At the very least, please, while driving your car, give respect to the rights of way of cyclists who are also riding within the scope of law and the social contract, instead of taking out your anger at some other asshole cyclist on the innocent
This is probably karma suicide, but....I don't see too many of those cylists. I drive through an area pretty regularly that is a popular biking route and almost everyone is riding side-by-side rather than single file, running through stopsigns without stopping, blatantly running red lights, and advancing past all the cars that are stopped at both of the above. Also, this road is no passing (double solid line in the middle). Are those of us in cars really expected to ride along at 10-15 mph behind a cyclist for 5 or 10 miles?
The basic fact is that cars and bicycles are fundamentally different vehicles and many of the laws that we have just don't deal with the reality of their interaction very well. I don't see too many motorists "taking out their anger" on cyclists, but I do see the vast majority of cyclists ignore "the scope of law and the social contract".
If it were up to me we'd be spending the money to put bike lanes along most roads and have plentiful bike routes, but sadly that's just not the case.
I think he/she was looking down his nose at people (like you) who expect the government to make sure entertainment is "safe" so as to avoid responsibility to monitor what their children do.
So in that respect, I think it is correct to ridicule you, becase you're a bad parent.
Wait, did you actually read what I posted? I advocated the government requiring accurate ratings on shows so that PARENTS can make good choices about what thier children watch. I don't think the government should be regulating the content except in the most extreme of cases -- but wanting good information about what my children are going to be exposed to allows me to be a BETTER parent.
Easy. The off switch. That's not even a difficult thing to do. I have two kids, and I don't forbid them to watch anything. Nothing. They don't watch much TV though. Life is too interesting. Surfing, martial arts, scuba, going to parties, playing sports, going to plays. TV is for the few minutes in between living life, or to put you to sleep when you're too keyed up from an exciting day.
Ah, the inevitable "I'm better than TV" post. Knew there had to be at least one around here somewhere.
I'm a pretty smart guy by most standards and I watched a fair amount of TV as a child. Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, 321 Countdown, Reading Rainbow, etc. Watched a bunch of fluff cartoons too (Transformers, Mask, etc), and sure, not all of it was "good for me" per se, but on the whole it was clearly beneficial. Even now as an adult there's plenty of really high-quality entertainment out there if you look around a bit. Nothing wrong with that -- everyone needs to be entertained, and not everything needs to be 100% edifying.
Do you have HBO or Cinemax? Would you be okay with them watching any program on those networks? I know for a fact that there's a lot of content that would have been inappropriate or upsetting for me to watch well into my teens. Nothing wrong with that content being accurately rated and you controlling what your children view.
And for the record I also practiced martial arts, played piano, was on 2 or 3 sports teams every year, and had fun with friends. There was plenty of time for all those other activities. No need to look down your nose that folks that enjoy some television. As much as you'd like to think so, you're not inherently better than them.
Teach our kids to get a tax break, so that they can help out those less fortunate.
And how much, percentage-wise, would you guess those tax breaks for the top 1% of wageearners went towards helping out the less fortunate?
I honestly don't know, but I'd expect it to be pretty small (much less than 100% anyway). Whenever I read things like it strikes me as extremely disingenuous -- "Yes, please give me money rather than the desperate and poor, and I'll be sure to help them out, honest!". If you were handing out aid checks and someone said that to you, would you believe them? Somehow I think not.
you make wild statements such as" the prison guards were told to violate the geneva convention up and down the chain of command"
Well, it's pretty well known that Bush is publicly ignoring the Geneva Convention when dealing with suspected Al-Qaeda and Afghani prisoners, so I wouldn't exactly characterize that statement as "wild".
The gov't saying what's wrong and what's right, what's too sexually explicit and what's not, is completely wrong.
If soccer mom's are afraid that their kid might see something bad on TV, they can: A) don't let the kid watch TV or B) let the kid watch and explain it was wrong.
Saying that something is "too sexually explicit" is a value judgement. Saying that something is "sexually explicit" is not. Presuming there's a commonly accepted standard, which there surely would be, it's not difficult to make a value-judgement-free ratings system.
I mean, do you potentially want extreme violence or hardcore porn just a channel click away from Sesame Street and Mister Rogers? That seems absurd to me -- of course you want to control what's available to your children. There's no reason TV viewing has to be an all-or-nothing situation.
If you're okay with the government regulating what frequences stations get, why is regulating that they accurately provide information on the content they're going to be showing such a big deal? It would help responsible parents do their job and yet still retain free speech rights as well as allowing adults to enjoy entertainment unencumbered by children's standards. Sounds like a win all the way around.
Wrath -- a game all about God!
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
A friend of mine and I, at the first Indie Game Jam (IGJ0), wrote a game in a couple of days called "Wrath".
It was bascially a two-player RTS-ish game where you had various tools that you could use to manipulate the 100,000 humans running around the board. One player played God, the other Satan. You could place attractors or repulsors, you could raise/lower terrain, you could convert them to your side (save vs damn), and you can kill them. The object is to basically convert-and-kill. Whoever ends up with more souls in their domain when the time runs out wins.
The IGJ0 page is here. You can see a screenshot of the game in action here.
The major networks only will be airing "Highlights" of the upcoming political conventions in the US.
Interestingly HDNet (Mark Cuban's network) is showing the entirety of both the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention in high-definition and is making the HD feel available for free to all MSOs and satellite providors.
So even though the networks aren't showing the whole thing, someone's stepping up to the plate. More info here.
Also, memory cards allow you to bring your game and continue at someone else's house. You don't have to take the entire console with you.
Um, the Xbox had memory cards too if you wanted to do that. But the HD meant that you weren't forced to buy one if you weren't interested in that functionality. Seems like a good deal to me.
When the PS2 was released, no other console had an expansion bay to put a hard drive in. No other console had USB AND Firewire ports. No other console used a controller designe exactly the same as the previous one.
How many of those features were used by games on those platforms? The controller conformity was definitely nice, though it seems a bit odd to be including not changing something being "innovative". But the hard drive port was a total failure, and how many games exactly used those USB and FireWire ports?
Compare that to how many games use the HD on the Xbox and how many games simply couldn't have been done without a HD.
And yet you get modded up to 4. Actually it's the best way to get karma on slashdot.
Hey, I generally browse at 3 and probably 95% of the posts as of my post were complete swipes at MS. I honestly expected to check back later and be modded down as a troll.
It happened before when I dared criticize people for copyright violation of something other than software, so I was expecting it here too. Honest!
Granted - Microsoft's standard may very well be superior; easier to use, easier to access, applied to multiple markets. And, in fact, I glossed over the origional posters mentioning the Xbox being "easy to program". However, just having a "standard" does not imply any of this. I wouldn't have been so critical if the parent poster had gone in to greater detail to demonstrate the importance of this particular standard over others.
Original poster checking in a day late (I hate it when I forget I posted and then don't check for replies!)
In my opinion the innovative thing about MS's standards is that they are well-established and widespread. Anyone doing any PC graphics programming knows DirectX already (that is, basically all game developers, console or not -- remember editors largely work on the PC). Then add on the plugin nature of Xbox projects to Visual Studio so that everyone can leverage their existing compiling/debugging/IDE knowledge, and you've got a substantially eaiser product to program for that any other console...ever.
As far as I know very few GameCube or PS2 developers actually use the tools provided by Nintendo or Sony. Third-party tools rule the day on those platforms.
I mean, have you see PIX running on an Xbox? It is un-freaking-believable. The best graphics tool I've ever seen in my life, by many orders of magnitude. It's practially magic.
Because despite the rhetoric, Microsoft can't innovate. They can only copy.
The Xbox is one of the most innovative consoles to ever hit the market. First and foremost, it's the first console to ever include a hard drive. Also, the Xbox was built to be easy to program, utilizing standard libraries (DirectX) and development environments (Visual Studio). They launched a unified online gaming environment with full voice that no one else is even close to touching. And they're the ones who are unable to innovate?
I know that it's unpopular to actually say good things about Microsoft, but the Xbox is a really good console. It's easy to program, full-featured, and especially lately seems to be getting a lot of the top releases.
The fact that a company could enter an industry with no prior experience and do better than the likes of Nintendo is really impressive, huge bankroll or no. They had a good strategy, good hardware, innovated in relevant areas, and managed to do pretty well. The simple fact that they stand a good chance of unseating Sony in the next round of consoles (which many analysts believe) is just evidence of their success.
Page compatibility issues? Mozilla is far more standards compliant than IE, and you can get plug-ins for flash/java.... that only leaves horrible ASP sites that try to for you to ues IE or use some hideous DHTML
This is what I was telling them too, but the thing is, they just don't care. If a page works in IE and doesn't in Firefox/Mozilla, they're going to be unhappy with the browser, not the web page. From an enduser's point of view, all they care about is being able to browse with everything working. You can talk until you're blue in the face about Firefox's standards compliance, but when pages don't work, they're going to switch back.
A few of my tech-savvy friends tried Mozilla/Firefox and ended up preferring to continue to use IE. From their point of view, a bunch of pages didn't work in Firefox/Mozilla and the bookmark management didn't work as well (no-drag-n-drop within the meny itself, can't get to the bookmark via the windows Favorites menu). They liked the addition of tabs, but didn't notice any speed difference. They have the google taskbar installed so they've already got popup blocking.
In the end, Firefox/Mozilla just had too many issues that were relevant to their day-to-day browsing, and didn't offer enough of an improvement for them to actually want to switch. One ended up using Maxthon and really loves it.
Personally, I'm a loyal Firefox user. I can't live without tabs and have learned to deal with the little ideosyncracies in certain pages.
There seems to be a general consensus here that if only people were exposed to other browsers they'd all pick Firefox/Mozilla...but until they get really really solid and eliminate all page compatibility issues, I don't think that's truthfully the case.
Give me a break, do you even know what happened that day?! When the first plane hit no one knew what the hell was going on, they thought it was an accident. They didn't know it was a terrorist attack! My god, TEN MINUTES? You mean, shorter than the time between the two planes?
Something like ten minutes passed between when the SECOND plane hit (and it was clear that a massive terrorist attack was taking place) and when Bush left the classroom. This is well-documented and made perfectly clear in F9/11.
And if you read some of the information regarding that "photo-op" he deliberately stayed so as to present a strong front.
Present a strong front to who? That classroom? That was a local photo-op at best. I hardly see how sitting in a classroom reading to children at a time of national crisis demonstrates anything but ineptitude. Perhaps he should have stayed there all day, to demonstrate that the nation was still strong, that nothing could shake us?
Please, that's just absurd.
Let us not forget that Moore had information about the abuses in Iraq MONTHS before they came out and did NOTHING. Piece of shit.
Um, what? The president was visiting a school. The attacks happened. Cameras were there because they are always there when the president is. How the hell is this some kind of calculated photo op? It isn't, Moore is a moron if that's one of his main accusations. Wait, scratch the end of that sentance and leave it at "Moore is a moron."
The salient point (that you're ignoring) is that Bush remained in the photo-op, reading to the class, for something like ten minutes after he was informed that a massive terrorist attack was taking place in New York.
It boggles the mind how the leader of the country could sit, bewildered, doing nothing, for that amount of time.
Regardless of what people say, if you can't literally see the transmitter from your location you are going to need some sort of antenna hardware above and beyond bunny ears...
Regardless of disregarding what people say, I'm not line-of-sight to any of the four towers broadcasting in the Austin area (I'm probably 10-15 miles from the tower farm) and I can get each of them with between 70-90 signal strength. None of the stations ever break up or have any other reception problems.
The best advice is to just check up on what the tower setup is in your area and visit the AVS forum's Local HDTV Info and Reception section to get info specific to your location.
What we NEED, and I mean REALLY NEED, is the ability to get HDTV from sources we int he real world actually USE (cable and sattelite) into our boxes. Right now there is no way to do this without an insanely expensive Component encoder card.
It's a bit hacked at the moment, but you can actually get HD signals from your cable box via firewire to your PC. The FCC has mandated that all cable companies that provide HD also provide a cable box that has working firewire outs.I'm able to record the HD transport stream to my laptop and actually watch the HD stream on my laptop screen as well.
AT BEST, with your HDTV OTA card you will get marginal quality from a handful of HDTV channels. With satellite or cable you will get dozens of absolutely pure channels - and you can't get them into your PVR
Here you're just wrong -- OTA signals are often BETTER than via cable because cable companies can compress their QAM signal as much as they'd like. OTA requires the diginal feed to use the full 19.2mb/s stream, so as long as they're not multicasting you're often getting a better-quality feed.
Also, most cable boxes use a component (YPrPb) connection whereas computer-based HD OTA tuners use RGB, and RGB is a noticably better signal. So if you're able to actually receive the HD signals (not too hard in my experience), OTA can often look better than cable.
That said, I do agree that it's nice to finally have a QAM-capable card so that it's easier to actually record content using cable.
Actually he is not - the pixel size will be smaller and the pixels per inch will be greater on the 17" @ 1440x900 than the 51" @ 1920x1080.
Right, be he was talking about a 50" screen. The problem was that said "this resolution" which I took to mean 1440x900, whereas he actually meant 7680x4320.
DLP theaters use a 2048x1080 chip (three actually, one for each color) and I could see room for improvement. Next time I'll sit a few rows further back
Are you sure about that? Most DLP theaters I've heard of use a three-panel 1280x1024 DLP projector with an anamorphic lens.
All CRT based (both direct view and rear-projection) are 1080i native...
CRTs are analog so it's less clear, but only the best front-projection CRT projects can actually resolve 1920x1080. Most commercial HD RPTVs don't come anywhere near that.
i have to disagree. my folks have a 51" HDTV, and i can still see the pixels. definitely room for improvement.
consider that a 17" WXGA screen is 1440x900- you could definitely go up to, say, a 50" screen with this resolution and have something really photoreal, even when you're standing up close to it
Um, you're actually contradicting yourself here. If your parents have a 51" HDTV, it should be able to do 1920x1080, which is quite a bit higher than your "photoreal" 1440x900.
Now, there's the problem that most (maybe all) current HDTVs can't actually do 1080i natively, but that's a problem with the hardware, not the actual HDTV spec which has plenty of resolution for almost all viewing situations.
For many typical viewing distances, we're alrady there.
I've got a 9' wide projection setup that displays 1365x768, and from 15' or so away, the pixels are small enough that I'm losing detail because of my vision, not because of the resolution of the image. I typically sit more like 8' or 9' away where I can pick out some pixel-y details (like jaggies), but sitting that close means that the image takes up a huge portion of my FOV.
I imagine for typical setups of 42" or 50" plasma displays that do 720p natively, most people's eyes are the limiting factors when viewing HD material, not the lack of pixels.
As an owner of a 10lb "gaming" laptop (which I actually use as a workstation as well), I can attest that it is quite portable. It goes with me whenever I travel and daily to work and back, very comfortably. There's nothing that works better for getting work done both at home and at the office.
Due to its size and battery drain, it's not particularly good for using on a plane, or at a conference, or really anywhere you don't have a table to set it on and a nearby outlet. But really, the difference between 5lbs and 10lbs isn't going to make the difference in portability.
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The basic fact is that cars and bicycles are fundamentally different vehicles and many of the laws that we have just don't deal with the reality of their interaction very well. I don't see too many motorists "taking out their anger" on cyclists, but I do see the vast majority of cyclists ignore "the scope of law and the social contract".
If it were up to me we'd be spending the money to put bike lanes along most roads and have plentiful bike routes, but sadly that's just not the case.
I'm a pretty smart guy by most standards and I watched a fair amount of TV as a child. Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, 321 Countdown, Reading Rainbow, etc. Watched a bunch of fluff cartoons too (Transformers, Mask, etc), and sure, not all of it was "good for me" per se, but on the whole it was clearly beneficial. Even now as an adult there's plenty of really high-quality entertainment out there if you look around a bit. Nothing wrong with that -- everyone needs to be entertained, and not everything needs to be 100% edifying.
Do you have HBO or Cinemax? Would you be okay with them watching any program on those networks? I know for a fact that there's a lot of content that would have been inappropriate or upsetting for me to watch well into my teens. Nothing wrong with that content being accurately rated and you controlling what your children view.
And for the record I also practiced martial arts, played piano, was on 2 or 3 sports teams every year, and had fun with friends. There was plenty of time for all those other activities. No need to look down your nose that folks that enjoy some television. As much as you'd like to think so, you're not inherently better than them.
I honestly don't know, but I'd expect it to be pretty small (much less than 100% anyway). Whenever I read things like it strikes me as extremely disingenuous -- "Yes, please give me money rather than the desperate and poor, and I'll be sure to help them out, honest!". If you were handing out aid checks and someone said that to you, would you believe them? Somehow I think not.
I mean, do you potentially want extreme violence or hardcore porn just a channel click away from Sesame Street and Mister Rogers? That seems absurd to me -- of course you want to control what's available to your children. There's no reason TV viewing has to be an all-or-nothing situation.
If you're okay with the government regulating what frequences stations get, why is regulating that they accurately provide information on the content they're going to be showing such a big deal? It would help responsible parents do their job and yet still retain free speech rights as well as allowing adults to enjoy entertainment unencumbered by children's standards. Sounds like a win all the way around.
A friend of mine and I, at the first Indie Game Jam (IGJ0), wrote a game in a couple of days called "Wrath".
It was bascially a two-player RTS-ish game where you had various tools that you could use to manipulate the 100,000 humans running around the board. One player played God, the other Satan. You could place attractors or repulsors, you could raise/lower terrain, you could convert them to your side (save vs damn), and you can kill them. The object is to basically convert-and-kill. Whoever ends up with more souls in their domain when the time runs out wins.
The IGJ0 page is here.
You can see a screenshot of the game in action here.
So even though the networks aren't showing the whole thing, someone's stepping up to the plate. More info here.
Um, the Xbox had memory cards too if you wanted to do that. But the HD meant that you weren't forced to buy one if you weren't interested in that functionality. Seems like a good deal to me.
Compare that to how many games use the HD on the Xbox and how many games simply couldn't have been done without a HD.
It happened before when I dared criticize people for copyright violation of something other than software, so I was expecting it here too. Honest!
In my opinion the innovative thing about MS's standards is that they are well-established and widespread. Anyone doing any PC graphics programming knows DirectX already (that is, basically all game developers, console or not -- remember editors largely work on the PC). Then add on the plugin nature of Xbox projects to Visual Studio so that everyone can leverage their existing compiling/debugging/IDE knowledge, and you've got a substantially eaiser product to program for that any other console...ever.
As far as I know very few GameCube or PS2 developers actually use the tools provided by Nintendo or Sony. Third-party tools rule the day on those platforms.
I mean, have you see PIX running on an Xbox? It is un-freaking-believable. The best graphics tool I've ever seen in my life, by many orders of magnitude. It's practially magic.
I know that it's unpopular to actually say good things about Microsoft, but the Xbox is a really good console. It's easy to program, full-featured, and especially lately seems to be getting a lot of the top releases.
The fact that a company could enter an industry with no prior experience and do better than the likes of Nintendo is really impressive, huge bankroll or no. They had a good strategy, good hardware, innovated in relevant areas, and managed to do pretty well. The simple fact that they stand a good chance of unseating Sony in the next round of consoles (which many analysts believe) is just evidence of their success.
A few of my tech-savvy friends tried Mozilla/Firefox and ended up preferring to continue to use IE. From their point of view, a bunch of pages didn't work in Firefox/Mozilla and the bookmark management didn't work as well (no-drag-n-drop within the meny itself, can't get to the bookmark via the windows Favorites menu). They liked the addition of tabs, but didn't notice any speed difference. They have the google taskbar installed so they've already got popup blocking.
In the end, Firefox/Mozilla just had too many issues that were relevant to their day-to-day browsing, and didn't offer enough of an improvement for them to actually want to switch. One ended up using Maxthon and really loves it.
Personally, I'm a loyal Firefox user. I can't live without tabs and have learned to deal with the little ideosyncracies in certain pages.
There seems to be a general consensus here that if only people were exposed to other browsers they'd all pick Firefox/Mozilla...but until they get really really solid and eliminate all page compatibility issues, I don't think that's truthfully the case.
Please, that's just absurd.
Got a link?
It boggles the mind how the leader of the country could sit, bewildered, doing nothing, for that amount of time.
This is a great thread on how to get it working.
The best advice is to just check up on what the tower setup is in your area and visit the AVS forum's Local HDTV Info and Reception section to get info specific to your location.
Here you're just wrong -- OTA signals are often BETTER than via cable because cable companies can compress their QAM signal as much as they'd like. OTA requires the diginal feed to use the full 19.2mb/s stream, so as long as they're not multicasting you're often getting a better-quality feed.
Also, most cable boxes use a component (YPrPb) connection whereas computer-based HD OTA tuners use RGB, and RGB is a noticably better signal. So if you're able to actually receive the HD signals (not too hard in my experience), OTA can often look better than cable.
That said, I do agree that it's nice to finally have a QAM-capable card so that it's easier to actually record content using cable.
Actually he is not - the pixel size will be smaller and the pixels per inch will be greater on the 17" @ 1440x900 than the 51" @ 1920x1080.
Right, be he was talking about a 50" screen. The problem was that said "this resolution" which I took to mean 1440x900, whereas he actually meant 7680x4320.
DLP theaters use a 2048x1080 chip (three actually, one for each color) and I could see room for improvement. Next time I'll sit a few rows further back
Are you sure about that? Most DLP theaters I've heard of use a three-panel 1280x1024 DLP projector with an anamorphic lens.
All CRT based (both direct view and rear-projection) are 1080i native...
CRTs are analog so it's less clear, but only the best front-projection CRT projects can actually resolve 1920x1080. Most commercial HD RPTVs don't come anywhere near that.
Now, there's the problem that most (maybe all) current HDTVs can't actually do 1080i natively, but that's a problem with the hardware, not the actual HDTV spec which has plenty of resolution for almost all viewing situations.
For many typical viewing distances, we're alrady there.
I've got a 9' wide projection setup that displays 1365x768, and from 15' or so away, the pixels are small enough that I'm losing detail because of my vision, not because of the resolution of the image. I typically sit more like 8' or 9' away where I can pick out some pixel-y details (like jaggies), but sitting that close means that the image takes up a huge portion of my FOV.
I imagine for typical setups of 42" or 50" plasma displays that do 720p natively, most people's eyes are the limiting factors when viewing HD material, not the lack of pixels.
As an owner of a 10lb "gaming" laptop (which I actually use as a workstation as well), I can attest that it is quite portable. It goes with me whenever I travel and daily to work and back, very comfortably. There's nothing that works better for getting work done both at home and at the office.
Due to its size and battery drain, it's not particularly good for using on a plane, or at a conference, or really anywhere you don't have a table to set it on and a nearby outlet. But really, the difference between 5lbs and 10lbs isn't going to make the difference in portability.