Seriously? 30 seconds? You sound like you have a medical condition. There are some people that do have overactive sweat glands in their hands... But they are the vast minority of the population. And for them, you can buy a controller glove. Problem solved.
Yes, seriously. But it doesn't take that much sweat. You are probably thinking sweat like you'd see on someone's face after running 5 miles or even standing in 100+ degree heat. The sweat I'd get on my hands is like the condensation you'd see on a can of soda a minute after opening it. Not really noticeable, but certainly there.
I get the same thing using a mouse, but it really doesn't affect me much... leave the mouse alone for 10 seconds, and it goes away. It's the full time contact with the remote (and subsequent lack of airflow across the palm) that exasperates the situation. And with the Wii remote, you never really get it out of your hand during game play.
A controller glove would be great, but the unfortunate problem is that by the time you realize you need it, the Wii remote has already hit the TV.
Sweaty hand. Slipped out. I'd dried my hands several times, but I couldn't hold the remote for more than 30 seconds or so without my hand getting sweaty again.
I'd guess that the contributing factors were that the remote's plastic is very smooth and prone to slipperiness, the remote got warm in my hand, the room was fairly warm since there were lots of people arounds (after Thanksgiving dinner), and I'm just prone to getting sweaty hands. I'm sure that being more active with the Wii remote than a normal remote or video game controller probably helped as well.
Had the remote been a rougher plastic or rubber I'm not sure it would have slipped and had the chance to test the strap's ability to break.
Well, like I stated in another post above, when I broke a remote, I was making a full baseball pitching motion, but not using all my might. It was definitely no more force than what I'd have used to toss (not throw) a ball to someone else while indoors to avoid breaking things.
The one I broke was a friend's remote, and I'd been using it less than 15 minutes. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've never read the instruction manuals for friends' toys. My decision to use the full motion was based on what I'd seen others do. The decision to not use full force was just common sense in not wanting to break something. And yet it still broke.
I think it was a silly decision by Nintendo to use such a small cord to attach the wrist strap to the remote. Just looking at it one can wonder if it'll break. And while some players (mostly owners) might read the instructions to see exactly how little force and/or motion is needed to operate the remote, a majority of players will base their usage on what others are doing.
You may be right that those in the videos you watched were being complete jackasses, but it certainly doesn't take being a complete jackass to break one of these remotes.
They're not telling the truth if they're saying it's Nintendo's fault they let go of their remote.
If the remotes are leaving hands because the design of the remote causes hands to become sweaty from holding the remote, then Nintendo does have some culpability.
The problem seems widespread enough that some testing by Nintendo could have identified ways to minimize this phenomenon by shaping the remote differently or using alternative materials in its construction.
I think the videos are fake too, I have a Wii and I don't think I could break the strap no matter how hard I flailed my arms around. It's just not going to get full force from a swinging arm within the ~6 inches of the strap length. It'd fly the length of the strap and snap back into my hand.
The videos may (or may not) be staged, but the problem is certainly real.
I don't have a Wii, but my friend does. I was playing the baseball game that comes with it, and while doing the pitching motion the remote flew out of my hand. My hand was sweaty from using the remote, which helped cause me to lose the remote. Luckily, I had the wrist strap on and it just dangled there. I put the remote back in my hand for the next pitch, and the same thing happened. Except this time the strap broke up near the base of the remote where it's attached (via something like fishing line with a sheath over it) and went flying into the carpet and bounced into the TV.
I wasn't swinging the remote around very wildly at all. I imagine if I were throwing a baseball with the same force I was using, it'd probably would fly 40 feet. If I were really being forceful, I'm sure I could throw a baseball more than 4 times that.
When this happened, I was shocked and embarrassed, since it wasn't my Wii. My friend told me it had been a common occurrence for others, but that was the first I'd heard of the problem.
This isn't the first round between McKillip and Nees. Nees had previously created a documentary film about McKillip entitled Words of Sedition: how the highest levels of power shut down free speech in Kokomo.
In terms of dollars per byte, or dollars per bite?
I think Mike Tyson got the best deal, getting paid millions to take a bite of Evander Holyfield's ear in their 1997 fight. Holyfield may have made more $ (I don't know), but ouch!
What you're proposing already exists. It's called an Edit Decsionion List.
To save money on expensive video editing suites, you can capture low resolution dummy footage and use that to create an edit on much less expensive hardware. You then use the software to output and EDL that is used to batch process the orignal footage into the desired edit on the more expensive hardware.
As this applies to your post, releasing the EDL likely wouldn't be a violation of anyone's IP, but the difficulty lies in ensuring that eveyone's edit uses the same source material and starts from the exact same timecode since most consumer hardware doesn't support seeking to an exact timecode (just FF, Rewind controls).
BTW, This might get by the legal restrictions, but it makes such an edit much more difficult to watch, since an EDL isn't going to be watchable in realtime. You'd need to render out the new edit.
Your comment, "It will also strengthen the claims that Linux users will not pay for software," led me to that assumption; sorry.
Crippled or not, I have a hard time believing Blender is better than the freebie Maya LPE. For most people doing 3d as a personal hobby or just to learn, the nonstandard fileformat is a non-issue. And the watermarking is only an issue if you try to use the images commercially; people browsing your stuff in a web gallery would be pretty understanding that you'd rather have a watermark than a receipt for the $7k worth of software.
FWIW, I have access to Maya in my school's computer labs, so I really haven't played with the FPE, but I have heard good things about it.
"There are no other 3d programs under Linux with it's level of sophistication."
Maya (possibly the preeminent 3D animation app) is available under Linux. It's just out of your freebie pricerange.
There's also a free "Personal Learning Edition" available, but it's only for WinNT/2k/XP or OSX. So contact Alias|Wavefront and tell them you want to see it for Linux.
Blender really isn't the end-all/be-all of 3d apps the Slashdot crowd makes it out to be.
The preexisiting name/number combination is a good idea (i assume you meant the integer atomic number, not weight, as the other poster pointed out).
Personally, I name my machines after girls I've slept with (and use the sequence number in the IP).
It doesn't scale well, but it does make scaling much more fun; running out of names for machines is a definite reminder that I really need to get out more.
Submitting the talkback builds sends a lot more than a trusting soul might think. For instance, the full pathname to the profile directory often has a full name in windows or even a fairly unique (eg. CmdrTaco) username in linux. That could lead one to determine exactly who submitted the talkback info. Furthermore, the info also contains goodies like hardware capabilities (processors, RAM, etc) and a complete listing of all the programs you have running at the time of the crash. Not something I want people knowing about me regardless of how proper the things I'm doing are.
Furthermore, N6 requires you to establish an @netscape.com email address/login to install (yes, there's ways around it, but it's not a click-to-decline). Using N6 or any version of Mozilla using that profile to access sites like CNN or CNNSI leads to your @netscape login being rendered in the HTML in the Netscape Bar (with Mail, Maps, IM, Search, Shopping, Netscape Presents) at the top of the page (right above the CNNSI banner, for instance).
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather see it in HTML that they know who I am than find out they knew when I thought they didn't; but I'd much rather have some way to avoid them knowing at all.
And don't even get me started on all the spam I'm getting to an address I only used one time (in N4.xx, not N6 or Mozilla) to register for a NCAA bracket challenge at CNNSI in 1999...
A friend of mine used to have quite a bit of fun going from demo PC to demo PC at Walmart and deleting all the fonts. Caused quite a bit of fuss to get the things working right again.
He'd sit back and watch the clueless employess tinker around trying to figure out what happened to all the menus and crap.
Lots of college campuses have apartment complexes offering included DSL and Cable modem Internet access. Here at Purdue I can think of at least a dozen complexes (with some having over a thousand tennants) including these services.
Partly, I'd assume, these features help people feel comfortable leaving their dorm rooms. But also, these features are expensive to setup for only a semester or two, so the management sets them up in bulk (i.e. cheaper) and uses it as a marketing tool.
The general setup is an Ethernet drop in every room, along with cable, phone, and panic alarms.
While some of these apartments are strictly local to Purdue, some companies are even doing this similar community complex idea at several campuses across the country.
Changing the way the Constitution is interpreted is not supposed to be easy. It is not as you say, a "playground." Every change that is made undermines the authority of the original document; the law needs to lag technology so that both can have some sense of stability.
I'm not saying that all changes are bad, just that they shouldn't be made arbitrarily.
"...We're talking about multi-hundred-dollar digital interconnect cables. Hello? Do you understand the concept of digital transmission? I thought not."
"Or, for example, the high-end audio store I was in this weekend that had high-end AC power cables running to the amplifier that were bigger in diameter than your typical garden hose. Kinda silly when you consider that on the other end of that wall plug is very low-tech 12-ga copper wire."
I'd really like to see the customer lists who bought this kind of stuff. I bet they get on every marketing database known to man. Really, they're buying stuff because the seller said they should and at the price the seller said was reasonable. Then they're feeling like they got a good deal. These are a bunch of chumps that deserve the crap that marketers pawn off on them.
I've gone the same way and got a domain for my email (and online portfolio). EVERY time I submit an email address I use sitename@mydomain.com (eg. amazon.com@[me].com, slashdot.org@[me].com, goatse.cx@[me].com, etc.)
The really interesting thing is that these addresses NEVER get used in spam. I wouldn't expect Amazon or any other big company to do it (since there'd be a huge backlash from/.ers et al), but even the shadier sites haven't used the addresses I gave them either.
The spam I do get is usually caught by my spam filter (doesn't contain @mydomain.com or @my.edu or mylastname in the to: or cc: headers). This spam generally references (in the addressing headers but not in the to: or cc:) my.edu account or the generic catchall address at my domain (I used to use it for usenet postings). The address in the whois db under which I registered my domain gets a ton of spam. It is a hotmail account, but it didn't get spammed for about 2 years after I created it; all of a sudden I get 10-15 per day. Disheartening, but I never used the account for anything other than.com registration, so I have no idea why they started spamming of late.
I was going to suggest (and will now second the reccomendation for) Spafford, as he's a top notch CS expert and includes "Ethical and societal implications of computing" as one of his interests on his webpage. Furthermore, it says "His current research interests are primarily in the areas of information security, computer crime investigation and information ethics. He also has an appointment as a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue."
Spaf has previously spoken out in favor of 2600 in their appeal vs. the MPAA in the DeCSS case through his involvment in an amicus breif. You can read the brief here and the/. discussion here.
In any event, Spaf's proximity to the event (only an hour and a half from Purdue to BSU) would probably make him more likely to agree to participate, as you're not likely to pull any other experts from a great distance to give a short talk unless you're spotting their airfare.
Alright smartass... but scuba diving to the wreckage is not likely (using a minisub like they did for the Titanic is possible, but that's more likely a Discovery channel program, not a reality series).
Scuba diving to a couple hundred feet doesn't produce a much different view than snorkeling when you're in the middle of the ocean and the wreckage is at a couple thousand feet. You're still not going to see anything unless you're really close and have a light. And since the wreckage isn't on a contiental shelf somewhere it's unlikely to be divable to get that close.
Now that Mir's on the bottom of the South Pacific, I wonder how long it'll take before NBC finally cancels their plans for the reality TV series Destination Mir.
According to their FAQs,
"Destination Mir is a television series and contest from NBC that allows 12 American civilians to undergo Russian cosmonaut training. One winner will visit the orbiting Russian space station, Mir. The television series will air in the fall of 2001."
Perhaps they'll just change from cosmonaut training to some scuba training! (Not that you can really scuba dive in the South Pacific; it's much too deep.) Or perhaps the show will go into production without those silly NBC execs -- creators of some such utter crap as last fall's Titans and butchers of the Olympic coverage last September (What? No live events? Come on!) -- even noticing that Mir's gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, seriously. But it doesn't take that much sweat. You are probably thinking sweat like you'd see on someone's face after running 5 miles or even standing in 100+ degree heat. The sweat I'd get on my hands is like the condensation you'd see on a can of soda a minute after opening it. Not really noticeable, but certainly there.
I get the same thing using a mouse, but it really doesn't affect me much... leave the mouse alone for 10 seconds, and it goes away. It's the full time contact with the remote (and subsequent lack of airflow across the palm) that exasperates the situation. And with the Wii remote, you never really get it out of your hand during game play.
A controller glove would be great, but the unfortunate problem is that by the time you realize you need it, the Wii remote has already hit the TV.
Sweaty hand. Slipped out. I'd dried my hands several times, but I couldn't hold the remote for more than 30 seconds or so without my hand getting sweaty again.
I'd guess that the contributing factors were that the remote's plastic is very smooth and prone to slipperiness, the remote got warm in my hand, the room was fairly warm since there were lots of people arounds (after Thanksgiving dinner), and I'm just prone to getting sweaty hands. I'm sure that being more active with the Wii remote than a normal remote or video game controller probably helped as well.
Had the remote been a rougher plastic or rubber I'm not sure it would have slipped and had the chance to test the strap's ability to break.
Well, like I stated in another post above, when I broke a remote, I was making a full baseball pitching motion, but not using all my might. It was definitely no more force than what I'd have used to toss (not throw) a ball to someone else while indoors to avoid breaking things.
The one I broke was a friend's remote, and I'd been using it less than 15 minutes. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've never read the instruction manuals for friends' toys. My decision to use the full motion was based on what I'd seen others do. The decision to not use full force was just common sense in not wanting to break something. And yet it still broke.
I think it was a silly decision by Nintendo to use such a small cord to attach the wrist strap to the remote. Just looking at it one can wonder if it'll break. And while some players (mostly owners) might read the instructions to see exactly how little force and/or motion is needed to operate the remote, a majority of players will base their usage on what others are doing.
You may be right that those in the videos you watched were being complete jackasses, but it certainly doesn't take being a complete jackass to break one of these remotes.
If the remotes are leaving hands because the design of the remote causes hands to become sweaty from holding the remote, then Nintendo does have some culpability.
The problem seems widespread enough that some testing by Nintendo could have identified ways to minimize this phenomenon by shaping the remote differently or using alternative materials in its construction.
The videos may (or may not) be staged, but the problem is certainly real.
I don't have a Wii, but my friend does. I was playing the baseball game that comes with it, and while doing the pitching motion the remote flew out of my hand. My hand was sweaty from using the remote, which helped cause me to lose the remote. Luckily, I had the wrist strap on and it just dangled there. I put the remote back in my hand for the next pitch, and the same thing happened. Except this time the strap broke up near the base of the remote where it's attached (via something like fishing line with a sheath over it) and went flying into the carpet and bounced into the TV.
I wasn't swinging the remote around very wildly at all. I imagine if I were throwing a baseball with the same force I was using, it'd probably would fly 40 feet. If I were really being forceful, I'm sure I could throw a baseball more than 4 times that.
When this happened, I was shocked and embarrassed, since it wasn't my Wii. My friend told me it had been a common occurrence for others, but that was the first I'd heard of the problem.
This isn't the first round between McKillip and Nees. Nees had previously created a documentary film about McKillip entitled Words of Sedition: how the highest levels of power shut down free speech in Kokomo.
You can find more info on this case from when it was filed in this Indianapolis Star article.
You can also read more about it on Nees' personal website.
You can watch Words of Sedition online as well.
You can use Maya 5 or 3dsmax 5. You submit the jobs via specific lab computers and get email notification when the job begins and finishes rendering.
More details are available at pete.purdue.edu.
I think Mike Tyson got the best deal, getting paid millions to take a bite of Evander Holyfield's ear in their 1997 fight. Holyfield may have made more $ (I don't know), but ouch!
But that's the only way some of us can get the ladies to go anywhere near our "sensitive equipment."
To save money on expensive video editing suites, you can capture low resolution dummy footage and use that to create an edit on much less expensive hardware. You then use the software to output and EDL that is used to batch process the orignal footage into the desired edit on the more expensive hardware.
As this applies to your post, releasing the EDL likely wouldn't be a violation of anyone's IP, but the difficulty lies in ensuring that eveyone's edit uses the same source material and starts from the exact same timecode since most consumer hardware doesn't support seeking to an exact timecode (just FF, Rewind controls).
BTW, This might get by the legal restrictions, but it makes such an edit much more difficult to watch, since an EDL isn't going to be watchable in realtime. You'd need to render out the new edit.
Crippled or not, I have a hard time believing Blender is better than the freebie Maya LPE. For most people doing 3d as a personal hobby or just to learn, the nonstandard fileformat is a non-issue. And the watermarking is only an issue if you try to use the images commercially; people browsing your stuff in a web gallery would be pretty understanding that you'd rather have a watermark than a receipt for the $7k worth of software.
FWIW, I have access to Maya in my school's computer labs, so I really haven't played with the FPE, but I have heard good things about it.
Maya (possibly the preeminent 3D animation app) is available under Linux. It's just out of your freebie pricerange.
There's also a free "Personal Learning Edition" available, but it's only for WinNT/2k/XP or OSX. So contact Alias|Wavefront and tell them you want to see it for Linux.
Blender really isn't the end-all/be-all of 3d apps the Slashdot crowd makes it out to be.
Personally, I name my machines after girls I've slept with (and use the sequence number in the IP).
It doesn't scale well, but it does make scaling much more fun; running out of names for machines is a definite reminder that I really need to get out more.
Furthermore, N6 requires you to establish an @netscape.com email address/login to install (yes, there's ways around it, but it's not a click-to-decline). Using N6 or any version of Mozilla using that profile to access sites like CNN or CNNSI leads to your @netscape login being rendered in the HTML in the Netscape Bar (with Mail, Maps, IM, Search, Shopping, Netscape Presents) at the top of the page (right above the CNNSI banner, for instance).
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather see it in HTML that they know who I am than find out they knew when I thought they didn't; but I'd much rather have some way to avoid them knowing at all.
And don't even get me started on all the spam I'm getting to an address I only used one time (in N4.xx, not N6 or Mozilla) to register for a NCAA bracket challenge at CNNSI in 1999...
He'd sit back and watch the clueless employess tinker around trying to figure out what happened to all the menus and crap.
Mods are cool and all, but I can get more than I care for here, among other places.
If Spielberg doesn't use it, I'm sure some porn knockoff will.
Partly, I'd assume, these features help people feel comfortable leaving their dorm rooms. But also, these features are expensive to setup for only a semester or two, so the management sets them up in bulk (i.e. cheaper) and uses it as a marketing tool.
The general setup is an Ethernet drop in every room, along with cable, phone, and panic alarms.
While some of these apartments are strictly local to Purdue, some companies are even doing this similar community complex idea at several campuses across the country.
Don't you mean racial equality. Or is "black" now a new gender?
I'm not saying that all changes are bad, just that they shouldn't be made arbitrarily.
"Or, for example, the high-end audio store I was in this weekend that had high-end AC power cables running to the amplifier that were bigger in diameter than your typical garden hose. Kinda silly when you consider that on the other end of that wall plug is very low-tech 12-ga copper wire."
I'd really like to see the customer lists who bought this kind of stuff. I bet they get on every marketing database known to man. Really, they're buying stuff because the seller said they should and at the price the seller said was reasonable. Then they're feeling like they got a good deal. These are a bunch of chumps that deserve the crap that marketers pawn off on them.
The really interesting thing is that these addresses NEVER get used in spam. I wouldn't expect Amazon or any other big company to do it (since there'd be a huge backlash from /.ers et al), but even the shadier sites haven't used the addresses I gave them either.
The spam I do get is usually caught by my spam filter (doesn't contain @mydomain.com or @my.edu or mylastname in the to: or cc: headers). This spam generally references (in the addressing headers but not in the to: or cc:) my .edu account or the generic catchall address at my domain (I used to use it for usenet postings). The address in the whois db under which I registered my domain gets a ton of spam. It is a hotmail account, but it didn't get spammed for about 2 years after I created it; all of a sudden I get 10-15 per day. Disheartening, but I never used the account for anything other than .com registration, so I have no idea why they started spamming of late.
Spaf has previously spoken out in favor of 2600 in their appeal vs. the MPAA in the DeCSS case through his involvment in an amicus breif. You can read the brief here and the /. discussion here.
In any event, Spaf's proximity to the event (only an hour and a half from Purdue to BSU) would probably make him more likely to agree to participate, as you're not likely to pull any other experts from a great distance to give a short talk unless you're spotting their airfare.
Scuba diving to a couple hundred feet doesn't produce a much different view than snorkeling when you're in the middle of the ocean and the wreckage is at a couple thousand feet. You're still not going to see anything unless you're really close and have a light. And since the wreckage isn't on a contiental shelf somewhere it's unlikely to be divable to get that close.
According to their FAQs,
Perhaps they'll just change from cosmonaut training to some scuba training! (Not that you can really scuba dive in the South Pacific; it's much too deep.) Or perhaps the show will go into production without those silly NBC execs -- creators of some such utter crap as last fall's Titans and butchers of the Olympic coverage last September (What? No live events? Come on!) -- even noticing that Mir's gone.