You're very naive. Yes, it's fair to believe it's the manufacturers responsibility to test this, but in reality they either just don't care or lack the resources to properly test such a complicated device across all hardware/software-configurations possible - or any combination of the above reasons or other reasons I haven't mentioned.
The sad reality is that Joe Average demands the latest shiny crap, and he demands it immediately. Companies making technology today need to push out the latest and greatest with only minimal testing, or they will have their lunch eaten by the competitor who launched a similar product earlier but with even less testing and product development.
I assure you, the days when companies actually cared about their product beyond launch or enough to avoid a class-action lawsuit because of a crappy product are long gone, my friend.
... have I (as a PC gamer) encountered crappy console conversions. Three examples off the top of my head:
Mirrors Edge: Yes, you could configure the controls, but in-game they were still referred to by their Xbox 360 identifiers. I.e. you could set jump to space, but in the tutorial it kept referring to non-existant buttons. Made the game virtually impossible to play since you'd get confused by the bad labeling.
Blur: Insane keyboard controls and completely unconfigurable. You had two keyboard layouts to choose from, both pre-defined and written in stone. Or you could use a 360-controller. Completely retarded. Various references all through the game telling you not to turn off your "console" while saving.
Assassins Creed: Completely un-intuitive console controls. Impossible to change.
Don't forget the recent Portal 2, which is quite pretty to look at, as well as an amazing story and immersive game, and it's running on a somewhat hot-rodded version of the Source engine, which is a bit over six years old now.
So by your logic, every time you find a snail in your garden you nuke the entire planet?
I mean, you can never be sure so basically every morning when you sit down in front of your computer you flash bios and reinstall operating system from scratch? I guess you don't get much done in a day since every day you have to spend 8-9 hours shuffling your data around and reinstalling.
Many years ago, a good friend of mine dropped his Nokia 3110 in the snow outside his parents house. We lived way up in the arctic then, and we couldn't find it.
So we basically assumed it was gone forever.
Later we found out that it had gotten frozen in the snow, and covered with a huge snowpile. His dad found the phone when he ran over it with his snowblower. It got sucked into the snowblower, blown maybe 20 yards away and landed in anoter pile of snow. His dad wondered what the clunk was and found the phone.
We thawed it out, plugged it in the charger and it lit up just as new. It had been frozen in ice/snow for maybe four months, gone through a snowblower and then thawed out and the only visible damage to it was a small chunk taken out of the plastic casing by one of the snowblowers blades.
Same phone was later the following summer accidentally dropped into shallow water in a lake. He dove down after it, let it dry in the sun and it started up just as new again. Only effect of a dip in the lake was that the numberpad squeaked for a few days afterwards.
The thing that almost killed it was a three-story drop onto concrete. The phone survived with some superficial damage to the casing and a distorted frame, but you could still use it. However the display got smashed in the fall and that made it quite useless so he retired it.
... had awful console-type controls. Game was probably good, but I quit and deleted it after about ten minutes because the controls were completely illogical to a PC-gamer.
They were essentially gamepad-controls that had been reassigned to keyboard keys. They made no sense to a pc-gamer used to a certain de-facto standard of controls.
It also had (as I recall) the typical you-can-only-save-when-we-say-so console conversion issues, as well as the wonderful "please don't turn off your console" while saving.
Sweden already has this policy. It's a blocklist implemented in the DNS structure of Swedish ISP's. Thus it's easily avoided by anyone with even basic computer skills.
Officially it's to block kiddie porn, but there's no public examination of what sites are on the list. Also, it's been demonstrated several times that there's a lot of rather odd choices when it comes to blocking - i.e. a korean site about Bonsai trees is on the list.
There's been quite a lot of controversy surrounding this list, and it's been accused of being the start of a slippery slide towards censorship.
Also, it's essentially useless since it's easily avoided.
The fact it's been made doesn't affect the original in any way whatsoever. Chill out.
Except that it's mere existence will taint the original. We who haven't seen a godawful sequel will still have to content with all the zombies out there running around shouting things like "the second one was soooo much better".
If there's only one movie, it will stand on it's own. As soon as a classic movie is turned into a franchise, then the quality and what made the movie a classic will disappear - no matter if you ignore it or not. It'll get turned into yet another money-machine where Hollywood chops off it's own heads in order to make a profit.
Besides, there's an outside chance it could be really good.
No, it'll be a crappy FX-driven horrorshow without any of the gravitas of the original. Just look at the crap that a majority of studios spew out. That's what we'll get. Even if Ridley himself directs it (doubtful) it'll still be a cardboard cutout in comparison.
I mean, I still cringe at the fact that there exist book-sequels to the movie. Much less would I want an actual movie-sequel to it.
that Logitech (and many other brands) of Webcam stops functioning, and that the CD/DVD drives inexplicably keep injecting immediately upon ejecting a disc.
That's two of the minor annoyances that I discovered the other day when I upgraded Hardy to Intrepid. One of the major bugs still is the poor I/O-performance that occurs at intense disk-usage.
And this is of course provided these bugs don't get fixed.
The problem I see with this device (and by extension any device or method used to improve gas-mileage in vehicles powered by fossil-fuels) is that it just serves to extend a technology that should've been abandoned decades ago.
Rather than solving the problem, i.e. our dependency on fossil-fuels, we are treating the symptoms of it.
This is just a band-aid. We're ignoring the fact that our vehicles need to be powered by something sustainable. This is where the research should be pointed - to alternate forms of energy for our cars. Not to prolong this addiction to gasoline.
I know this is a Mostly Useless posting, but in my case I've got to ask: what cap?
(Disclaimer: I live in Sweden, so this post is pretty much worthless for all you USanians)
Bandwidth capping do exist here among some dodgier ISP's, but overall I find that I will immediately sever my relations with a company who has bandwidth restrictions. Especially quickly will I sever my ties to them if they have secret restrictions where they themselves arbitrarily decide on some number and cut people off without telling them how, why or when.
This is mostly my own philosophical standpoint, but the whole concept of having broadband is that there shouldn't be restrictions on use. If ISP's have problem with bandwidth-hogging on their high-capacity lines then maybe they should rethink their strategy and offer "slower" pipes with less limits on traffic? I also feel that customers are way to quick to accept this policy from ISP's, rather than protest it. This is mostly because people (and with people I really don't mean us Slashdotians, but Joe Schmoe and his wife Donna Who) are clueless as to the concepts. Most people are happy with the "always on and won't interrupt you phone!"-crap that a lot of cutrate ISP's still push as the main reason to switch to the new shiny broadband. After awhile they get upset because the ISP is limiting their fair use. This is also true for people who fall for the DSL bait-and-switch of having 24 mbits downstream and less than 512 kbits upstream. It's essentially a scam, in my opinion.
Sweden is rather spoiled with options compared to the US. At the risk of sounding like I'm bragging, but I've got a 100/10 mbit/s (100 down, 10 up) LAN-connection in my apartment. I've never noticed any capping on this hookup; there's no official word on it from the ISP's homepage and when I've called them up a few times and asked they've chuckled in response. I run my own servers hosting legal independent music downloads for a friend, and get at least 4-5 gigabytes of traffic per day. Then add another gigabyte or so per day in traffic for my homepage, my brothers huge gallery of photos from his travels around south america, europe, africa and the swedish mountainsm, as well as the 4-5 other domains I host for some friends. Not once have I heard a grumble or annoyance from my ISP. In fact their motto is "Our customers are used to things going fast!" (translated, of course)
As a fellow nerd I really feel for you guys over there having to put up with crappy ISP's who scale their operations the wrong way around. Rather than building a service that people can recommend and enjoy they prefer to keep things small and put arbitrary limits on their users fair use of the service. I especially hate ISP's who automatically assume that someone is a pirate just because a lot of things pass through to that one customer. There's a lot of perfectly legit ways to use up bandwidth as well.
The real question is how much more of this crap will people accept before there is revolution. (Revolution is a word that means 'turn around.' It doesn't mean war or violence. Just to be clear on that point.) Is the government serving the people or are the people serving the government.
I admire your naivety, but there will be no revolution. People today are tied down with ridiculous demands, our brains have been turned into oatmeal from the constant media exposure of crap like Paris Hilton, commercials hammering our senses with the notion that we all need to be more like Paris Hilton, and the insane speed at which we're expected to live our lives, squeezing out children all the while not looking fat or old or stupid.
No, there will be no revolution. There will be a gigantic shrug and people will focus on all the mundane requirements that have been hoisted upon them, such as figuring out which brand of shampoo to choose from the 200.000 different brands that exist or figuring out if they can afford to mortgage their home so that they can get that new shiny kitchen that everyone in Beverly Hills seems to own.
We the people are way to apathetic to even care about our own integrity. We've been blinded by flashy things for the last two decades and in the process we as a species have lost our own roots and our collective will to be free, to enjoy life and to not get fucked by other people.
I saw this about 4-5 months ago. Yes, it's rather impressive/masochistic (pick one) but it's not exactly fresh off the presses.
Hell, I've done similar stunts in my time, but did it get me on Slashdot? Nope. So sorry to sound like a grumpy old man but this has been around the net a while.
I imagine a 300lb geek dressed as a pirate in high heels would go right through to his parent's basement.
Thanks. Now I'm having weird visions of pizza-faced Slashdot-geeks dancing around their living room in high heels. Really swell of you to share that with the rest of us.
According to reports I've heard about this damn thing is that it weighs MORE than an actual phone. Now tell me, why would I want some horrid piece of equipment strapped to my arm that actually weighs MORE than the actual thing? It makes no sense.
Sure, if it had just been like my regular watch I'd probably have loved it. But this? No thanks.
Seriously, computer cases haven't depended on convection since the freakin' 80s when a case-fan was someone who really liked William Gibsons books.
The manufacturers may claim a lot of booyah like "aluminium is better for cooling" and all that jazz, but it's just hot air (no pun intended). Cases these days depend on airflow, not convection from the cases material. Hence, it doesn't matter at all whether the case is made of aluminium, wood, solid steel or pink plastic.
Slashdot Mirror
And in other news, ancient romans claim they didn't kill Jesus.
You're very naive. Yes, it's fair to believe it's the manufacturers responsibility to test this, but in reality they either just don't care or lack the resources to properly test such a complicated device across all hardware/software-configurations possible - or any combination of the above reasons or other reasons I haven't mentioned.
The sad reality is that Joe Average demands the latest shiny crap, and he demands it immediately. Companies making technology today need to push out the latest and greatest with only minimal testing, or they will have their lunch eaten by the competitor who launched a similar product earlier but with even less testing and product development.
I assure you, the days when companies actually cared about their product beyond launch or enough to avoid a class-action lawsuit because of a crappy product are long gone, my friend.
Minecraft.
"Slightly british"? I read it with freakin' David Attenboroughs voice in my head.
... have I (as a PC gamer) encountered crappy console conversions. Three examples off the top of my head:
Mirrors Edge: Yes, you could configure the controls, but in-game they were still referred to by their Xbox 360 identifiers. I.e. you could set jump to space, but in the tutorial it kept referring to non-existant buttons. Made the game virtually impossible to play since you'd get confused by the bad labeling.
Blur: Insane keyboard controls and completely unconfigurable. You had two keyboard layouts to choose from, both pre-defined and written in stone. Or you could use a 360-controller. Completely retarded. Various references all through the game telling you not to turn off your "console" while saving.
Assassins Creed: Completely un-intuitive console controls. Impossible to change.
Feel free to provide more examples.
Don't forget the recent Portal 2, which is quite pretty to look at, as well as an amazing story and immersive game, and it's running on a somewhat hot-rodded version of the Source engine, which is a bit over six years old now.
So by your logic, every time you find a snail in your garden you nuke the entire planet?
I mean, you can never be sure so basically every morning when you sit down in front of your computer you flash bios and reinstall operating system from scratch? I guess you don't get much done in a day since every day you have to spend 8-9 hours shuffling your data around and reinstalling.
Reminds me of that quote by C-3PO:
"Oh my goodness! Shut me down. Machines building machines. How perverse."
Nobody has mentioned soylent green yet? Or perhaps a similar solution: feed the homeless to the hungry.
SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!
There, ya happy now?
Never, never, NEVER watch Netforce. I didn't even finish it.
Seemingly, neither did the producers of it.
"It's a trick. Get an axe."
Many years ago, a good friend of mine dropped his Nokia 3110 in the snow outside his parents house. We lived way up in the arctic then, and we couldn't find it.
So we basically assumed it was gone forever.
Later we found out that it had gotten frozen in the snow, and covered with a huge snowpile. His dad found the phone when he ran over it with his snowblower. It got sucked into the snowblower, blown maybe 20 yards away and landed in anoter pile of snow. His dad wondered what the clunk was and found the phone.
We thawed it out, plugged it in the charger and it lit up just as new. It had been frozen in ice/snow for maybe four months, gone through a snowblower and then thawed out and the only visible damage to it was a small chunk taken out of the plastic casing by one of the snowblowers blades.
Same phone was later the following summer accidentally dropped into shallow water in a lake. He dove down after it, let it dry in the sun and it started up just as new again. Only effect of a dip in the lake was that the numberpad squeaked for a few days afterwards.
The thing that almost killed it was a three-story drop onto concrete. The phone survived with some superficial damage to the casing and a distorted frame, but you could still use it. However the display got smashed in the fall and that made it quite useless so he retired it.
... had awful console-type controls. Game was probably good, but I quit and deleted it after about ten minutes because the controls were completely illogical to a PC-gamer.
They were essentially gamepad-controls that had been reassigned to keyboard keys. They made no sense to a pc-gamer used to a certain de-facto standard of controls.
It also had (as I recall) the typical you-can-only-save-when-we-say-so console conversion issues, as well as the wonderful "please don't turn off your console" while saving.
"It's a trick. Get an axe."
Sweden already has this policy. It's a blocklist implemented in the DNS structure of Swedish ISP's. Thus it's easily avoided by anyone with even basic computer skills.
Officially it's to block kiddie porn, but there's no public examination of what sites are on the list. Also, it's been demonstrated several times that there's a lot of rather odd choices when it comes to blocking - i.e. a korean site about Bonsai trees is on the list.
There's been quite a lot of controversy surrounding this list, and it's been accused of being the start of a slippery slide towards censorship.
Also, it's essentially useless since it's easily avoided.
The fact it's been made doesn't affect the original in any way whatsoever. Chill out.
Except that it's mere existence will taint the original. We who haven't seen a godawful sequel will still have to content with all the zombies out there running around shouting things like "the second one was soooo much better".
If there's only one movie, it will stand on it's own. As soon as a classic movie is turned into a franchise, then the quality and what made the movie a classic will disappear - no matter if you ignore it or not. It'll get turned into yet another money-machine where Hollywood chops off it's own heads in order to make a profit.
Besides, there's an outside chance it could be really good.
No, it'll be a crappy FX-driven horrorshow without any of the gravitas of the original. Just look at the crap that a majority of studios spew out. That's what we'll get. Even if Ridley himself directs it (doubtful) it'll still be a cardboard cutout in comparison.
I mean, I still cringe at the fact that there exist book-sequels to the movie. Much less would I want an actual movie-sequel to it.
that Logitech (and many other brands) of Webcam stops functioning, and that the CD/DVD drives inexplicably keep injecting immediately upon ejecting a disc.
That's two of the minor annoyances that I discovered the other day when I upgraded Hardy to Intrepid. One of the major bugs still is the poor I/O-performance that occurs at intense disk-usage.
And this is of course provided these bugs don't get fixed.
The problem I see with this device (and by extension any device or method used to improve gas-mileage in vehicles powered by fossil-fuels) is that it just serves to extend a technology that should've been abandoned decades ago.
Rather than solving the problem, i.e. our dependency on fossil-fuels, we are treating the symptoms of it.
This is just a band-aid. We're ignoring the fact that our vehicles need to be powered by something sustainable. This is where the research should be pointed - to alternate forms of energy for our cars. Not to prolong this addiction to gasoline.
I know this is a Mostly Useless posting, but in my case I've got to ask: what cap?
(Disclaimer: I live in Sweden, so this post is pretty much worthless for all you USanians)
Bandwidth capping do exist here among some dodgier ISP's, but overall I find that I will immediately sever my relations with a company who has bandwidth restrictions. Especially quickly will I sever my ties to them if they have secret restrictions where they themselves arbitrarily decide on some number and cut people off without telling them how, why or when.
This is mostly my own philosophical standpoint, but the whole concept of having broadband is that there shouldn't be restrictions on use. If ISP's have problem with bandwidth-hogging on their high-capacity lines then maybe they should rethink their strategy and offer "slower" pipes with less limits on traffic? I also feel that customers are way to quick to accept this policy from ISP's, rather than protest it. This is mostly because people (and with people I really don't mean us Slashdotians, but Joe Schmoe and his wife Donna Who) are clueless as to the concepts. Most people are happy with the "always on and won't interrupt you phone!"-crap that a lot of cutrate ISP's still push as the main reason to switch to the new shiny broadband. After awhile they get upset because the ISP is limiting their fair use. This is also true for people who fall for the DSL bait-and-switch of having 24 mbits downstream and less than 512 kbits upstream. It's essentially a scam, in my opinion.
Sweden is rather spoiled with options compared to the US. At the risk of sounding like I'm bragging, but I've got a 100/10 mbit/s (100 down, 10 up) LAN-connection in my apartment. I've never noticed any capping on this hookup; there's no official word on it from the ISP's homepage and when I've called them up a few times and asked they've chuckled in response. I run my own servers hosting legal independent music downloads for a friend, and get at least 4-5 gigabytes of traffic per day. Then add another gigabyte or so per day in traffic for my homepage, my brothers huge gallery of photos from his travels around south america, europe, africa and the swedish mountainsm, as well as the 4-5 other domains I host for some friends. Not once have I heard a grumble or annoyance from my ISP. In fact their motto is "Our customers are used to things going fast!" (translated, of course)
As a fellow nerd I really feel for you guys over there having to put up with crappy ISP's who scale their operations the wrong way around. Rather than building a service that people can recommend and enjoy they prefer to keep things small and put arbitrary limits on their users fair use of the service. I especially hate ISP's who automatically assume that someone is a pirate just because a lot of things pass through to that one customer. There's a lot of perfectly legit ways to use up bandwidth as well.
The real question is how much more of this crap will people accept before there is revolution. (Revolution is a word that means 'turn around.' It doesn't mean war or violence. Just to be clear on that point.) Is the government serving the people or are the people serving the government.
I admire your naivety, but there will be no revolution. People today are tied down with ridiculous demands, our brains have been turned into oatmeal from the constant media exposure of crap like Paris Hilton, commercials hammering our senses with the notion that we all need to be more like Paris Hilton, and the insane speed at which we're expected to live our lives, squeezing out children all the while not looking fat or old or stupid.
No, there will be no revolution. There will be a gigantic shrug and people will focus on all the mundane requirements that have been hoisted upon them, such as figuring out which brand of shampoo to choose from the 200.000 different brands that exist or figuring out if they can afford to mortgage their home so that they can get that new shiny kitchen that everyone in Beverly Hills seems to own.
We the people are way to apathetic to even care about our own integrity. We've been blinded by flashy things for the last two decades and in the process we as a species have lost our own roots and our collective will to be free, to enjoy life and to not get fucked by other people.
I saw this about 4-5 months ago. Yes, it's rather impressive/masochistic (pick one) but it's not exactly fresh off the presses.
Hell, I've done similar stunts in my time, but did it get me on Slashdot? Nope. So sorry to sound like a grumpy old man but this has been around the net a while.
I imagine a 300lb geek dressed as a pirate in high heels would go right through to his parent's basement.
Thanks. Now I'm having weird visions of pizza-faced Slashdot-geeks dancing around their living room in high heels. Really swell of you to share that with the rest of us.
me too!
According to reports I've heard about this damn thing is that it weighs MORE than an actual phone. Now tell me, why would I want some horrid piece of equipment strapped to my arm that actually weighs MORE than the actual thing? It makes no sense.
Sure, if it had just been like my regular watch I'd probably have loved it. But this? No thanks.
Seriously, computer cases haven't depended on convection since the freakin' 80s when a case-fan was someone who really liked William Gibsons books.
The manufacturers may claim a lot of booyah like "aluminium is better for cooling" and all that jazz, but it's just hot air (no pun intended). Cases these days depend on airflow, not convection from the cases material. Hence, it doesn't matter at all whether the case is made of aluminium, wood, solid steel or pink plastic.