I thought the howling was a pain in the ass too, until I tried just doing it by ear. It seems easier to just go high, middle, high, low, etc - but I had a difficult time doing that with the more complicated ones. It was actually easier to just listen to it and play back the right sound.
Here's a link to the MS memory diagnostic tool, which doesn't require vista. It extracts to a bootable CD image. Pretty handy to have around if you think your RAM is causing problems.
As for this whole vista release thing, it's nothing but a disappointment in my view. As many others have pointed out, it's only a matter of time before a really useful piece of software *requires* vista. I'm in a situation right now where I'm going to have to go from 2000 to XP in order to use some new software.
Note that I don't think OS upgrades are necessarily a bad thing - in fact they're usually a *good* thing. The problem that I have with the newer versions of Windows is all of the crap that MS is slipping in behind the scenes. Sure, I'll buy a new OS with better stability (they've come a long way since Win98) better multimedia capabilities built-in to the OS, etc. Forced DRM, product activation, "Trusted" computing, and gestapo paperwork checks in order to download patches? No thanks. Hopefully by the time XP is no longer supported, I'll be able to do everything I need to on Linux.
You're exactly right. What we should have is a system where all of the polling data is made publicly accessible, and the voter can compare the ID from their "voting reciept" to the data and see that their vote was tallied correctly.
If it's not, they should be able to pull up a scanned image of their ballot printout, which they reviewed after it printed from the voting machine and before it was dropped into the box.
Granted, it might be difficult to prove that your vote was tampered with if it has been, but at least you would know.
Yeah but audio lag is the least of a gamer's problems -- control lag is the killer.
I'd have expected this issue to be the main focus of the article, since your average gamer is not going to have trouble figuring out the different resolution and connection options. How to determine which TVs have the least lag is not so trivial.
because they are constantly diverted by a machine. Now what this does is it takes a person away from reality because they've created their own reality...
A) Allowing you to give people 100 million dollars tax free upon your death is hardly punishment for being successful. I don't see how it's a reward for being a failure either, unless you count the possibility that the person doing the inheriting is a loser.
B)You can still leave your wealth to whoever/whatever you want, you just have to distribute it. If you can't manage to do that, the government can distribute it for you.
I'm not saying that this would be the perfect system, but I think it has a lot of benefits.
Exactly. Anti "death tax" complainers always trot out the hypothetical situation where the family loses the farm, and therefore conclude that we shouldn't tax inheritance. I would like to suggest that, instead, we just raise the limit. Let's make it, say, 100 million. Anybody who inherits a farm (or anything else) worth more than 100 million dollars cannot seriously complain about having to pay taxes. That limit may sound awfully high, but the real point of estate taxes is to prevent families from becoming gradually richer and richer over generations in order to become an aristocracy.
Oh, and before anyone laughs their way to the bank, the kicker is that anything above 100 million is taxed at 100%. All of it. Bill Gates dies, he can't leave more than 100 million dollars worth of assets to any one person. Bill can't take it with him, and nobody who complains about inheriting *only* 100 million dollars can possibly be taken seriously. Here's a giant leg up over everybody else - if you want more you have to earn it.
You were clear, perhaps I wasn't. What I'm saying is the reason that the percentage (per individual) goes up, is because the population goes up. Population is not irrelevant, it is absolutely central to the problem.
Let me give an example. With a population of 100,000 people, you don't need sewage systems, and you don't need any laws governing sewer systems. You don't need laws about septic tanks. Everybody can just dig a hole in their backyard and (as long as it's not too close to the well) Bob's your uncle. With 300 million Americans, that just doesn't work anymore. Even if you assume privately owned sewer systems (now that not everyone even has a back yard) and waste management facilities, we have to have laws about what you can do with your tons of raw sewage, and we have to be able to enforce those laws. So, the population went up, and now there is an extra expense per person that didn't exist before.
I could list a *lot* more examples just like that one, and then you can also consider the way human behavior changes in large groups as opposed to small communities. Individuals are far more anonymous in large groups, which causes a couple of extra expenditures: 1. It's easier to commit crimes, and harder to get caught 2. It's easier to slip between the cracks, become homeless, develop addictions, and otherwise become a burden to society.
Anyway, that's just all about the economic costs of a large population - what I really care about are the costs to my freedom. You can't have 300 million people and not have laws about when you can burn yard waste. You can't have 300 million people and not have security measures at airports. You can't have 300 million people and not have laws about how much firewood you can cut on government land. You can't have 300 million people and not have limits on how many fish you can catch. What kind of restrictions will we need with 600 million citizens (or more!)? Do you think we could support a population of that size without further restricting individual rights? Maybe, but I don't see it happening.
There's a reason why every year there are thousands more laws on the books than the year before. There's a reson why the US government of today dwarfs the US government of only 50, let alone 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people.
And the main reason is... a larger population. Seriously, the reason things are going in the direction that they are is that we have so many more citizens all of the time. It was a lot easier for the people to police themselves when you knew who your neighbors were and when it was odd to have a car driving up the road at this time of night.
Unfortunately, the people who bitch the most about the loss of personal freedoms, personal space, and the availability of natural resources (like, enough bushes for everyone to drive over without trashing the country), are the same folks that want to develop the hell out of everything and have 5 kids.
That's not the real problem, though -- the real problem is how to have a stable economy that isn't based on population growth. We'll have to figure that out eventually, and the sooner the better IMO (as a person who values personal responsibility, independence, plenty of room to roam, and a fair share of our natural environment to use as I please). Any economists out there? It seems like this would be the major focus of modern economics, but I never seem to hear anything about it. What are the best ideas as of right now?
Hell yeah, exploration in order to "figure out where to go next" can be a lot of fun, given certain reasonable limits. It's still a part of modern games, assuming you don't read a walkthrough. Take the Metroid Prime games, for example -- if you don't turn on the "hints" you spend most of your time exploring and figuring out where to go next. If you actually knew what item you needed or where it was, the game would be over in no time, and you wouldn't really appreciate the environment that you were visiting.
I like to see video games as a sort of super exotic vacation, with the convenience of being able to teleport home instantly.:D
You lost me with your math. $490? If you're adding in some extra stuff beyond the console and controllers, you should have noted it, because otherwise it looks like you added wrong.
Base console = $250
3 extra wiimotes x $40 = $120
3 extra nunchucks x $20 = $60
Grand total= $430
Or, more realistically, $370 since you probably don't need those extra nunchucks for multiplayer, at least not with the launch software that I've seen described. I'll buy a couple of games, 1 extra wiimote, and some component cables, and I expect to still pay far less than $490.
Well, we'll have to try it out first. I watched the videos, and it looks like the problem is that the user is holding his/her arm out straight (see the character creation video, specifically). It's pretty tough to keep your hand steady like that -- you'd be a lot better off with your hand in your lap and just moving your wrist. Once people have some practice I bet they'll be able to move the pointer as smoothly as a mouse.
Like I said though, we'll all have to try it before we know for sure.
Assuming the videos on Wii.com show the pointer at its best, I'm afraid of how good/bad the common case is going to be.
I'm afraid that might not be a very good assumption. Most gameplay videos that I've seen are obviously being played by people who are not very good at video games, or at least by people who are demoing features without trying to actually play well.
The pointer is going to add a lot of freedom to gameplay, so I expect that skill is going to vary widely among players. Expect youtube videos of people pulling off crazy shit.;)
The more we will get better at genetic engineering, the more we will find that having symbionts is a potential hazard that is no longer needed.
Well, maybe. It's also possible that we'll introduce more symbionts. Certain problems may be most easily solved by putting a custom bacterial machine into the system. With advanced biotechnology, we may even want to put bacterial DNA into our own genomes, so that our bodies can produce these beneficial, self reproducing cells.
On the other hand, mutated symbionts that "steal" more stuff from the other species can get an advantage over their non-mutated brothers, thus becoming parasites and/or killers.
The best solution to this problem is not necessarily to get rid of the bacteria. Tighter integration with the human body can prevent these problems while still maintaining the benefits of having the symbiont. It looks like mitochondria started out as independent organisms, but now they are a critical part of most eukaryotic cells. I guess you could say that a tightly integrated bacteria isn't a symbiont anymore, but it doesn't mean that we just got rid of it either - we combined with it to become something new.
You might find the book Global Brain to be interesting, if you haven't read it. It looks at all life on Earth as one interconnected system, and it definitely gave me some new insights.
Well, you could kill off all of the bacteria in your body, but you'd have to figure out a different way to digest your food. Not to mention that our local friendly bacteria fight off invasion attempts made by harmful bacteria.
Face it, we've got a symbiotic relationship. It's a good thing.
Also, don't forget the billions of bacteria in every human body. We can't live without 'em, and biotech is just making us more dependent on bacteria all the time. So, if bacteria didn't exist, we would be fucked. If we didn't exist, most bacteria wouldn't mind much. Who's more successful? It all depends on what you call success.
Oh, and if we survive after the sun envelopes the Earth, I think it's pretty likely that we'll take bacteria with us - and that we'll find bacteria already there when we get where we're going!
Don't be too sure about that. Some bacteria can survive in space, and I think it's questionable that humans will be around long enough to colonize other planets.
Not only that, but "more advanced" and "better off" are completely arbitrary. Bacteria outnumber us a trillion to one - does that make them "better"? It all depends on your criteria!
Forget the "customer" reference. Change my statement to "There is only one reasonable solution - you *trust* people not to violate copyright law."
But that doesn't mean I expect the media groups to trust everyone in the world not to rip their stuff.
What choice do they have? Once you buy the data and it's in your hot little hands, it's unrealistic to expect to *prevent* you from violating copyright law. The only thing that is realistic is to bust you after the fact - which means you're trusted until you're found to be in violation.
DRM is an attempt to prevent you from breaking the law, but it doesn't work. Like you said, it's always going to be possible to circumvent it, and when it *is* working it prevents you from using the data in ways that are actually legal. Is there any other solution other than trusting your customer to obey the law? Isn't that how most of our laws already work?
The original statement was, "I understand that, given the chance, most consumers will steal media without a second thought."
How people are stealing physical media over the internet, I don't understand. Obviously a lot of people are violating copyright law, but I think that says more about copyright law than it does about people's morals.
I think most people would refrain from physically stealing something, even if they could get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Your mileage may vary. :)
As for this whole vista release thing, it's nothing but a disappointment in my view. As many others have pointed out, it's only a matter of time before a really useful piece of software *requires* vista. I'm in a situation right now where I'm going to have to go from 2000 to XP in order to use some new software.
Note that I don't think OS upgrades are necessarily a bad thing - in fact they're usually a *good* thing. The problem that I have with the newer versions of Windows is all of the crap that MS is slipping in behind the scenes. Sure, I'll buy a new OS with better stability (they've come a long way since Win98) better multimedia capabilities built-in to the OS, etc. Forced DRM, product activation, "Trusted" computing, and gestapo paperwork checks in order to download patches? No thanks. Hopefully by the time XP is no longer supported, I'll be able to do everything I need to on Linux.
I'd actually be pretty interested to see if this works through the opera browser on the Wii.
If it's not, they should be able to pull up a scanned image of their ballot printout, which they reviewed after it printed from the voting machine and before it was dropped into the box.
Granted, it might be difficult to prove that your vote was tampered with if it has been, but at least you would know.
I'd have expected this issue to be the main focus of the article, since your average gamer is not going to have trouble figuring out the different resolution and connection options. How to determine which TVs have the least lag is not so trivial.
...says some guy on a TV show. Give me a break.
B)You can still leave your wealth to whoever/whatever you want, you just have to distribute it. If you can't manage to do that, the government can distribute it for you.
I'm not saying that this would be the perfect system, but I think it has a lot of benefits.
Oh, and before anyone laughs their way to the bank, the kicker is that anything above 100 million is taxed at 100%. All of it. Bill Gates dies, he can't leave more than 100 million dollars worth of assets to any one person. Bill can't take it with him, and nobody who complains about inheriting *only* 100 million dollars can possibly be taken seriously. Here's a giant leg up over everybody else - if you want more you have to earn it.
Let me give an example. With a population of 100,000 people, you don't need sewage systems, and you don't need any laws governing sewer systems. You don't need laws about septic tanks. Everybody can just dig a hole in their backyard and (as long as it's not too close to the well) Bob's your uncle. With 300 million Americans, that just doesn't work anymore. Even if you assume privately owned sewer systems (now that not everyone even has a back yard) and waste management facilities, we have to have laws about what you can do with your tons of raw sewage, and we have to be able to enforce those laws. So, the population went up, and now there is an extra expense per person that didn't exist before.
I could list a *lot* more examples just like that one, and then you can also consider the way human behavior changes in large groups as opposed to small communities. Individuals are far more anonymous in large groups, which causes a couple of extra expenditures: 1. It's easier to commit crimes, and harder to get caught 2. It's easier to slip between the cracks, become homeless, develop addictions, and otherwise become a burden to society.
Anyway, that's just all about the economic costs of a large population - what I really care about are the costs to my freedom. You can't have 300 million people and not have laws about when you can burn yard waste. You can't have 300 million people and not have security measures at airports. You can't have 300 million people and not have laws about how much firewood you can cut on government land. You can't have 300 million people and not have limits on how many fish you can catch. What kind of restrictions will we need with 600 million citizens (or more!)? Do you think we could support a population of that size without further restricting individual rights? Maybe, but I don't see it happening.
Unfortunately, the people who bitch the most about the loss of personal freedoms, personal space, and the availability of natural resources (like, enough bushes for everyone to drive over without trashing the country), are the same folks that want to develop the hell out of everything and have 5 kids.
That's not the real problem, though -- the real problem is how to have a stable economy that isn't based on population growth. We'll have to figure that out eventually, and the sooner the better IMO (as a person who values personal responsibility, independence, plenty of room to roam, and a fair share of our natural environment to use as I please). Any economists out there? It seems like this would be the major focus of modern economics, but I never seem to hear anything about it. What are the best ideas as of right now?
I like to see video games as a sort of super exotic vacation, with the convenience of being able to teleport home instantly. :D
Base console = $250
3 extra wiimotes x $40 = $120
3 extra nunchucks x $20 = $60
Grand total= $430
Or, more realistically, $370 since you probably don't need those extra nunchucks for multiplayer, at least not with the launch software that I've seen described. I'll buy a couple of games, 1 extra wiimote, and some component cables, and I expect to still pay far less than $490.
Like I said though, we'll all have to try it before we know for sure.
I'm afraid that might not be a very good assumption. Most gameplay videos that I've seen are obviously being played by people who are not very good at video games, or at least by people who are demoing features without trying to actually play well.The pointer is going to add a lot of freedom to gameplay, so I expect that skill is going to vary widely among players. Expect youtube videos of people pulling off crazy shit. ;)
Should be the default, IMO.
Face it, we've got a symbiotic relationship. It's a good thing.
Oh, and if we survive after the sun envelopes the Earth, I think it's pretty likely that we'll take bacteria with us - and that we'll find bacteria already there when we get where we're going!
DRM is an attempt to prevent you from breaking the law, but it doesn't work. Like you said, it's always going to be possible to circumvent it, and when it *is* working it prevents you from using the data in ways that are actually legal. Is there any other solution other than trusting your customer to obey the law? Isn't that how most of our laws already work?
How people are stealing physical media over the internet, I don't understand. Obviously a lot of people are violating copyright law, but I think that says more about copyright law than it does about people's morals.
I think most people would refrain from physically stealing something, even if they could get away with it.