I'm glad that finally works. Last time I tried to up the PPI on windows a bunch of interfaces became unusable as fonts scaled but icons and widget spacing didn't, and other weird problems.

That seems incredibly dumb. Especially since apple advertises the fact that they sell 100ppi displays and higher (or at least used to) so that means their own cinema displays are out of wack. I'm a big fan of OSX, but you'd think for "The Desktop Publishing OS" they'd get that right.

You might want to try the command line though. I think there's something like: defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor SomeFloatingPointNumber that would help out. Netbook hackintosh users use it to make things fit on the screen without changing resolution. You have to kill finder and restart it for it to take effect. This may be the feature that went "missing" when they switched from NeXTStep.

When will the pixel density of my desktop monitor go up? It's been stuck at about 100ppi for quite some time now, and it's not like the prices for displays have dropped whenever they come out with new technologies like this. Did people really stop caring once they could fit a movie on their screen?

Though I suppose it would be a bad idea (for my eyesight at least) to feed the habit of running text-based consoles at max resolution. Mmmm... Monospaced characters. I'm a real hacker now!

If 3D content creators would stop making window violations and (my favourite) changing the convergence point of the screen without zooming (and vice versa) the idea that 3d is going to give headaches wouldn't have as much fact to go on. I'm sure some people get headaches anyway, but the majority of the people get them because of this stupid filmography. Also, stop changing the 3d depth every shot. I'm looking at you, Avatar.

If you give the brain realistic input that could actually happen, people would be more comfortable with it and it would be more likely to sell.

Also, the ghosting on some glasses is terrible. I could even see it in RealD, but it wasn't nearly as bad as some systems I've used (especially anaglyphs).

I hope it gets good before everyone becomes disinterested, because I'm actually excited for 3d to become kindof standard.

You forget, as I often do, that time spent working is worth money too. It's true that recording a song costs much more money to hire musicians, get/rent equipment, edit, etc, but when you say

It really does. In fact, it can take weeks or even months before the artist is satisfied with their composition. During that time, the composer doesn't get nearly as much money as the people who are just recording, (as they can output faster) with about the same amount of effort (providing the artist isn't procrastinating). They have to make up that money in the end by selling copies of their composition. Granted, this isn't true for every composer, but to simply dismiss composition as a "cheaper" form of art is rather short-sighted. (Unless we're talking about top-20 hits or so, that is cheap composition)

(Side note: My Dad's an artist, and I definitely feel the difference in family budget when his prints are selling or not.)

I've actually never met any audio guys who *use* windows. They've all been mac users, except for this one guy who used linux (his setup was rather strange, though).

My main issue with windows is I have a hell of a time with the audio subsystem. With Mac it just works (yay CoreAudio!), Linux took minimal twiddling with Jack (still not for non-geeky types though), but Windows would always work some days and not others. There were also annoying crackles and pops that would keep showing up no matter what settings or buffer size I used. Same stuff happened on XP, Vista, and 7 - with the same hardware (that works fine on Mac and Linux) Maybe Windows audio doesn't like firewire? - that sounds bad.

It's true that most of the DAW software and such work fine on windows, but I just don't trust the audio back end. I could see it being used for mixing and non realtime-critical tasks though - when I would need those specialized plugins.

While it's true you can't really hear a huge difference over 48khz, it really depends on what you're doing. If you're recording audio, you should probably sample at 96khz so that when you pass it through a plugin that does something temporally with the audio, there's less artifacts. It's true those algorithms fix most stuff, but for anything that sounds "nearly identical," there will be generational loss. 192 khz is for when you feel insane (I've had these moments, but always noticed having no disk space afterwards)

It's a little bit the same way HD downscaled to SD looks better than SD that was recorded as SD originally.

For playback, you don't need 96khz, unless you have thousand-dollar speakers. (I tried some out, the difference exists). In reality the quality comes down more to how good the recording engineer was before you can blame the sample rate.

Also I was under the impression that it was 44.1khz because of the video hardware they hacked together to see what they were doing while developing CDs?

I'm wondering who I have to write to in hopes of keeping Net Neutrality (or something like it) afloat.

A friend of mine lives in an area that is entirely served by Charter Cable. If they get to do whatever they want, it's not like he can drop them and move somewhere else if they start messing with his internet.

Well, I suppose there's dialup (shudder).

There's a Dual CPU 1.8GHz PowerMac G5 happily running in my house, and it sees excessive use every day. Feels about as fast as my 2.4GHz laptop, with the exception of the video card, which has trouble with HD Youtube. (Also doesn't have as much ram)

I've been wanting to gut the case to build a more powerful machine in it, but I can't bring myself to do it until it dies, which it hasn't been doing. Not even a little.

There used to be a Graphite G4 tower in it's place, but that finally bit the dust last year. (It couldn't take facebook's excessive javascript. (Damn that new layout!))

nVidia 9800GT. and my shiny mac was $650, actually.

That's what it says on the wikipedia page, and they provide sources that check out. Postal III is also on the source engine. The game doesn't excite me, but I'm assuming that means that a linux port is in the works as well (though it may be a bit behind), and that is exciting. Sometime this year, they say.

But then, I've been disappointed by "sometime this year" announcements before.

coughblackmesasourcecough

Up until I discovered Linux Mint I would recommend ubuntu for people who hadn't used linux before. Ubuntu has a great community and support system behind it, and it was relatively easy to install packages. However, I always had to either walk through or setup non-free software that refused to follow the package manager (ex. flash, java, dvd playback, etc) and while some people were good at picking up new interfaces as long as they made some vague amount of sense, others may really need that start menu. That's where Linux Mint saves ridiculous amounts of time. Flash, Java, and dvd playback are already there, and while it doesn't try and copy windows, it's layout is much more similar that ubuntu's. It's got a main menu that looks an awful lot like XP's (though I never use "favourites mode") only less bubbly (thank god) and has a default desktop layout that makes sense to former windows users, as well as a control panel window (big plus). I've always been weary about designs similar to windows, as they generally try too hard, but mint seems to keep to it's own design, making it feel more like an OS and less like a clunky imitation.

Y'know, I was actually thinking about getting a DS, but now that I can't load up emulators for older systems (like my GameBoy Pocket) or homebrew games, I might have to get a PSP. It seems you can't have both a system that's well known for a good library of games, popular, and a system that's open to homebrew (officially or otherwise) in the same package. Of course, there's Windows, I guess - but I'm tired of dealing with all of the slight-little driver issues to full blown failures of my computer and such with PC gaming, and would like a console that's open for development without this app-store xbox-live approval (sdk costs money) nonsense. It would appear that game publishers would avoid a console like that like the plague though, for fear that someone will develop a "Game Backup Tool." Of course, if consoles create a legal, fair way to backup games and do homebrew, then there would be little to no reason to hack except for piracy. Unless you're hacking for hacking's sake, in which case you probably don't care about whatever online service they'll ban you from anyway.