Yeah, I'm just waiting for "algorithms" to replace "on the ground" as the next overused buzzword in the media.
"We asked General Petraeus about his algorithm for winning the war in Iraq"
"Algorithmically, Bob, it seems the Steelers are unbeatable for this year's Superbowl"
"That's right, Jane, it looks like mid-length skirts are the algorithm for fashion success this year"
It's gonna be great!
The last, best hope for Babylon 5 died when Straczynski was forced to rush the ending of the original story arc after Season 3. Everything that came after that, including that godawful thing with Lumbergh, was just unwatchable.
The best thing about B5 was that, originally, it actually felt like you were in a big universe. The most brilliant scene in the entire show was when Catherine Sakai is telling G'Kar about the time her ship lost power when "something" -- an object so huge it blotted out the sun -- cruised by. Sakai describes what happened and asks G'Kar what the thing might have been. They're standing in the garden, and G'Kar sees an ant crawling up a flower stem. He puts his finger on the stem, the ant crawls onto it and onto his hand, and then after a few seconds he lets the ant crawl back onto the flower. He looks at Sakai and says, "That ant meets another ant and asks, what was that?..."
But after the third season, all that was out the window, and all that was left was a bad space combat show.
You're right, I should have been more clear: I meant digital HD, not just digital cable.
The other thing I should have been more clear about is the simple quantity of hardware that the cable company DVRs ship with, that would cost a fortune to replicate in a FOSS system: the SA 8300HD, for example, has 4 tuners (2 NTSC, 2 QAM) 2 of which can be used simultaneously (to record one program while watching another live one, or record two programs while watching a third prerecorded one) and four outputs (composite, S-video, HDMI, and component), two of which may be used simultaneously to output different programs.
Even if MythTV has the flexibility to do those things from a software standpoint, it's just not competitive to try and build that sort of thing from PC components.
I used a MythTV machine for a while, before I had HDTV. I set up whatever release of KnoppMyth was the latest in the spring of 2005 on an Asus Pundit with a Hauppauge PVR350 board. Setting up KnoppMyth was far from a plug and play experience; I had to update almost everything to make it work, and had to go hunt down patches to things like LIRC to get it working with the rest of the system. The choice of which video-out to use was a study in compromises: I could either use the Asus' built-in ATI S-Video out, which had no video acceleration and thus suffered from visible speed issues during playback; or I could use the PVR350 output, which had excellent TV playback, but had a terrible navigation and recording interface since the framebuffer X server could only render video fullscreen. I wound up choosing the PVR350 out, since I preferred to schedule recordings using the web server interface.
Once I got it fully running, the system was pretty nice. The basic menu interface looked good and was intuitive, and the picture quality from the PVR350 over S-Video was outstanding. I really liked being able to connect to its web server to schedule shows, because the scheduler interface was awful when viewed on the TV. On the whole, when it worked, it was brilliant, but it definitely had its fair share of bugs -- the two worst being that it would occasionally just produce a black screen when you rewound a show to the beginning, which you could usually revover from, and the wifi (a usb dongle) would sometimes just up and stop working due to a buggy driver, requiring a reboot to get connectivity again. But on the whole it was pretty nice, the TV interface was OK but the selling point for me was the excellent web interface.
Once I got HDTV in December of 05, the MythTV box really wasn't an option any more. Since then I've had HD digital cable from two different providers (Comcast and Optimum) both with the Scientific Atlanta SA8300HD DVR (though Comcast and Optimum load different firmware onto the DVR). Frankly, there's no comparison between the commercial DVR and MythTV. The commercial system does everything faster (powering up, changing channels) and never, ever crashes. Sure, I can't transfer movies to my laptop or whatever, but I guess that just isn't something I feel the need to do. I took the PVR350 out of the Pundit, upgraded it to Slackware, and keep it in my entertainment center as a MAME box.
Bottom line, if you have a 4:3 CRT TV and basic cable, MythTV is probably fine. If you have a nice widescreen TV and digital cable, MythTV just can't do the things you need, and you can get a DVR from your cable company for so cheap even MythTV can't compete (since after all you still need hardware to run the thing).
I bought my Panasonic TH-42PX50U 42" plasma in November of 2005. I have had zero problems of any kind with it, and I love it. I mostly watch movies and HD content on it, and play occasional XBox 360 games on it as well. I'm not the type to game for 12 hours straight so I'm not worried about burn-in. This tv is the best technology purchase I have ever made. My only slight regret is that, since I recently moved to a larger house, I wish I had got the 50-inch model instead of the 42-inch. Ah well.
The quality of this display is hands down better than any LCD or RP set I could have afforded at the time, or could today really. I paid about $2400 for it at the time, and I figure that was about right. In 3-4 years, if something genuinely better comes along, or if the display has really degraded, I'll replace it. This doesn't bother me.
Every few years I pay between $1500 and $2500 to buy the parts to build myself a new PC, and I don't think twice about the fact that in three years or so I'll be replacing that. I look at the TV the same way. I realize that LCD and RP sets (especially RP since the bulbs are replaceable) have longer potential life. But the display isn't as good, and for the money I'd rather get the best I can now. I'm not marrying the technology or making some kind of life commitment to it, I'm just blowing a bunch of money on something I don't need. When I'm watching a movie, I don't think about whether "the technology" is as good, I enjoy the image and that's all there is to it.
The 6600 series cards are all newer than the 6800 series. They support all of the same API features. What really differentiates the Nvidia 6xxx series cards are hardware features -- number of pipelines, memory type and bandwidth, gpu and memory clock speeds, etc. The very low end cards like 6200 don't support 64-bit textures or SLI, but all of these support the same shader model. The same is true of the 7800/7600/7900 cards among each other.
Of course, since the lower end cards in a given generation are less powerful, you may have to turn off certain eye candy features to get good frame rates at high resolutions, depending on the game. But the basic support for those features is still there.
A quick glance at the headline and stuff like this stands out:
At a bare minimum, you will become a Botnet Zombie -- if you're really lucky, you might be Trojaned, have a Rootkit installed on your PC, and be used for spam, file storage, and DOS attacks.
Excessive use of capitalized jargon like that always indicates that it's going to be a nothing story, and sure enough, that's exactly what it is. Although, if you think the fact that your PC can be compromised by something you download on purpose is news, you're probably the right target audience for this story.
Yup. There are a number of Glide emulators, but dgVoodoo is the one I have had the most success with (for Red Baron 3D). If it matters, it's also likely the highest performing one since it is a direct Glide to DirectX emulation, whereas most of the others were Glide to OpenGL emulators. I say "if it matters" because on a modern system the overhead of this conversion will make no difference given the simplicity of the games that used Glide.
Knoppmyth gathers most of the software pieces for you, but it hardly qualifies as "put in a disk, answer a few yes or no questions and then start using it". I used Knoppmyth to set up my HTPC based on an Asus Pundit-R with a Hauppauge PVR350, and a friend's machine which used a WinTV Go in a regular PC with a VIA-based Athlon XP motherboard and a Geforce ti4600 with TV-out. Getting Knoppmyth basically up and running so that you could just watch TV in X11 was pretty quick with my Pundit, but required adding module parameters to the bttv driver for the WinTV Go since it is a newer revision of that card. Getting either machine fully functional, with TV-out rather than VGA and with remotes using Lirc and ivtv, took quite a bit more work. I did get my Pundit machine working fine as a DVR, to the point where it was easy and intuitive to operate via the remote, but it has occasionally hung during playback and the USB wifi dongle I use for its connection craps out about half the time when I try to access MythWeb, requiring a reboot. Things like watching DVDs more or less work, but again require a lot of configuration to get the buttons mapped properly on the Hauppauge remotes.
So yeah, using Knoppmyth helps in that it saves some of the initial steps of gathering and compiling the software, but you still have to do a lot of legwork to get it really working properly.
What you should "like" is how Canada outsourced the job. They had an open bidding process and Lockheed won. The people you should complain to are your government, not the winner of the competition which your government decided to hold. Eh.
... why is the LCD vs plasma "debate" so vehement? I mean really, objectively, the differences are factual and clear, and which technology is "better" just depends on what you want to use the TV for. In terms of suitability for viewing, plasmas are better if all you ever want to do with your tv is watch widescreen movies, while LCDs are a better choice if you're into gaming and other applications which use a lot of static images. Most people won't do either of these 100% of the time, so which is better is a decision based on your usage habits. Neither TV type is fatally flawed, neither type will last forever, and neither technology is perfect.
It seems that once someone has plunked down a couple grand for a big TV, it becomes a phallic symbol, much like a car or any other big visible purchase. Pointing out flaws in the purchase then becomes akin to pointing out a personal inadequacy, which makes people defensive. This is only fueled by all of these ad-hominem-by-proxy technology evangelisms, such as reviews in home theater magazines saying that the PQ of a broad type of TV will be acceptable "to an uncritical viewer" and the like. Feeling this way about an inanimate object is silly and irrational. People should buy stuff on its merits, not on how they think it will make other people feel about them.
You know, TFA would be a lot better if it were a short film shot in black and white, with a blond freckled kid playing The Son and a pretty woman in a light colored skirt suit with shoulder pads playing the mother. And a Hugh Beaumont-esque voice narrating:
Working as an office manager in a career services office and hearing the warnings surrounding social networking sites, Mom knew her son could potentially have a problem. Timmy had created his Facebook.com profile when he was 18. Now 20, he had accumulated a good amount of material -- typical college musings and photos--that his friends might enjoy (fade in brief scene of Timmy snapping photo of a giggling girl in one-piece bathing suit) but others might view differently. (fade in brief scene of man in dark suit with horn rimmed glasses reading file and shaking his head)
Timmy was beginning a search for an internship, so she asked him to consider limiting access to his profile to just his friends. Understanding the gravity of the situation, he heeded his mother's advice and did so.
I'll name my US-based Linux company "Rise". Or "Elevate". Or just go for broke and name it "Superlative". Because those all obviously indicate that it is a Linux support company, unlike "Linuxcare", the meaning of which I can't even begin to fathom.
I decided to get a large screen TV this past Christmas. Here is how I went about it.
First, I learned about the technologies. That part was easy, and obviously you don't need me to repeat all the material that's out there. I boiled it down to either LCD rear projection, DLP, or plasma. I wasn't interested in CRT rear projection due to the price, weight, and need for professional alignment / calibration, LCD because of the size limitations, or CRT because of the size limitations and weight / size.
Second, I went to stores and evaluated different TVs which use different technologies. You can read AVSforum and all of the various professional magazines about this stuff, and they will measure black levels and white levels and everything else, but really those evaluations are nearly uselless. Those sorts of technical reviews myopically focus on individual aspects of the picture and their ratings rarely consider the overall image quality. The quality of a TV picture is really subjective, so it should be evaluated that way in terms of your buying decision. It's not always easy to do this in stores, but I decided that if I was going to buy a $1500 - $3000 tv set, the retailer was either going to help me do that, or not get my business. So I brought DVDs with me of a couple of movies that I am well familiar with and which had characteristics that would help me decide. These included:
Spider Man -- Action movie with very vivid colors and tons of sweeping action, to verify color and motion reproduction. Sin City -- Probably the most black ever in any movie, good for, obviously, measuring black levels. The Fellowship of the Rings -- an excellent, very sharp DVD transfer, just for image quality and again because I've seen it so many times.
(Yes, I realize that DVDs will display at 480p on these sets, and HD is 720p or 1080i, but the majority of programming I'll watch on this TV will be DVDs, and DVDs are the only media I can really control. Besides, the store always has Discovery-HD or that awful Charlotte Church video fed across all their HD sets, so it's easy to compare among the HD feeds.)
Then I went to the stores. I looked at rear-projection LCD and DLP first, since they had some compelling advangages -- similarly priced and lightweight. As it turns out, neither of these was that great. Both of those suffer from poor black levels (black looks gray) and restricted viewing angles (if you're not pretty close to perpendicular to the screen it will look dim). In addition, DLP sets have a sort of shimmering optical effect that I noticed and just didn't like. The best of the rear-projection sets was the Sony KDFE42A10 LCD RP -- it definitely had the blackest blacks and the best color reproduction -- but even so, I wasn't completetely satisfied watching movies like Sin City on it, and I still hated the picture degradation when sitting more than 45 degrees off center from it. Still, it was just about good enough. But I needed to look at plasmas.
So I went and looked at plasmas, and it was just absolutely night and day. I had spent a good deal of time looking at the rear projection sets, and each usually was better than the others in one aspect. But the plasma sets were almost all universally better than the RP sets. Colors were more vivid, blacks were blacker, the picture was smoother despite the physically lower resolution [1], and there were absolutely no shimmering effects. They weren't all free of artifacts, to be sure: some of them seemed to have slower response times, and got jaggies or pixelation in fast-moving scenes in Spider Man or when the Discovery-HD feed showed waterfalls for example. The best of the pack overall turned out to be the Panasonic TH-42PX50U. It was about $8000 higher than the Sony RP-LCD, but its picture quality just couldn't be denied, and that's what I wound up purchasing.
And about plasma... I read all about burn-in and screen lifetime, and decided neither was a big issue. I was careful to keep
This is Brigadier Kerla speaking for the High Command. There has been an incident on Praxis. However, everything is under control, we have no need for assistance. Obey treaty stipulations and remain outside the Neutral Zone. This transmission ends now.
This sort of thing is why I pretty much quit and make a new alt whenever I hit about 40. I just cannot stand the gigantic instance dungeons.
And really, to me they pretty much destroy the enjoyment of the game. Elite quests and instance dungeons seem like a cop out on the part of the designers -- they just make the same monsters three times as hard to kill, for no reason that makes sense in the context of the game world. It's so amazingly frustrating when you work your way through a nice story arc, with lots of challenging but not impossible quests, and then at the end of it you end up facing a dungeon which is completely impossible for the usual group of 3 that I play in. So you're stuck either never finishing anything, or having to LFG and hope you don't wind up with a bunch of retards.
But then I guess I'm cluelessly stuck on that whole "RPG" aspect of it, which is clearly not where the money is.
When the RIAA uses its influence in D.C. to regulate technological progress (or lack thereof), you're not going to be able to enjoy your independent music in the ways you'd like to (i.e. anything that doesn't fall under "customary historic use").
That's not true.
The DRM and broadcast restrictions on digital content are controlled by flags embedded in the content. If your independent music producer wants you to be able to do whatever you want with the music, they can set the flags to allow it.
It's similar to the way some DVD producers don't use CSS or region codes in their DVD's, thereby allowing copying and/or playback on non-CSS-licenced devices. The problem with that, of course, is that it's basically an all or nothing proposition -- either you have absolutely no legal right to copy a DVD, or you have no restriction whatsoever on it. These content flags will at least allow more granularity.
I have a Samsung DVD/VCR combo which can output the DVD signal through the RF coaxial output. I bought it specifically for this feature, because my kitchen TV was an old 13" with only a coaxial input and I didn't want to mess around with converters or have to worry about Macrovision. So they do in fact exist.
Smart and dumb people are equally impervious to reason. Smarter people only make up more complex arguments/fallacies to explain away their bad habits, like smoking or driving cars. I am not too impressed by your argument either.
So the dumber ones just resort to ad hominem attacks then?
Maybe it's conducive for one who programs computers to have a yearning for a different job and once they have enough financial backing, they take the plunge?
It's true. I've been a software engineer for 11 years and I frequently dream of a glamorous career as a truck driver. Once I get my house paid off, I'll buy some driving lessons, and then -- it's owner/operator time.
Yup, I started in August of 1993 with SLS 1.03 with the 0.99.something kernel on 54 floppies. I downloaded the images at U South AL, and spent half the night in the "Sun lab" writing them to 54 floppies on the agonizingly slow floppy drives of two Sparstation 2's.
Installed on my 486sx/25 with 8 megs of RAM. The sad thing was that I had to revert to my horrible Trident video card, because there was no X server that supported the mighty Diamond Stealth 24 card (s3 80c805 chipset) due to lack of documentation issues.
Titles Fantasy titles should be earned through the mechanics of the game, and should not be recreated through character naming. This category includes names which:
* Consist of any title prefix attached to a character's name be it fantasy-based or not (i.e. Kingmike, Presidentsanchez)
I read this myself a while back, and as soon as I saw the title of this article and who the author was, I correctly guessed the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm just waiting for "algorithms" to replace "on the ground" as the next overused buzzword in the media. "We asked General Petraeus about his algorithm for winning the war in Iraq" "Algorithmically, Bob, it seems the Steelers are unbeatable for this year's Superbowl" "That's right, Jane, it looks like mid-length skirts are the algorithm for fashion success this year" It's gonna be great!
The last, best hope for Babylon 5 died when Straczynski was forced to rush the ending of the original story arc after Season 3. Everything that came after that, including that godawful thing with Lumbergh, was just unwatchable.
The best thing about B5 was that, originally, it actually felt like you were in a big universe. The most brilliant scene in the entire show was when Catherine Sakai is telling G'Kar about the time her ship lost power when "something" -- an object so huge it blotted out the sun -- cruised by. Sakai describes what happened and asks G'Kar what the thing might have been. They're standing in the garden, and G'Kar sees an ant crawling up a flower stem. He puts his finger on the stem, the ant crawls onto it and onto his hand, and then after a few seconds he lets the ant crawl back onto the flower. He looks at Sakai and says, "That ant meets another ant and asks, what was that?..."
But after the third season, all that was out the window, and all that was left was a bad space combat show.
You're right, I should have been more clear: I meant digital HD, not just digital cable.
The other thing I should have been more clear about is the simple quantity of hardware that the cable company DVRs ship with, that would cost a fortune to replicate in a FOSS system: the SA 8300HD, for example, has 4 tuners (2 NTSC, 2 QAM) 2 of which can be used simultaneously (to record one program while watching another live one, or record two programs while watching a third prerecorded one) and four outputs (composite, S-video, HDMI, and component), two of which may be used simultaneously to output different programs.
Even if MythTV has the flexibility to do those things from a software standpoint, it's just not competitive to try and build that sort of thing from PC components.
Hrm I guess I should have picked "Plain Old Text", huh. That's what I get for not posting here for like a year.
I used a MythTV machine for a while, before I had HDTV. I set up whatever release of KnoppMyth was the latest in the spring of 2005 on an Asus Pundit with a Hauppauge PVR350 board. Setting up KnoppMyth was far from a plug and play experience; I had to update almost everything to make it work, and had to go hunt down patches to things like LIRC to get it working with the rest of the system. The choice of which video-out to use was a study in compromises: I could either use the Asus' built-in ATI S-Video out, which had no video acceleration and thus suffered from visible speed issues during playback; or I could use the PVR350 output, which had excellent TV playback, but had a terrible navigation and recording interface since the framebuffer X server could only render video fullscreen. I wound up choosing the PVR350 out, since I preferred to schedule recordings using the web server interface. Once I got it fully running, the system was pretty nice. The basic menu interface looked good and was intuitive, and the picture quality from the PVR350 over S-Video was outstanding. I really liked being able to connect to its web server to schedule shows, because the scheduler interface was awful when viewed on the TV. On the whole, when it worked, it was brilliant, but it definitely had its fair share of bugs -- the two worst being that it would occasionally just produce a black screen when you rewound a show to the beginning, which you could usually revover from, and the wifi (a usb dongle) would sometimes just up and stop working due to a buggy driver, requiring a reboot to get connectivity again. But on the whole it was pretty nice, the TV interface was OK but the selling point for me was the excellent web interface. Once I got HDTV in December of 05, the MythTV box really wasn't an option any more. Since then I've had HD digital cable from two different providers (Comcast and Optimum) both with the Scientific Atlanta SA8300HD DVR (though Comcast and Optimum load different firmware onto the DVR). Frankly, there's no comparison between the commercial DVR and MythTV. The commercial system does everything faster (powering up, changing channels) and never, ever crashes. Sure, I can't transfer movies to my laptop or whatever, but I guess that just isn't something I feel the need to do. I took the PVR350 out of the Pundit, upgraded it to Slackware, and keep it in my entertainment center as a MAME box. Bottom line, if you have a 4:3 CRT TV and basic cable, MythTV is probably fine. If you have a nice widescreen TV and digital cable, MythTV just can't do the things you need, and you can get a DVR from your cable company for so cheap even MythTV can't compete (since after all you still need hardware to run the thing).
Tar.
I bought my Panasonic TH-42PX50U 42" plasma in November of 2005. I have had zero problems of any kind with it, and I love it. I mostly watch movies and HD content on it, and play occasional XBox 360 games on it as well. I'm not the type to game for 12 hours straight so I'm not worried about burn-in. This tv is the best technology purchase I have ever made. My only slight regret is that, since I recently moved to a larger house, I wish I had got the 50-inch model instead of the 42-inch. Ah well. The quality of this display is hands down better than any LCD or RP set I could have afforded at the time, or could today really. I paid about $2400 for it at the time, and I figure that was about right. In 3-4 years, if something genuinely better comes along, or if the display has really degraded, I'll replace it. This doesn't bother me. Every few years I pay between $1500 and $2500 to buy the parts to build myself a new PC, and I don't think twice about the fact that in three years or so I'll be replacing that. I look at the TV the same way. I realize that LCD and RP sets (especially RP since the bulbs are replaceable) have longer potential life. But the display isn't as good, and for the money I'd rather get the best I can now. I'm not marrying the technology or making some kind of life commitment to it, I'm just blowing a bunch of money on something I don't need. When I'm watching a movie, I don't think about whether "the technology" is as good, I enjoy the image and that's all there is to it.
The 6600 series cards are all newer than the 6800 series. They support all of the same API features. What really differentiates the Nvidia 6xxx series cards are hardware features -- number of pipelines, memory type and bandwidth, gpu and memory clock speeds, etc. The very low end cards like 6200 don't support 64-bit textures or SLI, but all of these support the same shader model. The same is true of the 7800/7600/7900 cards among each other. Of course, since the lower end cards in a given generation are less powerful, you may have to turn off certain eye candy features to get good frame rates at high resolutions, depending on the game. But the basic support for those features is still there.
A quick glance at the headline and stuff like this stands out: At a bare minimum, you will become a Botnet Zombie -- if you're really lucky, you might be Trojaned, have a Rootkit installed on your PC, and be used for spam, file storage, and DOS attacks. Excessive use of capitalized jargon like that always indicates that it's going to be a nothing story, and sure enough, that's exactly what it is. Although, if you think the fact that your PC can be compromised by something you download on purpose is news, you're probably the right target audience for this story.
Yup. There are a number of Glide emulators, but dgVoodoo is the one I have had the most success with (for Red Baron 3D). If it matters, it's also likely the highest performing one since it is a direct Glide to DirectX emulation, whereas most of the others were Glide to OpenGL emulators. I say "if it matters" because on a modern system the overhead of this conversion will make no difference given the simplicity of the games that used Glide.
Knoppmyth gathers most of the software pieces for you, but it hardly qualifies as "put in a disk, answer a few yes or no questions and then start using it". I used Knoppmyth to set up my HTPC based on an Asus Pundit-R with a Hauppauge PVR350, and a friend's machine which used a WinTV Go in a regular PC with a VIA-based Athlon XP motherboard and a Geforce ti4600 with TV-out. Getting Knoppmyth basically up and running so that you could just watch TV in X11 was pretty quick with my Pundit, but required adding module parameters to the bttv driver for the WinTV Go since it is a newer revision of that card. Getting either machine fully functional, with TV-out rather than VGA and with remotes using Lirc and ivtv, took quite a bit more work. I did get my Pundit machine working fine as a DVR, to the point where it was easy and intuitive to operate via the remote, but it has occasionally hung during playback and the USB wifi dongle I use for its connection craps out about half the time when I try to access MythWeb, requiring a reboot. Things like watching DVDs more or less work, but again require a lot of configuration to get the buttons mapped properly on the Hauppauge remotes. So yeah, using Knoppmyth helps in that it saves some of the initial steps of gathering and compiling the software, but you still have to do a lot of legwork to get it really working properly.
What you should "like" is how Canada outsourced the job. They had an open bidding process and Lockheed won. The people you should complain to are your government, not the winner of the competition which your government decided to hold. Eh.
... why is the LCD vs plasma "debate" so vehement? I mean really, objectively, the differences are factual and clear, and which technology is "better" just depends on what you want to use the TV for. In terms of suitability for viewing, plasmas are better if all you ever want to do with your tv is watch widescreen movies, while LCDs are a better choice if you're into gaming and other applications which use a lot of static images. Most people won't do either of these 100% of the time, so which is better is a decision based on your usage habits. Neither TV type is fatally flawed, neither type will last forever, and neither technology is perfect.
It seems that once someone has plunked down a couple grand for a big TV, it becomes a phallic symbol, much like a car or any other big visible purchase. Pointing out flaws in the purchase then becomes akin to pointing out a personal inadequacy, which makes people defensive. This is only fueled by all of these ad-hominem-by-proxy technology evangelisms, such as reviews in home theater magazines saying that the PQ of a broad type of TV will be acceptable "to an uncritical viewer" and the like. Feeling this way about an inanimate object is silly and irrational. People should buy stuff on its merits, not on how they think it will make other people feel about them.
You know, TFA would be a lot better if it were a short film shot in black and white, with a blond freckled kid playing The Son and a pretty woman in a light colored skirt suit with shoulder pads playing the mother. And a Hugh Beaumont-esque voice narrating:
Working as an office manager in a career services office and hearing the warnings surrounding social networking sites, Mom knew her son could potentially have a problem. Timmy had created his Facebook.com profile when he was 18. Now 20, he had accumulated a good amount of material -- typical college musings and photos--that his friends might enjoy (fade in brief scene of Timmy snapping photo of a giggling girl in one-piece bathing suit) but others might view differently. (fade in brief scene of man in dark suit with horn rimmed glasses reading file and shaking his head)
Timmy was beginning a search for an internship, so she asked him to consider limiting access to his profile to just his friends. Understanding the gravity of the situation, he heeded his mother's advice and did so.
I'll name my US-based Linux company "Rise". Or "Elevate". Or just go for broke and name it "Superlative". Because those all obviously indicate that it is a Linux support company, unlike "Linuxcare", the meaning of which I can't even begin to fathom.
It was about $8000 higher than the Sony RP-LCD
Obviously I meant $800. Oops.
I decided to get a large screen TV this past Christmas. Here is how I went about it.
First, I learned about the technologies. That part was easy, and obviously you don't need me to repeat all the material that's out there. I boiled it down to either LCD rear projection, DLP, or plasma. I wasn't interested in CRT rear projection due to the price, weight, and need for professional alignment / calibration, LCD because of the size limitations, or CRT because of the size limitations and weight / size.
Second, I went to stores and evaluated different TVs which use different technologies. You can read AVSforum and all of the various professional magazines about this stuff, and they will measure black levels and white levels and everything else, but really those evaluations are nearly uselless. Those sorts of technical reviews myopically focus on individual aspects of the picture and their ratings rarely consider the overall image quality. The quality of a TV picture is really subjective, so it should be evaluated that way in terms of your buying decision. It's not always easy to do this in stores, but I decided that if I was going to buy a $1500 - $3000 tv set, the retailer was either going to help me do that, or not get my business. So I brought DVDs with me of a couple of movies that I am well familiar with and which had characteristics that would help me decide. These included:
Spider Man -- Action movie with very vivid colors and tons of sweeping action, to verify color and motion reproduction.
Sin City -- Probably the most black ever in any movie, good for, obviously, measuring black levels.
The Fellowship of the Rings -- an excellent, very sharp DVD transfer, just for image quality and again because I've seen it so many times.
(Yes, I realize that DVDs will display at 480p on these sets, and HD is 720p or 1080i, but the majority of programming I'll watch on this TV will be DVDs, and DVDs are the only media I can really control. Besides, the store always has Discovery-HD or that awful Charlotte Church video fed across all their HD sets, so it's easy to compare among the HD feeds.)
Then I went to the stores. I looked at rear-projection LCD and DLP first, since they had some compelling advangages -- similarly priced and lightweight. As it turns out, neither of these was that great. Both of those suffer from poor black levels (black looks gray) and restricted viewing angles (if you're not pretty close to perpendicular to the screen it will look dim). In addition, DLP sets have a sort of shimmering optical effect that I noticed and just didn't like. The best of the rear-projection sets was the Sony KDFE42A10 LCD RP -- it definitely had the blackest blacks and the best color reproduction -- but even so, I wasn't completetely satisfied watching movies like Sin City on it, and I still hated the picture degradation when sitting more than 45 degrees off center from it. Still, it was just about good enough. But I needed to look at plasmas.
So I went and looked at plasmas, and it was just absolutely night and day. I had spent a good deal of time looking at the rear projection sets, and each usually was better than the others in one aspect. But the plasma sets were almost all universally better than the RP sets. Colors were more vivid, blacks were blacker, the picture was smoother despite the physically lower resolution [1], and there were absolutely no shimmering effects. They weren't all free of artifacts, to be sure: some of them seemed to have slower response times, and got jaggies or pixelation in fast-moving scenes in Spider Man or when the Discovery-HD feed showed waterfalls for example. The best of the pack overall turned out to be the Panasonic TH-42PX50U. It was about $8000 higher than the Sony RP-LCD, but its picture quality just couldn't be denied, and that's what I wound up purchasing.
And about plasma... I read all about burn-in and screen lifetime, and decided neither was a big issue. I was careful to keep
This is Brigadier Kerla speaking for the High Command. There has been an incident on Praxis. However, everything is under control, we have no need for assistance. Obey treaty stipulations and remain outside the Neutral Zone. This transmission ends now.
This sort of thing is why I pretty much quit and make a new alt whenever I hit about 40. I just cannot stand the gigantic instance dungeons.
And really, to me they pretty much destroy the enjoyment of the game. Elite quests and instance dungeons seem like a cop out on the part of the designers -- they just make the same monsters three times as hard to kill, for no reason that makes sense in the context of the game world. It's so amazingly frustrating when you work your way through a nice story arc, with lots of challenging but not impossible quests, and then at the end of it you end up facing a dungeon which is completely impossible for the usual group of 3 that I play in. So you're stuck either never finishing anything, or having to LFG and hope you don't wind up with a bunch of retards.
But then I guess I'm cluelessly stuck on that whole "RPG" aspect of it, which is clearly not where the money is.
When the RIAA uses its influence in D.C. to regulate technological progress (or lack thereof), you're not going to be able to enjoy your independent music in the ways you'd like to (i.e. anything that doesn't fall under "customary historic use").
That's not true.
The DRM and broadcast restrictions on digital content are controlled by flags embedded in the content. If your independent music producer wants you to be able to do whatever you want with the music, they can set the flags to allow it.
It's similar to the way some DVD producers don't use CSS or region codes in their DVD's, thereby allowing copying and/or playback on non-CSS-licenced devices. The problem with that, of course, is that it's basically an all or nothing proposition -- either you have absolutely no legal right to copy a DVD, or you have no restriction whatsoever on it. These content flags will at least allow more granularity.
I have a Samsung DVD/VCR combo which can output the DVD signal through the RF coaxial output. I bought it specifically for this feature, because my kitchen TV was an old 13" with only a coaxial input and I didn't want to mess around with converters or have to worry about Macrovision. So they do in fact exist.
Smart and dumb people are equally impervious to reason. Smarter people only make up more complex arguments/fallacies to explain away their bad habits, like smoking or driving cars. I am not too impressed by your argument either.
So the dumber ones just resort to ad hominem attacks then?
Maybe it's conducive for one who programs computers to have a yearning for a different job and once they have enough financial backing, they take the plunge?
It's true. I've been a software engineer for 11 years and I frequently dream of a glamorous career as a truck driver. Once I get my house paid off, I'll buy some driving lessons, and then -- it's owner/operator time.
Yup, I started in August of 1993 with SLS 1.03 with the 0.99.something kernel on 54 floppies. I downloaded the images at U South AL, and spent half the night in the "Sun lab" writing them to 54 floppies on the agonizingly slow floppy drives of two Sparstation 2's.
Installed on my 486sx/25 with 8 megs of RAM. The sad thing was that I had to revert to my horrible Trident video card, because there was no X server that supported the mighty Diamond Stealth 24 card (s3 80c805 chipset) due to lack of documentation issues.
And I still run Slackware today.
I read this myself a while back, and as soon as I saw the title of this article and who the author was, I correctly guessed the issue.