We would have apologized for a lot sooner if the Germans would have ever stopped thanking us for it.
As for Titanic, I don't think it was nearly as bad as some people make it out to be, but since Kate Winslet represents at least half of what went wrong with that picture, I think America and England can agree to share culpability for both disasters (the ship's fate, and the movie about it.)
Murder She Wrote? Mea Culpa. It was an awful show, and I was not aware that it had seeped outside our borders. Sorry you had to see it, but it seems only fair after subjecting us to all those years of "Are You Being Served?" and "Keeping Up Appearances."
Oh, and about the JFK thing? Oswald did it. We're positive. Every once in a while a complete nutter comes along to claim there's evidence to the contrary, but the matter was actually settled some time ago.
For those of you who think Cleese really hates America, consider for a second that all three of his wives have been American (and blonde). This is one of those posts that seems to need to be prefaced with "this is a joke".
Add to that the fact that he didn't even write it, and it's clear that he doesn't hate America at all.
You think you a nerd for coming up with all that, but if you were a real nerd you would know that Trek magazine ran stories back in the 70s explaining that the Klingons which appeared in TOS were genetically altered to infiltrate human worlds.
(Being that it is a tactic of deception, it's not a proud moment in Klingon war history, hence Worf's line in DS9 saying, "we don't like to talk about it.")
It wasn't until the movies that we got to see what "real" Klingons look like.
Soul Calibur for the Sega Genesis is what got me into console gaming in the first place. It blew me away. Nothing prior to it, going all the way back to the original Nintendo, looked like anything I would want to spend money on.
When my friend with the Genesis console explained to me that the next version of Soul Calibur would be on the X-Box, that's what I set my sights on. Even when they said it would be on the PS/2, I still bought the X-Box because it was the better graphics platform to run Soul Calibur II on.
In the end, it turned out that both the gameplay and the graphics of Soul Calibur II were overshadowed by Dead or Alive 3, which came out considerably earlier and was in many ways a better game.... That said, now that I have an HDTV, SC-II does look really good on it in 720p mode (though strangely, not available in widescreen.)
If the GTA series didn't get me to buy a PS/2, I doubt this game will.
(For the record: I'm not a platform bigot.. I'll choose between the XBox360 and the PS3 sometime after both have come out... unless I skip this console generation entirely.)
i was always pretty surprised, personally, by the secular nation of american video game markets
Secular?
Did graphics programs in the 80s have something to do with your religion?
Shouldn't you have abandoned the Earth on the Hale-Bopp comet along with the rest of the Heaven's Gate members? I hate to be the one to tell you, but you've missed the last train out by about eight years.
You can use a UHF/VHF indoor antenna which I'm referring to as rabitt ears (even if they don't look like rabbit ears anymore).
Yes, we are talking semantics. That's why I opened by saying I was nit-picking.
"Rabit ears" are the ones that look kinda like rabbit ears: two long (usually extendable) poles going up and away from each other on little pivot hinges. They are designed for VHF signal reception.
A lot of them come also with a UHF antenna attached (which usually looks like a little loop or a small grid of wire at the base of the antenna), but the term "rabbit ears" applies to the VHF part, which on its own will do very little to help you tune in HDTV (unless you are close enough to the broadcast tower that you get the signal coming in on your dental fillings.)
OS X, but not Tiger yet because M-Audio does not have working drivers for the Sonica with 10.4 yet, and if I can't have DTS audio, there's no point in going on with life.:)
Word of warning if you are going to use the mini:
The EyeTV software somehow manages to record and display HDTV signals okay on the mini, but HDTV playback via any other means (Quicktime, VLC, etc.) is damn near impossible, due to the relatively low CPU and GPU power of the mini.
So, if you are mainly watching DVD's and using the EyeTV 500 pretty much exclusively for your HDTV, it's all fine and dandy, but if you plan on running other HD sources through the mini, you will not be happy with it.
If you are a Linux geek and want to play back a wide variety of HD sources, you are probably better off setting up a MythTV box with a high-def video card.
If you are not a Linux geek, I reccomend throwing money at the problem: A dual-G5 tower is a video processing god.
For now, I'm happy enough with the mini. A year from now, when a lot more HD options are out there, I should be able to swap in something beefier (i.e. the XBox360, the next-gen PlayStation, or a newer and better Apple option) while leaving the real meat of my system, the projector and the stereo, exactly as it is.
That was a goofy typo, but no I was not kidding. Rabbit-ear style antennae are designed for VHF reception.
You can use the hybrid UHF/VHF roof antenna, but a dedicated UHF one is even better. There's nothing "oldschool" about the massive YAGI antenna I installed for my HD reception.
I see all these home built Mediacenters, but truthfully, how many average people use these for more than one week. I can see this being a novelty, but do people actually use these for longer than one month?
Step 1: Hook up a current Mac to the HDMI or DVI input of your TV.
Step 2: Hook up the EyeTV 500 from Elgato to your Mac via Firewire.
Step 3: There's no step three.
I've been using this set up for my media center for a couple months now, enjoying HDTV with PVR features, DVDs (mostly archived on my hard drives), Doctor Who rips downloaded from newsgroups, my entire music library (which I'm slowly upgrading from MP3 and/or AAC to Apple Lossless format), and World of Warcraft gaming on my 119" projector screen.
So far, nobody can figure out the convoluted way in which I programmed my remote control except for me, but one of these rainy afternoons I might set it up in a more logical way... if I'm not too busy playing WoW or watching shows on it.
Well to be fair, they faced a tough choice: Making the controls look less "sophisticated" than the one in the original series would mean making them look outdated by what we have in reality right now. If the bridge of the Enterprise looked like the set of the 1930s Frankenstein, nobody would be able to swallow it.
A better way to go would be to simply make the Enterprise in prequel look relatively cool, and explain the NCC-1701 from TOS by claiming that there was a "retro" fad in starship design at the time it was built.
Wow. And now you've started a metathread complaining of all the metacomments.
Now all we need are a few dozen posts complaining about moderation before anything actually falls to the -1 threshold, and our journey to the Dark Side will be complete!
At first I thought you could make sound by waving your hands at a sensor or something.
Hmm... Come to think of it, a software version of the Theremin would be extremely cool.
Perhaps one could make it a Mac program to work with those iSight cameras.
Re:Let me be the first to say something POSITIVE
on
Xbox 360 Lightsynth
·
· Score: 1
I think the problem is that this was posted on games.slashdot.com.
Not a lot of FPS and MMORPG players are going to give a crap about an obscure work of visual art from the 80s showing up in the firmware of the upcoming XBox360.
I see the logic of posting it here, since it is a feature on a game console we are talking about... but it probably would have been more well-received on the front page.
Anyone who's been around gaming a while will remember Jeff Minter and Gridrunner and Attack of the Mutant Camels... the guy's earned some respect.
Dude. I've been around gaming since PONG, and I've never heard of either of those games!
What did "Attack of the Mutant Camels" run on anyway?
Shit. I just googled it. The C64. I owned a C64, and a Vic20 before that. Even had the goofy mercury-switch handheled joystick for it. Still never heard of "Attac of the Mutant Camels."
Okay. I got it now. Pretty colors and music. I'm sure LSD users everywhere are going to snap up the XBox360 now. For that matter E-popping ravers will probably want to hook one up to a projector screen at their next party.
If you don't use recreational hallucinagens, then this thing is still a quirky work of art and a clever toy, but certainly not enough to make me want to buy the console.
When it comes to my interest in buying one, I have no questions about polygon count or built-in "Lightsynths" or funky new controllers. I'm sure it's all spiffy. What I most want to know is: What games will there be?
I don't need to see 2,000 titles available. The threshold for buying a console for me is "three games which don't suck, at least one of which totally kicks ass."
As soon as I get done googling Jeff Minter, reading TFA and figuring out what the hell a Lightsynth is and why the hell I should care, I'll be happy to call him a sellout.... Not that I consider "sellout" to be a bad thing. That word stopped being an insult which carried any weight sometime around 1972.
Slashdot Mirror
We would have apologized for a lot sooner if the Germans would have ever stopped thanking us for it.
As for Titanic, I don't think it was nearly as bad as some people make it out to be, but since Kate Winslet represents at least half of what went wrong with that picture, I think America and England can agree to share culpability for both disasters (the ship's fate, and the movie about it.)
Murder She Wrote? Mea Culpa. It was an awful show, and I was not aware that it had seeped outside our borders. Sorry you had to see it, but it seems only fair after subjecting us to all those years of "Are You Being Served?" and "Keeping Up Appearances."
Oh, and about the JFK thing? Oswald did it. We're positive. Every once in a while a complete nutter comes along to claim there's evidence to the contrary, but the matter was actually settled some time ago.
For those of you who think Cleese really hates America, consider for a second that all three of his wives have been American (and blonde). This is one of those posts that seems to need to be prefaced with "this is a joke".
Add to that the fact that he didn't even write it, and it's clear that he doesn't hate America at all.
Q: Why don't the British make PC's?
A: They couldn't figure out how to make one leak oil.
You think you a nerd for coming up with all that, but if you were a real nerd you would know that Trek magazine ran stories back in the 70s explaining that the Klingons which appeared in TOS were genetically altered to infiltrate human worlds.
(Being that it is a tactic of deception, it's not a proud moment in Klingon war history, hence Worf's line in DS9 saying, "we don't like to talk about it.")
It wasn't until the movies that we got to see what "real" Klingons look like.
In the SW books, he went as far as General.
He was addressed as "General Solo" in the briefing room during "Return of the Jedi."
Holy crap, I'm a huge geek for knowing that!
It's just sad.
... That said, now that I have an HDTV, SC-II does look really good on it in 720p mode (though strangely, not available in widescreen.)
Soul Calibur for the Sega Genesis is what got me into console gaming in the first place. It blew me away. Nothing prior to it, going all the way back to the original Nintendo, looked like anything I would want to spend money on.
When my friend with the Genesis console explained to me that the next version of Soul Calibur would be on the X-Box, that's what I set my sights on. Even when they said it would be on the PS/2, I still bought the X-Box because it was the better graphics platform to run Soul Calibur II on.
In the end, it turned out that both the gameplay and the graphics of Soul Calibur II were overshadowed by Dead or Alive 3, which came out considerably earlier and was in many ways a better game.
If the GTA series didn't get me to buy a PS/2, I doubt this game will.
(For the record: I'm not a platform bigot.. I'll choose between the XBox360 and the PS3 sometime after both have come out... unless I skip this console generation entirely.)
i was always pretty surprised, personally, by the secular nation of american video game markets
Secular?
Did graphics programs in the 80s have something to do with your religion?
Shouldn't you have abandoned the Earth on the Hale-Bopp comet along with the rest of the Heaven's Gate members? I hate to be the one to tell you, but you've missed the last train out by about eight years.
You can use a UHF/VHF indoor antenna which I'm referring to as rabitt ears (even if they don't look like rabbit ears anymore).
Yes, we are talking semantics. That's why I opened by saying I was nit-picking.
"Rabit ears" are the ones that look kinda like rabbit ears: two long (usually extendable) poles going up and away from each other on little pivot hinges. They are designed for VHF signal reception.
A lot of them come also with a UHF antenna attached (which usually looks like a little loop or a small grid of wire at the base of the antenna), but the term "rabbit ears" applies to the VHF part, which on its own will do very little to help you tune in HDTV (unless you are close enough to the broadcast tower that you get the signal coming in on your dental fillings.)
OS X, but not Tiger yet because M-Audio does not have working drivers for the Sonica with 10.4 yet, and if I can't have DTS audio, there's no point in going on with life. :)
Word of warning if you are going to use the mini:
The EyeTV software somehow manages to record and display HDTV signals okay on the mini, but HDTV playback via any other means (Quicktime, VLC, etc.) is damn near impossible, due to the relatively low CPU and GPU power of the mini.
So, if you are mainly watching DVD's and using the EyeTV 500 pretty much exclusively for your HDTV, it's all fine and dandy, but if you plan on running other HD sources through the mini, you will not be happy with it.
If you are a Linux geek and want to play back a wide variety of HD sources, you are probably better off setting up a MythTV box with a high-def video card.
If you are not a Linux geek, I reccomend throwing money at the problem: A dual-G5 tower is a video processing god.
For now, I'm happy enough with the mini. A year from now, when a lot more HD options are out there, I should be able to swap in something beefier (i.e. the XBox360, the next-gen PlayStation, or a newer and better Apple option) while leaving the real meat of my system, the projector and the stereo, exactly as it is.
besides it's quite obviously Major Kira Nerys. Fools. :-P
This may be evidence that there's something seriously wrong with me, but I find that she's way hotter with her alien make-up than without it.
Kira Nerys (with the weird nose ridges): Sexy.
Nana Visitor (without them): Not so much.
Anyone else feel the same way, or am I just really sick?
That was a goofy typo, but no I was not kidding. Rabbit-ear style antennae are designed for VHF reception.
You can use the hybrid UHF/VHF roof antenna, but a dedicated UHF one is even better. There's nothing "oldschool" about the massive YAGI antenna I installed for my HD reception.
This is perhaps a nit-pick, but you don't use rabbit ears for over-the-air HDTV.
Digial broadcasts are on the UHS band. Rabbit ears are for VHS reception.
For my Mac-based HDTV PVR, I use a YAGI roof antenna.
I have no interest in paying monthly fees of any kind just for television.
I see all these home built Mediacenters, but truthfully, how many average people use these for more than one week. I can see this being a novelty, but do people actually use these for longer than one month?
Step 1: Hook up a current Mac to the HDMI or DVI input of your TV.
Step 2: Hook up the EyeTV 500 from Elgato to your Mac via Firewire.
Step 3: There's no step three.
I've been using this set up for my media center for a couple months now, enjoying HDTV with PVR features, DVDs (mostly archived on my hard drives), Doctor Who rips downloaded from newsgroups, my entire music library (which I'm slowly upgrading from MP3 and/or AAC to Apple Lossless format), and World of Warcraft gaming on my 119" projector screen.
So far, nobody can figure out the convoluted way in which I programmed my remote control except for me, but one of these rainy afternoons I might set it up in a more logical way... if I'm not too busy playing WoW or watching shows on it.
Hey, take it easy pal. I'm not the one who had a problem with the way the sets looked on Enterprise.
(I thought the show itself was about as dull as a radio broadcast of a golf tournament, but that's another story.)
For the record, my favorite TV sci-fi ever was Doctor Who... so you can hardly accuse me of being a "Special-effects addled American."
1. Anything not nailed down is mine.
2. Anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.
Damn, that's funny. I gotta put that on a T-Shirt.
More important is who was the hottest eye candy female (of whatever species) crewmember?
Yeoman Rand for t3h win!!!1!
Well to be fair, they faced a tough choice: Making the controls look less "sophisticated" than the one in the original series would mean making them look outdated by what we have in reality right now. If the bridge of the Enterprise looked like the set of the 1930s Frankenstein, nobody would be able to swallow it.
A better way to go would be to simply make the Enterprise in prequel look relatively cool, and explain the NCC-1701 from TOS by claiming that there was a "retro" fad in starship design at the time it was built.
Sisko was cooler than either of them, but he not a starship captain. He was a base commander.
Between Kirk and Picard: Kirk, obviously.
Wow. And now you've started a metathread complaining of all the metacomments.
Now all we need are a few dozen posts complaining about moderation before anything actually falls to the -1 threshold, and our journey to the Dark Side will be complete!
At first I thought you could make sound by waving your hands at a sensor or something.
Hmm... Come to think of it, a software version of the Theremin would be extremely cool.
Perhaps one could make it a Mac program to work with those iSight cameras.
I think the problem is that this was posted on games.slashdot.com.
Not a lot of FPS and MMORPG players are going to give a crap about an obscure work of visual art from the 80s showing up in the firmware of the upcoming XBox360.
I see the logic of posting it here, since it is a feature on a game console we are talking about... but it probably would have been more well-received on the front page.
Then again, I can't even remember to close an HTML "bold" tag, so what do I know?
Anyone who's been around gaming a while will remember Jeff Minter and Gridrunner and Attack of the Mutant Camels... the guy's earned some respect.
Dude. I've been around gaming since PONG, and I've never heard of either of those games!
What did "Attack of the Mutant Camels" run on anyway?
Shit. I just googled it. The C64. I owned a C64, and a Vic20 before that. Even had the goofy mercury-switch handheled joystick for it. Still never heard of "Attac of the Mutant Camels."
He's obviously not as huge as you think he is.
Okay. I got it now. Pretty colors and music. I'm sure LSD users everywhere are going to snap up the XBox360 now. For that matter E-popping ravers will probably want to hook one up to a projector screen at their next party.
If you don't use recreational hallucinagens, then this thing is still a quirky work of art and a clever toy, but certainly not enough to make me want to buy the console.
When it comes to my interest in buying one, I have no questions about polygon count or built-in "Lightsynths" or funky new controllers. I'm sure it's all spiffy. What I most want to know is: What games will there be?
I don't need to see 2,000 titles available. The threshold for buying a console for me is "three games which don't suck, at least one of which totally kicks ass."
As soon as I get done googling Jeff Minter, reading TFA and figuring out what the hell a Lightsynth is and why the hell I should care, I'll be happy to call him a sellout. ... Not that I consider "sellout" to be a bad thing. That word stopped being an insult which carried any weight sometime around 1972.