| Saturday,
November 18, 2000 Swamped. VERY short shrift.
Regarding your www.byte.com article,
Pioneer has been selling a DVD-R drives for several
years. The first version was $16k, and the latest (DVRS201) is < $5000.
The DVRS201 is the cheapest DVD-R available. It is quite popular among
those wanting to do one-off DVD movie productions using DVD authoring
software such as that from Minerva, Sonic Solutions, DVDmotion, or Spruce
Technologies.
What is interesting is the price DVD authoring
software is dropping through the floor (Spruce and DVDmotion both offering
$129 and $99 products, respectively). This software use to be $8-10k and
up, only months ago. This market will explode once the DVD-R drives are
affordable (~$500).
Check it out at: http://www.videoguys.com/pioneer.html
Greg
Correct as far as it goes, and thank you for the
information; but I do not believe DVD-R drives will be under a couple of
thousand dollars at any time soon, while DVD-RAM is here and affordable
now.
You have seen this before, perhaps, but I will
put it here anyway:
Published: unknown Author: unknown
NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE
To the citizens of the United States of
America,
In the light of your failure to elect a
President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice
of the revocation of your independence, effective today.
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will
resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other
territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime
minister (The rt. hon. Tony Blair, MP for the 97.85% of you who have until
now been unaware that there is a world outside your borders) will appoint
a minister for America without the need for further elections. Congress
and the Senate will be disbanded. A questionnaire will be circulated next
year to determine whether any of you noticed.
To aid in the transition to a British Crown
Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
1. You should look up "revocation"
in the Oxford English dictionary. Then look up "aluminium".
Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you
have been pronouncing it.
2. Generally, you should raise your
vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Using the
same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as
"like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and
inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed".
3. There is no such thing as "US
English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf.
4. You should learn to distinguish the
English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard.
5. Hollywood will be required occasionally to
cast English actors as the good guys.
6. You should relearn your original national
anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out
task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way
through.
7. You should stop playing American
"football". There is only one kind of football. What you refer
to as American "football" is not a very good game. The 2.15% of
you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have
noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no
longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football.
Initially, it would be best if you played
with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in
time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American
"football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every
twenty seconds or wearing full Kevlar body armour like nancies). We are
hoping to get together at least a US rugby sevens side by 2005.
8. You should declare war on Quebec and
France, using nuclear weapons if they give you any merde. The 98.85% of
you who were not aware that there is a world outside your borders should
count yourselves lucky. The Russians have never been the bad guys. "Merde"
is French for "shit".
9. July 4th is no longer a public holiday.
November 8th will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will
be called "Indecisive Day".
10. All American cars are hereby banned. They
are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you
will understand what we mean.
11. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been
driving us crazy.
Thank you for your cooperation.
I have no comment. None at all. None. Zero.
An exchange of posts in a discussion group I
belong to:
<< A program that translates Jewish to
Gregorian dates and back.
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,,001BJF,.html
sg >>
Hi--
Sorry. Not only was this not meant for H-XX, but it
was wrong to boot. Seems the J stood for Julian, not Jewish.
It's not my day.
best,
Steve
--
> One of my first ventures in computer
programming was an app that let you do > arithmetic (add, subtract,
multiply, divide with remainder) on roman > numerals. This is much
harder than you'd think. Often wondered if I could > have sold it to
MicroSoft...
Around 1950 Claude Shannon built out of relays the
THROBAC desk calculator, "thrifty Roman backward-looking automatic
calulator." The largest number provided for was LXXXI.
John McCarthy
Dr. Pournelle
I find that I have become partial to meta-search
tools. While there are a number out there, the one I tend to use the most
often is Copernic ( www.copernic.com
) for several reasons:
1) reasonably small download 2) it has a free
version. free is good. 3) searches are saved to to a local file 4)
Duplicates are at least partially filtered. 5) It searches multiple search
engines simultaneously 6) Configurable including number of hits, time
limits, etc. 7) Skinnable (art counts for something)
I do not use it for all the commercial bells and
whistles, just the simple web searches. It is not perfect, but definitely
a decent tool, and easy to use. It is also worth checking out the
configuration options for things like font size, colors, and other
niceties.
here's hoping you survive the election [joke]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a
Babylon 5 problem." (found on a bulletin board at Fermi Lab)
I should look into that. I need a good
search system. But inertia and sloth take their toll...
There appear to have been problems with VirusScan
updates in the past two weeks or so. From local and Netnews discussions,
the 4102 and 4104 updates are bad: at least under NT 4.0, they can suck up
100% of the CPU. The latest, 4105, can be found (as always) at:
http://www.nai.com/naicommon/download/dats/find.asp
4105 had a date of 15 November 2000, even when I
downloaded it yesterday; scary stuff. I don't know if it's better.
Updating via this URL may be better than the "Automatic Update"
tool in VirusScan; I think it needs to update the engine, and that's
better done externally.
If an NT machine seems to hung, the following is
said to disable VirusScan:
net stop mcshield
In NT, control-alt-delete to start the Task Manager;
under the Applications Tab, click New Task; enter the command line you
want to run.
Either of you heard anything about this? A bunch of
us here at work have been hit. --PSRC
I have been at COMDEX all week and know nothing
about this. Anyone?
THERE IS A LOT OF MAIL ON THIS. It is posted
MONDAY 20 November. To go there click
here.
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