I want one for this exact reason as well. Been too busy/lazy to really research it (and/or get my employer to buy me one).. how well does it function as a "portable thin client"?
Can I reinstall it to get rid of the easy mode programs and turn it into a simple portable xterm?
However, when someone does have a problem, I expect them to fulfill their obligations on it, not lie and jerk around the customer who bought it for THREE MONTHS.
Experiences with these in-store warranties can vary quite a bit. Obviously this lady had a bad one. When I was gifted an xbox several years ago, the person who bought it for me got a 2 year warranty on the thing. Up until then I'd always felt the warranty was a waste.. but a year later the xbox went tits up. Took it into the store and they refunded me no questions asked in about 20 minutes.
There had even been a price drop recently, and the store credit they awarded me reflected the original purchase price, not the current price. So I even even got a "free" gift card out of it that made up the difference.
In general these warranties are stupid (would you like to spend $20 to guarantee your $15 keyboard??) but in the situation of gadgets that have no significant personal attachment (video game console, no. laptop with lots of personal data, yes) I think it's worth considering.
The accusation that HardOCP is making is that it is not possible to perform the exact same tests for all video cards, because software vendors sneak in shortcuts and cheats (sorry, optimizations) that screw with the numbers.
So they threw benchmarking out, for the most part, and instead tried to make a system for measuring how well a given video card delivers a positive experience. It's not ideal.. but at least it's immune to interference from the video card makers. Now you just have to worry about bias from the reviewers.;)
Spend all your time in meetings and nagging lazy workers to do their job? Asking for money to develop improvements and being told you can't have the budget?
The only rewarding thing to come out of IT is getting into the guts of a computer and making it work, which is not something managers do. I've turned down several opportunities since this became my profession, and I'm glad I did because everyone I've ever seen who got moved into management became bitter, unhappy husks of what they used to be.
I take a different approach.. I'm the resident hard drive collector as well, except I take them apart and extract the magnets. The older they are the better, drives from the late 90's seem to have the best ones. Modern desktop drives have pussy magnets.:( Seagate 73 gig fiber channel disks have the best magnets I've ever pulled.
Of course, the hard part is doing something productive with them. They're really not good for much, except for marveling how cool magnetism is. Eddy currents are a good crowd pleaser.. made a pendulum type device with a led wired up to a coil, as it swung past a magnet the led would flicker.
Hitler wasn't the only one with the idea anyways. Ferdinand Porsche had been working on the VW for years, it was just coincidence that the two wanted to build the same kind of car at around the same time.
Hitler was more of a bankroll for the project than inspiration.
At least with a computer, there are LAN gaming options (although some game platforms may have LAN gaming capabilities, they don't seem to be as flexible or easy to set up, or even as well thought-out).
Every xbox game I have ever played that supported any kind of multiplayer also supported LAN based play. In fact early on, before XBL was running, it was all the games supported. Was one of the most painless things you could experience as well. Wire up all the xboxes to a hub, and every xbox that turned on would start talking to each other. Wouldn't even need a dhcp server working. Someone fires up a game and makes a server, everyone else can instantly drop in.
There may be a lot of good arguments to favor PC gaming over console gaming.. but the LAN situation ain't one of them.
Even most of 2007 was pretty rock solid. Things only started going wonky around the time of the fall update. I've been an XBL subscriber since the start and this is the only significant outage they've had that I can remember (note: my brain likes to purge old data points). Yeah, it sucks. But it's not the end of the world. There's plenty of other ways for me to waste my free time so its not like it's my sole source of entertainment.
I do find it amusing how loudly a lot of people are complaining. The same people who have spent the past couple years praising the xbox for how much better than the PS3 it is are now pulling out the pitchforks, promising to go get a PS3 if the XBL problems don't get fixed.
It's a sound argument for intelligent design. If temperature overflows, it means we were all programmed and god does, in fact, exist.
The downside is he's a first year CS student.
It would certainly explain a lot. The universe's expansion is just a memory leak and the big bang was simply POST. Black holes? Core dumps. I just worry what happens when he wedges the machine and has to reboot.
I wonder if the 3 meg jpeg on the front page had anything to do with the crash.
Nice to know that, no matter what part of the world you're in, people are willing to listen to "my brother's little kid, he's great with this world wide web stuff!" and actually pay them to do some work.
It doesn't test anything such as deduction and problem solving either, which is where I would bet humans have the advantage.
Repeat the test with a predictable pattern of numbers (or symbols, doesn't really matter), and have the subjects try to guess the next in the sequence.
The sad part is if any of their flamboyant birthday songs got popular, they'd rely on the same laws to extort money out of people using it.
I know the people who made laws establishing copyright went into it with noble intentions, but it's hard to see that now. The whole concept needs to be revisited, the system needs some kind of check against exploiting society the same way it was originally intended to prevent exploitation of creators.
"However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with -- 320x240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much"
I would think a lot of this has to do with the fact that it's a pretty common trick to get decent quality with the existing youtube.. resize your video to 320x240 at the highest bitrate that will keep you below 100 megs. The logic is if you reduce the amount of reprocessing that's necessary, fewer artifacts appear.
Omitting details like drives and case is cheating quite a bit.
What about the types who are still running a system with IDE drives? Or their old case has dead fans? The cost starts escalating fast. If they built an all-new system for $500 that could play Crysis, maybe then I would be impressed.
Some guy for this Institute was on the Colbert Report last week, and one reason he gave was that many languages have very unique ways of expressing certain concepts(he gave an example, but heck if I can remember it). He considered the loss of these languages to be a loss of information. Not sure I agree that it is a good reason to spend a lot of time preserving languages, but it was kind of an interesting way to look at it.
It uses a projector to put the image on the table.
Seems kind of backwards to me but I bet it's cheaper than getting an LCD of that size. Only similarity to the iPhone seems to be the way you use touch to navigate, but ideas like that have been floating around for years now.
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I want one for this exact reason as well. Been too busy/lazy to really research it (and/or get my employer to buy me one).. how well does it function as a "portable thin client"?
Can I reinstall it to get rid of the easy mode programs and turn it into a simple portable xterm?
However, when someone does have a problem, I expect them to fulfill their obligations on it, not lie and jerk around the customer who bought it for THREE MONTHS.
Experiences with these in-store warranties can vary quite a bit. Obviously this lady had a bad one. When I was gifted an xbox several years ago, the person who bought it for me got a 2 year warranty on the thing. Up until then I'd always felt the warranty was a waste.. but a year later the xbox went tits up. Took it into the store and they refunded me no questions asked in about 20 minutes.
There had even been a price drop recently, and the store credit they awarded me reflected the original purchase price, not the current price. So I even even got a "free" gift card out of it that made up the difference.
In general these warranties are stupid (would you like to spend $20 to guarantee your $15 keyboard??) but in the situation of gadgets that have no significant personal attachment (video game console, no. laptop with lots of personal data, yes) I think it's worth considering.
The accusation that HardOCP is making is that it is not possible to perform the exact same tests for all video cards, because software vendors sneak in shortcuts and cheats (sorry, optimizations) that screw with the numbers.
;)
So they threw benchmarking out, for the most part, and instead tried to make a system for measuring how well a given video card delivers a positive experience. It's not ideal.. but at least it's immune to interference from the video card makers. Now you just have to worry about bias from the reviewers.
Why would you want to be a manager?
Spend all your time in meetings and nagging lazy workers to do their job? Asking for money to develop improvements and being told you can't have the budget?
The only rewarding thing to come out of IT is getting into the guts of a computer and making it work, which is not something managers do. I've turned down several opportunities since this became my profession, and I'm glad I did because everyone I've ever seen who got moved into management became bitter, unhappy husks of what they used to be.
I take a different approach.. I'm the resident hard drive collector as well, except I take them apart and extract the magnets. The older they are the better, drives from the late 90's seem to have the best ones. Modern desktop drives have pussy magnets. :( Seagate 73 gig fiber channel disks have the best magnets I've ever pulled.
Of course, the hard part is doing something productive with them. They're really not good for much, except for marveling how cool magnetism is. Eddy currents are a good crowd pleaser.. made a pendulum type device with a led wired up to a coil, as it swung past a magnet the led would flicker.
Also, this:
http://xzzy.org/files/geek/eddy/eddy.avi
Know a guy who would make such projects and donate them to schools as educational toys.. schools are always glad for stuff like that.
Hitler wasn't the only one with the idea anyways. Ferdinand Porsche had been working on the VW for years, it was just coincidence that the two wanted to build the same kind of car at around the same time.
Hitler was more of a bankroll for the project than inspiration.
At least with a computer, there are LAN gaming options (although some game platforms may have LAN gaming capabilities, they don't seem to be as flexible or easy to set up, or even as well thought-out).
Every xbox game I have ever played that supported any kind of multiplayer also supported LAN based play. In fact early on, before XBL was running, it was all the games supported. Was one of the most painless things you could experience as well. Wire up all the xboxes to a hub, and every xbox that turned on would start talking to each other. Wouldn't even need a dhcp server working. Someone fires up a game and makes a server, everyone else can instantly drop in.
There may be a lot of good arguments to favor PC gaming over console gaming.. but the LAN situation ain't one of them.
Even most of 2007 was pretty rock solid. Things only started going wonky around the time of the fall update. I've been an XBL subscriber since the start and this is the only significant outage they've had that I can remember (note: my brain likes to purge old data points). Yeah, it sucks. But it's not the end of the world. There's plenty of other ways for me to waste my free time so its not like it's my sole source of entertainment.
;)
I do find it amusing how loudly a lot of people are complaining. The same people who have spent the past couple years praising the xbox for how much better than the PS3 it is are now pulling out the pitchforks, promising to go get a PS3 if the XBL problems don't get fixed.
Loyalty is a funny thing.
It's a sound argument for intelligent design. If temperature overflows, it means we were all programmed and god does, in fact, exist.
The downside is he's a first year CS student.
It would certainly explain a lot. The universe's expansion is just a memory leak and the big bang was simply POST. Black holes? Core dumps. I just worry what happens when he wedges the machine and has to reboot.
I wonder if the 3 meg jpeg on the front page had anything to do with the crash.
Nice to know that, no matter what part of the world you're in, people are willing to listen to "my brother's little kid, he's great with this world wide web stuff!" and actually pay them to do some work.
Or subjugate us as their power source.. one of the two.
After the budget the Senate passed on Monday, doing much of anything is pretty unlikely.
NASA were just about the only guys to get a budget increase (3%), and even what they got will require sacrificing programs.
Landscape is even worse for other fields of science:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1218/1
You could just gzip everything.
Until they decide compressed files are a sign of piracy, I suppose.
It doesn't test anything such as deduction and problem solving either, which is where I would bet humans have the advantage.
Repeat the test with a predictable pattern of numbers (or symbols, doesn't really matter), and have the subjects try to guess the next in the sequence.
The sad part is if any of their flamboyant birthday songs got popular, they'd rely on the same laws to extort money out of people using it.
I know the people who made laws establishing copyright went into it with noble intentions, but it's hard to see that now. The whole concept needs to be revisited, the system needs some kind of check against exploiting society the same way it was originally intended to prevent exploitation of creators.
"However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with -- 320x240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much"
I would think a lot of this has to do with the fact that it's a pretty common trick to get decent quality with the existing youtube.. resize your video to 320x240 at the highest bitrate that will keep you below 100 megs. The logic is if you reduce the amount of reprocessing that's necessary, fewer artifacts appear.
What I want to know is how a 480x270 video can be considered "HD".
Maybe I'm just being grumpy but I was hoping to get at least a 720p sized frame.
Omitting details like drives and case is cheating quite a bit.
What about the types who are still running a system with IDE drives? Or their old case has dead fans? The cost starts escalating fast. If they built an all-new system for $500 that could play Crysis, maybe then I would be impressed.
Clearly the only way to settle it is riff each other's riffing of bad movies.
You were looking at the member join dates.
The post date is in the lower right corner (lower left for SA), and all of them linked in the story are from the past week or two.
what would have become of the black holes?
They got plastic surgery, built a playground ranch in California, and became white.
Is there a good place to learn?
Most I've found have been on either extreme "oh yeah my $15 sony earbuds sound awesome" to "$3000 for speaker wire? what a bargain!"
How does one break into this without wasting a ton of money on trial and error?
Some guy for this Institute was on the Colbert Report last week, and one reason he gave was that many languages have very unique ways of expressing certain concepts(he gave an example, but heck if I can remember it). He considered the loss of these languages to be a loss of information. Not sure I agree that it is a good reason to spend a lot of time preserving languages, but it was kind of an interesting way to look at it.
Tom Cruise has shown us you need psychics for that, and it will backfire on you eventually anyways.
If someone hasn't been witnessed actually committing a crime, they shouldn't be rounded up for it.
It uses a projector to put the image on the table.
Seems kind of backwards to me but I bet it's cheaper than getting an LCD of that size. Only similarity to the iPhone seems to be the way you use touch to navigate, but ideas like that have been floating around for years now.