Damn straight, this was the only reason I was looking into modchips for my xbox.. enable 480p or better for DVD playback. Word is they disabled it in software just prior to release due to macrovision problems (ie, higher display modes didn't have it).
Which quite frankly, pisses me off. I have a quite-capable media center sitting in my house, and I can't bloody use it unless I'm content with 480i (guess what, I'm not). Were I to try and remedy this, I'd have to add $100 to the price I paid for the xbox, and risk getting banned off Live because of it (let alone frying the xbox with a soldering iron and my clumsy fingers). Yes I am aware there's mods that have an off toggle, but there's a principle involved here. I shouldn't have to hide from the "authorities" to use things I own the way I want to use them.
Since I doubt microsoft is gonna say "oops sorry" and re-enable highres playback, modchips have a valid reason to exist. Feeding consumers crippleware is never justifiable, and modchips should be allowed so those that wish to can remedy the problem.
I dunno. It seems anymore they aren't experts in ANYTHING.:)
One would like to think that with their 6,500 employees and 1.3 billion dollar budget (in 2003) there would be at least ONE person that actually reads the applications would have some basic awareness of the world and be able to react appropriately. Or hell, even ask a question.
6,500 people is simply too great a number for the entire organization to be so grossly ignorant. There has to be ONE person at least, right?:)
> there is this web page i've seen briefly in the > past at one time or another. Today, I need to find > that web page.
Mozilla's history browser is quite good at this. Granted it only shines on sites you visited 6 days or less ago (everything else gets lumped into one group), but all it takes is a quick scan of the domain names and you can generally pick out what you need.
I suppose it could be cool to have mozilla record the referrer for every domain, and if it came from a search engine it stores the query you sent. This would later enable you to find that site by keyword in the history.
But then I guess you gotta wait for some programmer with an itch to implement it.;)
I think it would be interesting for PC gaming to become so irrelevent that the argument of "well your os (OSX/linux/whatever) can't play any games" becomes invalid.
I don't think it will ever reach that point, but considering the "alternative" OS's are competing viably against every other facet of windows, marginalize the gaming and perhaps some real cuts into the microsoft monopoly could be made.
I'm sure a lot of us would gleefully delete our windows partitions, at the least.;)
It's not like there's some legal reason to have the definition of a planet rigidly defined, it doesn't effect the money anyone gets, it doesn't influence political boundaries, and it won't get anyone out of jail.. so who cares?:P
If it's big, it's a planet. If it's not big, it's an asteroid. If it's not big and made of ice, it's a comet.
Might as well debate which text editor is bettor or whether we should be putting GNU in front of Linux.. it's such a silly thing to discuss it baffles me this shows up in the news so often.
Granted much of the software isn't as user-oriented, but that's not the point. The point is it is another government institution that has put real effort into making free software available to the public.
The intent is similar in effect to moths or butterflies that have scary patterns on their wings, it tries to scare off birds that would be hunting them.
Swap "moths" with "foil hat wearing kooks" and "birds" with "us" to understand the point.
By eyeballing the picture in the news story of course.;)
A quarter is about 0.06 of an inch thick, so I just rounded up to an easily divisible number. Obviously that's a very optimistic guess, but then again, discussing putting 200 4gb drives into a chassis and using raid on them is already stretching the limits of plausibility so I figured why not.
Stacked like a roll of quarters, you could fit around 200 of these into a space 19 inches wide.. the width of a standard rack.
That's 800 gigs per 1u assuming 4gb per disk, and that's not even considering the additional 29 inches (or so) of depth you'd have in the case. Which from a density perspective is pretty close to what already exists.. you can easily get 4 terabyte in a 3 unit chassis these days.
I wouldn't envy the poor engineer that would have to design the wiring for such a setup however, not to mention dealing with pesky details like swapping out bad disks and heat dissipation.
> (ie. they have to race almost as fast as human drivers would drive normally)
It was 142 miles in 10 hours, wasn't it?
That's an average speed of only 14.2 MPH.:p Humans could average double that I'd think. From what I could tell the racers were trying to push the vehicles over 40 mph.
While I understand it's a "race", I think this early in the game taking a more measured pace would have been smarter.
What's "wrong" with it is that they are willing to use the public domain to further their interests, but are not willing to release their productions into the public domain, and in fact lobby heavily for legislation that will allow them to keep it from happening.
It's a double standard. They should be willing to play by the same rules that made them the success they are today.
Publishing was always one of Bungie's demons, one that went all the way back to the Marathon days. The deal they entered with Take2 just before the MS buyout was an effort to improve the situation.
To say it was the sole motivation for the buyout is probably way off, but I'm sure it was at the front of everyone's mind.
The other publicly stated reason, can't remember who said it (either Jones or Soell), was that Bungie just wanted to make great games and had never had any specific loyalty to any one platform. That the xbox was coming and promised a smooth development environment was one of many lures.
> responsible for a slew of poorly designed sites,
That's precisely why you do it. This software is popular. You want as much popular software on linux as you can get, so when jimbob gets pissed off at windows someday and someone suggests he try linux, the inevitable argument of "well can it do this and this like windows" holds no merit.
uh-huh. I appreciate your concern, but if I started sending out encrypted emails 99% of the people I sent them to would start asking me why I was sending them a virus.
For casual shoot the shit type conversations, emailing a cleartext password (which people are later required to change) is a perfectly acceptable risk. The goal was to have a place to chat with no spam, and we got that.:)
Or web-based forums. Usenet is still quite useful if you're looking to discuss a very specific topic as well. My email only gets used anymore for helping lusers that forgot their password.:'P
I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that email is "dying", but it's significance is definetly diminishing.
Great, so when some punk starts circle strafing around you, you snap your neck in half trying to track him.;) Which of course ignores that when you turn your head to adjust the view you're now forces to watch the screen out of the corner of your eyes.
However, it would be kinda neat if there was a 360 degree display and the mouse was hooked to a motor that spinned your chair around.
Because there's always going to be a few who end up being immune and don't get infected.
Look at mosquitos for a good modern example.. bug spray manufacturer's have to update their formulas every few years because the bugs that survive end up being immune, and as they breed the entire population inherits the immunity.
Not that I'm an authority on the topic; I suppose a "super virus" could have nailed them and decimated the population so badly that even those who survived were unable to repopulate. So it's not to say a virus wasn't the cause, but it's not a convenient "deus ex" type solution.
Then don't watch the shows? The oscars aren't operated for your benefit. It's soley for the benefit of the people who make movies, for other movie makers to show recognition for notable achievments.
Not to mention the fact that games have basically revolved around "taking drugs" to give temporary power boosts for nearly as long as video games have existed.
Would pac-man suddenly be taboo if instead they said you ate some steroids so you could beat up the ghosts? Or magic mushrooms in super mario bros.. oh wait they actually did that.;)
One thing I've noticed with a lot of open source game-directed projects is that they feed off each other as needed.
You can take jim's physics library and link it into fred's ROAM engine, slap tommy's interface toolkit on top if it then shoehorn bob's network protocol in and actually get a usable piece of software out of it. The SDL libraries are one obvious example of this but it's far from the only place I've seen it.
No it won't be the next jaw dropping engine that will command everyone's respect but that's not really the point, the point is as long as you have enough basic intelligence to learn an API and can manage to glue several of them together the open source world is plenty willing to fill in the gaps of your knowledge.
It isn't really an open source specific thing, this mode of thinking can be found under windows as well, but for obvious reasons it seems to flourish best in the linux world. It's not mature area of development yet, but the foundations are there. As the barrier of entry into developing commercial games increases, so to do the free software options.
I think it'll be neat to wait and see if open source can evolve to present a solution to the "kitchen sink" problems that current game development has to deal with.
Don't know if you've used it lately, but modern incarnations of windows have about that many checkboxes as well.;) And some dissappear and reappear depending on what other checkboxes you have checked and unchecked.
Still more are spread out in obscure locations or buried in obvious locations but are poorly labelled.
"Checkboxitis" is the price of customizability. I don't think linux OR windows deal with the problem very well. Well, the linux window managers anyways. Is why I generally stick with the plan9-derived managers.
Yeah no kidding. Every so often I consider trying my hand at machinima, and if nothing else watching this has convinced me to never, EVER try to create my own musical score. Yikes that was horrid.
Technically it's quite good. If I didn't know beforehand I wouldn't have pegged it as rendered in the q3 engine, though obviously an ameteur did it because the animation of the animals/girl is pretty stiff.
But the poor story and poor audio made watching the whole thing painful.
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Damn straight, this was the only reason I was looking into modchips for my xbox.. enable 480p or better for DVD playback. Word is they disabled it in software just prior to release due to macrovision problems (ie, higher display modes didn't have it).
Which quite frankly, pisses me off. I have a quite-capable media center sitting in my house, and I can't bloody use it unless I'm content with 480i (guess what, I'm not). Were I to try and remedy this, I'd have to add $100 to the price I paid for the xbox, and risk getting banned off Live because of it (let alone frying the xbox with a soldering iron and my clumsy fingers). Yes I am aware there's mods that have an off toggle, but there's a principle involved here. I shouldn't have to hide from the "authorities" to use things I own the way I want to use them.
Since I doubt microsoft is gonna say "oops sorry" and re-enable highres playback, modchips have a valid reason to exist. Feeding consumers crippleware is never justifiable, and modchips should be allowed so those that wish to can remedy the problem.
> They can't be experts in everything.
:)
:)
I dunno. It seems anymore they aren't experts in ANYTHING.
One would like to think that with their 6,500 employees and 1.3 billion dollar budget (in 2003) there would be at least ONE person that actually reads the applications would have some basic awareness of the world and be able to react appropriately. Or hell, even ask a question.
6,500 people is simply too great a number for the entire organization to be so grossly ignorant. There has to be ONE person at least, right?
He got the joke.
:)
You didn't get his.
Sanitized word documents will appear on microsoft's site quickly though, and all the links I looked at on this site pointed to microsoft's web site.
So if you want THAT bit of history, best get it soon.
> there is this web page i've seen briefly in the
;)
> past at one time or another. Today, I need to find
> that web page.
Mozilla's history browser is quite good at this. Granted it only shines on sites you visited 6 days or less ago (everything else gets lumped into one group), but all it takes is a quick scan of the domain names and you can generally pick out what you need.
I suppose it could be cool to have mozilla record the referrer for every domain, and if it came from a search engine it stores the query you sent. This would later enable you to find that site by keyword in the history.
But then I guess you gotta wait for some programmer with an itch to implement it.
I think it would be interesting for PC gaming to become so irrelevent that the argument of "well your os (OSX/linux/whatever) can't play any games" becomes invalid.
;)
I don't think it will ever reach that point, but considering the "alternative" OS's are competing viably against every other facet of windows, marginalize the gaming and perhaps some real cuts into the microsoft monopoly could be made.
I'm sure a lot of us would gleefully delete our windows partitions, at the least.
Honestly, who cares.
:P
It's not like there's some legal reason to have the definition of a planet rigidly defined, it doesn't effect the money anyone gets, it doesn't influence political boundaries, and it won't get anyone out of jail.. so who cares?
If it's big, it's a planet. If it's not big, it's an asteroid. If it's not big and made of ice, it's a comet.
Might as well debate which text editor is bettor or whether we should be putting GNU in front of Linux.. it's such a silly thing to discuss it baffles me this shows up in the news so often.
Granted much of the software isn't as user-oriented, but that's not the point. The point is it is another government institution that has put real effort into making free software available to the public.
;)
http://fermitools.fnal.gov/
This is just one example I personally know of. Is this common at all? I'm too lazy to sift through every *.gov domain hunting for a software page.
The intent is similar in effect to moths or butterflies that have scary patterns on their wings, it tries to scare off birds that would be hunting them.
Swap "moths" with "foil hat wearing kooks" and "birds" with "us" to understand the point.
It's a defense mechanism, plain and simple.
You're right, the scary part about armageddon is actually surviving the initial event, and being forced to adapt your strategy instantly.
Talk about the ultimate episode of survivor.
By eyeballing the picture in the news story of course. ;)
A quarter is about 0.06 of an inch thick, so I just rounded up to an easily divisible number. Obviously that's a very optimistic guess, but then again, discussing putting 200 4gb drives into a chassis and using raid on them is already stretching the limits of plausibility so I figured why not.
Stacked like a roll of quarters, you could fit around 200 of these into a space 19 inches wide.. the width of a standard rack.
That's 800 gigs per 1u assuming 4gb per disk, and that's not even considering the additional 29 inches (or so) of depth you'd have in the case. Which from a density perspective is pretty close to what already exists.. you can easily get 4 terabyte in a 3 unit chassis these days.
I wouldn't envy the poor engineer that would have to design the wiring for such a setup however, not to mention dealing with pesky details like swapping out bad disks and heat dissipation.
> (ie. they have to race almost as fast as human drivers would drive normally)
:p Humans could average double that I'd think. From what I could tell the racers were trying to push the vehicles over 40 mph.
It was 142 miles in 10 hours, wasn't it?
That's an average speed of only 14.2 MPH.
While I understand it's a "race", I think this early in the game taking a more measured pace would have been smarter.
> What's wrong with that?
What's "wrong" with it is that they are willing to use the public domain to further their interests, but are not willing to release their productions into the public domain, and in fact lobby heavily for legislation that will allow them to keep it from happening.
It's a double standard. They should be willing to play by the same rules that made them the success they are today.
Publishing was always one of Bungie's demons, one that went all the way back to the Marathon days. The deal they entered with Take2 just before the MS buyout was an effort to improve the situation.
To say it was the sole motivation for the buyout is probably way off, but I'm sure it was at the front of everyone's mind.
The other publicly stated reason, can't remember who said it (either Jones or Soell), was that Bungie just wanted to make great games and had never had any specific loyalty to any one platform. That the xbox was coming and promised a smooth development environment was one of many lures.
> responsible for a slew of poorly designed sites,
That's precisely why you do it. This software is popular. You want as much popular software on linux as you can get, so when jimbob gets pissed off at windows someday and someone suggests he try linux, the inevitable argument of "well can it do this and this like windows" holds no merit.
You gotta take the good with the bad.
uh-huh. I appreciate your concern, but if I started sending out encrypted emails 99% of the people I sent them to would start asking me why I was sending them a virus.
:)
For casual shoot the shit type conversations, emailing a cleartext password (which people are later required to change) is a perfectly acceptable risk. The goal was to have a place to chat with no spam, and we got that.
Or web-based forums. Usenet is still quite useful if you're looking to discuss a very specific topic as well. My email only gets used anymore for helping lusers that forgot their password. :'P
I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that email is "dying", but it's significance is definetly diminishing.
Great, so when some punk starts circle strafing around you, you snap your neck in half trying to track him. ;) Which of course ignores that when you turn your head to adjust the view you're now forces to watch the screen out of the corner of your eyes.
However, it would be kinda neat if there was a 360 degree display and the mouse was hooked to a motor that spinned your chair around.
> and not some kind of disease/virus?
Because there's always going to be a few who end up being immune and don't get infected.
Look at mosquitos for a good modern example.. bug spray manufacturer's have to update their formulas every few years because the bugs that survive end up being immune, and as they breed the entire population inherits the immunity.
Not that I'm an authority on the topic; I suppose a "super virus" could have nailed them and decimated the population so badly that even those who survived were unable to repopulate. So it's not to say a virus wasn't the cause, but it's not a convenient "deus ex" type solution.
Then don't watch the shows? The oscars aren't operated for your benefit. It's soley for the benefit of the people who make movies, for other movie makers to show recognition for notable achievments.
Not to mention the fact that games have basically revolved around "taking drugs" to give temporary power boosts for nearly as long as video games have existed.
;)
Would pac-man suddenly be taboo if instead they said you ate some steroids so you could beat up the ghosts? Or magic mushrooms in super mario bros.. oh wait they actually did that.
One thing I've noticed with a lot of open source game-directed projects is that they feed off each other as needed.
You can take jim's physics library and link it into fred's ROAM engine, slap tommy's interface toolkit on top if it then shoehorn bob's network protocol in and actually get a usable piece of software out of it. The SDL libraries are one obvious example of this but it's far from the only place I've seen it.
No it won't be the next jaw dropping engine that will command everyone's respect but that's not really the point, the point is as long as you have enough basic intelligence to learn an API and can manage to glue several of them together the open source world is plenty willing to fill in the gaps of your knowledge.
It isn't really an open source specific thing, this mode of thinking can be found under windows as well, but for obvious reasons it seems to flourish best in the linux world. It's not mature area of development yet, but the foundations are there. As the barrier of entry into developing commercial games increases, so to do the free software options.
I think it'll be neat to wait and see if open source can evolve to present a solution to the "kitchen sink" problems that current game development has to deal with.
> approximately seven thousand checkboxes
;) And some dissappear and reappear depending on what other checkboxes you have checked and unchecked.
Don't know if you've used it lately, but modern incarnations of windows have about that many checkboxes as well.
Still more are spread out in obscure locations or buried in obvious locations but are poorly labelled.
"Checkboxitis" is the price of customizability. I don't think linux OR windows deal with the problem very well. Well, the linux window managers anyways. Is why I generally stick with the plan9-derived managers.
Yeah no kidding. Every so often I consider trying my hand at machinima, and if nothing else watching this has convinced me to never, EVER try to create my own musical score. Yikes that was horrid.
Technically it's quite good. If I didn't know beforehand I wouldn't have pegged it as rendered in the q3 engine, though obviously an ameteur did it because the animation of the animals/girl is pretty stiff.
But the poor story and poor audio made watching the whole thing painful.