I wouldn't be so sure about the state of security being what they imply in this article. You never know if the author's just trying to bait a trap for the CIA. For all we know, the reason this story is even out there is to try and trick some Osama-friendly spy into giving stealing something from this base a shot.:)
I mean, do you really think there aren't any guards on that base that have real weapons?
If you had a TV, I'd recommend you check out The Daily Show. Its informative, insightful, and funny. Although, yes, it is kind of a news show....So I take it you're not a Buffy fan?:)
So if you send an email, you have to put a penny on the line. If it gets through, and the person on the other end doesn't think it's spam, then you get your penny back.
This is an interesting idea.. I just don't see how its any better than forced verification of the originating addresses on an incoming email, though.
I mean, I can see how this could get expensive for the type of people who forward around those annoying chain emails, or jokes or what have you. Undoubtedly, they'd cut it out after realizing that people aren't reimbursing them for their email. But for the spammers at large..
See, the thing is, you're putting the responsibility for this back on the users. If I get an email, I'm either going to have to manually reimburse them, or manually not reimburse them. The onus is still on the end user.
Sure, they might be investigating Turing-test checks for spam, and the like, and yes, there is Bayesian filtering now too. But this is all still going to have to be there to automate the process, even with this transaction system.
I would've hoped that, by now, we'd be looking at ways to move this onto the system, in the form of proper verification or something, so we the users don't have to deal with it as much. (To those of you talking about having to upgrade all of our infastructure to handle verification, should the protocol change, what makes you think we wouldn't have to if a transaction pay-per-email system comes into place?)
The other problem I see is that these spammers might just not care about the cost. I mean, c'mon, a penny an email? That's still cheaper than a snail-mail ad.
What about if the singer's just lipsyncing? For instance, someone like Britney Spears... Wouldn't that be, like, same thing as the studio session, and therefor not duplicable without the studio's consent?
Also, do they still have to pay royalties to the songwriter for the CD? I mean, technically, they've already paid royalties to perform the song in public, and these are the exact same people who listened to it at the concert, so do they have to pay another royalty for the recorded version as well?
Re:Want to sell this POS game?
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
lol. You know, having read the way they designed the original game in one of the issues of Game Developer, I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible--maybe even easy--to hack an object like that into the game. (You'd probably have to make sure all other players had the object installed, though.)
I know it'd be pretty simple to do it for the offline version... but then again, that's not quite as fun, now, is it?:)
Re:This is a Classic EA ploy.
on
Sim-Dud?
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· Score: 1
I dunno.. personally, I think it's kind of nice for them to put a best before date on their product, even though it isn't required by law.;)
One last thing: Japanese pop culture has a lot of violence, sex, and sex and violence co-mingled. However, Japanese civil culture is perhaps one of the least violent the world has ever known. Investigate the homicide rate in Japan, then compare it to the US and Europe. Then get back to me.
I used to think this too, but lately I tend to raise an eyebrow a little when I see this mentioned. True, you don't see violent crime as much as you do in the states, but at the same time, look at the suicide rate. Just because you don't have the results you do in the US with people exploding doesn't mean that it isn't eating away at something in the minds of these people and causing them to implode.
Yes, guns are a huge part of the equation too (I see you link Bowling for Columbine) but I think that's partially because of this polarization difference between the west and the east. The west is very much about the individual over the whole; the east is very much about the whole over the individual. So while North America has names like Oprah, Regis, J-lo, etc., Japan has Sony, Pioneer, etc.
Further to that, if you look at the family unit in the east, the family is more important than it's members. In the west, it's the individual members who are more important. So if something goes wrong in an eastern family, there's a greater pressure to conform, while in the west, there's a greater pressure towards ensuring all parts excel independantly.
I see guns more as a manifestation of this independance; I don't need the rest of my family to come to bat for me, because I can go out and buy a gun. Instead of strength in numbers, there becomes strength in one, and thus guns are not the cause of the problem, but rather a byproduct of it.
Add to that fact that Markoff refuses, as Mitnick points out, to acknowledge a prior relationship with him. So any talk he had with Mitnick concerning the purchase of rights to his story has somehow been 'forgotten' by Markoff. Mitnick would somehow have to convince a jury that:
(a) he is credible, and his word should be believed--that is, that they did have a prior working relationship. (Uhhh.. not gonna happen.) Or,
(b) the two did talk at some point in the past, and in some traceable manner. If it was by telephone, then he'd have to get ahold of the phone records.. quite possibly destroyed by now. Or, find the emails sent back and forth.. no doubt impounded as evidence by the DoJ. Considering the attitudes of the arrogant pricks at the DoJ, what do you think his chances are of getting those back?
I think he's taking the high road. Really, the best thing he could do to get back at them at this point would be to.. well.. write his own book and outsell Markoff.:) But even that would be a bit risky right now.
Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but as a convicted criminal, isn't he not allowed to benefit monetarily from his crimes? So even if he did manage to sue Markoff, the gov't would get the money, not him. And I have such contempt for the US gov't right now that I would bet all of it would go directly to the DoJ.
Come to think of it, they'd probably take any money he'd make off a book deal, too..... *sigh*... I hate water monopolies.....
I agree on the romulans count. That had me going "Whaa..?"
The Romulans are the Federation's foil, and they're supposed to be all cloak-and-dagger. To then turn around and expose them for all the world to see.. what was he thinking?! (And incidentally, where were the rest of the romulan ships!?!? We've got a Federation/Romulan war with only two Romulan ships encountered, ever!?!?)
Did anyone else think the Remans looked like orc rejects from LotR? What, so now an enemy has to be ugly in order for them to pose a threat to the Federation?
Incidentally, I'm still confused as to how they're able to press any of those buttons with those huge-ass fingernails..
It didn't matter how good they made it; thanks to the string of bad movies before it, the characters had completely lost credibility by the time they got to Nemesis.
See, the big thing about the Next Generation series is that a lot of people really felt for the characters. They all had their own individual battles or things that made things difficult for them, even though this was supposed to be a utopian future. The ones that come to mind immediately are Data, who struggled to be human, and Geordi, who had no natural vision. And Picard, of course, with the Borg. (And his other little quirks..)
So instead of seeing some real character development over those first few movies, with each of them struggling with their impediments or against them, and triumphing over them, which is what being a hero's all about, we see them getting them handed to them deus ex machina. LaForge--bam--has these newfangled eyes. Data--bam--emotion chip got fixed. Picard... is a special case; I'll get to him in a minute.
Data, they should've done the following; stretched out the problems he had with his emotion chip. We see him responding poorly to it when he first gets it, but very quickly he overcomes this--and here's the kicker--in such a way that the audience never actually sees him overcome it. We, the audience, don't get to see this happen, and thus, we aren't able to really root for him. He has many minor struggles, but we never really see the big one, as it were.
So when Data dies in Nemesis, he's no longer the same entity we know and love; we can't even tell what emotions he's feeling in a lot of those scenes where he finds B4, because we feel no empathy for this feeling Data. To the audience, he's totally different. So when he goes bye-bye, we feel a sense of loss, but not because Data overcame all and gave of himself, but because the writers took our Data from us, and never let us get to know him before kicking him out the airlock.
LaForge, I don't really know what to say.. there just should've been more to his ocular upgrade. It just happens too quickly, and without cost.:(
Worf---What the heck is he doing there!?!? The fact that he's there, doing the same old job, just screams TV episode to everyone in the audience. Especially after all that he went through in DS9, regaining the respect of his fellow Klingons... to treat him like the Worf from TNG is just unacceptable.
Finally, the biggie; Picard. He's the one character that you've admired through the whole series. You sympathized with his problems with talking to kids. (Because he had to tell Wesley his father was dead.) You respected him because he was the voice of reason in times of war, conflict, strife. He's been the source of nobility in times of uncertainty. And you sympathized with him when he personally experienced what it was like to have his humanity ripped away from him by the Borg, and cried with him as he struggled to regain something of that humanity from his brother.
Then the movies started.
Generations started off the work on him by throwing him into the Nexus, and having him meet up with Kirk for some good 'ole fashuned cowboy-style fun. Okay... so it's his first movie in this role... but still, they managed to completely ruin the Guinan/Picard dynamic, and kill off his family. The former wrecked a very delicate and interesting relationship between the two; the latter destroyed something about the nobility of the man--from here-on he's lost something of his humanity, of his nobility, that his brother was providing him. Now, he just fights for the federation; his links to the average man have been severed, and he's now just another member of the military arm of the federation. This is a sad turn of events.
Next comes First Contact. One word; borg queen. Whaaaaaa...?? Okay, if it, like, explained something about why the borg were doing what they were doing, or gave us some better piece of the bigger puzzle, then okay. Instead, she's just the new voice for the borg, who has the hots for Picard. (Huh???) And Data. (Double huh????) Other than that and the fact that it's a time travel plot, though, it was the most credible of all the movies.
Then came Insurrection, and Picard's been reduced yet again. Now he's off on some planet playing hokey mind-magic... I think everyone's starting to suspect by now that Picard's really off his rocker. First his family's gone, then this borg queen shows up again, and now this mind-magic fountain of youth crap he's playing with some old hag....!?!? It's just ludicrous..! Remember how he cried after Best of Both Worlds? That's what we needed to see; him struggling with what he's lost, and trying to build on what he's gained, and instead we get.. this?!?
Why Nemesis failed is because Picard was no longer the emotionally strong man he was in the series--and yet they pretend he still is. They've torn away at what makes him tick so much that to have him act like none of this ever happened--or that he came to grips with it all while we weren't looking, and hey, no biggie, nothing changed as a result--is just insulting the audience.
So when you see Picard saying crap throw-away lines that use the words "unsafe velocities" or you see him laughing like a crazy man on the desert planet, so at ease with himself that it's beyond belief, you just can't help but realize that this isn't the same man from the series, or even the movies. This is someone completely different, who has more in common with someone like Storm from X-Men. ("Know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightening?") And that just plain sucks.
I'm not even going to bother going into Riker, Troi, Crusher, or anyone else at this point because they haven't been the focus for any of these movies anyways. The problem with the movies for TNG has been that they've just destroyed the characters we've cared about too completely.. and any time they spend on any of the other characters would certainly finish the rest of 'em off.
Speaking of DVD extras, I've always wondered... do they put extras on porn DVDs? I don't buy 'em, so I was wondering if someone in the know would weigh in....
(I mean, really, what are they gonna do; interview the fluffers? Makeup artists? Emergency plastic surgeons who get called when an implant leaks?)
Dreamcast doesn't count; while DivX does build for it, it's not especially high frame rate (~2-3 fps) unless you specially encode the content for it. There are a few people working on XBox projects, though, so..
If you buy now, get the Ati 9700 instead. Between the Geforce4 Ti4200 and it, it's overall the better card. You'd probably be doing just as well if you got a 9500 instead..
The GeForce FX is going to be expensive when it comes out anyways. If you're going to buy now, you may as well get the top of the line one out there. I'll bet you anything that getting an Ati 9700 today will be... well, it's going to be at least the same price as the GeForce FX will be a few months from now.
Don't expect the GeForce FX price to fall quickly, either; it's been in development for too long. If they're to recoup all their development money, they're going to need to keep it at introductory pricing a lot longer than they usually do. (Don't expect ATi's competition to make much of a dent in the NVidia part's price, either; there are so many NVidia fanboys out there that'll buy it regardless, it simply won't make sense to them to drop to compete for at least a quarter or two.)
Having read a lot of stuff on emergence lately, I'm kind of in the mindset of considering nations as their own organisms too. And this "bully" idea is a bad thing. As is the current "policeman" idea.
The US should not be the world's policeman; that's what the UN is for. The US should instead be the world's more knowledgeable older sister. They should be behaving as such; talking with these nations, trying to help them along.
People make mistakes, and so do nations; corporal punishment's on the decrease domestically, so why should it remain such a fervant part of the US's foreign policy?
Um.. by now, I think it's expected that the movies screw up the series continuity. Remember the borg queen who was "always there" in the flashbacks, but not in Best of Both Worlds? Data's emotion chip that was "damaged beyond repair" and then suddenly salvageable? Scotty thinking Kirk was still alive when he was rescued by the Enterprise D, even though Kirk gets dead good? Yeaahh.....
For those of you who didn't see it before, the reviews for this product used to include several from parents complaining about the.. um.. gyrating nature of the broom in very.. creative.. ways.
Another strike against targetted advertising; gender bias. Guys would automatically get video game and jock itch commercials, and gals would get beauty product and tampon commercials.
I know several gals who'd sign up as guys just to avoid those tampon commercials.. and I know several guys who'd sign up as gals just so they could watch the girls prancing around saying "You're worth it!" in their underwear.
R9000 is a DirectX 8.1 part. XP4 is a DirectX 9.0 part.
To execute 9.0 pixel shaders, the R9000 would have to render everything in software. Likewise, to execute 9.0 vertex shaders coupled with 8.1 pixel shaders, the R9000 would still have to calculate the vertex shaders in software. This is slow, and not always supported. (Some games don't work with software vertex shaders.) So this isn't a good comparison at all.
If you do, then I commend you for it. It's people like you who make this world a better place.
I respect the arts. I just felt obligated to put it into perspective, that's all. $1,000,000 is an awful lot of money, and the first thing that came to mind is that an amount like that could feed a fair number of mouths. (It may have had something to do with my just having listened to the evening news.)
And while you're donating $800,000 so a bunch of guys 'n gals can run around in rubber and vinyl while stuff blows up around them, why not donate a few bucks to charity so a few kids can eat for a year?
No, seriously.. you'll feel better about yourself.:)
The article you point to was all about how AMD is interested in branching out. It's no longer their key business, is what they're saying; I wouldn't surprised if they're looking at going up against Motorola, which tends to have it's chips in pretty much everything.
In other words, that article was mostly an appeal for new corporate partners.
As usual, the Slashdot employee got it wrong; timothy, in this case. Funny.. I don't remember seeing him screw up before.
Anyone want to make a scorecard site of some sort for these kinds of things? I think it'd be kinda amusing to keep track of how many times each of the respective Slashdot editors over-exaggerate an article's content. Or, at the very least, it might embarrass them into enforcing some stricter quality control.. (although if last week's two dupe-posts couldn't do it..... or was it three?..)
Mod me down if you must, but I did answer the question.:P
Put the old floppy drive or a stick of ram from the old machine into the new one. Install your copy on the "same upgraded" machine. Remove the floppy/stick of ram to "complete" the upgrade.
Tada. Legal carry-over of licence to the.. uh.. same machine.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be so sure about the state of security being what they imply in this article. You never know if the author's just trying to bait a trap for the CIA. For all we know, the reason this story is even out there is to try and trick some Osama-friendly spy into giving stealing something from this base a shot. :)
I mean, do you really think there aren't any guards on that base that have real weapons?
No offense, dude, but I don't think I'd sell many tickets to an evening of me coding perl scripts..
If you had a TV, I'd recommend you check out The Daily Show. Its informative, insightful, and funny. Although, yes, it is kind of a news show.. ..So I take it you're not a Buffy fan? :)
So if you send an email, you have to put a penny on the line. If it gets through, and the person on the other end doesn't think it's spam, then you get your penny back.
This is an interesting idea.. I just don't see how its any better than forced verification of the originating addresses on an incoming email, though.
I mean, I can see how this could get expensive for the type of people who forward around those annoying chain emails, or jokes or what have you. Undoubtedly, they'd cut it out after realizing that people aren't reimbursing them for their email. But for the spammers at large..
See, the thing is, you're putting the responsibility for this back on the users. If I get an email, I'm either going to have to manually reimburse them, or manually not reimburse them. The onus is still on the end user.
Sure, they might be investigating Turing-test checks for spam, and the like, and yes, there is Bayesian filtering now too. But this is all still going to have to be there to automate the process, even with this transaction system.
I would've hoped that, by now, we'd be looking at ways to move this onto the system, in the form of proper verification or something, so we the users don't have to deal with it as much. (To those of you talking about having to upgrade all of our infastructure to handle verification, should the protocol change, what makes you think we wouldn't have to if a transaction pay-per-email system comes into place?)
The other problem I see is that these spammers might just not care about the cost. I mean, c'mon, a penny an email? That's still cheaper than a snail-mail ad.
What about if the singer's just lipsyncing? For instance, someone like Britney Spears... Wouldn't that be, like, same thing as the studio session, and therefor not duplicable without the studio's consent?
Also, do they still have to pay royalties to the songwriter for the CD? I mean, technically, they've already paid royalties to perform the song in public, and these are the exact same people who listened to it at the concert, so do they have to pay another royalty for the recorded version as well?
lol. You know, having read the way they designed the original game in one of the issues of Game Developer, I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible--maybe even easy--to hack an object like that into the game. (You'd probably have to make sure all other players had the object installed, though.)
:)
I know it'd be pretty simple to do it for the offline version... but then again, that's not quite as fun, now, is it?
I dunno.. personally, I think it's kind of nice for them to put a best before date on their product, even though it isn't required by law. ;)
One last thing: Japanese pop culture has a lot of violence, sex, and sex and violence co-mingled. However, Japanese civil culture is perhaps one of the least violent the world has ever known. Investigate the homicide rate in Japan, then compare it to the US and Europe. Then get back to me.
I used to think this too, but lately I tend to raise an eyebrow a little when I see this mentioned. True, you don't see violent crime as much as you do in the states, but at the same time, look at the suicide rate. Just because you don't have the results you do in the US with people exploding doesn't mean that it isn't eating away at something in the minds of these people and causing them to implode.
Yes, guns are a huge part of the equation too (I see you link Bowling for Columbine) but I think that's partially because of this polarization difference between the west and the east. The west is very much about the individual over the whole; the east is very much about the whole over the individual. So while North America has names like Oprah, Regis, J-lo, etc., Japan has Sony, Pioneer, etc.
Further to that, if you look at the family unit in the east, the family is more important than it's members. In the west, it's the individual members who are more important. So if something goes wrong in an eastern family, there's a greater pressure to conform, while in the west, there's a greater pressure towards ensuring all parts excel independantly.
I see guns more as a manifestation of this independance; I don't need the rest of my family to come to bat for me, because I can go out and buy a gun. Instead of strength in numbers, there becomes strength in one, and thus guns are not the cause of the problem, but rather a byproduct of it.
Add to that fact that Markoff refuses, as Mitnick points out, to acknowledge a prior relationship with him. So any talk he had with Mitnick concerning the purchase of rights to his story has somehow been 'forgotten' by Markoff. Mitnick would somehow have to convince a jury that:
:) But even that would be a bit risky right now.
.... *sigh*... I hate water monopolies.....
(a) he is credible, and his word should be believed--that is, that they did have a prior working relationship. (Uhhh.. not gonna happen.) Or,
(b) the two did talk at some point in the past, and in some traceable manner. If it was by telephone, then he'd have to get ahold of the phone records.. quite possibly destroyed by now. Or, find the emails sent back and forth.. no doubt impounded as evidence by the DoJ. Considering the attitudes of the arrogant pricks at the DoJ, what do you think his chances are of getting those back?
I think he's taking the high road. Really, the best thing he could do to get back at them at this point would be to.. well.. write his own book and outsell Markoff.
Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but as a convicted criminal, isn't he not allowed to benefit monetarily from his crimes? So even if he did manage to sue Markoff, the gov't would get the money, not him. And I have such contempt for the US gov't right now that I would bet all of it would go directly to the DoJ.
Come to think of it, they'd probably take any money he'd make off a book deal, too.
With respect to point 3, it didn't help that they said the same thing about the last episode of the series, which sucked..
I agree on the romulans count. That had me going "Whaa..?"
The Romulans are the Federation's foil, and they're supposed to be all cloak-and-dagger. To then turn around and expose them for all the world to see.. what was he thinking?! (And incidentally, where were the rest of the romulan ships!?!? We've got a Federation/Romulan war with only two Romulan ships encountered, ever!?!?)
Did anyone else think the Remans looked like orc rejects from LotR? What, so now an enemy has to be ugly in order for them to pose a threat to the Federation?
Incidentally, I'm still confused as to how they're able to press any of those buttons with those huge-ass fingernails..
It didn't matter how good they made it; thanks to the string of bad movies before it, the characters had completely lost credibility by the time they got to Nemesis.
:(
See, the big thing about the Next Generation series is that a lot of people really felt for the characters. They all had their own individual battles or things that made things difficult for them, even though this was supposed to be a utopian future. The ones that come to mind immediately are Data, who struggled to be human, and Geordi, who had no natural vision. And Picard, of course, with the Borg. (And his other little quirks..)
So instead of seeing some real character development over those first few movies, with each of them struggling with their impediments or against them, and triumphing over them, which is what being a hero's all about, we see them getting them handed to them deus ex machina. LaForge--bam--has these newfangled eyes. Data--bam--emotion chip got fixed. Picard... is a special case; I'll get to him in a minute.
Data, they should've done the following; stretched out the problems he had with his emotion chip. We see him responding poorly to it when he first gets it, but very quickly he overcomes this--and here's the kicker--in such a way that the audience never actually sees him overcome it. We, the audience, don't get to see this happen, and thus, we aren't able to really root for him. He has many minor struggles, but we never really see the big one, as it were.
So when Data dies in Nemesis, he's no longer the same entity we know and love; we can't even tell what emotions he's feeling in a lot of those scenes where he finds B4, because we feel no empathy for this feeling Data. To the audience, he's totally different. So when he goes bye-bye, we feel a sense of loss, but not because Data overcame all and gave of himself, but because the writers took our Data from us, and never let us get to know him before kicking him out the airlock.
LaForge, I don't really know what to say.. there just should've been more to his ocular upgrade. It just happens too quickly, and without cost.
Worf---What the heck is he doing there!?!? The fact that he's there, doing the same old job, just screams TV episode to everyone in the audience. Especially after all that he went through in DS9, regaining the respect of his fellow Klingons... to treat him like the Worf from TNG is just unacceptable.
Finally, the biggie; Picard. He's the one character that you've admired through the whole series. You sympathized with his problems with talking to kids. (Because he had to tell Wesley his father was dead.) You respected him because he was the voice of reason in times of war, conflict, strife. He's been the source of nobility in times of uncertainty. And you sympathized with him when he personally experienced what it was like to have his humanity ripped away from him by the Borg, and cried with him as he struggled to regain something of that humanity from his brother.
Then the movies started.
Generations started off the work on him by throwing him into the Nexus, and having him meet up with Kirk for some good 'ole fashuned cowboy-style fun. Okay... so it's his first movie in this role... but still, they managed to completely ruin the Guinan/Picard dynamic, and kill off his family. The former wrecked a very delicate and interesting relationship between the two; the latter destroyed something about the nobility of the man--from here-on he's lost something of his humanity, of his nobility, that his brother was providing him. Now, he just fights for the federation; his links to the average man have been severed, and he's now just another member of the military arm of the federation. This is a sad turn of events.
Next comes First Contact. One word; borg queen. Whaaaaaa...?? Okay, if it, like, explained something about why the borg were doing what they were doing, or gave us some better piece of the bigger puzzle, then okay. Instead, she's just the new voice for the borg, who has the hots for Picard. (Huh???) And Data. (Double huh????) Other than that and the fact that it's a time travel plot, though, it was the most credible of all the movies.
Then came Insurrection, and Picard's been reduced yet again. Now he's off on some planet playing hokey mind-magic... I think everyone's starting to suspect by now that Picard's really off his rocker. First his family's gone, then this borg queen shows up again, and now this mind-magic fountain of youth crap he's playing with some old hag....!?!? It's just ludicrous..! Remember how he cried after Best of Both Worlds? That's what we needed to see; him struggling with what he's lost, and trying to build on what he's gained, and instead we get.. this?!?
Why Nemesis failed is because Picard was no longer the emotionally strong man he was in the series--and yet they pretend he still is. They've torn away at what makes him tick so much that to have him act like none of this ever happened--or that he came to grips with it all while we weren't looking, and hey, no biggie, nothing changed as a result--is just insulting the audience.
So when you see Picard saying crap throw-away lines that use the words "unsafe velocities" or you see him laughing like a crazy man on the desert planet, so at ease with himself that it's beyond belief, you just can't help but realize that this isn't the same man from the series, or even the movies. This is someone completely different, who has more in common with someone like Storm from X-Men. ("Know what happens when a toad gets hit by lightening?") And that just plain sucks.
I'm not even going to bother going into Riker, Troi, Crusher, or anyone else at this point because they haven't been the focus for any of these movies anyways. The problem with the movies for TNG has been that they've just destroyed the characters we've cared about too completely.. and any time they spend on any of the other characters would certainly finish the rest of 'em off.
Berman, I hope you're reading this..
Speaking of DVD extras, I've always wondered... do they put extras on porn DVDs? I don't buy 'em, so I was wondering if someone in the know would weigh in....
(I mean, really, what are they gonna do; interview the fluffers? Makeup artists? Emergency plastic surgeons who get called when an implant leaks?)
Dreamcast doesn't count; while DivX does build for it, it's not especially high frame rate (~2-3 fps) unless you specially encode the content for it. There are a few people working on XBox projects, though, so..
If you buy now, get the Ati 9700 instead. Between the Geforce4 Ti4200 and it, it's overall the better card. You'd probably be doing just as well if you got a 9500 instead..
... well, it's going to be at least the same price as the GeForce FX will be a few months from now.
The GeForce FX is going to be expensive when it comes out anyways. If you're going to buy now, you may as well get the top of the line one out there. I'll bet you anything that getting an Ati 9700 today will be
Don't expect the GeForce FX price to fall quickly, either; it's been in development for too long. If they're to recoup all their development money, they're going to need to keep it at introductory pricing a lot longer than they usually do. (Don't expect ATi's competition to make much of a dent in the NVidia part's price, either; there are so many NVidia fanboys out there that'll buy it regardless, it simply won't make sense to them to drop to compete for at least a quarter or two.)
Having read a lot of stuff on emergence lately, I'm kind of in the mindset of considering nations as their own organisms too. And this "bully" idea is a bad thing. As is the current "policeman" idea.
The US should not be the world's policeman; that's what the UN is for. The US should instead be the world's more knowledgeable older sister. They should be behaving as such; talking with these nations, trying to help them along.
People make mistakes, and so do nations; corporal punishment's on the decrease domestically, so why should it remain such a fervant part of the US's foreign policy?
Um.. by now, I think it's expected that the movies screw up the series continuity. Remember the borg queen who was "always there" in the flashbacks, but not in Best of Both Worlds? Data's emotion chip that was "damaged beyond repair" and then suddenly salvageable? Scotty thinking Kirk was still alive when he was rescued by the Enterprise D, even though Kirk gets dead good? Yeaahh.....
Sorry, bud, they took down the "good" reviews. :)
For those of you who didn't see it before, the reviews for this product used to include several from parents complaining about the.. um.. gyrating nature of the broom in very.. creative.. ways.
Another strike against targetted advertising; gender bias. Guys would automatically get video game and jock itch commercials, and gals would get beauty product and tampon commercials.
I know several gals who'd sign up as guys just to avoid those tampon commercials.. and I know several guys who'd sign up as gals just so they could watch the girls prancing around saying "You're worth it!" in their underwear.
R9000 is a DirectX 8.1 part. XP4 is a DirectX 9.0 part.
To execute 9.0 pixel shaders, the R9000 would have to render everything in software. Likewise, to execute 9.0 vertex shaders coupled with 8.1 pixel shaders, the R9000 would still have to calculate the vertex shaders in software. This is slow, and not always supported. (Some games don't work with software vertex shaders.) So this isn't a good comparison at all.
If you do, then I commend you for it. It's people like you who make this world a better place.
I respect the arts. I just felt obligated to put it into perspective, that's all. $1,000,000 is an awful lot of money, and the first thing that came to mind is that an amount like that could feed a fair number of mouths. (It may have had something to do with my just having listened to the evening news.)
I apologize if I came across as heavy-handed.
And while you're donating $800,000 so a bunch of guys 'n gals can run around in rubber and vinyl while stuff blows up around them, why not donate a few bucks to charity so a few kids can eat for a year?
:)
No, seriously.. you'll feel better about yourself.
The article you point to was all about how AMD is interested in branching out. It's no longer their key business, is what they're saying; I wouldn't surprised if they're looking at going up against Motorola, which tends to have it's chips in pretty much everything.
... or was it three?..)
:P
In other words, that article was mostly an appeal for new corporate partners.
As usual, the Slashdot employee got it wrong; timothy, in this case. Funny.. I don't remember seeing him screw up before.
Anyone want to make a scorecard site of some sort for these kinds of things? I think it'd be kinda amusing to keep track of how many times each of the respective Slashdot editors over-exaggerate an article's content. Or, at the very least, it might embarrass them into enforcing some stricter quality control.. (although if last week's two dupe-posts couldn't do it..
Mod me down if you must, but I did answer the question.
Put the old floppy drive or a stick of ram from the old machine into the new one. Install your copy on the "same upgraded" machine. Remove the floppy/stick of ram to "complete" the upgrade.
;)
Tada. Legal carry-over of licence to the.. uh.. same machine.
IANAL.. blah blah blah..
How can you agree to binding another party to do something, by simply agreeing to an agreement of your own writing ?
;)
I say they agreed by way of providing him with the binary files.