1) Have you noticed that the stock market is tanking lately? Invest in what? As for savings, with the Federal government printing money as fast as it can, your cash's value is falling like a rock. You might as well buy something you enjoy with it.
You should try investing in Canadian companies. My entire portfolio went up 25% in the last 6 months!:D
Plus, a ZPM technically doesn't have much juice. Remember that episode where they phased the entire planet in a parallel reality? No ZPM available, so they had to use the US power grid.
I've never seen a ZPM do anything close to that.:P I think their perk is they store a *lot* of power in a very condensed form - not that they output ridiculous amounts. (though clearly they do output a lot)
A year ago I experimented with HTML5, and made (you guessed it) a Tetris clone, which took advantage of Canvas elements.
I noted that when drawing entire images, it was all very fast. Drawing a frame took about 12ms in Firefox and Opera. (limited by the precision of the timer)
Then I tried combining all the images into one, and drawing a region from the tileset. Talk about slowdown! Wow! Separate 64x64 images blitted fast, but as soon as it was dealing with a 512x512 image, the time to render jumped to about 500ms.
I did some quick pixel math and concluded both Opera and Firefox must've been making a copy of the entire tileset every time I tried to blit a region from it. It's the only thing that added up. When I boosted the size to 1024x1024, it jumped to over 2000ms for a frame. Completely ridiculous!;)
Perhaps someone else could chime in about whether this bug has been fixed? Note: I was blitting from Image elements to Canvas elements. Canvas to Canvas always worked fine for me.
SecuCode annoys me. Half the time the page doesn't even load. When all the hot deals were coming out around Christmas, I had to use Paypal to buy everything, because SecuCode was indefinitely down.
Oh yeah - know what password does fit their limitations? bullsh1t
Well, it appears I'm almost totally unique. One in 70843 people have my fonts. One in 70843 have my plugins. One in 863.94 have my resolution. I refreshed the page, and all three are going up. Go figure.
If everone plays only pirated games, there will be no more games to pirate. Did that occur to you?
Nope. Companies will crumble, but new ones will pop up. Maybe it'll be an indy game revolution. Thousands of games of similar calibre to World of Goo? Wouldn't that be great?
I'm not worried - but the companies should be.:P You can only persecute your customers for so long.
And then someone cracks and patches this in three... two... one... and yet again the legitimate customers are the ones who get screwed.
When my internet is down, I can't download cracks or patches to let me play.:P
I must say, I'm quite happy Steam isn't this retarded. When flipping ISPs my connection was down for 4-5 weeks. Steam offline mode kept me from going insane. My old ISP (Telus) was dicking around - I went from ADSL to ADSL, so the new one couldn't hook me up.:(
I completely agree. It also cuts out those nasty transaction fees, which means in theory more profit can go to the devs, and lower price games are possible.
Most games have had their Securom DRM stripped out and replaced with whatever Steam uses. No more annoying DVDs! There's constant sales with great prices - right now Psychonauts is on sale for $2. (A ridiculously fun game, btw)
When a friend bought Left4Dead, I was able to copy my L4D folder to his computer, and he was able to avoid downloading it.
Really convenient - the only area they need improvement is refunds on games that just don't work! (there are a few - ex: Universe at War wants Games for Windows Live running, and for whatever reason it won't start on my PC)
They are only references to locations of EXE's, not actual files, so why are they allegedly a security risk?
I'm guessing you don't know much about.lnk files or their history?
Until Vista, shortcuts (.lnk files) were basically more dangerous than downloading an exe and running it. A mostly unmentioned problem, though known to anyone in the field. (on either side)
It's trivially easy dumping a malicious.lnk file on the XP desktop, preventing Windows from starting normally or in safe mode. Time for a clean format!.. unless you want to boot up a linux distro to delete it.
P.S. A program or installer running under an admin account could still put shortcuts on the desktops and start menus of every profile. I just don't see the need for "All Users". If one user deletes it, it vanishes for all the rest.
It might work amazingly well. Anyone remember that article about a software patcher that examines machine code and fixes buffer overflows and null pointers and stuff? These are things that our compilers should catch, but instead some researchers had to make a watchdog program that fixes them at runtime.
Well, this could work. Every once and a while there's a program released that exceeds all expectations, and revolutionizes things. But most of the time, no.
So again, I'll reserve judgement until I see it in action.
P.S. What's Google do? They catch almost all spam.
A couple times now games have half-crashed my desktop. When Explorer starts up again, anything that was in All Users is missing. That's half the desktop icons, and most of the start menu. A reboot fixes it, but the first time it happened I was scratching my head for a few minutes.:P
It really isn't necessary, especially since Windows security is starting to line up with Linux. (Installing apps per profile and stuff)
If it was only $2000, they'd already have licensed it. But people are throwing around quotes of $5,000,000 per year, which is a HUGE amount of Mozilla and Opera's revenue.
Youtube, Vimeo & Co are trying to use h.264 to become the new majors. I understand why those companies don't want a free codec to succeed: that would lead to more competition and less ways to profit from their position. I'm afraid that in this case their best interests are our worst interests.
They're using H.264 because of the bandwidth costs. When you're looking at saving hundreds of thousands of gigabytes, the savings add up to very real amounts. It's not about stifling competition - that's a side effect. It's about cutting costs.
Think if it happened to images.
I thought it did happen to images? Aren't JPEG/GIF - the most widely used formats online - patent encumbered? I don't recall anything apocalyptic happening with them, but I have a feeling MPEG-LA will be more pushy. After all, they want money so they can work on H.265.
Uhh... interesting? That's a bit nutty if you ask me.
Firefox has helped Google chop away at Microsoft's stranglehold on the web. It's helped Google more than any other browser.
Now Google owns Youtube and has big red numbers in their balance books. When examining bandwidth costs, H.264 just makes sense.
Profit is the goal, but there's no malice involved, and no conspiracy to kill Firefox. Plus, according to a thread from a few days ago, Firefox is working on the same solution as Opera (GStreamer based plugin) - they just don't want to implement it.
Someone seems to have signed me up to every spam newsletter imaginable. Google filters about 3000 emails out per month. It misses one every couple weeks.
The only reason I tolerate Steam's lockdown is the sale prices. I've always traded games back and forth with my roommates. Lately I've been re-buying a lot of old games on GOG, and it's nice having that option open again. It's like a better demo system. There's about 5 games on there that we both own.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Have you noticed that the stock market is tanking lately? Invest in what? As for savings, with the Federal government printing money as fast as it can, your cash's value is falling like a rock. You might as well buy something you enjoy with it.
You should try investing in Canadian companies. My entire portfolio went up 25% in the last 6 months! :D
I love those diamond mines up north.
Plus, a ZPM technically doesn't have much juice. Remember that episode where they phased the entire planet in a parallel reality? No ZPM available, so they had to use the US power grid.
I've never seen a ZPM do anything close to that. :P I think their perk is they store a *lot* of power in a very condensed form - not that they output ridiculous amounts. (though clearly they do output a lot)
P.S. I hate that TV trope.
A year ago I experimented with HTML5, and made (you guessed it) a Tetris clone, which took advantage of Canvas elements.
I noted that when drawing entire images, it was all very fast. Drawing a frame took about 12ms in Firefox and Opera. (limited by the precision of the timer)
Then I tried combining all the images into one, and drawing a region from the tileset. Talk about slowdown! Wow! Separate 64x64 images blitted fast, but as soon as it was dealing with a 512x512 image, the time to render jumped to about 500ms.
I did some quick pixel math and concluded both Opera and Firefox must've been making a copy of the entire tileset every time I tried to blit a region from it. It's the only thing that added up. When I boosted the size to 1024x1024, it jumped to over 2000ms for a frame. Completely ridiculous! ;)
Perhaps someone else could chime in about whether this bug has been fixed? Note: I was blitting from Image elements to Canvas elements. Canvas to Canvas always worked fine for me.
SecuCode annoys me. Half the time the page doesn't even load. When all the hot deals were coming out around Christmas, I had to use Paypal to buy everything, because SecuCode was indefinitely down.
Oh yeah - know what password does fit their limitations? bullsh1t
Hmm... high user ID. Might be a plant. :P
I'm guessing there's censorship going on, regardless of the public spin. It is Microsoft, after all. They love any deal that makes more money.
I was amazed to find out Bart's voice is a woman.
Additionally, while it seems unlikely that we will ever be possible to 100% recreate a dinosaur
Avoid making statements that could be proven untrue in just two or three decades.
Looking back, it really is quite amazing.
"In thirty years my watch is going to have a hundred thousand times as much RAM as this supercomputer." ;)
CCleaner can also wipe out Flash cookies.
Well, it appears I'm almost totally unique. One in 70843 people have my fonts. One in 70843 have my plugins. One in 863.94 have my resolution. I refreshed the page, and all three are going up. Go figure.
If everone plays only pirated games, there will be no more games to pirate. Did that occur to you?
Nope. Companies will crumble, but new ones will pop up. Maybe it'll be an indy game revolution. Thousands of games of similar calibre to World of Goo? Wouldn't that be great?
I'm not worried - but the companies should be. :P You can only persecute your customers for so long.
And then someone cracks and patches this in three... two... one... and yet again the legitimate customers are the ones who get screwed.
When my internet is down, I can't download cracks or patches to let me play. :P
I must say, I'm quite happy Steam isn't this retarded. When flipping ISPs my connection was down for 4-5 weeks. Steam offline mode kept me from going insane. My old ISP (Telus) was dicking around - I went from ADSL to ADSL, so the new one couldn't hook me up. :(
I wonder how much you saved in transaction fees by maintaining a credit balance.
I completely agree. It also cuts out those nasty transaction fees, which means in theory more profit can go to the devs, and lower price games are possible.
Totally agree. Hackintoshes just don't play nicely with AMD CPUs.
Steam is great!
Most games have had their Securom DRM stripped out and replaced with whatever Steam uses. No more annoying DVDs! There's constant sales with great prices - right now Psychonauts is on sale for $2. (A ridiculously fun game, btw)
When a friend bought Left4Dead, I was able to copy my L4D folder to his computer, and he was able to avoid downloading it.
Really convenient - the only area they need improvement is refunds on games that just don't work! (there are a few - ex: Universe at War wants Games for Windows Live running, and for whatever reason it won't start on my PC)
They are only references to locations of EXE's, not actual files, so why are they allegedly a security risk?
I'm guessing you don't know much about .lnk files or their history?
Until Vista, shortcuts (.lnk files) were basically more dangerous than downloading an exe and running it. A mostly unmentioned problem, though known to anyone in the field. (on either side)
It's trivially easy dumping a malicious .lnk file on the XP desktop, preventing Windows from starting normally or in safe mode. Time for a clean format!.. unless you want to boot up a linux distro to delete it.
P.S. A program or installer running under an admin account could still put shortcuts on the desktops and start menus of every profile. I just don't see the need for "All Users". If one user deletes it, it vanishes for all the rest.
I'll reserve judgement until I see it in action.
It might work amazingly well. Anyone remember that article about a software patcher that examines machine code and fixes buffer overflows and null pointers and stuff? These are things that our compilers should catch, but instead some researchers had to make a watchdog program that fixes them at runtime.
Well, this could work. Every once and a while there's a program released that exceeds all expectations, and revolutionizes things. But most of the time, no.
So again, I'll reserve judgement until I see it in action.
P.S. What's Google do? They catch almost all spam.
I'm annoyed by All Users.
A couple times now games have half-crashed my desktop. When Explorer starts up again, anything that was in All Users is missing. That's half the desktop icons, and most of the start menu. A reboot fixes it, but the first time it happened I was scratching my head for a few minutes. :P
It really isn't necessary, especially since Windows security is starting to line up with Linux. (Installing apps per profile and stuff)
If it was only $2000, they'd already have licensed it. But people are throwing around quotes of $5,000,000 per year, which is a HUGE amount of Mozilla and Opera's revenue.
Youtube, Vimeo & Co are trying to use h.264 to become the new majors. I understand why those companies don't want a free codec to succeed: that would lead to more competition and less ways to profit from their position. I'm afraid that in this case their best interests are our worst interests.
They're using H.264 because of the bandwidth costs. When you're looking at saving hundreds of thousands of gigabytes, the savings add up to very real amounts. It's not about stifling competition - that's a side effect. It's about cutting costs.
Think if it happened to images.
I thought it did happen to images? Aren't JPEG/GIF - the most widely used formats online - patent encumbered? I don't recall anything apocalyptic happening with them, but I have a feeling MPEG-LA will be more pushy. After all, they want money so they can work on H.265.
Uhh... interesting? That's a bit nutty if you ask me.
Firefox has helped Google chop away at Microsoft's stranglehold on the web. It's helped Google more than any other browser.
Now Google owns Youtube and has big red numbers in their balance books. When examining bandwidth costs, H.264 just makes sense.
Profit is the goal, but there's no malice involved, and no conspiracy to kill Firefox. Plus, according to a thread from a few days ago, Firefox is working on the same solution as Opera (GStreamer based plugin) - they just don't want to implement it.
Totally agree. That's why I called them spam newsletters. :)
3000 a month is quite a lot for "legit" newsletters. Stuff like Sears.
Someone seems to have signed me up to every spam newsletter imaginable. Google filters about 3000 emails out per month. It misses one every couple weeks.
Then buy on GOG. ;)
The only reason I tolerate Steam's lockdown is the sale prices. I've always traded games back and forth with my roommates. Lately I've been re-buying a lot of old games on GOG, and it's nice having that option open again. It's like a better demo system. There's about 5 games on there that we both own.
GSM is finally being cracked. It'll happen eventually.