Antialiasing obscures the target's detail though, AA can actualy make things appear where they are not. Granted, it is just a pixel or two off, but. . . . It is still inaccuract, and therefore bad.
Of course all displays are nothing more then innacuret depictions of 3d worlds which do really not exist anyways, and are rendered with inaccuret physics algor's and inaccurete models, so, moot point really.
True, but not that much depending on what sort of book it is and how much color they have. Good moraly minded authers won't be able to include those one or two full color maps in their books for fear of having the price go up too much.
That, and while I to try to take the best possable care of my books, the fact is that when reading in the BathTub or such, books often do get wet! (and I am *NOT* going to give up reading in the bathtub, heh:)
On the other hand, electronic paper hopefully is better for the enviroment then standard paper, which is always a Good Thing(tm)
Not to mention, if they implement some sort of transfer system, printing things from your InkJet printer could get alot faster (now it would just be a USB connection or such, save alot of time and money, heh:)
Sorry, my bad, it turns out it CAN do color, and its slightly more readable then regular LCD's, but its still not paper! It still uses electronics and is limited by such. Current books can get a bit wet, and if you hurry up and dry them off (and seperate the wet pages) everything is A-OK, anybody want to try that with electronic paper?
It can do color, but at what costs? Wanna bet they'll charge extra for color?
Well yah, theres eye candy, but if people have hard edged polygon intersections to begin with. . . . Not to mention texturing, a properly textured game has minimal amounts of problems with the roads and such, its mainly things that stick up in the air (such as sidewalks and what not). Even then, I would rather that they get more polygons on the screen then worry about anti-aliasing! Seriusly, what would you rather have, realistic tree's (as opposed to simple measly little pathetic spirits) or antialiased Dragons?
Dragon, did someone say Dragon?
OH SHIT, IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US! Hurry up and pull out the +100 Sword Of Dragon Thwamping!
Hmm, ooh, lets see what E-Books have going for them:
Batteries: How nice, the book that keeps on taking, buy it once, then pay energizer, yeech, even if they are rechargable, I don't want to have to worry about battery length!
Priporiatary standards: Remember why we still have ASCII? Its so that people will be able to read documents written in the past, and continue reading documents written now in the future. E-Books, just what we need to leave behind no trace that our civilization ever had the written word.
Duribility: Books are durible, period. I can drop a book, I can drop a book from ten stories. I can sit on a book, I can put 1000lbs of pressure on a book, books rock, its to the that papery thang they have down so darn well!
Resolution: Want a high quality book, you just have to pay a bit more for it. Oversized? No problem, a few more cents here and there, but not much. Easy to read? You betcha! Books rock, you can keep reading books for hours on end and actualy get engrossed in the story, instead of ingrossed in a headache like you do with a moniter, yes, even LCD moniters aren't as good as books!
Vaporware technology: Hey look, e-paper, oh wow, by 2010 you say? Sheesh, its 2001 and we don't all have flying cars yet, and BlackLight Power (yah, theres a reliable source, LOL) said we'd have flying saucers! Zippy, where are they? There have been so many different developments in E-Paper (4 or 5 at last count) that it's getting rediculas, I'm begining to see why the IEEE and ANSI commitee's where formed, will somebody just make up their mind and start production already!
Flexability: No, I'm not talking about the paper (again) but rather all the different formats regular plain ol' fashion books come in. Full color illistrations, no prob, but don't look for those on a cheap B/W LCD moniter. Inlay's? No prob, maps? Once again, easy as pie. Just get the proper printing house to manage your book. What about a nice decrative cover? Oh wait, E-Books don't have cover art (or if they do, they are only on the web page you buy the e-book from).
I don't know about you, but getting done with a book and then looking at the cover and now reconizing the scene therein, is a great experance.
Software: Ickies, need I say more? I don't want to have to reboot my book, or wait for my book to boot up. Not to mention the entire scrolling around thing. Being one of those people blessed with the ability to open a book to almost exactly where I left off, (and feeling horribly dishonerable by saying such, heh:) I kinda like the current interface, you know, turning the page?
Honestly, how often do you stop in the midst of a game of Counter-Strike and say to yourself;
"Boy, I'm sure glad I'm running 4xFSAA, why, that sniper over there aiming at my head sure does look alot aaaaaaagggghhhhh"
Not often I bet. Sure, when you first get a new card, you jack everything up to the max and turn on all the features just to see what this baby can do, but after that you set things down to your normaly resolution (I actualy perfer 320x240 but I am slowly getting used to 640x480, 320x240 makes head shots REALLY friggin easy let me tell you:) and turn off the annoying features (shit, having everything shooting off lens flairs just makes the enemy harder to see! Doh, and it can increase load times, ala Expendable) and play as normal, but at a faster FPS.
Instead of having useless features like FSAA, why not work on including better 2d image quality, remember the problem that NVIDIA is having with their digital->analog chips, crips, why not get some better quality parts!
Even more so, just double the memory bus width please, because god knows it needs it! (though granted a 256bit DDR bus would be an emmense pain to implement, it's the only thing that will help NVIDIA cure their bandwidth woes, besides from a new memory archetecture design system)
I like how @Home does its system, by licencing out their name, you can end up with either a good ISP, or a bad ISP, depending on where you live. I'm lucky, I have a GREAT @Home ISP, they rock, almost uncensored newsgrounds, great anti-spam, and the download speeds rock (I can beat the living shit out of a T1 line, can we say 2MEGABYTES per second? heh:)
Sure, the upload speeds suck (15KiloBytes per second) but that's to keep the download speeds up there (once again, TWO FRIGGIN MEGABYTES PER SECOND, DAMN THAT IS FAST)
Sorry, still havn't gotten over that one download there, and it was almost two years ago!
My local @Home ISP is also nice enough to sell off static IP's for $5.95 a month, something that I hear that other @Home ISP's don't do, unforunatly.
They have outsourced their content to Excite@Home, which pretty much sucks since they aren't taking advantage of the cable modems true capabilities (I'm sorry, but 640x480 streaming video rocks, even if it does hod down a good 1000MBp/s)
Of course, the problem would be solved if all the ISP's just plain ol' fashion worked. You see, the entire Service -V.S.- Price thing wouldn't be an issue if the damn product didn't fail to begin with! Granted, with cable modems the main problem is entering numbers into windows (and the tech support people are VERY good at that let me tell you, heh, polite about it too, though some standard commisions should really standardize the laqyout of network setup box's in OS's in general, specificaly W2K is horrible for their network setup, compleatly different then Linux, NT4, and Win9x, all of which are easy to get setup for basic static IP networking.)
If the thing worked, their wouldn't be a problem. If lines didn't go down and AOL clients didn't need to be reinstalled, and if tech's actualy paid attention to the message board and noticed when the damn satalinks uplinks are down, the only tech support line that would be needed would be a basic setup help line.
Excuse me, but I happen to LIKE hard edged fonts, so excuse me. I find dull gray on black (read: Consol) to be the perfect friggin font face!
I actualy LIKE ASCII, go figure eh?
And for who ever marked me as a troll, your a bigot, moderation is to mod up comments that raise up points of intrest, even if they are opposed to yours. I do not believe in bloat and I believe that a AA engine is bloat, it is not required, therefore it is bloat.
I looked at the screenshot, its ugly, period. I perfer nice blocky letters, excuse me for being mathmatical logical and LIKING 90 degree hard edges, so fucking sue me, I like pixilation, is there a problem with that??
I have to agree that a library only having to pay for one copy of a piece of material, and then having 30 copies being read at the same time, is kind of ridiculas. Normaly things thrive or die based on their popularity, and such as been said before by other posters above me, and said much better at that.
What I think should happen is that a balencing system should be updated. The system should keep tabs on how many times different people print out/read/access/look at/quote/etc the document, and the price that the library is charged for the next months copy is then increased realitivly. Actualy, having a two month observation period would probebly be better for monthly magizenes, of course quarterly Scientific Journlals could use a quarterly observation method.
The point is that it could be done transparently in the background, and if a piece of work was accessed so many times in a month, so much so that the library was in risk of it's next month cost going out of the budgets bounds, the librarian could then choose to make that work of litature unaviable, just as a book that is in high demand becomes unavaible because people already have it. Compare one copy of an (electronic) magizene going around to fifty people in a few weeks and then be cut of, tothree copies (of a physical) magazine being backordered to wazuu. There really is little differnce in the number of people who get to access the material.
Of course, after a basic fee is paid, the authers are paid, and the company has a profit, they should shut-up and let everyone read the magizene as much as they want. That's why I am opposed to charging money to old issues. especialy in digital format, if the library is responsable for upkeeping a full collection of archived material, and it is the libraries resources that are being spent on that maintence, then there is no reason for there to be a charge associated with back issues. In fact, I would wholeheartedly support an internet accessable archive of all major scientific journals. The current pay system is ridiculas, (you want me to pay HOW MUCH to access a 5 year old article? That's re-fricking-diculas!)
The internet is useless for the transfer of small amounts of data anyways, unless both people have some neato privet P2P setup that allows direct connections to an IP address without any other B.S. going on. If ya use e-mail, you can often times get complaints about size (one server supports 2MB attachments, another supports 10MB attachments, another supports 300KB attachements, ACK, evil evil EVIL, no way to send a 100meg video file like that:) Or even a decent sized Document with a few graphs and such in there)
CD-R's are notoriusly unreliable. I've heard of cheap CD-R's having a 20% failure rate, successful burn, succesful read, 2 or 3 months later, dead CD-R. (or CD-RW, case depending)
That is why I don't trust my data to those CD-R's that are free after rebate, those are NOT designed for archiving people! Either use expensive CD-R's, or just buy a few more HD's (I recently upgraded to a Full Tower, large one at that;] just so I could put in another few HD's, unfortunately the cost of the new computer has left me without money for a HD, and I'm taking in around 10gigs a week of data, I have files that are 2 gigs in size, CD-R's are not the solution to backups!)
Damn, I wish ORB Drives would come down in price, and up in data density. Mabye they could use this new technique to up their storage capacity to something around 10 gigs or so, that would be really damn nice. As it stands, they are not price efficent (300$ for 30gigs, ick, 80gig HD's are cheaper then that:)
Most modern BIOS's support USB floppy drives. They also support booting from floppy drives. Catch my drift here? Support for booting from a USB ZIP drive is also supported by alot of the newer MOBO's.
Point is, compatibility is not a problem for 85% of the people out there, it's just the 15% who are screwed. I still use floppies because I KNOW they will work no matter what, crap, I can insert a floppy in any computer and read it, and what's more, I'll be able to write to it! You can't do that with CD-ROM's, only computers with CD-R or CD-RW's can do that. This is why CD-R's are not used in collages to transfer documents back and forth, they aren't exactly usefull for that (nor where they designed for many small rapid writes, they where designed for a small number of large write operations.)
Floppies are also fun, they are the (almost) square frisbee!
But the land was already there, and now the people are not, so in effect, the world itself has lost something. There is now a physical lack of something in existence, thus, a loss.
The reason that Zero Sum Games are so popular is that there is a point to them. In a day and age where people are without direction and have no idea what they are here for, it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up.
Of course, compare this to ages past, where life defintly did have a set purpose and a set goal (get X amount of wheat farmed in X amount of time, or else you starve) the idea of playing a game WITHOUT purpose was a nice thought, since every minute of every day of their lives was setout by directions, people liked the idea of an occasional break from working to get stuff, and enjoyed None Zero Sum Games (should that be cap'd?) for the sake of the leisure they allowed.
Reversal of roles in life, reversal of what we define as fun.
Oh come on now, my Grandma (who is 101% computer illiterate) has enough games she plays on the computer to make the task of memorizing a different gesture/button/whatever for each game impossable. My mother is constantly switching between applications while doing art work, and file management is critical for her. She needs to be able to divide up her files to different directories, zip them up, compress them, and select different install options for her paint programs (no, I do not want boarders, yes I want the font pack, no I do not want the animated helpers, etc). One button installs would fill up our HD so friggin quickly.
I have over 2000 files.
In my largest directory with only 1 sub directory of depth.
YOU try accessing over 6gigs of files with just one command, it would be impossable.
Push a button and I start typing?
Click NOTEPAD
type type type type type
Click SAVE
ok, so its THREE movements, big friggin deal. If the administrative staff (also known as Ye Ol' Secretaries) can figure out how to type on a computer, then it can't be all that hard.
Now then, if someone would do something about LOADING time, that is the major problem. Streamline, Streamline, STREAMLINE IT ALREADY. No more friggin memory bugs, no more pop up banners, and no more unwanted help, that would make the user experiance easy.
Find the directories exact name, there is at least one 'ls' (if not more, depending on how long the name is and how deeply rooted it is)
route the directory listing into your file
open the file in a text editor
save the file to a location that you desire (if its not already so, or of course you could have specified the files exact location while making it, but that's not exactly intuative, and you may need to change it's location depending on it's exact contents)
Of course in GUI's you have to open a text editor first, but thats a trivial task.
I normaly drop to the consol to do file listings anyways, so I don't know why I am complaining. CLI's are much more efficent for file maintence, but they are not a 2 step proccess like you said.
Oh come off it, I can hit a mouse button in.15 seconds, less if I'm into the game.
I cannot say "switch to rocket launcher" or even "launcher" that fast.
I have a mouse wheel, they rock, spin the wheel, goto the weapon, fire.
If I'm feeling smart, I'll setup an Alias, if the game doesn't support alias's, I'll use a 3rd party macro program. It works, great too.
Oh yah, and it would take ALOT of programming to set it up on a per game basis, would be a pain. Since each game engine supports a different set of features (I've seen some games that support next weapon but not last weapon, ickies) and implement their weapon systems differently (Ie, Q3 has 1 weapon per slot, Half-Life has Multiple weapons per slot, etc) it would be almost impossable to make one godly config. Sure, certin commands are the same in each game, but I am sure as hell not gona yell "Jump!" whenever I need to jump, to slow, and too loud. (not to mention, the interfearence from the game noise, it would stress out even the best of microphones!)
Shit folks, in the time it takes to teach a computer to understand your voice (somewheres around until hell freezes over) you can learn to type.
With your feet.
blindfolded.
While playing Classical Music with your hands.
Get the point? Voice reconization does not work, at all! The error rate is about 70%, and thats during training. Shit, it says for me to say the word so it can learn, and then it complains that I didn't say it right. I SAID IT RIGHT, *YOU* LEARN IT! Those things are useless! Can't someone work on something usefull, it would have been better to get firewire working, or implement USB2.0 support (ahead of time you know, as in, before its already established in the market!)
Oh honestly now, just as people go to their distro's FTP to get Linux packages to download and install, Windows users goto FTP's to get programs to download and install.
www.easywarez.com happens to be a VERY nice warez, err uh, windows programs FTP listing. Heck, you mean to tell me that Photoshop COSTS money?
(Just kidding, bought mine with a student discount, it's actualy not priced half bad, and it IS worth it, you have a little something called plug-ins that totaly rock. Yes you can do great art work in Linux, but its easier to find tutorials of how to do great artwork in Windows, let that be a lesson to ya, until its on Geocities, it isn't popular!)
Seriusly now, with open source being what it is (open source and all) you can go to the same FTP's you got the Linux programs on, download'em and recompile (if somebody hasn't already done that for you.)
Oh yah, and if your worrying about the quality of your IRC client, then you spend FAR to much time on IRC, shit, don't waste your time, watch for Anime instead!
Re:Users with access - find flaws!
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 1
As I posted above, thats exactly what is happening. Bess is ridiculasly easy to get past. Nobody wants to release the information on how it's done though since bugs may actualy get patched. That is what happened with the last Proxy, people reported the bugs and they where fixed, oops!
Linux does have one MAJOR advantage over Win9x. It doesn't eat half your ram! Hey, that is an advantage for ya! What's more, users can actualy setup their Linux boxes to be efficent, as opposed to Windows in which you are forced to load a bunch of DLL and Driver files you may never need.
Of course, DOS actualy had one up on Linux as far as its memory footprint went, around 100k in the max, though I actualy had all 640k free one time in DOS (that's rounded off of course, I more likely actualy had 635k of so free, with 500bytes going towards the memory manager, which was QEMM before it went Windows and started to suck and crash even more then Norton does now.)
The main problem with LInux programming today is that most programmers have gotten out of the old mindset of "write your own hardware drivers." If Linux had come into the limelight a few years earlier (1994 or so would have ben preferable) when COders where at their heigth of writting custom drivers, then it would have most likely blasted off to success. As it is now though, people have been spoiled by Windows horriblely inefficent API's. What ever happened to the VESA video card standards? Its about time we get a VESA3 out folks, as it is though, few new cards are even VESA2 complient, my old Riva128 was almost 100% Vesa2 complient, missing only a few highly esoteric modes (widescreen 512xwhatever interlaced, and such as that) While my new Geforce256 is missing alot of the critical Vesa2 modes. Screwy.
With Creative being the main SoundCard company out there now, you can pretty much write software for the Creative Sound Blaster Live! Cards and be guarenteed that 40% of so of the hardcore gamer user base has one. Either that, or enough companies write their software soly for the SB:LIVE! that people have to buy one, that is the same thing that happened with the SB:16 and the SB:AWE. Yah, Creative is a darn near monopoly, but they have great prices and their products rock, people don't mind WORKING Monopolies, its non-working monopolies they get pissed off at.
With MS's current strength in the market, they could actualy rewrite 100% of their code and compleatly break backwords compatibility and have thereselves a damn good OS. Sorry to say if folks, but MS _KNOWS_ how to design an OS, it is just that their implementations of those idealogies isn't so great. God knows that Win9x has a very natural feel to it. Win2k is hard as hell to setup though, their DLL system is a pain, since you have to pretty much figure out at random what DLL's to load up to do what. Educational Tech departments aren't exactly blessed with manuals from the donaters or nothing you know:)
Bess is hidiusly easy to bypass, and while I cannot post a list of all the varius methods for getting by her (there are ALOT, trust me on this one:) for fear of a company employee (or just a moraly rightious asshole) closing up the loopholes, suffice to say that three students (myself included) managed to get past her, and the revamped NT securety that the school had installed for that semester, by the end of the period.
Actualy, we bypassed it before the end of the period, and we where bringing up bomb recipes just to show the teachers (who where getting a laugh out of it too) just how pitiful there new NT security is.
I am often called away to gain access to information for another teacher who is restricted by Bess, many people don't realize this, but BESS restricts the teachers too. Microsoft used to provide my schools Internet service and offered a much less restrictive censor, that we where actualy allowed to bypass if we wanted too! MS had given the librarian the PW to bypass the proxy, something that the local School District refuses to give out. MS's proxy also allowed for the Libarian to add and remove sites from the blocked list, useful if a student was doing a report on a contreversial topic. Once again, Bess doesn't allow that.
On the plus side, everybody in my school is now against net censorship, so I guess Bess is good for something, namely, getting people to go against her!
Of course the data that Bess is collecting is compleatly useless, since she only (suposedly) allows access to educational material, there is really no use for that that advetisers could have. Sheesh, if it isn't sex drugs or violence (all things Bess blocks) what good is it to the marketing suits?
Excuse me, but last time I checked, voice reconization at all requires very clear and precise speaking, involving hours of vigious training at a computer. The amount of time it would take to get a sensable translation out of these things could be used to teach the officers using them numorious languages. Not only that, but the officers would then be better, more educated and intelligent people for the training.
Of course, if you actualy READ the announcement, it just says that they are planning on designing one, not exactly a sure sign of hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Antialiasing obscures the target's detail though, AA can actualy make things appear where they are not. Granted, it is just a pixel or two off, but. . . . It is still inaccuract, and therefore bad.
Of course all displays are nothing more then innacuret depictions of 3d worlds which do really not exist anyways, and are rendered with inaccuret physics algor's and inaccurete models, so, moot point really.
True, but not that much depending on what sort of book it is and how much color they have. Good moraly minded authers won't be able to include those one or two full color maps in their books for fear of having the price go up too much.
That, and while I to try to take the best possable care of my books, the fact is that when reading in the BathTub or such, books often do get wet! (and I am *NOT* going to give up reading in the bathtub, heh:)
On the other hand, electronic paper hopefully is better for the enviroment then standard paper, which is always a Good Thing(tm)
Not to mention, if they implement some sort of transfer system, printing things from your InkJet printer could get alot faster (now it would just be a USB connection or such, save alot of time and money, heh:)
Sorry, my bad, it turns out it CAN do color, and its slightly more readable then regular LCD's, but its still not paper! It still uses electronics and is limited by such. Current books can get a bit wet, and if you hurry up and dry them off (and seperate the wet pages) everything is A-OK, anybody want to try that with electronic paper?
It can do color, but at what costs? Wanna bet they'll charge extra for color?
Well yah, theres eye candy, but if people have hard edged polygon intersections to begin with. . . . Not to mention texturing, a properly textured game has minimal amounts of problems with the roads and such, its mainly things that stick up in the air (such as sidewalks and what not). Even then, I would rather that they get more polygons on the screen then worry about anti-aliasing! Seriusly, what would you rather have, realistic tree's (as opposed to simple measly little pathetic spirits) or antialiased Dragons?
Dragon, did someone say Dragon?
OH SHIT, IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US! Hurry up and pull out the +100 Sword Of Dragon Thwamping!
Shling
Thwamp
Thwamp
Dead Dragon, Thwamped Dragon, Good Dragon.
::Dragon lifts head and eats player::
Damn, Zombie Dragon, bastards don't die easily!
Hmm, ooh, lets see what E-Books have going for them:
Batteries: How nice, the book that keeps on taking, buy it once, then pay energizer, yeech, even if they are rechargable, I don't want to have to worry about battery length!
Priporiatary standards: Remember why we still have ASCII? Its so that people will be able to read documents written in the past, and continue reading documents written now in the future. E-Books, just what we need to leave behind no trace that our civilization ever had the written word.
Duribility: Books are durible, period. I can drop a book, I can drop a book from ten stories. I can sit on a book, I can put 1000lbs of pressure on a book, books rock, its to the that papery thang they have down so darn well!
Resolution: Want a high quality book, you just have to pay a bit more for it. Oversized? No problem, a few more cents here and there, but not much. Easy to read? You betcha! Books rock, you can keep reading books for hours on end and actualy get engrossed in the story, instead of ingrossed in a headache like you do with a moniter, yes, even LCD moniters aren't as good as books!
Vaporware technology: Hey look, e-paper, oh wow, by 2010 you say? Sheesh, its 2001 and we don't all have flying cars yet, and BlackLight Power (yah, theres a reliable source, LOL) said we'd have flying saucers! Zippy, where are they? There have been so many different developments in E-Paper (4 or 5 at last count) that it's getting rediculas, I'm begining to see why the IEEE and ANSI commitee's where formed, will somebody just make up their mind and start production already!
Flexability: No, I'm not talking about the paper (again) but rather all the different formats regular plain ol' fashion books come in. Full color illistrations, no prob, but don't look for those on a cheap B/W LCD moniter. Inlay's? No prob, maps? Once again, easy as pie. Just get the proper printing house to manage your book. What about a nice decrative cover? Oh wait, E-Books don't have cover art (or if they do, they are only on the web page you buy the e-book from).
I don't know about you, but getting done with a book and then looking at the cover and now reconizing the scene therein, is a great experance.
Software: Ickies, need I say more? I don't want to have to reboot my book, or wait for my book to boot up. Not to mention the entire scrolling around thing. Being one of those people blessed with the ability to open a book to almost exactly where I left off, (and feeling horribly dishonerable by saying such, heh:) I kinda like the current interface, you know, turning the page?
Honestly, how often do you stop in the midst of a game of Counter-Strike and say to yourself;
"Boy, I'm sure glad I'm running 4xFSAA, why, that sniper over there aiming at my head sure does look alot aaaaaaagggghhhhh"
Not often I bet. Sure, when you first get a new card, you jack everything up to the max and turn on all the features just to see what this baby can do, but after that you set things down to your normaly resolution (I actualy perfer 320x240 but I am slowly getting used to 640x480, 320x240 makes head shots REALLY friggin easy let me tell you:) and turn off the annoying features (shit, having everything shooting off lens flairs just makes the enemy harder to see! Doh, and it can increase load times, ala Expendable) and play as normal, but at a faster FPS.
Instead of having useless features like FSAA, why not work on including better 2d image quality, remember the problem that NVIDIA is having with their digital->analog chips, crips, why not get some better quality parts!
Even more so, just double the memory bus width please, because god knows it needs it! (though granted a 256bit DDR bus would be an emmense pain to implement, it's the only thing that will help NVIDIA cure their bandwidth woes, besides from a new memory archetecture design system)
I like how @Home does its system, by licencing out their name, you can end up with either a good ISP, or a bad ISP, depending on where you live. I'm lucky, I have a GREAT @Home ISP, they rock, almost uncensored newsgrounds, great anti-spam, and the download speeds rock (I can beat the living shit out of a T1 line, can we say 2MEGABYTES per second? heh:)
Sure, the upload speeds suck (15KiloBytes per second) but that's to keep the download speeds up there (once again, TWO FRIGGIN MEGABYTES PER SECOND, DAMN THAT IS FAST)
Sorry, still havn't gotten over that one download there, and it was almost two years ago!
My local @Home ISP is also nice enough to sell off static IP's for $5.95 a month, something that I hear that other @Home ISP's don't do, unforunatly.
They have outsourced their content to Excite@Home, which pretty much sucks since they aren't taking advantage of the cable modems true capabilities (I'm sorry, but 640x480 streaming video rocks, even if it does hod down a good 1000MBp/s)
Of course, the problem would be solved if all the ISP's just plain ol' fashion worked. You see, the entire Service -V.S.- Price thing wouldn't be an issue if the damn product didn't fail to begin with! Granted, with cable modems the main problem is entering numbers into windows (and the tech support people are VERY good at that let me tell you, heh, polite about it too, though some standard commisions should really standardize the laqyout of network setup box's in OS's in general, specificaly W2K is horrible for their network setup, compleatly different then Linux, NT4, and Win9x, all of which are easy to get setup for basic static IP networking.)
If the thing worked, their wouldn't be a problem. If lines didn't go down and AOL clients didn't need to be reinstalled, and if tech's actualy paid attention to the message board and noticed when the damn satalinks uplinks are down, the only tech support line that would be needed would be a basic setup help line.
Excuse me, but I happen to LIKE hard edged fonts, so excuse me. I find dull gray on black (read: Consol) to be the perfect friggin font face!
I actualy LIKE ASCII, go figure eh?
And for who ever marked me as a troll, your a bigot, moderation is to mod up comments that raise up points of intrest, even if they are opposed to yours. I do not believe in bloat and I believe that a AA engine is bloat, it is not required, therefore it is bloat.
I looked at the screenshot, its ugly, period. I perfer nice blocky letters, excuse me for being mathmatical logical and LIKING 90 degree hard edges, so fucking sue me, I like pixilation, is there a problem with that??
I have to agree that a library only having to pay for one copy of a piece of material, and then having 30 copies being read at the same time, is kind of ridiculas. Normaly things thrive or die based on their popularity, and such as been said before by other posters above me, and said much better at that.
What I think should happen is that a balencing system should be updated. The system should keep tabs on how many times different people print out/read/access/look at/quote/etc the document, and the price that the library is charged for the next months copy is then increased realitivly. Actualy, having a two month observation period would probebly be better for monthly magizenes, of course quarterly Scientific Journlals could use a quarterly observation method.
The point is that it could be done transparently in the background, and if a piece of work was accessed so many times in a month, so much so that the library was in risk of it's next month cost going out of the budgets bounds, the librarian could then choose to make that work of litature unaviable, just as a book that is in high demand becomes unavaible because people already have it. Compare one copy of an (electronic) magizene going around to fifty people in a few weeks and then be cut of, tothree copies (of a physical) magazine being backordered to wazuu. There really is little differnce in the number of people who get to access the material.
Of course, after a basic fee is paid, the authers are paid, and the company has a profit, they should shut-up and let everyone read the magizene as much as they want. That's why I am opposed to charging money to old issues. especialy in digital format, if the library is responsable for upkeeping a full collection of archived material, and it is the libraries resources that are being spent on that maintence, then there is no reason for there to be a charge associated with back issues. In fact, I would wholeheartedly support an internet accessable archive of all major scientific journals. The current pay system is ridiculas, (you want me to pay HOW MUCH to access a 5 year old article? That's re-fricking-diculas!)
The internet is useless for the transfer of small amounts of data anyways, unless both people have some neato privet P2P setup that allows direct connections to an IP address without any other B.S. going on. If ya use e-mail, you can often times get complaints about size (one server supports 2MB attachments, another supports 10MB attachments, another supports 300KB attachements, ACK, evil evil EVIL, no way to send a 100meg video file like that:) Or even a decent sized Document with a few graphs and such in there)
CD-R's are notoriusly unreliable. I've heard of cheap CD-R's having a 20% failure rate, successful burn, succesful read, 2 or 3 months later, dead CD-R. (or CD-RW, case depending)
;] just so I could put in another few HD's, unfortunately the cost of the new computer has left me without money for a HD, and I'm taking in around 10gigs a week of data, I have files that are 2 gigs in size, CD-R's are not the solution to backups!)
That is why I don't trust my data to those CD-R's that are free after rebate, those are NOT designed for archiving people! Either use expensive CD-R's, or just buy a few more HD's (I recently upgraded to a Full Tower, large one at that
Damn, I wish ORB Drives would come down in price, and up in data density. Mabye they could use this new technique to up their storage capacity to something around 10 gigs or so, that would be really damn nice. As it stands, they are not price efficent (300$ for 30gigs, ick, 80gig HD's are cheaper then that:)
Most modern BIOS's support USB floppy drives. They also support booting from floppy drives. Catch my drift here? Support for booting from a USB ZIP drive is also supported by alot of the newer MOBO's.
Point is, compatibility is not a problem for 85% of the people out there, it's just the 15% who are screwed. I still use floppies because I KNOW they will work no matter what, crap, I can insert a floppy in any computer and read it, and what's more, I'll be able to write to it! You can't do that with CD-ROM's, only computers with CD-R or CD-RW's can do that. This is why CD-R's are not used in collages to transfer documents back and forth, they aren't exactly usefull for that (nor where they designed for many small rapid writes, they where designed for a small number of large write operations.)
Floppies are also fun, they are the (almost) square frisbee!
In Simcity the idea is to progress further then you did last time, and to do that you earn money.
:(
Doh, progression and money, defintly disqualifies SimCity as being Zero Sum,
But the land was already there, and now the people are not, so in effect, the world itself has lost something. There is now a physical lack of something in existence, thus, a loss.
The reason that Zero Sum Games are so popular is that there is a point to them. In a day and age where people are without direction and have no idea what they are here for, it's nice to be able to sit back and blow crap up.
Of course, compare this to ages past, where life defintly did have a set purpose and a set goal (get X amount of wheat farmed in X amount of time, or else you starve) the idea of playing a game WITHOUT purpose was a nice thought, since every minute of every day of their lives was setout by directions, people liked the idea of an occasional break from working to get stuff, and enjoyed None Zero Sum Games (should that be cap'd?) for the sake of the leisure they allowed.
Reversal of roles in life, reversal of what we define as fun.
Oh come on now, my Grandma (who is 101% computer illiterate) has enough games she plays on the computer to make the task of memorizing a different gesture/button/whatever for each game impossable. My mother is constantly switching between applications while doing art work, and file management is critical for her. She needs to be able to divide up her files to different directories, zip them up, compress them, and select different install options for her paint programs (no, I do not want boarders, yes I want the font pack, no I do not want the animated helpers, etc). One button installs would fill up our HD so friggin quickly.
I have over 2000 files.
In my largest directory with only 1 sub directory of depth.
YOU try accessing over 6gigs of files with just one command, it would be impossable.
Push a button and I start typing?
Click NOTEPAD
type type type type type
Click SAVE
ok, so its THREE movements, big friggin deal. If the administrative staff (also known as Ye Ol' Secretaries) can figure out how to type on a computer, then it can't be all that hard.
Now then, if someone would do something about LOADING time, that is the major problem. Streamline, Streamline, STREAMLINE IT ALREADY. No more friggin memory bugs, no more pop up banners, and no more unwanted help, that would make the user experiance easy.
to get a directory listing into a file you:
Find the directories exact name, there is at least one 'ls' (if not more, depending on how long the name is and how deeply rooted it is)
route the directory listing into your file
open the file in a text editor
save the file to a location that you desire (if its not already so, or of course you could have specified the files exact location while making it, but that's not exactly intuative, and you may need to change it's location depending on it's exact contents)
Of course in GUI's you have to open a text editor first, but thats a trivial task.
I normaly drop to the consol to do file listings anyways, so I don't know why I am complaining. CLI's are much more efficent for file maintence, but they are not a 2 step proccess like you said.
[alt-e] s stupidity [tab] intelligence [return]
actualy, its shorter.
(three esoteric buttons instead of 5, 4 buttons if you count alt-e as two, but I hit'em at the same time so it takes just as long.)
Oh come off it, I can hit a mouse button in .15 seconds, less if I'm into the game.
I cannot say "switch to rocket launcher" or even "launcher" that fast.
I have a mouse wheel, they rock, spin the wheel, goto the weapon, fire.
If I'm feeling smart, I'll setup an Alias, if the game doesn't support alias's, I'll use a 3rd party macro program. It works, great too.
Oh yah, and it would take ALOT of programming to set it up on a per game basis, would be a pain. Since each game engine supports a different set of features (I've seen some games that support next weapon but not last weapon, ickies) and implement their weapon systems differently (Ie, Q3 has 1 weapon per slot, Half-Life has Multiple weapons per slot, etc) it would be almost impossable to make one godly config. Sure, certin commands are the same in each game, but I am sure as hell not gona yell "Jump!" whenever I need to jump, to slow, and too loud. (not to mention, the interfearence from the game noise, it would stress out even the best of microphones!)
Crap, just what windows doesn't need, more bloat.
I'm against speech reconization anyways, it's far to iffy. Oh yah, and incase no-one has noticed yet.
_______________IT DOESN'T WORK____________________
Shit folks, in the time it takes to teach a computer to understand your voice (somewheres around until hell freezes over) you can learn to type.
With your feet.
blindfolded.
While playing Classical Music with your hands.
Get the point? Voice reconization does not work, at all! The error rate is about 70%, and thats during training. Shit, it says for me to say the word so it can learn, and then it complains that I didn't say it right. I SAID IT RIGHT, *YOU* LEARN IT! Those things are useless! Can't someone work on something usefull, it would have been better to get firewire working, or implement USB2.0 support (ahead of time you know, as in, before its already established in the market!)
Oh honestly now, just as people go to their distro's FTP to get Linux packages to download and install, Windows users goto FTP's to get programs to download and install.
www.easywarez.com happens to be a VERY nice warez, err uh, windows programs FTP listing. Heck, you mean to tell me that Photoshop COSTS money?
(Just kidding, bought mine with a student discount, it's actualy not priced half bad, and it IS worth it, you have a little something called plug-ins that totaly rock. Yes you can do great art work in Linux, but its easier to find tutorials of how to do great artwork in Windows, let that be a lesson to ya, until its on Geocities, it isn't popular!)
Seriusly now, with open source being what it is (open source and all) you can go to the same FTP's you got the Linux programs on, download'em and recompile (if somebody hasn't already done that for you.)
Oh yah, and if your worrying about the quality of your IRC client, then you spend FAR to much time on IRC, shit, don't waste your time, watch for Anime instead!
As I posted above, thats exactly what is happening. Bess is ridiculasly easy to get past. Nobody wants to release the information on how it's done though since bugs may actualy get patched. That is what happened with the last Proxy, people reported the bugs and they where fixed, oops!
Linux does have one MAJOR advantage over Win9x. It doesn't eat half your ram! Hey, that is an advantage for ya! What's more, users can actualy setup their Linux boxes to be efficent, as opposed to Windows in which you are forced to load a bunch of DLL and Driver files you may never need.
Of course, DOS actualy had one up on Linux as far as its memory footprint went, around 100k in the max, though I actualy had all 640k free one time in DOS (that's rounded off of course, I more likely actualy had 635k of so free, with 500bytes going towards the memory manager, which was QEMM before it went Windows and started to suck and crash even more then Norton does now.)
The main problem with LInux programming today is that most programmers have gotten out of the old mindset of "write your own hardware drivers." If Linux had come into the limelight a few years earlier (1994 or so would have ben preferable) when COders where at their heigth of writting custom drivers, then it would have most likely blasted off to success. As it is now though, people have been spoiled by Windows horriblely inefficent API's. What ever happened to the VESA video card standards? Its about time we get a VESA3 out folks, as it is though, few new cards are even VESA2 complient, my old Riva128 was almost 100% Vesa2 complient, missing only a few highly esoteric modes (widescreen 512xwhatever interlaced, and such as that) While my new Geforce256 is missing alot of the critical Vesa2 modes. Screwy.
With Creative being the main SoundCard company out there now, you can pretty much write software for the Creative Sound Blaster Live! Cards and be guarenteed that 40% of so of the hardcore gamer user base has one. Either that, or enough companies write their software soly for the SB:LIVE! that people have to buy one, that is the same thing that happened with the SB:16 and the SB:AWE. Yah, Creative is a darn near monopoly, but they have great prices and their products rock, people don't mind WORKING Monopolies, its non-working monopolies they get pissed off at.
With MS's current strength in the market, they could actualy rewrite 100% of their code and compleatly break backwords compatibility and have thereselves a damn good OS. Sorry to say if folks, but MS _KNOWS_ how to design an OS, it is just that their implementations of those idealogies isn't so great. God knows that Win9x has a very natural feel to it. Win2k is hard as hell to setup though, their DLL system is a pain, since you have to pretty much figure out at random what DLL's to load up to do what. Educational Tech departments aren't exactly blessed with manuals from the donaters or nothing you know:)
Bess is hidiusly easy to bypass, and while I cannot post a list of all the varius methods for getting by her (there are ALOT, trust me on this one:) for fear of a company employee (or just a moraly rightious asshole) closing up the loopholes, suffice to say that three students (myself included) managed to get past her, and the revamped NT securety that the school had installed for that semester, by the end of the period.
Actualy, we bypassed it before the end of the period, and we where bringing up bomb recipes just to show the teachers (who where getting a laugh out of it too) just how pitiful there new NT security is.
I am often called away to gain access to information for another teacher who is restricted by Bess, many people don't realize this, but BESS restricts the teachers too. Microsoft used to provide my schools Internet service and offered a much less restrictive censor, that we where actualy allowed to bypass if we wanted too! MS had given the librarian the PW to bypass the proxy, something that the local School District refuses to give out. MS's proxy also allowed for the Libarian to add and remove sites from the blocked list, useful if a student was doing a report on a contreversial topic. Once again, Bess doesn't allow that.
On the plus side, everybody in my school is now against net censorship, so I guess Bess is good for something, namely, getting people to go against her!
Of course the data that Bess is collecting is compleatly useless, since she only (suposedly) allows access to educational material, there is really no use for that that advetisers could have. Sheesh, if it isn't sex drugs or violence (all things Bess blocks) what good is it to the marketing suits?
Excuse me, but last time I checked, voice reconization at all requires very clear and precise speaking, involving hours of vigious training at a computer. The amount of time it would take to get a sensable translation out of these things could be used to teach the officers using them numorious languages. Not only that, but the officers would then be better, more educated and intelligent people for the training.
Of course, if you actualy READ the announcement, it just says that they are planning on designing one, not exactly a sure sign of hope.