I wound up getting a Blu-ray player "for free" with my TV purchase (I put "for free" in quotes because I could have ordered the TV online and not paid sales tax, but buying it locally for the same price and paying sales tax got a Blu-ray player and 3 discs bundled in).
I'm not paying extra for my movies-- Netflix doesn't charge me any extra to rent Blu-rays instead of DVDs. (Set the right checkbox in your preferences, and if the Blu-ray exists, they send it to you, and if not, they just send you the DVD) The image quality is spectacular-- and yes, better even than DVD.
That said, it ain't perfect. Like someone else noted, Blu-ray hasn't gotten rid of the unskippable commercials (much like DVD never technically did...) Boot time is pretty atrocious, though slightly better than my Toshiba HD-A3.
I'm glad I did it, though. I needed a new TV anyhow (ok, wanted, but I did get rid of my old CRT TV when I moved, so there was a gaping space of empty in the room where the TV would've lived.) and it was worth the cost of sales tax to get the unit. Netflix has made it so media doesn't cost me any extra. It's worked out quite well for me.
Either Usenet isn't dead yet, since there's folks like Giganews and Google Groups and such, and you can note people have been predicting the death of Usenet for over a decade.
There's the other way of looking at it, which is Usenet quit being useful for anything but porn and warez a long time ago and thus, Usenet's been dead for a long time-- some people will tell you, since September of '93.
Either way, the timing of this article is a bit questionable. It's either been dead, or not dead yet. It's not Recently Dead Now...
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is such a feat. In LIMIT hold'em, bluffing, psychological aspects, and implied odds are diminished to the point of meaning next to nothing. It is almost a purely computational game. So, yes, a computer can play technically "perfect".
There still exists a psychological aspect to a limit hold'em game, particularly at higher stakes.
But even at a 3-6 or a 4-8 table, I find a chance for a bluff oh, about once every four or five hours. It's not a big aspect of the game, but it's there. You have to know the players well enough to know who's actually capable of folding, AND get into a situation where they can believe they're beat, but it's possible, and even more important, valuable. Not required to make money at the low limits, mind, but can score a couple extra bucks every now and again.
I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing. The machine would turn into a professional folding station that only plays AA, KK, or AK. Guess what? That strategy isn't winning any games or any period of time in a no-limit or pot-limit world.
Bah. Even I can write code that can handle that: "move in over the top, with nothing".
That said, a computer's got to walk before it can run. If it can sit down at a 20-40 game somewhere, it's not doing too bad. Once they've figured out how to write a limit bot that can handle that, then they can start working on a no-limit bot.
Given the play we see from supposed "pros" on TV, I fear what the researchers will determine is random play backed by a large bankroll is indeed the optimal strategy in modern no-limit hold-em.:-/
In some cases, Apple won't even sell you the upgrade. They don't sell a 15.4" Macbook Pro with a WUXGA screen-- but Dell will put a WUXGA screen in one of their 15.4" widescreen laptops. Imagine what it would cost if they would!
And at least for the CCFL-backlit Macbook Pros, the parts are directly interchangeable. Plug-and-bolt-compatible. (http://www.hiresmacbook.com has details; that's how I did mine)
Sure, men and women think differently, but perhaps the answer is even simpler. Look around your average IT shop, and it's pretty plain that there are a lot more men there than there are women.
Perhaps it's just that for men, IT's a reasonable and expected field to go into, but for women, it's not as much, so a woman going into IT is much more likely to be well-suited for it and better at it?
It might have very little to do at all with the difference in thought processes between men and women.
But if I were being absolutely honest, I'd probably say that XP was a high point--possibly the high point for Microsoft. In many ways, it doesn't suck quite as much as its predecessors. A lot of people and a lot of companies like it.
Bill Gates can't say that, though, because Vista's biggest competitor right now is Windows XP...
It must've stuck in this guy's craw a little, given that he's at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland to find out that the Center of the Known Wikiverse is the United Kingdom...
I've used a few of them of them over the past few years:
1) Treo 650. It's not a bad little device, but at least the 650's screen resolution is so low that if you want an 80-column wide output window, your font is pretty darned small. The more modern versions may fix this a little, I haven't tried them. 2) Blackberries. I've used both the 8700 and the 8800, and both aren't bad. The 8700, don't bother trying to get a 80-column screen out of it, the 8800, even though the horizontal resolution is no better than the Treo, seems to have chosen a font that makes a little better use of it. 3) iPhone. The screen blows anything else away, and the Mobile Terminal I most recently played with has some of the more unixy keys bound to gestures in the output window area-- but it's still annoying to send an escape, or anything with a bucky-key involved. Note also that the iPhone requires hacking to put a terminal on it at all, at least for another month or so.
My carry-around solution is a Blackberry 8800, which works okay when I'm not on-call as I don't have to do a whole lot of it. The weeks that I am on-call, I bring a laptop and leave it in the car trunk, as none of them are really GOOD solutions yet.
I believe that when someone makes a mistake like this, it's generally wise to give them a chance to fix it-- and when it comes to asinine crazy-making policy, that means _one_ chance. I'd go to my current boss and explain it-- here's the plan of what I was going to do these four weeks, these are the parts I can't do, what can we do to fix it?
It's very well likely that the Policy that comes from On High cannot be fixed, but I do think it's a requirement to try-- once. If they can't fix it, I'd do the things in the plan that I can do, and then I'd implement a telcommute policy for the remaining week or two.
I believe the easiest option for Amazon would be to simply drop all affiliates in New York. Refusing to sell to New York is financial suicide for them, but dropping all affiliates wouldn't cause too much grief from the public. I don't know. Financial suicide? Refusing to sell to people in New York (or hell, even charging them sales tax) is a nice way to get the people of New York _really_ pissed off. In an ideal world, this would have the people of New York decide they need new lizards in office.
Now, what an ideal world has to do with where we are now, that's anybody's guess...
Let's say that a copyright tax might be a good idea, just for sake of discussion. How about a copyright tax of a dollar the first year, two cents the second year, and doubles each year thereafter?
If the idea's good enough to continue generating money, it's worth paying $1024 after ten years, but most ideas aren't. The little guy doesn't get screwed because his copyright only costs a dollar or two. Linux can probably find enough donors to keep their $60k or so copyright, but much like any other piece of software, the Linux community would have to release it into the public domain as well-- if it's good enough for Microsoft or the RIAA, it's good enough for Linux, y'know?
We keep it cheap early on to protect the ideas of inventors/creators. Off the cuff, I think it's probably best to not bother charging the first few years-- it'd cost more than $1 to collect the dollar for the first year, I suspect. Better to simply charge $15 ($8 for the fourth year and $7 in back taxes) the fourth year, which protects the little guy even further and streamlines the process-- back taxes only being owed if you decide it's still worth protecting in year 4, so you could get three years protection effectively for free, so you're not forced to speculate on what's actually worth putting even a dollar's worth of copyright on.
Actually, the truth is pretty much the opposite of this statement. Because Blu-ray had 50% more bandwidth, it could be compressed less, and since it supported exactly the same video codecs as HD DVD that's all that really matters.
Unfortunately, while the theory is sound, in practice, it doesn't seem to have happened often: Even the studios who were "only blu-ray" were mastering almost everything to fit on an HD-DVD, hedging their bets-- if they had to switch to HD-DVD when everything was said and done, they wouldn't have to spend the money to master the stuff Yet Again.
Not that anyone could tell by watching. Even at HD-DVD sizes instead of Blu-ray, both look spectactular.
Indeed. I really hate it when people make things that don't suck. I mean, come on, companies of America. Bring me stuff that's unpleasant. I want the suck!
Why does the designer of the phone have any say at all as to who can service it?
I don't know, perhaps the designer of the phone has features they want to include that aren't part of the standard feature set? Like being able to activate at home without having to wait for a sales droid. Or visual voicemail. Or perhaps they don't want customers of their phones to have to wade through a sea of bizarre contracts and options? But again, that's part of that pleasant experience that you think is wrong.
Believe it or not, the United States already has this technology. And it's in the hands of the rednecks.
There's a stock car track in Bristol, TN that holds 165,000 people, and has 43 800+ horsepower cars running around an oval just a shade over a half mile long. This generates a lot of heat-- body heat, engine heat, heat from tires cornering on concrete fast enough to turn fifteen second laps. Enough heat that, as long as the race is still running, rain clouds can blow over Bristol, drench the entire city with rain, but the pocket of high pressure due to the heat (and possibly some counter-clockwise swirling motion due to the cars) will keep the rain from passing directly over the track.
If the caution flag flies and the cars slow down for too long, thus slowing the heat output and cooling the track, the rain may start to fall on the track, but it takes one heck of a storm to make the rain fall while the race is green-flagged.
You can talk about sales rates or attach rates or how much shelf space is dedicated to blue boxes as opposed to red boxes, you can talk about technical merit or political merit, you can talk about studios committing to or being bought out by one side or another. You can talk about all number of things, but I know the war is over.
Blu-ray wins. I know this to be true.
I know this because sitting on the shelf underneath my teevee is a Toshiba HD-A3.
For no readily apparent reason, my company started leasing Windows servers a decade or so ago instead of buying 'em outright. The good news is you have new hardware every three years. The bad news is you have to move everything.
A couple years back they went virtualized with everything. Now lease-rolls are a piece of cake; shut off your virtual server, zone the SAN storage so the new box can see it, and fire it up on the new box. Poof.
That said, I'm still glad I'm not a Windows admin here. Who leases servers?!
Blu-ray will win; you can go out and buy a Blu-ray player and all your favorite movies without worry. No, it has nothing to do with whether or not they're technically superior, or which studios are backing Blu-ray. It's not gonna win because everyone who bought a Playstation 3 got one built in, it's not going to win because the marketing folks are smarter, or anything like that. It's even simpler:
Slashdot Mirror
(Quick, mod me down!)
I wound up getting a Blu-ray player "for free" with my TV purchase (I put "for free" in quotes because I could have ordered the TV online and not paid sales tax, but buying it locally for the same price and paying sales tax got a Blu-ray player and 3 discs bundled in).
I'm not paying extra for my movies-- Netflix doesn't charge me any extra to rent Blu-rays instead of DVDs. (Set the right checkbox in your preferences, and if the Blu-ray exists, they send it to you, and if not, they just send you the DVD) The image quality is spectacular-- and yes, better even than DVD.
That said, it ain't perfect. Like someone else noted, Blu-ray hasn't gotten rid of the unskippable commercials (much like DVD never technically did...) Boot time is pretty atrocious, though slightly better than my Toshiba HD-A3.
I'm glad I did it, though. I needed a new TV anyhow (ok, wanted, but I did get rid of my old CRT TV when I moved, so there was a gaping space of empty in the room where the TV would've lived.) and it was worth the cost of sales tax to get the unit. Netflix has made it so media doesn't cost me any extra. It's worked out quite well for me.
Either Usenet isn't dead yet, since there's folks like Giganews and Google Groups and such, and you can note people have been predicting the death of Usenet for over a decade.
There's the other way of looking at it, which is Usenet quit being useful for anything but porn and warez a long time ago and thus, Usenet's been dead for a long time-- some people will tell you, since September of '93.
Either way, the timing of this article is a bit questionable. It's either been dead, or not dead yet. It's not Recently Dead Now...
It would cut down on "low blows"-- Anyone who's heard "One Night in Bangkok" knows that chess players get their kicks above the waistline, sunshine.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is such a feat. In LIMIT hold'em, bluffing, psychological aspects, and implied odds are diminished to the point of meaning next to nothing. It is almost a purely computational game. So, yes, a computer can play technically "perfect".
There still exists a psychological aspect to a limit hold'em game, particularly at higher stakes.
But even at a 3-6 or a 4-8 table, I find a chance for a bluff oh, about once every four or five hours. It's not a big aspect of the game, but it's there. You have to know the players well enough to know who's actually capable of folding, AND get into a situation where they can believe they're beat, but it's possible, and even more important, valuable. Not required to make money at the low limits, mind, but can score a couple extra bucks every now and again.
I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing. The machine would turn into a professional folding station that only plays AA, KK, or AK. Guess what? That strategy isn't winning any games or any period of time in a no-limit or pot-limit world.
Bah. Even I can write code that can handle that: "move in over the top, with nothing".
That said, a computer's got to walk before it can run. If it can sit down at a 20-40 game somewhere, it's not doing too bad. Once they've figured out how to write a limit bot that can handle that, then they can start working on a no-limit bot.
Given the play we see from supposed "pros" on TV, I fear what the researchers will determine is random play backed by a large bankroll is indeed the optimal strategy in modern no-limit hold-em. :-/
In some cases, Apple won't even sell you the upgrade. They don't sell a 15.4" Macbook Pro with a WUXGA screen-- but Dell will put a WUXGA screen in one of their 15.4" widescreen laptops. Imagine what it would cost if they would!
And at least for the CCFL-backlit Macbook Pros, the parts are directly interchangeable. Plug-and-bolt-compatible. (http://www.hiresmacbook.com has details; that's how I did mine)
Sure, men and women think differently, but perhaps the answer is even simpler. Look around your average IT shop, and it's pretty plain that there are a lot more men there than there are women.
Perhaps it's just that for men, IT's a reasonable and expected field to go into, but for women, it's not as much, so a woman going into IT is much more likely to be well-suited for it and better at it?
It might have very little to do at all with the difference in thought processes between men and women.
What else does this mean? I need to pay more attention to the preview. Damn, I suck.
Apparently more people want to be MÃtley Crüe than want to listen to them.
But if I were being absolutely honest, I'd probably say that XP was a high point--possibly the high point for Microsoft. In many ways, it doesn't suck quite as much as its predecessors. A lot of people and a lot of companies like it.
Bill Gates can't say that, though, because Vista's biggest competitor right now is Windows XP...
It must've stuck in this guy's craw a little, given that he's at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland to find out that the Center of the Known Wikiverse is the United Kingdom...
I've used a few of them of them over the past few years:
1) Treo 650. It's not a bad little device, but at least the 650's screen resolution is so low that if you want an 80-column wide output window, your font is pretty darned small. The more modern versions may fix this a little, I haven't tried them.
2) Blackberries. I've used both the 8700 and the 8800, and both aren't bad. The 8700, don't bother trying to get a 80-column screen out of it, the 8800, even though the horizontal resolution is no better than the Treo, seems to have chosen a font that makes a little better use of it.
3) iPhone. The screen blows anything else away, and the Mobile Terminal I most recently played with has some of the more unixy keys bound to gestures in the output window area-- but it's still annoying to send an escape, or anything with a bucky-key involved. Note also that the iPhone requires hacking to put a terminal on it at all, at least for another month or so.
My carry-around solution is a Blackberry 8800, which works okay when I'm not on-call as I don't have to do a whole lot of it. The weeks that I am on-call, I bring a laptop and leave it in the car trunk, as none of them are really GOOD solutions yet.
I believe that when someone makes a mistake like this, it's generally wise to give them a chance to fix it-- and when it comes to asinine crazy-making policy, that means _one_ chance. I'd go to my current boss and explain it-- here's the plan of what I was going to do these four weeks, these are the parts I can't do, what can we do to fix it?
It's very well likely that the Policy that comes from On High cannot be fixed, but I do think it's a requirement to try-- once. If they can't fix it, I'd do the things in the plan that I can do, and then I'd implement a telcommute policy for the remaining week or two.
From the beach. I've done my due diligence.
I mean, what're they going to do? Fire me?
This sounds to me like the sort of stunt Improv Everwhere might pull.
Now, what an ideal world has to do with where we are now, that's anybody's guess...
So by the time you buy it, the darned thing's already been obsolete for a year and a half or so?
Let's say that a copyright tax might be a good idea, just for sake of discussion. How about a copyright tax of a dollar the first year, two cents the second year, and doubles each year thereafter?
If the idea's good enough to continue generating money, it's worth paying $1024 after ten years, but most ideas aren't. The little guy doesn't get screwed because his copyright only costs a dollar or two. Linux can probably find enough donors to keep their $60k or so copyright, but much like any other piece of software, the Linux community would have to release it into the public domain as well-- if it's good enough for Microsoft or the RIAA, it's good enough for Linux, y'know?
We keep it cheap early on to protect the ideas of inventors/creators. Off the cuff, I think it's probably best to not bother charging the first few years-- it'd cost more than $1 to collect the dollar for the first year, I suspect. Better to simply charge $15 ($8 for the fourth year and $7 in back taxes) the fourth year, which protects the little guy even further and streamlines the process-- back taxes only being owed if you decide it's still worth protecting in year 4, so you could get three years protection effectively for free, so you're not forced to speculate on what's actually worth putting even a dollar's worth of copyright on.
Actually, the truth is pretty much the opposite of this statement. Because Blu-ray had 50% more bandwidth, it could be compressed less, and since it supported exactly the same video codecs as HD DVD that's all that really matters.
Unfortunately, while the theory is sound, in practice, it doesn't seem to have happened often: Even the studios who were "only blu-ray" were mastering almost everything to fit on an HD-DVD, hedging their bets-- if they had to switch to HD-DVD when everything was said and done, they wouldn't have to spend the money to master the stuff Yet Again.
Not that anyone could tell by watching. Even at HD-DVD sizes instead of Blu-ray, both look spectactular.
Apple's "pleasant experience end to end" is wrong
Indeed. I really hate it when people make things that don't suck. I mean, come on, companies of America. Bring me stuff that's unpleasant. I want the suck!
Why does the designer of the phone have any say at all as to who can service it?
I don't know, perhaps the designer of the phone has features they want to include that aren't part of the standard feature set? Like being able to activate at home without having to wait for a sales droid. Or visual voicemail. Or perhaps they don't want customers of their phones to have to wade through a sea of bizarre contracts and options? But again, that's part of that pleasant experience that you think is wrong.
Believe it or not, the United States already has this technology. And it's in the hands of the rednecks.
There's a stock car track in Bristol, TN that holds 165,000 people, and has 43 800+ horsepower cars running around an oval just a shade over a half mile long. This generates a lot of heat-- body heat, engine heat, heat from tires cornering on concrete fast enough to turn fifteen second laps. Enough heat that, as long as the race is still running, rain clouds can blow over Bristol, drench the entire city with rain, but the pocket of high pressure due to the heat (and possibly some counter-clockwise swirling motion due to the cars) will keep the rain from passing directly over the track.
If the caution flag flies and the cars slow down for too long, thus slowing the heat output and cooling the track, the rain may start to fall on the track, but it takes one heck of a storm to make the rain fall while the race is green-flagged.
-F
Snopes claims it's an urban legend.
You can talk about sales rates or attach rates or how much shelf space is dedicated to blue boxes as opposed to red boxes, you can talk about technical merit or political merit, you can talk about studios committing to or being bought out by one side or another. You can talk about all number of things, but I know the war is over.
Blu-ray wins. I know this to be true.
I know this because sitting on the shelf underneath my teevee is a Toshiba HD-A3.
I think I've accidentally been transported into a parallel universe. Is this not Slashdot?
What, you say it is Slashdot? Then how do you explain this article without someone (incorrectly) referring to "bricking" the Apple CD drive?
I'd trade every so-called "skill" on our new hires' resumes for just one person who'd recognize a clue if it hit him upside the head.
For no readily apparent reason, my company started leasing Windows servers a decade or so ago instead of buying 'em outright. The good news is you have new hardware every three years. The bad news is you have to move everything.
A couple years back they went virtualized with everything. Now lease-rolls are a piece of cake; shut off your virtual server, zone the SAN storage so the new box can see it, and fire it up on the new box. Poof.
That said, I'm still glad I'm not a Windows admin here. Who leases servers?!
Blu-ray will win; you can go out and buy a Blu-ray player and all your favorite movies without worry. No, it has nothing to do with whether or not they're technically superior, or which studios are backing Blu-ray. It's not gonna win because everyone who bought a Playstation 3 got one built in, it's not going to win because the marketing folks are smarter, or anything like that. It's even simpler:
I bought an HD-DVD player.
-F