It is TOO LATE for MS to fix their browser, because they should have done this years ago before even starting to work on the hundreds of stupid little patches for so brutally specific hacks they almost had to be originated by the user itself. 3/4's of the world's largest web sites will now break with SP2, because anyone with an iota of web talent has learned to work around the shortcomings of current MS browsers. Just killing the ActiveX popup would have been more than enough to relieve 99% of users' woes.
I'm just pissed now that I'll be hacking HTML day and night when this thing hits prime time, because my breadwinner is on the line. I'd rather see all the ignoramuses flock to Mozilla Firefox, but since they're ignoramuses they probably never leave MSN unless their 12-year old script kiddie is present to create a bookmark for them. URLs are rocket science to the common luser.
Hey, I know your pain. I am part of a 2-man web operation, and the other dude is a complete techno-weenie. The kicker is that I'm stuck blowing hours building an HTML-spewing wizard app when I could hand-code the same HTML in seconds, but _HE_ wants to do it. In my case, the guy can't quite trace the line between coder/webmaster (me) and media monkey (him).
The simplest explanation is that a large proportion of business users, shouldn't even be using a PC in the first place. Having destroyed 3 years of my life in a federal establishment, writing software for people who really needed hardware (violently installed across their dumb faces), I've "invested" more time tweaking button colors and label text, than actually fixing the fundamental problems with their workflow, which is the reason I was hired in the first place. People just don't "get" the point of having 1.8 ghz of number-crunching power at their fingertips, they'd rather have a solitaire ActiveX object embedded within their quarterly report, then at least they have something tacky to forward to everyone in the corporate address book.
Seeing as I had been looking forward to this con for a few months now, but recent events have turned my bankroll into mush so I'm stuck 600 miles away trying to ignore it. Mitnick is just banner candy now, but to shake hands and exchange intellect with the king of all geeks, The Woz.. would have been a fascinating moment.
Call me hardcore, I remember a little Ninja Turtles toy that did just this, but with smaller, pizza-colored hard plastic discs that hurt like @*#^$. I think it used small motors to spin and launch the discs because the pizza thingies would fly everywhere, bouncing off walls/expensive vases/my forehead. Now those things were about 2" wide, and 1/8" thick, so they were relatively "dull". If you did this with CDs, I think it would be a safety risk because CDs are thinner, thus "sharper" and lighter so they fly faster and farther and dig deeper into your victim's skin if properly aimed.
If you really want to do nasty stuff, store it on a USB dongle and swallow the thing/shove it up your rear USB port. That's what they do in mexican movies!
Is it safe to assume that at least one of those academy reviewers is a hardware geek, or at least has one in his immediate family ?
Why not just mod the player and grab the output post-decryption ? Heck, you could probably devise a buffered digital output right before the RAMDAC, stream it to a PC and reencode it right there. Sure, it won't kill the watermarking, but we can deal with that later.
17 different choices of MTA and they all require a PhD in Pedantry to configure.
I'm thinking of writing a user-to-lazy-geek input library, so that all these uber-genius coders can have sensible config file parsing that doesn't have hardcoded line lengths or break on newlines (or both, if your name is Exim).
Sure we have tons of eccentric, inspired software, but 90% of is it grossly unpolished, be it the config file paradigm, or glitchy X interfaces, or vicious compile-time issues. Rather than reinvent the wheel 7 times for each software task, why aren't we cleaning up the rough gems ?
I for one am _pissed_ (in a childish way) that the DVD burners have fallen in price so damn fast. I can no longer charge a penny for doing quality DVD transfers because now the inbred swine can just buy a 70$ POS burner and it even comes with "DVD Mastering for Dummies" software. There went my 12-month business plan to subsidize the frickin' AV equipment.
Dude, wear a shirt! These guys should have a computer that DRIVES the car too, because these little gino twits with their neon-ridden honda civics are the bane of my existence.
But seriously, I could have parked a school bus in that spot, it is HUGE compared to what you can expect in the city. Puh-leeze. Parallel parking requires practice/skill/functional-synapses.
Lately the city wankers have been replacing parallel spots with slant spots, it's a bit weird when you first see it, but you can park a dozen cars in slant, where only 5-6 used to fit in parallel, and they only jut out a few feet more which isn't a problem around here. They easier to get in/out of, and they make it easy for meter maids to grab your license plate:P
The only reason women get lower rates is because insurance agents, much like bankers, are too damn quirky to get laid, so they use favoritism to steer the materialistic socialites toward their pants.
Being near-jobless (as in, I work long hours at non-tech jobs because my home town sucks), most of my coworkers are tech illiterate. They know what a Pentium is, at least they know the bigger the number, the better it is. They still don't know the clock speed, but if they say it's a P2, then I can safely assume it's between 233 and 450 mhz, faster than their brains, at any rate.
Now comes Celeron. First of all these people will have a hell of a time remembering that name, because it is gibberish. At least "Pentium" sounds like "Uranium", and they all learned THAT word watching Back To The Future movies. Now consider that Celerons aren't adorned by a model ID (Celeron 2 wasn't an official name), and these people won't tell the diff between a Coppermine 300a and a Prescott 2.8ghz. These are people who paid to get an 8meg ATI Rage Pro installed because they heard "sideways monitor plugs are bad".
So why not just call it a Pentium IV Lite or something cute like that ? Or just make the older P4's cheaper and begone with the whole Celeron debacle.
Last time I checked, AMD Durons had vanished from the market. Now that you can get an Athlon XP for about $80 canadian ($60 USD), they've pretty much trumped the whole point of budget cpus. Now I still can't grok how Intel gets away with charging 2-3x the price for roughly equivalent performance, but it's probably thanks to Compaq, HP and Dell who have their established clientele of rich ignorants, not all of them, but with all the government and fortune 500 contracts they've got their steak well covered.
Try carring two GBA battery packs, with those stupid little contact pads.. 2 years later my thigh is still dark pink from the boiling acid. It didn't help that I "ignored" the problem for a few minutes thinking it was just the midday sun. Yeah, 4 years of crack will do that to a nerve.
The worst is that now I have no battery pack for the GBA. Batteries suck.
This would make for a fap-tastic game, if only the games were short enough to be finished in one sitting. An MMORPG is a never-ending world where time doesn't stop to ask directions. Sure, you could build the greatest war fortress in the world, design a BFG9000 to rule over your enemies. Then when the phone rings and you turn your back for ten minutes, you come back to find your empire in ruins because the enemy swooped in while you weren't paying attention.
That's why most MMORPG's have a friendly atmosphere, with safe havens. In Fallout's storyline there isn't room for such a place, war is war.
When they get around to releasing Q4, we will have moved on to bigger, faster rigs that can handle the output.
In addition, consider that Doom 3 has been under development for several years already. Graphics hardware has evolved, not as fast as it used to, but I'd say my not-so-expensive Radeon 9600 Pro is faster and nicer on the eyes than the Geforce 4200 I had last year. NVidia recently announced (released?) the Geforce 5, and THG gave it a very positive rating, leaps and bounds ahead of the Geforce FX line of shite, and outperforming the top Radeon model.
Heck, Quake 2 made the Voodoo shine, and led all my buddies to lust after my Voodoo2. Quake 3 saw us all move to 32-bit OpenGL cards like the TNT2. Doom 3 will bring forth the new age of graphics acceleration, exactly as the developers foretold years ago, not only their goal, it is a necessity, or else we won't enjoy the game nearly as much.
Wooo you need to lay off the freebase. I meant that Google and Linux go hand-in-hand. Those who don't know how to google effectively, end up calling ME and YOU for free tech support. Those people should have their PC taken away, refunded, and replaced with a Playstation.
The USA is only at "War" because they stuck their nose into other nations' problems. Because they can't just sit still and enjoy the quality of life they already have, your nation of inbred leaders has to go out and buy/destroy everything else. USA is to the planet as Microsoft is to the software industry.
Do we really need a huge weapon that can liquify its target at 250km when the typical infantry unit can't even be trusted with a six-shooter ?
Couldn't they just all jump into a really deep ditch while we fill it with cement, so we can get back to spending those billions in government funds on something CREATIVE rather than DESTRUCTIVE ?
But not dreadfully boring since it's an FPS and there are perks such as interchangeable "licenses" to for vehicles/weapons, and the heart of its fun factor revolves around the team aspect. There is a sense of heroism in gathering 150 soldiers scattered across a dozen squads, and coordinating a full-scale invasion on an enemy continent. Even the carrier pilot gets a kick out of assisting a successful airdrop.
I think where it shines is that you don't have to be Level 50 to see all the cool things, you can do more cool things simultaneously when you're that high. But if you're a green level 5 you can try all the same equipment as the old timers, because of the exchangeable license system. Don't like the sniper rifle ? trade your papers for a rocket license and blast away. It allows for a nice variety of playing styles and this diversity is the most valuable aspect of any team.
Do we ever see Microsoft ratting on Tru64 or any other big-iron Unix distro ? No. So why is Linux any different ? Sure, the uber-hackers like to run it on the desktop, and I'm personally getting intimate with Gentoo's ridiculously tortutous installation methods (which would be better served by a 10-line shell script). But if I walk 10 feet to the family computer where unbeaten fools download games and virii all night long, I couldn't even dare trying to use Linux on that toy.
I tried once at an internet cafe, to use Linux on the master rig (which would do access control and later, pr0n filtering). Well it didn't get very far before he installed XP on it and used the built-in internet sharing instead. Windows is easy for idiots, when something breaks you can just right click everything until you find a workaround. To do the same with Linux, these same idiots would need a second computer for googling the answer.
So quit the whining please, Linux is a threat to Windows Server right now. When we finally have a seamless distro that has tons of pretty little automatisms to diagnose/repair itself and enough GUI tools to not even need a bash terminal, then we can set our phasers to "kill" and have a stab at Redmond.
It seems we have a new one of these every other week, and they're all underachievers in that they simply accomplish what we've all done with our laptops since the day MP3 was unleashed upon the world, except these guys make a big fuss about it and take extra steps just to make their page appear meaty.
On the other hand, we've got audio nazis (yours truly) trying to put together a piece of stereo that will bring tears to your eyes, at significant cost, mind you. Just look at all the Mini-ITX projects out there, and try to imagine what a bored hacker can accomplish. And for the love of god, NO MORE TAPE ADAPTORS. What's the sense in using several hundred dollars in computer equipment for mp3 decoding, when the stereo system itself is OEM ?
Anyways, here's the right way to do this, at least the right way to build something worthy of slashdot visibility:
- DC-DC power supply with ignition sensing - x86 or ARM system, preferably hidden from view - custom code that works like a real stereo, no lame XMMS hacks with weird keypress combos - proper amplification and aftermarket speakers - in-dash display and control panel, either standard DIN size or a D-DIN touchscreen - rotary encoder! (or something even better) - WiFi and/or a removable drive for file mgmt - how about a nice slot-load cd-rom for when you want to hear the cd you haven't ripped yet, and while you're at it, rip it right then and there in 5 minutes or less
Bottom line: don't just hook a PC into your car stereo; make a car stereo out of a PC. Make it so only YOU know it's a PC, because it works so damn seamlessly that only an acute observer will notice the lack of a brand name:)
Well that's all nice and dandy, except I was talking about onboard sound on a cheap motherboard. It's not really that difficult to move the audio connectors elsewhere with a little soldering work, but considering the board sells for about 40$ it's just not worth the effort:)
Those bay panel thingies are cool, but I far far prefer the Midiman Omni-IO which is a truly external breakout box that you can stick just anywhere on your work desk. But then I also use an external firewire enclosure for my dvd burner, just so I don't have to bend down and reach for the PC case, which I hid far away to kill off the last few dB of harddisk whine that my Antec silent case couldn't squelch.
Slashdot Mirror
In related news, XBL user accounts are stored on a 428 meg Connor hard drive formatted as FAT.
C:\XBL\K1LL3R.XBL
Alt-255 anyone ?
It is TOO LATE for MS to fix their browser, because they should have done this years ago before even starting to work on the hundreds of stupid little patches for so brutally specific hacks they almost had to be originated by the user itself. 3/4's of the world's largest web sites will now break with SP2, because anyone with an iota of web talent has learned to work around the shortcomings of current MS browsers. Just killing the ActiveX popup would have been more than enough to relieve 99% of users' woes.
I'm just pissed now that I'll be hacking HTML day and night when this thing hits prime time, because my breadwinner is on the line. I'd rather see all the ignoramuses flock to Mozilla Firefox, but since they're ignoramuses they probably never leave MSN unless their 12-year old script kiddie is present to create a bookmark for them. URLs are rocket science to the common luser.
Hey, I know your pain. I am part of a 2-man web operation, and the other dude is a complete techno-weenie. The kicker is that I'm stuck blowing hours building an HTML-spewing wizard app when I could hand-code the same HTML in seconds, but _HE_ wants to do it. In my case, the guy can't quite trace the line between coder/webmaster (me) and media monkey (him).
The simplest explanation is that a large proportion of business users, shouldn't even be using a PC in the first place. Having destroyed 3 years of my life in a federal establishment, writing software for people who really needed hardware (violently installed across their dumb faces), I've "invested" more time tweaking button colors and label text, than actually fixing the fundamental problems with their workflow, which is the reason I was hired in the first place. People just don't "get" the point of having 1.8 ghz of number-crunching power at their fingertips, they'd rather have a solitaire ActiveX object embedded within their quarterly report, then at least they have something tacky to forward to everyone in the corporate address book.
Seeing as I had been looking forward to this con for a few months now, but recent events have turned my bankroll into mush so I'm stuck 600 miles away trying to ignore it. Mitnick is just banner candy now, but to shake hands and exchange intellect with the king of all geeks, The Woz.. would have been a fascinating moment.
Screw Dubya, Steve Wozniak for president!
Call me hardcore, I remember a little Ninja Turtles toy that did just this, but with smaller, pizza-colored hard plastic discs that hurt like @*#^$. I think it used small motors to spin and launch the discs because the pizza thingies would fly everywhere, bouncing off walls/expensive vases/my forehead. Now those things were about 2" wide, and 1/8" thick, so they were relatively "dull". If you did this with CDs, I think it would be a safety risk because CDs are thinner, thus "sharper" and lighter so they fly faster and farther and dig deeper into your victim's skin if properly aimed.
If you really want to do nasty stuff, store it on a USB dongle and swallow the thing/shove it up your rear USB port. That's what they do in mexican movies!
How about we nuke their frickin' web server until the bandwidth bill destroys the company ? That's one way to nullify a stupid patent.
Is it safe to assume that at least one of those academy reviewers is a hardware geek, or at least has one in his immediate family ?
Why not just mod the player and grab the output post-decryption ? Heck, you could probably devise a buffered digital output right before the RAMDAC, stream it to a PC and reencode it right there. Sure, it won't kill the watermarking, but we can deal with that later.
17 different choices of MTA and they all require a PhD in Pedantry to configure.
I'm thinking of writing a user-to-lazy-geek input library, so that all these uber-genius coders can have sensible config file parsing that doesn't have hardcoded line lengths or break on newlines (or both, if your name is Exim).
Sure we have tons of eccentric, inspired software, but 90% of is it grossly unpolished, be it the config file paradigm, or glitchy X interfaces, or vicious compile-time issues. Rather than reinvent the wheel 7 times for each software task, why aren't we cleaning up the rough gems ?
I for one am _pissed_ (in a childish way) that the DVD burners have fallen in price so damn fast. I can no longer charge a penny for doing quality DVD transfers because now the inbred swine can just buy a 70$ POS burner and it even comes with "DVD Mastering for Dummies" software. There went my 12-month business plan to subsidize the frickin' AV equipment.
I stand corrected.
:P
My point was that anything with a -ium suffix sounds high tech to most ignoramuses.
Plutonium
Iridium (hah!)
Einsteinium "genius matter!"
Slashium (worth a try =)
Dude, wear a shirt! These guys should have a computer that DRIVES the car too, because these little gino twits with their neon-ridden honda civics are the bane of my existence.
:P
But seriously, I could have parked a school bus in that spot, it is HUGE compared to what you can expect in the city. Puh-leeze. Parallel parking requires practice/skill/functional-synapses.
Lately the city wankers have been replacing parallel spots with slant spots, it's a bit weird when you first see it, but you can park a dozen cars in slant, where only 5-6 used to fit in parallel, and they only jut out a few feet more which isn't a problem around here. They easier to get in/out of, and they make it easy for meter maids to grab your license plate
The only reason women get lower rates is because insurance agents, much like bankers, are too damn quirky to get laid, so they use favoritism to steer the materialistic socialites toward their pants.
Being near-jobless (as in, I work long hours at non-tech jobs because my home town sucks), most of my coworkers are tech illiterate. They know what a Pentium is, at least they know the bigger the number, the better it is. They still don't know the clock speed, but if they say it's a P2, then I can safely assume it's between 233 and 450 mhz, faster than their brains, at any rate.
Now comes Celeron. First of all these people will have a hell of a time remembering that name, because it is gibberish. At least "Pentium" sounds like "Uranium", and they all learned THAT word watching Back To The Future movies. Now consider that Celerons aren't adorned by a model ID (Celeron 2 wasn't an official name), and these people won't tell the diff between a Coppermine 300a and a Prescott 2.8ghz. These are people who paid to get an 8meg ATI Rage Pro installed because they heard "sideways monitor plugs are bad".
So why not just call it a Pentium IV Lite or something cute like that ? Or just make the older P4's cheaper and begone with the whole Celeron debacle.
Last time I checked, AMD Durons had vanished from the market. Now that you can get an Athlon XP for about $80 canadian ($60 USD), they've pretty much trumped the whole point of budget cpus. Now I still can't grok how Intel gets away with charging 2-3x the price for roughly equivalent performance, but it's probably thanks to Compaq, HP and Dell who have their established clientele of rich ignorants, not all of them, but with all the government and fortune 500 contracts they've got their steak well covered.
ah yes, linux is free as in speech, beer and base.
well then let's all just lay off the smack instead.
Try carring two GBA battery packs, with those stupid little contact pads.. 2 years later my thigh is still dark pink from the boiling acid. It didn't help that I "ignored" the problem for a few minutes thinking it was just the midday sun. Yeah, 4 years of crack will do that to a nerve.
The worst is that now I have no battery pack for the GBA. Batteries suck.
This would make for a fap-tastic game, if only the games were short enough to be finished in one sitting. An MMORPG is a never-ending world where time doesn't stop to ask directions. Sure, you could build the greatest war fortress in the world, design a BFG9000 to rule over your enemies. Then when the phone rings and you turn your back for ten minutes, you come back to find your empire in ruins because the enemy swooped in while you weren't paying attention.
That's why most MMORPG's have a friendly atmosphere, with safe havens. In Fallout's storyline there isn't room for such a place, war is war.
When they get around to releasing Q4, we will have moved on to bigger, faster rigs that can handle the output.
In addition, consider that Doom 3 has been under development for several years already. Graphics hardware has evolved, not as fast as it used to, but I'd say my not-so-expensive Radeon 9600 Pro is faster and nicer on the eyes than the Geforce 4200 I had last year. NVidia recently announced (released?) the Geforce 5, and THG gave it a very positive rating, leaps and bounds ahead of the Geforce FX line of shite, and outperforming the top Radeon model.
Heck, Quake 2 made the Voodoo shine, and led all my buddies to lust after my Voodoo2. Quake 3 saw us all move to 32-bit OpenGL cards like the TNT2. Doom 3 will bring forth the new age of graphics acceleration, exactly as the developers foretold years ago, not only their goal, it is a necessity, or else we won't enjoy the game nearly as much.
Wooo you need to lay off the freebase. I meant that Google and Linux go hand-in-hand. Those who don't know how to google effectively, end up calling ME and YOU for free tech support. Those people should have their PC taken away, refunded, and replaced with a Playstation.
Well actually yes.
The USA is only at "War" because they stuck their nose into other nations' problems. Because they can't just sit still and enjoy the quality of life they already have, your nation of inbred leaders has to go out and buy/destroy everything else. USA is to the planet as Microsoft is to the software industry.
Do we really need a huge weapon that can liquify its target at 250km when the typical infantry unit can't even be trusted with a six-shooter ?
Couldn't they just all jump into a really deep ditch while we fill it with cement, so we can get back to spending those billions in government funds on something CREATIVE rather than DESTRUCTIVE ?
Blowing shit up is fun, blowing people up is NOT.
Planetside: mega treadmill
But not dreadfully boring since it's an FPS and there are perks such as interchangeable "licenses" to for vehicles/weapons, and the heart of its fun factor revolves around the team aspect. There is a sense of heroism in gathering 150 soldiers scattered across a dozen squads, and coordinating a full-scale invasion on an enemy continent. Even the carrier pilot gets a kick out of assisting a successful airdrop.
I think where it shines is that you don't have to be Level 50 to see all the cool things, you can do more cool things simultaneously when you're that high. But if you're a green level 5 you can try all the same equipment as the old timers, because of the exchangeable license system. Don't like the sniper rifle ? trade your papers for a rocket license and blast away. It allows for a nice variety of playing styles and this diversity is the most valuable aspect of any team.
Do we ever see Microsoft ratting on Tru64 or any other big-iron Unix distro ? No. So why is Linux any different ? Sure, the uber-hackers like to run it on the desktop, and I'm personally getting intimate with Gentoo's ridiculously tortutous installation methods (which would be better served by a 10-line shell script). But if I walk 10 feet to the family computer where unbeaten fools download games and virii all night long, I couldn't even dare trying to use Linux on that toy.
I tried once at an internet cafe, to use Linux on the master rig (which would do access control and later, pr0n filtering). Well it didn't get very far before he installed XP on it and used the built-in internet sharing instead. Windows is easy for idiots, when something breaks you can just right click everything until you find a workaround. To do the same with Linux, these same idiots would need a second computer for googling the answer.
So quit the whining please, Linux is a threat to Windows Server right now. When we finally have a seamless distro that has tons of pretty little automatisms to diagnose/repair itself and enough GUI tools to not even need a bash terminal, then we can set our phasers to "kill" and have a stab at Redmond.
It seems we have a new one of these every other week, and they're all underachievers in that they simply accomplish what we've all done with our laptops since the day MP3 was unleashed upon the world, except these guys make a big fuss about it and take extra steps just to make their page appear meaty.
:)
On the other hand, we've got audio nazis (yours truly) trying to put together a piece of stereo that will bring tears to your eyes, at significant cost, mind you. Just look at all the Mini-ITX projects out there, and try to imagine what a bored hacker can accomplish. And for the love of god, NO MORE TAPE ADAPTORS. What's the sense in using several hundred dollars in computer equipment for mp3 decoding, when the stereo system itself is OEM ?
Anyways, here's the right way to do this, at least the right way to build something worthy of slashdot visibility:
- DC-DC power supply with ignition sensing
- x86 or ARM system, preferably hidden from view
- custom code that works like a real stereo, no lame XMMS hacks with weird keypress combos
- proper amplification and aftermarket speakers
- in-dash display and control panel, either standard DIN size or a D-DIN touchscreen
- rotary encoder! (or something even better)
- WiFi and/or a removable drive for file mgmt
- how about a nice slot-load cd-rom for when you want to hear the cd you haven't ripped yet, and while you're at it, rip it right then and there in 5 minutes or less
Bottom line: don't just hook a PC into your car stereo; make a car stereo out of a PC. Make it so only YOU know it's a PC, because it works so damn seamlessly that only an acute observer will notice the lack of a brand name
Well that's all nice and dandy, except I was talking about onboard sound on a cheap motherboard. It's not really that difficult to move the audio connectors elsewhere with a little soldering work, but considering the board sells for about 40$ it's just not worth the effort :)
Those bay panel thingies are cool, but I far far prefer the Midiman Omni-IO which is a truly external breakout box that you can stick just anywhere on your work desk. But then I also use an external firewire enclosure for my dvd burner, just so I don't have to bend down and reach for the PC case, which I hid far away to kill off the last few dB of harddisk whine that my Antec silent case couldn't squelch.