it's no different than the cops using a plane or a car to follow you, just a lot cheaper.
Right. So you don't mind putting one in everyone's car, and just rounding up all the "bad guys" at a later point in time? It's just like a national ID card or the like - no problem, unless you're guilty.
It's not for us. Not for any of us.
on
G4 Drops TechTV Name
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· Score: 2, Insightful
One thing that seems consistent, down to the new logo - they're not just going after gamers, but specifically console gamers. After all, Halo 2 made more than a Hollywood blockbuster, so there's tons of people just waiting to watch console game stuff, right? That's my bet - they'll keep dumbing it down (which is sad - Call4Help and TSS were, depending, already fairly dumbed down) further, so the 15-year-olds with a PS2 can be happy. That's where the money is.
I wonder if I can call Charter and ask that they drop G4 and put on something else instead?
Couple thoughts 1) if you have a beefy enough computer, hardware encoding is not really necessary, especially if you just want to "try out some of the linux solutions". Buy any number of the BT878-based TV cards and try with that. I know the TV Wonder VE used to go for about $30. Granted, it's mono, but I'm sure there's other stuff, cheaper. I remember Isaac mentioning that a 1700mhz machine was almost enough to record two streams and play one simultaneously.
2) The idea for your "ppc-based" box makes a lot of sense, too, and I'm curious to see what people will do with it, PVR-wise.
3) MediaMVP - you might want to look at the PrismIQ. I know the GUI is a lot better, and I think it has some features the MVP doesn't. Unfortunately, I believe both require some software running on another computer. (And neither supports MPEG4 natively, the prismiq uses the server computer to transcode). Oh, and the big annoyance on both - NO PCM AUDIO. Means that iMovie-based DVDs can't be ripped and played - you need to convert them to something else. Not a huge deal, but a deal nonetheless.
What I did was rent it. I used 007:AUF, not Mechassault, though the exploit is similar. You only need it once.
You'll also need a memory card that you can put the savegame on. I wound up buying a $7 USB/Xbox adapter that let me use a USB thumbdrive (the adapter was for the Phantasy Star Online game, so you could use a keyboard), and a $10 thumbdrive that had 16mb (I seem to remember that the max size of the stick could only be 32mb or something like that). There's a couple other ways. The "Action Replay" game, though that's $30.
So, Xbox + $7 adapter + $10 memory card + several hours of effort (finding the exploit, loading the exploit, and finding compiled XBMC) gives you a PVR. Except that it's loud as heck.
And all of this is irrelevant for the newer Xboxes anyhow, from what I remember. Buy an old one, used, etc.
And from looking at xbox-linux.org, you can find someone local who's willing to do it for you.
Agreed. After playing Carmageddon 2 for several hours, I needed to go to the store, and wondered if I took out that light pole, would it kill those pedestrians? Not to mention the ability in Carmageddon 2 to shear your car in half. Oh, those were the days. Carmageddon 3 stunk, but rumors abound of a new one coming soon.
Two options: 1) Something like the El Gato EyeTV. This is your PVR functionality.
2) Someone write a Cocoa frontend for MythTV. I don't think it'd be easy to port over a full fledged version, but a frontend is probably doable. (I Am Not A Software Programmer)
After watching (or trying to watch) the first few episodes of Season 2 of RvB, I gave up - there were too many injokes and self-referencing going on, and I'd even watched the first series recently. Sad to say, it wasn't funny. (Nor was the first episode of Strangerhood, though I don't know if it was supposed to be). Not trying to be a smartass, but has RvB gotten funny again?
Instead of drooling over still from a movie that will (in all likelihood) suck, go play Knights of the Old Republic. The first one, to be honest, was better than 3 of the 5 Star War movies. It had an engaging storyline, an awesome twist, you got to choose light side or dark side, you were a Jedi, turn-based combat, force powers, etc, etc. You were _in_ the movie. Utterly amazing.
The first one's about $15-$20 these days (for Xbox or PC), and the second one will be out shortly on the PC. (Both are equally worth it - deep RPGs in the Star Wars universe, with tons of cutscenes, moral dilemnas, and a lot more)
Cintra is ponying up all the money for this project. The State of Texas will pay nothing. And gets the ability to take over tolls in 50 years.
It will go south, around the east side of Dallas, and around the east side of Austin.
Tolls are expected to be about what current tolls are, which means (according to the Star Telegram, at least) to drive the whole thing will cost about $40. Seems like a lot, but it isn't - truck drivers have to routinely sit in Dallas/Fort Worth traffic, which probably costs an hour's worth of time. Same with Austin.
I don't particularly feel sorry for the small towns - usually, the town builds up around the road, and once they have several hundred people, drop the speed limit to 45 while going through their town. Thanks, guys. Not.
Oh, and the speed limit's supposed to be 85.
I'm really looking forward to it. For those of you who think this is minor, it's not. The drive from Mexico to Oklahoma is probably 10 hours - DFW is about an hour south from Oklahoma, 3 hours from Austin, and probably 8 from the border. Yes, Texas is big.
Classic story - a friend of mine bought a couple martial arts DVDs while in China. She was pissed that her DVD wouldn't play them. I told her why - basically, it allows an arbitrary price structure, so that a different price can be set, so we may pay $15, the Brits may pay #15 (sorry, no "pound" key aside from that), and Indians might only pay 5. She was fine with that. I tried to explain that that's _why_ she couldn't play these DVDs, but she simply didn't connect the two. Ah, well. (And, IIRC, she later refused to let me make her DVD player region-free, because she didn't see the benefit)
The difference between Cyberpunk (which I've played) and Shadowrun (which I've been playing for 14+ years now) is that Shadowrun is Cinematic. The good guys pull through by the skin of their teeth. The bad guys always get away - even if a trunk is dropped on them from A Great Height. SR1 was clunky, especially during large combats using burst-fire. But SR3 has really improved things, and our group's been loving it. Once everyone knows what they're doing, it's quick and fun. Even for mages. *grin*
That being said, I'd love for their to be some sort of SR RPG. Tactical simulator, too, while you're at it. Rumors have abounded for years about an SR videogame - c'mon, guys, where is it?
I was even more surprised when the series turned out to be good.
Oh, glad to hear it's gotten better. I watched a couple Season 1 or 2 episodes and went back to watching (insert name of a random sci-fi show... it was probably better). That was the most godawful derivative tripe. I wondered "why" when SciFi first started carrying it, since most of their original stuff was so much better. It was like they decided to pick up another "Lexx" (another godawful show, for those lucky enough to have not seen it), rather than a good show. (Guess Roddenberry's latest crap shows were priced too high)
That said, rent the first season or so. That said, don't. I'll probably watch the last couple episodes... or maybe just start watching fresh.
And oh, the irony... they cancelled Farscape because it got good ratings but cost too much, and now they're trying to bring over the (somewhat-less-alienated-since-the-miniseries) Farscape fans by grabbing the actors. Wonder if that was the purpose of the miniseries - give the fans a sense of closure(?), and give them (okay, "us") a reason to stop boycotting the network.
That being said, my new favorite quote about how SciFi has gone downhill over the years: "the writing was on the wall when the Sci-Fi channel showed Braveheart".
(and yes, people hacking it will be an issue) * Traffic notification - this is almost the least the system can do. Easy to implement, too - just base it off the speed of the vehicle.
* Auto-follow. Imagine if the cruise control on the guy ahead of you worked better. It would reduce the incidence of "phantoms", where there's a slow down for no good reason. And at a stop light, everyone would start accelerating at the same time, smoothly.
* Mesh-based phone. Cringely (I think) did an article on this a while ago. Imagine if there were a decent-bandwidth mesh node in each GM car. Do it right, and now they have their own network. It's competition for the cell-phone market.
* Network services. Sure, more stuff to pay for. But, could be cool. Music streamed to your car, movies on demand, etc, etc. And you're not limited by towers, just by the number of hops.
And hey, it's not a centralized auto-pilot system. Decentralized, IMHO, is better.
The Left Hand of Darkness was great, but I felt that The Lathe of Heaven sucked profoundly
I have a different take as well. I liked the Lathe of Heaven. Improbable, yes. Fantastic, yes. But neat.
Left Hand of Darkness, though (apparently) the first of the "gender-bender" novels, is far from the best. I finally read it in college, astonished at how dull the actual story was. Of course, I like Jack L. Chalker (although, Jack, stop with the "how fucked can this person be at the end of book 2"), and I enjoy his gender-bending-body-swapping-mind-switching books a _whole_ lot more. They take the premise, but then put an actual story to it. LHOD seemed to be a prototype for that type of story, which is fine, but in and of itself not all that impressive.
And that's why Kyoto should include population densities. How many tons of CO2 are nations like India or China putting out? Isn't that harming the fragil ecosystem as well?
That could be interesting. Not sure how much it would cost, but running numbers from (yes I have no life) the Buffy TV show (cost 1.4-2.0 million per episode, 3.8 million viewers) would cost 2$ per episode. Which is ironic, since the DVDs sell for a little bit more than that.
However, there's most of a cost than that. The networks use certain shows to prop up others, give them exposure, pay for the prerequisite hookers&blow, exec salaries, show off the network, etc. All that goes away - there's just a show, which the networks hate. Hence stuff like "must-see Thursdays". And there's a limit - would you pay $10 a week to watch 5 shows you like, considering that you still need cable to watch anything else that's on?
TBS Superstation has all programming beginning:05 after the hour, which I never understood.
My impression was that they had done it for separate listings - in TV Week (or whatever comes with the paper) you'd see the listings for everything at 9:00, and then a separate listing just for TBS, which definitely resulted in me watching a few more shows there.
These days, with TiVo and the like, it simply results in irritation.
So he saved Gamegrene a Slashdotting. Good for him.
Except that Fark had it a week or so ago.:) (but still, it feels a bit disingenuous - like he submitted the link, got bounced, then submitted a review)
I'm needing to re-rip all my CDs to fit the format-of-the-year
Why? Your coworkers are probably going to look at the extension and say "never mind". Yeah yeah yeah, ogg is great, all hail ogg, but when it gets down to it, there's no reason for you to go through all that effort. MP3s play in everything you mentioned. Ogg is going to be a value-add, but down the road. Same with AAC. For the forseeable future, it's all MP3.
I should therefore expected to have my Windows 98 machine "forcibly upgraded", I suppose. And here I am, without a spare stick of RAM and a sub-2ghz processor.
Frankly, I'd rather rebuild arcade cabinets as they are than shove a MAME box into one.
I'm with you part-way - I'd rather have an actual arcade cab than a MAME cab. Something about having the original side art, dents, etc.
That being said, I wrote a script to remove all the mahjong and solitaire variants - pretty easy, actually. The key, naturally, is to figure out what you want to do - personally, I'd rather have a simple cab than one with 200 buttons, so that everything would work. (though I do dig the one guy who built a 3-way console, where you could rotate the console to get a steering wheel)
Hate to say this, but September is a miserable date, and will probably cause it to tank. Why? Statistics. Box Office Mojo had an article about this for Sky Captain - on the whole, a movie released in September will make approximately 50% of the money it would've made during the summer months. Lots of reasons (School starting, summer family vacations, etc), but it all adds up to a loss of income. Which is a shame. February's another bad month - that and September are usually where sucky movies go to die. Not that I think it'll suck, but it's a bad economics decision.
Slashdot Mirror
it's no different than the cops using a plane or a car to follow you, just a lot cheaper.
Right. So you don't mind putting one in everyone's car, and just rounding up all the "bad guys" at a later point in time? It's just like a national ID card or the like - no problem, unless you're guilty.
One thing that seems consistent, down to the new logo - they're not just going after gamers, but specifically console gamers. After all, Halo 2 made more than a Hollywood blockbuster, so there's tons of people just waiting to watch console game stuff, right? That's my bet - they'll keep dumbing it down (which is sad - Call4Help and TSS were, depending, already fairly dumbed down) further, so the 15-year-olds with a PS2 can be happy. That's where the money is.
I wonder if I can call Charter and ask that they drop G4 and put on something else instead?
Couple thoughts
1) if you have a beefy enough computer, hardware encoding is not really necessary, especially if you just want to "try out some of the linux solutions". Buy any number of the BT878-based TV cards and try with that. I know the TV Wonder VE used to go for about $30. Granted, it's mono, but I'm sure there's other stuff, cheaper. I remember Isaac mentioning that a 1700mhz machine was almost enough to record two streams and play one simultaneously.
2) The idea for your "ppc-based" box makes a lot of sense, too, and I'm curious to see what people will do with it, PVR-wise.
3) MediaMVP - you might want to look at the PrismIQ. I know the GUI is a lot better, and I think it has some features the MVP doesn't. Unfortunately, I believe both require some software running on another computer. (And neither supports MPEG4 natively, the prismiq uses the server computer to transcode). Oh, and the big annoyance on both - NO PCM AUDIO. Means that iMovie-based DVDs can't be ripped and played - you need to convert them to something else. Not a huge deal, but a deal nonetheless.
What I did was rent it. I used 007:AUF, not Mechassault, though the exploit is similar. You only need it once.
You'll also need a memory card that you can put the savegame on. I wound up buying a $7 USB/Xbox adapter that let me use a USB thumbdrive (the adapter was for the Phantasy Star Online game, so you could use a keyboard), and a $10 thumbdrive that had 16mb (I seem to remember that the max size of the stick could only be 32mb or something like that). There's a couple other ways. The "Action Replay" game, though that's $30.
So, Xbox + $7 adapter + $10 memory card + several hours of effort (finding the exploit, loading the exploit, and finding compiled XBMC) gives you a PVR. Except that it's loud as heck.
And all of this is irrelevant for the newer Xboxes anyhow, from what I remember. Buy an old one, used, etc.
And from looking at xbox-linux.org, you can find someone local who's willing to do it for you.
Agreed. After playing Carmageddon 2 for several hours, I needed to go to the store, and wondered if I took out that light pole, would it kill those pedestrians? Not to mention the ability in Carmageddon 2 to shear your car in half. Oh, those were the days. Carmageddon 3 stunk, but rumors abound of a new one coming soon.
Two options:
1) Something like the El Gato EyeTV. This is your PVR functionality.
2) Someone write a Cocoa frontend for MythTV. I don't think it'd be easy to port over a full fledged version, but a frontend is probably doable.
(I Am Not A Software Programmer)
After watching (or trying to watch) the first few episodes of Season 2 of RvB, I gave up - there were too many injokes and self-referencing going on, and I'd even watched the first series recently. Sad to say, it wasn't funny. (Nor was the first episode of Strangerhood, though I don't know if it was supposed to be). Not trying to be a smartass, but has RvB gotten funny again?
Instead of drooling over still from a movie that will (in all likelihood) suck, go play Knights of the Old Republic. The first one, to be honest, was better than 3 of the 5 Star War movies. It had an engaging storyline, an awesome twist, you got to choose light side or dark side, you were a Jedi, turn-based combat, force powers, etc, etc. You were _in_ the movie. Utterly amazing.
The first one's about $15-$20 these days (for Xbox or PC), and the second one will be out shortly on the PC. (Both are equally worth it - deep RPGs in the Star Wars universe, with tons of cutscenes, moral dilemnas, and a lot more)
I read an article about it last week.
Cintra is ponying up all the money for this project. The State of Texas will pay nothing. And gets the ability to take over tolls in 50 years.
It will go south, around the east side of Dallas, and around the east side of Austin.
Tolls are expected to be about what current tolls are, which means (according to the Star Telegram, at least) to drive the whole thing will cost about $40. Seems like a lot, but it isn't - truck drivers have to routinely sit in Dallas/Fort Worth traffic, which probably costs an hour's worth of time. Same with Austin.
I don't particularly feel sorry for the small towns - usually, the town builds up around the road, and once they have several hundred people, drop the speed limit to 45 while going through their town. Thanks, guys. Not.
Oh, and the speed limit's supposed to be 85.
I'm really looking forward to it. For those of you who think this is minor, it's not. The drive from Mexico to Oklahoma is probably 10 hours - DFW is about an hour south from Oklahoma, 3 hours from Austin, and probably 8 from the border. Yes, Texas is big.
Classic story - a friend of mine bought a couple martial arts DVDs while in China. She was pissed that her DVD wouldn't play them. I told her why - basically, it allows an arbitrary price structure, so that a different price can be set, so we may pay $15, the Brits may pay #15 (sorry, no "pound" key aside from that), and Indians might only pay 5. She was fine with that. I tried to explain that that's _why_ she couldn't play these DVDs, but she simply didn't connect the two. Ah, well. (And, IIRC, she later refused to let me make her DVD player region-free, because she didn't see the benefit)
The difference between Cyberpunk (which I've played) and Shadowrun (which I've been playing for 14+ years now) is that Shadowrun is Cinematic. The good guys pull through by the skin of their teeth. The bad guys always get away - even if a trunk is dropped on them from A Great Height. SR1 was clunky, especially during large combats using burst-fire. But SR3 has really improved things, and our group's been loving it. Once everyone knows what they're doing, it's quick and fun. Even for mages. *grin*
That being said, I'd love for their to be some sort of SR RPG. Tactical simulator, too, while you're at it. Rumors have abounded for years about an SR videogame - c'mon, guys, where is it?
I was even more surprised when the series turned out to be good.
Oh, glad to hear it's gotten better. I watched a couple Season 1 or 2 episodes and went back to watching (insert name of a random sci-fi show... it was probably better). That was the most godawful derivative tripe. I wondered "why" when SciFi first started carrying it, since most of their original stuff was so much better. It was like they decided to pick up another "Lexx" (another godawful show, for those lucky enough to have not seen it), rather than a good show. (Guess Roddenberry's latest crap shows were priced too high)
That said, rent the first season or so.
That said, don't. I'll probably watch the last couple episodes... or maybe just start watching fresh.
And oh, the irony... they cancelled Farscape because it got good ratings but cost too much, and now they're trying to bring over the (somewhat-less-alienated-since-the-miniseries) Farscape fans by grabbing the actors. Wonder if that was the purpose of the miniseries - give the fans a sense of closure(?), and give them (okay, "us") a reason to stop boycotting the network.
That being said, my new favorite quote about how SciFi has gone downhill over the years: "the writing was on the wall when the Sci-Fi channel showed Braveheart".
What's the big problem?
(and yes, people hacking it will be an issue)
* Traffic notification - this is almost the least the system can do. Easy to implement, too - just base it off the speed of the vehicle.
* Auto-follow. Imagine if the cruise control on the guy ahead of you worked better. It would reduce the incidence of "phantoms", where there's a slow down for no good reason. And at a stop light, everyone would start accelerating at the same time, smoothly.
* Mesh-based phone. Cringely (I think) did an article on this a while ago. Imagine if there were a decent-bandwidth mesh node in each GM car. Do it right, and now they have their own network. It's competition for the cell-phone market.
* Network services. Sure, more stuff to pay for. But, could be cool. Music streamed to your car, movies on demand, etc, etc. And you're not limited by towers, just by the number of hops.
And hey, it's not a centralized auto-pilot system. Decentralized, IMHO, is better.
The Left Hand of Darkness was great, but I felt that The Lathe of Heaven sucked profoundly
I have a different take as well. I liked the Lathe of Heaven. Improbable, yes. Fantastic, yes. But neat.
Left Hand of Darkness, though (apparently) the first of the "gender-bender" novels, is far from the best. I finally read it in college, astonished at how dull the actual story was. Of course, I like Jack L. Chalker (although, Jack, stop with the "how fucked can this person be at the end of book 2"), and I enjoy his gender-bending-body-swapping-mind-switching books a _whole_ lot more. They take the premise, but then put an actual story to it. LHOD seemed to be a prototype for that type of story, which is fine, but in and of itself not all that impressive.
Still on, with new episodes this month, including this Thursday. Not sure why you can't find it - they show it frickin' all the time.
The "icon" says movie, but is it? Sorry, no idea.
And that's why Kyoto should include population densities. How many tons of CO2 are nations like India or China putting out? Isn't that harming the fragil ecosystem as well?
That could be interesting. Not sure how much it would cost, but running numbers from (yes I have no life) the Buffy TV show (cost 1.4-2.0 million per episode, 3.8 million viewers) would cost 2$ per episode. Which is ironic, since the DVDs sell for a little bit more than that.
However, there's most of a cost than that. The networks use certain shows to prop up others, give them exposure, pay for the prerequisite hookers&blow, exec salaries, show off the network, etc. All that goes away - there's just a show, which the networks hate. Hence stuff like "must-see Thursdays". And there's a limit - would you pay $10 a week to watch 5 shows you like, considering that you still need cable to watch anything else that's on?
TBS Superstation has all programming beginning :05 after the hour, which I never understood.
My impression was that they had done it for separate listings - in TV Week (or whatever comes with the paper) you'd see the listings for everything at 9:00, and then a separate listing just for TBS, which definitely resulted in me watching a few more shows there.
These days, with TiVo and the like, it simply results in irritation.
So he saved Gamegrene a Slashdotting. Good for him.
:)
Except that Fark had it a week or so ago.
(but still, it feels a bit disingenuous - like he submitted the link, got bounced, then submitted a review)
I'm needing to re-rip all my CDs to fit the format-of-the-year
Why? Your coworkers are probably going to look at the extension and say "never mind". Yeah yeah yeah, ogg is great, all hail ogg, but when it gets down to it, there's no reason for you to go through all that effort. MP3s play in everything you mentioned. Ogg is going to be a value-add, but down the road. Same with AAC. For the forseeable future, it's all MP3.
I should therefore expected to have my Windows 98 machine "forcibly upgraded", I suppose. And here I am, without a spare stick of RAM and a sub-2ghz processor.
Frankly, I'd rather rebuild arcade cabinets as they are than shove a MAME box into one.
I'm with you part-way - I'd rather have an actual arcade cab than a MAME cab. Something about having the original side art, dents, etc.
That being said, I wrote a script to remove all the mahjong and solitaire variants - pretty easy, actually. The key, naturally, is to figure out what you want to do - personally, I'd rather have a simple cab than one with 200 buttons, so that everything would work. (though I do dig the one guy who built a 3-way console, where you could rotate the console to get a steering wheel)
Hate to say this, but September is a miserable date, and will probably cause it to tank. Why? Statistics. Box Office Mojo had an article about this for Sky Captain - on the whole, a movie released in September will make approximately 50% of the money it would've made during the summer months. Lots of reasons (School starting, summer family vacations, etc), but it all adds up to a loss of income. Which is a shame. February's another bad month - that and September are usually where sucky movies go to die. Not that I think it'll suck, but it's a bad economics decision.