Looks like the guy wrote an indexing service for Windows SMB file shares on the local LAN. Made it real easy to copy mp3's from everyone elses systems. But that's just it, the same thing could be accomplished with start>search>files & folders, this just simplified that by indexing everything so you wouldn't have to go comp by comp.
Doesn't look like they have a leg to stand on. They just need to hope for a relatively intelligent judge and/or jury, depending on how far this goes.
It's not, but they haven't. There is no click-through license on install (since there's no install) or 10-page EULA (the game would have to be sealed for this to work (break this seal signifies acceptance of EULA...)) in any console game that I've ever seen or purchased.
And you don't agree to a EULA at the time of purchase. It's during the install when you click 'I agree' or when you break the seal on an internal package when the EULA is printed for you to read external to that package (a la a set of Lotus AmiPro disks I have sitting around here).
Well, that list doesn't have nearly the weight as countries actually devoting troops, money or material. Just saying, "Yeah, we got your back, you go on," is just those countries covering diplomatic bases with the U.S. A lot of the poor ones still need aid money and the economic goodwill of the US government. A good number of their leaders and a majority of their people still condemn the war effort, publically even. It's rather disingenuous of some of the Republican leadership to state that this Coalition is bigger than Gulf War I.
GW1: 425K US, 35K British, 20K Saudi Arabian, 9800 French, 1700 Canadian, 2K Moroccan, 35K Egyptian, 8K Pakistani, 70K Syrians, 100K Turkish (on their borders), 6K from Bangladesh, Niger and Senegal sent 500 men apiece, Honduras 150 troops, and 450 from Argentina. GW2 has 300K US, 45K British, 2K Australian and 200 each from 4 or 5 others.
Lawrence J. Korb -- a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration said to Salon, "We made a profit last time for heaven's sake. It didn't cost us a nickel." Conversely, this time "nobody's giving us any money, as far as I can see." Yale University economist William Nordhaus, author of one of the most detailed private sector analyses of the Iraq war's possible costs, estimated the full bill for the Persian Gulf conflict could range between $99 billion and $1.92 trillion, including the price of fighting the war, occupying Iraq afterward and rebuilding the country. But you're right at least so far as print media goes, even Foxnews.com says estimates run from $100 billion to $1.6 trillion.
Also, 1441 wasn't sold to the UN nations as being a pretext for war. Several diplomats report they were assured of this by the U.S. and there would be another UN vote before a war began. Hell, Bush even committed to going through another vote "no matter what the whip count is" during his press conference last week and bailed on it.
In other news...;) the last I read on Turkey is that they were holding up on flyover rights due to disputes about whether they were allowed to send troops into Iraq to make sure the Kurds don't form their own state. (Just read a bit more on this, looks like we're giving them $15 billion and allowing them to deploy 25K-30K troops into Kurdish-controlled areas of Northern Iraq for flyover rights. The Kurds have vowed to fight any Turkish presence. Looks like those Kurdish troops might not materialize to fight Iraq-proper after all.)
One reason I hate the media, only 2 stories I can find on yesterdays Turkish vote talking about troop deployment concessions. One here states the $15 billion expected for the flyover rights. The other one here says how Colin Powell has stated they will not pay for flyover rights.
The counterargument I've read to that is that it does monkey with certain things but only when 'necessary'. Like the people are starving and it can't import food from other colonies it will change some zoning over to food production or if a revolt is about to happen it will start building morale improving structures. Supposedly the 'real' way to manage your viceroys revolve around creating your own buildlists and contingency plans and they'll follow those depending on the situation at hand instead of the built-in ones. Looks like it'll take a while to get used to the management balance there if that's the case.
Some aspects of graphics processing are like this. The most obvious two are Anisotropic texture filtering and Anti-Aliasing. You can enable these in the hardware of modern day graphics card and see improvements playing older, hardware-accelerated games.
Supposedly with the ATI card you can turn on a feature called TruForm that will interpolate higher-polygon models from lower, effectively smoothing out rough edges. Don't know how well that works though.
Some features you have to right the game engine to support though, like having higher resolution textures available or bump-mapping those textures or doing environment mapping for shiny surfaces.
The thing is, these newer cards can do things the older cards didn't. Extensions of the API's are written to support these new features. Newer engines support these newer features (or support them in a novel way, i.e. prerendered bump-mapping extrapolated from higher-poly models in doom3) and make things look better.
When and if the code of a game becomes open, the newer enhancements often are written into the older engines by enterprising young coders. Thing is, most companies don't open their source (Id being a notable exception).
Re:Logitech MX Series Mice
on
Hardware Block
·
· Score: 1
I bought one of those MX500's with some of my Christmas money this year. It's a very nice piece of hardware, very responsive and smooth. The drivers, however, as mentioned in the above review, in a word, suck.
If Logitech could turn out a set of drivers to allow you to program all 8 buttons that would work in games, this would be a nearly flawless device. As it stands, you pretty much have to sacrifice 3 of them and not install the Logitech button programming driver in order for games to work properly. The latest version of the drivers do tend to play better with games but just because they have a routine built-in to disable the button mapper driver (em_exec) when it detects a program requesting DirectInput.
Wormholes were a major player in the most recent episode and promise to continue to be for the rest of the show. Scorpius has been back for the last 5 or 6 episodes and, without spoiling you too much, Talyn & Crais aren't coming back.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with them cancelling the show if they had given the production company advanced notice. As it was there was obviously some 'out' clause in the 2 year contract that allowed Sci-Fi to get out halfway through, but as things stand they more or less finalized the cancellation while they were taping the last show of Season 4.
What really pisses me off is they always end the season on a cliffhanger, so what we're left with is the final episode of a season cliffhanging for the start of Season 5 which will never come. That sucks.
They've had sex already, more than once, IIRC. But when your duplicate dies that your girlfriend was having a relationship with and then she goes off and gets pregnant by someone else in order to save your life it kinda dries the intimacy up a bit...:)
I *like* the fact that it's not a cut-and-dried relationship. Nuance, subtlety, texture... Yeah, texture...:)
So you can turn up all the dials and switches in the latest games. Battlefield 1942 with 8x Antialiasing & 16x Anisotropic Filtering would still likely cause either of these cards to dip down well under 75fps. That's more what I'm interested in, from reading about the Radeon, it's supposed to give you high-end AA & AF "for free". There's some performance hit but not nearly as much as other cards. I wonder how the GF-FX will stand up to high-end AA & AF.
Nothing at all. IE doesn't ask what the servertype is, it just acts initially as if it were an IIS server. If it doesn't respond to the initial request then it goes on into the SYN/ACK routine it would go through with any other server.
That's ridiculous. If oxygen were the only component of the environment you might have a point. But trees help hold topsoil in place, preventing erosion, they provide habitats for a variety of birds and animals, they act as a huge carbon sink keeping the CO2 levels down...
There's more to the environmentalist argument than just O2 production, don't oversimplify.
Because, as we all know, games that have effectively eliminated piracy (such as online games where you need a key to play), are SO much cheaper than games that people are able to pirate...
Ummm, I work for a large OEM and we're still shipping Win2k. No longer selling systems with 98 or ME, but Win2K is still important to our large enterprise customers and we still sell brand new systems with it (as well as XP Home and Pro, but still...)
That's odd, at the "large PC manufacturer" I'm most familiar with, swapping out the hard drive never affected the recovery CD. It was (and I recall recovery CD's all the way back to Windows 3.1) and is keyed to the custom BIOS only, not CPU, HDD, memory or anything else.
I saw a TV show maybe 2 years ago about a new procedure being developed where they insert thin metal blades into the cornea to reshape it. The advantage being that it was supposed to be a reversible process, if they didn't get it quite right you could have them removed, wait for the eye to heal back then have a new set reinserted (pricey and slow, but still reversible). Has anyone else heard about this process or when/if it'll be commercially available?
The *point* has to be whether it's fantasy or sci-fi? In one sense, the point is enjoyment, entertainment. Internally, the point is to follow the main characters through a series of harrowing adventures while they each try to accomplish sometimes disparate goals (Crichton wants to return home, maybe, or maybe stay with Aeryn. Rygel wants to return to his throne as Dominar and throw his cousin out of power. D'argo, for a large part of the series wanted to find his son. They all want to avoid the Peacekeepers, who have a bounty on their head.)
As to the genre, it's certainly not hard sci-fi. It does have a veneer of science over the fantasy but doesn't delve into explanations (a good thing, imo, I was tired of the "particle of the week" syndrome in Star Trek).
For me, the payoff of the series is in the characters, so call it space opera if you must categorize it. Their motivations are sometimes apparent, sometimes hidden. They have depth, desires, past traumas, and strengths. I'm sure it helps to have followed the series from near the beginning, some of the strongest points of the series is in the overreaching story arc that a purveyor of single episodes may well miss. One of my favorite theories that I've heard put forth on the relative weakness of the 4th season is that they're focusing more on stand-alone episodes versus extending the story arc to bring in new viewers.
But the attitude that if it's "supposed" to be sci-fi get rid of it but if it's "supposed" to be something else then OK just baffles me.
It's odd, a lot of my friends at work don't like the series much, they've watched a half episode or so and just not gotten into it. All of my "real friends" love the series and come over every Friday night there's a new one on to watch it (barring prior engagments, of course, and even then I'm implored to tape it for them). So maybe it is a matter of having followed it for a while, it's surpassed Babylon 5 for me as my favorite series and I really liked Bab 5 (seasons 2-4 anyway..:) )
Ummm, I can only recall 3 or 4 instances of sex between characters (at least onscreen or having been mentioned). You may be right in that a larger percentage of the show is character interactions, but some people like that aspect of things.
The cartoon episode was weak, imo, but only the cartoon parts, the rest was pretty good. I like the dark fantasy world they've built, it's nowhere near hard sci-fi but the characters have depth and the situations they are put into are the most intense I've ever seen in a television series. I really get a sense that the character's actions have consequences unlike a lot of other shows.
What's the last show you've seen with extended torture scenes of the main character or where time travel was the cause of a major genocide where once a great peace treaty was signed (and not vice versa)? Scorpius alone is probably the scariest, and the best developed, bad guy I've ever seen in any film media. Ruthless, efficient, duplicitous, but with an ambitious goal that's definitely in a gray area in terms of morality.
My wife cooked the same thing the other night. Lots of leftovers, went through a total of two 1lb bags of egg noodles & quite a bit of rice finishing it all off over the next week...
Recipe was badly worded though, it says to add the sour cream with the other stuff at the beginning then says to add it again at the end...:P Came out OK though having added it at the beginning so no harm no foul...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like the guy wrote an indexing service for Windows SMB file shares on the local LAN. Made it real easy to copy mp3's from everyone elses systems. But that's just it, the same thing could be accomplished with start>search>files & folders, this just simplified that by indexing everything so you wouldn't have to go comp by comp.
Doesn't look like they have a leg to stand on. They just need to hope for a relatively intelligent judge and/or jury, depending on how far this goes.
It's not, but they haven't. There is no click-through license on install (since there's no install) or 10-page EULA (the game would have to be sealed for this to work (break this seal signifies acceptance of EULA...)) in any console game that I've ever seen or purchased.
And you don't agree to a EULA at the time of purchase. It's during the install when you click 'I agree' or when you break the seal on an internal package when the EULA is printed for you to read external to that package (a la a set of Lotus AmiPro disks I have sitting around here).
Well, that list doesn't have nearly the weight as countries actually devoting troops, money or material. Just saying, "Yeah, we got your back, you go on," is just those countries covering diplomatic bases with the U.S. A lot of the poor ones still need aid money and the economic goodwill of the US government. A good number of their leaders and a majority of their people still condemn the war effort, publically even. It's rather disingenuous of some of the Republican leadership to state that this Coalition is bigger than Gulf War I.
... ;) the last I read on Turkey is that they were holding up on flyover rights due to disputes about whether they were allowed to send troops into Iraq to make sure the Kurds don't form their own state. (Just read a bit more on this, looks like we're giving them $15 billion and allowing them to deploy 25K-30K troops into Kurdish-controlled areas of Northern Iraq for flyover rights. The Kurds have vowed to fight any Turkish presence. Looks like those Kurdish troops might not materialize to fight Iraq-proper after all.)
GW1: 425K US, 35K British, 20K Saudi Arabian, 9800 French, 1700 Canadian, 2K Moroccan, 35K Egyptian, 8K Pakistani, 70K Syrians, 100K Turkish (on their borders), 6K from Bangladesh, Niger and Senegal sent 500 men apiece, Honduras 150 troops, and 450 from Argentina.
GW2 has 300K US, 45K British, 2K Australian and 200 each from 4 or 5 others.
Lawrence J. Korb -- a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration said to Salon, "We made a profit last time for heaven's sake. It didn't cost us a nickel." Conversely, this time "nobody's giving us any money, as far as I can see." Yale University economist William Nordhaus, author of one of the most detailed private sector analyses of the Iraq war's possible costs, estimated the full bill for the Persian Gulf conflict could range between $99 billion and $1.92 trillion, including the price of fighting the war, occupying Iraq afterward and rebuilding the country. But you're right at least so far as print media goes, even Foxnews.com says estimates run from $100 billion to $1.6 trillion.
Also, 1441 wasn't sold to the UN nations as being a pretext for war. Several diplomats report they were assured of this by the U.S. and there would be another UN vote before a war began. Hell, Bush even committed to going through another vote "no matter what the whip count is" during his press conference last week and bailed on it.
In other news
One reason I hate the media, only 2 stories I can find on yesterdays Turkish vote talking about troop deployment concessions. One here states the $15 billion expected for the flyover rights. The other one here says how Colin Powell has stated they will not pay for flyover rights.
The counterargument I've read to that is that it does monkey with certain things but only when 'necessary'. Like the people are starving and it can't import food from other colonies it will change some zoning over to food production or if a revolt is about to happen it will start building morale improving structures. Supposedly the 'real' way to manage your viceroys revolve around creating your own buildlists and contingency plans and they'll follow those depending on the situation at hand instead of the built-in ones. Looks like it'll take a while to get used to the management balance there if that's the case.
From the box (not the best place to find "real" sysreqs but what the hell?):
OS: Win98/Me/2000/XP
CPU: PII-300 or higher
Memory: 128MB
HDD Space: 800MB Free
CDROM: 8X
Video: Win98/ME/2000/XP compatible vid card (800x600x16 bit)
DirectX: DirectX version 8.1 or higher
I saw this on Yahoo earlier today.
Yahoo link
Hey, you can win a T-shirt or a cooler if you get enough of their letters published in your local papers.
Some aspects of graphics processing are like this. The most obvious two are Anisotropic texture filtering and Anti-Aliasing. You can enable these in the hardware of modern day graphics card and see improvements playing older, hardware-accelerated games.
Supposedly with the ATI card you can turn on a feature called TruForm that will interpolate higher-polygon models from lower, effectively smoothing out rough edges. Don't know how well that works though.
Some features you have to right the game engine to support though, like having higher resolution textures available or bump-mapping those textures or doing environment mapping for shiny surfaces.
The thing is, these newer cards can do things the older cards didn't. Extensions of the API's are written to support these new features. Newer engines support these newer features (or support them in a novel way, i.e. prerendered bump-mapping extrapolated from higher-poly models in doom3) and make things look better.
When and if the code of a game becomes open, the newer enhancements often are written into the older engines by enterprising young coders. Thing is, most companies don't open their source (Id being a notable exception).
I bought one of those MX500's with some of my Christmas money this year. It's a very nice piece of hardware, very responsive and smooth. The drivers, however, as mentioned in the above review, in a word, suck.
If Logitech could turn out a set of drivers to allow you to program all 8 buttons that would work in games, this would be a nearly flawless device. As it stands, you pretty much have to sacrifice 3 of them and not install the Logitech button programming driver in order for games to work properly. The latest version of the drivers do tend to play better with games but just because they have a routine built-in to disable the button mapper driver (em_exec) when it detects a program requesting DirectInput.
IIRC = If I Recall Correctly.
mmmm, drama.
Wormholes were a major player in the most recent episode and promise to continue to be for the rest of the show. Scorpius has been back for the last 5 or 6 episodes and, without spoiling you too much, Talyn & Crais aren't coming back.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with them cancelling the show if they had given the production company advanced notice. As it was there was obviously some 'out' clause in the 2 year contract that allowed Sci-Fi to get out halfway through, but as things stand they more or less finalized the cancellation while they were taping the last show of Season 4.
What really pisses me off is they always end the season on a cliffhanger, so what we're left with is the final episode of a season cliffhanging for the start of Season 5 which will never come. That sucks.
*spoilers*
... :)
... Yeah, texture ... :)
They've had sex already, more than once, IIRC.
But when your duplicate dies that your girlfriend was having a relationship with and then she goes off and gets pregnant by someone else in order to save your life it kinda dries the intimacy up a bit
I *like* the fact that it's not a cut-and-dried relationship. Nuance, subtlety, texture
So you can turn up all the dials and switches in the latest games. Battlefield 1942 with 8x Antialiasing & 16x Anisotropic Filtering would still likely cause either of these cards to dip down well under 75fps.
That's more what I'm interested in, from reading about the Radeon, it's supposed to give you high-end AA & AF "for free". There's some performance hit but not nearly as much as other cards. I wonder how the GF-FX will stand up to high-end AA & AF.
Nothing at all. IE doesn't ask what the servertype is, it just acts initially as if it were an IIS server. If it doesn't respond to the initial request then it goes on into the SYN/ACK routine it would go through with any other server.
That's ridiculous. If oxygen were the only component of the environment you might have a point. But trees help hold topsoil in place, preventing erosion, they provide habitats for a variety of birds and animals, they act as a huge carbon sink keeping the CO2 levels down...
There's more to the environmentalist argument than just O2 production, don't oversimplify.
Because, as we all know, games that have effectively eliminated piracy (such as online games where you need a key to play), are SO much cheaper than games that people are able to pirate ...
Oh wait, they're not.
How does that argument go again?
I don't believe the 120gxp line was that bad quality-wise, it was the 75gxp line that had all the quality issues.
Ummm, I work for a large OEM and we're still shipping Win2k. No longer selling systems with 98 or ME, but Win2K is still important to our large enterprise customers and we still sell brand new systems with it (as well as XP Home and Pro, but still...)
That's odd, at the "large PC manufacturer" I'm most familiar with, swapping out the hard drive never affected the recovery CD. It was (and I recall recovery CD's all the way back to Windows 3.1) and is keyed to the custom BIOS only, not CPU, HDD, memory or anything else.
Hell, I have read it, enjoyed it myself and still didn't know what the hell you were talking about ... :)
...
No memory for names, I guess
The ad locally (Raleigh-Durham) says 99% success rate, then in fast-talk at the end "success is defined as 20-40 or better."
...
I'd rather have a 90% shot at 20-20 personally
I saw a TV show maybe 2 years ago about a new procedure being developed where they insert thin metal blades into the cornea to reshape it. The advantage being that it was supposed to be a reversible process, if they didn't get it quite right you could have them removed, wait for the eye to heal back then have a new set reinserted (pricey and slow, but still reversible). Has anyone else heard about this process or when/if it'll be commercially available?
Well, just so you know, there's at least two people in the world who thinks Tori Amos is the best musical artist of all time.
No accounting for taste, right?
The *point* has to be whether it's fantasy or sci-fi? In one sense, the point is enjoyment, entertainment. Internally, the point is to follow the main characters through a series of harrowing adventures while they each try to accomplish sometimes disparate goals (Crichton wants to return home, maybe, or maybe stay with Aeryn. Rygel wants to return to his throne as Dominar and throw his cousin out of power. D'argo, for a large part of the series wanted to find his son. They all want to avoid the Peacekeepers, who have a bounty on their head.)
.. :) )
As to the genre, it's certainly not hard sci-fi. It does have a veneer of science over the fantasy but doesn't delve into explanations (a good thing, imo, I was tired of the "particle of the week" syndrome in Star Trek).
For me, the payoff of the series is in the characters, so call it space opera if you must categorize it. Their motivations are sometimes apparent, sometimes hidden. They have depth, desires, past traumas, and strengths. I'm sure it helps to have followed the series from near the beginning, some of the strongest points of the series is in the overreaching story arc that a purveyor of single episodes may well miss. One of my favorite theories that I've heard put forth on the relative weakness of the 4th season is that they're focusing more on stand-alone episodes versus extending the story arc to bring in new viewers.
But the attitude that if it's "supposed" to be sci-fi get rid of it but if it's "supposed" to be something else then OK just baffles me.
It's odd, a lot of my friends at work don't like the series much, they've watched a half episode or so and just not gotten into it. All of my "real friends" love the series and come over every Friday night there's a new one on to watch it (barring prior engagments, of course, and even then I'm implored to tape it for them). So maybe it is a matter of having followed it for a while, it's surpassed Babylon 5 for me as my favorite series and I really liked Bab 5 (seasons 2-4 anyway
Ummm, I can only recall 3 or 4 instances of sex between characters (at least onscreen or having been mentioned). You may be right in that a larger percentage of the show is character interactions, but some people like that aspect of things.
The cartoon episode was weak, imo, but only the cartoon parts, the rest was pretty good. I like the dark fantasy world they've built, it's nowhere near hard sci-fi but the characters have depth and the situations they are put into are the most intense I've ever seen in a television series. I really get a sense that the character's actions have consequences unlike a lot of other shows.
What's the last show you've seen with extended torture scenes of the main character or where time travel was the cause of a major genocide where once a great peace treaty was signed (and not vice versa)? Scorpius alone is probably the scariest, and the best developed, bad guy I've ever seen in any film media. Ruthless, efficient, duplicitous, but with an ambitious goal that's definitely in a gray area in terms of morality.
My wife cooked the same thing the other night. Lots of leftovers, went through a total of two 1lb bags of egg noodles & quite a bit of rice finishing it all off over the next week ...
... :P Came out OK though having added it at the beginning so no harm no foul ... :)
Recipe was badly worded though, it says to add the sour cream with the other stuff at the beginning then says to add it again at the end