Insightful. I suppose. Of the majority of guys I play video games with, very few are willing to pay for LAN game time. They either don't see it as 'money well spent', or think they can put together a LAN party on their own and have just as much fun.
We have a game center in town (owned by a friend, ironically) that actually does quite well. The way he's making his money is that he provides everything. You just show up and hand him $4 an hour. It's a huge hit with the jr high and high school kids.
I know that when the Mac G5 Cluster was developed they claimed tremendous speed, but when the sustained rate was calculated, it turned out to be much lower...
Speaking of the Big Mac (lame name), where is it now? I don't see it in the list and the the news page on their site doesn't list it as coming back on the 24th edition in November.
I would like to say that only the next thing we need is a motion picture camera to capture full 35mm frames... Then I thought of the next level of using IMAX frames and realized that upgrading will never end.
I've wondered when the MP increase will stop. When is there enough data? Lets say we hit 50MP in the next couple years - one would think that that might be enough data to replicate a picture into any printed size. So then what? How do we make cameras better?
I guess it's the same with the home PC. 600mhz and 128mb of memory is probably enough power to get all your web surfing and email sending taken care of. So then what? How do we make it better after that?
Foale's suggestions for leaving the comfort zone ring true on several levels. We can't really explore space until we're ready to leave the Garden of Eden behind. So far, we're trying to take it with us -- everything must be 100% safe, from the toilets to the astronauts themselves. We're not going to get past the walls of the garden until there's a flaming sword -- until we must either push forward or die.
Well you can't throwing money and people at space either. If certain safty procautions aren't met you're garounteed to fail (at least some of the time) and when you fail, you stop getting money to try again. If the people with the money aren't pleased with the current minimalistic failure rate, they're sure not going to agree with any increases.
It seems great for cable, but how well does it interface with a satellite-based service such as DirecTV? Since in that case, all tuning is controlled by the receiver, MythTV would be helpless - unless you could wire an IR emitter to it. But even then, the software would still have only passive control over the receiver (what if it goes to change a channel, but the reciever is off?).
Does MSCE have an advantage here? Not that I am aware of. I do understand that this is a huge benefit of a TiVo or ReplayTV over a PC driven system, but where the PC setups (especially MythTV) win is in the ability to do as you please with the files.
And the bit about the reciever being off would fall under 'user error' in my opinion. Someone who would make that mistake most likely wouldn't be able to install MythTV and / or Linux (:
This is a killer awesome way to display amature photography and geekdom in the home, or appartment. Though I would go with a different arrangement. I can see someone trying to approach the window to look at a different angle of the image. If all the pannels were together, possibly with narrower trimming, viewers would be less likely to figure it out the illusion as quickly.
I'll accept that sometimes Mac fans will give Apple too much credit, but you've gone to the other absolute extreme here.
Fair enough. I guess it's fair to say that I have a high dislike for "Apple". I think their computers and software are incredible. Apple and the majority of people who support them (financially etc...) hold them in some kind of saviour catagory, as if they've come to purify the computer world.
Breaking into someone else's computer without permission is illegal. A zombie network of 20,000 PCs means that someone has compromised 20,000 computers and, apparently, advertising that fact for personal gain. How hard would it be for a cop to shell out the $2000, then arrest spammer? Of course anyone who has read Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown realizes just how clueless law enforcement can be with technical issues, but this one looks like a no brainer:
How embarrassing would it be for the police to discover their own machines in the zombie network...
Scams are criminal acts. Thus, the money was removed from the bank due to a criminal act. A bank that loses money to a criminal act that refuses to reimburse its customers might well lose its status as a bank. They took from her, without her permission, money from her bank account. Which is stealing, fraud, etc, etc. Maybe it was her fault it got stolen, but the money was stolen, from the bank.
Though I do agree that this is the law and that you are correct, I disagree with the law. Fraud and scams have been going on long enough that I believe anyone who is the victim of a scam or fraudulent act is the person at fault and should be held responsible for their actions. How difficult would it have been for her to call her bank and ask if they were sending such emails? And how many times has the general public been told by any system administrative group "We will never ask for your usename and password." ? She screwed up and it cost her bank a lot of money. If I were her bank, any rates on loans just went up, and interest on savings accounts just hit the floor.
In this case, the woman essentially is no longer the victim - the bank is. So scams and fraud will not stop because the idiot consumers (this woman as an example) have no reason to stop falling for the scam. They are the weakest link! They must be punished!
Microsoft might as well let SenderID go open source. It would make their jobs easier. Less spam = less viruses = less need for frequent updates and less load on Hotmail servers. Am I wrong?
But if it's open source then people will associate it with 'free', and Microsoft can't charge for 'free', and that doesn't go over well with the accountant.
When streaming audio on the internet was in its infancy Real Player (or, Real Audio Player, as video playback wasn't even in the player) was a very good program, innovative, inventive, etc. I did recommend it.
Well, if streaming is what you want to do. But what I found was that most so called "streams" were just files being played as they were downloaded. Big woop. Why not just offer the file to be downloaded and play it when it's done? Or while it's downloading. Quicktime has been able to do that for quite a while. The streaming really comes into effect when you are talking about 'internet radio stations', or live 'webcasts' (man I hate those terms) and that wasn't happening much back in the day because no one had the bandwidth, even with Real's compression, to have... buffering buffering... any decent... buffering buffering buffering... userbase. So when bandwidth caught up other companies jumped in and did a MUCH better job - then streaming caught on and we got some great technology.
I don't know that Micrsoft necessarily needs China buying their product, but if MS can't sell their products in China there eventually will be some stiff competition coming from the big country.
The first company to ship and popularize Sony's revolutionary 3.5" hard-case floppy drives and disks, and...
The first company to realize that the floppy was dead, and that it was time to wisely move consumers away from it.
(Not to mention the first computers[1] to include USB, FireWire, etc. - and wise enough to eliminate ancient legacy ports at the same time.)
Many consumers weren't *ready* to give up floppies in 1998, but it was more out of fear than actual need. The PC industry even played into that fear with the iMac, scaring customers with it's lack of a floppy drive. And 5 years later, the PC industry followed along. Hmm, 5 years...that seems about right...
[1] Yes, yes, someone will come up with some retarded example about some other obscure thing that was "first", but let's face it: Apple was the first to mainstream technologies in so many of these realms. "First" to 802.11? No, but the first to force prices of access points down from over $1000 to under $300, and cards from $300 to under $100, and to include integrated wireless in its laptops and desktops...and then everyone else followed in earnest a couple years later. "First" to 64-bit on the desktop? No, but some random company someone has never heard of ("BOXX TECHNOLOGIES") doesn't really count, and Apple's G5 orders far eclipsed any other 64-bit *desktop* offering from any vendor the first day it was introduced. "First" to an online music store? No, but the first one to receive widespread press and the first one to not completely and utterly blow that normal people can (and actually do) use. Let's face the facts: like it or not, Apple is the innovator here, and one of very, very few in the industry.
- - - - -
A) My Dell Dimension created more than a year before the first iMac had USB. I didn't use its USB connections. Didn't even know what they were. But they were there. Years later I used them for printer / scanner / keyboard / mouse.
B) I don't know that Apple forced the prices down on 802.11 hardware - I believe that would be Linksys and D-Link. But I have no examples. Also, where the two mentioned companies are now selling hardware for $50, how is it that our industry leading innovator and price driver is still selling their 802.11 access points for $200?
C) For anyone to follow in integrated wireless a couple years later would be a bit aggressive. Maybe a year at most. And it's not like any of them are very good anyway. There's too much shielding in the case. Especially Apple's marvelous Titanium model with internal antenna. That was an awesome idea!...
D) Yes, Apple did have the first large first-day order for 64 bit desktops. Doesn't hurt that eleven hundred went to one purchaser. Also doesn't hurt that the only other 64 bit desktops ever sold were and are from even more nitch markets than Apple. Sun, SGI, and HP are highly specified markets. They also don't do huge new releases. In fact, the whole statement that it's a big deal is really a load of crap. Wait until Intel and AMD go main stream with their 64 bit systems and someone like Dell or HP ships standard desktops with 64 bit processors.
Apple isn't innovative. It's a marketing machine. And you got sold on the hype.
You mention using it for the standard distributed projects, but what about the computers that are already running these projects? Are they not part of a super computer? A type of cluster? Surely the fellas (and ladies?) at distributed.net and / or the SETI@Home crew could write up a simple distributed RMAX app to test how much CPU time is available on the internet. Submit those numbers to the top500.org and see where you end up. I bet it'd put the Earth Simulator to shame.
Now, for 'real time', it'd be shat. But the computational power is there. It's just a high latency cluster.
80GB seems pretty weak when my normal recordings are 1GB/30min. I'm building a mythtv backend right now, and I'm looking for at least 1TB of space.
Wow! Look at that stream of piss go! But mine will have TWO TERABYTES!
Seriously dude.
Ok lets do the breakdown. 1GB / 30 Min is roughly 40 hours of recorded television on an 80GB drive. Lets call it 38 so we don't have an issue about that.
38 hours. How much programing in a week do you wish to record? All the Star Trek together is only 15 hours in a week. Throw in another 5 hours of random anime, 4 hours of Tech TV, 6 hours of Discovery, 2 hours of sitcoms... that's only 32 hours. Got another 6 you can dig up?
And 1GB / 30 Min? What the crap!? This is television we're talking about.
But if you're using it for "DVD Archival", I understand. My plan is to wait for 500GB SATA drives to hit the market and be less than $1/1GB. Then fill my ten drive tower with them and start borrowing DVDs from my friends' collections.
I'd like to see the brain readings when a console game gets started up. Nothing like seven unskippable splash screens in a row to really affect the enjoyment of a game.
No doubt. I bet scientifically that is the most unenjoyable part of the gaming experience. I'd rather lose a game that have to sit through the splash screen sequence of most games.
I get the same responce when I talk about the company I work for. We're an advertising agency, where it's common to refer to the artists as "creatives", and the work they create as "creative". It's kind of like changing the adjective creativework to just the noun creative. Very slang.
Slashdot Mirror
dont try and make a profit :P
Insightful. I suppose. Of the majority of guys I play video games with, very few are willing to pay for LAN game time. They either don't see it as 'money well spent', or think they can put together a LAN party on their own and have just as much fun.
We have a game center in town (owned by a friend, ironically) that actually does quite well. The way he's making his money is that he provides everything. You just show up and hand him $4 an hour. It's a huge hit with the jr high and high school kids.
Who says that the warning was received? If it is via email, what if my spam filter makes it go away?
Do they have to deliver the warning with a "Process server" in order for it to count in court?
Official, legal, warnings are generally done in person with varification of compliance.
I know that when the Mac G5 Cluster was developed they claimed tremendous speed, but when the sustained rate was calculated, it turned out to be much lower ...
Speaking of the Big Mac (lame name), where is it now? I don't see it in the list and the the news page on their site doesn't list it as coming back on the 24th edition in November.
I would like to say that only the next thing we need is a motion picture camera to capture full 35mm frames... Then I thought of the next level of using IMAX frames and realized that upgrading will never end.
I've wondered when the MP increase will stop. When is there enough data? Lets say we hit 50MP in the next couple years - one would think that that might be enough data to replicate a picture into any printed size. So then what? How do we make cameras better?
I guess it's the same with the home PC. 600mhz and 128mb of memory is probably enough power to get all your web surfing and email sending taken care of. So then what? How do we make it better after that?
Just curious.
Wouldn't 11 screenshots be just as helpful?
Well it would at least be easier to read.
That is, when does the average human eye stop distinguishing them as seperate points?
In the advertising business we use 400 dpi as the standard. I can still see pixels but it takes a trained eye.
There's a lot more to it than black borders ... and why does the government get to tax the airwaves? It's not like they created them.
Foale's suggestions for leaving the comfort zone ring true on several levels. We can't really explore space until we're ready to leave the Garden of Eden behind. So far, we're trying to take it with us -- everything must be 100% safe, from the toilets to the astronauts themselves. We're not going to get past the walls of the garden until there's a flaming sword -- until we must either push forward or die.
Well you can't throwing money and people at space either. If certain safty procautions aren't met you're garounteed to fail (at least some of the time) and when you fail, you stop getting money to try again. If the people with the money aren't pleased with the current minimalistic failure rate, they're sure not going to agree with any increases.
Actually they canned support for Macintosh browsers over a year ago. As far as I know the only MS products for Macintosh are Office and Virtual PC.
"All the news that fits, in print"
... that should be "all the news that's fit to print".
Uh, no
And kids wonder where sayings come from. They come from nowhere because they're all getting screwed up!
It seems great for cable, but how well does it interface with a satellite-based service such as DirecTV? Since in that case, all tuning is controlled by the receiver, MythTV would be helpless - unless you could wire an IR emitter to it. But even then, the software would still have only passive control over the receiver (what if it goes to change a channel, but the reciever is off?).
Does MSCE have an advantage here? Not that I am aware of. I do understand that this is a huge benefit of a TiVo or ReplayTV over a PC driven system, but where the PC setups (especially MythTV) win is in the ability to do as you please with the files.
And the bit about the reciever being off would fall under 'user error' in my opinion. Someone who would make that mistake most likely wouldn't be able to install MythTV and / or Linux (:
This is a killer awesome way to display amature photography and geekdom in the home, or appartment. Though I would go with a different arrangement. I can see someone trying to approach the window to look at a different angle of the image. If all the pannels were together, possibly with narrower trimming, viewers would be less likely to figure it out the illusion as quickly.
I'll accept that sometimes Mac fans will give Apple too much credit, but you've gone to the other absolute extreme here.
...) hold them in some kind of saviour catagory, as if they've come to purify the computer world.
Fair enough. I guess it's fair to say that I have a high dislike for "Apple". I think their computers and software are incredible. Apple and the majority of people who support them (financially etc
Breaking into someone else's computer without permission is illegal. A zombie network of 20,000 PCs means that someone has compromised 20,000 computers and, apparently, advertising that fact for personal gain. How hard would it be for a cop to shell out the $2000, then arrest spammer? Of course anyone who has read Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown realizes just how clueless law enforcement can be with technical issues, but this one looks like a no brainer:
...
How embarrassing would it be for the police to discover their own machines in the zombie network
Scams are criminal acts. Thus, the money was removed from the bank due to a criminal act. A bank that loses money to a criminal act that refuses to reimburse its customers might well lose its status as a bank. They took from her, without her permission, money from her bank account. Which is stealing, fraud, etc, etc. Maybe it was her fault it got stolen, but the money was stolen, from the bank.
Though I do agree that this is the law and that you are correct, I disagree with the law. Fraud and scams have been going on long enough that I believe anyone who is the victim of a scam or fraudulent act is the person at fault and should be held responsible for their actions. How difficult would it have been for her to call her bank and ask if they were sending such emails? And how many times has the general public been told by any system administrative group "We will never ask for your usename and password." ? She screwed up and it cost her bank a lot of money. If I were her bank, any rates on loans just went up, and interest on savings accounts just hit the floor.
In this case, the woman essentially is no longer the victim - the bank is. So scams and fraud will not stop because the idiot consumers (this woman as an example) have no reason to stop falling for the scam. They are the weakest link! They must be punished!
(:
Microsoft might as well let SenderID go open source. It would make their jobs easier. Less spam = less viruses = less need for frequent updates and less load on Hotmail servers. Am I wrong?
But if it's open source then people will associate it with 'free', and Microsoft can't charge for 'free', and that doesn't go over well with the accountant.
When streaming audio on the internet was in its infancy Real Player (or, Real Audio Player, as video playback wasn't even in the player) was a very good program, innovative, inventive, etc. I did recommend it.
... buffering buffering ... any decent ... buffering buffering buffering ... userbase. So when bandwidth caught up other companies jumped in and did a MUCH better job - then streaming caught on and we got some great technology.
Well, if streaming is what you want to do. But what I found was that most so called "streams" were just files being played as they were downloaded. Big woop. Why not just offer the file to be downloaded and play it when it's done? Or while it's downloading. Quicktime has been able to do that for quite a while. The streaming really comes into effect when you are talking about 'internet radio stations', or live 'webcasts' (man I hate those terms) and that wasn't happening much back in the day because no one had the bandwidth, even with Real's compression, to have
I don't know that Micrsoft necessarily needs China buying their product, but if MS can't sell their products in China there eventually will be some stiff competition coming from the big country.
Real has gone from a company that I once recommended to being viewed as antagonistic with its customers.
Well, I don't know that I really ever recommended it to anyone in the first place, but I definitely dislike them more now than ever before.
Is it possible to issue a company a cease and desist order for their own benefit? (:
The first company to ship and popularize Sony's revolutionary 3.5" hard-case floppy drives and disks, and...
...
The first company to realize that the floppy was dead, and that it was time to wisely move consumers away from it.
(Not to mention the first computers[1] to include USB, FireWire, etc. - and wise enough to eliminate ancient legacy ports at the same time.)
Many consumers weren't *ready* to give up floppies in 1998, but it was more out of fear than actual need. The PC industry even played into that fear with the iMac, scaring customers with it's lack of a floppy drive. And 5 years later, the PC industry followed along. Hmm, 5 years...that seems about right...
[1] Yes, yes, someone will come up with some retarded example about some other obscure thing that was "first", but let's face it: Apple was the first to mainstream technologies in so many of these realms. "First" to 802.11? No, but the first to force prices of access points down from over $1000 to under $300, and cards from $300 to under $100, and to include integrated wireless in its laptops and desktops...and then everyone else followed in earnest a couple years later. "First" to 64-bit on the desktop? No, but some random company someone has never heard of ("BOXX TECHNOLOGIES") doesn't really count, and Apple's G5 orders far eclipsed any other 64-bit *desktop* offering from any vendor the first day it was introduced. "First" to an online music store? No, but the first one to receive widespread press and the first one to not completely and utterly blow that normal people can (and actually do) use. Let's face the facts: like it or not, Apple is the innovator here, and one of very, very few in the industry.
- - - - -
A) My Dell Dimension created more than a year before the first iMac had USB. I didn't use its USB connections. Didn't even know what they were. But they were there. Years later I used them for printer / scanner / keyboard / mouse.
B) I don't know that Apple forced the prices down on 802.11 hardware - I believe that would be Linksys and D-Link. But I have no examples. Also, where the two mentioned companies are now selling hardware for $50, how is it that our industry leading innovator and price driver is still selling their 802.11 access points for $200?
C) For anyone to follow in integrated wireless a couple years later would be a bit aggressive. Maybe a year at most. And it's not like any of them are very good anyway. There's too much shielding in the case. Especially Apple's marvelous Titanium model with internal antenna. That was an awesome idea!
D) Yes, Apple did have the first large first-day order for 64 bit desktops. Doesn't hurt that eleven hundred went to one purchaser. Also doesn't hurt that the only other 64 bit desktops ever sold were and are from even more nitch markets than Apple. Sun, SGI, and HP are highly specified markets. They also don't do huge new releases. In fact, the whole statement that it's a big deal is really a load of crap. Wait until Intel and AMD go main stream with their 64 bit systems and someone like Dell or HP ships standard desktops with 64 bit processors.
Apple isn't innovative. It's a marketing machine. And you got sold on the hype.
You mention using it for the standard distributed projects, but what about the computers that are already running these projects? Are they not part of a super computer? A type of cluster? Surely the fellas (and ladies?) at distributed.net and / or the SETI@Home crew could write up a simple distributed RMAX app to test how much CPU time is available on the internet. Submit those numbers to the top500.org and see where you end up. I bet it'd put the Earth Simulator to shame.
Now, for 'real time', it'd be shat. But the computational power is there. It's just a high latency cluster.
80GB seems pretty weak when my normal recordings are 1GB/30min. I'm building a mythtv backend right now, and I'm looking for at least 1TB of space.
... that's only 32 hours. Got another 6 you can dig up?
Wow! Look at that stream of piss go! But mine will have TWO TERABYTES!
Seriously dude.
Ok lets do the breakdown. 1GB / 30 Min is roughly 40 hours of recorded television on an 80GB drive. Lets call it 38 so we don't have an issue about that.
38 hours. How much programing in a week do you wish to record? All the Star Trek together is only 15 hours in a week. Throw in another 5 hours of random anime, 4 hours of Tech TV, 6 hours of Discovery, 2 hours of sitcoms
And 1GB / 30 Min? What the crap!? This is television we're talking about.
But if you're using it for "DVD Archival", I understand. My plan is to wait for 500GB SATA drives to hit the market and be less than $1/1GB. Then fill my ten drive tower with them and start borrowing DVDs from my friends' collections.
I'd like to see the brain readings when a console game gets started up. Nothing like seven unskippable splash screens in a row to really affect the enjoyment of a game.
No doubt. I bet scientifically that is the most unenjoyable part of the gaming experience. I'd rather lose a game that have to sit through the splash screen sequence of most games.
When did "creative" become a noun?
I get the same responce when I talk about the company I work for. We're an advertising agency, where it's common to refer to the artists as "creatives", and the work they create as "creative". It's kind of like changing the adjective creative work to just the noun creative. Very slang.
Isn't that kind of how time works?
It may depend on who's time you're refering to. But yeah, I laughed at that too.