Gee, you only barely touched on the animation problem...
Look at most PS2 games, and they look scarcely any better than Playstation games, not because the models aren't better...they're WAY better (making higher-polygon, higher-detail models isn't as hard as you might think...making low-poly ones look good is.) Its the animation. The animation is as unrealistic as it was with lower-frame rate, lower-detail, less-realistic models, and it ends up looking just BAD with better looking graphics. Only a few games I've seen thus far really improve on the animation, and one of those was Gran Turismo 3 (so it really isn't much of an accomplishment)
the last time I used a floppy when I had a CHOICE, was when I lost about 4 days worth of work on an image I was creating in photoshop to a Prodigy floppy disk. (The disks I actually BOUGHT around that time are mostly still just fine. I think 1996 was the last year you could buy a decent floppy disk.)
I always tell people not to use them. When I see someone using a floppy for something important (or losing something important to a floppy), I show them how to use FTP (all students at my school have a few megs of space they can FTP to), and point out that if they do that with all their papers, they'll actually have multiple copies to fall back on.
I've seen a few people lose things to zip disks, too...glorified floppies, those.
Anyhow, I do like the idea of these things. Get it down to 10 or 15 bucks, and no doubt they'll really take off. Especially as more manufacturers start putting USB ports on the FRONT of their machines:P
One thing I like about all the other fancy media sources, and other bells and whistles and whatnot, is that I get to skip creating about a dozen different accounts that I'd have to do if the things I used were on different web sites.
It'd be nice if more mainstream web sites would take a cue from the porn industry and consolodate their logins via third-party services. Hell, if Yahoo wants something else to add to their swiss-army knife (it may not do anything particularly well, but boy does it do a lot of stuff), they could try that.
Google's recently-added directory is for the most part far superior to Yahoo's. Sure, the improvements in quality of actual search-engines (Especially Google:P) had already rendered Yahoo's directory less relevant than it used to be, and Google hasn't yet branched out into many, if any, of the other dozens of things Yahoo does, but they are going into territory that Yahoo might consider their own.
It generates lots and lots of heat, and that has to go somewhere. Also, isn't water vapor also a (unimportant) greenhouse gas?
Now here's something I wonder...how much does all the waste heat from our energy usage affect the climate...not just the things people do that alter how much heat we keep from the sun.
What's the use of a robotic arm if all it can do is make more robotic arms? (Well, I suppose if it can make robotic arms that can do something besides replicate...)
At least americans with their analog phones aren't getting those "talking underwater" digital artifacts I've been getting on every other call with my digital phone in Japan.
something which doesn't require much processing power, but DOES require flexibility and low cost to succeed... Digital books, which we've been hearing about being right around the corner for frickin' ever (but are never good enough to really catch on) have been waiting for this sort of technology.
But seriously, if it can't run half-life, it ain't replacing my note book.
It could potentially give more business to Register.com, especially if they prominently link near the results of a search. Just about the same as a search engine (except more resources taken up.)
I've never made more than about 7000 dollars in a year (hey, I'm a student, and until now have always lived with my mother). Buy I was able to get a 1000 dollar limit without trying, and soon after was offered a 5000 dollar card with 9.99...then 7.99...then 5.99...FIXED. (I figured by 5.99 that I'd be a fool NOT to accept this offer...) Then the other card I had (with like a 16 percent rate) starts falling all over themselves to raise my limit. (Never used it again...the activation number never worked. Hey...if they screw up, I'm not going to go out of my way to give them their cut of all my CC purchases....that is to say, just about anything I buy over 20 bucks. In Alaska...EVERYWHERE takes credit cards.)
Anyhow...doesn't make a lot of sense. Except that I had a card on my MOTHER's account with another company for about 10 years (which I rarely used, and never carried a balance on). She is a credid card company's DREAM customer. She carries a balance, often a large one (went through some rough periods with large bills) but always pays more than the minimum payment.
So I think that they just see my name associated with this really juicy customer account, so I get good credit cards. (And ones which they get some fat fees from...I ALWAYS pay my tuition by credit card...since I've had TWO *MAJOR* clerical errors with my university's business and registrars offices.)
What gets me, though...is that I get a much better interest rate than my mother. Maybe it's because I never carry a balance, and they want to encourage me to? Regardless, she needs to start agitating for a better rate herself. I think she has 17.
Exactly. And a timeline-view, preferably with the ability to show different sections in the hierarchy alongside each other, would be nice, too.
Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there!
on
Free Books Online
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· Score: 1
An online book is MUCH more inconvenient compared to the hard copy than an MP3 is compared to CD. Hell, MP3s are often MORE convenient. An MP3, you can listen to while doing other things, even if you're stuck in front of your computer. An online book will demand much more of your attention, and require you to be in front of your computer. (I could deal with that, with a notebook, but I'd still prefer the hard copy...well, for novels...for reference books, I'd rather have it on my notebook.)
The paper book still has a huge advantage in convenience and ease of use. The CD does not. (It might not even have a SMALL advantage, depending on the person and the circumstances)
While I am completely against the existance of the Dragonlance books, as I think they are cliched, idiotic GARBAGE...some of the worst attempts to ape (not imitate..APE) Tolkien EVER...I think they're the perfect example of the sort of book that (IMO) I THINK would be best sold this way. Something where you can put COMPLETE, SELF-CONTAINED stories online...and a lot of them, even...and still have a lot of other stuff which the readers would be interested in, but have to pay for to get.
Or how about back to LOTR, which has popped up a bit in this article...give away the Hobbit, but you have to pay for LOTR
"In its day CSIRAC was a marvel, but today any decent desktop computer can do more work in 30 seconds than CSIRAC did in its entire 15-year service."
If we take decent to mean any computer that can get about 20 FPS (that is to say, consistantly playable performance) in Half-Life, and this sentence to NOT mean a LOT more work...then this machine would get about 40 frames per year, or about.00000127 frames per second. Enough maybe to play against someone traveling near the speed of light, I guess.
It'd take a decade or more of argument in Alaska for anything like that to be agreed on. But it wouldn't be impossible. If the money could be found (that is to say, if oil prices remain high, and if the gas pipeline gets postponed longer than a rail expansion), it might get sold as a way to increase tourism on the Alaska Railroad, by expanding it's routes.
And if the russians would foot part of the cost (now THAT would be an unprecedented turnaround!) it would probably be an even easier sell. (Well, easier...not that it would ever be easy...alaskans can be rather contentious when it comes to cutting routes through wilderness areas)
Anyhow, you'd have to cover at least half the state without having any existing road right-of-ways that you could run alongside (that would probably be easier to swallow for the environmentalists). How about Canada? How well received would something like this be there?
There will be no public discussion of the monopolistic (as opposed to oligopolistic, which they've already got) power wielded by that beast of the apocolypse, because it will control all (save what, two? which will probably be owned by the same company by then, which would be unwilling to point out its own flaws in another entity, for fear of having the same thing done to it) mass-media outlets by which people could find out just how screwed up the situation is (at least, in numbers great enough to matter)
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, you only barely touched on the animation problem...
Look at most PS2 games, and they look scarcely any better than Playstation games, not because the models aren't better...they're WAY better (making higher-polygon, higher-detail models isn't as hard as you might think...making low-poly ones look good is.) Its the animation. The animation is as unrealistic as it was with lower-frame rate, lower-detail, less-realistic models, and it ends up looking just BAD with better looking graphics. Only a few games I've seen thus far really improve on the animation, and one of those was Gran Turismo 3 (so it really isn't much of an accomplishment)
the last time I used a floppy when I had a CHOICE, was when I lost about 4 days worth of work on an image I was creating in photoshop to a Prodigy floppy disk. (The disks I actually BOUGHT around that time are mostly still just fine. I think 1996 was the last year you could buy a decent floppy disk.)
I always tell people not to use them. When I see someone using a floppy for something important (or losing something important to a floppy), I show them how to use FTP (all students at my school have a few megs of space they can FTP to), and point out that if they do that with all their papers, they'll actually have multiple copies to fall back on.
:P
I've seen a few people lose things to zip disks, too...glorified floppies, those.
Anyhow, I do like the idea of these things. Get it down to 10 or 15 bucks, and no doubt they'll really take off. Especially as more manufacturers start putting USB ports on the FRONT of their machines
1 and a half HOURS?
Gee, you could have a race between your heart and your notebook, see which runs out of juice first.
One thing I like about all the other fancy media sources, and other bells and whistles and whatnot, is that I get to skip creating about a dozen different accounts that I'd have to do if the things I used were on different web sites.
It'd be nice if more mainstream web sites would take a cue from the porn industry and consolodate their logins via third-party services. Hell, if Yahoo wants something else to add to their swiss-army knife (it may not do anything particularly well, but boy does it do a lot of stuff), they could try that.
Google's recently-added directory is for the most part far superior to Yahoo's. Sure, the improvements in quality of actual search-engines (Especially Google :P) had already rendered Yahoo's directory less relevant than it used to be, and Google hasn't yet branched out into many, if any, of the other dozens of things Yahoo does, but they are going into territory that Yahoo might consider their own.
It generates lots and lots of heat, and that has to go somewhere. Also, isn't water vapor also a (unimportant) greenhouse gas?
Now here's something I wonder...how much does all the waste heat from our energy usage affect the climate...not just the things people do that alter how much heat we keep from the sun.
>>>They'd probably even make the argument that if a consumer wants unlimited viewing rights, he can stick with VHS.
Am I mixed up here, or didn't we actually hear this suggested in the DeCSS case? (By the judge)
Lube it up and the possibilities are greatly expanded.
What's the use of a robotic arm if all it can do is make more robotic arms? (Well, I suppose if it can make robotic arms that can do something besides replicate...)
At least americans with their analog phones aren't getting those "talking underwater" digital artifacts I've been getting on every other call with my digital phone in Japan.
something which doesn't require much processing power, but DOES require flexibility and low cost to succeed... Digital books, which we've been hearing about being right around the corner for frickin' ever (but are never good enough to really catch on) have been waiting for this sort of technology.
But seriously, if it can't run half-life, it ain't replacing my note book.
Couldn't non-compete agreements potentially deny microsoft contractors any former microsoft employees?
It could potentially give more business to Register.com, especially if they prominently link near the results of a search. Just about the same as a search engine (except more resources taken up.)
I've never made more than about 7000 dollars in a year (hey, I'm a student, and until now have always lived with my mother). Buy I was able to get a 1000 dollar limit without trying, and soon after was offered a 5000 dollar card with 9.99...then 7.99...then 5.99...FIXED. (I figured by 5.99 that I'd be a fool NOT to accept this offer...) Then the other card I had (with like a 16 percent rate) starts falling all over themselves to raise my limit. (Never used it again...the activation number never worked. Hey...if they screw up, I'm not going to go out of my way to give them their cut of all my CC purchases....that is to say, just about anything I buy over 20 bucks. In Alaska...EVERYWHERE takes credit cards.)
Anyhow...doesn't make a lot of sense. Except that I had a card on my MOTHER's account with another company for about 10 years (which I rarely used, and never carried a balance on). She is a credid card company's DREAM customer. She carries a balance, often a large one (went through some rough periods with large bills) but always pays more than the minimum payment.
So I think that they just see my name associated with this really juicy customer account, so I get good credit cards. (And ones which they get some fat fees from...I ALWAYS pay my tuition by credit card...since I've had TWO *MAJOR* clerical errors with my university's business and registrars offices.)
What gets me, though...is that I get a much better interest rate than my mother. Maybe it's because I never carry a balance, and they want to encourage me to? Regardless, she needs to start agitating for a better rate herself. I think she has 17.
Exactly. And a timeline-view, preferably with the ability to show different sections in the hierarchy alongside each other, would be nice, too.
An online book is MUCH more inconvenient compared to the hard copy than an MP3 is compared to CD. Hell, MP3s are often MORE convenient. An MP3, you can listen to while doing other things, even if you're stuck in front of your computer. An online book will demand much more of your attention, and require you to be in front of your computer. (I could deal with that, with a notebook, but I'd still prefer the hard copy...well, for novels...for reference books, I'd rather have it on my notebook.)
The paper book still has a huge advantage in convenience and ease of use. The CD does not. (It might not even have a SMALL advantage, depending on the person and the circumstances)
While I am completely against the existance of the Dragonlance books, as I think they are cliched, idiotic GARBAGE...some of the worst attempts to ape (not imitate..APE) Tolkien EVER...I think they're the perfect example of the sort of book that (IMO) I THINK would be best sold this way. Something where you can put COMPLETE, SELF-CONTAINED stories online...and a lot of them, even...and still have a lot of other stuff which the readers would be interested in, but have to pay for to get.
Or how about back to LOTR, which has popped up a bit in this article...give away the Hobbit, but you have to pay for LOTR
I'm afraid it doesn't.
I don't think I'd care for that unless the vertical (horizontal when turned portrait) resolution were 1024.
that isn't saying much.
"In its day CSIRAC was a marvel, but today any decent desktop computer can do more work in 30 seconds than CSIRAC did in its entire 15-year service."
If we take decent to mean any computer that can get about 20 FPS (that is to say, consistantly playable performance) in Half-Life, and this sentence to NOT mean a LOT more work...then this machine would get about 40 frames per year, or about .00000127 frames per second. Enough maybe to play against someone traveling near the speed of light, I guess.
It'd take a decade or more of argument in Alaska for anything like that to be agreed on. But it wouldn't be impossible. If the money could be found (that is to say, if oil prices remain high, and if the gas pipeline gets postponed longer than a rail expansion), it might get sold as a way to increase tourism on the Alaska Railroad, by expanding it's routes. And if the russians would foot part of the cost (now THAT would be an unprecedented turnaround!) it would probably be an even easier sell. (Well, easier...not that it would ever be easy...alaskans can be rather contentious when it comes to cutting routes through wilderness areas) Anyhow, you'd have to cover at least half the state without having any existing road right-of-ways that you could run alongside (that would probably be easier to swallow for the environmentalists). How about Canada? How well received would something like this be there?
Use trucks and busses. Or don't send passengers through it.
There will be no public discussion of the monopolistic (as opposed to oligopolistic, which they've already got) power wielded by that beast of the apocolypse, because it will control all (save what, two? which will probably be owned by the same company by then, which would be unwilling to point out its own flaws in another entity, for fear of having the same thing done to it) mass-media outlets by which people could find out just how screwed up the situation is (at least, in numbers great enough to matter)
Well, not in the US, anyhow.