The way most CDs are mastered uses only a small fraction of the resolution available on the disc in order to make the tracks sound as 'loud' as possible. One can only assume that the same would happen with the new format. Studios and producers don't care about quality, they care about marketing. What you'll end up with is a new format that costs more, with the same (poor) quality sound, and a bunch of self proclaimed 'audiophiles' running around telling you how much better the first Brittany album sounds now, even though it doesn't.
It's unfortunate, because it makes life unplesant for those of us that really care about the quality of audio we listen to. Yes, 'Audiophiles' are hilarious, but actual audiophiles who aren't spouting second hand opinion have some valid complaints about CDs.
I have one of those printers. Bought it because it was cheaper then an ink cartridge for my lexmark, and cheaper then having kinko's print addresses on 100 envelopes. Used it 'till it was out of ink, and now it sits in a box. Some day I'll throw it out. Oh well.
(It was $29 right before christmas, cable included)
My great grandmother had a rotary phone in her house that was owned by the local phone company (SNET). It was wired directly into the wall. They charged her $2 a month to use it for almost 60 years. When we moved her out of her house a few years ago, they wanted to charge $50 to send a technician to come remove the phone, or there would be a $100 fine for damages from cutting the wire from the wall. The tech came, cut the wire, and threw the phone out in the trash can by the curb as he left.
Yes, Intel makes systems. They just don't market them because they don't want to compete with their customers. Many Intel based servers sold by Dell or HP are in fact manufactured by Intel. I'm sitting next to two racks full of intel made machines. There are some 1U duals, so 2U duals, some 2U single CPU machines, and some 8U quads. They all arrived here directly from Intel.
That's strange. I have a Duron 900 and a Radeon 8500, and I can play it at 1600x1200 no problem (even with the view distance all the way up, and 2x antialiasing turned on). Now that I think about it though, I do have to turn real-time shadows off. They seem to make it perform like ass at any resolution. I also have 512Mb of DDR RAM, but that shouldn't make much difference.
The other thing I've noticed is that the game runs at 60Hz unless you play in a window, and there's no option for 1280x1024.
It'll be interesting to see if there is any sort of 'war'. Intel isn't going to remove the premium price tag from Itanium, so for there to be a price war some other vendor is going to have to make a 64bit chip, or Intel will have to come out with a low end (not Itanium based) 64bit chip. That would be interesting indeed.
My experience with morrowind on the PC (which I'm totally in love with, BTW) has been that it's limited by planning for the console controller in the first place. It doesn't take much imagination to think of how the controls could have been better if they were designed for the PC instead of the Xbox. You could have done so much more. As it is there are only four important buttons. (Attack, interact, run, and menu). The other controlls are movement (which seems like it'll be fine with two analog sticks) and scroll through weapons (Can you say shoulder buttons?). Things that you could either interact with, or pick up have a cumbersome menu interface that could have been overcome easily on the PC. It's probably only there because of the Xbox target.
The only difference between the Xbox version and the PC version (besides the fact that you can't play the Xbox version in 1600x1200 at 90Hz) will likely be that the Xbox version will lack hotkeys.
I hope they hire a proofreader for their game text before they ship the Xbox version, because they won't be able to patch that one:)
610,000,000 people fly in the US each year. Being generous, in the last 5 years 6000 people were effected due to commercial air accidents in the US in the last year that's less then 0.0002%. Less people are actually terrorists by a factor of at least 1000. So now, you're detecting over 100,000 false terrorists for every real terrorist you might encounter. If you want to have false positives, you better get them considerably less frequently then 100,000 times as often a true positive.
More perspective: That's ~610,000 people held for questioning due to false positives each year. Almost 2,000 a day. If you had to question 2,000 people a day, and you knew that out of those 2,000 people probably none of them were terrorists, how long would it take before you started doing a sloppy job? Talk about thankless work, and enormous expense.
The person missing the point is you. I don't see where this story singles out Microsoft as anything but the defendant in this case. There's no Microsoft bashing going on here.
Besides, it's worse then you let on. Microsoft removed the images. They lost the lawsuit because they wouldn't agree to police their servers and remove all images of that type in the future. That is a burden that no ISP should carry. Honestly, I'm having a hard time seeing how the images were illegal in the first place; I mean, sure it's wrong, but I don't know what law would enforce that. Even then, the defendant should be the creator and owner of the content, not the ISP. This is like going after the phone company because someone used their home line to make a death threat.
There's a huge difference though. Kia didn't have to dig up every lawn in the US to start selling cars.
Competitive telecom companies aren't even allowed to dig up your lawn and attach wires to your house (Or to run a cable across your lawn to get to your neighbor's house). If you want competitive local loop access, you need to either force the incumbant providers to lease out their wire, or you need to let competitive telecom providers have access to private property to run cable. Which one of those do you think is more practical? (Consider that you don't need wire from more then one company to your house because you're presumably only going to buy one provider's service at a time).
If the fees are reasonable, and they aren't loosing money on the deal, then the incumbant phone companies should have nothing to complain about. They should be bending over backwards and kissing our asses for letting them exist in the first place. Not everybody gets to be an exception to the rule.
I just want to thank you. I read your comment at lunchtime, and now I've had fucking "Come on Eileen" stuck in my fucking head all fucking afternoon! I hope your happy!:)
I would criticize the point in that article where they said that a well-chosen 8 digit password would still take 13 years to crack on average on a Pentium 4. An 8 digit password chosen from the 95 printable ASCII characters is about equivalent to a 52 bit key. It is well known that the 56bit DES key can be broken within a few minutes on machines that are not prohibitively expensive to build. Assuming that people are only going to try to crack passwords on a Pentium 4 is somewhat naive and misleading.
If the system that you're trying to break into has 30,000 users with unique strong passwords that are 8 "digits" and more or less randomly distributed across the set of available passwords, you will have greatly reduced the amount of time required to get access to the system (assuming you have a list of user id's or the passwd file). With that many accounts, you'll likely be finding up to 10 valid passwords a day.
A secure password on a post-it note on someone's monitor is much more secure then an easy password in someone's head if the premesis are secure, and you're worried about external attacks. Someone in another country, or even another building, likely won't be seeing the post-it or the slip of paper in your desk drawer. It depends on the circumstances.
Yeah, you only need to know Lisp programming. Sigh, what a relief to end users!
No problem if your target end users are programmers. Besides, lisp is fun:) I'd rather learn lisp (or have learned in my case) then learn about X, which I think is what I said before, so I'll shut up now...
To buy a computer powerful enough to play games similar to those available on the XBox would cost at least 3 times as much as the XBox
That won't be true in 6 months. The only thing keeping it true right now is the video hardware. You also don't need a machine with Xbox style power to chat.
Please, it was UNLICENSED. Of cource it was copyrighted, as everything is by default, but that's irrelevent. copyrighted doesn't mean non-free with the proper licensing.
That's Microsoft tricking you. They just drop the leading "0." from their version numbers to get the idiot market. It'll be at least another 4 releases before they get their rendering engine up to standards compliance. CSS in particular. (look at those pages in both mozilla and IE for an example of what I'm talking about)
Hey, if it's something that has to exist in a variable anyway, it's not really bloat to have it user tweakable. If you like the default, don't change the option. Personally I'm glad gnome is leaving sawfish behind, because sawfish has the right idea on alot of things, and it would suck if they changed because of gnome. You're right that the graphical configurator is less useable because of all the options, but personally I think that the graphical configurator is less useable because of the mouse. The best sawfish configurator is emacs.
It's amazing what you can do with sawfish if you take a day in write some lisp code. It's like writing your own window manager that does exactly what you want, but without having to know anything about X or window manager programming.
gcc, gimp, and glibc already have the apropriate GNU prefix. You could always use xemacs or one of the other non-GNU emacs versions. There's nothing forcing you to use bash either.
What I really want to know is why RMS would want a GNU/ stuck to the fromt of Linux distributions that don't subscribe to or agree with his beliefs. Debian is GNU/Linux, and follows strict free software guidelines. All the commercial distributions use non-free software. Why does he want his group to be associated with these?
I think that the margins on the early machines were more like $5, not $50. I was told that it was definatly single digits (Some retailers might have gotten a better deal then others though). Also, Microsoft doesn't get the entire cost of the game after markup, they only get the licensing fees that are paid for the game. The majority of the money goes to the publisher. If Microsoft is the publisher, then they might get more like $25 instead of $10. Microsoft isn't the publisher of the majority of the games though.
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The way most CDs are mastered uses only a small fraction of the resolution available on the disc in order to make the tracks sound as 'loud' as possible. One can only assume that the same would happen with the new format. Studios and producers don't care about quality, they care about marketing. What you'll end up with is a new format that costs more, with the same (poor) quality sound, and a bunch of self proclaimed 'audiophiles' running around telling you how much better the first Brittany album sounds now, even though it doesn't.
It's unfortunate, because it makes life unplesant for those of us that really care about the quality of audio we listen to. Yes, 'Audiophiles' are hilarious, but actual audiophiles who aren't spouting second hand opinion have some valid complaints about CDs.
I have one of those printers. Bought it because it was cheaper then an ink cartridge for my lexmark, and cheaper then having kinko's print addresses on 100 envelopes. Used it 'till it was out of ink, and now it sits in a box. Some day I'll throw it out. Oh well.
(It was $29 right before christmas, cable included)
My great grandmother had a rotary phone in her house that was owned by the local phone company (SNET). It was wired directly into the wall. They charged her $2 a month to use it for almost 60 years. When we moved her out of her house a few years ago, they wanted to charge $50 to send a technician to come remove the phone, or there would be a $100 fine for damages from cutting the wire from the wall. The tech came, cut the wire, and threw the phone out in the trash can by the curb as he left.
Yes, Intel makes systems. They just don't market them because they don't want to compete with their customers. Many Intel based servers sold by Dell or HP are in fact manufactured by Intel. I'm sitting next to two racks full of intel made machines. There are some 1U duals, so 2U duals, some 2U single CPU machines, and some 8U quads. They all arrived here directly from Intel.
m =2028399075 m =2028282610 m =2028048472
Look at the following:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
All these are made and sold by intel.
That's strange. I have a Duron 900 and a Radeon 8500, and I can play it at 1600x1200 no problem (even with the view distance all the way up, and 2x antialiasing turned on). Now that I think about it though, I do have to turn real-time shadows off. They seem to make it perform like ass at any resolution. I also have 512Mb of DDR RAM, but that shouldn't make much difference.
The other thing I've noticed is that the game runs at 60Hz unless you play in a window, and there's no option for 1280x1024.
It'll be interesting to see if there is any sort of 'war'. Intel isn't going to remove the premium price tag from Itanium, so for there to be a price war some other vendor is going to have to make a 64bit chip, or Intel will have to come out with a low end (not Itanium based) 64bit chip. That would be interesting indeed.
That's probably because intel makes systems, and AMD doesn't. A pile of chips doesn't make a cluster.
My experience with morrowind on the PC (which I'm totally in love with, BTW) has been that it's limited by planning for the console controller in the first place. It doesn't take much imagination to think of how the controls could have been better if they were designed for the PC instead of the Xbox. You could have done so much more. As it is there are only four important buttons. (Attack, interact, run, and menu). The other controlls are movement (which seems like it'll be fine with two analog sticks) and scroll through weapons (Can you say shoulder buttons?). Things that you could either interact with, or pick up have a cumbersome menu interface that could have been overcome easily on the PC. It's probably only there because of the Xbox target.
:)
The only difference between the Xbox version and the PC version (besides the fact that you can't play the Xbox version in 1600x1200 at 90Hz) will likely be that the Xbox version will lack hotkeys.
I hope they hire a proofreader for their game text before they ship the Xbox version, because they won't be able to patch that one
610,000,000 people fly in the US each year. Being generous, in the last 5 years 6000 people were effected due to commercial air accidents in the US in the last year that's less then 0.0002%. Less people are actually terrorists by a factor of at least 1000. So now, you're detecting over 100,000 false terrorists for every real terrorist you might encounter. If you want to have false positives, you better get them considerably less frequently then 100,000 times as often a true positive.
More perspective: That's ~610,000 people held for questioning due to false positives each year. Almost 2,000 a day. If you had to question 2,000 people a day, and you knew that out of those 2,000 people probably none of them were terrorists, how long would it take before you started doing a sloppy job? Talk about thankless work, and enormous expense.
The person missing the point is you. I don't see where this story singles out Microsoft as anything but the defendant in this case. There's no Microsoft bashing going on here.
Besides, it's worse then you let on. Microsoft removed the images. They lost the lawsuit because they wouldn't agree to police their servers and remove all images of that type in the future. That is a burden that no ISP should carry. Honestly, I'm having a hard time seeing how the images were illegal in the first place; I mean, sure it's wrong, but I don't know what law would enforce that. Even then, the defendant should be the creator and owner of the content, not the ISP. This is like going after the phone company because someone used their home line to make a death threat.
Considering the low chance of hijacking, I'll pass on the 1 in 1000 chance of anal intrusion, thank you.
Let's see if you think a false positive is ok when the guy with the rubber gloves is up your ass to the elbow looking for explosives.
False positives are as bad if not worse then false negatives.
There's a huge difference though. Kia didn't have to dig up every lawn in the US to start selling cars.
Competitive telecom companies aren't even allowed to dig up your lawn and attach wires to your house (Or to run a cable across your lawn to get to your neighbor's house). If you want competitive local loop access, you need to either force the incumbant providers to lease out their wire, or you need to let competitive telecom providers have access to private property to run cable. Which one of those do you think is more practical? (Consider that you don't need wire from more then one company to your house because you're presumably only going to buy one provider's service at a time).
If the fees are reasonable, and they aren't loosing money on the deal, then the incumbant phone companies should have nothing to complain about. They should be bending over backwards and kissing our asses for letting them exist in the first place. Not everybody gets to be an exception to the rule.
I've found that one of the easiest songs to get stuck in someone else's head is the theme song to "Charles in Charge."
I just want to thank you. I read your comment at lunchtime, and now I've had fucking "Come on Eileen" stuck in my fucking head all fucking afternoon! I hope your happy! :)
I would criticize the point in that article where they said that a well-chosen 8 digit password would still take 13 years to crack on average on a Pentium 4. An 8 digit password chosen from the 95 printable ASCII characters is about equivalent to a 52 bit key. It is well known that the 56bit DES key can be broken within a few minutes on machines that are not prohibitively expensive to build. Assuming that people are only going to try to crack passwords on a Pentium 4 is somewhat naive and misleading.
If the system that you're trying to break into has 30,000 users with unique strong passwords that are 8 "digits" and more or less randomly distributed across the set of available passwords, you will have greatly reduced the amount of time required to get access to the system (assuming you have a list of user id's or the passwd file). With that many accounts, you'll likely be finding up to 10 valid passwords a day.
A secure password on a post-it note on someone's monitor is much more secure then an easy password in someone's head if the premesis are secure, and you're worried about external attacks. Someone in another country, or even another building, likely won't be seeing the post-it or the slip of paper in your desk drawer. It depends on the circumstances.
Yeah, you only need to know Lisp programming. Sigh, what a relief to end users!
:) I'd rather learn lisp (or have learned in my case) then learn about X, which I think is what I said before, so I'll shut up now...
No problem if your target end users are programmers. Besides, lisp is fun
To buy a computer powerful enough to play games similar to those available on the XBox would cost at least 3 times as much as the XBox
That won't be true in 6 months. The only thing keeping it true right now is the video hardware. You also don't need a machine with Xbox style power to chat.
other various COPYRIGHTED materials
Please, it was UNLICENSED. Of cource it was copyrighted, as everything is by default, but that's irrelevent. copyrighted doesn't mean non-free with the proper licensing.
That's Microsoft tricking you. They just drop the leading "0." from their version numbers to get the idiot market. It'll be at least another 4 releases before they get their rendering engine up to standards compliance. CSS in particular. (look at those pages in both mozilla and IE for an example of what I'm talking about)
Hey, if it's something that has to exist in a variable anyway, it's not really bloat to have it user tweakable. If you like the default, don't change the option. Personally I'm glad gnome is leaving sawfish behind, because sawfish has the right idea on alot of things, and it would suck if they changed because of gnome. You're right that the graphical configurator is less useable because of all the options, but personally I think that the graphical configurator is less useable because of the mouse. The best sawfish configurator is emacs.
It's amazing what you can do with sawfish if you take a day in write some lisp code. It's like writing your own window manager that does exactly what you want, but without having to know anything about X or window manager programming.
--
Desktop environment free since 1996
gcc, gimp, and glibc already have the apropriate GNU prefix. You could always use xemacs or one of the other non-GNU emacs versions. There's nothing forcing you to use bash either.
What I really want to know is why RMS would want a GNU/ stuck to the fromt of Linux distributions that don't subscribe to or agree with his beliefs. Debian is GNU/Linux, and follows strict free software guidelines. All the commercial distributions use non-free software. Why does he want his group to be associated with these?
I think that the margins on the early machines were more like $5, not $50. I was told that it was definatly single digits (Some retailers might have gotten a better deal then others though). Also, Microsoft doesn't get the entire cost of the game after markup, they only get the licensing fees that are paid for the game. The majority of the money goes to the publisher. If Microsoft is the publisher, then they might get more like $25 instead of $10. Microsoft isn't the publisher of the majority of the games though.
Will they still put some of the content on second third or fourth discs for marketing reasons? You bet your ass they will.