Posted 11/18/2009 at 08:54:22pm

I believe he's saying that at this point it won't likely play the 1970's version of "Pong"  :P

Posted 11/16/2009 at 10:54:32pm

Article should read either:

 1,759 teraflops

or

1.759 petaflops

 or in the case of the EU, most countries would use:

 1,759 petaflops due to the frequent reversal of the , and . characters and thier uses over there.  Was over in Gemany, a few years back, took quite a while to get used to seeing beer in glasses with sizes like "0,5 L" for one half liter.

Dan O.

Posted 11/12/2009 at 07:50:26am

An LED flashlight with a crank handle will never run out of power, provided you never run out of arms! :P

Dan O.

Posted 11/01/2009 at 10:26:58pm

I have often used peer-to-peer networks to get a better idea of an artists work before investing in it.   But, despite owning a digital copy on my HDD, which would be easily burnable, I instead choose to support the artist, by buying the CD, which not only gives me a full-quality hard-copy, but also all the associated materials such as CD artwork and often lyrics.

I had a rude awakening today.   I went to the local mall for the first time in almost 1 year.   I was horrified to find out that there no longer any music stores in the mall.   This mall is 2 stories tall, and contains nearly 200 shops, plus a full-blown food court.

 Furthermore,  the mall was the last vestige of music shops in our fair city of nearly 200,000 metro area.

We have ~200,000 people living within 20 miles of our city, and there exists only 2 stores that are dedicated towards music, a used CD store (about 500sqft) and Toad Hall, one of the oldest record stores out there, that has a very large collection of new and old records and books from most any time period.

 I find myself shopping for music at Toad Hall often, I've got a collection of roughly 50 LP's which my wife and I listen to almost daily on our turntable and receiver. 

But that's it!   200,000 people now get their music at places like Target, Best Buy, and Walmart.   I find it both sad and frightening.

 If there's ever been one binding factor of these 50 states, it was the music.   It was the music that fueled social / cultural revolution of the 1960's.   Most people when they identify a generation do so by music.   When we reach the point at which our radios blast the same 12 tracks every hour for weeks on end, and the masses are forced into purchasing their music across the isle from the socks and underwear isle, I fear our fair country has lost something, and that something may just end up being our identity.

Dan O. 

Posted 10/20/2009 at 10:47:59pm

IMO, the most contentious topics for Fanboys are CPU's, GPU's, and OS'es...

Well, here in my wife and I's lovely home, we have 2 PC's, and 2 Desktops (1 of which is technically a server).

3 of those have Dual-Core CPU's, my personal Desktop has an Intel Q6600 Quad Core, paired with an Nvidia 8800GTS.  It runs Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.04 (soon to be 9.10) roughly half and half, with the time in XP being spent mostly gaming, and Ubuntu time being mostly used for everything else.

My personal Laptop has an AMD Processor, and an ATI GPU.  It's also a Dual-Boot, although in this case I've got Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04.

 My wife's Laptop has an AMD Processor as well, paired with an Nvidia GPU,  also in dual-boot, although here it's Windows Vista and Ubuntu 9.04 (though she's thinking of trying something different soon).

 The Server runs an Intel C2D E6300 with an ATI 3650, running Ubuntu Linux 100% (and 100% run time, save power outages). 

Simplified, in our 1 house, with 4 PC's, we have the following Combos:

 Intel + Nvidia + Ubuntu + WinXP

AMD + ATI + Ubuntu + Win7

AMD + Nvidia + Ubuntu + Win Vista

Intel + ATI + Ubuntu

I think we've got our bases covered!

 Can anyone here every realistically call us "fanboys"? I don't think so!

Dan O. 

Posted 08/25/2009 at 07:23:28am

Unfortunately, while this resolves the bandwith problem (something tells me this is something Blizzard will actually benifet more from than the players), this method does not help those located behind firewalls.

There's many instances where a player would be behind a firewall, a few that I can think of of the top of my head:

1.  College Dorms.

2.  Military Baracks.

3.  Shared connection w/ appartment complex or similar.

Dan O.

Posted 03/28/2009 at 08:53:23am

I full-heartedly agree Tom...

 I'm a photo lab manager, I've encountered more problems with digital imagery than film-based, although now that film is dying, it's becoming far more difficult to get a quality film-based print. (old film, poor storage, stale developer, all common problems).

At any rate, for every important shoot I do with my DSLR, I do 2 things:

 1.   I take the images in RAW, process them to JPEG, and make prints from every JPEG that's acceptable.   I don't care if I make 200 prints for a birthday party, I want every image that shows a family member / loved one permantently made into print.

2.  I do a differential backup of the entire 500GB hard drive (all photos) onto an external drive.

One thing I have considered and am hopefull for is that some day in the not so distant future, storage capacities of inexpensive media will reach the point where by I can make a copy of every image I've ever taken, and give one to every family member in my family (7 siblings).

 
I realize your topic is on the nature of DTV, but in the sense of photgraphy, one must understand the reason one takes a photo to understand why digital is "scary" to me in the sense of reliablity.   One does not take a photo for the fun of clicking a shutter and getting an image back, although that is all part of it.  One takes a photo to preserve a memory.

 Think about it.   If you look at a photo of yourself when you were a kid, 9/10 you know exactly where you were, what you were doing, why the photo was taken, etc.    But then try and think about 2 hours later, and you can't retrieve any info from your memory about that.    The photo may just be a peice of paper with dyes, but the memory is embedded or in some other way attached to it.  Looking at that photo allows the memory to be brought up from the mind, in a way not usually otherwise possible.

In that way, as a photographer my job is to preserve memories, and if I can only garauntee a memory for 3-5 years (typical life of an HDD) then I have to ask myself how good I am at what I am doing, and if I am really doing my job at all.

 A professional photographer friend of mine almost lost 700GB of wedding / model photos that had no backups.   80,000 images in total.  I managed to rescue the drive and retrieve the data, but is scared the living hell out of him.   That was his carreer's work in that drive, his means of income.   Still, I fail to be able convince him to at least buy a backup drive for it.

An for what it's worth, I too listen to my collection of about 50 LP's on a regular basis. ;)

Dan O.

Posted 12/26/2008 at 07:11:18pm

These days it depends on how lazy my wife and I are, or how tired we are of adverts.

 
If we're really lazy we'll put on the Radio, lots of music fast.  Of course, then the adverts come on and we usually switch to a recorded format after that.

 Over the past 2 years my wife and I have purchased roughly 30 LP's, 15-20 CD's, and the only album I can recall purchased digitally was Radiohead's "In Rainbows" which is actually quite good.

My main complaint with the "digital" era is compression.   Most forms of compression popular today are lossy, so you always loose something.   Yeah, I shoot with a DSLR now, but I always shoot in RAW.  I don't mess around with JPEGs unless they're going to my gallery online, and even then, it's only 2% compressed.

At any rate, LP's are the most "lossless" type of compression you can have on a recorded medium these days IMO.  CD's do have compression, albeit much less so than MP3's.     That, and I just love that "feel" of an old record playing on my turntable. ;)

 We do listen to Slacker occasionaly, it is our favorite of the online music sites.   However, when listened through the reciever, it just seems to have lost too much quality being broadcast over the internet in the type of compression required to fit the lowest common denominator of broadband here in the USA.

Anyway, Our favorite Music, and the medium it's stored on:

 LP: 

Eric Clapton: Slowhand

Fleetwood Mac:  Tango in the Night

Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory

CD: 

Snow Patrol: Eyes Open

Placebo:  Meds

Portisehead: Dummy

Other "obscure" music:

Moby,  Wyclef Jean, David Gilmour, Moody Blues.

But if you want really obscure?  And festive?  The Monks of Weston Priory: "Winter's Coming Home"

 Yeah, I know it sounds odd, but my father listened to this album on LP every year around the holidays since I can remember.   So, I bought my own copy on vinyl about a month or two ago.

Dan

Posted 11/19/2008 at 03:02:21am

I'm the only guy I've ever heard of that met his wife in Linux class. :-P

As such, I have  a slightly unique point of view...

 1.  Some women, though few, like the "nerd / geek" status.   My wife is not alone in this area, her sister, and a few other women I've met fall into this category.   

 2.  Upbringing can have a lot of influence.    My mother-in-law was in the Computer Programming field in college, worked with all the old-skool languages like FORTRAN and such.   Back then, programming was done on punch cards.    At any rate, she passed on some of that knowledge as they grew up, especially things like how to read binary and hex, and how to love Star Trek. 

 3.  My sisters (all 6 of them) are the complete opposite, and none of them know what to do when the PC doesn't do what they want.   This, despite the fact that most of us grew up from a young age with a PC in the house (1985 on up).   Turns out a  lot of women are just simply afraid of PC's, or at least afraid they'll screw something up, therefore they don't even attempt to try something new with a PC, which is the basics of learning.

 Dan O.

Posted 10/16/2008 at 02:57:22pm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000240124%20115750974&bop=And&Order=PRICE

*Note* The first one listed is Direct Storage not NAS, but most of the others are NAS.

Prices range from $189 to $369 for 1TB models, with 3 popular models at the $229 price range.

FWIW, Iomega has a drive listed there as well, although not the one in the article above, for $269, which is a bit pricey when you factor the lack of GbE.

Dan