IIRC space.com has a list of launches and their acknowledged payloads.
I don't care about "stopping the machine". I think its quite funny, actually.
Then again, the last CD I bought was in '99, the last DVD I bought was in '00, and the last movie I went to see in the theatre was '97. I have satellite tv, which I'll flip on to watch the Americas' Cup (Yacht racing), F1, Champ, WRC, or the occasional NASCAR race (for the two or three road courses they run each year), and to have the classic cartoons on (Top Cat, Tom & Jerry, Jetsons, Flintstones, and the like) as background noise. I'm also one of those boring old Luddites that listens to the radio (AM & FM, not satellite) for traffic and weather, and nothing else.
Modern "entertainment" is rubbish. Even the "independent" rubbish.
But watching the "entertainment" companies blunder about trying to control technology they don't understand, and angst-filled teens trying to justify copyright infringement -- well, that is comedy gold.
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Yawn, another schmuck who has to convince himself that the money spent on his HD setup was worth it.
I've got a 1080p display, HDDVD (via laptop & HDMI) and BluRay (PS3), and ya know what? I don't give a damn about HD. The quality improvement (and yes, there is a difference) doesn't fucking matter to me. There's so little thats actually WORTH buying, that the quality of the picture is a moot point.
But go on with your elitist attitude about how fucking special you are and how anyone who doesn't agree that HD is the most amazing thing in the world is just a kid who doesn't know any better.
Of course, I'm also in the camp that thinks the Wii is every bit as as good as the PS3 and 360, because graphics don't matter as much to me as content, which pisses other elitists off as well. I'd guess from your posting that you see the Wii as a toy, and think that "real" gamers won't touch it.
Please?
True. I should have said "record companies" instead of the RIAA.
I doubt he'd say much.
RIAA: track record of suing their own customers, based on "evidence" gathered via pretty shady means
MS: doesn't regularly sue their own customers (their competitors, sure, but not random joe off the street)
Failure of vista: Not the only money maker that MS has. Also not their only market.
Failure of music sales: only thing the riaa has.
I haven't been in a library in several years.
The local library has very little selection (part of being a small town). What selection they do have is very dated. So, I now just buy books rather than going to libraries. Over the years I've accumulated enough to fill a half-dozen bookshelves, almost all of which I've read, and am continually buying more. Several of my friends have similar sized libraries of their own, although most of their libraries dominated by science fiction.
Estate sales are fun, you can get boxes upon boxes of books really cheap, sort through them for the ones you want, and donate the rest to the local library to help them out, or sell them to a used book store and often break even.
No kidding.
I'm trying to find a small house: couple bedrooms (one for an office), kitchen (eat-in is fine, don't need a separate dining room), couple bathrooms, living room, and a 2 car garage (truck for when its cold, motorcycle when its not, and room for my woodworking hobby).
Can't be found around here. All the older, smaller homes have been bought by property management companies to use as rentals, while the builders have gone on to $180k+ 2500+ sq ft homes. Average income for the county? $27k. Average income for the town isn't much better at about $30k
And the builders are bitching that they're not selling houses anymore.
Hard to say. Vista box is core 2 duo, xp64 box is core duo, and difference in clock speed as well. That said, the vista machine didn't seem any faster than the older xp 64 machine, so I guess I'd interpret that to be noticeably slower.
I'd guess there'd be a quite a few members of the armed forces that would not blindly follow orders to kill their fellow citizens. The police, on the other hand, would probably see it as an excuse to finally play with all their toys.
Either way, I doubt any sort of armed revolt will happen in my lifetime, since the majority of my countrymen are happy as long as they can watch "reality" tv shows. Sure, there'll be the occasional localized riot, or the odd lunatic or two trying to blow stuff up, but I see my countrymen, in general, as too apathetic for any sort of nation-wide revolt -- which, my opinion, is a good thing, since there's a lot that can be done to fix our problems before resorting to that sort of violence. On the other hand, we've had a civil war before, so we're by no means immune from that sort of violence either.
The group of native americans withdrawing from treaties, rejecting US citizenship, and trying to form an actual nation (instead of just being a "nation" on paper) is far more interesting than those shows, but is getting very little media attention.
Its better than listening to the generic top-40 crap on the radio, or the hip-hop crap most people use for ringtones.
If it works, and he's happy with it, why not?
The key, of course, being if he's happy. Just because its "better" doesn't mean what you're currently doing has be changed.
Well, it *IS* Zonk...
If you visit a few of the better US universities -- especially those with good science & engineering programs -- you'll find little of the fundamentalist "science-is-bad-everything-we-need-to-know-is-in-this-book-right-here" mentality. Its not really as prevalent as the media makes it out to be. My experience has been that the West coast and the North East have less of that nonsense than other places, while the South and Midwest have more of it (the section referred to as the "Bible Belt" especially). Those are generalities, and there are exceptions, of course. Huntsville, AL has a decent engineering university, and is basically a city full of engineers. Rolla, MO is squarely in the middle of the bible belt, but because of the engineering university there is fairly sane (just don't go too far out of town). I'd suggest visiting a few schools with your son, deciding if you like the area, and explaining to your son that the Americans you'll find at engineering / science universities aren't *quite* as crazy as the media makes the typical American appear. Besides which, better than half of the students at most science & engineering universities are foreign students as well - predominantly from China, Japan, India, former soviet-bloc countries, and of course other countries as well, although not nearly as many.
There's been a mass revolt in public opinion of this administration, and many people voted for democrats for the first time in their lives last year to give us a democrat-controlled congress with the hopes that they'd move towards impeachment and would use congress' power to put the brakes on Bush's policies and power grabs. What they received in return was a democrat controlled congress that's happy to continue to act as a rubber-stamp while making a few speeches to give the appearance of resistance.
At this point, I think most people are a) too scared of the government* to do anything and b) holding out some hope that there's only a few months left and we'll have someone else in charge before too much more damage can be done.
*"Too scared of the government" doesn't mean an armed uprising, but merely people are beginning to watch what they say, lest they be deemed an "extremest" and marked as a "potential domestic terrorist", since there have been bills passed to study the "problem" of dissenting opinion (although its phrased "radical extremism" it is fairly clearly an attempt to find way to hang the "domestic terrorist" label on those that disagree with the government). To me, that is far more troubling than the guy with his hunting rifle being afraid the police or army would kick his ass in an armed revolt. I won't make any tinfoil-hat claims that the government is going to be sending random people to Guantanamo because of what they posted on the internet, but they can make things like air travel virtually impossible for people, based on no evidence that would hold up in our courts, and no chance of a day in court ever happening because they won't answer to anyone about why someone's on the no-fly list, all in the name of "national security". While I have no personal experience with, nor have I heard any first-hand accounts of, life in the former Soviet Union, the squelching of dissent and the fear of being seen as "out of line" sounds as if we're heading towards a situation very much like what I was told the former Soviet Union was like.
My request still applies.
A request for the rest of the world:
DO NOT COPY US. It will take years to undo the damage this administration has done to the US, and most of the damage will likely never be completely undone. Point and mock if you must, but PLEASE learn from our mistakes.
I think thats the key. DDR (or the Wii, or whatever) can serve as the kick in the butt to get things going (even if just mentally). Once motivation is there, more traditional methods are probably more effective.
They gave you the engine in one piece? You didn't have to build it? :)
Actually, the airplane kit is a new one to me, thanks for giving me something to do today instead of work (its dead at the office today)
But the components all had their standard markings, and the kits provided actual schematics as well as the "this piece goes on the board at location A" instructions. If you wanted to learn as you went along, you could. If you didn't want to learn, you could get by with just blindly following the instructions.
I dabble in electronics as a hobby. I enjoy amateur radio, again, as a hobby. I do not have the knowledge to sit down and design a 1.5 KW CW & SSB HF amplifier starting from a blank sheet of paper. I CAN sit down with the old Heathkit & its instructions and figure out what the parts are doing enough to bring a dead kit back to life without resorting to the brute force method of blindly replacing components until it works.
Like most things in life, what you get out of your projects and hobbies is directly related to the amount of effort you put into them. If you put no effort into it, then a heathkit kit was probably pretty useless. But if you put effort into it, you could learn a lot from them.
As I said, My experiences with XP 64 were limited, and with systems that I did not set up or maintain. I suspect the instability was a result of bad drivers (probably beta / early-release drivers) but since I do not know 100% one way or the other what the cause of the instability was, I won't make any claims as to how usable XP 64 is.
I've just noticed that Vista 64 has been (again, my experience) much, much more stable than the 32 bit version.
The only commercial I've seen about it has been via Dish network, saying the switch is coming "but dish network subscribers won't notice any difference unless you're also using rabbit ears for local stations" and then goes on to try to sell their local channels (additional fee, of course) that are "available in most areas"
About the only time I watch something that isn't DVR'd though is the occasional football (american) or football (rest of the world) game. Since I usually skip commercials, maybe there have been more, but the dish network commercial seems to have been a recent thing -- last month or so.
Vista's 64 bit incarnation seems to be much, much, much better than its 32 bit sibling. Having two machines at home with Vista Ultimate (64 bit) and two at work (Ultimate, 32 bit) - the home machines, with more demands than Visual Studio and MS Office, and an oddball mix of hardware, have had nary a hiccup. The work machines, using MS Office, and Visual Sudio (compiling the same programs as the home machine, since I take work home with me), have performance and memory issues that cause a couple crashes a week, despite being much higher-end than my home machines, and having no strange hardware. 64 bit driver support is there for most components developed in the last couple of years, although some third parties (Logitech, I'm looking at you) were slow in releasing drivers.
If you're using critical hardware thats more than a couple years old, you should probably not move to vista -- but if you have hardware made by a major company within the last year or two, finding drivers shouldn't be much of an issue.
I can't say much about 64 bit XP - the few times I dealt with it were nightmares of instability, but since I didn't set those machines up or use them on a regular basis, I can't say if the cause was the OS or badly kludged together sets of drivers.
Very true. Boeing is going to get shafted on this, while companies that didn't spend the money to do the R&D will be able to price themselves low enough to get the production contracts while still making very nice product. Hopefully the bid writers at Boeing saw it coming and obtained enough funding that Boeing doesn't end up losing money on the R&D.
The shuttle isn't the only launch platform the US has. Its the only one for manned missions, yes, but for launching satellites, the air force has been fairly active over the years out at Vandenberg AFB. Just a guess, but I'd put money on the air force being able to launch most GPS, communications, or spy satellites.
IIRC space.com has a list of launches and their acknowledged payloads.
Commercial ships are under way a surprising amount of time -- they're docked only long enough to unload/load.
Is it that big of a deal to you that someone is trying to not offend someone who may not celebrate Christmas?
I don't care about "stopping the machine". I think its quite funny, actually.
Then again, the last CD I bought was in '99, the last DVD I bought was in '00, and the last movie I went to see in the theatre was '97. I have satellite tv, which I'll flip on to watch the Americas' Cup (Yacht racing), F1, Champ, WRC, or the occasional NASCAR race (for the two or three road courses they run each year), and to have the classic cartoons on (Top Cat, Tom & Jerry, Jetsons, Flintstones, and the like) as background noise. I'm also one of those boring old Luddites that listens to the radio (AM & FM, not satellite) for traffic and weather, and nothing else.
Modern "entertainment" is rubbish. Even the "independent" rubbish.
But watching the "entertainment" companies blunder about trying to control technology they don't understand, and angst-filled teens trying to justify copyright infringement -- well, that is comedy gold.