I opted for a Mac Mini over an AppleTV when rebuilding my home entertainment setup.
Although the AppleTV has HDMI, component etc., it isn't fast enough to run the emulators I primarily want it for.
The Mac Mini has DVI video out, and the audio I/O is on combination optical digital/analog minijacks. The optical output is converted to co-axial S/PDIF using a M-Audio CO2, and the DVI and S/PDIF are combined into a HDMI signal using a Gefen adapter.
The same connectivity is available on your MacBook Pro, but it is a kludge, and the audio and DVI are on opposite sides so it's not very neat.
As someone points out below, this was supposed to be part of the promise of Firewire - but just like MLAN, it didn't deliver. And yeah, the only difference between modern "consumer" and "professional" connectors is DRM support.
The first step of using Lenslok involved you calibrating your screen while it showed you the letters "OK". This process was basically holding the Lenslok a given distance from the screen depending on the screen size.
When you could see them clearly, you typed "OK" and then two new letters appeared, which were the "Challenge" code. You then typed them in as they appeared through the Lenslok. By searching the memory for the strings used by the calibration routine, you could find the Lenslok code, and the two bytes that held "OK" during the calibration stage were reloaded with the unencrypted result, from where you could simply read it and type it in. The first Lenslok I received with OCP Art Studio wasn't even the right one for the product, and I felt awfully proud at the time that even though they refused to send me a new one (might have had something to do with me being eight years old, I still remember the pleading phone calls to Rainbird - basically British Telecom) I was still able to get into the software my dad had bought me for my birthday. He did eventually speak to them and get them to send us the matching Lenslok for the product, but by that time I had realised that it was easier to just skip it altogether by peeking at the memory. It was pretty unreliable at the best of times, and after a five minute load time off cassette, three failed attempts reset the machine.
Good times..
Legacy Intel Mac owners are more likely nonplussed by the fact that if there was any advantage to running Vista over XP, be it through Boot Camp / Parallels; and the licensing of Vista didn't already forbid this in most cases, then after a product scheduled for release in 2008 reaches End-Of-Life, they will be unsupported.
"There's not at all a problem with this," Chapman said. "We have total confidence in the integrity of the repairs but I'm telling you right now that your mind will have a hard time convincing your eyes."
I have to represent the SAM Coupé.
The logical evolution of the Spectrum, it could even emulate it perfectly (in 1989!).
Abject commercial failure, but it is the reason I am in this business at all
I have two, still fully working, and it has what is still my favourite keyboard of any machine ever.
I can't condense my feelings for this box of chips into a/. post. Thinking about it gets me embarrassingly emotional.
Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon are hugely important figures in my childhood.
The HD-DVD specification allows regioning to be added in the future. Also, that doesn't make an HD-DVD player a region-free DVD player: they are supposed to honour the region-locks of legacy DVD discs, so players are (supposed to be) already keyed for a particular region.
Would you be OK with the postal services opening your mail.....
I recently discovered that this is now the case in the UK.
When I was growing up, the post was sacrosanct, and in fact being the "Royal Mail", opening someone elses mail was technically an act of treason. (Another nugget of trivia relating to this is that Royal Mail vehicles are the only vehicles on the road allowed to disregard traffic lights - emergency services must have their sirens on to do this).
Anyway, sometimes I am sent data that is covered by the NNPT, but last year was informed by several overseas agencies that they now could not send me anything further until I had filled out the "waiver" stating that I had just reason to request that my mail not be opened by any Royal Mail employee. They forwarded me what is apparently now their "standard letter" for UK nationals needing to be posted sensitive information, which includes the line:
"The nature of our business requires that you treat our communications as private".
That was the easy part: actually finding out what to do with this letter was the hard part, and of course, phoning around I was greeted with incredulity, and accusations of being some sort of conspiracy theorist.
In the end I discovered, you have to inform the police, who give you the other bit of the form and then you send the whole thing off to the Royal Mail, and a week or so later you receive acknowledgement that your mail will not be opened without due cause.
In short, postal privacy in the United Kingdom became opt-in a few years ago, and you had better have strong justification for requesting it - otherwise you're probably giving them more reason to check you out. Nobody I have spoken to in the UK (excepting colleagues similarly affected) seems to know about this.
Don't ever post any variation of this bullshit again.
It was bad enough resorting to Digg et al on April 1st just not to be wholly uninformed.
(Note: Planning a worm/virus launch? Your sysadmin's newsfeeds will be full of shit on April 1st).
Thing is, it's over a week since I killed time on Digg because of./the1st. That's when I saw it on Digg, and even then I thought "This was on slashdot months ago, and it was old news back then."
DVD-A supports up to 96kHz.
Audio on your video DVD is at 48kHz.
Just how many commercial DVDs did you buy that have no video on them?
That's how relevant 96k is to the consumer. And you know what:
The studio the audio was mastered at did it at 48kHz. Duplicate the data or interpolate the values, there's no benefit.
Let's talk about bit-depth...
I have to say, I was a big fan of ATRAC. At the time, it was a "trick" to bounce to and from MD with your finished mixes. ATRAC compromises dynamics not unlike FM, and it was a quick test to see "how it sounds on radio".
But as for being dead - you should drop by a radio station recently - it has become the de facto standard for jingles:
Fast random access, rewritable and replayable without sonic degradation. Fits the bill very neatly.
ADAT is dead and buried as a tape format. The ADAT protocol that was introduced on the hardware is still the most convenient (and cost-effective) way to pipe multichannel audio around, and will (has already?) outlast the ADAT recording medium.
DCC has nothing to do with DAT, it was positioned as a competitor for MiniDisc, and lost out basically because you didn't have to rewind MiniDiscs. Fuck all commercial albums were released in either format.
And while I'm at it, SCMS was basically the precursor of HDCP, as far as I can tell, and was in a large part responsible for the failure of DAT as a consumer format.
Slashdot Mirror
I opted for a Mac Mini over an AppleTV when rebuilding my home entertainment setup.
Although the AppleTV has HDMI, component etc., it isn't fast enough to run the emulators I primarily want it for.
The Mac Mini has DVI video out, and the audio I/O is on combination optical digital/analog minijacks. The optical output is converted to co-axial S/PDIF using a M-Audio CO2, and the DVI and S/PDIF are combined into a HDMI signal using a Gefen adapter.
The same connectivity is available on your MacBook Pro, but it is a kludge, and the audio and DVI are on opposite sides so it's not very neat.
As someone points out below, this was supposed to be part of the promise of Firewire - but just like MLAN, it didn't deliver. And yeah, the only difference between modern "consumer" and "professional" connectors is DRM support.
The first step of using Lenslok involved you calibrating your screen while it showed you the letters "OK". This process was basically holding the Lenslok a given distance from the screen depending on the screen size.
When you could see them clearly, you typed "OK" and then two new letters appeared, which were the "Challenge" code. You then typed them in as they appeared through the Lenslok.
By searching the memory for the strings used by the calibration routine, you could find the Lenslok code, and the two bytes that held "OK" during the calibration stage were reloaded with the unencrypted result, from where you could simply read it and type it in.
The first Lenslok I received with OCP Art Studio wasn't even the right one for the product, and I felt awfully proud at the time that even though they refused to send me a new one (might have had something to do with me being eight years old, I still remember the pleading phone calls to Rainbird - basically British Telecom) I was still able to get into the software my dad had bought me for my birthday. He did eventually speak to them and get them to send us the matching Lenslok for the product, but by that time I had realised that it was easier to just skip it altogether by peeking at the memory. It was pretty unreliable at the best of times, and after a five minute load time off cassette, three failed attempts reset the machine.
Good times..
Legacy Intel Mac owners are more likely nonplussed by the fact that if there was any advantage to running Vista over XP, be it through Boot Camp / Parallels; and the licensing of Vista didn't already forbid this in most cases, then after a product scheduled for release in 2008 reaches End-Of-Life, they will be unsupported.
There has been a new fuel tank built for the shuttle. Last weekend NASA were still deciding whether to use the new tank on this mission or go with the patched-up one.
They have opted to instead keep the new tank for the Endeavour mission in August (STS-118).
The mission overview is here.
Hanging a brown bear in a porcelain cave.
Fair point, now get with the fscking program.
Stuff that matters == £$
Any stocks in your portfolio on track for a split?
My next phone's gonna have CDE!
All of the above, and remote display of the battery charge, please!
See Alaska State Revenue Sharing.
I haven't seen this for a few days.
I was actually beginning to get a bit worried.
Just as one human being to another, I'm glad you're ok.
The Z80 is the most sophisticated microprocessor on the Space Shuttle.
</trivia>
I used to love telling Commodore owners that.
I have to represent the SAM Coupé. /. post. Thinking about it gets me embarrassingly emotional.
The logical evolution of the Spectrum, it could even emulate it perfectly (in 1989!).
Abject commercial failure, but it is the reason I am in this business at all
I have two, still fully working, and it has what is still my favourite keyboard of any machine ever.
I can't condense my feelings for this box of chips into a
Alan Miles and Bruce Gordon are hugely important figures in my childhood.
The HD-DVD specification allows regioning to be added in the future. Also, that doesn't make an HD-DVD player a region-free DVD player: they are supposed to honour the region-locks of legacy DVD discs, so players are (supposed to be) already keyed for a particular region.
I recently discovered that this is now the case in the UK.
When I was growing up, the post was sacrosanct, and in fact being the "Royal Mail", opening someone elses mail was technically an act of treason. (Another nugget of trivia relating to this is that Royal Mail vehicles are the only vehicles on the road allowed to disregard traffic lights - emergency services must have their sirens on to do this).
Anyway, sometimes I am sent data that is covered by the NNPT, but last year was informed by several overseas agencies that they now could not send me anything further until I had filled out the "waiver" stating that I had just reason to request that my mail not be opened by any Royal Mail employee. They forwarded me what is apparently now their "standard letter" for UK nationals needing to be posted sensitive information, which includes the line:
"The nature of our business requires that you treat our communications as private".
That was the easy part: actually finding out what to do with this letter was the hard part, and of course, phoning around I was greeted with incredulity, and accusations of being some sort of conspiracy theorist.
In the end I discovered, you have to inform the police, who give you the other bit of the form and then you send the whole thing off to the Royal Mail, and a week or so later you receive acknowledgement that your mail will not be opened without due cause.
In short, postal privacy in the United Kingdom became opt-in a few years ago, and you had better have strong justification for requesting it - otherwise you're probably giving them more reason to check you out.
Nobody I have spoken to in the UK (excepting colleagues similarly affected) seems to know about this.
Skype?
I wouldn't buy a DVD at 120RMB.
I'd consider a 160 RenMegaByte CD, but that kind of bitrate is way too low for video.
But to diff the directory tree?
Quickly?
There must be a tool that does this..
Don't ever post any variation of this bullshit again.
./the1st. That's when I saw it on Digg, and even then I thought "This was on slashdot months ago, and it was old news back then."
It was bad enough resorting to Digg et al on April 1st just not to be wholly uninformed.
(Note: Planning a worm/virus launch? Your sysadmin's newsfeeds will be full of shit on April 1st).
Thing is, it's over a week since I killed time on Digg because of
Before you get excited, check out the cost of the blanks..
DVD-A supports up to 96kHz.
Audio on your video DVD is at 48kHz.
Just how many commercial DVDs did you buy that have no video on them?
That's how relevant 96k is to the consumer. And you know what:
The studio the audio was mastered at did it at 48kHz. Duplicate the data or interpolate the values, there's no benefit.
Let's talk about bit-depth...
I have to say, I was a big fan of ATRAC. At the time, it was a "trick" to bounce to and from MD with your finished mixes. ATRAC compromises dynamics not unlike FM, and it was a quick test to see "how it sounds on radio".
But as for being dead - you should drop by a radio station recently - it has become the de facto standard for jingles:
Fast random access, rewritable and replayable without sonic degradation. Fits the bill very neatly.
And shit, ADATs are SVHS tapes, DATs are DATs (the same as DDS tapes, except DDS tapes are only cut from the centre of the tape).
ADAT is dead and buried as a tape format.
The ADAT protocol that was introduced on the hardware is still the most convenient (and cost-effective) way to pipe multichannel audio around, and will (has already?) outlast the ADAT recording medium.
DCC has nothing to do with DAT, it was positioned as a competitor for MiniDisc, and lost out basically because you didn't have to rewind MiniDiscs. Fuck all commercial albums were released in either format.
And while I'm at it, SCMS was basically the precursor of HDCP, as far as I can tell, and was in a large part responsible for the failure of DAT as a consumer format.