Couldn't they just have said it Slashdot style? The people being photographed at Burning Man own the copyright of their own image.
In which case, Burning Man can't police it, as it's not their copyright to enforce. Which means each-and-every single burner will have to try and protect themselves. And not all burners are aware of all the myriad of ways their image could be exploited outside of the Burn.
This lets them centralize protecting attendees. Without getting sign-off from each-and-over person, without miles of paperwork, without random glitches. If you're worried about the organizers turning around and trying to profit from this and generally shutting the burners our from the content they produce... you may have the wrong idea about what Burning Man is, and the dedicated folks who make it happen. Yes, this system depends on benevolent dictators. But if you're attending Burning Man... you've already decided you trust them with *way* more then a random picture or two.
And really - this is something for the burners themselves to bitch about, if they feel it isn't in their interest. And given you're writing this *now* on Slashdot, chances are you aren't at the Burn.
Perhaps I missed something, but the link you supplied to demonstrate why the Panasonic camcorder is overpriced seems to only provides information for 3D still photography, not 3D video. An apples to oranges comparison.
I, too, owned the iPhone for a year and now the G1 for a couple months. I, however, came to the apposite conclusion - I've found the G1 to be an inferior device. I'll address each of your points with my own take.
The battery life is *awful*. I have to charge multiple times a day, and am seriously considering buying an extended battery so I'm not constantly worried about my phone dying just as I need it. The standby time is lousy, and actually *talking* on your phone decimates it.
The GUI is *not* fine. It's inconsistent and lacking polish. No spell-checking, clickable labels behaving differently from application to application, the UI mishmash of using either the touch pad or the mouse, inconsistent and random application of physical back button... And the UI *does* crash - I've had to force my phone off on a couple of occasions to work around a UI lockup. Heck, most of the time the screen doesn't even wake up when I get a phone call, forcing me to deal with even more buttons just to answer the phone.
As for the visual LED that flashes on notifications - perhaps it'd be useful, but the notification system isn't used well by some of the applications and ends up compromising it. Take the IMAP client, for example - if I read the message on another machine (like, say, my home computer), the notification on the G1 isn't updated - the dead entries just sit there. It's hard to trust the notifications when you can't be sure if it's spurious or not.
PF Voicemail a great visual voicemail app? Meh. My iPhone was unlocked and running on T-Mobile, so I never played with it's visual voicemail application. Hence, I can't make a direct comparison. That said, if the iPhone's visual voicemail application is as lackluster as PF Voicemail, it's a shame. The UI in PF is uninspired and feels inconsistent with the rest of the phone. Deleting messages doesn't actually remove them from the main listing - it just flags them red, which makes them seem *more* visually important (compared this to read messages, which are grayed out). Having to remove the messages by navigating to the menu and empty the trash is hockey. And, because it uses an incoming SMS message to update the client, you get junk SMS notifications (since PF apparently can't eat the message).
The Marketplace may let you return apps within 24 hours... but that presumes you can actually buy them. My phone's an unlocked developer edition (ADP1), a device which Google's apparently decided to ban from making purchases from the App Store.
Maybe Google Apps are well integrated - I can't really tell. You see, I use multiple Google accounts - my personal account, my public account (junkmail, shopping, etc), and my work account. And in this case, it works poorly - there's no integration between the multiple accounts, no ability to sign out of one to log into another. Google employees have resorted to installing Maverick, a 3rd party IM client, just so they can at least run an IM that's on a different account. Having integration is of course better then not, so I'm sure the G1 has the upper hand here. But given it doesn't work well for me, I can't claim any personal benefit. And I can't imagine I'm the only person suffering from this particular circumstance.
Sure, the SD card is upgradeable. But what are you going to put on it? You can't install applications to it. Caches aren't written to it. There's no integrated handling of common files like PDFs or ZIPs. And it's not like there's a reasonable media player on there. The darn thing can't even play videos out of the box. I was planning on ordering a larger SD card for the phone, but held-off until I played with it a bit. I'm glad I made that decision - I've barely used 100mbs of the SD card's space. And coupled with the poor battery life, using the phone as a media player would be a awful idea.
As for the mini-USB slot looking like the standard on phones from now on - oh golly, I hope not. Being forced to use an adapter so I can plug in headphones? Terrible
I, for one, do not use peer-to-peer file sharing for any reason. However the answer to secure peer-to-peer file sharing is so simple it's right in front of our noses. [...] Under the DMCA, the sender and receiver are the only two authorized to decrypt that file. If "any one else" decrypts it, even though they know the password, they are guilty of violating the DMCA.
The problem is not so trivially solved. Remember - folks looking to prosecute filesharers are perfectly capable of joining a P2P network. Once they're in the network, the can examine any file they want just like any other member of the network - they can be "receivers" too, after all.
To expand further on the parent's point - I personally have 4 monitors hooked up to my main machine, using a combination of GeForce2's and FeForceMX's. And I have on ordered another GeForceMX to push my count up to 6 monitors.
Heat has never been an issue. And this is a standard ATX case - no mods, no heavy cooling. Just one intake, one exhast, and the PSU.
This is not a robot (in the opinion of the original poster and me) because it is neither autonomous
nor does it have the capacity to be made autonomous-ish by adding sensors and a brain (microcontroller).
I beg to differ. We may not be able to "code" directly against the RoboSapien, but that need not stop us from automating it. As other industrious fellows have demonstrated, you can work around the ingrained limitations by attacking the external controller, instead. While we won't be able to (trivially) expand on the RoboSapien's existing repertoire, we're still welcome to work within its existing framework.
Personally, I'm looking forward to experimenting with this thing. Assuming the controller uses regular IR to communicate, it shouldn't be too much of a burden to simulate it's remote. If that fails, I guess it's time to tear apart the remote itself... I wonder how expensive spare remotes are?:)
What I'm quite amazed at is no one tries pushing keyboards with keys in alphabetic order, as opposed to QWERTY.
The majority of the people out there using computers don't know how to type and really have no intention to learn. If pushing CTRL-C is too much work as the poster states, imagine the frustration of a new computer user trying to hunt down C in the first place.
The QWERTY keyboard should be to the vast majority of computer users what the DVORAK keyboard is to the vast majority of us geeks - an interesting keyboard layout that's suppose to allow someone to type faster whose learned to use it.
A burner with Mt. Rainier support (i.e. CD-MRW) might be useful for you. The format keeps a defect map, and can intelligently write around the trouble spots. Sure, you give up some space, but that seems a small price to pay to keep your RW's useful for beyond "a mere" 30-40 burns.
Personally, I'm waiting quite anxiously for the DVD-MRW drives to come out...
If you really feel that watching a movie the way you perfer it even though it differs from the original presentation is wrong, well, listening to a CD outside of it's original presentation on the CD is wrong, too.
For all the babbling that goes on here at Slashdot about fair use, for someone to even question what ClearFlicks is doing is "right" really blows my mind (Well, it would if this weren't Slashdot).
Do I like what they're doing? No. Do I have plans on buying movies from them? No. Is it wrong for people to do what they want with their PROPERTY for their own private use? NO.
I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways people - either you agree that we have our fair use rights, or we don't. So what if someone is doing something that you feel is Bad(tm) on artistic grounds? It's their choice to make - let them waste their money how they see fit, just as I should be allowed to waste mine as I see fit.
No one's forcing me to watch their bastardized verion of a movie - I see no reason someone should be forced to watch the original.
Wow, does this take me back! I remember the really good old-school DOS memory managers (QEMM, for example) were able to create a handful more conventional memory beyond the 640k limit by using video memory in textmode. Quite handy for things like Word Perfect 5.1.
<JOKE> So I guess Linux is finally catching up to DOS. </JOKE>
The remote site is surrounded by thousands of additional acres of land withdrawn from the public domain for use as
a protected wildlife range and for a military gunnery range, creating an unpopulated land area comprising some 5,470 square miles.
While Stephenson immediately popped into my head as well, I honed in on a passage from another one of his books - "The Diamond Age", where the blight of a fellow who had an imbedded display in his eye was mentioned.
Advertisers, always trying to find new places to plaster their ads, hacked into the guy's visual system and planted an ad right smack-dab in the middle of the fellow's field of vision. Permanently. He even saw it when his eyes were closed. Eventually, the guy did the only thing he could to get rid of the damned ad - he off'ed himself.
The technology was perfectly safe. But it was the social ramifications that did our minor supporting-character in.
Ummm... huh? You do realize vertex/pixel shaders and color combiners are not the same thing, don't you?
<sarcasm>
My GeForce2 claims to have color combiners. Yet, as perplexing as it may be, it does not claim to have Vertex or Pixel shaders. Must have left that off the box!
</sarcasm>
Have you even looked at the DX 8 SDK? Or, if you refuse to "stare into the eyes of the beast", how about nVidia's vendor extensions for GL to support pixel and vertex shaders, or even the OpenGL 2.0 specs?
A linear equation for coloring and a programable pipeline are, well, completely different things. I'd love to see you magically be able to perform, say, deformed-skinned skeletal animation with a color combiner.
Here is a near verbatim copy of the letter the dean of students sent all of us Purdue students in response to the rioting, minus the dean's phone # and email address.
Enjoy.
_________________________
TO: All Purdue Students
FROM: Tony Hawkins
Dean of Students
dean.of.students@purdue.edu
SUBJECT: Violence and Vandalism
In the wake of the campus disturbance a week ago Sunday night, following the NCAA women's title basketball game, I am writing to express my concern, inform you about student conduct procedures, and solicit your help.
I know most of you will agree that this conduct was unacceptable. It demeaned our women athletes at a time they should have received our highest praises and compliments for a splendid season. It embarrassed the student body and reflected negatively on the University's reputation around the world. More than $75,000 in property was destroyed. (Costs continue to mount daily in staff time spent in the aftermath.) Emails, phone calls, and letters to Purdue officials run to extremes - from some calling for resignations of staff who "let this happen" to others who voice concern about overreaction and punishment of the innocent. Parents are rightfully worried. Residents experienced a fearful night that night and remain anxious about a potential repeat. The community is justifiably angry. Alumni are outraged. The reputation of the University is tarnished.
In the long run, we all pay for the damages, and some of the damages cannot have a price tag attached. These damages, however, are not simply someone else's expenses.
It is a miracle that no one was seriously injured in the dozens of fires that were set, including one that nearly burned overhead electrical wires that could have fallen into the crowd, and others that were set adjacent to buildings. Many of the spectators unwittingly put themselves in danger.
Most of our more than 37,000 students were not involved. In fact, some tried to discourage the vandalism and even helped extinguish fires. But at least 1,000 students participated. Spectators hanging on the sidelines provided a cloak of anonymity to the more destructive participants and helped create conditions in which rioters could easily escape. A large portion of the crowd even cheered and incited destruction and violence while a smaller group lit fires, broke windows, threw rocks and destroyed vehicles.
This kind of behavior is unacceptable at Purdue. Any students identified as actively participating in the destructive and dangerous activity will be charged by police and referred both to the prosecutor's office and to the Office of the Dean of Students for disciplinary procedures. With sufficient evidence, they can be suspended or expelled from Purdue. It is sad to think that one's future can so quickly change because of a momentary lapse in reason.
Additionally, all students need to be aware that they are not just spectators when they are asked by public officials to leave a scene. In order to protect people and property, these authorities must have clear and safe paths to do so. At the point of refusing to comply with these public officials, those who choose to remain can be identified and charged. In some cases they may be facing more than a fine and a court case. A student's status with the University can also be in jeopardy because of his/her refusal to comply with directions of University officials.
Finally, I am asking all of you to work within your housing units, student organizations and circle of friends to help all of us bring to a halt the kind of mob-like violence and destruction we have seen at Purdue over the past few years. Please do not let the actions of a few who fail to see all the interconnections between the past, the present, and the future undermine the reputation of Purdue, one that has been built upon the care and concern of generations of other students, faculty, and staff.
With Grand Prix week only days away, I urge you to promote pride in Purdue through positive actions and behaviors. Let's demonstrate that we can enjoy and celebrate special events with greater integrity and class than other campuses! Talk to each other. Ask yourself what you and your friends can do. Take back Your University. A reputation is an easy thing to destroy and so hard to repair!
L. Tony Hawkins, Ph.D.
Dean of Students
Schleman Hall, Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1096
I remember back in the day when Accolade backward engineered the Sega Genesis, allowing them to product games compatible with the system without Sega's intervention.
This was all well and good, but one of the initialization procedures required to startup the machine displayed a Sega logo... There was no around this, of course, and Sega took Accolade to court for infringing on its usage of their logo.
As I recall, Accolade won since there was no other way of working with the system - it was Sega's fault for designing the system such that it required the infringement to occur.
I can't help but draw analogy between what was happening then and what is happening now - A party designs a system that forces anyone who works with it to do Bad Legal Things(tm) in an effort to keep anyone from working with it, despite perfectly legitimate reverse engineering. Tsk tsk tsk...
For those interested, the verdict an be found on EFF's site here.
Ummm.... you do realize it's the Open Source nature of this project that makes it so OPEN to this type of exploit, right?
I don't use GNUtella myself - while the project does sound interesting, I've had too many of my friends tell me they completely gave up on the system months ago because too many hacked clients were appearing and spamming the entire system.
I am not going to make the claim that making this project closed source is a viable solution to correcting this problem. HOWEVER, I won't make the rather insipid statement that the problem will go away because the project is Open Source, either.
Open Source is a great idea. BUT, it is not a magic bullet.
Be forewarned - this is a long and very XBox friendly rant, going over many of the comments that I've seen posted that have forced me out of my lurker status for a 2nd time. I give this warning because, though I believe I have made rational, unbiased comments, my post does not include the normal slashdot "Yeah Linux, Boo M$" rhetoric most seem accustom to. Here goes...
The hard drive isn't for MS to store an OS. Or patches. Or ANY of that crap. MS doesn't need to patch the OS. EVER. A copy of the OS is included with every game, tailored to the game (like it should be). This allows MS and developers to do whatever they want with the underlying OS, and not worry about breaking anyone else's code. But if the hard drive isn't in their for the MS, why on earth is it in there? Could it be... for the DEVELOPER? <sarcasm> Wow, what a STRANGE and MYSTICAL idea! A part in the gaming console is actually meant to be used for the gaming console! </sarcasm> I, personally, am THRILLED at this inclusion - now it's possible to cache stuff to a hard drive instead of hitting the DVD, making it SO much simpler and down-right faster to handle gameplay that requires more then what 64 megs'o'ram can hold. And, just to make sure it's mentioned, the OS DOES NOT support virtual memory - the app's get to manage the space for themselves. Why an 8 gig drive? Well, as of this point in time, 8 gig drives are the cheapest, readily available drives that are produced in quantity.
As for the hard drive complaints concerning uptime - I shared them for quite some time... till someone pointed out that the DVD-drive is expected to be the *real* uptime problem. And how many here complained about the PS2 including a DVD drive? Personally, I think a tray-loaded console is just ASKING to be broken...
Also, to respond to the (rather childish) posts saying that 64 megs couldn't possibly be enough to run an MS OS on. Apparently, the XBox is running a heavily stripped derivation of Win2k. The entire OS fits comfortably in ~500k. So, I *think* 64 megs can handle that.:)
As for MS "redesigning" the USB port - while initially it sounds like an assinine thing to do, it actually does make sense (at least to me). Otherwise, folks are going to see the port and try plugging in all sorts of USB device, and become quite confused and frustrated when nothing happens. Remember, MS isn't building this thing so we can enjoy hacking it - they're building it for the average consumer. And, since the USB port is such a simple pinout, I really found it hard to swallow that MS is doing this just because they're plain greedy - if a hardware house can't figure it out, they don't deserve to be making hardware!:)
To the folks who say developers "dont have anything to do with hardware" in response to someone's stable system-configuration comment, what the hell have you been smokin'! Do you know how HARD it is to try and wring all the performance out of a chipset without breaking another?! If hardware differences weren't an issue, cap-bits and vendor extensions wouldn't exist...
Also, to the pundits that cry that this thing is bad because it's a PC, I ask, what the hell is wrong with that?! I *like* my PC - it can runs games very well, thank-you-very-much. And Remember that this is a UNIFIED MEMORY SYSTEM, so... there is no AGP BUS!!! And, the thing is going to be running an NV25. To put this in perspective, the GeForce 2 is an NV15. Consequently, this thing is around 2 generations ahead of what nVidia has available for the desktop. My guess is the NV25 is a performance tuned NV20, based off the existence of the special "Enable NV20 Emulation" option in nVidia's drivers.
Also, from what I've gathered, MS *is* including a VGA port in-the-box, so no special breaker box needed for monitor support.
MS is NOT going to be making money of the machines themselves - they are selling these at a loss, just like every other console (don't know about the Indrema, though - anyone know how much that box is expected to cost?). But, from talking with a fellow involved with the XBox, I found that MS isn't expecting to lose more then $20-$30 per box. And, when asked during a tech-talk what the launch price of this thing is going to be, the MS fellow said "No console has ever successfully launched for more the $299 in the US." MS plans on being successful. You do the math...
I, personally, am looking forward to the XBox.
MS has made the entire API available for me to play with on my own PC. MS has set up a hobbyist program to help people to learn to do stuff for the system. MS has TOLD you what is in the box. MS has even setup an "incubator" program to help small game development startups. I'm sorry, but for all the closed-source M$ bashing, MS has made a system that is a shit-load more open and accessible then Nintendo, Sega, or Sony. MS's willingness to give me all the information I need to work with the hardware is why MS has guaranteed that I'll be buying and learning to develop for this box.
And so ends my long and winding post. But before you replay, I would like to state that I tried to be rational, unbias, and coherent throughout my post. I only ask that you do the same.
I've got the HP 8100i burner, and got sick enough with HP's "support" for the thing under Win2k that I ended up flashing it into the equivalent Sony drive. Works like a charm now.:)
Quake uses the PVS and PHS (potentially visible/hearable sets. The PVS is the list of all 'areas' visible from the player's location, and the PHS is the PVS and all PVSes...) for knowing when to send information about one player to the next. In some fairly connected levels, the PHS is *huge* and the client knows where the other players are far in advance. This could be changed to use an algorithm to determine the quickest route for both entities to take before being visible to each other, and if that's under the update delay (ie, likely to happen before the next update) then the information would be sent. Otherwise, it wouldn't. Thus, cheaters would have a much smaller window of opportunity.
I might be inferring this incorrectly, but it sounds like your saying using the PHS at all is a bad thing. If that's the case, all I can say is NOT using the PHS is a BAD thing. It's a TREMENDOUS speed up, keeping the server from having to do a massive amount of expensive tests per player at *ever-single-moment*. And, this still won't help in the repetitively specified "around the corner" cheat, would it? It was because of ingenious and quite frankly vital tricks like these that Quake performs so, SO well compared to the rest of the FPS pack (remember Unreal?).
One other 'bug' is that if the player models are replaces with a big pointy model, where each axis has a big arrow, you can see these arrows far ahead of the actual player, even through walls and floors (in the other player is in your PHS). Writing the code, in many spots, to generate errors if the models were above a certain maximum reasonable size, and if they passed through world brushes, would make this a non-trivial hack, unlike now where you load the models into an editor, add a couple of points, and boom, can see people through walls.
Polygon accurate collision detection == expensive. Isn't that what would be required to see if a model passes through world brushes? Also, won't enforcing an arbitrary size limit reign in on the amazing amount of flexibility purposely built into the engine in the first place?
The skin, the image that wraps around the wireframe, can be altered. A white skin naturally shows up better in shadows than a dark one. In Quake some colors are 'full bright', meaning that they 'emit light'... A skin made up on these literally is visible in complete darkness. If they changed the renderer to not use these drawing modes for characters skins, this would eliminate this easy for of cheating. A skilled programmer could add this in, but it would take a lot more work than simply opening up MS Paint and flood-filling a PCX...
Again, isn't this cutting back on the flexibility of the engine? Lets say I want to make a mod that's a crawler though a mine shaft, with glowing lights on the players helmets. Or maybe I'm making a mod in a fantasy setting, with a few fantasy models, like beasts with sinister glowing eyes, or glowing pixies. The Quake engine was made flexible for a reason!
Also, the design of the basic game could change a little. Quake 1 had few instant-hit weapons. The shotgun and the lightning gun are the only ones. Bots of course favor instant-hit weapons because they don't have to predict the enemy's movements, they simply line up the crosshairs and fire. The shotgun isn't a big deal because it's fairly low damage and the spread makes it less effective at medium or long range. The lightning gun is a Quake1 bot's favorite weapon. Knowing this, they could have designed the game to reduce the effectiveness of the lightning gun in such a way.
So, we are now required to compromise gameplay to make sure folks don't cheat. Boy, it's almost like this ain't a game anymore! Are we also required to put code in a restriction for mods including anything like this?
I hate to have to say it, but don't you think (and I'm not referring to you specifically Nitpicks), considering how much effort they put in, and flat-out AMAZING things the good folks at id did, they would have *considered* doing some of these? I'm sure they've tried to make it as secure as they can, given the restrictions of
real-time, low bandwidth use and
engine flexibility
But every suggestion I've been hearing that id "should have put in" is a definite step away from those 2 overriding design goals. One of the reasons quake is so gash-darn fun is because of all the stuff folks have been able to do with it to make it fun! I love the grapple hook, I love the mods folks make (especially some of the absolutely fabulous total conversions), I love the responsiveness... To have taken these out when the game was created (assuming that the open-source community would have implemented these things that have been suggested) would have really taken away from the game. And there's a reason we all care so much about Quake's source code and player cheats; We all love the game SO much.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't they just have said it Slashdot style? The people being photographed at Burning Man own the copyright of their own image.
In which case, Burning Man can't police it, as it's not their copyright to enforce. Which means each-and-every single burner will have to try and protect themselves. And not all burners are aware of all the myriad of ways their image could be exploited outside of the Burn.
This lets them centralize protecting attendees. Without getting sign-off from each-and-over person, without miles of paperwork, without random glitches. If you're worried about the organizers turning around and trying to profit from this and generally shutting the burners our from the content they produce... you may have the wrong idea about what Burning Man is, and the dedicated folks who make it happen. Yes, this system depends on benevolent dictators. But if you're attending Burning Man... you've already decided you trust them with *way* more then a random picture or two.
And really - this is something for the burners themselves to bitch about, if they feel it isn't in their interest. And given you're writing this *now* on Slashdot, chances are you aren't at the Burn.
Perhaps I missed something, but the link you supplied to demonstrate why the Panasonic camcorder is overpriced seems to only provides information for 3D still photography, not 3D video. An apples to oranges comparison.
I, too, owned the iPhone for a year and now the G1 for a couple months. I, however, came to the apposite conclusion - I've found the G1 to be an inferior device. I'll address each of your points with my own take.
The battery life is *awful*. I have to charge multiple times a day, and am seriously considering buying an extended battery so I'm not constantly worried about my phone dying just as I need it. The standby time is lousy, and actually *talking* on your phone decimates it.
The GUI is *not* fine. It's inconsistent and lacking polish. No spell-checking, clickable labels behaving differently from application to application, the UI mishmash of using either the touch pad or the mouse, inconsistent and random application of physical back button... And the UI *does* crash - I've had to force my phone off on a couple of occasions to work around a UI lockup. Heck, most of the time the screen doesn't even wake up when I get a phone call, forcing me to deal with even more buttons just to answer the phone.
As for the visual LED that flashes on notifications - perhaps it'd be useful, but the notification system isn't used well by some of the applications and ends up compromising it. Take the IMAP client, for example - if I read the message on another machine (like, say, my home computer), the notification on the G1 isn't updated - the dead entries just sit there. It's hard to trust the notifications when you can't be sure if it's spurious or not.
PF Voicemail a great visual voicemail app? Meh. My iPhone was unlocked and running on T-Mobile, so I never played with it's visual voicemail application. Hence, I can't make a direct comparison. That said, if the iPhone's visual voicemail application is as lackluster as PF Voicemail, it's a shame. The UI in PF is uninspired and feels inconsistent with the rest of the phone. Deleting messages doesn't actually remove them from the main listing - it just flags them red, which makes them seem *more* visually important (compared this to read messages, which are grayed out). Having to remove the messages by navigating to the menu and empty the trash is hockey. And, because it uses an incoming SMS message to update the client, you get junk SMS notifications (since PF apparently can't eat the message).
The Marketplace may let you return apps within 24 hours... but that presumes you can actually buy them. My phone's an unlocked developer edition (ADP1), a device which Google's apparently decided to ban from making purchases from the App Store.
Maybe Google Apps are well integrated - I can't really tell. You see, I use multiple Google accounts - my personal account, my public account (junkmail, shopping, etc), and my work account. And in this case, it works poorly - there's no integration between the multiple accounts, no ability to sign out of one to log into another. Google employees have resorted to installing Maverick, a 3rd party IM client, just so they can at least run an IM that's on a different account. Having integration is of course better then not, so I'm sure the G1 has the upper hand here. But given it doesn't work well for me, I can't claim any personal benefit. And I can't imagine I'm the only person suffering from this particular circumstance.
Sure, the SD card is upgradeable. But what are you going to put on it? You can't install applications to it. Caches aren't written to it. There's no integrated handling of common files like PDFs or ZIPs. And it's not like there's a reasonable media player on there. The darn thing can't even play videos out of the box. I was planning on ordering a larger SD card for the phone, but held-off until I played with it a bit. I'm glad I made that decision - I've barely used 100mbs of the SD card's space. And coupled with the poor battery life, using the phone as a media player would be a awful idea.
As for the mini-USB slot looking like the standard on phones from now on - oh golly, I hope not. Being forced to use an adapter so I can plug in headphones? Terrible
So we should expect an April 1st, 2008 release?
I'd trust "Hitach" before I'd trust Hitachi. I've been burned by Hitachi / IBM drives far too often to trust my data to the brand again.
To expand further on the parent's point - I personally have 4 monitors hooked up to my main machine, using a combination of GeForce2's and FeForceMX's. And I have on ordered another GeForceMX to push my count up to 6 monitors.
Heat has never been an issue. And this is a standard ATX case - no mods, no heavy cooling. Just one intake, one exhast, and the PSU.
Personally, I'm looking forward to experimenting with this thing. Assuming the controller uses regular IR to communicate, it shouldn't be too much of a burden to simulate it's remote. If that fails, I guess it's time to tear apart the remote itself... I wonder how expensive spare remotes are?
What I'm quite amazed at is no one tries pushing keyboards with keys in alphabetic order, as opposed to QWERTY.
The majority of the people out there using computers don't know how to type and really have no intention to learn. If pushing CTRL-C is too much work as the poster states, imagine the frustration of a new computer user trying to hunt down C in the first place.
The QWERTY keyboard should be to the vast majority of computer users what the DVORAK keyboard is to the vast majority of us geeks - an interesting keyboard layout that's suppose to allow someone to type faster whose learned to use it.
A burner with Mt. Rainier support (i.e. CD-MRW) might be useful for you. The format keeps a defect map, and can intelligently write around the trouble spots. Sure, you give up some space, but that seems a small price to pay to keep your RW's useful for beyond "a mere" 30-40 burns.
Personally, I'm waiting quite anxiously for the DVD-MRW drives to come out...
If you really feel that watching a movie the way you perfer it even though it differs from the original presentation is wrong, well, listening to a CD outside of it's original presentation on the CD is wrong, too.
For all the babbling that goes on here at Slashdot about fair use, for someone to even question what ClearFlicks is doing is "right" really blows my mind (Well, it would if this weren't Slashdot).
Do I like what they're doing? No.
Do I have plans on buying movies from them? No.
Is it wrong for people to do what they want with their PROPERTY for their own private use? NO.
I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways people - either you agree that we have our fair use rights, or we don't. So what if someone is doing something that you feel is Bad(tm) on artistic grounds? It's their choice to make - let them waste their money how they see fit, just as I should be allowed to waste mine as I see fit.
No one's forcing me to watch their bastardized verion of a movie - I see no reason someone should be forced to watch the original.
Apparently, Blizzard's planning on gaining more sales by having their female lead not wear any pants. Brilliant!
It's funny. Laugh.
Wow, does this take me back! I remember the really good old-school DOS memory managers (QEMM, for example) were able to create a handful more conventional memory beyond the 640k limit by using video memory in textmode. Quite handy for things like Word Perfect 5.1.
<JOKE>
So I guess Linux is finally catching up to DOS.
</JOKE>
Oh yeah? What about "werestewardesses"?
While Stephenson immediately popped into my head as well, I honed in on a passage from another one of his books - "The Diamond Age", where the blight of a fellow who had an imbedded display in his eye was mentioned.
Advertisers, always trying to find new places to plaster their ads, hacked into the guy's visual system and planted an ad right smack-dab in the middle of the fellow's field of vision. Permanently. He even saw it when his eyes were closed. Eventually, the guy did the only thing he could to get rid of the damned ad - he off'ed himself.
The technology was perfectly safe. But it was the social ramifications that did our minor supporting-character in.
cough RIAA's Membership List cough
If your going to bash MS, at least try to do it intellgently.
Ummm... huh? You do realize vertex/pixel shaders and color combiners are not the same thing, don't you?
<sarcasm> My GeForce2 claims to have color combiners. Yet, as perplexing as it may be, it does not claim to have Vertex or Pixel shaders. Must have left that off the box! </sarcasm>
Have you even looked at the DX 8 SDK? Or, if you refuse to "stare into the eyes of the beast", how about nVidia's vendor extensions for GL to support pixel and vertex shaders, or even the OpenGL 2.0 specs?
A linear equation for coloring and a programable pipeline are, well, completely different things. I'd love to see you magically be able to perform, say, deformed-skinned skeletal animation with a color combiner.
Here is a near verbatim copy of the letter the dean of students sent all of us Purdue students in response to the rioting, minus the dean's phone # and email address.
Enjoy.
_________________________
TO: All Purdue Students
FROM: Tony Hawkins
Dean of Students
dean.of.students@purdue.edu
SUBJECT: Violence and Vandalism
In the wake of the campus disturbance a week ago Sunday night, following the NCAA women's title basketball game, I am writing to express my concern, inform you about student conduct procedures, and solicit your help.
I know most of you will agree that this conduct was unacceptable. It demeaned our women athletes at a time they should have received our highest praises and compliments for a splendid season. It embarrassed the student body and reflected negatively on the University's reputation around the world. More than $75,000 in property was destroyed. (Costs continue to mount daily in staff time spent in the aftermath.) Emails, phone calls, and letters to Purdue officials run to extremes - from some calling for resignations of staff who "let this happen" to others who voice concern about overreaction and punishment of the innocent. Parents are rightfully worried. Residents experienced a fearful night that night and remain anxious about a potential repeat. The community is justifiably angry. Alumni are outraged. The reputation of the University is tarnished.
In the long run, we all pay for the damages, and some of the damages cannot have a price tag attached. These damages, however, are not simply someone else's expenses.
It is a miracle that no one was seriously injured in the dozens of fires that were set, including one that nearly burned overhead electrical wires that could have fallen into the crowd, and others that were set adjacent to buildings. Many of the spectators unwittingly put themselves in danger.
Most of our more than 37,000 students were not involved. In fact, some tried to discourage the vandalism and even helped extinguish fires. But at least 1,000 students participated. Spectators hanging on the sidelines provided a cloak of anonymity to the more destructive participants and helped create conditions in which rioters could easily escape. A large portion of the crowd even cheered and incited destruction and violence while a smaller group lit fires, broke windows, threw rocks and destroyed vehicles.
This kind of behavior is unacceptable at Purdue. Any students identified as actively participating in the destructive and dangerous activity will be charged by police and referred both to the prosecutor's office and to the Office of the Dean of Students for disciplinary procedures. With sufficient evidence, they can be suspended or expelled from Purdue. It is sad to think that one's future can so quickly change because of a momentary lapse in reason.
Additionally, all students need to be aware that they are not just spectators when they are asked by public officials to leave a scene. In order to protect people and property, these authorities must have clear and safe paths to do so. At the point of refusing to comply with these public officials, those who choose to remain can be identified and charged. In some cases they may be facing more than a fine and a court case. A student's status with the University can also be in jeopardy because of his/her refusal to comply with directions of University officials.
Finally, I am asking all of you to work within your housing units, student organizations and circle of friends to help all of us bring to a halt the kind of mob-like violence and destruction we have seen at Purdue over the past few years. Please do not let the actions of a few who fail to see all the interconnections between the past, the present, and the future undermine the reputation of Purdue, one that has been built upon the care and concern of generations of other students, faculty, and staff.
With Grand Prix week only days away, I urge you to promote pride in Purdue through positive actions and behaviors. Let's demonstrate that we can enjoy and celebrate special events with greater integrity and class than other campuses! Talk to each other. Ask yourself what you and your friends can do. Take back Your University. A reputation is an easy thing to destroy and so hard to repair!
L. Tony Hawkins, Ph.D.
Dean of Students
Schleman Hall, Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1096
<Insert requisite IANAL disclaimer here>
I remember back in the day when Accolade backward engineered the Sega Genesis, allowing them to product games compatible with the system without Sega's intervention.
This was all well and good, but one of the initialization procedures required to startup the machine displayed a Sega logo... There was no around this, of course, and Sega took Accolade to court for infringing on its usage of their logo. As I recall, Accolade won since there was no other way of working with the system - it was Sega's fault for designing the system such that it required the infringement to occur.
I can't help but draw analogy between what was happening then and what is happening now - A party designs a system that forces anyone who works with it to do Bad Legal Things(tm) in an effort to keep anyone from working with it, despite perfectly legitimate reverse engineering. Tsk tsk tsk...
For those interested, the verdict an be found on EFF's site here.
Ummm.... you do realize it's the Open Source nature of this project that makes it so OPEN to this type of exploit, right?
I don't use GNUtella myself - while the project does sound interesting, I've had too many of my friends tell me they completely gave up on the system months ago because too many hacked clients were appearing and spamming the entire system.
I am not going to make the claim that making this project closed source is a viable solution to correcting this problem. HOWEVER, I won't make the rather insipid statement that the problem will go away because the project is Open Source, either.
Open Source is a great idea. BUT, it is not a magic bullet.
Be forewarned - this is a long and very XBox friendly rant, going over many of the comments that I've seen posted that have forced me out of my lurker status for a 2nd time. I give this warning because, though I believe I have made rational, unbiased comments, my post does not include the normal slashdot "Yeah Linux, Boo M$" rhetoric most seem accustom to. Here goes...
:)
:)
The hard drive isn't for MS to store an OS. Or patches. Or ANY of that crap. MS doesn't need to patch the OS. EVER. A copy of the OS is included with every game, tailored to the game (like it should be). This allows MS and developers to do whatever they want with the underlying OS, and not worry about breaking anyone else's code. But if the hard drive isn't in their for the MS, why on earth is it in there? Could it be... for the DEVELOPER? <sarcasm> Wow, what a STRANGE and MYSTICAL idea! A part in the gaming console is actually meant to be used for the gaming console! </sarcasm> I, personally, am THRILLED at this inclusion - now it's possible to cache stuff to a hard drive instead of hitting the DVD, making it SO much simpler and down-right faster to handle gameplay that requires more then what 64 megs'o'ram can hold. And, just to make sure it's mentioned, the OS DOES NOT support virtual memory - the app's get to manage the space for themselves. Why an 8 gig drive? Well, as of this point in time, 8 gig drives are the cheapest, readily available drives that are produced in quantity.
As for the hard drive complaints concerning uptime - I shared them for quite some time... till someone pointed out that the DVD-drive is expected to be the *real* uptime problem. And how many here complained about the PS2 including a DVD drive? Personally, I think a tray-loaded console is just ASKING to be broken...
Also, to respond to the (rather childish) posts saying that 64 megs couldn't possibly be enough to run an MS OS on. Apparently, the XBox is running a heavily stripped derivation of Win2k. The entire OS fits comfortably in ~500k. So, I *think* 64 megs can handle that.
As for MS "redesigning" the USB port - while initially it sounds like an assinine thing to do, it actually does make sense (at least to me). Otherwise, folks are going to see the port and try plugging in all sorts of USB device, and become quite confused and frustrated when nothing happens. Remember, MS isn't building this thing so we can enjoy hacking it - they're building it for the average consumer. And, since the USB port is such a simple pinout, I really found it hard to swallow that MS is doing this just because they're plain greedy - if a hardware house can't figure it out, they don't deserve to be making hardware!
To the folks who say developers "dont have anything to do with hardware" in response to someone's stable system-configuration comment, what the hell have you been smokin'! Do you know how HARD it is to try and wring all the performance out of a chipset without breaking another?! If hardware differences weren't an issue, cap-bits and vendor extensions wouldn't exist...
Also, to the pundits that cry that this thing is bad because it's a PC, I ask, what the hell is wrong with that?! I *like* my PC - it can runs games very well, thank-you-very-much. And Remember that this is a UNIFIED MEMORY SYSTEM, so... there is no AGP BUS!!! And, the thing is going to be running an NV25. To put this in perspective, the GeForce 2 is an NV15. Consequently, this thing is around 2 generations ahead of what nVidia has available for the desktop. My guess is the NV25 is a performance tuned NV20, based off the existence of the special "Enable NV20 Emulation" option in nVidia's drivers.
Also, from what I've gathered, MS *is* including a VGA port in-the-box, so no special breaker box needed for monitor support.
MS is NOT going to be making money of the machines themselves - they are selling these at a loss, just like every other console (don't know about the Indrema, though - anyone know how much that box is expected to cost?). But, from talking with a fellow involved with the XBox, I found that MS isn't expecting to lose more then $20-$30 per box. And, when asked during a tech-talk what the launch price of this thing is going to be, the MS fellow said "No console has ever successfully launched for more the $299 in the US." MS plans on being successful. You do the math...
I, personally, am looking forward to the XBox.
MS has made the entire API available for me to play with on my own PC. MS has set up a hobbyist program to help people to learn to do stuff for the system. MS has TOLD you what is in the box. MS has even setup an "incubator" program to help small game development startups. I'm sorry, but for all the closed-source M$ bashing, MS has made a system that is a shit-load more open and accessible then Nintendo, Sega, or Sony. MS's willingness to give me all the information I need to work with the hardware is why MS has guaranteed that I'll be buying and learning to develop for this box.
And so ends my long and winding post. But before you replay, I would like to state that I tried to be rational, unbias, and coherent throughout my post. I only ask that you do the same.
As a completely off topic comment, do you know who wrote DONKEY?
:)
Bill Gates.
C=64
I've got the HP 8100i burner, and got sick enough with HP's "support" for the thing under Win2k that I ended up flashing it into the equivalent Sony drive. Works like a charm now. :)
C=64
I might be inferring this incorrectly, but it sounds like your saying using the PHS at all is a bad thing. If that's the case, all I can say is NOT using the PHS is a BAD thing. It's a TREMENDOUS speed up, keeping the server from having to do a massive amount of expensive tests per player at *ever-single-moment*. And, this still won't help in the repetitively specified "around the corner" cheat, would it? It was because of ingenious and quite frankly vital tricks like these that Quake performs so, SO well compared to the rest of the FPS pack (remember Unreal?).
Polygon accurate collision detection == expensive. Isn't that what would be required to see if a model passes through world brushes? Also, won't enforcing an arbitrary size limit reign in on the amazing amount of flexibility purposely built into the engine in the first place?
Again, isn't this cutting back on the flexibility of the engine? Lets say I want to make a mod that's a crawler though a mine shaft, with glowing lights on the players helmets. Or maybe I'm making a mod in a fantasy setting, with a few fantasy models, like beasts with sinister glowing eyes, or glowing pixies. The Quake engine was made flexible for a reason!
So, we are now required to compromise gameplay to make sure folks don't cheat. Boy, it's almost like this ain't a game anymore! Are we also required to put code in a restriction for mods including anything like this?I hate to have to say it, but don't you think (and I'm not referring to you specifically Nitpicks), considering how much effort they put in, and flat-out AMAZING things the good folks at id did, they would have *considered* doing some of these? I'm sure they've tried to make it as secure as they can, given the restrictions of
But every suggestion I've been hearing that id "should have put in" is a definite step away from those 2 overriding design goals. One of the reasons quake is so gash-darn fun is because of all the stuff folks have been able to do with it to make it fun! I love the grapple hook, I love the mods folks make (especially some of the absolutely fabulous total conversions), I love the responsiveness... To have taken these out when the game was created (assuming that the open-source community would have implemented these things that have been suggested) would have really taken away from the game. And there's a reason we all care so much about Quake's source code and player cheats; We all love the game SO much.Just my 2 cents...