But why would that make your current
collection "look like crap"? It's the same
DVDs you've been watching (or rather,
collecting) since the beginning.
Think of a video game you enjoyed from the
early 90's, something that had amazing graphics
and you just stared at the eye candy for hours
when you played it.
Try playing it now, on a modern PC, after having
seen a few modern games. They look like crap,
not even worth playing unless they included a
great story as well (for me, the original
"Unreal" kinda ruined all earlier games, at least
as far as appearance goes - Pathetic story line,
but so pretty...).
The same goes for TV. Most people still use
plain old analog NTSC or PAL TVs. We expect,
and automatically filter out, a low level of
static, and expect a fairly low resolution
image. To prove that to yourself, check
out an NTSC screen capture on a modern PC
monitor - They look like tiny little pictures
with horrible graininess.
So yeah, the picture itself won't change,
once we all have real digital HDTV playing
capabilities. But our expectations will
change, and what we currenly have will seem
woefully inadequate, just like that classic
video game.
We don't need a good review to know that
this film is going to be good.
Out of curiousity, does anyone have a link to
some reviews differentiating between those who
read Tolkien before Peter Jackson made
LotR into a set of movies, and those for whom
the movie provides their first experience with
LotR?
I can't imagine that I count as the only
person who feels VERY dissapointed in the
movies... I mean, tons of eye candy, and
I'll gladly watch anything with an alluringly
clad Liv Tyler in it, but IMO, Jackson has
murdered LotR.
I realize that some things need to get cut
out, and the same process requires some "glue"
to make the plot still flow properly. But
some of Jackson's additions strike me as
not "making a very very long story work in
this medium", but rather, "I think Gollum
should have had a bigger part, so I'll give
him one with tons of psychodrama, that seems
to sell well".
I admit, I'll go see RotK when it comes out.
But those who have called this the best
movie/trillogy ever (possibly other than
Star Wars)... Well, what can I say other
than "Read the books".
That's really an impressive technology.
Kinda creepy, too. All that information
streaming through the dark sea bed...
Now you know why the high-pressure methane
breathing aliens (the ones who live under the
sea for convenience of maintaining "atmospheric"
pressure in their domes) know all about us,
but we know almost nothing about them.
We've just given them a high-bandwidth
line that we have almost no ability to monitor
between the two endpoints.
The only possible problem anyone could have
with this is that they want a greater say in the
matter than "Joe and Jane Six-Pack" as the typical
consumer is usually referred to here.
Except that the Six-Pack family doesn't even
notice the war going on (for now), so
can't take sides. And by the time they notice,
the "wrong" side will have won.
How many people, if they understood the idea
that their new media purchase could simply
vanish at the whim of companies with less
interest in them than Enron had in its
employees' retirement funds, would still
plop down the same (or more) money as for
an unencumbered and semi-permanent product?
Not a whole lot, I'd wager. In my experience,
people have NO clue about the implications (or
even the presence) of DRM. Just last week, for
example, I had to explain to a friend (and not
even a tech-illiterate one at that) that all
the music on his computer, ripped by him from
his own CDs, would no longer work simply because
he had used WMP to rip and encode them, and had
never turned off WMP's "rights management".
Granted, WMP lets you back up your keys for a
planned migration, but major crashes
rarely bother popping up a dialog warning "This
installation of Windows has died, and five
minutes from now, will never boot again. Please
back up your music library at this time".
So yes, I believe "Joe Sixpack" should have less
say in matters such as this, and should listen
more to those of us who do understand that
"enhanced" and "restricted" do not mean the same
thing. But calling that a power-grab strikes me
as a rather egregious twisting of the facts. For
an analogy, do you believe that fire codes should
result from the whims of the market, or from
those who've spent thousands of hours studying how
fire propagates through your house? Or do you
just consider your greatly increased likelyhood
of living through each night a power-grab by
those in the know on that particular topic?
Re:buffer
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
8x is a pretty damn fast write speed
for a 2MB buffer.
Agreed... It really surprises me they'd go with
a buffer that small. At 8x (just over 11MB/s),
the buffer needs to completely refill every
182ms, 5.5 times per second. Considering how
often computers seem to "hiccup", just freezing
for half a second every now and then, I would not
want to trust more expensive 8x media to the
odds that one of those random events won't occur
during a burn.
Especially considering the price of these drives,
does it seem like so much to ask to put in a
decent sized buffer? +5 for first to market
with the new burning speed, but -100 for lack
of forethought about how many coasters people
really need around the house.
A general sort of "I know this will offend some
folks, but I intend to say it anyway" apology.
So I don't see in what ways products are
supposed to be "crippled" to accommodate
"crippled users".
The phone in question seems like a good example.
Most of us could use it, and it also makes life
more convenient to the blind. However, most
of us would prefer an ordinary old
text+sound+vibrate phone over one that could
only communicate via sound.
I'm curious if this is an abstraction or
something that you have real experience with
and in what ways.
Offhand, I'd say virtually all (non-specialty)
products on the market have functionality
intended toward those with a full compliment of
senses. So in that sense, I meant my peeve
as an abstraction. I could probably come up
with a product or two that had would serve its
purpose better at the cost of excluding those
with a given disability, but on the whole, simple
market pressure has kept such products from
popularity.
However, I also meant it as a very real,
immediate point, in that the post to which
I responded suggested all products should
come as a fully-useable-by-all form - A noble
ideal, but with the exception of purely passive
objects (a fork, for example), not even remotely
practical. That attitude, that we should
all suffer less useful products so a small
minority can use them as well as we can, peeves
me in a very concrete way.
in what ways has your life been negatively
impacted by accommodating someone with a
handicap - Other than perhaps having to park
a few spaces further back?
Mostly unrelated to my point, but since you did
bring it up...
Personally I don't mind walking, and don't even
bother with that "circle for a good spot" thing. I
just park out in the boonies, and still get
inside faster than those who play parking-spot-vulture.
But it does irk me a tad to see packed parking lots,
with every single handicapped spot vacant. And 90%
of the time I have seen one occupied, the
occupant has simply parked there illegally. At a
mall or WallyWorld or other largish store, I don't
consider that unreasonable for the convenience it
provides those who do legitimately need them
(although don't get me started on the politics of
getting a handicapped plate - I've known people
who could barely stand up who couldn't get them,
and people who could run a marathon who do have
them, all because of connections or the lack
thereof).
However, while I think they seem reasonable at
stores with large parking lots, I find it offensive
that the law requires places like a tiny corner
minimart, with only three parking spaces total,
to dedicate one to handicapped parking. Anyone
who can't walk the extra ten feet also won't make
it from the car to the building and back. But
with a small number of total parking spots, that
one handicapped spot doesn't "help" anyone, it
just means one fewer people can visit that store
at the same time.
If a device is made to enable someone with
physical challenges, it should be a cinch to
use for anyone who isn't challenged.
Yeah, because we folks with functional limbs
find tongue-joysticks a piece of cake to use.
And I can't even tell you how much easier
I can read braille as opposed to a quick glance
at a screen...
Of course, we might have a problem accomodating
both the deaf and the blind... Perhaps
we could make everything communicate via
pheromones. "Hey, did you just piss on me?"
"Nah, just my phone ringing - I chose the new
'gazelle' scent, do you like it?"
Sorry, but the "cripple the product to accomodate
crippled users" PC BS kinda peeves me. Humans have
a basic level of sensory and motor capability.
Where convenient, we can make life easier for
those lacking some of those capabilities, but
in most cases, a multi-sensory product will do
its job more efficiently.
If one considers that virtually all consumers
will be physically challenged at some point in
their lives (broken bones, aging, etc.), why
shouldn't manufacturers be building devices
with a "fail-safe" user mode that permits
limted, but functional use?
Because adapting a product to someone lacking
a random human ability generally requires making
that product less useable to everyone else (see
my three sarcastic examples above).
As a simple example of this, we can look at the
very product under consideration in this topic,
cell phones. Although they can work such
that they only use sound or vision, people
generally have them set up to use no fewer
than three senses (including touch for "vibrate"
mode). Any manufacturer that removed any two of
those three would find themselves pushed off the
market by better products that appeal to as many
of the user's senses as practical.
Last time I used one, phones used sound
as a means of communication. You dial a number
on the very position-standardized keypad (so even
those with functional eyes can usually dial a
phone without looking), and speak into the handset.
The person you called then uses their end to do
the same, and you can both hear each other.
It would seem that no one else has noticed this
seeming absurdity yet...
"Normal" phones do not significantly hinder the
blind! Wake up, people! This has no obvious
purpose other than yet another way to bilk medicaid
on another very expensive specialty device that
actually has less functionality than a normal
version of the same product (no screen? That
probably halved the cost to the manufacturer).
And for those who would mention SMS or caller ID,
I have a friend who already has an ordinary cell
phone that will read those to him (no idea on
the model, but nothing special). So even those
two functions don't discriminate against the
blind.
Before October, I received as much as one call
per hour from telemarketers. Since mid-October,
I have yet to receive a single telemarketing
call.
I did get one (and only one) political survey
call, though... Free hint: charities stop
calling if you tell them you have no job and
would like to know how you can apply for their
assistance, and politicians stop calling if you
tell them you don't vote - Whether or not either
tells the truth.
If that doesn't count as "success", I don't
know what criteria you have applied...
We got hammered with spam.
My spam volume shot up in early summer, not
mid-October. Although it may have gone up
a bit since the DNC registry went into effect,
I wouldn't consider it enough to notice over
the normal deluge.
However... I do have doubts about the possible
effectiveness of a Do-Not-Spam registry. Most
spam already violates several laws (forged headers?
Blatantly illegal products such as Viagra or Xanax
without a script? Unregulated medical devices for
penis enlargement? "barely legal" porn to addresses
with an underage recipient? Pyramid schemes? Naaaah,
we never see any of those, do we?). The
spammers simply circumvent the already-applicable
laws by originating from outside the US, or making
the sender all-but-untraceably, or both.
Re:Best practices? I can sum it up in three points
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 1
Your rose-colored glasses approach
doesn't account for:
The first two have nothing to do with managing
the team under you. Both describe hassles that any
manager needs to deal with, but do not have much
relation to their personal style of managing.
The third I consider a problem, but one that
also has no affect on dealing with one's
underlings. Trying to meet an impossible
schedule or budget just stresses people out,
for no good reason. Or put another way, if I
give you the task of proving 1+1=3 by next
month, you might as well play solitaire for the
next month, because you'll get the same end
result.
The fourth I consider a real problem, though
again, not one that a person can do much about.
With a good metamanager, you could perhaps
give a mini-ultimatum that either you have the
authority to deal with those under you, or you
have no accountability for their performance
(when doomed to failure, you don't have much
to lose anyway). If not, you simply route
around the driftwood, perhaps finding
something helpful they can do... "Bill,
you take care of the backend DB. Mary, you
have the thin client. Steve... Um... Steve,
you keep the coffee-pot full".
Managers, for better or worse, have to
work with humans, who are notoriously
non-deterministic.
While I basically agree with that, I also
consider it somewhat of a cop-out. No, things
won't always go perfectly. But not
sticking to the three points I gave will all
but guarantee failure and resentment.
Best practices? I can sum it up in three points..
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You don't need a book to tell you how to manage
people well... It boils down to just a few simple
points:
1) Break down the "big" tasks into
personal-project-sized chunks. If a large
number of underlings complain about the size
of those chunks, adjust accordingly. If one
or two people complain, tell them to quit
whining.
2) Leave people alone to do their work. Realize
that deadlines will occasionally slip, and some
people will have bad weeks on occasion. If
one or two people consistantly underperform,
axe them. If everyone consistantly fails to
do their work in time, the problem sits at your
own desk.
3) Give people a reason to remain loyal and do
their work. Money obviously forms the single
biggest motivating factor, but pride in their
work, credit for exceeding expectations, and
comfort in their jobs matters quite a lot as
well. If your best worker always comes in at
noon and leaves at eight (at a 9-to-5 company),
don't complain, but rather appreciate that
someone knows when they do their best work.
Same applies to attire - Unless your underlings
deal directly with the public, every day
should count as a dress-down day, within reason.
PJ's obviously do not seem acceptible, but jeans
and a T-shirt? A tie doesn't make people more
productive, despite what management-types seem
to believe. It just makes them uncomfortable.
Overall, I suppose I can sum this up in two
abstractions - Treat people like you would like
them to treat you (golden rule, basically); and,
if everyone seems to complain about you,
don't assume you have a lazy team, start looking
at your own job performance.
As an Indian in the IT industry I resent
your charecterisation of us as starving
slave labour
Though Indians may count as the most obvious
example of US companies outsourcing from the
point of view of a Slashdotter, I do realize
that Indians do fairly well, not in any way
"third world".
I also did not refer even to tech, specifically,
limiting my text basically to the sort of
sweatshop labor US companies use in Central
America, parts of Africa (more Western Europe
for that one), and a few former-Soviet
countries. Yes, I mentioned Union Carbide
with Bhopal in mind, but would you honestly
say that all of India does as well as
the engineers in the cities?
Well guess what? A thousand dollars a month
is a very comfortable salary in India.
Unfortunately, your government (unlike my own,
which grants H1b's at the drop of a hat)
won't let me follow my job to your country,
where I too might live well on a thousand or so
per month. In the US, a thousand barely pays
rent on a crappy apartment (and in the major
cities, it doesn't even come close to rent).
So yes, I sincerely feel "good" that a quarter
of my previous salary makes you able to live
comfortably. I'd gladly take the remainder,
though, making both of us able to live
comfortably. That I consider a fair
compromise, rather than you working for what a
US employer laughs at you for accepting, while
an American worker (myself included) remains
unemployed.
He didn't romanticize farms at all.
The problem is, when industries enter into 3rd
world countries, they do their thing, and when
they leave, the land is in far worse shape.
Thank you. At least someone understood my
point, though I suspect you "got" it before I
wrote it.:-)
I in no way mean to glamorize subsistence
farming... I realize it pretty much sucks,
working fairly hard for one's entire life
to stay alive, with no chance to "get ahead".
But it does keep those who do it alive,
which we can't say about occupants of the
wastelands left behind after a company like
Union Carbide pulls out of a place like Bhopal.
Hey, I'll admit it, I quite enjoy my standard
of living. But I really do regret that 90%
of the world lives so badly for my
comfort, and unneccessarily at that (thus
my original comment, that I would gladly give
up, say, 10% of my income if it meant that I
could raise the dirt-farmers of the world to
a level of reasonable material stability).
Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to
living better than 90% of the world's population."
is not a convincing argument.
I can see you have a poor grasp of sarcasm, so
I'll spell it out for you...
We currently live in the 21st century. Not
the 19th.
The jobs we ship to people "willing" to work
cheaper do not, for the most part, improve the
lives of those they go to. We destroy the land
the local populace used to at least manage to
survive on, make them wage slaves for a
pittance far below liveable, and when Nike, or
Union Carbide, or Walmart, or whatever company,
finally gets bored and moves elsewhere, they leave
slums and wastelands.
Now justify your standard of living.
Okay, I will do exactly that.
What does Nike make? Shoes. Expensive
shoes. Can a typical sweatshop laboror, whose
life you seem to think Nike enhances greatly,
buy those shoes? No. I can. You probably can.
Most Slashdot readers probably can. We "justify"
our standard of living simply by having it (or
did some religion's imaginary friend wave the
"US propserity and world hegemony" wand to give
us our standard of living?).
Had you not decided to karma-whore (as an AC?
not very useful...) with the "I feel so sick of
whining programmers" card, you might have noticed
my point - That we don't "help" third-world
countries by forcing the local populace into
corporate slavery. We lower our own standard
of living without raising theirs.
I fully support raising the world-wide standard
of living. Paying someone less than their food
costs them (regardless of physical location) does
not accomplish that.
Free market, free trade, free information,
free software and free beer, what more could
a philanthropist ask for?
Job security at a liveable wage?
Hey, I personally don't mind sacrificing a
small bit of comfort to bring large portions
of the world forward into the 19th century.
But when a company ships jobs to places
where environmental and labor laws allow
them to simply replace good workers with
people treated little better than slaves,
I have a problem with that.
correct me if i'm wrong, but even the adult
swim seems very mild compared to most of the
anime one can get at the video store.
Sure, if you mean H like La Blue Girl, or violence
like Fist of the North Star... But compared to
standard broadcast TV? Or more relevantly,
compared to the standard American cartoon
drivel with singing and dancing mice and happy
bunnies and themes that even an 8YO finds below
their level?
Broadcast stations like FOX need to worry about
the FCC spanking them. Cable channels only need
to worry about going too far in the direction
of tastelessness such that it offends their
audience. Comedy Central appears to have realized
that "too far" doesn't exist, and Cartoon Network
has, to its credit, at least distinguished itself
in focusing on adult-oriented cartoons (and at
least for Adult Swim, they seem to limit the
censorship to a tolerable level).
I don't see EVD being much of a issue outside
of China because it does not offer any advantage
to consumers
Reduced patent encumbrance means cheaper players
and media. Everyone wants that
(except the MPAA and the MPEG consortium).
Basing their codec on an open source one means
that we'll have the ability to play these under
Linux without breaking the law (and perhaps even
encode our own material without uber-expensive
authoring software (or breaking the law)).
No region protection means we can buy the
$39 special at WallyWorld without needing to
research it to make sure we can region-unlock
it to watch imported movies.
Using a "modern" encoding technique, rather than
crappy ol' MPEG-2, doesn't just mean it can encode
for HDTV... It means, for standard DVD-sized
frames (720x480 and there like), higher quality
images in the same space, or more material at
the same quality. How many DVDs have you watched
where, if you paused it (and sometimes without
even doing that) you could see encoding artifacts?
Personally, I'd say I have yet to see a DVD where
I couldn't see at least one glaring encoding
artifact somewhere during the movie.
How will China convince pressing plants
to adapt to EVD?
I may have missed something, but I had the
impression that they made this as a sort of
"DVD without the encumbrance", not "DVD with
new stuff"... Basically a data-mode DVD with
a new media compression format, which any
existing plant could produce, and most existing
players could read with only a firmware upgrade.
Though on that last point, I admit I do not know
enough about the specifics of EVD to say that with
certainty. Considering their stated goals, however,
it seems almost guaranteed that they will try to
remain as compatible as possible with existing DVD
hardware.
Although I like the idea (since we can't really
implement my preferred method of dealing with
spam, "hunt them down and kill them in the most
painful way imagineable"), I see one major flaw
with it...
Namely, the very methods we've come up with to
avoid spam would work for the spammers.
How long do you think it would take before,
in addition to lists of live email addresses,
spammers also begin keeping lists of "people
wasting our time"? I'd give it a week, if this
really caught on suddenly.
For that matter, I believe this would leave
them in a better position than now,
since they'd not only have a list of people
who won't buy from them (allowing them to cull
their list of live email addresses a bit), but
also a list of people likely to actually take
steps to stop spammers.
Think about that for a minute - The few spammers
we have managed to put out of business
have gotten nabbed by a few small groups of
dedicated, annoyed, and technologically-saavy
people. Taking action along the recommended
lines would give the spammers a way to identify
and steer clear of similar groups of people.
While some of us may consider that a win ("they
don't bother me anymore"), I think most
of us realize that we need to do more to stop
spam than unclog our own individual inboxes - We
need to permanantly shut down all spammers in
general. Or, put another way, my filters already
block most of the spam I get (literally over
300/day now). That doesn't do a damn thing to
help friends and relatives who don't understand
how to maintain a good filter (like it or not,
good spam filters require a fairly high level
of understanding about the workings of email to
properly tune - Not so much to simply block spam,
but more importantly, to not block legit
email).
I like that people keep thinking about this
problem, and eventually look forward to a good
solution. This does not seem like "the" solution,
though.
We are required by law to be able to
log sufficient information to associate
IPs with customers if informed to do so
by authorities.
You already took steps to look into "how long",
good. Beyond "67.32.1.14, MAC:00C0F07A5183 (Jim
Brown) connected at 11/05/2003-15:02GMT", you
don't need (or want) to know anything more
about your customers.
Yes, you need to balance providing a reasonable
level of service against protecting your
customers privacy and rights. But if your
customers can't use Kazaa, have to also pay
for a decent usenet feed, and fully expect you
to go running to the RIAA every time they
download an MP3 (not all of which break the law),
you can also expect your customers to migrate
to an ISP that has "plausible deniability" as
its motto.
We came to the conclusion that the wild herd
doesn't pay for stuff... , is ADD... and
generally thinks that education is mostly
worthless (the bi-annual do I need a degree
grudge match).
Though valid points, I think they may result
more from your own preconceptions than from
the reality of Slashdot.
First and most importantly, not all Slashdotters
follow CS, or even work as Software Engineers.
Many have low-level tech jobs, or even non-techie
jobs with simply a hobby interest in computers.
Such people simply do not have the ability to
read journal articles due to the technical
language and unyielding notations used. In case
you've forgotten how that feels, try reading an
article on something in which you have a hobby
interest but no formal education - Not a matter
of stupidity or effort, just that you need the
basics to understand the advanced material.
Second, Slashdot represents a wide range of
age groups - Though 18-25YO males certainly
dominate, I expect if we could plot it we'd
get a positively skewed and very platykurtic
distribution of ages here. I mention that
because those below 18 haven't experienced
college (I certainly dreaded it, expecting it
to end up just another 4-9 years of babysitting
much like my 13 years of public education).
At the same time, at least for the geeks among us,
the 25-40 YO's currently have degrees not worth
wiping their behinds with, while their friends
working in less rigorous jobs (such as CompUSA
lackey) do pretty well with their nice shiny
(and meaningless) A+ certification. Such
conditions do tend to breed a wee bit
of anti-college sentiment after a while. I
personally appreciate my college education,
but I also studied a very wide range of topics,
not just CS (leading me to have 3.5 degrees).
And still, none of those currently help me all
that much, I'd have done far better if I had
skipped the self-improving "education" aspect
of college and gone straight for the money in
something like pharmacy (not whining about it,
just describing the reality of my, and many
Slashdotters', situation).
I ponder if we made a list of oh say 'n'
of these if the typical/.er would read
them.
Probably not. But keep in mind that Slashdot
includes a lot of people, not all of
whom care about or understand, for example, the
worst-case performance difference between
quicksort and heapsort (then agan, it amazes
me how many educated CS people will
naively always use quicksort, so perhaps that
doesn't count as a very good example, but I
will presume you get my point).
You don't want it. Crappy low-res, low-bitrate
mono-green movie. If she hadn't filed suit about
it, people would otherwise have taken one look
at it and deleted it as crap, with no idea who
"starred" in it.
Adolescents have a healthy interest in
sex, as members of a species that reproduces
sexually. More relevantly, they have a healthy
interest in masturbatory material owing to a
lack of readily available partners.
I am really concerned about the
"no-big-deal" attitude that so many
on Slashdot seem to have.
Because many of us realize these things
don't count as a big deal. You may
have grown up in a different world; personally,
I grew up at the very start of the internet era,
now 28YO, and have had access to the very worst
of the online world since about 12. I believe
I turned out fairly well (though I realize that
"free thinker" currently counts as un-PC, but
really don't give a damn).
The older generations seem to have a problem
with freely available information...
Information does nothing without someone to
improperly use it. Put bluntly, we all
masturbate, and if you've raised your kids
well, they won't go blowing (big, living)
things up. It comes down to what their parents
have taught them, not what their parents
have hidden them from. In college, I always
found the absolutely most decadent people had
the most repressive parents - Take that to
heart, because you don't get a magical
exemption from it.
Porn hurts people.
Yeah, yeah, whatever, save it for your priest
and the womens' lib group meetings. Porn provides
a way for buxom-but-braindead women to make a
few bucks with the only real asset they have.
Sure, you could point to a dark side to porn, but
I think we can agree a sharp distinction exists
between, say, "Playboy" and "Underage
Goat Torture Monthly".
the file system on a mac-formatted iPod is HFS and the file system
on a PC-formatted iPod is FAT32. Nothing to do with drivers.
People apparently don't understand the meaning of "driver", I think...
If you give Windows the "/SOS" boot flag, it will show you (some of)
the drivers it loads on startup. Notice the "ntfs.sys" driver, or
"fat32.sys". Nothing stops Windows from also loading an "hfs.sys" as
well, except the fact that Apple didn't feel like making life easier
for the people willing to shell out $400 on their products.
Slashdot Mirror
I knew the Galileo project would run into trouble, but I honestly thought it would be the Catholics causing it.
Nah... They got over that whole "we don't occupy the center of the universe" thing years ago. All the way back in 1983, IIRC.
But why would that make your current collection "look like crap"? It's the same DVDs you've been watching (or rather, collecting) since the beginning.
Think of a video game you enjoyed from the early 90's, something that had amazing graphics and you just stared at the eye candy for hours when you played it.
Try playing it now, on a modern PC, after having seen a few modern games. They look like crap, not even worth playing unless they included a great story as well (for me, the original "Unreal" kinda ruined all earlier games, at least as far as appearance goes - Pathetic story line, but so pretty...).
The same goes for TV. Most people still use plain old analog NTSC or PAL TVs. We expect, and automatically filter out, a low level of static, and expect a fairly low resolution image. To prove that to yourself, check out an NTSC screen capture on a modern PC monitor - They look like tiny little pictures with horrible graininess.
So yeah, the picture itself won't change, once we all have real digital HDTV playing capabilities. But our expectations will change, and what we currenly have will seem woefully inadequate, just like that classic video game.
We don't need a good review to know that this film is going to be good.
Out of curiousity, does anyone have a link to some reviews differentiating between those who read Tolkien before Peter Jackson made LotR into a set of movies, and those for whom the movie provides their first experience with LotR?
I can't imagine that I count as the only person who feels VERY dissapointed in the movies... I mean, tons of eye candy, and I'll gladly watch anything with an alluringly clad Liv Tyler in it, but IMO, Jackson has murdered LotR.
I realize that some things need to get cut out, and the same process requires some "glue" to make the plot still flow properly. But some of Jackson's additions strike me as not "making a very very long story work in this medium", but rather, "I think Gollum should have had a bigger part, so I'll give him one with tons of psychodrama, that seems to sell well".
I admit, I'll go see RotK when it comes out. But those who have called this the best movie/trillogy ever (possibly other than Star Wars)... Well, what can I say other than "Read the books".
That's really an impressive technology. Kinda creepy, too. All that information streaming through the dark sea bed...
Now you know why the high-pressure methane breathing aliens (the ones who live under the sea for convenience of maintaining "atmospheric" pressure in their domes) know all about us, but we know almost nothing about them.
We've just given them a high-bandwidth line that we have almost no ability to monitor between the two endpoints.
(For the humor-impaired... Laugh).
The only possible problem anyone could have with this is that they want a greater say in the matter than "Joe and Jane Six-Pack" as the typical consumer is usually referred to here.
Except that the Six-Pack family doesn't even notice the war going on (for now), so can't take sides. And by the time they notice, the "wrong" side will have won.
How many people, if they understood the idea that their new media purchase could simply vanish at the whim of companies with less interest in them than Enron had in its employees' retirement funds, would still plop down the same (or more) money as for an unencumbered and semi-permanent product?
Not a whole lot, I'd wager. In my experience, people have NO clue about the implications (or even the presence) of DRM. Just last week, for example, I had to explain to a friend (and not even a tech-illiterate one at that) that all the music on his computer, ripped by him from his own CDs, would no longer work simply because he had used WMP to rip and encode them, and had never turned off WMP's "rights management". Granted, WMP lets you back up your keys for a planned migration, but major crashes rarely bother popping up a dialog warning "This installation of Windows has died, and five minutes from now, will never boot again. Please back up your music library at this time".
So yes, I believe "Joe Sixpack" should have less say in matters such as this, and should listen more to those of us who do understand that "enhanced" and "restricted" do not mean the same thing. But calling that a power-grab strikes me as a rather egregious twisting of the facts. For an analogy, do you believe that fire codes should result from the whims of the market, or from those who've spent thousands of hours studying how fire propagates through your house? Or do you just consider your greatly increased likelyhood of living through each night a power-grab by those in the know on that particular topic?
8x is a pretty damn fast write speed for a 2MB buffer.
Agreed... It really surprises me they'd go with a buffer that small. At 8x (just over 11MB/s), the buffer needs to completely refill every 182ms, 5.5 times per second. Considering how often computers seem to "hiccup", just freezing for half a second every now and then, I would not want to trust more expensive 8x media to the odds that one of those random events won't occur during a burn.
Especially considering the price of these drives, does it seem like so much to ask to put in a decent sized buffer? +5 for first to market with the new burning speed, but -100 for lack of forethought about how many coasters people really need around the house.
First, who are you apologizing to?
A general sort of "I know this will offend some folks, but I intend to say it anyway" apology.
So I don't see in what ways products are supposed to be "crippled" to accommodate "crippled users".
The phone in question seems like a good example. Most of us could use it, and it also makes life more convenient to the blind. However, most of us would prefer an ordinary old text+sound+vibrate phone over one that could only communicate via sound.
I'm curious if this is an abstraction or something that you have real experience with and in what ways.
Offhand, I'd say virtually all (non-specialty) products on the market have functionality intended toward those with a full compliment of senses. So in that sense, I meant my peeve as an abstraction. I could probably come up with a product or two that had would serve its purpose better at the cost of excluding those with a given disability, but on the whole, simple market pressure has kept such products from popularity.
However, I also meant it as a very real, immediate point, in that the post to which I responded suggested all products should come as a fully-useable-by-all form - A noble ideal, but with the exception of purely passive objects (a fork, for example), not even remotely practical. That attitude, that we should all suffer less useful products so a small minority can use them as well as we can, peeves me in a very concrete way.
in what ways has your life been negatively impacted by accommodating someone with a handicap - Other than perhaps having to park a few spaces further back?
Mostly unrelated to my point, but since you did bring it up...
Personally I don't mind walking, and don't even bother with that "circle for a good spot" thing. I just park out in the boonies, and still get inside faster than those who play parking-spot-vulture. But it does irk me a tad to see packed parking lots, with every single handicapped spot vacant. And 90% of the time I have seen one occupied, the occupant has simply parked there illegally. At a mall or WallyWorld or other largish store, I don't consider that unreasonable for the convenience it provides those who do legitimately need them (although don't get me started on the politics of getting a handicapped plate - I've known people who could barely stand up who couldn't get them, and people who could run a marathon who do have them, all because of connections or the lack thereof).
However, while I think they seem reasonable at stores with large parking lots, I find it offensive that the law requires places like a tiny corner minimart, with only three parking spaces total, to dedicate one to handicapped parking. Anyone who can't walk the extra ten feet also won't make it from the car to the building and back. But with a small number of total parking spots, that one handicapped spot doesn't "help" anyone, it just means one fewer people can visit that store at the same time.
If a device is made to enable someone with physical challenges, it should be a cinch to use for anyone who isn't challenged.
Yeah, because we folks with functional limbs find tongue-joysticks a piece of cake to use.
And I can't even tell you how much easier I can read braille as opposed to a quick glance at a screen...
Of course, we might have a problem accomodating both the deaf and the blind... Perhaps we could make everything communicate via pheromones. "Hey, did you just piss on me?" "Nah, just my phone ringing - I chose the new 'gazelle' scent, do you like it?"
Sorry, but the "cripple the product to accomodate crippled users" PC BS kinda peeves me. Humans have a basic level of sensory and motor capability. Where convenient, we can make life easier for those lacking some of those capabilities, but in most cases, a multi-sensory product will do its job more efficiently.
If one considers that virtually all consumers will be physically challenged at some point in their lives (broken bones, aging, etc.), why shouldn't manufacturers be building devices with a "fail-safe" user mode that permits limted, but functional use?
Because adapting a product to someone lacking a random human ability generally requires making that product less useable to everyone else (see my three sarcastic examples above).
As a simple example of this, we can look at the very product under consideration in this topic, cell phones. Although they can work such that they only use sound or vision, people generally have them set up to use no fewer than three senses (including touch for "vibrate" mode). Any manufacturer that removed any two of those three would find themselves pushed off the market by better products that appeal to as many of the user's senses as practical.
Last time I used one, phones used sound as a means of communication. You dial a number on the very position-standardized keypad (so even those with functional eyes can usually dial a phone without looking), and speak into the handset. The person you called then uses their end to do the same, and you can both hear each other.
It would seem that no one else has noticed this seeming absurdity yet...
"Normal" phones do not significantly hinder the blind! Wake up, people! This has no obvious purpose other than yet another way to bilk medicaid on another very expensive specialty device that actually has less functionality than a normal version of the same product (no screen? That probably halved the cost to the manufacturer).
And for those who would mention SMS or caller ID, I have a friend who already has an ordinary cell phone that will read those to him (no idea on the model, but nothing special). So even those two functions don't discriminate against the blind.
What happened with the "do not call" registry?
Um... It seems to have worked VERY well.
Before October, I received as much as one call per hour from telemarketers. Since mid-October, I have yet to receive a single telemarketing call.
I did get one (and only one) political survey call, though... Free hint: charities stop calling if you tell them you have no job and would like to know how you can apply for their assistance, and politicians stop calling if you tell them you don't vote - Whether or not either tells the truth.
If that doesn't count as "success", I don't know what criteria you have applied...
We got hammered with spam.
My spam volume shot up in early summer, not mid-October. Although it may have gone up a bit since the DNC registry went into effect, I wouldn't consider it enough to notice over the normal deluge.
However... I do have doubts about the possible effectiveness of a Do-Not-Spam registry. Most spam already violates several laws (forged headers? Blatantly illegal products such as Viagra or Xanax without a script? Unregulated medical devices for penis enlargement? "barely legal" porn to addresses with an underage recipient? Pyramid schemes? Naaaah, we never see any of those, do we?). The spammers simply circumvent the already-applicable laws by originating from outside the US, or making the sender all-but-untraceably, or both.
Your rose-colored glasses approach doesn't account for:
The first two have nothing to do with managing the team under you. Both describe hassles that any manager needs to deal with, but do not have much relation to their personal style of managing.
The third I consider a problem, but one that also has no affect on dealing with one's underlings. Trying to meet an impossible schedule or budget just stresses people out, for no good reason. Or put another way, if I give you the task of proving 1+1=3 by next month, you might as well play solitaire for the next month, because you'll get the same end result.
The fourth I consider a real problem, though again, not one that a person can do much about. With a good metamanager, you could perhaps give a mini-ultimatum that either you have the authority to deal with those under you, or you have no accountability for their performance (when doomed to failure, you don't have much to lose anyway). If not, you simply route around the driftwood, perhaps finding something helpful they can do... "Bill, you take care of the backend DB. Mary, you have the thin client. Steve... Um... Steve, you keep the coffee-pot full".
Managers, for better or worse, have to work with humans, who are notoriously non-deterministic.
While I basically agree with that, I also consider it somewhat of a cop-out. No, things won't always go perfectly. But not sticking to the three points I gave will all but guarantee failure and resentment.
You don't need a book to tell you how to manage people well... It boils down to just a few simple points:
1) Break down the "big" tasks into personal-project-sized chunks. If a large number of underlings complain about the size of those chunks, adjust accordingly. If one or two people complain, tell them to quit whining.
2) Leave people alone to do their work. Realize that deadlines will occasionally slip, and some people will have bad weeks on occasion. If one or two people consistantly underperform, axe them. If everyone consistantly fails to do their work in time, the problem sits at your own desk.
3) Give people a reason to remain loyal and do their work. Money obviously forms the single biggest motivating factor, but pride in their work, credit for exceeding expectations, and comfort in their jobs matters quite a lot as well. If your best worker always comes in at noon and leaves at eight (at a 9-to-5 company), don't complain, but rather appreciate that someone knows when they do their best work. Same applies to attire - Unless your underlings deal directly with the public, every day should count as a dress-down day, within reason. PJ's obviously do not seem acceptible, but jeans and a T-shirt? A tie doesn't make people more productive, despite what management-types seem to believe. It just makes them uncomfortable.
Overall, I suppose I can sum this up in two abstractions - Treat people like you would like them to treat you (golden rule, basically); and, if everyone seems to complain about you, don't assume you have a lazy team, start looking at your own job performance.
As an Indian in the IT industry I resent your charecterisation of us as starving slave labour
Though Indians may count as the most obvious example of US companies outsourcing from the point of view of a Slashdotter, I do realize that Indians do fairly well, not in any way "third world".
I also did not refer even to tech, specifically, limiting my text basically to the sort of sweatshop labor US companies use in Central America, parts of Africa (more Western Europe for that one), and a few former-Soviet countries. Yes, I mentioned Union Carbide with Bhopal in mind, but would you honestly say that all of India does as well as the engineers in the cities?
Well guess what? A thousand dollars a month is a very comfortable salary in India.
Unfortunately, your government (unlike my own, which grants H1b's at the drop of a hat) won't let me follow my job to your country, where I too might live well on a thousand or so per month. In the US, a thousand barely pays rent on a crappy apartment (and in the major cities, it doesn't even come close to rent).
So yes, I sincerely feel "good" that a quarter of my previous salary makes you able to live comfortably. I'd gladly take the remainder, though, making both of us able to live comfortably. That I consider a fair compromise, rather than you working for what a US employer laughs at you for accepting, while an American worker (myself included) remains unemployed.
He didn't romanticize farms at all.
:-)
The problem is, when industries enter into 3rd world countries, they do their thing, and when they leave, the land is in far worse shape.
Thank you. At least someone understood my point, though I suspect you "got" it before I wrote it.
I in no way mean to glamorize subsistence farming... I realize it pretty much sucks, working fairly hard for one's entire life to stay alive, with no chance to "get ahead". But it does keep those who do it alive, which we can't say about occupants of the wastelands left behind after a company like Union Carbide pulls out of a place like Bhopal.
Hey, I'll admit it, I quite enjoy my standard of living. But I really do regret that 90% of the world lives so badly for my comfort, and unneccessarily at that (thus my original comment, that I would gladly give up, say, 10% of my income if it meant that I could raise the dirt-farmers of the world to a level of reasonable material stability).
Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.
I can see you have a poor grasp of sarcasm, so I'll spell it out for you...
We currently live in the 21st century. Not the 19th.
The jobs we ship to people "willing" to work cheaper do not, for the most part, improve the lives of those they go to. We destroy the land the local populace used to at least manage to survive on, make them wage slaves for a pittance far below liveable, and when Nike, or Union Carbide, or Walmart, or whatever company, finally gets bored and moves elsewhere, they leave slums and wastelands.
Now justify your standard of living.
Okay, I will do exactly that.
What does Nike make? Shoes. Expensive shoes. Can a typical sweatshop laboror, whose life you seem to think Nike enhances greatly, buy those shoes? No. I can. You probably can. Most Slashdot readers probably can. We "justify" our standard of living simply by having it (or did some religion's imaginary friend wave the "US propserity and world hegemony" wand to give us our standard of living?).
Had you not decided to karma-whore (as an AC? not very useful...) with the "I feel so sick of whining programmers" card, you might have noticed my point - That we don't "help" third-world countries by forcing the local populace into corporate slavery. We lower our own standard of living without raising theirs.
I fully support raising the world-wide standard of living. Paying someone less than their food costs them (regardless of physical location) does not accomplish that.
Free market, free trade, free information, free software and free beer, what more could a philanthropist ask for?
Job security at a liveable wage?
Hey, I personally don't mind sacrificing a small bit of comfort to bring large portions of the world forward into the 19th century. But when a company ships jobs to places where environmental and labor laws allow them to simply replace good workers with people treated little better than slaves, I have a problem with that.
correct me if i'm wrong, but even the adult swim seems very mild compared to most of the anime one can get at the video store.
Sure, if you mean H like La Blue Girl, or violence like Fist of the North Star... But compared to standard broadcast TV? Or more relevantly, compared to the standard American cartoon drivel with singing and dancing mice and happy bunnies and themes that even an 8YO finds below their level?
Broadcast stations like FOX need to worry about the FCC spanking them. Cable channels only need to worry about going too far in the direction of tastelessness such that it offends their audience. Comedy Central appears to have realized that "too far" doesn't exist, and Cartoon Network has, to its credit, at least distinguished itself in focusing on adult-oriented cartoons (and at least for Adult Swim, they seem to limit the censorship to a tolerable level).
now SCO is targetting DEAD OSes! ;-)
Aww, man! Does this mean I might need to fork over $699 to keep using CP/M on my DEC Rainbow to run Hack (as in, precursor to NetHack)?
Bummer. At this rate, I might as well just install Windows on all my machines.
Hmm, Now who gave $50M to SCO to keep this crap alive, and what possible motives might they have?
I don't see EVD being much of a issue outside of China because it does not offer any advantage to consumers
Reduced patent encumbrance means cheaper players and media. Everyone wants that (except the MPAA and the MPEG consortium).
Basing their codec on an open source one means that we'll have the ability to play these under Linux without breaking the law (and perhaps even encode our own material without uber-expensive authoring software (or breaking the law)).
No region protection means we can buy the $39 special at WallyWorld without needing to research it to make sure we can region-unlock it to watch imported movies.
Using a "modern" encoding technique, rather than crappy ol' MPEG-2, doesn't just mean it can encode for HDTV... It means, for standard DVD-sized frames (720x480 and there like), higher quality images in the same space, or more material at the same quality. How many DVDs have you watched where, if you paused it (and sometimes without even doing that) you could see encoding artifacts? Personally, I'd say I have yet to see a DVD where I couldn't see at least one glaring encoding artifact somewhere during the movie.
How will China convince pressing plants to adapt to EVD?
I may have missed something, but I had the impression that they made this as a sort of "DVD without the encumbrance", not "DVD with new stuff"... Basically a data-mode DVD with a new media compression format, which any existing plant could produce, and most existing players could read with only a firmware upgrade.
Though on that last point, I admit I do not know enough about the specifics of EVD to say that with certainty. Considering their stated goals, however, it seems almost guaranteed that they will try to remain as compatible as possible with existing DVD hardware.
Although I like the idea (since we can't really implement my preferred method of dealing with spam, "hunt them down and kill them in the most painful way imagineable"), I see one major flaw with it...
Namely, the very methods we've come up with to avoid spam would work for the spammers.
How long do you think it would take before, in addition to lists of live email addresses, spammers also begin keeping lists of "people wasting our time"? I'd give it a week, if this really caught on suddenly.
For that matter, I believe this would leave them in a better position than now, since they'd not only have a list of people who won't buy from them (allowing them to cull their list of live email addresses a bit), but also a list of people likely to actually take steps to stop spammers.
Think about that for a minute - The few spammers we have managed to put out of business have gotten nabbed by a few small groups of dedicated, annoyed, and technologically-saavy people. Taking action along the recommended lines would give the spammers a way to identify and steer clear of similar groups of people.
While some of us may consider that a win ("they don't bother me anymore"), I think most of us realize that we need to do more to stop spam than unclog our own individual inboxes - We need to permanantly shut down all spammers in general. Or, put another way, my filters already block most of the spam I get (literally over 300/day now). That doesn't do a damn thing to help friends and relatives who don't understand how to maintain a good filter (like it or not, good spam filters require a fairly high level of understanding about the workings of email to properly tune - Not so much to simply block spam, but more importantly, to not block legit email).
I like that people keep thinking about this problem, and eventually look forward to a good solution. This does not seem like "the" solution, though.
We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities.
You already took steps to look into "how long", good. Beyond "67.32.1.14, MAC:00C0F07A5183 (Jim Brown) connected at 11/05/2003-15:02GMT", you don't need (or want) to know anything more about your customers.
Yes, you need to balance providing a reasonable level of service against protecting your customers privacy and rights. But if your customers can't use Kazaa, have to also pay for a decent usenet feed, and fully expect you to go running to the RIAA every time they download an MP3 (not all of which break the law), you can also expect your customers to migrate to an ISP that has "plausible deniability" as its motto.
We came to the conclusion that the wild herd doesn't pay for stuff ... , is ADD ... and
generally thinks that education is mostly
worthless (the bi-annual do I need a degree
grudge match).
/.er would read
them.
Though valid points, I think they may result more from your own preconceptions than from the reality of Slashdot.
First and most importantly, not all Slashdotters follow CS, or even work as Software Engineers. Many have low-level tech jobs, or even non-techie jobs with simply a hobby interest in computers. Such people simply do not have the ability to read journal articles due to the technical language and unyielding notations used. In case you've forgotten how that feels, try reading an article on something in which you have a hobby interest but no formal education - Not a matter of stupidity or effort, just that you need the basics to understand the advanced material.
Second, Slashdot represents a wide range of age groups - Though 18-25YO males certainly dominate, I expect if we could plot it we'd get a positively skewed and very platykurtic distribution of ages here. I mention that because those below 18 haven't experienced college (I certainly dreaded it, expecting it to end up just another 4-9 years of babysitting much like my 13 years of public education).
At the same time, at least for the geeks among us, the 25-40 YO's currently have degrees not worth wiping their behinds with, while their friends working in less rigorous jobs (such as CompUSA lackey) do pretty well with their nice shiny (and meaningless) A+ certification. Such conditions do tend to breed a wee bit of anti-college sentiment after a while. I personally appreciate my college education, but I also studied a very wide range of topics, not just CS (leading me to have 3.5 degrees). And still, none of those currently help me all that much, I'd have done far better if I had skipped the self-improving "education" aspect of college and gone straight for the money in something like pharmacy (not whining about it, just describing the reality of my, and many Slashdotters', situation).
I ponder if we made a list of oh say 'n' of these if the typical
Probably not. But keep in mind that Slashdot includes a lot of people, not all of whom care about or understand, for example, the worst-case performance difference between quicksort and heapsort (then agan, it amazes me how many educated CS people will naively always use quicksort, so perhaps that doesn't count as a very good example, but I will presume you get my point).
Got a link?
You don't want it. Crappy low-res, low-bitrate mono-green movie. If she hadn't filed suit about it, people would otherwise have taken one look at it and deleted it as crap, with no idea who "starred" in it.
You're concerned if they weren't looking at porn?
Adolescents have a healthy interest in sex, as members of a species that reproduces sexually. More relevantly, they have a healthy interest in masturbatory material owing to a lack of readily available partners.
I am really concerned about the "no-big-deal" attitude that so many on Slashdot seem to have.
Because many of us realize these things don't count as a big deal. You may have grown up in a different world; personally, I grew up at the very start of the internet era, now 28YO, and have had access to the very worst of the online world since about 12. I believe I turned out fairly well (though I realize that "free thinker" currently counts as un-PC, but really don't give a damn).
The older generations seem to have a problem with freely available information... Information does nothing without someone to improperly use it. Put bluntly, we all masturbate, and if you've raised your kids well, they won't go blowing (big, living) things up. It comes down to what their parents have taught them, not what their parents have hidden them from. In college, I always found the absolutely most decadent people had the most repressive parents - Take that to heart, because you don't get a magical exemption from it.
Porn hurts people.
Yeah, yeah, whatever, save it for your priest and the womens' lib group meetings. Porn provides a way for buxom-but-braindead women to make a few bucks with the only real asset they have. Sure, you could point to a dark side to porn, but I think we can agree a sharp distinction exists between, say, "Playboy" and "Underage Goat Torture Monthly".
the file system on a mac-formatted iPod is HFS and the file system on a PC-formatted iPod is FAT32. Nothing to do with drivers.
People apparently don't understand the meaning of "driver", I think...
If you give Windows the "/SOS" boot flag, it will show you (some of) the drivers it loads on startup. Notice the "ntfs.sys" driver, or "fat32.sys". Nothing stops Windows from also loading an "hfs.sys" as well, except the fact that Apple didn't feel like making life easier for the people willing to shell out $400 on their products.