(By the way, what's a reliable Windows non-Vista product for writing DVDs of both data and video formats. I don't need "ripping", but want to transcode some of my old animation.avi files to DVD.)
Imgburn. If you don't like it, there are about a hundred great free alternatives.
Even weirder? How about an anonymous coward requesting citation from a non-anon?
set of routers from Goodwill and found not only default programming but a sheet of paper stuck inside with passwords.
I've never seen computing equipment, let alone routers at goodwill, and yes, I shop there.
The passwords were for a Department of Energy facility with nuclear activities.
Citation needed. How was it known to be DOE?
Based on my experience at Goodwill at and DOE sites, I'd say this is quite plausible, though statistically unlikely. Passwords to a router running in a DOE lab are pretty much useless, though.
I must confess, I'm not really following what is going on in helping the disabled in the technology field, but I know it's been a big issue since at least one decade and I thought it had somewhat been solved at the OS / standards / specialized hardware level.
I'm kindof shocked by this headline... and also wondering what is the current state of supporting the blinds in other apps than iTune nowadays? Is iTune (pre-patched) the exception or the norm?
In Windows it was already fully accessible. I guess OSX doesn't have the same sort of accessibility features, but now at least in iTunes it does.
This conversation is being derailed, I am venezuelan and you cant prove i am not. In fact why the hell would i lie about that?
You could point out that your posting record, easily available with a single mouse click, obviously shows you at least have a deep interest in Venezuela along with a lot of demonstrated knowledge about it.
People have difficulty dealing with Chavez in the "western world." The man is obviously intentionally antagonistic, which understandably leads to a lot of people, even those who might normally be more moderate, seeing him as the devil incarnate, or at least incredibly annoying. The extreme level of this response leads opponents of cultural and economic imperialism to take a rather extreme response in opposition. They genuinely think Chavez is a wonderful leader, ignoring corruption, torture, etc. There are several posts here today responding to Chavez's torture record (hey, just like we have in the good ol' US of A) by saying it's okay, because he's torturing business owners and such, who are obviously the scum of the Earth.
My tentative perspective is that Chavez really is an improvement, economically, for a lot of the people in the country, but that this is only because predecessors were particularly bad. If a man like Chavez were suddenly made the effective dictator of the UK, he'd be seen as the worst tyrant in two hundred years.
I am not the moderator of your post, though I have moderated posts in this story and thus now I post as AC.
The reason IMO your post isflamebait is:
Someone tried to characterise your book list as racist.
you counter argued this person, by stating that one of the writers you talked about was a Jew.
That is flamebait because it implicitly argues that "cannot be racist because he/she is a Jew". That correlation simply does not exist. What you were doing is "positive discrimination". There are racists that are Jews just as there are racists that are Budhists/Christians/Muslims/Atheists.
The attack on his book list specifically compared the author's argument to those of Nazis justifying genocide of Jews in WWII. His response directly dealt with that. You, and the moderator, both didn't spend the time to figure that out.
The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets:-)
Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.
I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.
But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.
dave
While you may be right in terms of the market, if you just want the best phone with the most flexibility and software, it's definitely going to be on WM6.x for the forseeable future, as long as you're willing to mod your phone and you get a good one, like an HTC Touch Diamond, Pro, or HD.
Re:This is a great example of why PC gaming is dea
on
Review: Crysis Warhead
·
· Score: 0
Looking at that screencap makes me think "PS2, circa 2003" not "zOMG wow let me upgrade my video card!"
Seriously, can anyone justify building a $2K rig to play that thing?
I didn't think so.
I'm not interested in the game, but this "$2k rig" meme forced me to respond. If you want to play a game like Crysis and you have a desktop PC, as most people with an interest in PC gaming do, then you can probably add a $230 graphics card and play all the newest things very smoothly with graphics about ~4x more complex than a PS3 or 360 can handle. Even if you have to do a major overhaul, a great new CPU, MB, video card, and 2-4 gigs of RAM can all be had for $500. Let's say you've never had high end components before and you need a new PSU. Still only $550. The only people who spend $2k on a gaming rig are people who have the explicit goal of spending $2k on a gaming rig.
The Amazon store, the only way to buy music from Myspace, is DRM-free, but I don't see how this is worth a headline since Amazon's store is nothing new. The only new component is terrible ad-supported DRM-laden streaming content.
There are four gen1 Nanos in my family, and all of them froze and wouldn't turn off without a forced reboot (and sometimes not even then) since they were a month old. The mini and shuffle also suffer from similar problems. The only iPod I don't have trouble with is my gen...er...2 or 3 iPod, which not only doesn't crash but also has better battery life with my $7 replacement battery than it ever did on the original. I hadn't thought of the Rockbox as a stability fix, but given your post I think I'll switch over my two devices and try it out.
I don't think I'll buy anything with Apple software ever again.
Much as I like, and rely upon, GMail, you can't say that it's yet really production/release (i.e. out of Beta) quality, and in fact in the last few weeks it's taken a turn for the worse.
The functionality seems bug free, but the deployment/availablility still seems to have issues. I'm used to the occasional GMail service outages which don't last very long, but a new thing from the last few weeks is that almost every operation you do on GMail results in a (paraphrasing) "temporary failure/unavailable - try again in a few seconds" error with the operation then succeeding on the second attempt. I get the impression they've enabled some super-aggressive session/cache timeout maybe to help scalability.
Maybe they should just replace the "Beta" label with "Unreliable."
Why do they insist on shooting themselves in the foot like this? I somehow suspect that the App store is led by an inexperienced team, and that Steve only has sideline control over the operation of that one. I think he would not be so foolish as to create this much bad publicity. He may be an (ass/strict ruler), but he's certainly not this stupid and he should know that this behaviour will come back to bite him later on. I'm interested in hearing the full story once upon a time.
This is precisely consistent with his business and personal history.
Five minutes later when I was looking for other things to clear off, I found the directory had been recreated in C:\Program Files\, complete with files! I have no idea where they came from, either, as the computer was not on the network and did not have the Windows CD in (or the install files on the hard drive).
Even creepier is that Quicktime was able to do this on my last XP install.
I know you were just kidding, but I'd like to contribute.
The Windows Add/Remove Programs menu doesn't even begin to cover what should be removable from the Operating System. Internet Explorer is the back end for a number of programs and cannot be fully removed, a few programs even rely on MSN Messenger and will not allow you to remove it if they are installed. There are all sorts of extra services running, like one for office that waits for it to be installed so it can clean it up. There's Alexa, a never ending assortment of drivers for ancient equipment. The system restore and hibernation services are installed and running whether you want them or not. And even in XP (although this is worse in Vista) the indexing service.
There are replacements for every single one of these applications that are better than the original, yet there is no way to easily remove them. You should check out the nLite program for making your own Windows image to get an idea of all of the cruft that is built into Windows (and isn't anywhere in the add/remove programs menu). With Linux, everything outside of the Kernel can be removed, usually without even restarting. With Windows you need to reinstall just to remove most of this junk, and that's assuming you have the administrative knowledge to make your own custom image.
Why struggle to remove it when you can trivially disable it? The difference is only a little hard drive space, and I mean very little. Also, while, say Messenger is fairly useless, System Restore is quite nice. Both can be turned off, but shipping the OS with all turned off by default actually does remove some normal functionality from default installs. It would probably be best if the installer asked what the user wanted to install, but for someone with access to the internet and an interest in tweaking the OS, disabling the useless and maintaining the useful only takes about 15 minutes from zero knowledge to completion.
You are right. I have a friend who was born in Korea. She start working at Seoul and the move to NY. She was very happy, as the work pace was quite slower in America.
She now had moved to Europe one year ago. She has been shocked again. The European pace is even slower that the American one.
The strange thing is that Europeans seen to achieve the same results in a much more relaxed ambient.
Korea has the longest working hours of any nation on Earth according to wiki info I read within the last month.
In my anecdotal experience, Americans and Koreans get as much done if they work 8 hours a day as they do in a 12 hour day.
I'm a French PhD student working in a German research center, and I just happened to see your post during working hours:D
Most American PhD students don't have working hours. This is misleading, though, as while timing is extremely flexible, students are basically expected to be "working" or at least present in the lab 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When your WHOLE COUNTRY is behind a firewall? NAT the hell out of that! Flatten it to a/8 network in 10.0.0.0 and put it all behind one public IP. Problem solved!
A lot of westerners would just block that one IP if that were the case, and I don't think they want that.
Dex and Head1nd are correct. I suspect that the reason the linked article isn't very interesting is that it doesn't bring up Dexmachina's point, which is the reason this is spookily cool, and which is probably in the academic paper.
I wouldn't think a Halo MMO would be feasible. Its FPS. Hellgate failure anyone? (And i had high hopes for that one) with an EPIC main character which CAN be done, Conan does a half decent job of it but you can't let everyone play a spartan.
In Conan you are a warrior just like everyone else. You are better than common warriors in theory but everyone has the same potential that you do. The halo universe is extremely unbalanced. There are only X number of spartans, certainly not enough to populate an MMO. And playing Halo MMO as a marine would be more of a Team Fortress with experience and items type game. Not a bad idea for a game, but an idea that doesn't fit the Halo universe at all.
I also can't see the fans of the Halo gameplay appreciating roll-to-hit combat, nor do I see typical MMO players taking to the twitch and adrenalin style of play that would cater to the FPS gamers. You will end up alienating one full half of the group a Halo MMO appeal to.
There are exceptions to each rule (I like both styles of play myself and I really enjoy the story to Halo) but you have to appeal to a very large group of people to keep an MMO going. It was a smart decision to cancel the project and I appreciate the fact that they were willing to forgo some quick easy cash in order to work on something else.
They should have made it like Planetside or WWII Online. An MMO can be an FPS too.
I'd get over it dude. Even if you could put a VoIP app on your phone, the latency is horrible. I have both a T-Mobile data card and a Blackberry I can tether, and using EDGE, I get around 1000-1300ms latency. Even with 3G, my understanding is that latency is over 100-200ms, and VoIP ain't workin' with that.
On AT&T my voice call latency to another cell phone on AT&T held up to my other ear is about 300-500 ms. You'd be surprised what's acceptable. 1 second of lag is sort of painful (use an international calling card if you want a preview of that), but 300-500 ms is pretty much normal feeling in most conversations.
I could probably look it up, and maybe I'm ignorant....but for all the pain in the ass they've made flying now, how often do they actually thwart terrorist attempts or find people trying to smuggle explosives through security? I just don't recall hearing any news in recent history about DHS actually *doing* anything productive.
None so far, but they did catch the guy with dangerous shoes once his device failed.
Show a casual user a DVD on a 42" 1080p TV from 8' away, then show them a bluray on the same TV from the same distance. Their jaw will drop unless they have worse than 20/40 vision.
The differences aren't small, you just have to know how to compare them.
The jaw will only drop because of the yawn. "The second one looks sharper," the casual user will say, while thinking, "I don't care."
Slashdot Mirror
Mod. Parent. Up.
(By the way, what's a reliable Windows non-Vista product for writing DVDs of both data and video formats. I don't need "ripping", but want to transcode some of my old animation .avi files to DVD.)
Imgburn. If you don't like it, there are about a hundred great free alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imgburn
Even weirder? How about an anonymous coward requesting citation from a non-anon?
set of routers from Goodwill and found not only default programming but a sheet of paper stuck inside with passwords.
I've never seen computing equipment, let alone routers at goodwill, and yes, I shop there.
The passwords were for a Department of Energy facility with nuclear activities.
Citation needed. How was it known to be DOE?
Based on my experience at Goodwill at and DOE sites, I'd say this is quite plausible, though statistically unlikely. Passwords to a router running in a DOE lab are pretty much useless, though.
I must confess, I'm not really following what is going on in helping the disabled in the technology field, but I know it's been a big issue since at least one decade and I thought it had somewhat been solved at the OS / standards / specialized hardware level.
I'm kindof shocked by this headline ... and also wondering what is the current state of supporting the blinds in other apps than iTune nowadays? Is iTune (pre-patched) the exception or the norm?
In Windows it was already fully accessible. I guess OSX doesn't have the same sort of accessibility features, but now at least in iTunes it does.
This conversation is being derailed, I am venezuelan and you cant prove i am not. In fact why the hell would i lie about that?
You could point out that your posting record, easily available with a single mouse click, obviously shows you at least have a deep interest in Venezuela along with a lot of demonstrated knowledge about it.
People have difficulty dealing with Chavez in the "western world." The man is obviously intentionally antagonistic, which understandably leads to a lot of people, even those who might normally be more moderate, seeing him as the devil incarnate, or at least incredibly annoying. The extreme level of this response leads opponents of cultural and economic imperialism to take a rather extreme response in opposition. They genuinely think Chavez is a wonderful leader, ignoring corruption, torture, etc. There are several posts here today responding to Chavez's torture record (hey, just like we have in the good ol' US of A) by saying it's okay, because he's torturing business owners and such, who are obviously the scum of the Earth.
My tentative perspective is that Chavez really is an improvement, economically, for a lot of the people in the country, but that this is only because predecessors were particularly bad. If a man like Chavez were suddenly made the effective dictator of the UK, he'd be seen as the worst tyrant in two hundred years.
But the truth is that year after year, kids get more stupid.
Not disagreeing, but, why do you think that is?
TV? Genetics? Mutations? Social welfare? Religion?
Since I was seven I blamed this partially on relying on computers (then Apple ][ machines) in the classroom in place of actual teaching.
I am not the moderator of your post, though I have moderated posts in this story and thus now I post as AC.
The reason IMO your post is flamebait is:
That is flamebait because it implicitly argues that "cannot be racist because he/she is a Jew". That correlation simply does not exist. What you were doing is "positive discrimination". There are racists that are Jews just as there are racists that are Budhists/Christians/Muslims/Atheists.
The attack on his book list specifically compared the author's argument to those of Nazis justifying genocide of Jews in WWII. His response directly dealt with that. You, and the moderator, both didn't spend the time to figure that out.
The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets :-)
Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.
I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.
But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.
dave
While you may be right in terms of the market, if you just want the best phone with the most flexibility and software, it's definitely going to be on WM6.x for the forseeable future, as long as you're willing to mod your phone and you get a good one, like an HTC Touch Diamond, Pro, or HD.
Looking at that screencap makes me think "PS2, circa 2003" not "zOMG wow let me upgrade my video card!"
Seriously, can anyone justify building a $2K rig to play that thing?
I didn't think so.
I'm not interested in the game, but this "$2k rig" meme forced me to respond. If you want to play a game like Crysis and you have a desktop PC, as most people with an interest in PC gaming do, then you can probably add a $230 graphics card and play all the newest things very smoothly with graphics about ~4x more complex than a PS3 or 360 can handle. Even if you have to do a major overhaul, a great new CPU, MB, video card, and 2-4 gigs of RAM can all be had for $500. Let's say you've never had high end components before and you need a new PSU. Still only $550. The only people who spend $2k on a gaming rig are people who have the explicit goal of spending $2k on a gaming rig.
So it's not actually DRM free.
The Amazon store, the only way to buy music from Myspace, is DRM-free, but I don't see how this is worth a headline since Amazon's store is nothing new. The only new component is terrible ad-supported DRM-laden streaming content.
There are four gen1 Nanos in my family, and all of them froze and wouldn't turn off without a forced reboot (and sometimes not even then) since they were a month old. The mini and shuffle also suffer from similar problems. The only iPod I don't have trouble with is my gen...er...2 or 3 iPod, which not only doesn't crash but also has better battery life with my $7 replacement battery than it ever did on the original. I hadn't thought of the Rockbox as a stability fix, but given your post I think I'll switch over my two devices and try it out.
I don't think I'll buy anything with Apple software ever again.
Much as I like, and rely upon, GMail, you can't say that it's yet really production/release (i.e. out of Beta) quality, and in fact in the last few weeks it's taken a turn for the worse.
The functionality seems bug free, but the deployment/availablility still seems to have issues. I'm used to the occasional GMail service outages which don't last very long, but a new thing from the last few weeks is that almost every operation you do on GMail results in a (paraphrasing) "temporary failure/unavailable - try again in a few seconds" error with the operation then succeeding on the second attempt. I get the impression they've enabled some super-aggressive session/cache timeout maybe to help scalability.
Maybe they should just replace the "Beta" label with "Unreliable."
Why do they insist on shooting themselves in the foot like this? I somehow suspect that the App store is led by an inexperienced team, and that Steve only has sideline control over the operation of that one. I think he would not be so foolish as to create this much bad publicity. He may be an (ass/strict ruler), but he's certainly not this stupid and he should know that this behaviour will come back to bite him later on. I'm interested in hearing the full story once upon a time.
This is precisely consistent with his business and personal history.
Should be something like:
Cell phone companies struggle to market hardware that nobody wants.
Or how about "Google Claims that Software Like Android is Important?"
Of course. One mustn't ask questions regarding the most holy Operating Systems bestowed upon us by our chair-propelling overlords.
Vista is perfect. Vista has ALWAYS been perfect, because all Microsoft products are perfect.
You're confusing the attitude of Apple Fanboys with Microsoft employees.
Five minutes later when I was looking for other things to clear off, I found the directory had been recreated in C:\Program Files\, complete with files! I have no idea where they came from, either, as the computer was not on the network and did not have the Windows CD in (or the install files on the hard drive).
Even creepier is that Quicktime was able to do this on my last XP install.
I know you were just kidding, but I'd like to contribute.
The Windows Add/Remove Programs menu doesn't even begin to cover what should be removable from the Operating System. Internet Explorer is the back end for a number of programs and cannot be fully removed, a few programs even rely on MSN Messenger and will not allow you to remove it if they are installed. There are all sorts of extra services running, like one for office that waits for it to be installed so it can clean it up. There's Alexa, a never ending assortment of drivers for ancient equipment. The system restore and hibernation services are installed and running whether you want them or not. And even in XP (although this is worse in Vista) the indexing service.
There are replacements for every single one of these applications that are better than the original, yet there is no way to easily remove them. You should check out the nLite program for making your own Windows image to get an idea of all of the cruft that is built into Windows (and isn't anywhere in the add/remove programs menu). With Linux, everything outside of the Kernel can be removed, usually without even restarting. With Windows you need to reinstall just to remove most of this junk, and that's assuming you have the administrative knowledge to make your own custom image.
Why struggle to remove it when you can trivially disable it? The difference is only a little hard drive space, and I mean very little. Also, while, say Messenger is fairly useless, System Restore is quite nice. Both can be turned off, but shipping the OS with all turned off by default actually does remove some normal functionality from default installs. It would probably be best if the installer asked what the user wanted to install, but for someone with access to the internet and an interest in tweaking the OS, disabling the useless and maintaining the useful only takes about 15 minutes from zero knowledge to completion.
You are right. I have a friend who was born in Korea. She start working at Seoul and the move to NY. She was very happy, as the work pace was quite slower in America.
She now had moved to Europe one year ago. She has been shocked again. The European pace is even slower that the American one.
The strange thing is that Europeans seen to achieve the same results in a much more relaxed ambient.
Korea has the longest working hours of any nation on Earth according to wiki info I read within the last month.
In my anecdotal experience, Americans and Koreans get as much done if they work 8 hours a day as they do in a 12 hour day.
Ok, I guess you have a point.
I'm a French PhD student working in a German research center, and I just happened to see your post during working hours :D
Most American PhD students don't have working hours. This is misleading, though, as while timing is extremely flexible, students are basically expected to be "working" or at least present in the lab 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When your WHOLE COUNTRY is behind a firewall? NAT the hell out of that! Flatten it to a /8 network in 10.0.0.0 and put it all behind one public IP. Problem solved!
A lot of westerners would just block that one IP if that were the case, and I don't think they want that.
Dex and Head1nd are correct. I suspect that the reason the linked article isn't very interesting is that it doesn't bring up Dexmachina's point, which is the reason this is spookily cool, and which is probably in the academic paper.
I wouldn't think a Halo MMO would be feasible. Its FPS. Hellgate failure anyone? (And i had high hopes for that one) with an EPIC main character which CAN be done, Conan does a half decent job of it but you can't let everyone play a spartan.
In Conan you are a warrior just like everyone else. You are better than common warriors in theory but everyone has the same potential that you do. The halo universe is extremely unbalanced. There are only X number of spartans, certainly not enough to populate an MMO. And playing Halo MMO as a marine would be more of a Team Fortress with experience and items type game. Not a bad idea for a game, but an idea that doesn't fit the Halo universe at all.
I also can't see the fans of the Halo gameplay appreciating roll-to-hit combat, nor do I see typical MMO players taking to the twitch and adrenalin style of play that would cater to the FPS gamers. You will end up alienating one full half of the group a Halo MMO appeal to.
There are exceptions to each rule (I like both styles of play myself and I really enjoy the story to Halo) but you have to appeal to a very large group of people to keep an MMO going. It was a smart decision to cancel the project and I appreciate the fact that they were willing to forgo some quick easy cash in order to work on something else.
They should have made it like Planetside or WWII Online. An MMO can be an FPS too.
I'd get over it dude. Even if you could put a VoIP app on your phone, the latency is horrible. I have both a T-Mobile data card and a Blackberry I can tether, and using EDGE, I get around 1000-1300ms latency. Even with 3G, my understanding is that latency is over 100-200ms, and VoIP ain't workin' with that.
On AT&T my voice call latency to another cell phone on AT&T held up to my other ear is about 300-500 ms. You'd be surprised what's acceptable. 1 second of lag is sort of painful (use an international calling card if you want a preview of that), but 300-500 ms is pretty much normal feeling in most conversations.
I could probably look it up, and maybe I'm ignorant....but for all the pain in the ass they've made flying now, how often do they actually thwart terrorist attempts or find people trying to smuggle explosives through security? I just don't recall hearing any news in recent history about DHS actually *doing* anything productive.
None so far, but they did catch the guy with dangerous shoes once his device failed.
Show a casual user a DVD on a 42" 1080p TV from 8' away, then show them a bluray on the same TV from the same distance. Their jaw will drop unless they have worse than 20/40 vision.
The differences aren't small, you just have to know how to compare them.
The jaw will only drop because of the yawn. "The second one looks sharper," the casual user will say, while thinking, "I don't care."