Blizzard doesn't really want to own you system, they just don't want you to play unattended.
I always thought that it would be great to have a game that let's you script whatever you want, up to the point where you can play unattended. A game that rewards the best programmer rather than simply the quickest fingers. Whenever I play a game, I always think I could do a better job with the A.I., I'd like to have a chance to put my money where my mouth is and I don't have time to write an entire game by myself.
Thanks, maybe I should start looking for a player then. Although I guess I'd have to keep my existing DVD player (Oppo 970) as it does support upconversion over component. Not sure how though, they claim it doesn't. I wasn't about to complain. However many argue that upconversion is pointless, so maybe I shouldn't be concerning myself with it at all.
However, I've noticed a lot of younger kids throwing around the F word these days. We didn't say that even when we watched R rated movies as kids. Of course it might be a moot point in 20 years when everyone that is a kid now grows up and things that cursing is fine.
Are you kidding? I'm in my mid 30s now and I and every kid I know said fuck more often when we were 8 to 9 than at any time in our lives. You couldn't say it to teachers or around parents, but it was every second word out of our mouths. Luckily we grew up, but cursing isn't anything new. I think the only thing that is different is that kids today are becoming cynical more early in life. The internet probably does more to school them in that than anything else.
Whenever I see BlueRay or HD-DVD in the stores, I've been very unimpressed. It looks almost worse than DVD in some ways. Now, I know that's not technically true, but I also know that electronics stores know nothing about calibrating their TVs so that everything looks like junk. For instance, sharpness should be at or near 0, it's artificial noise.
HD/BD aside, half the time, you don't even know it the source is HD or not. At one big electronics store, a salesman told me that the signal came off a central hard drive and it was heavily recompressed. WTF? HD TVs should be showing nothing but a high quality HD feed.
So my advice to the Sountrack/Ultimate, Best Buy and Circuit City, get the best signal you can and spend some time calibrating your sets so that when I walk by, I can by wowed and say that looks better than my crappy 8 year old HDTV. Maybe then I'd upgrade my TV or get a Blueray player. Just telling me it's great isn't enough. Hire someone who can actually afford the TV to set it up for you. I'm not going to spend several thousand dollars for a product on the advice of someone who can barely afford beer and gas.
From what I understand, even many of the early HDTVs don't have the correct plugs for these players for full resolution.
I think of DRM as a kind of joke most of the time, since it's so easy to circumvent. I'm against it in principle, but it's always been more of an academic issue to me. But what you said, struck a cord. That's the reason I never got an HD player. As far as I know, there are no HD players that'll do component out (this may have changed, but it was the case when I looked into it). If there are now any players that do component, then what are the odds that I'll have much choice? I'll only buy an HD player when I'm ready to upgrade my TV to something that's HDMI ready. I guess the DRM issue hasn't been so academic in my life after all. And the only outcome in this case was lost sales for the electronics and movie companies and some money saved for me. And yet pirated copies are available for download despite all of this, so I'm not sure what was gained in risking those sales.
One of the finest shows ever made with absolutely the worst UI ever portrayed in Hollywood. Gotta love that flash in history when virtual reality was going to take over the world.
Yeah, I don't really remember anything about that show except the great looking computer interfaces. Oddly enough, it was the main reason I watched the show at the time. Nothing else in Hollywood came close. Things have gotten better these last few years though.
Short term? Like what, a day's worth? I recently calculated how much time I spend watching my screen paint and for application servers to restart cause the huge ass telecom company I work for won't invest in new hardware. Multiplying that amount of time by my salary means that a new computer would pay for itself in a month. Not to mention all the time we spend with "clever" little scripts to offload data from an overworked 5 gig production drive cause they don't want to spring the lousy $150 for a new 500 gig drive so that we'll never have to worry about space again. I can't even begin to calculate how many millions we lose in lost productivity each year just because management lacks the ability to engage in short-term thinking, much less the mid or long term.
My home server services one person, me. It's not all that high end, but it blows the equipment we use at work out of the water and that stuff is servicing millions. The Sun workstation they expect me to use goes for $20 on eBay (sans/monitor), but they still want new applications delivered in a week. I've given up expecting any of this to change. I'm just so tired of making these arguments and seeing people shrug their shoulders. I wish that guy good luck in his quest for a second monitor. For me, if I want a decent working environment, I have to pay for it myself.
Re:TrueCrypt also supports 'plausible deniabilty'
on
TrueCrypt 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
Then again, AFAIK, you can't resize a truecrypt volume. So even if you're not using the hidden volume feature, it's best to make your volume as big as you think you'll ever need. After all, I have some large unencrypted partitions with very few files on them.
Actually Java provides a CipherOutputStream supporting all of the AES candidates right out of the box. It wouldn't be too hard to write something yourself. Although for real security, I'd put my trust in the experts. You can screw up encryption if you do it wrong. Truecrypt is pretty slick and the price is right.
I think most games contribute to faster reflexes. As your reflexes go up, so does your intolerance for driving like a grandmother. It's like saying that exercise gives you more energy. It's kind of obvious.
Most of the people I know who drive real slow are the same people who won't play today's video games because they complain about too many buttons. Why should I be forced to drive like a snail cause everyone else is retarded? I'm not saying we should drive like we do in video games, but 35 mph is parking lot speed to anyone who regularly plays fast moving games.
I love your number 5. I don't really care about outsourcing and I feel the pay is adequate, but having non-technical people dictate technical solutions is the worst part of this career for me. When it's not like that, I really love what I do.
I'm not saying that viruses don't mutate, I'm saying that the chances of this one specific animal virus mutating to a human transmissible virus is about as likely as any animal virus mutating. And there are probably millions out there. And since we don't have big pandemics often (name the ones you've lived through), then I'm correct in saying there's only a slim chance. You don't need to be a microbiologist to recognize this. You just need to live and have a memory.
As someone who works for a large corporation, with contracts in both the private and public sector, I can tell you that private interests are much easier to "interoperate" with.
As for the roads, it never ceases to amaze me that we laid out most of the interstate highway system in 10 years, yet today, there's this one exit off of I-25 I know about that they've been working on for 11 years (maybe longer, that's as long as I've lived here). I've always been taught that a declining infrastructure is the first tell-tale sign of a declining civilization. Between the poor roads, schools falling apart and a water system barely able to keep up, I'd say that there are plenty of signs abound.
These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband.
You're arguing against free enterprise by giving of example showing that we don't have it to begin with. People often complain about large corporations and say we need the government to protect us against the ravages of a laissez-faire system. What those people are missing is that corporations use the government to keep their competitors down. So the people on the left cry out against big business while the people on the right cry out against big government. What we really have is a blend of socialism and fascism and people get confused because a term for it has yet to be coined. But you can't blame business for trying to get what it can get, you can only hope to reduce the scope and power of government to prevent anyone from getting it in the first place. If we had a true free market, we be number one on this list. But we're not going to get there through new government legislation, only through the repeal of old government legislation. I say, abolish the FCC and you'll start seeing some choice available.
If someone went through the trouble and cost of purchasing a game, then they were most likely sold on the game before they even played it. In fact, many of the Gamespot user reviews are by reviewers who admit they haven't even played the game. The site reviewers may not give out many (if any) 10/10s, but pretty much every game is in the 7-9 range, regardless of quality. And they do seem to give the highest scores to the games with the biggest publishers behind them, even the community agreed upon bombs. I think that average games should receive a 5 and that bad and good games should proceed from there. Since most games are not that great, then I'd say they're artificially pumping the scores, leading the readers to revisit the site to get the cheats to just get through the stupid game they bought on Gamespot's recommendation.
We have the ability to copy books. Why do we not do that?
People put more effort into copying books than they do CDs or DVDs. They scan them in and proofread them, putting out new versions as typos are found. This effort is more time consuming and never caught on as much. That's one reason it's not common. Another is that people prefer not to read a book on their computer and the cost of printing it out exceeds the cost of simply buying it. And then there's TV, who needs books? But this all has been going on since before DeCSS was cracked, if you knew where to look.
As for books being cheaper, they should be. There are less people involved in the production. No actors to pay, no expensive recording studios, just booze to pay for.
And how is this different from all the other gazillion viruses out there? Why all the focus on this one? And why did it take the focus off of, say, the monkey pox? Why aren't we making preparations for the eventual mutation of AIDS into an airborne virus? That's what makes the whole bird flu thing ridiculous. We're picking a single "what if" out of an unlimited pool of "what ifs" and rearranging our lives around it. Do you know what you have to worry about if the bird flu ever mutates? You have to worry about washing your hands more. That's about it. I don't consider myself a tough or brave guy by any means, so why does each day manage to convince me a little more that I live among a nation of pussies? How did people ever manage to live their lives before antibiotics, when people died regularly from real viruses?
Right and that if is the problem here. There are billions of catastrophic things that could go wrong if. But the if has a slim chance of happening here without a little help. The people responsible for the what if's we've been seeing lately are the same people accusing Comedy Central of a Boston bomb hoax. There are plenty of real problems we should be focusing on. The point of terrorism is to spread fear and that's precisely what our government and media do with sensationalist crap like this. The former gains power and the latter gain news stories and profit. It's all about scaring people into submission and who can blame them, it works.
Why do so many people equate Java with applets? I'm glad that applets didn't take off, just as I am upset that flash did. I just want a simple, more elegant web that doesn't freakin' scream at me all the time. And Java has taken off, with regards to internet applications. Most people just never see it since it runs on the server. It's ubiquitous yet Slashdot articles always try to make it seem like it's dying because people here think it's slower than punch cards and oh yeah, they once saw a poor UI. But trust me, it's not going away, at the enterprise level, any time soon. And I'll take IntelliJ's UI over KDevelop or Visual Studio any day of the week.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard doesn't really want to own you system, they just don't want you to play unattended.
I always thought that it would be great to have a game that let's you script whatever you want, up to the point where you can play unattended. A game that rewards the best programmer rather than simply the quickest fingers. Whenever I play a game, I always think I could do a better job with the A.I., I'd like to have a chance to put my money where my mouth is and I don't have time to write an entire game by myself.
Thanks, maybe I should start looking for a player then. Although I guess I'd have to keep my existing DVD player (Oppo 970) as it does support upconversion over component. Not sure how though, they claim it doesn't. I wasn't about to complain. However many argue that upconversion is pointless, so maybe I shouldn't be concerning myself with it at all.
However, I've noticed a lot of younger kids throwing around the F word these days. We didn't say that even when we watched R rated movies as kids. Of course it might be a moot point in 20 years when everyone that is a kid now grows up and things that cursing is fine.
Are you kidding? I'm in my mid 30s now and I and every kid I know said fuck more often when we were 8 to 9 than at any time in our lives. You couldn't say it to teachers or around parents, but it was every second word out of our mouths. Luckily we grew up, but cursing isn't anything new. I think the only thing that is different is that kids today are becoming cynical more early in life. The internet probably does more to school them in that than anything else.
Whenever I see BlueRay or HD-DVD in the stores, I've been very unimpressed. It looks almost worse than DVD in some ways. Now, I know that's not technically true, but I also know that electronics stores know nothing about calibrating their TVs so that everything looks like junk. For instance, sharpness should be at or near 0, it's artificial noise.
HD/BD aside, half the time, you don't even know it the source is HD or not. At one big electronics store, a salesman told me that the signal came off a central hard drive and it was heavily recompressed. WTF? HD TVs should be showing nothing but a high quality HD feed.
So my advice to the Sountrack/Ultimate, Best Buy and Circuit City, get the best signal you can and spend some time calibrating your sets so that when I walk by, I can by wowed and say that looks better than my crappy 8 year old HDTV. Maybe then I'd upgrade my TV or get a Blueray player. Just telling me it's great isn't enough. Hire someone who can actually afford the TV to set it up for you. I'm not going to spend several thousand dollars for a product on the advice of someone who can barely afford beer and gas.
From what I understand, even many of the early HDTVs don't have the correct plugs for these players for full resolution.
I think of DRM as a kind of joke most of the time, since it's so easy to circumvent. I'm against it in principle, but it's always been more of an academic issue to me. But what you said, struck a cord. That's the reason I never got an HD player. As far as I know, there are no HD players that'll do component out (this may have changed, but it was the case when I looked into it). If there are now any players that do component, then what are the odds that I'll have much choice? I'll only buy an HD player when I'm ready to upgrade my TV to something that's HDMI ready. I guess the DRM issue hasn't been so academic in my life after all. And the only outcome in this case was lost sales for the electronics and movie companies and some money saved for me. And yet pirated copies are available for download despite all of this, so I'm not sure what was gained in risking those sales.
LOL, EDS were the ones who provided the $20 Sun workstation. Although I don't actually work for them.
One of the finest shows ever made with absolutely the worst UI ever portrayed in Hollywood. Gotta love that flash in history when virtual reality was going to take over the world.
Yeah, I don't really remember anything about that show except the great looking computer interfaces. Oddly enough, it was the main reason I watched the show at the time. Nothing else in Hollywood came close. Things have gotten better these last few years though.
What is "laid"? Is that like a sex thing?
Short term? Like what, a day's worth? I recently calculated how much time I spend watching my screen paint and for application servers to restart cause the huge ass telecom company I work for won't invest in new hardware. Multiplying that amount of time by my salary means that a new computer would pay for itself in a month. Not to mention all the time we spend with "clever" little scripts to offload data from an overworked 5 gig production drive cause they don't want to spring the lousy $150 for a new 500 gig drive so that we'll never have to worry about space again. I can't even begin to calculate how many millions we lose in lost productivity each year just because management lacks the ability to engage in short-term thinking, much less the mid or long term.
My home server services one person, me. It's not all that high end, but it blows the equipment we use at work out of the water and that stuff is servicing millions. The Sun workstation they expect me to use goes for $20 on eBay (sans/monitor), but they still want new applications delivered in a week. I've given up expecting any of this to change. I'm just so tired of making these arguments and seeing people shrug their shoulders. I wish that guy good luck in his quest for a second monitor. For me, if I want a decent working environment, I have to pay for it myself.
Then again, AFAIK, you can't resize a truecrypt volume. So even if you're not using the hidden volume feature, it's best to make your volume as big as you think you'll ever need. After all, I have some large unencrypted partitions with very few files on them.
Actually Java provides a CipherOutputStream supporting all of the AES candidates right out of the box. It wouldn't be too hard to write something yourself. Although for real security, I'd put my trust in the experts. You can screw up encryption if you do it wrong. Truecrypt is pretty slick and the price is right.
I think most games contribute to faster reflexes. As your reflexes go up, so does your intolerance for driving like a grandmother. It's like saying that exercise gives you more energy. It's kind of obvious.
Most of the people I know who drive real slow are the same people who won't play today's video games because they complain about too many buttons. Why should I be forced to drive like a snail cause everyone else is retarded? I'm not saying we should drive like we do in video games, but 35 mph is parking lot speed to anyone who regularly plays fast moving games.
I love your number 5. I don't really care about outsourcing and I feel the pay is adequate, but having non-technical people dictate technical solutions is the worst part of this career for me. When it's not like that, I really love what I do.
...but Mars also needs women so this should help in a virtual kind of way.
I'm not saying that viruses don't mutate, I'm saying that the chances of this one specific animal virus mutating to a human transmissible virus is about as likely as any animal virus mutating. And there are probably millions out there. And since we don't have big pandemics often (name the ones you've lived through), then I'm correct in saying there's only a slim chance. You don't need to be a microbiologist to recognize this. You just need to live and have a memory.
$60 / month for cable internet is the worst screwing I've ever received.
But I'm sure it's pretty good at serving your masturbatory habits.
As someone who works for a large corporation, with contracts in both the private and public sector, I can tell you that private interests are much easier to "interoperate" with.
As for the roads, it never ceases to amaze me that we laid out most of the interstate highway system in 10 years, yet today, there's this one exit off of I-25 I know about that they've been working on for 11 years (maybe longer, that's as long as I've lived here). I've always been taught that a declining infrastructure is the first tell-tale sign of a declining civilization. Between the poor roads, schools falling apart and a water system barely able to keep up, I'd say that there are plenty of signs abound.
These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband.
You're arguing against free enterprise by giving of example showing that we don't have it to begin with. People often complain about large corporations and say we need the government to protect us against the ravages of a laissez-faire system. What those people are missing is that corporations use the government to keep their competitors down. So the people on the left cry out against big business while the people on the right cry out against big government. What we really have is a blend of socialism and fascism and people get confused because a term for it has yet to be coined. But you can't blame business for trying to get what it can get, you can only hope to reduce the scope and power of government to prevent anyone from getting it in the first place. If we had a true free market, we be number one on this list. But we're not going to get there through new government legislation, only through the repeal of old government legislation. I say, abolish the FCC and you'll start seeing some choice available.
So I initially read your post thinking, "well of course it is, just post the fuckin' translation already." Whoops on my part!
If someone went through the trouble and cost of purchasing a game, then they were most likely sold on the game before they even played it. In fact, many of the Gamespot user reviews are by reviewers who admit they haven't even played the game. The site reviewers may not give out many (if any) 10/10s, but pretty much every game is in the 7-9 range, regardless of quality. And they do seem to give the highest scores to the games with the biggest publishers behind them, even the community agreed upon bombs. I think that average games should receive a 5 and that bad and good games should proceed from there. Since most games are not that great, then I'd say they're artificially pumping the scores, leading the readers to revisit the site to get the cheats to just get through the stupid game they bought on Gamespot's recommendation.
We have the ability to copy books. Why do we not do that?
People put more effort into copying books than they do CDs or DVDs. They scan them in and proofread them, putting out new versions as typos are found. This effort is more time consuming and never caught on as much. That's one reason it's not common. Another is that people prefer not to read a book on their computer and the cost of printing it out exceeds the cost of simply buying it. And then there's TV, who needs books? But this all has been going on since before DeCSS was cracked, if you knew where to look.
As for books being cheaper, they should be. There are less people involved in the production. No actors to pay, no expensive recording studios, just booze to pay for.
The problem is that virus mutate
And how is this different from all the other gazillion viruses out there? Why all the focus on this one? And why did it take the focus off of, say, the monkey pox? Why aren't we making preparations for the eventual mutation of AIDS into an airborne virus? That's what makes the whole bird flu thing ridiculous. We're picking a single "what if" out of an unlimited pool of "what ifs" and rearranging our lives around it. Do you know what you have to worry about if the bird flu ever mutates? You have to worry about washing your hands more. That's about it. I don't consider myself a tough or brave guy by any means, so why does each day manage to convince me a little more that I live among a nation of pussies? How did people ever manage to live their lives before antibiotics, when people died regularly from real viruses?
Right and that if is the problem here. There are billions of catastrophic things that could go wrong if. But the if has a slim chance of happening here without a little help. The people responsible for the what if's we've been seeing lately are the same people accusing Comedy Central of a Boston bomb hoax. There are plenty of real problems we should be focusing on. The point of terrorism is to spread fear and that's precisely what our government and media do with sensationalist crap like this. The former gains power and the latter gain news stories and profit. It's all about scaring people into submission and who can blame them, it works.
Why do so many people equate Java with applets? I'm glad that applets didn't take off, just as I am upset that flash did. I just want a simple, more elegant web that doesn't freakin' scream at me all the time. And Java has taken off, with regards to internet applications. Most people just never see it since it runs on the server. It's ubiquitous yet Slashdot articles always try to make it seem like it's dying because people here think it's slower than punch cards and oh yeah, they once saw a poor UI. But trust me, it's not going away, at the enterprise level, any time soon. And I'll take IntelliJ's UI over KDevelop or Visual Studio any day of the week.