If this thing doesn't do component video output and preferably progressive scan video, then it's not worth the price. I already have a stand-alone DVD player that does DD5.1, DTS, and all of the lesser Dolby types, progressive scan video, etc. And it has a cool blue LED. I already have several DVD-ROMs in my PCs, and I have a CD-R (bah, who needs CD-RW?). In other words, this thing is pretty useless, because the people that would be buying it likely already have all of the functionality it can provide and more.
You're not going to see Joe Sixpack picking this thing up at the store for $300, because he can get a decent DVD player for half of that, and he doesn't have a computer with USB2.0 anyway. You're not going to see the technically savvy pick this up either, because they already have the separate components this thing replaces. No, this is going to appeal to the "toy" market (which is not a bad thing, and in fact they could get away with charging much more than $300, but it's really not going to go anywhere mainstream).
Haven't you guys been paying attention? Modifying your XBox means no XBox Live for you (okay, sure, you can hack around and change your serial and/or MAC, but don't expect that to work for long, especially once it starts screwing legitimate owners and Microsoft has to really step up). It's like the past week or so of XBox news is just thrown out the window with this article.
Okay, so you're asking, why would you want to play XBox Live if your whole reason for buying a modified XBox is for this media stuff? Ask the guys that are currently bitching and moaning about their modified XBox. Sure, many of them likely modified their XBoxes to be able to play pirated games (and fewer to play imports), but I'd bet a large chunk modified their XBoxes so that they could geek out and install Linux. In any case, if modders didn't care about not playing XBox Live, then there'd never be any major stories about modders complaining, so it seems obvious that modders want to play XBox Live. And they can't.
My hope is that this is just the first phase of many, and that ultimately a larger system (and one not subject to traffic jams because it doesn't run at grade level) *would* ultimately get people out of their cars.
You'll get my combustion engine when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Mmm... 2.7L flat six... dr00l.
It's going to be interesting to see how you're going to pay for those roads, since the new gas tax was denied and the car fees were reduced... it's fine to have a taxpayer revolt as long as people are realistic about what they want to pay for.
That referrendum failed because it was a bad referrendum (for my vote, I never could get an official number on the tax amount, nor could I find a length limit on the tax -- since it was designed for a specific set of imporvements, it should exist for a specific amount of time). If the lawmakers would go back to the drawing board and come up with a realistic plan, I'm sure they'd have no trouble getting it passed. You've got to wonder about a referrendum that failed in a state full of hippies, liberals, and feminazis. Even they apparently had issues with it.
(d) WA doesn't have an income tax, so the brunt of payment is falling on non-new car owning citizens (new cars aren't taxed), and disproportionately on the poor.
New cars aren't taxed in Washington? GOD DAMMIT! I want my $5500 back!
A kick ass game (just got it today), and it will be using this feature too.
No, the article is about a way to play GBA games on your NGC sans GBA. Metroid Prime uses the link cable with the GBA to do two things -- beat Metroid Prime and link to Metroid Fusion, and you can play the game using Samus' new Fusion suit. Beat Metroid Fusion and link the two, and you can play the original Metroid on the GameCube. (I may have those reversed on what you have to do to get each, but those are the two things you get.) Since you need to have the Prime disk in the NGC to access these features, and you have to use an emulator disk with this peripheral, I don't believe you're going to be able to connect the NGC back to itself via the GBA link cable. It'd be kinda sweet if you could, but that would mean the peripheral itself would just be a GBA that sits under the cube and hooks into the cube's A/V outputs, which it's not.
I find it just as funny as User Friendly (link deleted to save the innocent) but with better cartooning.
Nice subtle troll. You really don't think User Friendly is funny, do you? Then again, I don't read Angst Technology, so I can't say whether or not your comparison is correct. If it is, then double kudos for your troll, by pimping another terrible comic.
To quote Tycho of Penny Arcade, "People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day." I think that sums up User Friendly quite adequately.
Well, did you see any signs when Microsoft started a browser war against the de facto standard Netscape browser back in the old days? I mean, who would have believed back then that Microsoft would be able to beat Netscape in browser war?
Doesn't matter. You can't sue for something someone might do. I might get drunk and kill your daughter in a drunk driving incident, but until I do so, you cannot sue me. I might slander you, or steal your wife, or do any of a number of things that would be grounds for a lawsuit, but until I actually do them, you cannot sue me. Same goes for Microsoft. Just because they might get a monopoly in the mobile market doesn't mean the EU has the right to preemptively sue them (never mind the fact that having a monopoly in and of itself is not a bad thing at all, only abusing it is).
Then again, let the EU try. They'll lose, because they can't prove Microsoft has done anything wrong at this point.
Okay, so I realize that Slashback is the place to follow up on stories, but what's the follow-up on the Tivo story? How is this any different from the last story posted on this topic? Okay, so there's a press release now, but in typical press release fashion it doesn't tell us anything more than we already knew.
If the editors can't keep from reposting stories even in Slashback, they have real problems.
Windows XP (Pro) is the followup to Windows 2000 Workstation.
Just to nitpick your nitpick, there never was a Windows 2000 "Workstation". That was Windows 2000 Pro, the successor to NT4 Workstation, the last of the Windows line to use the "Workstation" moniker.
Oh, yeah, and to be even more picky, you should say "Windows.NET Server family" and "Windows 2000 Server family", otherwise you'll be ignoring Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Data Center, as well as the various versions.NET Server will have.
Officially, sure. But most people that go there shorten it to "Whistler" (had they called it "Blackcomb-Whistler", I'm sure it would be shortened to "Blackcomb" instead). That's why I said "normally", and not "officially".
Get your pacific northwest ski resorts straight and life becomes a lot easier.:)
Longhorn is not a ski resort. It's the bar between Whistler mountain and Blackcomb mountain at the Whistler ski resort, which means not only do you have to be familiar with your ski resorts (though Whistler and Blackcomb together are normally just called "Whistler" for the resort name), you also have to have been there. Otherwise, you'd never know what Longhorn is. Or at least what it's referencing here, since Longhorn can mean other things, of course.
Windows XP is Cairo. (get it, Cairo? Chi + Rho == XP)
No, Windows XP was Whistler..NET Server is also Whistler, because they're the same code base (like Windows 2000 Pro vs. Windows 2000 Server).
I'm a CS student with very limited experience with both OpenGL/DirectX, but does the fact that OpenGL's association with C and DirectX's with C++ affect some developers' support for that library?
It shouldn't make any difference. Since C++ is a superset of C, you can use OpenGL just fine with it (and if you can't find one of the 092384092389 C++ wrappers for OpenGL out there, you can always wrap it up yourself). At the same time, COM has always been available to C code as well as C++ code, so you can use DX in C as well (it's just very ugly). In either case, I don't think the native language of the library should make a difference -- COM is supported by many languages (some requiring that the COM object support the IDispatch automation interface, but I believe DX already does that, and if it doesn't you can wrap that yourself or find bindings that somebody has already done), and thus DX is available (C, C++, VB, Delphi, Java, and all of the managed code langauges). OpenGL is written in C, which means it's easy for developers to write bindings for other languages (C++, perl, python, ruby, etc).
The moral of the story is that any properly designed library will be available across languages, so don't let the library tie you into a language you don't know or like.
Perhaps Star Wars has some similarities to Hinduism, but how does that apply to Star Wars having similarities to Dune? Dune was pretty firmly based on Islamic and Buddhist ideas, not Hindu. Mostly Islamic, though.
I believe that the debt was the line "Spice mines of Arrakis" in episode IV.
As has already been pointed out, that's "Kessel", not "Arrakis", and it bears no resemblence other than "spice".
Also the large worm like skeleton in the background as c3p0 gets out of the escape pod. Or the Sarnak(sp?) pit, could be interpreted as a worm ala Dune.
Worms generally don't have skeletons (Dune worms or otherwise). However, that skeleton was from a Krayt Dragon, or something like that, definitely not a sand-burrowing, spice- and oxygen-producing, crysknife-factory worm.
So where on the web that Google knows, or in Google groups, did anyone link the special folders to that enumeration. The only references I found were the MSDN pages for SHGetSpecialFolder (which didn't mention the link), and some Estonian's VB code for using a call to the unmanaged SHGetSpecialFolder (which broke spectacularly in C#).
So if Google doesn't know about it, it doesn't exist? Sorry, but no. Google is an excellent search engine, and it usually returns very good results, but it's not the only resource out there for finding information, and if Google doesn't find what you need then you should try something else. For example, I'd never expect Google to be able to spider MSDN (the links change fairly frequently, I've seen plenty of older MSDN pages that have bad links so I can imagine how out of date Google would be; there's a huge amount of information to be spidered). Fortunately, "msdn.microsoft.com" is an easy URL to remember, if you don't have it bookmarked, and it provides a decent search utility.
What is wrong with the second example? i would have to be declared previously of course.... but what's wrong with it?
The problem is that i is declared within the scope of the for loop, which means it shouldn't be available outside of the loop. With the second example, even though i is declared in the for loop, it's declared outside of the scope of the loop, which is not what C++ says should happen. (IIRC, that's how the standard used to be a long time ago, and then the standard changed. It's hard for a compiler written before the standard change to support the new changes in the standard...)
Many movies encoded for streaming use an even lower fps, around 15 or less. Sure, they still convey motion, but you wouldn't call it smooth, would you?
A 24hz video display would be next to unwatchable, whereas I never have problems with projected film.
Video, even at 60Hz, still has its problems, as does cinema. They're different problems, but they're both related to "frame rate" (in quotes, because video is more about refresh rate). Video obviously suffers from flicker (unless you're lucky/wealthy enough to have an LCD display, in which case you'll probably just get ghosting), while cinema suffers from stuttering. Like I said, watch a film with a long pan (horizontal is easiest to notice, but it happens on vertical pans as well). Watch how things seem to jump and jerk along, rather than being one long, smooth pan. (pan speed makes a difference of course, but anything but the slowest or fastest pans will have issues.)
I brought up video for two reasons:
To anecdotally prove the fallacy of the "24fps is as much as you can see" argument, by noting that if your eye could only see 24fps, then you wouldn't be able to notice the flicker at 60Hz.
To propose a reason why we may not see higher frame rates in theaters yet, mainly because the 60Hz/30fps video (or 50Hz/25fps, if you're PAL) format is quite established, as are the methods of up-converting from 24fps to 30fps (3:2 pulldown). If video were to increase its refresh/frame rate (and some hardware does, like DLPs), then there would be incentive to increase theatrical frame rates as well for easier/better conversion to the home market (arguably where a majority of the money is made for theatrical releases). Sure a method would exist to up-convert from 24fps to whatever video is doing, but it would be a good point in the industry to do a major conversion.
You moderators mark him as funny, but he has a point. Modern movies show in 24fps (most theaters double-shutter, so you get an effect 48 fps, but each frame is doubled). This is extremely noticeable on any pan. And before anyone jumps in with the, "Human eyes can only see 24fps anyway, so what's the point?" argument, let me just say you're wrong wrong wrong. 24 frames per second is near the bare minimum required for the human eye to distinguish motion rather than individual frames. I've never seen a study claiming a maximum value, but I'd expect it to be much higher than even the 60fps some people suggest. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to tell the difference between 60Hz refresh rate monitors and 100Hz refresh rates. Movies can get away with this because of intrinsic "artificats" like motion blur, that help create a better sense of motion in fewer frames. (Incidentally, that's also why 24fps in a video game feels really jerky, while 24fps in a movie is usually pretty smooth -- video games tend not to have motion blur, because it requires lots of computational power. It's easier to push out more frames for a smoother look, rather than add motion blur.)
Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time. I wouldn't expect it until TV broadcasts have switched completely to 720p (60 full frames per second, not 60 fields or half-frames), and DVDs are encoded at the same (rather than the current 480i encoding, and relying on special hardware to do 3:2 pulldown conversion for progressive display). Until then, the 24fps movie is too entrenched, I think.
You could never expect fragile computer parts to survive for more than a week inside a typewriter, a pumpkin, a cardboard box, etc
Computer hardware is a lot less fragile than you seem to believe. Okay, it probably wouldn't work well in a pumpkin (moisture), but I don't see how a cardboard box or typewriter would be a problem, other than the grounding problem for a cardboard box. Obviously steps will need to be taken to make sure there's not too much dust accumulation on exposed parts, but then most people don't have dust filters on their intake fans anyway, and the insides of their boxes are covered in dust.
It's ironic that many of them are leftists -- one cheap $500 computer today that they throw into a pumpkin or a typewriter is more than what a third-worlder makes in an entire year.
And I should finish my entire meal because there are children starving in Africa. Talk about comparing apples to oranges. Sure, third-worlders may make the equivalent of $500USD, when the exchange rate of their currency is compared against dollars, but within their local economy, that $500USD is equivalent to probably $20,000USD. These people aren't buying computers, fancy cars, etc (they've got other problems they need to deal with first).
I do agree with the comparison between the case-modding community and the "boy racer" or "rice racer" community (not to be confused with "sport compact enthusiasts", who I would define as caring more about the actual performance of the car rather than just the looks). However, if these people want to spend money on idiot mods for their cars/computers, good for them. The mods may be completely worthless (or worse -- they could even hinder performance), and they almost always look stupid, but it's not affecting me in any way so what do I care? (Well, it doesn't affect me until a boy racer tries to get me to drag him at a stop light, which is just plain stupid. I usually just laugh at him, play along, and then turn when the light goes green, rather than actually racing.)
All these casemods do not deserve front page news here.
I wouldn't go that far. They do, however, need their own topic so that those who don't care to see case-mod topics can easily filter them without losing any interesting hardware stories.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!-Weeeh!
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
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· Score: 2
If you decide to try it out, let me know and I'll race ya.
It's already been done. Well, New York to LA anyway. Next year, they're doing San Francisco to Miami. I hope you have a lot of money, an exotic car, and no fear of tickets or jail time (and have the money to bail yourself out of jail). It takes a little more than 5 hours (more like 5 days), but it's about as close as you're going to get.
If you don't have the balls to participate in person, there's a Gumball 3000 video game on the PS2 (seems to be only in Europe, or at least I couldn't find a US version). It's based on the pre-2002 European Gumball 3000 races, not the latest US races (2002 and upcoming 2003).
Slashdot Mirror
Strong Bad rocks, but you really should have a link there in your sig.
If this thing doesn't do component video output and preferably progressive scan video, then it's not worth the price. I already have a stand-alone DVD player that does DD5.1, DTS, and all of the lesser Dolby types, progressive scan video, etc. And it has a cool blue LED. I already have several DVD-ROMs in my PCs, and I have a CD-R (bah, who needs CD-RW?). In other words, this thing is pretty useless, because the people that would be buying it likely already have all of the functionality it can provide and more.
You're not going to see Joe Sixpack picking this thing up at the store for $300, because he can get a decent DVD player for half of that, and he doesn't have a computer with USB2.0 anyway. You're not going to see the technically savvy pick this up either, because they already have the separate components this thing replaces. No, this is going to appeal to the "toy" market (which is not a bad thing, and in fact they could get away with charging much more than $300, but it's really not going to go anywhere mainstream).
Haven't you guys been paying attention? Modifying your XBox means no XBox Live for you (okay, sure, you can hack around and change your serial and/or MAC, but don't expect that to work for long, especially once it starts screwing legitimate owners and Microsoft has to really step up). It's like the past week or so of XBox news is just thrown out the window with this article.
Okay, so you're asking, why would you want to play XBox Live if your whole reason for buying a modified XBox is for this media stuff? Ask the guys that are currently bitching and moaning about their modified XBox. Sure, many of them likely modified their XBoxes to be able to play pirated games (and fewer to play imports), but I'd bet a large chunk modified their XBoxes so that they could geek out and install Linux. In any case, if modders didn't care about not playing XBox Live, then there'd never be any major stories about modders complaining, so it seems obvious that modders want to play XBox Live. And they can't.
That's "El", as in "elevated", not "L" as in "the letter L".
You'll get my combustion engine when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Mmm ... 2.7L flat six ... dr00l.
That referrendum failed because it was a bad referrendum (for my vote, I never could get an official number on the tax amount, nor could I find a length limit on the tax -- since it was designed for a specific set of imporvements, it should exist for a specific amount of time). If the lawmakers would go back to the drawing board and come up with a realistic plan, I'm sure they'd have no trouble getting it passed. You've got to wonder about a referrendum that failed in a state full of hippies, liberals, and feminazis. Even they apparently had issues with it.
New cars aren't taxed in Washington? GOD DAMMIT! I want my $5500 back!
No, the article is about a way to play GBA games on your NGC sans GBA. Metroid Prime uses the link cable with the GBA to do two things -- beat Metroid Prime and link to Metroid Fusion, and you can play the game using Samus' new Fusion suit. Beat Metroid Fusion and link the two, and you can play the original Metroid on the GameCube. (I may have those reversed on what you have to do to get each, but those are the two things you get.) Since you need to have the Prime disk in the NGC to access these features, and you have to use an emulator disk with this peripheral, I don't believe you're going to be able to connect the NGC back to itself via the GBA link cable. It'd be kinda sweet if you could, but that would mean the peripheral itself would just be a GBA that sits under the cube and hooks into the cube's A/V outputs, which it's not.
Nice subtle troll. You really don't think User Friendly is funny, do you? Then again, I don't read Angst Technology, so I can't say whether or not your comparison is correct. If it is, then double kudos for your troll, by pimping another terrible comic.
To quote Tycho of Penny Arcade, "People will pass up steak once a week for crap every day." I think that sums up User Friendly quite adequately.
Doesn't matter. You can't sue for something someone might do. I might get drunk and kill your daughter in a drunk driving incident, but until I do so, you cannot sue me. I might slander you, or steal your wife, or do any of a number of things that would be grounds for a lawsuit, but until I actually do them, you cannot sue me. Same goes for Microsoft. Just because they might get a monopoly in the mobile market doesn't mean the EU has the right to preemptively sue them (never mind the fact that having a monopoly in and of itself is not a bad thing at all, only abusing it is).
Then again, let the EU try. They'll lose, because they can't prove Microsoft has done anything wrong at this point.
Okay, so I realize that Slashback is the place to follow up on stories, but what's the follow-up on the Tivo story? How is this any different from the last story posted on this topic? Okay, so there's a press release now, but in typical press release fashion it doesn't tell us anything more than we already knew.
If the editors can't keep from reposting stories even in Slashback, they have real problems.
Just to nitpick your nitpick, there never was a Windows 2000 "Workstation". That was Windows 2000 Pro, the successor to NT4 Workstation, the last of the Windows line to use the "Workstation" moniker.
Oh, yeah, and to be even more picky, you should say "Windows .NET Server family" and "Windows 2000 Server family", otherwise you'll be ignoring Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Data Center, as well as the various versions .NET Server will have.
Officially, sure. But most people that go there shorten it to "Whistler" (had they called it "Blackcomb-Whistler", I'm sure it would be shortened to "Blackcomb" instead). That's why I said "normally", and not "officially".
Longhorn is not a ski resort. It's the bar between Whistler mountain and Blackcomb mountain at the Whistler ski resort, which means not only do you have to be familiar with your ski resorts (though Whistler and Blackcomb together are normally just called "Whistler" for the resort name), you also have to have been there. Otherwise, you'd never know what Longhorn is. Or at least what it's referencing here, since Longhorn can mean other things, of course.
No, Windows XP was Whistler. .NET Server is also Whistler, because they're the same code base (like Windows 2000 Pro vs. Windows 2000 Server).
(full quote, for the parent is at Score: 0)
It shouldn't make any difference. Since C++ is a superset of C, you can use OpenGL just fine with it (and if you can't find one of the 092384092389 C++ wrappers for OpenGL out there, you can always wrap it up yourself). At the same time, COM has always been available to C code as well as C++ code, so you can use DX in C as well (it's just very ugly). In either case, I don't think the native language of the library should make a difference -- COM is supported by many languages (some requiring that the COM object support the IDispatch automation interface, but I believe DX already does that, and if it doesn't you can wrap that yourself or find bindings that somebody has already done), and thus DX is available (C, C++, VB, Delphi, Java, and all of the managed code langauges). OpenGL is written in C, which means it's easy for developers to write bindings for other languages (C++, perl, python, ruby, etc).
The moral of the story is that any properly designed library will be available across languages, so don't let the library tie you into a language you don't know or like.
Perhaps Star Wars has some similarities to Hinduism, but how does that apply to Star Wars having similarities to Dune? Dune was pretty firmly based on Islamic and Buddhist ideas, not Hindu. Mostly Islamic, though.
As has already been pointed out, that's "Kessel", not "Arrakis", and it bears no resemblence other than "spice".
Worms generally don't have skeletons (Dune worms or otherwise). However, that skeleton was from a Krayt Dragon, or something like that, definitely not a sand-burrowing, spice- and oxygen-producing, crysknife-factory worm.
So if Google doesn't know about it, it doesn't exist? Sorry, but no. Google is an excellent search engine, and it usually returns very good results, but it's not the only resource out there for finding information, and if Google doesn't find what you need then you should try something else. For example, I'd never expect Google to be able to spider MSDN (the links change fairly frequently, I've seen plenty of older MSDN pages that have bad links so I can imagine how out of date Google would be; there's a huge amount of information to be spidered). Fortunately, "msdn.microsoft.com" is an easy URL to remember, if you don't have it bookmarked, and it provides a decent search utility.
The problem is that i is declared within the scope of the for loop, which means it shouldn't be available outside of the loop. With the second example, even though i is declared in the for loop, it's declared outside of the scope of the loop, which is not what C++ says should happen. (IIRC, that's how the standard used to be a long time ago, and then the standard changed. It's hard for a compiler written before the standard change to support the new changes in the standard ...)
Yes, distinguishably choppy motion.
Many movies encoded for streaming use an even lower fps, around 15 or less. Sure, they still convey motion, but you wouldn't call it smooth, would you?
Video, even at 60Hz, still has its problems, as does cinema. They're different problems, but they're both related to "frame rate" (in quotes, because video is more about refresh rate). Video obviously suffers from flicker (unless you're lucky/wealthy enough to have an LCD display, in which case you'll probably just get ghosting), while cinema suffers from stuttering. Like I said, watch a film with a long pan (horizontal is easiest to notice, but it happens on vertical pans as well). Watch how things seem to jump and jerk along, rather than being one long, smooth pan. (pan speed makes a difference of course, but anything but the slowest or fastest pans will have issues.)
I brought up video for two reasons:
So good of you to post your references. Here are mine:
You moderators mark him as funny, but he has a point. Modern movies show in 24fps (most theaters double-shutter, so you get an effect 48 fps, but each frame is doubled). This is extremely noticeable on any pan. And before anyone jumps in with the, "Human eyes can only see 24fps anyway, so what's the point?" argument, let me just say you're wrong wrong wrong. 24 frames per second is near the bare minimum required for the human eye to distinguish motion rather than individual frames. I've never seen a study claiming a maximum value, but I'd expect it to be much higher than even the 60fps some people suggest. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to tell the difference between 60Hz refresh rate monitors and 100Hz refresh rates. Movies can get away with this because of intrinsic "artificats" like motion blur, that help create a better sense of motion in fewer frames. (Incidentally, that's also why 24fps in a video game feels really jerky, while 24fps in a movie is usually pretty smooth -- video games tend not to have motion blur, because it requires lots of computational power. It's easier to push out more frames for a smoother look, rather than add motion blur.)
Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time. I wouldn't expect it until TV broadcasts have switched completely to 720p (60 full frames per second, not 60 fields or half-frames), and DVDs are encoded at the same (rather than the current 480i encoding, and relying on special hardware to do 3:2 pulldown conversion for progressive display). Until then, the 24fps movie is too entrenched, I think.
Computer hardware is a lot less fragile than you seem to believe. Okay, it probably wouldn't work well in a pumpkin (moisture), but I don't see how a cardboard box or typewriter would be a problem, other than the grounding problem for a cardboard box. Obviously steps will need to be taken to make sure there's not too much dust accumulation on exposed parts, but then most people don't have dust filters on their intake fans anyway, and the insides of their boxes are covered in dust.
And I should finish my entire meal because there are children starving in Africa. Talk about comparing apples to oranges. Sure, third-worlders may make the equivalent of $500USD, when the exchange rate of their currency is compared against dollars, but within their local economy, that $500USD is equivalent to probably $20,000USD. These people aren't buying computers, fancy cars, etc (they've got other problems they need to deal with first).
I do agree with the comparison between the case-modding community and the "boy racer" or "rice racer" community (not to be confused with "sport compact enthusiasts", who I would define as caring more about the actual performance of the car rather than just the looks). However, if these people want to spend money on idiot mods for their cars/computers, good for them. The mods may be completely worthless (or worse -- they could even hinder performance), and they almost always look stupid, but it's not affecting me in any way so what do I care? (Well, it doesn't affect me until a boy racer tries to get me to drag him at a stop light, which is just plain stupid. I usually just laugh at him, play along, and then turn when the light goes green, rather than actually racing.)
I wouldn't go that far. They do, however, need their own topic so that those who don't care to see case-mod topics can easily filter them without losing any interesting hardware stories.
It's already been done. Well, New York to LA anyway. Next year, they're doing San Francisco to Miami. I hope you have a lot of money, an exotic car, and no fear of tickets or jail time (and have the money to bail yourself out of jail). It takes a little more than 5 hours (more like 5 days), but it's about as close as you're going to get.
If you don't have the balls to participate in person, there's a Gumball 3000 video game on the PS2 (seems to be only in Europe, or at least I couldn't find a US version). It's based on the pre-2002 European Gumball 3000 races, not the latest US races (2002 and upcoming 2003).