screw up the roundness and even the convexness of the surface
You did say it was silly, but I still need to comment:)
The roundness is much less screwed up than that of a tennis ball. What seems to us as high mountains and wild oceans in fact does nothing more than make the earch raspy and moist.
Earth equatorial radius: 6,378 km Mt. Everest: 9 km Marianas Trench: -11 km
20 km / 6381 km = 0.003134305
Tennisball radius: 3.175 cm 0.003134305 * 3.175 cm = 0.009 cm
Earth polar radius: 6,356 km
6,378 km / 6,356 km = 1.003461296
3.175 cm * 1.003461296 = 3.185989615 cm 3.185989615 cm - 3.175 cm = ~ 0.01 cm
Thickness of atmosphere left as exercise for the reader. The reader is then also encouraged to meditate about the wisdom of blowing crap into the same.
How else would you define it without adding lots of "unless" and "except" clauses?
I think I'd like to see the condition that it must have been created from the planetary disc of the star, but that would be too hard to police and anyway not practical for planets of other stars than the sun.
But if I would spend 500-600 for a console plus HD player, why wouldn't I take the PS3 which is a better console and has it all in one box instead of a clunky extension*? Sounds like a risky strategy to me.
* Or two. Xbox360 + huge power supply + huge HDDVD extension sure is not easy to fit into the living room
I got my hopes up with the Wii announcements due on the first day (industry-only) of the Leipzig Games Convention, bought tickets for the first public day and took off a day from work. Only to find out a little later that there will no playable machinese (German). NINTENDO, I WANT MY Wii!!
Vorbis has been proven to be of much higher quality than MP3 (usually found to be on par with AAC) in the same size of a file
Proven? I love the concept of ogg vorbis (even bought a pretty expensive iAudio player because it handles both ogg and flac) and did some quite extensive tests using my quite good headphones (AKG K501) and stereo (Rotel amps, TDL speakers). I encoded Mike Watt's Contemplating the Engine Room, which has beautiful solo e-bass lines, into ogg vorbis (oggenc) and mp3 (lame) in various quality settings.
To be honest, all of them sucked. The harmonics simply vanished to a large degree. Yes, the base frequencies were still there, the instrument didn't disappear, you could still follow the notes. But the specific sound of the instrument, which is created by the harmonics, was gone. I now encode in flac. People who say that they can't tell the difference between mp3 and CD don't know what to listen for (harmonics, spatial information), don't know how the instruments actually sounds in the first place, or listen to music that can do without the fine details.
But: while lame lost the harmonics, oggenc also added a nasty hiss, even at the highest quality setting. (And this setting makes the use of a lossy format pretty questionable, as it is not that much smaller than flac.)
While nothing has changed about the general gist of this article, it is not entirely true anymore. After the simple definition you quoted, they further refine and then end with
A psychopath who tortures and murders solely to satisfy his personal demons but who videotapes the event to create a reliveable record of the experience has produced a snuff film.
Using that definition, their strong statement
No snuff films. Some clever fakes, yes. But no real product.
Thanks! I've been waiting for that since I read the first part of the book. (A few years ago out of interest for what these people are raving about on/.)
These TightPod cases aren't for iPods, and so to complain that Apple's actions are infringing on the ability of a company to properly represent the purpose of their product is moot.
Oh, I didn't RTFA, I was at work and it's/. and all. I just had assumed that it is an iPod case because otherwise calling it *pod* seemed rather stupid. In this case I very much agree with the excellent points you made.
This might be useful in many situations, but if a 3rd party offers me, as a consumer, a protective case for particular mp3 players, I very much would like them to be able to call it "iPodCase", and "iAudioCase" instead of "gFruitProt" or "mKoreaBag". No need for originality here:)
I'm sure they thought about the iPod allusion. But if Apple doesn't want this, they shouldn't use a common word as part of their product name, but should have called the iPod, dunno, Ekiga or Wii.
I could maybe follow Apple if the product was called iPodTight or something. But even then, it's a fricking iPod protector, why should the producer of TightPod not refer to it?
SM64 was a wonderful introduction into 3D gaming. I remember when I came home with my brand-new N64 and started up the game. I had it figured out within a few minutes, and soon it felt like I had never done anything else. I was just running around and trying stuff and feeling good for hours before I even was interested in starting the game in earnest.
As a goodbye to my GC I'm planning on playing a few classics I never had time for and am currently in the middle of Metroid Prime. I love it. Yes, it feels kind of awkward in the beginning, but it handles superbly once you stop treating it as a FPS. There's a reason why Nintendo calls it a first-person adventure game. I think the rather indirect controls, HUD delay and so on perfectly translate that you are stuck inside a big robot, which of course doesn't feel like running around in a ninja suit.
check in the iBook, then not even show up for the flight
I had numerous flights being delayed because one guy checked in luggage but then did't show up, which lead to his luggage having to be unloaded. That's standard procedure in Germany, not in US?
Chi Gong, Tai Chi Chuan and other traditional Chinese body techniques (plus examples from India, etc.) Besides the health benefits that anyone wo has practiced for a while can attest to (yeah, that's anecdotal, doesn't matter to me; there are also some formal studies that, while not conclusive, point in this direction), here's one interesting tidbit:
The tradition of Tai Chi I study teaches a great deal about the lumbar vertebrae, namely about their role in the dynamics of the body, how they move and so on. At one time I purchased the abridged version of the canonical anatomy atlas in my country (Thieme, Taschenatlas der Anatomie, 6th edition 1991) and found that the main text contradicted those teachings by stating that the lumbar vertebrae cannot rotate in relation to each other (with the spine being the axis). However there was a footnote stating that recent studies showed that in fact they can rotate up to 7 degrees per vertebra.
Which strikes me as especially odd since this is quite a lot - 35 degrees in total. On the other hand, most people's are stiff and in fact can't rotate, or very little. And this seems to be a common problem of the atlas: it describes well the properties of dead or handicapped bodies, but misses the mark all the time when the dynamics of living bodies are concered, which is consistently much better understood by my teachers who draw on the tradition that was passed down mostly by practice over hundreds of years.
Also, the storage space on a Wii is limited and games can't be copied, so if you buy a lot of these you'll fill up all memory and will have to either delete games (the ones you paid for!) or buy a new Wii (just because of the memory!) in order to get more.
The Revolution has 512 MB of flash memory, allowing for some initial storage space. The system also has a slot for SD memory cards, which are widely used in digital cameras and can hold a greater amount of data. Most importantly, Iwata mentioned, were the USB ports that are built into the Revolution "so practically any storage method can be used".
Totally not true. Yes, it is an upscaled GC in essence, but the GC was very good (see Resident Evil 4) and lacked in a few specific departments: it had not enough RAM and the CPU wasn't fast enough to fully feed the GPU. This has been been corrected.
The GC has 24 MB RAM. Nothing is known about the amount in the Wii, but given current RAM prices it is safe to assume a lot more. Heck, even the very low "specs" that were allegedly leaked recently (ars thinks they are fake) have it at 64 MB. The "leaked specs" give a 729 MHz CPU for the Wii, which seems far too low given current technology, but even that would be a significant improvement over GC.
With that info, let's revisit the GC specs. Notice the Image Processing Functions:
Fog
Subpixel anti-aliasing
8 hardware lights
4 pixel pipelines (4 x 162 MHz = 648 MPixels)
hardware nurbs
Alpha blending
Virtual texture design
Multi-texturing, bump mapping
Environment mapping
MIP mapping
Bilinear filtering
Trilinear filtering
Anisotropic filtering
Real-time hardware texture decompression (S3TC)
Real-time decompression of display list
Hardware 3-line flicker filter
Some of these haven't been used much on the GC due to aforementioned problems. On the Wii they will be and likely some more.
Now, that surely doesn't make the Wii a PS3, but it's misleading to say the Wii is only "marginally more powerful" than the GC. Also, have you watched the E3 video of, say, Mario Galaxy? It's way better than the GC.
Slashdot Mirror
Props for linking to Steve Albini. Courtney Does the Math is not bad either
Just FYI, at MediaMarkt in Germany you can only preorder one that costs 600 EUR. I don't know which model it is, the ad didn't say.
screw up the roundness and even the convexness of the surface
:)
You did say it was silly, but I still need to comment
The roundness is much less screwed up than that of a tennis ball. What seems to us as high mountains and wild oceans in fact does nothing more than make the earch raspy and moist.
Earth equatorial radius: 6,378 km
Mt. Everest: 9 km
Marianas Trench: -11 km
20 km / 6381 km = 0.003134305
Tennisball radius: 3.175 cm
0.003134305 * 3.175 cm = 0.009 cm
Earth polar radius: 6,356 km
6,378 km / 6,356 km = 1.003461296
3.175 cm * 1.003461296 = 3.185989615 cm
3.185989615 cm - 3.175 cm = ~ 0.01 cm
Thickness of atmosphere left as exercise for the reader. The reader is then also encouraged to meditate about the wisdom of blowing crap into the same.
How else would you define it without adding lots of "unless" and "except" clauses?
I think I'd like to see the condition that it must have been created from the planetary disc of the star, but that would be too hard to police and anyway not practical for planets of other stars than the sun.
RTFSummary: "Earth's moon is drifting away from us more than an inch every year"
But if I would spend 500-600 for a console plus HD player, why wouldn't I take the PS3 which is a better console and has it all in one box instead of a clunky extension*? Sounds like a risky strategy to me.
* Or two. Xbox360 + huge power supply + huge HDDVD extension sure is not easy to fit into the living room
I got my hopes up with the Wii announcements due on the first day (industry-only) of the Leipzig Games Convention, bought tickets for the first public day and took off a day from work. Only to find out a little later that there will no playable machinese (German). NINTENDO, I WANT MY Wii!!
Vorbis has been proven to be of much higher quality than MP3 (usually found to be on par with AAC) in the same size of a file
Proven? I love the concept of ogg vorbis (even bought a pretty expensive iAudio player because it handles both ogg and flac) and did some quite extensive tests using my quite good headphones (AKG K501) and stereo (Rotel amps, TDL speakers). I encoded Mike Watt's Contemplating the Engine Room, which has beautiful solo e-bass lines, into ogg vorbis (oggenc) and mp3 (lame) in various quality settings.
To be honest, all of them sucked. The harmonics simply vanished to a large degree. Yes, the base frequencies were still there, the instrument didn't disappear, you could still follow the notes. But the specific sound of the instrument, which is created by the harmonics, was gone. I now encode in flac. People who say that they can't tell the difference between mp3 and CD don't know what to listen for (harmonics, spatial information), don't know how the instruments actually sounds in the first place, or listen to music that can do without the fine details.
But: while lame lost the harmonics, oggenc also added a nasty hiss, even at the highest quality setting. (And this setting makes the use of a lossy format pretty questionable, as it is not that much smaller than flac.)
While nothing has changed about the general gist of this article, it is not entirely true anymore. After the simple definition you quoted, they further refine and then end withUsing that definition, their strong statement is not true anymore since the "Rotenburg Cannibal".
Thanks! I've been waiting for that since I read the first part of the book. (A few years ago out of interest for what these people are raving about on /.)
These TightPod cases aren't for iPods, and so to complain that Apple's actions are infringing on the ability of a company to properly represent the purpose of their product is moot.
/. and all. I just had assumed that it is an iPod case because otherwise calling it *pod* seemed rather stupid. In this case I very much agree with the excellent points you made.
Oh, I didn't RTFA, I was at work and it's
I know that cringing feeling :)
Apple is just forcing people to be original
:)
This might be useful in many situations, but if a 3rd party offers me, as a consumer, a protective case for particular mp3 players, I very much would like them to be able to call it "iPodCase", and "iAudioCase" instead of "gFruitProt" or "mKoreaBag". No need for originality here
I'm sure they thought about the iPod allusion. But if Apple doesn't want this, they shouldn't use a common word as part of their product name, but should have called the iPod, dunno, Ekiga or Wii.
I could maybe follow Apple if the product was called iPodTight or something. But even then, it's a fricking iPod protector, why should the producer of TightPod not refer to it?
can't imagine someone calling ...
My mom calls her CDs "cassettes"
Super Mario 64.
Metroid Prime.
Are you kidding me?
SM64 was a wonderful introduction into 3D gaming. I remember when I came home with my brand-new N64 and started up the game. I had it figured out within a few minutes, and soon it felt like I had never done anything else. I was just running around and trying stuff and feeling good for hours before I even was interested in starting the game in earnest.
As a goodbye to my GC I'm planning on playing a few classics I never had time for and am currently in the middle of Metroid Prime. I love it. Yes, it feels kind of awkward in the beginning, but it handles superbly once you stop treating it as a FPS. There's a reason why Nintendo calls it a first-person adventure game. I think the rather indirect controls, HUD delay and so on perfectly translate that you are stuck inside a big robot, which of course doesn't feel like running around in a ninja suit.
check in the iBook, then not even show up for the flight
I had numerous flights being delayed because one guy checked in luggage but then did't show up, which lead to his luggage having to be unloaded. That's standard procedure in Germany, not in US?
Do other languages/cultures suffer from the same difficulty? That alone might explain some of the discrepancy.
:)
German does. So no, it doesn't, sorry
Give me some examples, please.
Chi Gong, Tai Chi Chuan and other traditional Chinese body techniques (plus examples from India, etc.)
Besides the health benefits that anyone wo has practiced for a while can attest to (yeah, that's anecdotal, doesn't matter to me; there are also some formal studies that, while not conclusive, point in this direction), here's one interesting tidbit:
The tradition of Tai Chi I study teaches a great deal about the lumbar vertebrae, namely about their role in the dynamics of the body, how they move and so on. At one time I purchased the abridged version of the canonical anatomy atlas in my country (Thieme, Taschenatlas der Anatomie, 6th edition 1991) and found that the main text contradicted those teachings by stating that the lumbar vertebrae cannot rotate in relation to each other (with the spine being the axis). However there was a footnote stating that recent studies showed that in fact they can rotate up to 7 degrees per vertebra.
Which strikes me as especially odd since this is quite a lot - 35 degrees in total. On the other hand, most people's are stiff and in fact can't rotate, or very little. And this seems to be a common problem of the atlas: it describes well the properties of dead or handicapped bodies, but misses the mark all the time when the dynamics of living bodies are concered, which is consistently much better understood by my teachers who draw on the tradition that was passed down mostly by practice over hundreds of years.
And this is different from believing in God... how, exactly?
Dark Matter doesn't try to tell me whom to fuck or not.
Iwata said something else:
They've also had some employee turn-over over the decades
I'm sure that also contributed, but don't forget they had a very significant change of leadership.
Well at least you get the full picture, the above ars guy took the specs on face value, this is the one I had in mind.
Forgot the ars link
Totally not true. Yes, it is an upscaled GC in essence, but the GC was very good (see Resident Evil 4) and lacked in a few specific departments: it had not enough RAM and the CPU wasn't fast enough to fully feed the GPU. This has been been corrected.
The GC has 24 MB RAM. Nothing is known about the amount in the Wii, but given current RAM prices it is safe to assume a lot more. Heck, even the very low "specs" that were allegedly leaked recently (ars thinks they are fake) have it at 64 MB.
The "leaked specs" give a 729 MHz CPU for the Wii, which seems far too low given current technology, but even that would be a significant improvement over GC.
With that info, let's revisit the GC specs. Notice the Image Processing Functions:
- Fog
- Subpixel anti-aliasing
- 8 hardware lights
- 4 pixel pipelines (4 x 162 MHz = 648 MPixels)
- hardware nurbs
- Alpha blending
- Virtual texture design
- Multi-texturing, bump mapping
- Environment mapping
- MIP mapping
- Bilinear filtering
- Trilinear filtering
- Anisotropic filtering
- Real-time hardware texture decompression (S3TC)
- Real-time decompression of display list
- Hardware 3-line flicker filter
Some of these haven't been used much on the GC due to aforementioned problems. On the Wii they will be and likely some more.Now, that surely doesn't make the Wii a PS3, but it's misleading to say the Wii is only "marginally more powerful" than the GC. Also, have you watched the E3 video of, say, Mario Galaxy? It's way better than the GC.