provided you can find and stay in the one "sweet" spot in the auditorium. Without the people around you yelling, with all the bum notes that the band can't re-record later and the auditory damage resulting from being too close to too many kilowatt-rated speaker stacks.
Give me a nice, controllable, predictable and comfortable listening experience any day.
If people prefer what they're used to, rather than what's "good" then there's no real reason for those same people to want HDTV. In fact the industry could probably make just as good a job of marketing Low def. or "cable" as it's known in many places.
Obviously the main thrust is to increase profits, so there is a need to make new TV sets sound as if their features are somehow better than those on the old models. However, it does make you wonder how much of the uptake is due to actual, visual appreciation of the better picture (even though the content is the same old crap) and how much is merely advertising?
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season.
The lesson to be learned from that is to ignore the vocal, but insignificant (in terms of advertising revenue) fan base and go for mass appeal. In that respect, most people hated it - me included. It wasn't SF, it was cowboys and indians. Everyone saw through the veneer of space-ships (gotta be the biggest cliche out there) and recognised an embarrassingly bad script underneath.
If you want a good premise for a Star Trek series, lose the warp-drive, transporters, phasers and other familiar paraphernalia and look at it from a new angle: say that of a lone-trader/explorer who takes contracts from the federation or maybe a political angle, rather than the, frankly, tired old weapons-based blast 'em approach. There's huge scope in the ST universe, it just needs writers with skill and imagination to use it in a different, more engaging, way.
The original series was all about shoot it, kill it, destroy it.
I had hoped that,as a society we had matured past this fear of the unknown or different. Maybe not.
However, to produce a more thoughtful, TNG-like series does require more writing talent that simply the ability to produce cheap thrills from excess body-counts (heroes: are you listening? thought not). In the current climate, the money people might just decide to fall back on the old blood and thunder recipe just to scrape some extra revenue, rather than pick up the chance to produce good television.
started "can I speak to Mr Alexander Bell".... Hello Mr. Bell, how are you today. I wonder if you would take a few minutes to answer some questions... hangs up in disgust
The thing about school is that it biggest tacit lesson is to give the expected answer - not the correct one. As the OP, I use this exact question (along with how many colours in a rainbow) as an example.
It goes down great with the kids, though the teachers I know, hate it.
But some times of the year Venus isn't visible at night and some (not necessarily the same) times of the month, the moon isn't visible at night.
So there may well be nights when the ISS is the brightest thing up there.
Some say Venus is visible during the day (tho' I've not seen it myself).
If the ISS does turn out to be brighter than Venus - which varies in brightness considerably, depending on where in it's orbit it is - relative to earth, then it will be interesting to see if it's visible during daytime passes, too.
And the very first thing the users will do is write down the encryption key, so they don't forget it.
After all, what's the point of having all your data on a disk that you can't access? It's far more likely that the user(s) will forget the key, than for the drive to fail. However, the result will be the same in both cases: inaccessible data and if past experience is anything to go by, no backups (which would also have to be encrypted, again with the isssue over keys).
Until the average PC user radically rethinks their attitude towards their computers - whether at work or play, this seems just one step too far.
Typical, now I suppose we'll all just have to buy the new "improved" nuclear weapons.
There is a serious side to this. The US hasn't actually built any nukes, stuck 'en on a rocket, fired them and had a successful BOOM for well over 40 years. That must be coming up for 2 generations of rocket / nuclear scientists and the third generation is now in training. That means that the "new guys" will learn from people who didn't have any practical experience and in turn learned from the people who actually *did it* nearly 50 years ago.
Faslane has been known and talked about for decades. It was "made famous" when the british navy started getting Trident missiles for it's nuclear submarines - the BBC among others regualrly reported on the protests at "... the Faslane nuclear base..."
Even when you get up there, it's presence is announced by the miles of razor-wire and notices telling people to keep out.
This is a second rate piece of sensationalist reporting, by people who do know better, but have such a low regard for their readers, that they think we're all stupid.
As it is, the UK has a far more effective way of concealing it's bases from Google Earth - why do you think it's cloudy for 99% of the time?
It's simpler than that
on
Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1
It's because computers do digital better than TV does analog.
In this case better means cheaper, more flexible and easier to distribute. Once content became digital, as opposed to only existing on videotape, and computers got connected - which is what made digital better than broadcast, the rest was inevitable.
That way it'll encourage them to write efficient implementations.
If you give your programmers an 8-way 4GHz m/b with 64GB of memory (if sucha thing exists yet), they'll use all the processing power in dumb, inefficient algorithms, just because the development time is reduced. While those of us in the real world have to get by on "normal" machines.
When we complain about poor performance, they just shrug and say "well it works fine on my nuclear-powered, warp-10, so-fast-it-can-travel-back-in-time" machine"
However, if they were made to develop the software on boxes that met the minimum recommended spec. for their operating system, they'd have to give some thought to making the code run efficiently. If it extended the development time and reduced the frequency of updates, well that wouldn't be a bad thing either.
Re:It's just been reviewed - not good
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
Generally I find that there's a negative correlation between a review and my enjoyment of a film. However, the clip they showed of this did not impress. Basically it was a bunch of over-muscled people (mostly men) in daft costumes - not quite wearing their underpants on the outside, but you get the picture, spouting cliches and trying to look "hard". The 1970's "batman and robin" sprang to mind. There was even a "bat" type character in there, too. I was waiting for a "holy guacamole, batman" but it never came.
It's just been reviewed - not good
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 1
I had a teacher in one subject for five years, who didn't ever get to know my name. There were only 20-ish in the class (one lesson a day, 5 days a week). I *did* attend the classes, just sat there keeping quiet, never volunteering anything or rocking the boat.
Makes you wonder about the amount of attention some of these people have.....
The people who are motivated to contribute to Joomla only do so as it meets their personal needs to write intricate, arcane, obscure code that will impress their friends - who are doing the same.
If anyone actually wants to use this, in ways more complicated than point-click-publish, they will have to open it up, look desperately for any comments (which either don't exist, are wrong, or weren't changed when the code was updated) or other clues about how it works.
If you put any financial cost on your time, it's far cheaper to buy a commercial product to produce the equivalent website than to spend time trying to bend Joomla to fit what you want.
In that respect as "free" open source, it's a manifest failure.
For all it's "friendly" facade, once you try to do anything with Joomla that's more complicated than selecting the modules you want to use, you have to get deep and dirty in XML, PHP, CSS and a whole mess of languages, undocumented code and interdependencies.
A couple of years ago I was attracted to Joomla as a way to quickly produce some professional looking websites. However, the logo I wanted to use was a different size from the standard Joomla template.
Just making this simply and obvious change meant I had to open up parts of the Joomla code and hack it - in trial-and-error ways, due to a total lack of documentation.
It may be better now, or maybe even documented (although lack of written descriptions is OSS's single, biggest weakness), but I was completely put off by this initial experience, that I never touched it again.
While it might be a nice platform for some tech-heads to show off their prowess amongst their peers, for casual users who just want to GET STUFF DONE it sucks fatally.
If the device is really as small as they say, it will be extremely easy to lose every digital thing you value in one careless moment.
This technology should kick-start the backup market as people will have to continually restore all their photos, music and movies every time they leave the last chip somewhere they forget about.
Hopefully the backup/restore device will be bigger (and static) so that it, too, doesn't get easily lost.
The article says they plan a demonstrator in LEO. This is the bit I don't understand`. A LEO satellite would only be useful for a few minutes every hour-and-a-half (and would be in darkness half the time, too). So it seems to me that this is fine for playing with the tech, but no use whatsoever for a commercial operation.
for a "grown-up" system I can't see how anything except a geostationary orbit would be practical, otherwise you have to have the power beam continually tracking your target (word used advisedly, considering other applications:-( ) and the costs to GEO are so much more than LEO that there's no way a commercial launcher will be anywhere close within 10 years - especially at the price per kg. this guy needs.
Sage said SBSP will never be cost comparable with the current going rate of 6 or 7 cents a kilowatt due to the enormous set-up costs
The proposer of this scheme also says that "there are times in the US when electricity is sold wholesale for close to a dollar a kilowatt" so it looks like this is the market they're going after.
For it to be viable, therefore, there would have to be many occasions when this spot price was reached. If that's the case, I'd prefer to go with ground based solar for my personal electricity supply, rather than being dependent on a single[1] satellite up there beaming energy in my general direction.
[1] we've all heard recently what happens if you have two satellites too close to each other - and these puppies aren't going to be small, either. So the number that could service a particular location would be quite small. Eggs? Baskets?
Text based O/s's are easy, just write down the command to run, include the runtime options and list the expected output.
With windows you have to capture a screenshot, point out which button to click on, whether it needs a double-click, right-click or dragging anything. Then you have to go through the whole process again for the next level of window/menu.
No wonder graphics based O?s's (or those with graphical front-ends) are so poorly understood and even more poorly administered - no-one has the time to create these bulky and sparse documents and they have even less time to update them when a new release comes out and changes everything.
Maybe now these children will start to realise that a large part of growing up is to do what you're told to. Hopefully they won't forget that lesson very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me a nice, controllable, predictable and comfortable listening experience any day.
Obviously the main thrust is to increase profits, so there is a need to make new TV sets sound as if their features are somehow better than those on the old models. However, it does make you wonder how much of the uptake is due to actual, visual appreciation of the better picture (even though the content is the same old crap) and how much is merely advertising?
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season.
The lesson to be learned from that is to ignore the vocal, but insignificant (in terms of advertising revenue) fan base and go for mass appeal. In that respect, most people hated it - me included. It wasn't SF, it was cowboys and indians. Everyone saw through the veneer of space-ships (gotta be the biggest cliche out there) and recognised an embarrassingly bad script underneath.
If you want a good premise for a Star Trek series, lose the warp-drive, transporters, phasers and other familiar paraphernalia and look at it from a new angle: say that of a lone-trader/explorer who takes contracts from the federation or maybe a political angle, rather than the, frankly, tired old weapons-based blast 'em approach. There's huge scope in the ST universe, it just needs writers with skill and imagination to use it in a different, more engaging, way.
I had hoped that,as a society we had matured past this fear of the unknown or different. Maybe not.
However, to produce a more thoughtful, TNG-like series does require more writing talent that simply the ability to produce cheap thrills from excess body-counts (heroes: are you listening? thought not). In the current climate, the money people might just decide to fall back on the old blood and thunder recipe just to scrape some extra revenue, rather than pick up the chance to produce good television.
started "can I speak to Mr Alexander Bell" .... Hello Mr. Bell, how are you today. I wonder if you would take a few minutes to answer some questions ... hangs up in disgust
It goes down great with the kids, though the teachers I know, hate it.
But some times of the year Venus isn't visible at night and some (not necessarily the same) times of the month, the moon isn't visible at night. So there may well be nights when the ISS is the brightest thing up there.
If the ISS does turn out to be brighter than Venus - which varies in brightness considerably, depending on where in it's orbit it is - relative to earth, then it will be interesting to see if it's visible during daytime passes, too.
After all, what's the point of having all your data on a disk that you can't access? It's far more likely that the user(s) will forget the key, than for the drive to fail. However, the result will be the same in both cases: inaccessible data and if past experience is anything to go by, no backups (which would also have to be encrypted, again with the isssue over keys).
Until the average PC user radically rethinks their attitude towards their computers - whether at work or play, this seems just one step too far.
There is a serious side to this. The US hasn't actually built any nukes, stuck 'en on a rocket, fired them and had a successful BOOM for well over 40 years. That must be coming up for 2 generations of rocket / nuclear scientists and the third generation is now in training. That means that the "new guys" will learn from people who didn't have any practical experience and in turn learned from the people who actually *did it* nearly 50 years ago.
Even when you get up there, it's presence is announced by the miles of razor-wire and notices telling people to keep out.
This is a second rate piece of sensationalist reporting, by people who do know better, but have such a low regard for their readers, that they think we're all stupid.
As it is, the UK has a far more effective way of concealing it's bases from Google Earth - why do you think it's cloudy for 99% of the time?
In this case better means cheaper, more flexible and easier to distribute. Once content became digital, as opposed to only existing on videotape, and computers got connected - which is what made digital better than broadcast, the rest was inevitable.
If you give your programmers an 8-way 4GHz m/b with 64GB of memory (if sucha thing exists yet), they'll use all the processing power in dumb, inefficient algorithms, just because the development time is reduced. While those of us in the real world have to get by on "normal" machines.
When we complain about poor performance, they just shrug and say "well it works fine on my nuclear-powered, warp-10, so-fast-it-can-travel-back-in-time" machine"
However, if they were made to develop the software on boxes that met the minimum recommended spec. for their operating system, they'd have to give some thought to making the code run efficiently. If it extended the development time and reduced the frequency of updates, well that wouldn't be a bad thing either.
Generally I find that there's a negative correlation between a review and my enjoyment of a film. However, the clip they showed of this did not impress. Basically it was a bunch of over-muscled people (mostly men) in daft costumes - not quite wearing their underpants on the outside, but you get the picture, spouting cliches and trying to look "hard". The 1970's "batman and robin" sprang to mind. There was even a "bat" type character in there, too. I was waiting for a "holy guacamole, batman" but it never came.
I just saw the BBC review on their NEWS TV channel (review available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/review/7926222.stm), one word springs to mind: turkey
Makes you wonder about the amount of attention some of these people have.....
If anyone actually wants to use this, in ways more complicated than point-click-publish, they will have to open it up, look desperately for any comments (which either don't exist, are wrong, or weren't changed when the code was updated) or other clues about how it works.
If you put any financial cost on your time, it's far cheaper to buy a commercial product to produce the equivalent website than to spend time trying to bend Joomla to fit what you want.
In that respect as "free" open source, it's a manifest failure.
A couple of years ago I was attracted to Joomla as a way to quickly produce some professional looking websites. However, the logo I wanted to use was a different size from the standard Joomla template.
Just making this simply and obvious change meant I had to open up parts of the Joomla code and hack it - in trial-and-error ways, due to a total lack of documentation.
It may be better now, or maybe even documented (although lack of written descriptions is OSS's single, biggest weakness), but I was completely put off by this initial experience, that I never touched it again.
While it might be a nice platform for some tech-heads to show off their prowess amongst their peers, for casual users who just want to GET STUFF DONE it sucks fatally.
After all, what's japanese for "but it's shiny and pretty and I WANT ONE NOW
lesson #2, trust no-one with your data
lesson #3 disaster recovery capability only exists after it's been tested
lesson #4 backups are useless unless you can prove you can recover from them
This technology should kick-start the backup market as people will have to continually restore all their photos, music and movies every time they leave the last chip somewhere they forget about.
Hopefully the backup/restore device will be bigger (and static) so that it, too, doesn't get easily lost.
for a "grown-up" system I can't see how anything except a geostationary orbit would be practical, otherwise you have to have the power beam continually tracking your target (word used advisedly, considering other applications :-( ) and the costs to GEO are so much more than LEO that there's no way a commercial launcher will be anywhere close within 10 years - especially at the price per kg. this guy needs.
Sage said SBSP will never be cost comparable with the current going rate of 6 or 7 cents a kilowatt due to the enormous set-up costs
The proposer of this scheme also says that "there are times in the US when electricity is sold wholesale for close to a dollar a kilowatt" so it looks like this is the market they're going after.
For it to be viable, therefore, there would have to be many occasions when this spot price was reached. If that's the case, I'd prefer to go with ground based solar for my personal electricity supply, rather than being dependent on a single[1] satellite up there beaming energy in my general direction.
[1] we've all heard recently what happens if you have two satellites too close to each other - and these puppies aren't going to be small, either. So the number that could service a particular location would be quite small. Eggs? Baskets?
With windows you have to capture a screenshot, point out which button to click on, whether it needs a double-click, right-click or dragging anything. Then you have to go through the whole process again for the next level of window/menu.
No wonder graphics based O?s's (or those with graphical front-ends) are so poorly understood and even more poorly administered - no-one has the time to create these bulky and sparse documents and they have even less time to update them when a new release comes out and changes everything.
Maybe now these children will start to realise that a large part of growing up is to do what you're told to. Hopefully they won't forget that lesson very quickly.