1. I don't know if Fall of Man could have been done better on a PC but even if it could I doubt that it could have been done better on a $700 PC. I don't own a PS3 and probably will not but If he likes it and likes the games that is good for him. It is kind of like the people that bash the Wii because it isn't as powerful as the PS3. I like my Wii and I like the games.
"Magazines? Somebody still reads those?" You have never read Circuit Cellar or you wouldn't have asked that. Trust me it well worth the Paper or the PDF download.
"By doing a Google search for what you want, of course. Every company has a web site these days. This will show you all the companies available, not just the one whose ad you happened to see. How will you know if the company is any good if not by comparing it with its competitors? What's needed here, is not advertisement, but a global directory of companies, where you could search by type of good and see a list of all brands, with prices and a short commentary. There are some web sites that try to do this, but they are not as complete as I would like."
Google searches will show you the most popular sites. New companies and or sites don't always show up well on Google. Also not every product class is well represented by Company websites.
"Or, you could have checked eBay for what the best deal is this month and gotten an even lower price for it. On eBay you can see all the other prices it's compared with too. Can you do that in a magazine ad? I thought not." Yes you can look at the other ads not only that but eBay has for me been a little hit or miss. What about returns? What about fakes? For some things like a Motorcycle helmet I don't always want the cheapest. I will pay a little more for a better brand and better service. Would I buy just off an ad? No I would first hit some of the message boards and ask if anyone has dealt with the company before.
"I would rather do business with a company that doesn't waste money on advertising and instead spends time on putting truthful and complete information on their web site. With prices, dammit!" You do relize that web site is nothing but one very large ad. If you Google for say an AVR programmer and this site comes up in the search and or the ads it is still just an ad. Yea I want prices on the website as well. Want to know what is worse. Try shopping for a motorcycle. They don't even put prices on them IN THE SHOP! Then they have and MSRP but then the dealers will try and put on "freight" and "set up" charges! Makes buying a car looks easy.
The Air Traffic control system is no different than the road system, river system, or Coast Guard. The Airlines DO pay for the ATC equipment in the planes. They pay for the radios, transponders, encoding altimeters you name it. It kind of reminds me of when they slapped the Luxury tax on light airplanes. It played well with the people since if you can afford to buy a light plane you are rich. The problem was that combined with the stupid law suits almost caused the complete destruction of the light aircraft industry in the US. That tax resulted in almost no increase in revenue but caused many of my friends families to loose there jobs and for them to have to drop out of college. The FAA in this case is paying for the TEST equipment.
"Oh yes they are. The very premise of advertising, that you can sell your stuff to people who don't initially want to buy it borders on brainwashing and is extremely offensive to me." Not good advertising and yes there is good advertising. And example are the ads in Circuit Cellar magazine or Cycle World magazine. Yes I may be looking for a new AVR programmer when I see the ad in Circuit Cellar. Of course I will do some research but how else will I know that the company exists? Or I may want a new Motorcycle helmet. When reading Cycle World I might see a company offering a really good price on Shoei helmets this month. Yes some ads are just dumb and insulting. Mainly those for consumer goods. But some ads do inform you of options that I might not know about otherwise. The world isn't just black and white. Ads when they are well done pay for free content while informing you of options. Yes Ads are always going to be one sided so you have to do more research than just trusting the ads. However isn't a company that sells you exactly what they advertise the kind of company you want to do business with?
Censoring free speech sites in China vs Cheap wireless broadband in the US. Sorry for me that just doesn't cut it. I am not saying that Google is evil incarnate but judging them by their ideal of "Don't be Evil" I just can not equate the two. On the plus side they haven't turned in any Bloggers I know of to the Chinese government.
"Techies are known for a negative attitude toward advertising. I know I always block all ads on every site. If I see an ad, I automatically right-click and block it. If an advertiser does manage to get my attention after all, I am going to hate him so much for it that I wouldn't buy the product no matter how good it was or how much I wanted it." Then are you paying for a Slashdot subscription? I block ads also but I understand that they put the food on the table and provide for hosting space and bandwidth. Slashdot and sites like it can not live without some kind of review paying the bills. Ads are not in themselves evil or even all that bad. The problem with ads is that they are using animation and pop overs. I don't think people really hate most Google ads since they are just simple text. You can hate ads all you want but if everybody that likes this kind of content blocks them then this kind of content will not be available. At least not for free.
So we have the Webkit family. The Gekko family. Opera. and the IE family of browsers. All this would be great if they would all follow the standards! Okay it would be great if IE followed the standards instead of making them up as they go. IE7 is better but far from perfect. I wounder if there is any chance that Firefox will move to Webkit in the future? I know it is unlikely but one does wonder.
"2) Figure out how to bypass ad blockers, flash blockers, hosts files" 2a) Tick off your users so they go someplace else.
It is a hard nut to crack. I still think part of the problem is using doubleclick but then that is just me. So many ads on double click are so bad I just *.doubleclick.* in my adblocker.
The church of RMS probably does have something to with it. Really is a shame because a lot of people on Slashdot buy a lot of software and hardware. I think part of Slashdot's problem comes from using Doubleclick to serve adds. What Slashdot user doesn't have *.doubleclick.net* in their ad blocker?
Slashdot is an extremely popular website with great demographics. It should be a huge money maker but it probably under performs. It doesn't show up all that well in Alexa because very few people that go to Slashdot use or would use the Alexa toolbar. It probably doesn't show up all that well with the advertisers because Slashdot readers are technically very sophisticated. What percentage of Slashdot users are blocking the ads on Slashdot? 80%? Slashdot should be the "Myspace" of the technical crowd. Heck it had the friends list long before Myspace was around. We have our Journals "aka" blogs so yea it is a little Myspace full of bright people with money to spend. But it doesn't make that much money. Slashdot should be worth many millions but it isn't. The real problem isn't Alexa but how can Slashdot live up to it's potental for that evil word. Profit. After all I am sure the Slashdot crew would like to make the big bucks.
Actually the US did find small stock piles of gas agents and one centrifuge that is used to enrich uranium. Not the massive infrastructure that was claimed to be sure but that statement that NO WMD where found is also false. The claim is that the gas agents where miss placed when the Iraqis where destroying them under UN supervision. I know that I will get flamed for this but it is the truth.
Re:Chords are used all the time for subtitling
on
Five Finger Keyboards
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· Score: 2, Informative
For closed captioning it is called a stenomachine.
I would say that Steno machines predate even those. A good court-reporter can "write" on a stenomachine at more than 240 WPM. Yes that is word per minute. The only down side is it takes years to learn how to write well.
It depends. In a college I can see the value/fun of LUGs. Outside not so much anymore. Linux has become more mainstream and the Internet really has done a job on this kind of get together. Kind of like user groups in general I don't know if they have much value. It is kind of sad in a way. Local BBS and user groups where local. Now that we have the internet fewer and fewer local groups seem to be thrive. Like the death of computer magazines I think we are getting exposed to fewer and fewer new ideas. We seek out those that fit with what we know. That is why you have "Computer Experts" that think that Windows is the Alpha and Omega of computers. They know nothing about Macs, Linux, or even that there are computers bigger than PCs or maybe a server.
I would think that render farms would be cranking out frames or would be in sleep mode with little to nothing in between. Of course that is just the logical way they should work which means that it is probably wrong.
Actually I was agreeing with you. If you read what wrote I said that was correct for most servers. However with XEN I wonder how the cpu loads will lock in the future.
"This is a very important special case (unless you somehow have a steady workload 24/7, which I think would be highly atypical)" Yes for most servers but for say Rendering farms or HPC clusters "I will not use b word" it could be very typical.
In the low end server market I wounder how the new 45 Watt Athlon's do. For a small servers you don't need "server" class cpu and those low power Athlons look like they could make some pretty nice 1U systems.
"Yeah I've always felt that solar panels are similar enough to ICs that the same thing should happen to costs "
But and this is a big but.
The reason ICs get cheaper and cheaper is because they get smaller and smaller! That will not work with SolarCells. You get x amount of power from x amount of surface.
They can not follow Moore's law because they different. On the plus side some of the the technology used in making ICs and LCD panel do carry over and help to bring down the cost.
Actually TVs and Radios quickly became pieces of fine furniture. They took the place of the Hearth in peoples homes. I have a computer room in my house and a server. There are more computers than people in my home. But I have seen people get laptops time and time again because they can use them then put them away.
"When all the average Joe had to do was insert a dollar to get back $10 or $20, as in *no* game play at all, that's not "luck", that's "a stupid idiot who thinks he can rip off a casino"."
You know this kind of reminds me of the Baseball strike a few years back. You had the millionaire players complaining that the billionaire owners where greedy on the flip side you had the billionaire owners complaining about the spoiled millionaire players.
So you have the Casinos that do everything to exploit peoples greed, addictive personalities, and or other vices complaining that they got ripped off. Yea if you put in 1$ and then instantly cash out for $10 that is pretty immoral. But then just how moral are the Casinos? The ones I saw offered you free drinks if you where playing, had not clocks on the gaming floor, and pretty much made it impossible to leave your room without going by a slot machine.
I thought getting more money out of a slot machine than you put in was the whole point of playing the slots.
I do think part of it is space. Computers have never really fit into home decor. Laptops allow "normal people" to get out there computer and do work then put it away.
I did read the article. That is why I quoited that part of it. Notice the title of my post.
"Could the PS3 be part of the problem?" It wasn't "The PS3 is the problem." Or "It is all the PS3"s fault!" They do seem to have some issues with the 360 as well. Not really surprising since it is also multi-threaded but not as asymmetrical as the PS3 is. Epic has x Developers working on the UE3 engine. Back in the good old days porting form the PC to the XBox was simple and then porting to the PS2 was harder. How it would seem that porting to the 360 is difficult and porting to the PS3 is even more difficult. If you have X people to do the work and the work got a lot harder then you are going to miss deadlines.
Not I am not kidding but the PS3's programing model looks like a real bear to deal with I saw these comments in the article.
"Epic once again supposedly missed a deadline for an Engine Silicon Knights was going to use on a PLAYSTATION 3 game. Epic missed this deadline by six-months. A functional UE3 for the PS3 was supposed to be delivered by February 2007. It wasn't.
According to SK, the Engine apparently caused the game to "slow down significantly" due to lengthly load times and "memory-spikes" during loading. Epic apparently had known about this problem with the Unreal Engine since 2004 and promised a solution by 2005. It never came. "
I am not a big console gamer but didn't I hear that many of the "Hot must get" titles for the PS3 will not be out until March 08? I have heard on Slashdot time and time again that the PS3 programing model will not be a problem because everybody will use game engines that will deal with it for you. Seems like the game engines are having some issues now.
Yea but I have seem some sites that require ActiveX support. I think it may be possible to hack FireFox to use ActiveX but frankly I like to keep Firefox free of that stuff and only switch to IE when I have no choice. I feel that is the most secure way of doing things.
Slashdot Mirror
1. I don't know if Fall of Man could have been done better on a PC but even if it could I doubt that it could have been done better on a $700 PC.
I don't own a PS3 and probably will not but If he likes it and likes the games that is good for him.
It is kind of like the people that bash the Wii because it isn't as powerful as the PS3. I like my Wii and I like the games.
"Magazines? Somebody still reads those?"
You have never read Circuit Cellar or you wouldn't have asked that. Trust me it well worth the Paper or the PDF download.
"By doing a Google search for what you want, of course. Every company has a web site these days. This will show you all the companies available, not just the one whose ad you happened to see. How will you know if the company is any good if not by comparing it with its competitors? What's needed here, is not advertisement, but a global directory of companies, where you could search by type of good and see a list of all brands, with prices and a short commentary. There are some web sites that try to do this, but they are not as complete as I would like."
Google searches will show you the most popular sites. New companies and or sites don't always show up well on Google. Also not every product class is well represented by Company websites.
"Or, you could have checked eBay for what the best deal is this month and gotten an even lower price for it. On eBay you can see all the other prices it's compared with too. Can you do that in a magazine ad? I thought not."
Yes you can look at the other ads not only that but eBay has for me been a little hit or miss. What about returns? What about fakes? For some things like a Motorcycle helmet I don't always want the cheapest. I will pay a little more for a better brand and better service. Would I buy just off an ad? No I would first hit some of the message boards and ask if anyone has dealt with the company before.
"I would rather do business with a company that doesn't waste money on advertising and instead spends time on putting truthful and complete information on their web site. With prices, dammit!"
You do relize that web site is nothing but one very large ad. If you Google for say an AVR programmer and this site comes up in the search and or the ads it is still just an ad.
Yea I want prices on the website as well. Want to know what is worse. Try shopping for a motorcycle. They don't even put prices on them IN THE SHOP! Then they have and MSRP but then the dealers will try and put on "freight" and "set up" charges! Makes buying a car looks easy.
I have not kept up with this but will the new system provide terrain and weather avoidance information as well?
The Air Traffic control system is no different than the road system, river system, or Coast Guard. The Airlines DO pay for the ATC equipment in the planes. They pay for the radios, transponders, encoding altimeters you name it.
It kind of reminds me of when they slapped the Luxury tax on light airplanes. It played well with the people since if you can afford to buy a light plane you are rich. The problem was that combined with the stupid law suits almost caused the complete destruction of the light aircraft industry in the US. That tax resulted in almost no increase in revenue but caused many of my friends families to loose there jobs and for them to have to drop out of college.
The FAA in this case is paying for the TEST equipment.
"Oh yes they are. The very premise of advertising, that you can sell your stuff to people who don't initially want to buy it borders on brainwashing and is extremely offensive to me."
Not good advertising and yes there is good advertising.
And example are the ads in Circuit Cellar magazine or Cycle World magazine.
Yes I may be looking for a new AVR programmer when I see the ad in Circuit Cellar. Of course I will do some research but how else will I know that the company exists?
Or I may want a new Motorcycle helmet. When reading Cycle World I might see a company offering a really good price on Shoei helmets this month.
Yes some ads are just dumb and insulting. Mainly those for consumer goods. But some ads do inform you of options that I might not know about otherwise.
The world isn't just black and white. Ads when they are well done pay for free content while informing you of options. Yes Ads are always going to be one sided so you have to do more research than just trusting the ads. However isn't a company that sells you exactly what they advertise the kind of company you want to do business with?
Censoring free speech sites in China vs Cheap wireless broadband in the US.
Sorry for me that just doesn't cut it. I am not saying that Google is evil incarnate but judging them by their ideal of "Don't be Evil" I just can not equate the two.
On the plus side they haven't turned in any Bloggers I know of to the Chinese government.
"Techies are known for a negative attitude toward advertising. I know I always block all ads on every site. If I see an ad, I automatically right-click and block it. If an advertiser does manage to get my attention after all, I am going to hate him so much for it that I wouldn't buy the product no matter how good it was or how much I wanted it."
Then are you paying for a Slashdot subscription?
I block ads also but I understand that they put the food on the table and provide for hosting space and bandwidth.
Slashdot and sites like it can not live without some kind of review paying the bills.
Ads are not in themselves evil or even all that bad. The problem with ads is that they are using animation and pop overs. I don't think people really hate most Google ads since they are just simple text.
You can hate ads all you want but if everybody that likes this kind of content blocks them then this kind of content will not be available. At least not for free.
So we have the Webkit family.
The Gekko family.
Opera.
and the IE family of browsers.
All this would be great if they would all follow the standards!
Okay it would be great if IE followed the standards instead of making them up as they go. IE7 is better but far from perfect.
I wounder if there is any chance that Firefox will move to Webkit in the future? I know it is unlikely but one does wonder.
"2) Figure out how to bypass ad blockers, flash blockers, hosts files"
2a) Tick off your users so they go someplace else.
It is a hard nut to crack. I still think part of the problem is using doubleclick but then that is just me. So many ads on double click are so bad I just *.doubleclick.* in my adblocker.
The church of RMS probably does have something to with it. Really is a shame because a lot of people on Slashdot buy a lot of software and hardware. I think part of Slashdot's problem comes from using Doubleclick to serve adds. What Slashdot user doesn't have *.doubleclick.net* in their ad blocker?
Slashdot is an extremely popular website with great demographics. It should be a huge money maker but it probably under performs.
It doesn't show up all that well in Alexa because very few people that go to Slashdot use or would use the Alexa toolbar.
It probably doesn't show up all that well with the advertisers because Slashdot readers are technically very sophisticated.
What percentage of Slashdot users are blocking the ads on Slashdot? 80%? Slashdot should be the "Myspace" of the technical crowd. Heck it had the friends list long before Myspace was around. We have our Journals "aka" blogs so yea it is a little Myspace full of bright people with money to spend. But it doesn't make that much money. Slashdot should be worth many millions but it isn't. The real problem isn't Alexa but how can Slashdot live up to it's potental for that evil word. Profit. After all I am sure the Slashdot crew would like to make the big bucks.
Actually the US did find small stock piles of gas agents and one centrifuge that is used to enrich uranium. Not the massive infrastructure that was claimed to be sure but that statement that NO WMD where found is also false. The claim is that the gas agents where miss placed when the Iraqis where destroying them under UN supervision.
I know that I will get flamed for this but it is the truth.
For closed captioning it is called a stenomachine.
I would say that Steno machines predate even those.
A good court-reporter can "write" on a stenomachine at more than 240 WPM. Yes that is word per minute.
The only down side is it takes years to learn how to write well.
It depends. In a college I can see the value/fun of LUGs. Outside not so much anymore. Linux has become more mainstream and the Internet really has done a job on this kind of get together. Kind of like user groups in general I don't know if they have much value. It is kind of sad in a way. Local BBS and user groups where local. Now that we have the internet fewer and fewer local groups seem to be thrive. Like the death of computer magazines I think we are getting exposed to fewer and fewer new ideas. We seek out those that fit with what we know. That is why you have "Computer Experts" that think that Windows is the Alpha and Omega of computers. They know nothing about Macs, Linux, or even that there are computers bigger than PCs or maybe a server.
I would think that render farms would be cranking out frames or would be in sleep mode with little to nothing in between.
Of course that is just the logical way they should work which means that it is probably wrong.
Actually I was agreeing with you. If you read what wrote I said that was correct for most servers. However with XEN I wonder how the cpu loads will lock in the future.
"This is a very important special case (unless you somehow have a steady workload 24/7, which I think would be highly atypical)"
Yes for most servers but for say Rendering farms or HPC clusters "I will not use b word" it could be very typical.
In the low end server market I wounder how the new 45 Watt Athlon's do. For a small servers you don't need "server" class cpu and those low power Athlons look like they could make some pretty nice 1U systems.
"Yeah I've always felt that solar panels are similar enough to ICs that the same thing should happen to costs "
But and this is a big but.
The reason ICs get cheaper and cheaper is because they get smaller and smaller!
That will not work with SolarCells. You get x amount of power from x amount of surface.
They can not follow Moore's law because they different. On the plus side some of the the technology used in making ICs and LCD panel do carry over and help to bring down the cost.
Actually TVs and Radios quickly became pieces of fine furniture. They took the place of the Hearth in peoples homes.
I have a computer room in my house and a server. There are more computers than people in my home.
But I have seen people get laptops time and time again because they can use them then put them away.
"When all the average Joe had to do was insert a dollar to get back $10 or $20, as in *no* game play at all, that's not "luck", that's "a stupid idiot who thinks he can rip off a casino"."
You know this kind of reminds me of the Baseball strike a few years back.
You had the millionaire players complaining that the billionaire owners where greedy on the flip side you had the billionaire owners complaining about the spoiled millionaire players.
So you have the Casinos that do everything to exploit peoples greed, addictive personalities, and or other vices complaining that they got ripped off.
Yea if you put in 1$ and then instantly cash out for $10 that is pretty immoral. But then just how moral are the Casinos? The ones I saw offered you free drinks if you where playing, had not clocks on the gaming floor, and pretty much made it impossible to leave your room without going by a slot machine.
I thought getting more money out of a slot machine than you put in was the whole point of playing the slots.
I do think part of it is space.
Computers have never really fit into home decor. Laptops allow "normal people" to get out there computer and do work then put it away.
I did read the article. That is why I quoited that part of it.
Notice the title of my post.
"Could the PS3 be part of the problem?"
It wasn't "The PS3 is the problem."
Or "It is all the PS3"s fault!"
They do seem to have some issues with the 360 as well. Not really surprising since it is also multi-threaded but not as asymmetrical as the PS3 is.
Epic has x Developers working on the UE3 engine. Back in the good old days porting form the PC to the XBox was simple and then porting to the PS2 was harder.
How it would seem that porting to the 360 is difficult and porting to the PS3 is even more difficult.
If you have X people to do the work and the work got a lot harder then you are going to miss deadlines.
Not I am not kidding but the PS3's programing model looks like a real bear to deal with I saw these comments in the article.
"Epic once again supposedly missed a deadline for an Engine Silicon Knights was going to use on a PLAYSTATION 3 game. Epic missed this deadline by six-months. A functional UE3 for the PS3 was supposed to be delivered by February 2007. It wasn't.
According to SK, the Engine apparently caused the game to "slow down significantly" due to lengthly load times and "memory-spikes" during loading. Epic apparently had known about this problem with the Unreal Engine since 2004 and promised a solution by 2005. It never came. "
I am not a big console gamer but didn't I hear that many of the "Hot must get" titles for the PS3 will not be out until March 08?
I have heard on Slashdot time and time again that the PS3 programing model will not be a problem because everybody will use game engines that will deal with it for you. Seems like the game engines are having some issues now.
Yea but I have seem some sites that require ActiveX support. I think it may be possible to hack FireFox to use ActiveX but frankly I like to keep Firefox free of that stuff and only switch to IE when I have no choice. I feel that is the most secure way of doing things.