It's ridiculous that we're paying so much for ad-riddled content to begin with.
How did we wind up with such a backwards system anyway? Shouldn't these channels be paying your cable company to put their advertisments on your screen?
I think that once you have paid basic cable delivery service a reasonable fee for equipment rental and service operation and maintenance, you should automatically get all of the advertiser-sponsored channels at no extra cost. You could then opt to pay extra for channels which contain no advertisments, and that money would mostly go back to the content producers of those channels.
- People who floss tend to have better personal hygine overall.
- People who have better personal hygine tend to take care of themselves more.
- People who take care of themselves more tend to live longer and healthier.
Therefore, flossing doesn't *cause* you to live longer/healthier. Flossing is an *effect* of having good personal hygine, which can help you live longer/healthier.
One way to decrease paranoia (if you're running Firefox) is to install No Script. You then just whitelist (temporarily or permanently) the sites you trust.
I quit watching TV for several years until moving to an area where the cable company offered a cheap DVR rental. If they start pulling shit like this, I can drop TV again in an instant with no grief.
And then Microsoft and others will jump in and trumpet the "benefits" of Trusted Computing as a way to "protect" people from things like this. And people will flock to it like a gas station in Florida.
If you work 50-80+ hours, you shouldn't mess with your computer installing and uninstalling games and every other driver iteration (needed to play "just about any game").
I bought two All-In-Wonder cards and then swore off ATI forever. Their hardware engineers seem quite top-notch, but their software (drivers, utilities, etc) has consistently been poorly designed and implemented.
I'm running Eclipse 3.1 on a dual 733Mhz system with 640MB of memory.
It does take longer to start Eclipse than those other applications, but once it's loaded, the UI is just as responsive as any other big 2D application (Firefox, Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) on this system.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect has an interesting take on the Singularity, Asimov's Three Laws, and what people might do for "entertainment" when faced with the boredom of immortality.
Attendance was fairly low at the theater when I went this evening. I talked with the manager (who I know through a mutual friend). After chatting a bit, he told me that the peak attendance was only 71 people in a 250-seat auditorium for Serenity today (opening day). I really hope it does well, but this is not a good sign =(
I think a lot of this has to do with how Firefly is spreading so slowly by word-of-mouth, especially outside the geek community. The only way I even knew of Firefly was by accidently catching it on Sci-Fi channel, and deciding to leave it on and give it a chance since I recalled some friends mentioning it.
I really hope more people give this movie a chance. I can't see how anyone who enjoys science fiction could walk away from the theater unhappy with their ticket purchase for Serenity. If you're waiting to watch the series first, don't -- you don't need to see the series to enjoy the movie. And if you wait too long, it may be too late if these attendance numbers (in my limited sample) are any indication.
I'm going to see it again tomorrow. I'm going to be quite sad if the most enjoyable sci-fi I've seen in years goes out with such a disappointing opening weekend.
I for one welcome our new Magnetic Overlords! The day of their coming shall be signaled by The Day Of The Great Field Inversion when our Evil Bird Overlords shall fall from the sky in confusion.
And they will rule over all domains.
Re:$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a MMORPG?
on
Quickies Get Massive
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The title says about as much as saying "$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a web host?" (sic).
You can get a free account which you can use to explore and create content just like anyone else. The free account is quite sufficient for all but the most full-control-obsessed land owning requirements.
If you need to own land for your project, you can still keep your account free and rent land from other players (on negotiated terms), or you can upgrade your account to pay a monthly hosting fee to own land. You can own as little as 512 square meters for $7-10/month, or one or more whole regions for $195/month.
Keep in mind too, the company that runs SL isn't creating artificial scarcity with land like so many people assume. Each region of land (65,536 square meters) requires one server-unit of resources to be maintained for running things such as: - the simulator itself - the Havok physics engine - local asset storage and transfer - synchronizing updates to active agents within and near the region - running hundreds or even thousands of user scripts
The result is each region requires a decent piece of hardware to run without noticably lagging the region's simulator (incurring "time dilation", slower script execution, etc).
So the title is wrong. You can enjoy SL for free. And even if you pay, there are many pricing tiers between free and a full region. According to their Land FAQ, it is $25/month only if you absolutely need to have complete ownership control over 4,608 square meters of land.
PS: BTW, An odd quirk in the current economy makes it actually profitable to buy a minimal (512 sq m landowning) annual subscription, assuming the virtual currency (L$) value holds above a L$1000:US$3 ratio. The landowning accounts receive a weekly grant of L$500. At the end of a year, that comes to L$26k, which is currently valued at more than the price of the US$72 annual subscription fee.
Most of the stuff I make in SL is given away for free with open source. It's up to the creator what permissions they put on objects.
You have the following options to set on any object you create in SL:
- Modifyable - Copyable - Transferable
In the first year of SL, a sizeable portion of the content creators were quite willing to give away free and open source content. However, more recently, SL has attracted a lot of people who get involved with it just to make money. I have no real objection to this, but it has become quite an overwhelmingly large crowd now, which sort of taints the impression new residents may have.
If you look around though, the freebies are still there and the people who make them are still there; it's just that they are quite buried away in the massive sea of virtual malls, clubs, and casinos.
I think the important thing for anyone checking out SL is to find someone to mentor them, otherwise it's just too overwhelming for most people. SL is very flexible (read: complex) and yet quite poorly documented, so it's handy to have someone to bounce questions off of. There are a lot of places you can get help though (in-game "Live Help" volunteers, IRC, wikis, etc).
It may sound at first like this would make the web unusable, but it's not really all that bad. It takes two clicks to add a domain to NoScript's whitelist and one click to re-enable a Flash. AdBlock is good for removing the most offensively annoying ads with two clicks.
I'd ask why there still isn't a resolution if it's been considered so long and so meticulously?
1) You don't hear about the ones which are caught early before anyone notices. Most companies don't exactly report every time there is a dupe bug.
2) I think most games let IGE and the like continue to operate as long as they are creating a net positive value (ie their behavior brings in more players than they chase off, and/or it costs less to let them continue than to spend man-hours tracking them down).
3) Not all MMOs are like this. For example, the MMOE Second Life explicitly grants ownership of the IP to the creator, and encourages you to sell your creations for real world profit.
They used to support a dozen or so game currencies, until someone scammed them through PayPal.
Now they only support the Second Life currency, since they are they are probably nearly the only MMO which encourages currency exchange (and they have also agreed to work with them if someone pulls another scam).
Slashdot Mirror
Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.
Actually, it's conservation of angular momentum.
Seems to me that the first *true* AI will need no introduction -- it should be able to take care of that itself.
It's ridiculous that we're paying so much for ad-riddled content to begin with.
How did we wind up with such a backwards system anyway? Shouldn't these channels be paying your cable company to put their advertisments on your screen?
I think that once you have paid basic cable delivery service a reasonable fee for equipment rental and service operation and maintenance, you should automatically get all of the advertiser-sponsored channels at no extra cost. You could then opt to pay extra for channels which contain no advertisments, and that money would mostly go back to the content producers of those channels.
What is wrong with this logic?
Here's a simple explanation:
- People who floss tend to have better personal hygine overall.
- People who have better personal hygine tend to take care of themselves more.
- People who take care of themselves more tend to live longer and healthier.
Therefore, flossing doesn't *cause* you to live longer/healthier. Flossing is an *effect* of having good personal hygine, which can help you live longer/healthier.
One way to decrease paranoia (if you're running Firefox) is to install No Script. You then just whitelist (temporarily or permanently) the sites you trust.
I quit watching TV for several years until moving to an area where the cable company offered a cheap DVR rental. If they start pulling shit like this, I can drop TV again in an instant with no grief.
They need me more than I need them.
And then Microsoft and others will jump in and trumpet the "benefits" of Trusted Computing as a way to "protect" people from things like this. And people will flock to it like a gas station in Florida.
If you work 50-80+ hours, you shouldn't mess with your computer installing and uninstalling games and every other driver iteration (needed to play "just about any game").
I'm guessing you have an ATI video card?
Kurt Gödel
I bought two All-In-Wonder cards and then swore off ATI forever. Their hardware engineers seem quite top-notch, but their software (drivers, utilities, etc) has consistently been poorly designed and implemented.
I'm running Eclipse 3.1 on a dual 733Mhz system with 640MB of memory.
It does take longer to start Eclipse than those other applications, but once it's loaded, the UI is just as responsive as any other big 2D application (Firefox, Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) on this system.
DVD alone will push this into the black.
But that's Reaver territory! Best not be goin' out there without some mighty fine plannin'.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect has an interesting take on the Singularity, Asimov's Three Laws, and what people might do for "entertainment" when faced with the boredom of immortality.
Note: it's not a story for the squeamish.
Attendance was fairly low at the theater when I went this evening. I talked with the manager (who I know through a mutual friend). After chatting a bit, he told me that the peak attendance was only 71 people in a 250-seat auditorium for Serenity today (opening day). I really hope it does well, but this is not a good sign =(
I think a lot of this has to do with how Firefly is spreading so slowly by word-of-mouth, especially outside the geek community. The only way I even knew of Firefly was by accidently catching it on Sci-Fi channel, and deciding to leave it on and give it a chance since I recalled some friends mentioning it.
I really hope more people give this movie a chance. I can't see how anyone who enjoys science fiction could walk away from the theater unhappy with their ticket purchase for Serenity. If you're waiting to watch the series first, don't -- you don't need to see the series to enjoy the movie. And if you wait too long, it may be too late if these attendance numbers (in my limited sample) are any indication.
I'm going to see it again tomorrow. I'm going to be quite sad if the most enjoyable sci-fi I've seen in years goes out with such a disappointing opening weekend.
I for one welcome our new Magnetic Overlords! The day of their coming shall be signaled by The Day Of The Great Field Inversion when our Evil Bird Overlords shall fall from the sky in confusion.
And they will rule over all domains.
The title says about as much as saying "$25 a month, isn't a bit stiff for a web host?" (sic).
You can get a free account which you can use to explore and create content just like anyone else. The free account is quite sufficient for all but the most full-control-obsessed land owning requirements.
If you need to own land for your project, you can still keep your account free and rent land from other players (on negotiated terms), or you can upgrade your account to pay a monthly hosting fee to own land. You can own as little as 512 square meters for $7-10/month, or one or more whole regions for $195/month.
Keep in mind too, the company that runs SL isn't creating artificial scarcity with land like so many people assume. Each region of land (65,536 square meters) requires one server-unit of resources to be maintained for running things such as:
- the simulator itself
- the Havok physics engine
- local asset storage and transfer
- synchronizing updates to active agents within and near the region
- running hundreds or even thousands of user scripts
The result is each region requires a decent piece of hardware to run without noticably lagging the region's simulator (incurring "time dilation", slower script execution, etc).
So the title is wrong. You can enjoy SL for free. And even if you pay, there are many pricing tiers between free and a full region. According to their Land FAQ, it is $25/month only if you absolutely need to have complete ownership control over 4,608 square meters of land.
PS: BTW, An odd quirk in the current economy makes it actually profitable to buy a minimal (512 sq m landowning) annual subscription, assuming the virtual currency (L$) value holds above a L$1000:US$3 ratio. The landowning accounts receive a weekly grant of L$500. At the end of a year, that comes to L$26k, which is currently valued at more than the price of the US$72 annual subscription fee.
Most of the stuff I make in SL is given away for free with open source. It's up to the creator what permissions they put on objects.
You have the following options to set on any object you create in SL:
- Modifyable
- Copyable
- Transferable
In the first year of SL, a sizeable portion of the content creators were quite willing to give away free and open source content. However, more recently, SL has attracted a lot of people who get involved with it just to make money. I have no real objection to this, but it has become quite an overwhelmingly large crowd now, which sort of taints the impression new residents may have.
If you look around though, the freebies are still there and the people who make them are still there; it's just that they are quite buried away in the massive sea of virtual malls, clubs, and casinos.
I think the important thing for anyone checking out SL is to find someone to mentor them, otherwise it's just too overwhelming for most people. SL is very flexible (read: complex) and yet quite poorly documented, so it's handy to have someone to bounce questions off of. There are a lot of places you can get help though (in-game "Live Help" volunteers, IRC, wikis, etc).
They also make good coasters
Ok. People keep saying this about AOL CDs and misburned CD-Rs and such, but I don't see how they make good coasters.
A *good* coaster should be porous and *absorb* water, not cause it to bead up so that it runs off the edge more efficiently. =)
Firefox + NoScript + FlashBlock + AdBlock
It may sound at first like this would make the web unusable, but it's not really all that bad. It takes two clicks to add a domain to NoScript's whitelist and one click to re-enable a Flash. AdBlock is good for removing the most offensively annoying ads with two clicks.
You didn't mention the RPM of the drives in this test?
Obviously a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive will kick a 5400 RPM non-NCQ SATA drive anyday. =)
I would like to see a good fair comparison of newest SCSI vs SATA drives.
This solves lighting. SOLVES it.
I *wish* we had real-time photon mapping.
Until we get that, I wouldn't quite call it 'solved'. =)
Though this does look shiny, given current technology.
I'd ask why there still isn't a resolution if it's been considered so long and so meticulously?
1) You don't hear about the ones which are caught early before anyone notices. Most companies don't exactly report every time there is a dupe bug.
2) I think most games let IGE and the like continue to operate as long as they are creating a net positive value (ie their behavior brings in more players than they chase off, and/or it costs less to let them continue than to spend man-hours tracking them down).
3) Not all MMOs are like this. For example, the MMOE Second Life explicitly grants ownership of the IP to the creator, and encourages you to sell your creations for real world profit.
There is/was an exchange market designed just for this very purpose:
http://gamingopenmarket.com
They used to support a dozen or so game currencies, until someone scammed them through PayPal.
Now they only support the Second Life currency, since they are they are probably nearly the only MMO which encourages currency exchange (and they have also agreed to work with them if someone pulls another scam).
"American Democracy is like asking for a cup of coffee and getting to choose between Coke or Pepsi" --Unknown
I read somewhere in that review that you can't save to a Virtual Folder.
Why not let a user configure a default real folder to which files are saved if you try to save them to the Virtual Folder?