I am not advocating that 12-year olds should carry weapons, but had she known how to use one, she certainly would have been justified in defending herself.
I knew a kid growing up that picked up a target rifle when someone broke into his house and attempted to rape his mother.
You know, I can't condone rape under any circumstance, but raping your mother while someone's breaking into the house just seems particularly unwise.
3D video is nothing more than two 2D videos which alternate every other frame. It's trivial to create or decode; in fact, there are several ways you can do it:
Put the left and right frames next to each other into one big video frame, or...
Interleave the left and right frames into one stream with twice the frame rate, or...
Multiplex the two streams into one file, or...
Store the streams as two separate files.
Would interleaving the frames really work with lossy codecs? I mean, part of the way MPEG works is to detect trends in motion in the frame and encode those, effectively "morphing" some visual data from one frame to another. It's not a system that's well suited to the kind of jitter you'd get from interleaving a slightly different point-of-view into every second frame - not if you want to retain that jitter...
A more interesting approach would be to take advantage of the similarity between the left and right eye images for each 3-D frame, as well as the trends of color and motion in each stream... With an approach like that you should be able to encode a 3-D movie in significantly less than twice the space required for encoding the 2-D version...
3D really does not contribute in any way to a movie being "worthwhile" after you get over the novelty. I used to watch every 3D movie that came out when they were all the decent 3D rendered Pixar types, but these days there are plenty of crappy dumb horror movies and 3D stadium experience type ones that I don't consider worth it. Especially since I have an "Unlimited" card where I can see as many movies as I want a month for a flat rate.. except for the 3D ones which I now have to pay extra per movie, even if I bring my own glasses.. wtf?
You're not paying for 3-D glasses rental, you're paying for the fact that projecting 3-D requires more expensive equipment...
Too bad you failed to realize human vision is around 72Hz and not 60Hz, so your entire above statement is pure bullshit, or you're the defective one.
Really? 24Hz movie theaters must be unwatchable to you then.
24Hz is the rate that the film advances - not the rate of the projector's shutter. IIRC projectors project each frame twice - so film flicker is 48Hz. Still slower than 60Hz of course...
I'd expect that duty cycle plays a big part, too - with shutter glasses, each eye gets image for less than half of the time. With a 60Hz CRT, vertical blanking occurs 60 times a second - but the phosphors don't immediately fade, and the vertical blanking only takes about 1/10 the time that it takes to draw the actual frame...
That said, I haven't seen 3-D LCD TVs yet, let alone watched them enough to determine whether the shutter glasses would bother me.
I can't believe there aren't already good methods for disposal of medications widely in use.
High temperature incineration? Piranha solution (ask a chemist) ?
Great, just what we need... Water infused with piranha essence. Damn chemists, just always have to go and find new horrors to unleash upon the world...
Actually, a few years ago, I bought a Mac Mini which showed grave problems with BlueTooth and Wifi-reception. After digging around a little, that too was a hardware-problem, present in a lot of Mac Minis. Owners were never reimbursed, and (AFAIR) apple.com forum-threads removed.
Also, for that Mac, in OSX 10.4.6, Apple broke all support for FullHD-TV-monitors. Basically, the analysis claimed that for some unknown reason, Apple introduced a change in resolution-detection, filtering out 1920x1080p, if the monitor somehow identified itself as a televison-set. The bug were, to my knowledge, never solved, and owners recommended to buy 10.5 instead.
It's not a bug, it's a feature! And it sounds like it served its purpose.:)
It feels VERY nice, is well suited for emulating a wide variety of past consoles, and the wiimote can connect via bluetooth to any PC, very easily. There are free drivers you can download.
I do like the classic controller - but I don't like the whole "tethered to the Wii remote" thing even when playing games on the Wii... And to get not just a brand-new classic, but a Wii remote, too? That's at least $30-$40 of controllers.
Another option would be a PS2 controller and a USB adaptor. Even new PS2 controllers go for, what, $15 these days? PS1 dual shocks could probably be had for even cheaper. And adaptors are on E-Bay for like $3 or something. The one thing I hate about this kind of solution is the PSX controller connectors are huge... It's no fun having that bulky connector pair in the line. But apart from that, and the fact that it's not wireless, I'd say it's as good an option as going with the Classic Controller. (I don't think the Dual Shock is really the ideal option for classic gaming - but it is a very good controller IMO.)
But, really, as I said - a real NES or SNES controller is better still...
.... Question is just if you can get something jury-rigged with a serial-to-USB converter or something.
The DB-9 connector used on Atari, Commodore 64, Sega Master System/Genesis and so on wasn't an RS-232 connection... Pins 1-4 were used for directional controls, pin 6 was the fire button, and pin 8 was ground... That doesn't correspond to 9-pin RS-232. If you changed the wiring, you could maybe use the five input lines of the RS-232 port to read the joystick - or something like that...
But, really, why bother? Who wants to mess around with that kind of stupid hack, or connect joysticks to a parallel port, when you can just get cheap adaptors to connect them via USB?
For anything older than Super Nintendo (SNES, Genesis, SMS, NES, GB, GG, etc) that mostly used a digital joypad (rather than analog stick), the Gravis Gamepad was pretty darn good, though they did wear out fast.
Ugh, I always hated that thing. The way they recessed the buttons into the face of the controller? What were they thinking?
There are good PC gamepads, arcade sticks, and so on... But for something with the basic specifications of, say, an SNES controller, I would use... an SNES controller.:)
There are adaptors to use these controllers with USB... And you can buy modified controllers (sometimes, anyway) at places like Retrozone that have the adaptor built-in... I retrofitted one of my NES controllers for USB (and then tweaked it to work better at Mega Man 10 on PS3) and I have to say: the original NES controller is boxy and small, and way back in the day there were all the "Nintendo Thumb" complaints and so on, but it really is a damn good controller. The precise feel of a Nintendo D-pad, the response of the buttons, the overall ergonomic feel - most third-party controllers get some or all of that wrong.
When you run the numerical code in the US Cyber Command's logo through a standard two-pass RSA decryption, match it against known quantum fractal ciphers, look at it in a mirror while standing on your head, and de-converge your eyeballs to get the stereo effect, it reads as follows:
No, no... They didn't have color in the 1940s. Just look at the movies from back then...
Actually, you jest, but I remember the first time I saw footage from WWII that was in colour and being stunned, because it was so vivid.
Yeah, I know there actually was color photography in the 1940s. I mean Wizard of Oz came out in the 1930s... I thought about whether to add a footnote indicating that the joke wasn't factually correct, but decided against it.
Is this how screwed up NASA is, reduced to releasing video games as opposed to sending people into space?
It's a master recruitment plan. See, kids think they're playing a game but in reality, they're being trained and the best of the best of the best will rise until one day, via their "game" they're doing actual exploration without realizing it. I hear they're planning a military version of this too.
Remember, don't use the Death Blossom except as a last resort!
I get about as far as "Microsoft Spurned Researchers" and then the rest of it doesn't make any sense. Like you need a conjunction or something after "Researchers"...
Or, you know, hyphenate "Microsoft-Spurned" so the damn headline makes sense.
I had a Powerbook for several years (still do, actually, I just don't use it any more) - and one of the things I really liked when I switched to a EEE 901 was the power cord... 12V, with a good ol' 2.5mm coaxial power jack.
Now, this connector is nothing fancy - it doesn't project the laptop or the cord from someone tripping over the cord, things like that. But it's a simple, long-standing standard connector. I can buy one at Radio Shack.
"Why would someone need a replacement connector?" you might ask? Remember I said I owned a Powerbook? Between my wife and myself we probably owned a total of five of those old, pre-Magsafe Apple laptop power adaptors, and every damn one of them has failed. I've repaired a couple of them more than once, only to have them break again. For me, the idea of being able to simply read the damn specs and connect a suitable power source is just lovely.
Of course, apart from the "Magsafe"-type breakaway that everyone expects these days, there's another reason laptop manufacturers generally don't go in for such a simple solution: they want to protect the idiots who don't understand current ratings, keep them from hooking up their laptops to a 300mA adaptor or something stupid like that. They don't want these people going into Radio Shack, buying the wrong wall wart, pairing it with the "M" adaptaplug and killing the adaptor, or the laptop, or both. But for me, being able to get a power connector for my laptop just about anywhere is grand.
If the laptop manufacturers out there work out a common standard connector for laptop power bricks, that could still be nice, as the connector type will be common enough that I could at least buy the connector, or a cheap cord with the connector on it, should I need to fix something or rig something up... But there's something fabulous about having a laptop with a power connector that's really common and accessible... Even if the manufacturers come up with a new standard connector, as long as it's a new standard it still won't have that kind of ubiquity.
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I am not advocating that 12-year olds should carry weapons, but had she known how to use one, she certainly would have been justified in defending herself.
I knew a kid growing up that picked up a target rifle when someone broke into his house and attempted to rape his mother.
You know, I can't condone rape under any circumstance, but raping your mother while someone's breaking into the house just seems particularly unwise.
Sony also updated its PS3 Terms of Service to warn against too much 3-D viewing.
Good thing we aren't exposed to 3D that often. It's not like you could look out your window, and *bampf* everything is in 3D.
Damn, not only is your world in 3-D, but Nightcrawler is there, too??
3D video is nothing more than two 2D videos which alternate every other frame. It's trivial to create or decode; in fact, there are several ways you can do it:
Would interleaving the frames really work with lossy codecs? I mean, part of the way MPEG works is to detect trends in motion in the frame and encode those, effectively "morphing" some visual data from one frame to another. It's not a system that's well suited to the kind of jitter you'd get from interleaving a slightly different point-of-view into every second frame - not if you want to retain that jitter...
A more interesting approach would be to take advantage of the similarity between the left and right eye images for each 3-D frame, as well as the trends of color and motion in each stream... With an approach like that you should be able to encode a 3-D movie in significantly less than twice the space required for encoding the 2-D version...
3D really does not contribute in any way to a movie being "worthwhile" after you get over the novelty. I used to watch every 3D movie that came out when they were all the decent 3D rendered Pixar types, but these days there are plenty of crappy dumb horror movies and 3D stadium experience type ones that I don't consider worth it. Especially since I have an "Unlimited" card where I can see as many movies as I want a month for a flat rate.. except for the 3D ones which I now have to pay extra per movie, even if I bring my own glasses.. wtf?
You're not paying for 3-D glasses rental, you're paying for the fact that projecting 3-D requires more expensive equipment...
Too bad you failed to realize human vision is around 72Hz and not 60Hz, so your entire above statement is pure bullshit, or you're the defective one.
Really? 24Hz movie theaters must be unwatchable to you then.
24Hz is the rate that the film advances - not the rate of the projector's shutter. IIRC projectors project each frame twice - so film flicker is 48Hz. Still slower than 60Hz of course...
I'd expect that duty cycle plays a big part, too - with shutter glasses, each eye gets image for less than half of the time. With a 60Hz CRT, vertical blanking occurs 60 times a second - but the phosphors don't immediately fade, and the vertical blanking only takes about 1/10 the time that it takes to draw the actual frame...
That said, I haven't seen 3-D LCD TVs yet, let alone watched them enough to determine whether the shutter glasses would bother me.
Was it because you still feel glad whenever you feel any form of anxiety that you came to see me today?
I can't believe there aren't already good methods for disposal of medications widely in use.
High temperature incineration? Piranha solution (ask a chemist) ?
Great, just what we need... Water infused with piranha essence. Damn chemists, just always have to go and find new horrors to unleash upon the world...
Not even if Hitler stole your computer and drove off in a car powered by dead babies would I say post them on 4chan!
Can we get rule 34 on this?
Actually, a few years ago, I bought a Mac Mini which showed grave problems with BlueTooth and Wifi-reception. After digging around a little, that too was a hardware-problem, present in a lot of Mac Minis. Owners were never reimbursed, and (AFAIR) apple.com forum-threads removed.
Also, for that Mac, in OSX 10.4.6, Apple broke all support for FullHD-TV-monitors. Basically, the analysis claimed that for some unknown reason, Apple introduced a change in resolution-detection, filtering out 1920x1080p, if the monitor somehow identified itself as a televison-set. The bug were, to my knowledge, never solved, and owners recommended to buy 10.5 instead.
It's not a bug, it's a feature! And it sounds like it served its purpose. :)
One very simple replacement for the SNES is the modern Nintendo Classic Controller.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Controller
It feels VERY nice, is well suited for emulating a wide variety of past consoles, and the wiimote can connect via bluetooth to any PC, very easily. There are free drivers you can download.
I do like the classic controller - but I don't like the whole "tethered to the Wii remote" thing even when playing games on the Wii... And to get not just a brand-new classic, but a Wii remote, too? That's at least $30-$40 of controllers.
Another option would be a PS2 controller and a USB adaptor. Even new PS2 controllers go for, what, $15 these days? PS1 dual shocks could probably be had for even cheaper. And adaptors are on E-Bay for like $3 or something. The one thing I hate about this kind of solution is the PSX controller connectors are huge... It's no fun having that bulky connector pair in the line. But apart from that, and the fact that it's not wireless, I'd say it's as good an option as going with the Classic Controller. (I don't think the Dual Shock is really the ideal option for classic gaming - but it is a very good controller IMO.)
But, really, as I said - a real NES or SNES controller is better still...
... is The Arcade
.... Question is just if you can get something jury-rigged with a serial-to-USB converter or something.
The DB-9 connector used on Atari, Commodore 64, Sega Master System/Genesis and so on wasn't an RS-232 connection... Pins 1-4 were used for directional controls, pin 6 was the fire button, and pin 8 was ground... That doesn't correspond to 9-pin RS-232. If you changed the wiring, you could maybe use the five input lines of the RS-232 port to read the joystick - or something like that...
But, really, why bother? Who wants to mess around with that kind of stupid hack, or connect joysticks to a parallel port, when you can just get cheap adaptors to connect them via USB?
For anything older than Super Nintendo (SNES, Genesis, SMS, NES, GB, GG, etc) that mostly used a digital joypad (rather than analog stick), the Gravis Gamepad was pretty darn good, though they did wear out fast.
Ugh, I always hated that thing. The way they recessed the buttons into the face of the controller? What were they thinking?
There are good PC gamepads, arcade sticks, and so on... But for something with the basic specifications of, say, an SNES controller, I would use... an SNES controller. :)
There are adaptors to use these controllers with USB... And you can buy modified controllers (sometimes, anyway) at places like Retrozone that have the adaptor built-in... I retrofitted one of my NES controllers for USB (and then tweaked it to work better at Mega Man 10 on PS3) and I have to say: the original NES controller is boxy and small, and way back in the day there were all the "Nintendo Thumb" complaints and so on, but it really is a damn good controller. The precise feel of a Nintendo D-pad, the response of the buttons, the overall ergonomic feel - most third-party controllers get some or all of that wrong.
Yet another vaccine and cure that is hidden so that pharmaceutical companies get more and more money..
Well, it's actually the money, not the vaccines, that are suppressing the virus...
Good god, I can still remember converting numbers to base-36 because I was too cheap to spring for RIP-paint...
Field testing new signature in 5...
4...
3...
2...
(L)ook for something to kill
(H)ealer's Hut
(R)eturn to town
Hey, I have that tattooed on my ass!
When you run the numerical code in the US Cyber Command's logo through a standard two-pass RSA decryption, match it against known quantum fractal ciphers, look at it in a mirror while standing on your head, and de-converge your eyeballs to get the stereo effect, it reads as follows:
"A/S/L?"
But what could it possibly mean?
Actually, you jest, but I remember the first time I saw footage from WWII that was in colour and being stunned, because it was so vivid.
Yeah, I know there actually was color photography in the 1940s. I mean Wizard of Oz came out in the 1930s... I thought about whether to add a footnote indicating that the joke wasn't factually correct, but decided against it.
Jeebus!! Invented the pixel. I'll be damned. :-P
That's nothing. What about the guy back in the 40s that invented the color blue!
No, no... They didn't have color in the 1940s. Just look at the movies from back then...
Cheesing.
You never really get that good a look at her naked tits, though.
What, did we go through a time warp? Wasn't there a Moonbase Alpha back in 1999?
And, didn't the moon vacate the premises shortly thereafter?
Yes, but somebody used the dragonballs to restore it again.
Is this how screwed up NASA is, reduced to releasing video games as opposed to sending people into space?
It's a master recruitment plan. See, kids think they're playing a game but in reality, they're being trained and the best of the best of the best will rise until one day, via their "game" they're doing actual exploration without realizing it. I hear they're planning a military version of this too.
Remember, don't use the Death Blossom except as a last resort!
Microsoft Spurned Researchers Release 0-Day
I get about as far as "Microsoft Spurned Researchers" and then the rest of it doesn't make any sense. Like you need a conjunction or something after "Researchers"...
Or, you know, hyphenate "Microsoft-Spurned" so the damn headline makes sense.
I had a Powerbook for several years (still do, actually, I just don't use it any more) - and one of the things I really liked when I switched to a EEE 901 was the power cord... 12V, with a good ol' 2.5mm coaxial power jack.
Now, this connector is nothing fancy - it doesn't project the laptop or the cord from someone tripping over the cord, things like that. But it's a simple, long-standing standard connector. I can buy one at Radio Shack.
"Why would someone need a replacement connector?" you might ask? Remember I said I owned a Powerbook? Between my wife and myself we probably owned a total of five of those old, pre-Magsafe Apple laptop power adaptors, and every damn one of them has failed. I've repaired a couple of them more than once, only to have them break again. For me, the idea of being able to simply read the damn specs and connect a suitable power source is just lovely.
Of course, apart from the "Magsafe"-type breakaway that everyone expects these days, there's another reason laptop manufacturers generally don't go in for such a simple solution: they want to protect the idiots who don't understand current ratings, keep them from hooking up their laptops to a 300mA adaptor or something stupid like that. They don't want these people going into Radio Shack, buying the wrong wall wart, pairing it with the "M" adaptaplug and killing the adaptor, or the laptop, or both. But for me, being able to get a power connector for my laptop just about anywhere is grand.
If the laptop manufacturers out there work out a common standard connector for laptop power bricks, that could still be nice, as the connector type will be common enough that I could at least buy the connector, or a cheap cord with the connector on it, should I need to fix something or rig something up... But there's something fabulous about having a laptop with a power connector that's really common and accessible... Even if the manufacturers come up with a new standard connector, as long as it's a new standard it still won't have that kind of ubiquity.