actually the large wiring boxes down your block by the curb are often the ones that are providing the power. that same box also provides the dialtone you hear when you pick up the line on most modern equipment.
reclassification as an information service rather than a telecommunications service might change the way privacy and rights issues (i'm thinking of court cases, seizures of equipment, etc.) are handled, would it not?
i'd bet anything that this 'analyst' is a sony employee or was leaked to officially by a sony employee as a means of making folks feel better about that ps2 purchase they were thinking about but decided to hold off because the ps3 is just around the corner.
great... so now that they have the ghosting problem 'fixed' next maybe they can work on contrast ratio and color accuracy, which to me is the bigger problem with both tv, computer monitor and projector lcd's (most decent lcd monitors don't ghost enough to be terribly noticeable).
contrast ratio is pretty craptacular on most lcd monitors, even the best ones. watching movies on an lcd you will notice that the black levels are almost nonexistent. for instance, a dark movie like the lord of the rings: the two towers is very difficult to make out the detail in the dark scenes. on a crt they come out fine, though with arguably lesser clarity (depending on the crt type).
color accuracy is pretty crappy on most lcd's as well (and that is being nice). if you are doing work on a project that needs to have proper coloring, don't use an lcd as your only reference as you will very likely have strange results when compared to a crt or if it is printed to film...
the thing i wonder about is for how long has stuff been hitting the shuttle on launch and we never knew due to not having cameras and other devices looking at it or more specifically for it.
i bet there's been stuff hitting the shuttle since day 1 and we never really paid that much attention since it hasn't posed a real problem until recently or it was assumed to be caused by other means (like reentry heat, spacejunk or somesuch)...
i mean really, these games are expensive. where is the money coming from for these games. most hot new titles are in the $40-50 range. most kids i know don't have that kind of cash from taking out the garbage. so who is buying them?
most major game stores won't sell games rated higher than their esrb to children. so it is either 1) that they are getting them from their friends who either have big bros/sisters or are just rotten parents or 2) parents are just blindly buying what the kids wants to shut them up or are thinking they are good parents because they provide the children with what they want.
i would imagine it is a combination of those in most cases. parents buying things thinking "gee, they can't sell something sort of adult oriented in game stores" and then get surprised when they find out what is in the game. sort of like what has happened in the world of comics for many, many years.
thanks for the correction. when i first started writing my post i was referring to songs from the itunes store. however stuff you rip yourself is, as you said, without drm.
the thing i would love to see on the revolution is that nintendo makes deals with neo-geo, sega, nec (turbografx), etc. to produce emulators for their systems and offer the same setup for downloading games as they are going to offer for their own systems.
that would make for a really cool retro gaming experience. imagine all those games you grew up playing being made available for replay (legally!)...
speak.exe was the file. it was a replacement pcspeaker driver. aside from the quality issue there was a problem with the way it operated. the pc speaker was originally designed (and still is) to use an interrupt to operate and as a result everything halts when the speaker is used. normal short beeps aren't a problem but playing a waveform for a few seconds or minutes causes problems.
so it was sort of a pain if you used it with all of windows sound effects turned on as it would halt your mouse movement and everything else until the sound was through playing...
that "weird" format is mpeg 4 (with drm). in fact you can rip and play mpeg 4 (without drm) with standard open source tools. and yes, you can remove the drm from itms files with opensource tools as well.
My ideal would be if I could take a netflix downloaded rental and play it on my TiVo. If I have to hook up a computer to my TV, it's a bit more of a hassle. I haven't been a NetFlix member for a while now because I got tired of discs piling up that I never got around to watching, but if I can download a movie in a few hours I may resubscribe.
I'm thinking out loud here but yeah, seems to me that TiVo ought to have a module that you can download to your unit that allows this function. Then you would either log in anywhere in the world to NetFlix using a browser and tell it to deliver the content to your TiVo box.
The same functionality could be designed into the TivO module with the TV front end to browse the NetFlix system and add movies to your queue. The TiVo would download the movies to its harddrive at its leisure and alert you when a movie is available for viewing.
Like Apple and BSD, it has been expected they were on their last legs many times. Perhaps they ought to roll in together with 2600 magazine or Blackhat 411 (which recently came back from the dead... again)...
I know someone was bound to suggest this so I'll just do it now...
Perhaps Apple ought to buy them and merge them into their server UNIX server line. I'm sure there are parts of IRIX that could be useful to OSX as well.
An idea anyway. Sad to see them go into oblivion or be bought up by a company that is going to butcher their technology or not use it at all (ie, like Palm's buyout of Be and the mythical revolutionary new Be based PalmOS)...
on that note, if you are into old skool adventure games get a copy of http://scummvm.sf.net/ and play some of those old games. some of them are available free and others are cheap via ebay... a thought for those of u that are like me, into retrogaming.:)
the thing that gets me is that most new hot console games are in the $50 range. where are little kids getting that kind of money for these games? older kids i can see trusting them more with that kind of money and using their judgement but the age range that i think most folks are worried about should have more supervision with regards to their spending of money, particularly large amounts of it.
it isn't the games that are the problem it is parents giving money blindly to kids to do what they will with it. part of parenting is controlling the pursestrings and deciding what kids can and can't have...
an uncle of mine used to swear by mks toolkit and another program who's name i can't remember but i remember the box cover was a picture of a shell and the name was something like concentric... can anyone toss me a bone and recall who that was?
Slashdot Mirror
actually the large wiring boxes down your block by the curb are often the ones that are providing the power. that same box also provides the dialtone you hear when you pick up the line on most modern equipment.
reclassification as an information service rather than a telecommunications service might change the way privacy and rights issues (i'm thinking of court cases, seizures of equipment, etc.) are handled, would it not?
i'd bet anything that this 'analyst' is a sony employee or was leaked to officially by a sony employee as a means of making folks feel better about that ps2 purchase they were thinking about but decided to hold off because the ps3 is just around the corner.
great... so now that they have the ghosting problem 'fixed' next maybe they can work on contrast ratio and color accuracy, which to me is the bigger problem with both tv, computer monitor and projector lcd's (most decent lcd monitors don't ghost enough to be terribly noticeable).
contrast ratio is pretty craptacular on most lcd monitors, even the best ones. watching movies on an lcd you will notice that the black levels are almost nonexistent. for instance, a dark movie like the lord of the rings: the two towers is very difficult to make out the detail in the dark scenes. on a crt they come out fine, though with arguably lesser clarity (depending on the crt type).
color accuracy is pretty crappy on most lcd's as well (and that is being nice). if you are doing work on a project that needs to have proper coloring, don't use an lcd as your only reference as you will very likely have strange results when compared to a crt or if it is printed to film...
the thing i wonder about is for how long has stuff been hitting the shuttle on launch and we never knew due to not having cameras and other devices looking at it or more specifically for it.
i bet there's been stuff hitting the shuttle since day 1 and we never really paid that much attention since it hasn't posed a real problem until recently or it was assumed to be caused by other means (like reentry heat, spacejunk or somesuch)...
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there..."
i wonder if they are going to find a large black slab underground the surface of saturn...
i mean really, these games are expensive. where is the money coming from for these games. most hot new titles are in the $40-50 range. most kids i know don't have that kind of cash from taking out the garbage. so who is buying them?
most major game stores won't sell games rated higher than their esrb to children. so it is either 1) that they are getting them from their friends who either have big bros/sisters or are just rotten parents or 2) parents are just blindly buying what the kids wants to shut them up or are thinking they are good parents because they provide the children with what they want.
i would imagine it is a combination of those in most cases. parents buying things thinking "gee, they can't sell something sort of adult oriented in game stores" and then get surprised when they find out what is in the game. sort of like what has happened in the world of comics for many, many years.
Sorry about the copy errors, folks. They have been fixed.
Wow! So we aren't going to have to read any more dupe stories? Cool!
thanks for the correction. when i first started writing my post i was referring to songs from the itunes store. however stuff you rip yourself is, as you said, without drm.
the thing i would love to see on the revolution is that nintendo makes deals with neo-geo, sega, nec (turbografx), etc. to produce emulators for their systems and offer the same setup for downloading games as they are going to offer for their own systems.
that would make for a really cool retro gaming experience. imagine all those games you grew up playing being made available for replay (legally!)...
speak.exe was the file. it was a replacement pcspeaker driver. aside from the quality issue there was a problem with the way it operated. the pc speaker was originally designed (and still is) to use an interrupt to operate and as a result everything halts when the speaker is used. normal short beeps aren't a problem but playing a waveform for a few seconds or minutes causes problems.
so it was sort of a pain if you used it with all of windows sound effects turned on as it would halt your mouse movement and everything else until the sound was through playing...
that "weird" format is mpeg 4 (with drm). in fact you can rip and play mpeg 4 (without drm) with standard open source tools. and yes, you can remove the drm from itms files with opensource tools as well.
;p
here's some info dude...
We just can't have nice things.
My ideal would be if I could take a netflix downloaded rental and play it on my TiVo. If I have to hook up a computer to my TV, it's a bit more of a hassle. I haven't been a NetFlix member for a while now because I got tired of discs piling up that I never got around to watching, but if I can download a movie in a few hours I may resubscribe.
I'm thinking out loud here but yeah, seems to me that TiVo ought to have a module that you can download to your unit that allows this function. Then you would either log in anywhere in the world to NetFlix using a browser and tell it to deliver the content to your TiVo box.
The same functionality could be designed into the TivO module with the TV front end to browse the NetFlix system and add movies to your queue. The TiVo would download the movies to its harddrive at its leisure and alert you when a movie is available for viewing.
errr... Blacklisted 411 that is...
Like Apple and BSD, it has been expected they were on their last legs many times. Perhaps they ought to roll in together with 2600 magazine or Blackhat 411 (which recently came back from the dead... again)...
I know someone was bound to suggest this so I'll just do it now...
Perhaps Apple ought to buy them and merge them into their server UNIX server line. I'm sure there are parts of IRIX that could be useful to OSX as well.
An idea anyway. Sad to see them go into oblivion or be bought up by a company that is going to butcher their technology or not use it at all (ie, like Palm's buyout of Be and the mythical revolutionary new Be based PalmOS)...
No, he means Plan 9.
on that note, if you are into old skool adventure games get a copy of http://scummvm.sf.net/ and play some of those old games. some of them are available free and others are cheap via ebay... a thought for those of u that are like me, into retrogaming. :)
the thing that gets me is that most new hot console games are in the $50 range. where are little kids getting that kind of money for these games? older kids i can see trusting them more with that kind of money and using their judgement but the age range that i think most folks are worried about should have more supervision with regards to their spending of money, particularly large amounts of it.
it isn't the games that are the problem it is parents giving money blindly to kids to do what they will with it. part of parenting is controlling the pursestrings and deciding what kids can and can't have...
dunno if anyone else noticed who the narator is...
:)
it's none other than peter cullen, voice of the transformers optimus prime amongst many other cartoons and movies.
how about mortice kern systems toolkit? these guys have been around forever doing unix on windows.
an uncle of mine used to swear by mks toolkit and another program who's name i can't remember but i remember the box cover was a picture of a shell and the name was something like concentric... can anyone toss me a bone and recall who that was?
i remember when it was chips n' bits before it was renamed slashdot...
/me exits the pissing contest...
and you are surprised why?
heh, understood. ;p