Not interested in the Plex server, as I already have DLNA server software running (for a couple of years) that works well with everything.
As for the client, I see "Plex" in the App Store... for $4.95. Call me cheap, but I'd prefer a free client. I've contributed enough media playback code to the world to not feel too guilty about it, and I've contributed money to VideoLAN (as I do most "free" software efforts I make use of).
He's asking if VLC for iOS will play back DLNA-served media. As another iPhone/iPad owner with a DLNA server that holds all my media, I'd like to know too. Every TV in my house handles media streamed from the Linux box I have in my basement just great... it would be spiffy if I could also watch shows on my tablet so I can sit outside on my deck.
You'd think with all those advertising dollars, they'd hire somebody not related to Aunt Bunny (Goony Goo Hoo) to promote the product. Those arms were hairier than mine!
Performance isn't as much of a factor any more - a 7 year old PC will browse the web and get your e-mail just as well as a brand new one. Monitor resolutions are stagnating at 1080p... video cards that are 3 generations old still play games great on single 1080p monitors.
In short, for most people (gaming enthusiasts and developers excluded), older PCs still work fine, so WHY UPGRADE?
Yeah, maybe a new PC will boot in 10 seconds, or that office app will launch in 50% of the time as the old one, but when that 50% is only another 2 seconds, who cares?
There was a time when improvements in PCs were more dramatic - you could FEEL the change performance between one PC and the next, but we've entered an era of diminishing returns with those performance improvements. Sure, we will see good improvements in media encoding time, or see lag on a game that is run on 3 monitors, but most people don't do these things all the time, or even some of the time.
This is why PC sales have dropped. Everybody who needs a computer has them, and most people are ok with the computer they have, until it breaks down. This obviously will slow down sales.
OK, Slashdotters, who wants to help me make a geotagging app that crowdsources locations of people and businesses who are NOT gun owners so that legitimate users can use this as positive reinforcement of the anti-gun ideal?
It will allow users to personally thank those non-gun owners (and businesses) for their thoughtfulness toward others and their pacifist approach toward dealing with an increasingly dangerous and violent world.
I think Brett Stallbaum should be the first address in the database.
Just learned about this.... legendary for injuries. I'd guess physics had far less to do with the design than lots of beer and whiskey.
Action Park might be better known to you East Coast Slashdotters as "Traction Park", "Accident Park", or "Class Action Park" and closed in 1996 after 18 years and 5 fatalities.
Two words you do not want to hear together when getting a referral from a retinal specialist.
I had a tumor inside my eye. Maybe this process could have saved the vision in my eye, as opposed to the invasive radiation treatment I had to deal with instead. The radiation has basically done a number on the vision in that eye, which has degraded quite a bit since my treatment almost 3 years ago.
Keep in mind, there are other issues... when they did the biopsy, it resulted in bleeding in my eye, a shocking discovery I made after the treatment (where a radioactive plaque was sewn to my eye, under the tumor, for a week) when I would put the drops prescribed in my eye. It was unexpected, basically a dark encroaching blob that floated into my vision when my head was tilted back. I suspect injecting these into an eye would result in a similar problem. IT took several weeks to clear up (blood absorption is slow in the eye). I'm also not sure if these are up to the task of killing a 6mm tumor.
Will they provide "Safe Search" type filtering for schools? It's widely accepted that Bing provides the best results for searching for porn on the internet.
I'm not trying to be funny, either... for whatever other faults people place on Bing, the porn aspect has to be the biggest obstacle to pushing it in schools.
Likewise, property owners frustrated with the US's endangered species act find it's easier to hunt and kill such species on their property, rather than lose access to that property.
Isn't it wonderful, how well all this legislation to protect historical or ecological treasure works?
If I need the output of a $2000+ DSLR camera, I'll get one. I don't expect my phone to do that, but honestly, for 90% of the photo/video applications I need it for, my iPhone works pretty damn well - and more importantly, it's always at my side when I'm out. There are quite a few phones (Android and Windows Phones) that are getting better cameras on them, too.
It's been at least a year since I felt like I needed to grab my digital camera.
We are talking mobile devices here, and cameras really don't fall into that category. I suppose somebody could (probably already does?) make a DSLR that takes a SIM card and can handle 3G/4G, and that would be useful, but I doubt you'd get much sales from the consumer market.
Cameras will continue to improve on smart phones, also remember, massive pixel resolutions do not directly correlate to great quality, and IIRC, 4megapixels equates to an 8x10 printed to typical photo stock, detail-wise.
I suspect in the future, somebody will poo-poo the idea that neural inductance receptors can produce the same quality images from your eyes that you get from your smart cell device. There just isn't nearly the same number of receptors in your retina as their are on your quantum-film based camera sensors!
Let's see, everybody in this household has a phone, tablet and we have a netbook. 7 devices for 3 people.
Yeah, I can see mobile devices outnumbering people.
Realistically, tablets will always exist next to phones. Some people might like "phablets" but form-factor matters. A phone can replace a camera, can have a lot of handy apps, but is lousy for reading, browsing and video compared to a tablet (yes, they can be done, but... ugh). In short, the tablet and smart phone are two form factors that will likely be useful for some time.
Not sure where the "smart watch" will fit in, I see it more useful as a peripheral for your phone, but some people may see it as a replacement for the phone, and supplementing as a hotspot for a tablet (which then handles everything your phone might have). That's still two devices per person, as a reasonable "data and communications tool set"
I think the bigger issue missed here is that rentals are simply no longer possible with Xbox One.
Microsoft has killed the game rental market in one fell swoop.
Personally, I think this is a dumb move... I've bought many games after trying them out as rentals; I doubt I am alone with that practice. That is a lot of potential marketing tossed down the toilet.
Even if the used game market survives (though I doubt it will ever be a factor again), the rental market is gone, gone,gone.
First off, the jpeg was encoded without anti-aliasing and at high quality.
Second, the intention was to demonstrate the relative difficulty the human eye has at discerning pixel differentiation at higher resolutions. You'd never see that sort of aliased, high-contrast diagonal line in a motion video or game. You would see it in a fixed image as part of a PC display (part of the UI or displayed by an app). Almost all video you see is going to have a lot of natural anti-aliasing, either due to what is being filmed or the means to record it (I'm ignoring altogether compression artifacts, but they only would make my argument stronger).
For games and movies, the differences between 4K and 1080p are minimal, at best, even when you have an 80" screen viewed from 6 feet away, by a human eye.
720p to 1080p is noticeable on such a set up, but only side-by-side. If I had you walk into the room while a 720p or 1080p action movie was playing (note I'm excluding a film like Samsara, where visual quality is optimal and there is little motion), you'd have a hard time telling me which resolution it really was.
480p to 720p the difference is easily discernible, assuming the quality of interpolation is not great (there are some processors that do a great job, particularly with animation).
The chart that is usually presented claims you can tell the difference between 1080p and 4k 8ft away on a 20" display. This is laughable. You MIGHT be able to tell in the case of the aliased diagonal line I showed in my image, but not with anything else. At 8' you'd probably need a display bigger than 100" to tell the difference with the right still images.
It's about diminishing returns. The same rule applies to 3D models and tessellation. At a certain point, it simply doesn't matter. Our eyes are perceiving good enough quality, and we are more interested in everything else going on.
Well, these make great monitors.. somebody has already mentioned the 50" sub-$1500 TV.
I would rather make the case that 4k, while great for PC monitors, are not compelling as consumer TVs. I realize there are charts that demonstrate, scientifically, that 4K is visibly better in a living room, with a large screen, over 1080p, but I don't buy it, at least not for motion video (games and shows). We are reaching the pivot point towards vastly diminishing returns.
I do that by dropping these pictures fro reference:
The pictures explain as well as anything. I'd love the real estate for computer work, but games and video, not so much (at least, not to replace my 58" 1080p plasma)
SABNZBD is a great example of what I'm talkign about.
On Windows, it's... "click the installer" and it's pretty much done.
On Kubuntu Linux, I had to locate a solid tutorial, about 7 pages long, on installing it and getting it running correctly.
I have nothing against text files as config files, but geez... how about standardizing the damn things?...and Where the f*ck are my logs? No, they don't get put in the same subfolders every time, and I NEED those logs a lot more in Linux than in Windows.
I'm running a LAMP server and I have Kubuntu running as a media server. Every time I plug in a new USB drive, I have to go through a bunch of extraneous steps just to permanently mount and share the drive on SAMBA - there just isn't a simple way to do it. I have to get the UUID of the drive, and edit FSTAB and the samba config files. Why does it have to be that painful?
I have init.d scripts that work fine on a couple of my python daemons, but not on a couple of other daemons (which manually start fine).
So I'm "holding it wrong?" - sorry, the OS should NOT have me so involved. I'm a software developer, my bread and butter is on Microsoft-based enterprise apps, but my background includes years working in embedded systems. Hell, I've written my own multi-tasking operating systems and built up entire IO libraries for devices that were custom built.
I'm wrong for wanting to drop an installer on my Linux box and have it install without issues. I should WANT to have to fire up the editor-de-jour for whatever flavor of Linux I'm using (let's not forget to fire it up with sudo!!), and sift through a bunch of options, hopefully all of them are documented, to configure it? Again, why? What's the point of having a GUI if not to make life easier for users? Why bother with VNC?
Do you think my parents would use a shell-based OS? Hell no. What I always get form Linux fanatics is the condescending "use the shell" answer, which is complete bullsh*t. Editing text config files isn't much different from using a shell either... Would it kill Linux developers to provide a GUI control panel? Would it kill them to provide a one-click install?...and why don't they? Oh yeah... because who knows what desktop or distribution they will be installed in.... yes, it's all called Linux, but it's like everybody who gets upset takes theri ball and goes home... then branches off another distribution.
Sorry... venting again.
The point is, it shouldn't be so hard for people who are not autistic savants who dwell on TTY terminals, tapping away on monochrome 80x25 text displays, convinced of their superiority. I don't live and breathe Linux, so don't tell me I'm doing it wrong.
For the record, I've never had to do any "registry hacks" to install any damn Windows apps - not in 20 years of using Windows. Either there is an installer that works fine, or it's a portable app that can be dumped into a folder and run. I've written plenty of apps that can launch, and configure themselves for running as a service, or setting up as a startup app. I've also written a lot of software pretty "close to the metal" - apps running on over 400,000 PCs right now, where security and robustness is important. They work. They don't require any hacks. The user doesn't even get involved in the install process.
So I won't have to write special scripts every time I install a new daemon app?
Seriously, I do not live in the Linux ecosystem, so it's a pain in the ass when I have to install anything on the few Linux boxes I have here in my house, looking up the obscure commands to figure out how to get everything running - and failing to get some daemons running, without so much as a single log line to tell me why it failed.
Sorry... just venting. Compared to Linux, Windows installations are light years ahead. That's just a simple fact.
I discovered a bug with the gold in Pirates! while watching somebody play on my roommate's Mac (we were stationed in Okinawa on Camp Kinser)... he went into port with damage, and while he did not have enough money, it offered to repair his damaged ships for more money than he had.
Needless to say, the underflow was done to a UINT16 used to track gold (in 10-gold increments), so you'd end up with around 655350 gold after the transaction. That kept your crews happy, and let you buy lots of things.
I also enjoyed the mental image of 1200 pirates hanging off a sloop after I sold off my fleet.
I spent 3 years (2003~2006) working with a company to deliver MP3 Car Stereos for GM. I believe they still deliver vehicles with them, but keep in mind, very little change had occurred in car stereos before that. Telematics (Auto PCs) had been worked on, too, I was involved with projects at Visteon and Lear, but that was 1999~2002 time frame, and the technology just wasn't there.
There is also a lot more to development of automotive ANYTHING. Electronics have to be a lot more robust (-40degF~140degF, high humidity, vibration, shock, etc...), materials used have to match the car interiors (and be properly made to not fade 'differently' from the rest). Once a product is usable, it goes through a lot of tweaking, as product line engineers determine calibrations to set (like lighting, for example). Failure Modes need to be sorted out to make it as bullet-proof as possible.
Oh, and LOTS AND LOTS of testing. On the bench, in the cars...
We had looked at jumpstarting more advanced tech, like HDDs in the radios to act as radio 'DVRs' and store user's audio tracks. At the time, drives were cost prohibitive and there were still too many legal issues to make it practical.
Mix in the regulatory issues like Driver Distraction, and an immature market, and there are good reasons why design hasn't settled down yet. It's just not as simple as throwing in a general purpose PC with a touchscreen mounted to the dash.
Five years ago, we (drivers) were all buying dedicated GPS units - now we get those features in our smart phones and tablets and desire integration into the car. Dashcams are all the rage in Russia, and probably should be everywhere else. Cars are getting smarter with vision systems (having worked on some of those systems now in use, you cannot imagine just how complicated those are) that do everything from detecting lane changes, signs and oncoming headlights (to dim brights) to braking for unexpected hazards.
The problem with this, and why I bring it up, is that we have no idea what form factors and features we'll demand in 5 years. Automotive, much like mobile, is undergoing tremendous growth where automation is concerned. Unlike mobile, there are still a lot of things computers can do for us as features of our cars that we really haven't fully figured out yet.
Exactly why to provide these titles, and some... besides, existing Steam aren't the primary "target market" - console gamers are. Steam users will see the benefit without a prod of free games, but you need to hook console gamers.
Not just the Portal games, of course, at least one or two other AAA titles, and maybe some smaller, indie titles.
The purpose of the steambox is to GROW their market, not provide existing users another way to play Steam games.
Valve should consider Portal and Portal 2 along with a few other AAA titles to give away with SteamBox. That would give gamers an incentive for giving it a shot.
Seriously, I'm getting very annoyed when particles or chunks of meteorites are somehow identified as coming from some specific place... WTF?
A Neutrino is a Neutrino. It has no identifying characteristic. The nature of a single variable, the charge, may describe the sort of event the particle originated from, but hardly any specificity of the actual event or where that event took place. At least a chunk of space rock might be comprised of minerals that are similar to those from a neighboring planet (though that hardly means it was likely to have come from that place).
I'm also a bit puzzled why such a neutrino would require a "super black hole" - which is kind of like saying "super dead" - anything happening inside the event horizon of a black hole doesn't really matter... and anything happening outside of the event horizon is the same regardless of the size of the black hole (just covering a larger area)
Slashdot Mirror
Not interested in the Plex server, as I already have DLNA server software running (for a couple of years) that works well with everything.
As for the client, I see "Plex" in the App Store... for $4.95. Call me cheap, but I'd prefer a free client. I've contributed enough media playback code to the world to not feel too guilty about it, and I've contributed money to VideoLAN (as I do most "free" software efforts I make use of).
Plex is a media server, not a client, right?
He's asking if VLC for iOS will play back DLNA-served media. As another iPhone/iPad owner with a DLNA server that holds all my media, I'd like to know too. Every TV in my house handles media streamed from the Linux box I have in my basement just great... it would be spiffy if I could also watch shows on my tablet so I can sit outside on my deck.
You'd think with all those advertising dollars, they'd hire somebody not related to Aunt Bunny (Goony Goo Hoo) to promote the product. Those arms were hairier than mine!
Performance isn't as much of a factor any more - a 7 year old PC will browse the web and get your e-mail just as well as a brand new one. Monitor resolutions are stagnating at 1080p... video cards that are 3 generations old still play games great on single 1080p monitors.
In short, for most people (gaming enthusiasts and developers excluded), older PCs still work fine, so WHY UPGRADE?
Yeah, maybe a new PC will boot in 10 seconds, or that office app will launch in 50% of the time as the old one, but when that 50% is only another 2 seconds, who cares?
There was a time when improvements in PCs were more dramatic - you could FEEL the change performance between one PC and the next, but we've entered an era of diminishing returns with those performance improvements. Sure, we will see good improvements in media encoding time, or see lag on a game that is run on 3 monitors, but most people don't do these things all the time, or even some of the time.
This is why PC sales have dropped. Everybody who needs a computer has them, and most people are ok with the computer they have, until it breaks down. This obviously will slow down sales.
OK, Slashdotters, who wants to help me make a geotagging app that crowdsources locations of people and businesses who are NOT gun owners so that legitimate users can use this as positive reinforcement of the anti-gun ideal?
It will allow users to personally thank those non-gun owners (and businesses) for their thoughtfulness toward others and their pacifist approach toward dealing with an increasingly dangerous and violent world.
I think Brett Stallbaum should be the first address in the database.
Just learned about this.... legendary for injuries. I'd guess physics had far less to do with the design than lots of beer and whiskey.
Action Park might be better known to you East Coast Slashdotters as "Traction Park", "Accident Park", or "Class Action Park" and closed in 1996 after 18 years and 5 fatalities.
Two words you do not want to hear together when getting a referral from a retinal specialist.
I had a tumor inside my eye. Maybe this process could have saved the vision in my eye, as opposed to the invasive radiation treatment I had to deal with instead. The radiation has basically done a number on the vision in that eye, which has degraded quite a bit since my treatment almost 3 years ago.
Keep in mind, there are other issues... when they did the biopsy, it resulted in bleeding in my eye, a shocking discovery I made after the treatment (where a radioactive plaque was sewn to my eye, under the tumor, for a week) when I would put the drops prescribed in my eye. It was unexpected, basically a dark encroaching blob that floated into my vision when my head was tilted back. I suspect injecting these into an eye would result in a similar problem. IT took several weeks to clear up (blood absorption is slow in the eye). I'm also not sure if these are up to the task of killing a 6mm tumor.
Will they provide "Safe Search" type filtering for schools? It's widely accepted that Bing provides the best results for searching for porn on the internet.
I'm not trying to be funny, either... for whatever other faults people place on Bing, the porn aspect has to be the biggest obstacle to pushing it in schools.
Throw the bones away in the trash.
Likewise, property owners frustrated with the US's endangered species act find it's easier to hunt and kill such species on their property, rather than lose access to that property.
Isn't it wonderful, how well all this legislation to protect historical or ecological treasure works?
If I need the output of a $2000+ DSLR camera, I'll get one. I don't expect my phone to do that, but honestly, for 90% of the photo/video applications I need it for, my iPhone works pretty damn well - and more importantly, it's always at my side when I'm out. There are quite a few phones (Android and Windows Phones) that are getting better cameras on them, too.
It's been at least a year since I felt like I needed to grab my digital camera.
We are talking mobile devices here, and cameras really don't fall into that category. I suppose somebody could (probably already does?) make a DSLR that takes a SIM card and can handle 3G/4G, and that would be useful, but I doubt you'd get much sales from the consumer market.
Cameras will continue to improve on smart phones, also remember, massive pixel resolutions do not directly correlate to great quality, and IIRC, 4megapixels equates to an 8x10 printed to typical photo stock, detail-wise.
I suspect in the future, somebody will poo-poo the idea that neural inductance receptors can produce the same quality images from your eyes that you get from your smart cell device. There just isn't nearly the same number of receptors in your retina as their are on your quantum-film based camera sensors!
Progress... how does it work?
Let's see, everybody in this household has a phone, tablet and we have a netbook. 7 devices for 3 people.
Yeah, I can see mobile devices outnumbering people.
Realistically, tablets will always exist next to phones. Some people might like "phablets" but form-factor matters. A phone can replace a camera, can have a lot of handy apps, but is lousy for reading, browsing and video compared to a tablet (yes, they can be done, but... ugh). In short, the tablet and smart phone are two form factors that will likely be useful for some time.
Not sure where the "smart watch" will fit in, I see it more useful as a peripheral for your phone, but some people may see it as a replacement for the phone, and supplementing as a hotspot for a tablet (which then handles everything your phone might have). That's still two devices per person, as a reasonable "data and communications tool set"
We all know it was Bono and all that clapping of his hands
I think the bigger issue missed here is that rentals are simply no longer possible with Xbox One.
Microsoft has killed the game rental market in one fell swoop.
Personally, I think this is a dumb move... I've bought many games after trying them out as rentals; I doubt I am alone with that practice. That is a lot of potential marketing tossed down the toilet.
Even if the used game market survives (though I doubt it will ever be a factor again), the rental market is gone, gone,gone.
In a shocking statistic, 40% of sickdays are taken on Fridays or Mondays... clearly slackers trying to extend their weekends.
We should try and stamp out this scourge on productivity everywhere!
First off, the jpeg was encoded without anti-aliasing and at high quality.
Second, the intention was to demonstrate the relative difficulty the human eye has at discerning pixel differentiation at higher resolutions. You'd never see that sort of aliased, high-contrast diagonal line in a motion video or game. You would see it in a fixed image as part of a PC display (part of the UI or displayed by an app). Almost all video you see is going to have a lot of natural anti-aliasing, either due to what is being filmed or the means to record it (I'm ignoring altogether compression artifacts, but they only would make my argument stronger).
For games and movies, the differences between 4K and 1080p are minimal, at best, even when you have an 80" screen viewed from 6 feet away, by a human eye.
720p to 1080p is noticeable on such a set up, but only side-by-side. If I had you walk into the room while a 720p or 1080p action movie was playing (note I'm excluding a film like Samsara, where visual quality is optimal and there is little motion), you'd have a hard time telling me which resolution it really was.
480p to 720p the difference is easily discernible, assuming the quality of interpolation is not great (there are some processors that do a great job, particularly with animation).
The chart that is usually presented claims you can tell the difference between 1080p and 4k 8ft away on a 20" display. This is laughable. You MIGHT be able to tell in the case of the aliased diagonal line I showed in my image, but not with anything else. At 8' you'd probably need a display bigger than 100" to tell the difference with the right still images.
It's about diminishing returns. The same rule applies to 3D models and tessellation. At a certain point, it simply doesn't matter. Our eyes are perceiving good enough quality, and we are more interested in everything else going on.
Well, these make great monitors.. somebody has already mentioned the 50" sub-$1500 TV.
I would rather make the case that 4k, while great for PC monitors, are not compelling as consumer TVs. I realize there are charts that demonstrate, scientifically, that 4K is visibly better in a living room, with a large screen, over 1080p, but I don't buy it, at least not for motion video (games and shows). We are reaching the pivot point towards vastly diminishing returns.
I do that by dropping these pictures fro reference:
Pixel Fallacy example 1
Pixel Fallacy 2
The pictures explain as well as anything. I'd love the real estate for computer work, but games and video, not so much (at least, not to replace my 58" 1080p plasma)
Better would be to compare the S model to a typical current-model gas-powered sedan.
True, it likely does not pollute more than an SUV, but what about a Chevy Impala?
SABNZBD is a great example of what I'm talkign about.
On Windows, it's... "click the installer" and it's pretty much done.
On Kubuntu Linux, I had to locate a solid tutorial, about 7 pages long, on installing it and getting it running correctly.
I have nothing against text files as config files, but geez... how about standardizing the damn things? ...and Where the f*ck are my logs? No, they don't get put in the same subfolders every time, and I NEED those logs a lot more in Linux than in Windows.
I'm running a LAMP server and I have Kubuntu running as a media server. Every time I plug in a new USB drive, I have to go through a bunch of extraneous steps just to permanently mount and share the drive on SAMBA - there just isn't a simple way to do it. I have to get the UUID of the drive, and edit FSTAB and the samba config files. Why does it have to be that painful?
I have init.d scripts that work fine on a couple of my python daemons, but not on a couple of other daemons (which manually start fine).
So I'm "holding it wrong?" - sorry, the OS should NOT have me so involved. I'm a software developer, my bread and butter is on Microsoft-based enterprise apps, but my background includes years working in embedded systems. Hell, I've written my own multi-tasking operating systems and built up entire IO libraries for devices that were custom built.
I'm wrong for wanting to drop an installer on my Linux box and have it install without issues. I should WANT to have to fire up the editor-de-jour for whatever flavor of Linux I'm using (let's not forget to fire it up with sudo!!), and sift through a bunch of options, hopefully all of them are documented, to configure it? Again, why? What's the point of having a GUI if not to make life easier for users? Why bother with VNC?
Do you think my parents would use a shell-based OS? Hell no. What I always get form Linux fanatics is the condescending "use the shell" answer, which is complete bullsh*t. Editing text config files isn't much different from using a shell either... Would it kill Linux developers to provide a GUI control panel? Would it kill them to provide a one-click install? ...and why don't they? Oh yeah... because who knows what desktop or distribution they will be installed in.... yes, it's all called Linux, but it's like everybody who gets upset takes theri ball and goes home... then branches off another distribution.
Sorry... venting again.
The point is, it shouldn't be so hard for people who are not autistic savants who dwell on TTY terminals, tapping away on monochrome 80x25 text displays, convinced of their superiority. I don't live and breathe Linux, so don't tell me I'm doing it wrong.
For the record, I've never had to do any "registry hacks" to install any damn Windows apps - not in 20 years of using Windows. Either there is an installer that works fine, or it's a portable app that can be dumped into a folder and run. I've written plenty of apps that can launch, and configure themselves for running as a service, or setting up as a startup app. I've also written a lot of software pretty "close to the metal" - apps running on over 400,000 PCs right now, where security and robustness is important. They work. They don't require any hacks. The user doesn't even get involved in the install process.
So I won't have to write special scripts every time I install a new daemon app?
Seriously, I do not live in the Linux ecosystem, so it's a pain in the ass when I have to install anything on the few Linux boxes I have here in my house, looking up the obscure commands to figure out how to get everything running - and failing to get some daemons running, without so much as a single log line to tell me why it failed.
Sorry... just venting. Compared to Linux, Windows installations are light years ahead. That's just a simple fact.
I discovered a bug with the gold in Pirates! while watching somebody play on my roommate's Mac (we were stationed in Okinawa on Camp Kinser)... he went into port with damage, and while he did not have enough money, it offered to repair his damaged ships for more money than he had.
Needless to say, the underflow was done to a UINT16 used to track gold (in 10-gold increments), so you'd end up with around 655350 gold after the transaction. That kept your crews happy, and let you buy lots of things.
I also enjoyed the mental image of 1200 pirates hanging off a sloop after I sold off my fleet.
We put in ungodly hours into that game.
I had a nice long reply for this, but encountered something called the "lameness filter" and I didn't type the damn thing all in caps, but whatever...
Short version: I support standardization, and wrote a lot of notes on the subject when I worked in automotive.
I spent 3 years (2003~2006) working with a company to deliver MP3 Car Stereos for GM. I believe they still deliver vehicles with them, but keep in mind, very little change had occurred in car stereos before that. Telematics (Auto PCs) had been worked on, too, I was involved with projects at Visteon and Lear, but that was 1999~2002 time frame, and the technology just wasn't there.
There is also a lot more to development of automotive ANYTHING. Electronics have to be a lot more robust (-40degF~140degF, high humidity, vibration, shock, etc...), materials used have to match the car interiors (and be properly made to not fade 'differently' from the rest). Once a product is usable, it goes through a lot of tweaking, as product line engineers determine calibrations to set (like lighting, for example). Failure Modes need to be sorted out to make it as bullet-proof as possible.
Oh, and LOTS AND LOTS of testing. On the bench, in the cars...
We had looked at jumpstarting more advanced tech, like HDDs in the radios to act as radio 'DVRs' and store user's audio tracks. At the time, drives were cost prohibitive and there were still too many legal issues to make it practical.
Mix in the regulatory issues like Driver Distraction, and an immature market, and there are good reasons why design hasn't settled down yet. It's just not as simple as throwing in a general purpose PC with a touchscreen mounted to the dash.
Five years ago, we (drivers) were all buying dedicated GPS units - now we get those features in our smart phones and tablets and desire integration into the car. Dashcams are all the rage in Russia, and probably should be everywhere else. Cars are getting smarter with vision systems (having worked on some of those systems now in use, you cannot imagine just how complicated those are) that do everything from detecting lane changes, signs and oncoming headlights (to dim brights) to braking for unexpected hazards.
The problem with this, and why I bring it up, is that we have no idea what form factors and features we'll demand in 5 years. Automotive, much like mobile, is undergoing tremendous growth where automation is concerned. Unlike mobile, there are still a lot of things computers can do for us as features of our cars that we really haven't fully figured out yet.
Exactly why to provide these titles, and some... besides, existing Steam aren't the primary "target market" - console gamers are. Steam users will see the benefit without a prod of free games, but you need to hook console gamers.
Not just the Portal games, of course, at least one or two other AAA titles, and maybe some smaller, indie titles.
The purpose of the steambox is to GROW their market, not provide existing users another way to play Steam games.
Valve should consider Portal and Portal 2 along with a few other AAA titles to give away with SteamBox. That would give gamers an incentive for giving it a shot.
Seriously, I'm getting very annoyed when particles or chunks of meteorites are somehow identified as coming from some specific place... WTF?
A Neutrino is a Neutrino. It has no identifying characteristic. The nature of a single variable, the charge, may describe the sort of event the particle originated from, but hardly any specificity of the actual event or where that event took place. At least a chunk of space rock might be comprised of minerals that are similar to those from a neighboring planet (though that hardly means it was likely to have come from that place).
I'm also a bit puzzled why such a neutrino would require a "super black hole" - which is kind of like saying "super dead" - anything happening inside the event horizon of a black hole doesn't really matter... and anything happening outside of the event horizon is the same regardless of the size of the black hole (just covering a larger area)