I totally agree with the grandparent. Whenever ANY woman is in danger I immediately move to a protective stance, and if the threat is another human, I go into full-on hunter-killer mode.
So what do you think it is ? Nature or nurture ? Most boys are told to "never hit girls", but are we ever told to protect them ? It may well be a survival trait, as a male is useless to his species without a fertile female. Philosophers will surely debate this until the end of time, just as we will debate Linux vs Microsoft.
MP3 took forever to become a consumer reality. I started encoding and playing MP3 on my computer in late 1995. I first got my hands on the crappy, crappy MPTrip discman in 2000. It took another 3 years before a half-decent MP3 deck was sold for car audio. And no, the insanely expensive EMPEG did not pass as half-decent to me, poor poor sound quality. I had designed a better player myself, using a cheap PC and a luxury sound card. It took a really long time for the masses to clue in to MP3.
VHS vs DVD was different, because it took the entertainment industry ages to put out DVDs. For the most part, new releases had simultaneous VHS and DVD available, but all the classics, the movies we really wanted, took years before being released. The price was also not quite right, since the same movie in VHS was usually a good $5 to $8 cheaper than the DVD. Consumers might not know the intricate technical details, but they certainly aren't stupid. A movie is a movie is a movie, doesn't matter if it's VHS, DVD or High-Def, you're not getting "more". Nor does it have a significant cost difference to the producer, they're all cut from the same masters, and up until a couple years ago, most people's TV sets could hardly show a difference between good VHS and DVD.
Problems do have solutions, you know
on
Public Patents?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
One of the problems with patents is they exist.
The system is screwed up, it was never designed for the kind of abuse the technological revolution has brought forth. We either need dramatic reform of the patent system, or just abolish it entirely. Patents are being used as strategic weapons against competition, hindering progress. The recent case vs RIM concerning their email system is a perfect example of bad patents. Its sole use was to slam a competitor by threatening to cripple the entire customer base including some high officials. The company that owns it doesn't even use it. We have patent holding companies whose only purpose is to sit on a patent portfolio until someone pays for a license, or someone's ripe for a lawsuit. They serve no other purpose. They're IP pimps.
Ok kids, history lesson! Windows is the successor to MS-DOS. MS-DOS had a wonderful command called "MODE" that let you change text modes. Windows still supports the MODE command to some extent.
the syntax is : mode [cols],[lines]
So the default would be : mode 80,25
In Windows NT/2000/XP and later, you can pick any number of lines and columns. In DOS, 95 and 98, they have to be a legal text mode such as 80x25, 80x43/50/60 or 132x60 on certain displays.
Using the MODE command only changes the window size for the current session. You can set persistent defaults by right-clicking on the CMD window's title bar and choosing "Defaults", then using the dialogs to set your preferred window size and dressing.
If the government of the United States of America had any inkling of wisdom in global politics, they would have changed their name to the United States of Planet Earth. As it stands, for every small step forward, the Bush administration makes a huge leap backward. The only good thing about it, is the value of the US dollar is steadily dropping. Maybe one day India will outsource to the USA once the west is turned into a third-world country from its misdeeds.
Amen! As a shop tech I hate Intel for NOT diversifying their sockets. For the most part, each chipset is tied to a specific series of processors. It doesn't matter that it fits in a socket 478, if the chipset doesn't like the CPU it's not gonna boot PERIOD. Instead we have to worry about families like Prescott, Northwood, Willamette.. or even worse their friggin product numbers that you have to break down to figure out the speed and features of the cpu. Try telling a relative on the phone to buy a Pentium 672.. much easier to say "Get an Athlon 4000!".
Excluding old sketchy motherboards (ECS, Gigabyte), you can pretty much stick any Socket-A AMD on any board. Same thing with the 939, even the early boards will run fine with a screaming new dual-core.
As for the upgrading issues, it's very rare that you'll swap just a CPU, unless you bought a crappy CPU to begin with. Most people who want to future-proof their PC will buy the best kit they can afford and make it last. They won't get a budget CPU that they know will be obsolete within a year or two. We're still in a young computing age where everything is in great flux. Perhaps in another decade or two, computers will have reached a point where things have stabilized and one set of mainboard, ram and power supply can last through several generations of processors. For now, that's just a penny pincher's absurd dream.
Viiv ? What were you expecting anyway ?
on
Viiv Falls Flat
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· Score: 1
I thought Viiv was just another idiotic buzzword with no actual product. From what I had seen at the CES, Viiv is just DRM, and the only reason it "enables" high quality content is because the content provider / playback device / your dead stepmother won't play anything unless you've got the Viiv keyring.
The fact that few content providers chose to pay Intel for something that Microsoft already offers with WMV, and Apple provides with iTunes/iPod, and every other content distribution system provides in some form or another.. no surprise at all. Intel makes chips and chipsets.. that's all the world expects of them, and that's the only thing the world trusts them with. DRM is NOT their expertise.
So the display quality sucks, but it's got real purdy trim.. grrrrr.. LCD bases are interchangeable thanks to the VESA mounting standard. Just sell me the sexy aluminum base and keep your sub-par LCD panel.
Ironically I'm using an el-cheapo Benq display and it's nicer on the eyes than any other entry-level 19" display I've seen, and I've seen lots working in a retail PC shop. You'd think the manufacturers would have figured out which panels are best by now.
All this talk about SVG is cute, except for the fact that nobody will ever use it. Why not ? Because web designers use Photoshop.. bitmaps.. that's what they know. SVG = not a bitmap.
What we should have had YEARS ago is true full-page scaling. If I want large fonts, I'd like everything else to scale along with it. Just use a good quality Lanczos transform on the images, render the fonts natively sine they're vectors.. that way layouts and menus won't be out of whack, and we'll be able to read crisp, large text that's easy on the eyes.
Game developers (myself included) have been doing scaling for over a decade.. in real-time! So what are we all waiting for ?
The reason most game engines are complicated is because 3D game design is not for beginners, mostly due to the broad compromises we make due to technological limitations. Heck, just 3D graphic design is a beast to learn. Anyone can draw with a pen and paper, that's 2D.. photoshop, illustrator, these can be learned in a couple days. 3D is not something that's easily adapted between reality and virtual worlds.
What puts a hard cap on earnings is the mega production-distribution hierarchy that's in place. It doesn't matter what you're doing or who you are, your success is ultimately dependent on sales (the practice, not the transactions). The people and enterprises that have the greatest success in today's world are those who generate and control sales. Hell, most business don't even focus on a product at all, it's all about the art of selling. So many new high-profile businesses in the 21st century are little more than "legal" MLM schemes, built solely on their ability to deftly squeeze money out of naive or foolish people. It has nothing to do with quality, ingenuity or skill. Does Tom Cruise have skill ? Debatable.. does his line of work and the benefits it bestows unto society justify the extravagant paycheck ? Debatable. Who would you rather subsidize, the film industry or the health industry ? Or maybe you'll get more enjoyment from that 20$ bill by buying a case of beer for you and your friends, beer that's sold to us through mind-numbing commercials featuring sports, sex and good old fashioned household violence. Everyone's a bitch and sales is our master.
Why is it that every time we hear about some bored schmuck wanting to regulate the internet, it's always an American ? I really think someone should visit senate and explain to these people how they no longer have any say in these matters. They might have founded Arpanet way back, but today's network has little in common with the former military network. What's more pertinent though, is that if the US senators start crippling the internet, things will get moved beyond their juridsiction and the rest of the world will point and laugh at the foolish power-hungry senators.
Silence is my #1 requirement, followed by ridiculously high clock speeds and large storage/ram. I've been making my life simple for the past 7 years by going with Antec every time.
The cheap solution is the Sonata case with its modified SmartPower 450w supply, a bit labor-intensive to assemble but very quiet and just the power supply alone is worth the price of the whole kit. The downside is that apparently, some poor schmucks don't like the shiny black finish. It's around 130-140$ here in Canada, so probably less than 100 in the states.
The less cheap solution is the P180 case, no power supply included this time. Costs about 20% more than the Sonata, but it has a novel design with the power supply on the bottom, and separate chambers for the PS, board and graphics cards so heat gets ducted out very efficiently. It's got fans up the wazoo.. three 120mm fans, with three speed settings, and mounting spots for even more fans. I've found that even with the craziest Athlon FX rig with twin 7800GTX's, the system was rock stable at the slow fan setting for whisper quiet gaming. Now I don't have 1500$ of graphics, but I do love the sexy brushed aluminum appearance and comfort of having my most abused compoenent - the mainboard - right on top where I can tweak it.
I like that idea.. projector.. now the question is does anyone make an HD projector ? I love auto racing games, but I hate console resolution because distant objects are just fuzzy pixels in the distance. NFSU, Burnout and friends are fun, fast, but I end up hitting lots of obstacles because of the low visibility. NFSU on the PC looks absolutely gorgeous and is so much easier to play thanks to the 4x enhanced resolution and anti-aliasing.
Out of sheer curiosity what kind of app needs to dump thousands of tiny emails then fetch them by POP ? Why not just a good old fashioned SQL database ?
Oh man, Lost is the fastest one. Generally the bigger the show, the quicker it's ripped. That's a side effect of the warez attitude of "racing" releases.
For TV, I just use what everyone else uses.. tvtorrent.info and mininova. I swear most shows pop up an hour or two after the credits have rolled.
Mac Classic may run some level of virtualization, but it certainly doesn't shield your OSX from any nasties the classic app might try to pull, it offers no sandbox for YOUR data, it only protects the OSX kernel. What we're discussing here is virtualization as a magic hammer to stamp out mass spreading viruses and data loss, essentially a condom for your app.
In addition I'd like to say that while developers don't deliberately insert vulnerabilities in their code (unless they're crooked scammers), there can often be a high level of laziness and apathy with regards to careful coding. It's far more fun to quickly bang out a kludge that works 90% of the time, rather than follow proper design strategies and run thorough unit tests. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm special, I have a paranoid mind and I do extensive error checking and extend NO trust when dealing with user input. These things are obvious to me, as I'm writing code I know exactly what I want and don't want from it, and so I add sanity checks instinctively.
Here's an easy example: just compile a few linux packages, just pick from the basics and see how many warnings GCC spouts, and the severity of those warnings. The easy ones sometimes get rewritten, the hard ones get masked off. There are so many half-assed kludges in typical C code that it's no surprise everything's segfaulting left and right.
What's worse now with "data execution prevention", or the much sexier term "NX bit", is seeing how many apps break the data separation rules. I had a simple app a few days back, a RAD app no less, that refused to run with NX enabled. Now why the hell would a RAD app (in this case Delphi) need to copy data into a code segment ? It certainly wasn't doing any fancy JIT compilation, and even JIT can be done safely with the proper techniques. The last time I did anything of the sort was 1996 when I was writing brutally optimized assembler for graphics routines.. lots of self-modifying code and reverse data execution there:)
Yes, the cables that come with the average cheap board are fragile and hell to work with, but you can get much better quality cables from 3rd parties that offer 90-degree connectors that actually aren't made of cheap bendy plastic. For the signal corruption, well maybe I'm just lucky but I've been running this external raid rack pretty hard every day, for the past year. Retransmits are in the low tens, power-on hours in the eight-thousand range.. No data loss yet and it runs crazy fast. I think I'm safe.
The disadvantages of being RFID tagged are easily subverted with a small piece of aluminum foil. I've said it before, and I'll say it 'til the end of time: no matter what the government/RIAA/MPAA/Oprah tries to pull, if it's in my hands it's going to get hacked!
HDCP will be cracked, HD-DVD will be cracked, RFID is easily jammed, for everything else there's sledgehammers.
Most often the 4-way multiplayer is dropped because of technical issues. In any game shop, you pen a long long list of features you'd like to build into your game, then every two or three weeks as you move toward the deadline, you start hacking off features that would take too much time to implement, or that would compromise other aspects of the game. One big downer about 4-way xbox is the horsepower needed to render all 4 quadrants separately. Same total amount of pixels, 4 times more geometry; that's just not how 3D accelerators like to scale.
What would definitely be nice is 4-way netplay, each player using their own console and TV, either locally or over the network. If enough console games offered this capability we could start seeing console-based lan-parties.. scale it up to 16, 32 or more players over the lan.. offer dedicated host software for PC so people can set up game servers.. I could see this working wonders for the Xbox 360's sports titles. Invite the boyz over for some 4 on 4 football!
God I'm sick of this slam. The big controller was only an "oopsie" because it was the ONLY controller available at first. I think the bigger problem is how they pulled it once the smaller S-type was released.
Now I don't know how things are in other parts of the world, but I have big hands, big long agile hands that love the big Xbox ctlr, all the buttons are in exactly the right place for my fingers and thumbs. Now I come from a family of construction workers and outdoorsmen, we're all built big and tough. My partner has normal hands, smallish so she loves the small controller. That's just fine with me.
My issue is why the hell can't we have both ? I can't go into a store and buy a new large-style controller anymore. If and when my current controller gets worn out and breaks, I'll be screwed.
I have the same issues with PS2 controllers, so damned small they make my hands and arms sore after an hour or so, from the awkward position I have to hold them in. Now Sony is an asian company and I guess everything's a little smaller over there, but why couldn't Sony of America make an oversized ctlr for us oversized North Americans ?
Chum, you should learn the benefits of reality jamming (tm). Oppress your family and give them only one choice, one pizza joint, one flavor, as if every other option had been wiped out of existence by GW Bush's hostile racism, and you will rediscover the joy of being Man of the house.
TV over IP is cute and all, seeing as I've been doing the Bittorrent + media center thing for a few years already. The question I always end up asking, being the antisocial rebellious bastard that I am, is how much TV do we really need ?
I don't watch much, because about 98% of the content on cable inspires me to become independently wealthy just so I can travel the world and strangle all the reality-show attention whores in a vain attempt to cleanse the airwaves once again.
My partner and I are moving in together, and so we went over a tentative budget. I was shocked when showed me a 120$ monthly cable bill because of going digital and VOD and having the "everything" package, especially when she mostly watches 4 or 5 channels for 10 to 15 hours a week. Hell, if I could request a strict list of ten channels I REALLY want, and pay 25$ for that, I probably would. Instead, they force you into a minimum of 50-60$ for crap you don't want, so I skipped cable at my old apartment, bumped up my internet connection to a higher service class and just downloaded whatever shows I wanted. She rolls her eyes when I download the latest episodes of Lost and all her other shows less than an hour after they've aired, in full HD resolution with 5.1 sound with no commercial breaks.
Now I know that video has to originate from a benevolent soulless pirate who has invested significant cash into his/her video editing setup as well as paying for the originating video feed from cable or satellite. If J.Pirate can do this so easily, why the hell don't the cable companies get their heads out of their asses and do the same ? I'd rather pay for strictly on-demand video than have a zillion channels I absolutely hate.
I've always found it fallacious that the company charges so much more for extra channels: you can only watch one show at any given time, you only have one set of eyes and ears. It's like hiring ten hookers.. you're not going to have ten times more pleasure, since you only have one set of hardware;) Choice is nice, but it doesn't equate to GETTING more.
Ethical behavior is much like flocking behavior, in that it is a baseline to ensure everyone cooperates towards common goals. This implies that the individual shares those goals, and to a much greater extend, the individual is afraid of being abandoned. If, in any given moment, their goals are divergent, ethical behavior is unrequired in that moment and could even be detrimental. Even flocking birds have intellect and consciousness, so why do they always follow each other ? Fear takes over.
English: if I want to be a nice little grain-fed short-sighted lemming like everyone else, or more likely I'm afraid of being left out, then I will play by the "ethical rules", because that's the path to reaching my goal. If, on the other hand, I have a greater vision that does NOT converge with the mass majority, ethics can become a burden and even trap me in a corner.
So these white hat "security analysts" are being ethical because they need a job to fund their WoW habit. The attackers, are being unethical because they want botnets to empower their cyberterrorism for highly profitable extortion. Same difference, not very stimulating through.
Here's a much more dramatic example: health care. If X-pharma-racket is producing a drug that relieves the suffering of AIDS patients, and markets it at a somewhat reasonable price, they are considered ethical.
If Y-psycho-lab is finding a 100% cure for AIDS, but needs to chop up a dozen AIDS victims to further their research, it is considered UNethical, despite the great advances the research would offer. They're doing good, but they have to do a little bit of "bad" in order to achieve that goal.
Ethics may be instinctive and obvious, but that doesn't mean honest people are unable to break those fundamental laws. Hell, I'd kill a handful of people if it meant saving millions, but I wouldn't spread computer viruses for money.. go figure!
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I totally agree with the grandparent. Whenever ANY woman is in danger I immediately move to a protective stance, and if the threat is another human, I go into full-on hunter-killer mode.
So what do you think it is ? Nature or nurture ? Most boys are told to "never hit girls", but are we ever told to protect them ? It may well be a survival trait, as a male is useless to his species without a fertile female. Philosophers will surely debate this until the end of time, just as we will debate Linux vs Microsoft.
MP3 took forever to become a consumer reality. I started encoding and playing MP3 on my computer in late 1995. I first got my hands on the crappy, crappy MPTrip discman in 2000. It took another 3 years before a half-decent MP3 deck was sold for car audio. And no, the insanely expensive EMPEG did not pass as half-decent to me, poor poor sound quality. I had designed a better player myself, using a cheap PC and a luxury sound card. It took a really long time for the masses to clue in to MP3.
VHS vs DVD was different, because it took the entertainment industry ages to put out DVDs. For the most part, new releases had simultaneous VHS and DVD available, but all the classics, the movies we really wanted, took years before being released. The price was also not quite right, since the same movie in VHS was usually a good $5 to $8 cheaper than the DVD. Consumers might not know the intricate technical details, but they certainly aren't stupid. A movie is a movie is a movie, doesn't matter if it's VHS, DVD or High-Def, you're not getting "more". Nor does it have a significant cost difference to the producer, they're all cut from the same masters, and up until a couple years ago, most people's TV sets could hardly show a difference between good VHS and DVD.
One of the problems with patents is they exist.
The system is screwed up, it was never designed for the kind of abuse the technological revolution has brought forth. We either need dramatic reform of the patent system, or just abolish it entirely. Patents are being used as strategic weapons against competition, hindering progress. The recent case vs RIM concerning their email system is a perfect example of bad patents. Its sole use was to slam a competitor by threatening to cripple the entire customer base including some high officials. The company that owns it doesn't even use it. We have patent holding companies whose only purpose is to sit on a patent portfolio until someone pays for a license, or someone's ripe for a lawsuit. They serve no other purpose. They're IP pimps.
Ok kids, history lesson! Windows is the successor to MS-DOS. MS-DOS had a wonderful command called "MODE" that let you change text modes. Windows still supports the MODE command to some extent.
the syntax is : mode [cols],[lines]
So the default would be : mode 80,25
In Windows NT/2000/XP and later, you can pick any number of lines and columns. In DOS, 95 and 98, they have to be a legal text mode such as 80x25, 80x43/50/60 or 132x60 on certain displays.
Using the MODE command only changes the window size for the current session. You can set persistent defaults by right-clicking on the CMD window's title bar and choosing "Defaults", then using the dialogs to set your preferred window size and dressing.
If the government of the United States of America had any inkling of wisdom in global politics, they would have changed their name to the United States of Planet Earth. As it stands, for every small step forward, the Bush administration makes a huge leap backward. The only good thing about it, is the value of the US dollar is steadily dropping. Maybe one day India will outsource to the USA once the west is turned into a third-world country from its misdeeds.
Amen! As a shop tech I hate Intel for NOT diversifying their sockets. For the most part, each chipset is tied to a specific series of processors. It doesn't matter that it fits in a socket 478, if the chipset doesn't like the CPU it's not gonna boot PERIOD. Instead we have to worry about families like Prescott, Northwood, Willamette.. or even worse their friggin product numbers that you have to break down to figure out the speed and features of the cpu. Try telling a relative on the phone to buy a Pentium 672.. much easier to say "Get an Athlon 4000!".
Excluding old sketchy motherboards (ECS, Gigabyte), you can pretty much stick any Socket-A AMD on any board. Same thing with the 939, even the early boards will run fine with a screaming new dual-core.
As for the upgrading issues, it's very rare that you'll swap just a CPU, unless you bought a crappy CPU to begin with. Most people who want to future-proof their PC will buy the best kit they can afford and make it last. They won't get a budget CPU that they know will be obsolete within a year or two. We're still in a young computing age where everything is in great flux. Perhaps in another decade or two, computers will have reached a point where things have stabilized and one set of mainboard, ram and power supply can last through several generations of processors. For now, that's just a penny pincher's absurd dream.
I thought Viiv was just another idiotic buzzword with no actual product. From what I had seen at the CES, Viiv is just DRM, and the only reason it "enables" high quality content is because the content provider / playback device / your dead stepmother won't play anything unless you've got the Viiv keyring.
The fact that few content providers chose to pay Intel for something that Microsoft already offers with WMV, and Apple provides with iTunes/iPod, and every other content distribution system provides in some form or another.. no surprise at all. Intel makes chips and chipsets.. that's all the world expects of them, and that's the only thing the world trusts them with. DRM is NOT their expertise.
So the display quality sucks, but it's got real purdy trim.. grrrrr.. LCD bases are interchangeable thanks to the VESA mounting standard. Just sell me the sexy aluminum base and keep your sub-par LCD panel.
Ironically I'm using an el-cheapo Benq display and it's nicer on the eyes than any other entry-level 19" display I've seen, and I've seen lots working in a retail PC shop. You'd think the manufacturers would have figured out which panels are best by now.
All this talk about SVG is cute, except for the fact that nobody will ever use it. Why not ? Because web designers use Photoshop.. bitmaps.. that's what they know. SVG = not a bitmap.
What we should have had YEARS ago is true full-page scaling. If I want large fonts, I'd like everything else to scale along with it. Just use a good quality Lanczos transform on the images, render the fonts natively sine they're vectors.. that way layouts and menus won't be out of whack, and we'll be able to read crisp, large text that's easy on the eyes.
Game developers (myself included) have been doing scaling for over a decade.. in real-time! So what are we all waiting for ?
The reason most game engines are complicated is because 3D game design is not for beginners, mostly due to the broad compromises we make due to technological limitations. Heck, just 3D graphic design is a beast to learn. Anyone can draw with a pen and paper, that's 2D.. photoshop, illustrator, these can be learned in a couple days. 3D is not something that's easily adapted between reality and virtual worlds.
What puts a hard cap on earnings is the mega production-distribution hierarchy that's in place. It doesn't matter what you're doing or who you are, your success is ultimately dependent on sales (the practice, not the transactions). The people and enterprises that have the greatest success in today's world are those who generate and control sales. Hell, most business don't even focus on a product at all, it's all about the art of selling. So many new high-profile businesses in the 21st century are little more than "legal" MLM schemes, built solely on their ability to deftly squeeze money out of naive or foolish people. It has nothing to do with quality, ingenuity or skill. Does Tom Cruise have skill ? Debatable.. does his line of work and the benefits it bestows unto society justify the extravagant paycheck ? Debatable. Who would you rather subsidize, the film industry or the health industry ? Or maybe you'll get more enjoyment from that 20$ bill by buying a case of beer for you and your friends, beer that's sold to us through mind-numbing commercials featuring sports, sex and good old fashioned household violence. Everyone's a bitch and sales is our master.
Why is it that every time we hear about some bored schmuck wanting to regulate the internet, it's always an American ? I really think someone should visit senate and explain to these people how they no longer have any say in these matters. They might have founded Arpanet way back, but today's network has little in common with the former military network. What's more pertinent though, is that if the US senators start crippling the internet, things will get moved beyond their juridsiction and the rest of the world will point and laugh at the foolish power-hungry senators.
I hereby declare your sig YOINKED! :) Couldn't have said it better.
Silence is my #1 requirement, followed by ridiculously high clock speeds and large storage/ram. I've been making my life simple for the past 7 years by going with Antec every time.
The cheap solution is the Sonata case with its modified SmartPower 450w supply, a bit labor-intensive to assemble but very quiet and just the power supply alone is worth the price of the whole kit. The downside is that apparently, some poor schmucks don't like the shiny black finish. It's around 130-140$ here in Canada, so probably less than 100 in the states.
The less cheap solution is the P180 case, no power supply included this time. Costs about 20% more than the Sonata, but it has a novel design with the power supply on the bottom, and separate chambers for the PS, board and graphics cards so heat gets ducted out very efficiently. It's got fans up the wazoo.. three 120mm fans, with three speed settings, and mounting spots for even more fans. I've found that even with the craziest Athlon FX rig with twin 7800GTX's, the system was rock stable at the slow fan setting for whisper quiet gaming. Now I don't have 1500$ of graphics, but I do love the sexy brushed aluminum appearance and comfort of having my most abused compoenent - the mainboard - right on top where I can tweak it.
I like that idea.. projector.. now the question is does anyone make an HD projector ? I love auto racing games, but I hate console resolution because distant objects are just fuzzy pixels in the distance. NFSU, Burnout and friends are fun, fast, but I end up hitting lots of obstacles because of the low visibility. NFSU on the PC looks absolutely gorgeous and is so much easier to play thanks to the 4x enhanced resolution and anti-aliasing.
Out of sheer curiosity what kind of app needs to dump thousands of tiny emails then fetch them by POP ? Why not just a good old fashioned SQL database ?
Oh man, Lost is the fastest one. Generally the bigger the show, the quicker it's ripped. That's a side effect of the warez attitude of "racing" releases.
For TV, I just use what everyone else uses.. tvtorrent.info and mininova. I swear most shows pop up an hour or two after the credits have rolled.
Mac Classic may run some level of virtualization, but it certainly doesn't shield your OSX from any nasties the classic app might try to pull, it offers no sandbox for YOUR data, it only protects the OSX kernel. What we're discussing here is virtualization as a magic hammer to stamp out mass spreading viruses and data loss, essentially a condom for your app.
:)
In addition I'd like to say that while developers don't deliberately insert vulnerabilities in their code (unless they're crooked scammers), there can often be a high level of laziness and apathy with regards to careful coding. It's far more fun to quickly bang out a kludge that works 90% of the time, rather than follow proper design strategies and run thorough unit tests. Maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm special, I have a paranoid mind and I do extensive error checking and extend NO trust when dealing with user input. These things are obvious to me, as I'm writing code I know exactly what I want and don't want from it, and so I add sanity checks instinctively.
Here's an easy example: just compile a few linux packages, just pick from the basics and see how many warnings GCC spouts, and the severity of those warnings. The easy ones sometimes get rewritten, the hard ones get masked off. There are so many half-assed kludges in typical C code that it's no surprise everything's segfaulting left and right.
What's worse now with "data execution prevention", or the much sexier term "NX bit", is seeing how many apps break the data separation rules. I had a simple app a few days back, a RAD app no less, that refused to run with NX enabled. Now why the hell would a RAD app (in this case Delphi) need to copy data into a code segment ? It certainly wasn't doing any fancy JIT compilation, and even JIT can be done safely with the proper techniques. The last time I did anything of the sort was 1996 when I was writing brutally optimized assembler for graphics routines.. lots of self-modifying code and reverse data execution there
Yes, the cables that come with the average cheap board are fragile and hell to work with, but you can get much better quality cables from 3rd parties that offer 90-degree connectors that actually aren't made of cheap bendy plastic. For the signal corruption, well maybe I'm just lucky but I've been running this external raid rack pretty hard every day, for the past year. Retransmits are in the low tens, power-on hours in the eight-thousand range.. No data loss yet and it runs crazy fast. I think I'm safe.
The disadvantages of being RFID tagged are easily subverted with a small piece of aluminum foil. I've said it before, and I'll say it 'til the end of time: no matter what the government/RIAA/MPAA/Oprah tries to pull, if it's in my hands it's going to get hacked!
HDCP will be cracked, HD-DVD will be cracked, RFID is easily jammed, for everything else there's sledgehammers.
Most often the 4-way multiplayer is dropped because of technical issues. In any game shop, you pen a long long list of features you'd like to build into your game, then every two or three weeks as you move toward the deadline, you start hacking off features that would take too much time to implement, or that would compromise other aspects of the game. One big downer about 4-way xbox is the horsepower needed to render all 4 quadrants separately. Same total amount of pixels, 4 times more geometry; that's just not how 3D accelerators like to scale.
What would definitely be nice is 4-way netplay, each player using their own console and TV, either locally or over the network. If enough console games offered this capability we could start seeing console-based lan-parties.. scale it up to 16, 32 or more players over the lan.. offer dedicated host software for PC so people can set up game servers.. I could see this working wonders for the Xbox 360's sports titles. Invite the boyz over for some 4 on 4 football!
God I'm sick of this slam. The big controller was only an "oopsie" because it was the ONLY controller available at first. I think the bigger problem is how they pulled it once the smaller S-type was released.
Now I don't know how things are in other parts of the world, but I have big hands, big long agile hands that love the big Xbox ctlr, all the buttons are in exactly the right place for my fingers and thumbs. Now I come from a family of construction workers and outdoorsmen, we're all built big and tough. My partner has normal hands, smallish so she loves the small controller. That's just fine with me.
My issue is why the hell can't we have both ? I can't go into a store and buy a new large-style controller anymore. If and when my current controller gets worn out and breaks, I'll be screwed.
I have the same issues with PS2 controllers, so damned small they make my hands and arms sore after an hour or so, from the awkward position I have to hold them in. Now Sony is an asian company and I guess everything's a little smaller over there, but why couldn't Sony of America make an oversized ctlr for us oversized North Americans ?
Chum, you should learn the benefits of reality jamming (tm). Oppress your family and give them only one choice, one pizza joint, one flavor, as if every other option had been wiped out of existence by GW Bush's hostile racism, and you will rediscover the joy of being Man of the house.
TV over IP is cute and all, seeing as I've been doing the Bittorrent + media center thing for a few years already. The question I always end up asking, being the antisocial rebellious bastard that I am, is how much TV do we really need ?
;) Choice is nice, but it doesn't equate to GETTING more.
I don't watch much, because about 98% of the content on cable inspires me to become independently wealthy just so I can travel the world and strangle all the reality-show attention whores in a vain attempt to cleanse the airwaves once again.
My partner and I are moving in together, and so we went over a tentative budget. I was shocked when showed me a 120$ monthly cable bill because of going digital and VOD and having the "everything" package, especially when she mostly watches 4 or 5 channels for 10 to 15 hours a week. Hell, if I could request a strict list of ten channels I REALLY want, and pay 25$ for that, I probably would. Instead, they force you into a minimum of 50-60$ for crap you don't want, so I skipped cable at my old apartment, bumped up my internet connection to a higher service class and just downloaded whatever shows I wanted. She rolls her eyes when I download the latest episodes of Lost and all her other shows less than an hour after they've aired, in full HD resolution with 5.1 sound with no commercial breaks.
Now I know that video has to originate from a benevolent soulless pirate who has invested significant cash into his/her video editing setup as well as paying for the originating video feed from cable or satellite. If J.Pirate can do this so easily, why the hell don't the cable companies get their heads out of their asses and do the same ? I'd rather pay for strictly on-demand video than have a zillion channels I absolutely hate.
I've always found it fallacious that the company charges so much more for extra channels: you can only watch one show at any given time, you only have one set of eyes and ears. It's like hiring ten hookers.. you're not going to have ten times more pleasure, since you only have one set of hardware
Ethical behavior is much like flocking behavior, in that it is a baseline to ensure everyone cooperates towards common goals. This implies that the individual shares those goals, and to a much greater extend, the individual is afraid of being abandoned. If, in any given moment, their goals are divergent, ethical behavior is unrequired in that moment and could even be detrimental. Even flocking birds have intellect and consciousness, so why do they always follow each other ? Fear takes over.
English: if I want to be a nice little grain-fed short-sighted lemming like everyone else, or more likely I'm afraid of being left out, then I will play by the "ethical rules", because that's the path to reaching my goal. If, on the other hand, I have a greater vision that does NOT converge with the mass majority, ethics can become a burden and even trap me in a corner.
So these white hat "security analysts" are being ethical because they need a job to fund their WoW habit. The attackers, are being unethical because they want botnets to empower their cyberterrorism for highly profitable extortion. Same difference, not very stimulating through.
Here's a much more dramatic example: health care. If X-pharma-racket is producing a drug that relieves the suffering of AIDS patients, and markets it at a somewhat reasonable price, they are considered ethical.
If Y-psycho-lab is finding a 100% cure for AIDS, but needs to chop up a dozen AIDS victims to further their research, it is considered UNethical, despite the great advances the research would offer. They're doing good, but they have to do a little bit of "bad" in order to achieve that goal.
Ethics may be instinctive and obvious, but that doesn't mean honest people are unable to break those fundamental laws. Hell, I'd kill a handful of people if it meant saving millions, but I wouldn't spread computer viruses for money.. go figure!