I had a video card with TV-out several years ago, and in fact most cards seem to come with it standard now.
And if you don't like DivX's artifacts (what few there are now, on a properly encoded movie playing in any decent system), you can always try SVCD. A full movie often fits on 2 CDs, and damned if I can tell the difference from DVD. Added bonus, my DVD player plays em, so I guess that's what you meant by a 'real TV'.
Episode II: Attack of the Clones plays on American paranoia about Mexican immigration with its army of lookalikes marching in lockstep by the tens of thousands. The fact that the soldiers are bred on the planet Kamino --- which sounds like the Spanish word 'camino' --- is a dead giveaway to the bias and bounty hunter Jango Fett even looks Latino
Brin quotes what the Latino community is complaining about, then goes on to say that *normally* he'd consider this PC hysteria, but maybe, just maybe, there's something to it.
I completely lost him at this point. I'm sorry, but 'Kamino' for all we know could have been taken from the old El Caminos. Maybe Lucas was a car buff. And you damn well better believe if he never hired Latino actors for his movies, the shit would hit the fan. Considering that Boba Fett is widely considered by fans to be one of the 'coolest' Star Wars characters, I don't quite see how this is a bad thing for Latinos.
You might as well say that Lucas has a thing against car buffs with dark hair - your argument would hold about as much water.
And God forbid he ever use characters with any accents again (the other common 'racism' complaint of late with Star Wars). Know what? By making a character sound/look/act different, that's is PRECISELY what makes them alien. That's not racism, that's human nature. Trek has been doing this for decades now (hordes and hordes of alien races who look *similar* to us, but maybe with a different skin color), and I don't see any mass outcry against it. You have to make aliens different somehow, or else they wouldn't be.. alien. Accented English is a very effective medium for this - human beings of the same species speak in different accents, why wouldn't different species? Of course, the odds of them speaking the same language at all are pretty slim, but you have to draw the line somewhere unless you want the next Star Wars (now with no racial stereotypes!) to look like a foreign film filled with subtitles.
Methinks Mr. Brin, much as I love most of his writing, wants very badly to jump on the bash Lucas bandwagon. All he's done is re-hash the same tired criticisms of Lucas and Star Wars, wrapped in bigger words and more obscure concepts.
From what I've read about the specifics of the case, and the court's decisions so far, your idea is akin to trying to sue Ford because all of their trucks are mysteriously trespassing on your driveway.
Add to this the Vic20 and Sega Master System. Of course, the connector itself has been used on a whole horde of things (has it really been that long since serial mice?:), but in the case of these game units/early PCs, the PINOUTS are the same - or at least similar enough that you can use them on different machines with little problem.
Off the top of my head, the Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, early Macintosh mice... the list goes on and on for the venerable Dsub9 (or however the hell it's worded).
No, but a PS game *is* designed to be read from the platform it's intended to be run on - namely a Playstation. The issue with burning Playstation games has little to do with READING the data, it's with WRITING it.
It takes code written for one set of software and produces a result on an entirely different one. It's all semantics, and to most people (remember, not everyone in the world is a computer expert), this is about as good an explanation as they'll understand. WINE is a perfect example - try to explain to a non-geek just what the acronym stands for, and why. Most people respond to me with 'what's the diff?':)
The camera needs to be as close to the screen as possible, otherwise when you are talking to a girl, it will look to her like you are looking at her breasts.
I thought this was the normal male method of talking to women.
Same guy who bought an HDTV capable set before there were any HDTV signals (hell, for all I know, there STILL aren't any:)
On a related note, Atari once produced more cartridges for a couple of their games (Pac-Man and E.T.) than existed systems at the time. Can't play a game on a non-existant system, now can we?
Moral is: some people are either very savvy, or very stupid. Corporations only moreso.
They're called 'girlfriends'. These are women who will actually spend time with you WITHOUT you paying them in advance (the bill generally comes later:). Sometimes, they will actually leave the room you're in, and even rarer, will go somewhere like another city, so you can't be in physical contact with them. Hence the use of phone sex by real couples.
Call a random girl, say it is a bad number and send the end-of-connection video then black screen, she thinks the call is over, but you're still behind the cam!
Chances are, just like a regular phone, she'd hang up on her end too - or do you know women who, upon hearing a phone go 'click', just put it down whereever they are, thus tying up their phone line?
Basically, it's something along the lines of an emulator that allows the original LucasArts point and click games to run under modern Windows. I've played Sam n Max and Day of the Tentacle for hours, and compared to the 486 sitting next to me, it's identical. Support for other games is in the works.
The absolute coolest part is, it uses your (presumedly) modern sound card's MIDI - the intro to Sam n Max is AMAZING on my SBLive compared to the old SB16 - and it also offers anti-aliased graphics if you so choose. Sure, the jaggies are nice for a nostalgic feel, but these games look simply amazing with the AA effects turned on.
I really can't recommend this enough for anyone who wants to play the old LucasArts games on anything approaching a modern system.
Why do people think that it is possible to make bits uncopyable?
Last I checked, it's STILL impossible for most people (if not all) to copy Playstation games 100%, due to bad/corrupt/whatever data burnt to the CD, which home cd burners can't deal with. Yes, modchipping gets around this little problem, but the fact remains: for all intents and purposes, someone HAS created uncopyable bits - at least as far as consumers are concerned.
Now, as far as doing something like this with bits that a CD-ROM drive can actually read and do something meaningful with... that's a whole nother ball of wax.
Mix and matching units isn't the way to go, for instance, how many times further is the Voyager from the sun than us?... (12 light hours compaired to 8 light mins, is more complecated than 15 uLightYear compaired to 1368uLightYear, where in the latter, it can be seen that it is approx 100 times further.)
Most people educated past grade 2 these days are taught that there are 60 minutes in an hour, and have no trouble working these sorts of figures out.
The biggest reason *I* like to see light-hours/minutes/etc is that it's actually meaningful. 871 micro-Light Years is some arbitrary figure. 11 light minutes means that light (a really, really fast thing) takes 11 minutes to travel that distance. And if I want to communicate with a spacecraft that's 12 light hours out.. well, I won't be getting my response back until this time tomorrow. Things like that.
instead of biology-chemistry-physics, we should teach physics-chemistry-biology.
While I sort of agree with this, and certainly once people are at the University level, there's a big reason why we don't: familiarity.
Most any kid can picture his dog (biology). He can maybe think about what happens when the dog eats (chemistry). There's almost no way he can conceive of what the food is made of, on a level so small it has to be described only with mathematics (physics). Even when talking about classical physics, I don't care how much of a science geek you are - balls rolling down planes are NOT exciting. Physics tends to be either highly math focussed (and a lot of memorization), or so abstract that most people don't even grasp the basics (quantum physics, anyone?).
Biology is an easy course to teach, because it deals with every day occurences. Sure, adding vinegar to baking soda looks cool, but without the biological effects, try explaining to a 10 year old why this should be important to him/her. Why there are so many mosquitoes during rainy years is a lot more relevant, and approachable, to the average student.
Personally, I think we really need to return to a more traditional "Science" type of course, with less division between the fields. I'll never forget the day in chem lab when it occured to me that everything we talked about in physics and bio were all connected - it was an epiphany I'll never be able to top. Yet all through school, it was never really explained that all of this stuff is not only related, but basically THE SAME THING.
Same goes for math (esp. algebra). You simply cannot do physics without it, nor chem, nor bio (unless we're talking the ubiquitous worm disection that really teaches nothing). The worst mistake we ever make in school is the old "this isn't english class, so you can't deduct marks for spelling mistakes". I've seen people get away with horrendous mathematical errors (even in University) because "this isn't a math course".
Abstract concepts like algebra are simply too fundamental for darn near everything, most peope don't even realize they're using it almost every day. Unfortunately, testing understanding of abstracts isn't as easy as checking memorization and regurgitation skills - hence those dozens and hundreds of formulae that almost no one remembers 5 minutes after the final exam.
Slashdot Mirror
Something tells me you don't need too powerful of search tools when you're looking for a site called "GodFuckingDammit.com".
Most folk looking for that probably also try "go to hell" in google (try it, it's fun, but don't forget to include the quotes).
Yeah, but we all know that GNU's Not Unix, WINE Is Not an Emulator, and PHP Hypertext Protocol exists..
As far as I know, no one has yet figured out how to pirate the Cube. Perhaps you could have one of these merchants email me? :)
the inability to play them on a real TV
I had a video card with TV-out several years ago, and in fact most cards seem to come with it standard now.
And if you don't like DivX's artifacts (what few there are now, on a properly encoded movie playing in any decent system), you can always try SVCD. A full movie often fits on 2 CDs, and damned if I can tell the difference from DVD. Added bonus, my DVD player plays em, so I guess that's what you meant by a 'real TV'.
Episode II: Attack of the Clones plays on American paranoia about Mexican immigration with its army of lookalikes marching in lockstep by the tens of thousands. The fact that the soldiers are bred on the planet Kamino --- which sounds like the Spanish word 'camino' --- is a dead giveaway to the bias and bounty hunter Jango Fett even looks Latino
Brin quotes what the Latino community is complaining about, then goes on to say that *normally* he'd consider this PC hysteria, but maybe, just maybe, there's something to it.
I completely lost him at this point. I'm sorry, but 'Kamino' for all we know could have been taken from the old El Caminos. Maybe Lucas was a car buff. And you damn well better believe if he never hired Latino actors for his movies, the shit would hit the fan. Considering that Boba Fett is widely considered by fans to be one of the 'coolest' Star Wars characters, I don't quite see how this is a bad thing for Latinos.
You might as well say that Lucas has a thing against car buffs with dark hair - your argument would hold about as much water.
And God forbid he ever use characters with any accents again (the other common 'racism' complaint of late with Star Wars). Know what? By making a character sound/look/act different, that's is PRECISELY what makes them alien. That's not racism, that's human nature. Trek has been doing this for decades now (hordes and hordes of alien races who look *similar* to us, but maybe with a different skin color), and I don't see any mass outcry against it. You have to make aliens different somehow, or else they wouldn't be.. alien. Accented English is a very effective medium for this - human beings of the same species speak in different accents, why wouldn't different species? Of course, the odds of them speaking the same language at all are pretty slim, but you have to draw the line somewhere unless you want the next Star Wars (now with no racial stereotypes!) to look like a foreign film filled with subtitles.
Methinks Mr. Brin, much as I love most of his writing, wants very badly to jump on the bash Lucas bandwagon. All he's done is re-hash the same tired criticisms of Lucas and Star Wars, wrapped in bigger words and more obscure concepts.
Actually, Dell (or Compaq, can't remember) actually had a help topic on this in their FAQ.
Q: where is the 'any' key?
A: there is no 'any' key. 'Press any key' means to hit any key on your keyboard.
Or something to that effect.
From what I've read about the specifics of the case, and the court's decisions so far, your idea is akin to trying to sue Ford because all of their trucks are mysteriously trespassing on your driveway.
Now we just need computers that will refuse to boot windows.
Well, yep. Apple made them too...
So did most PC manufacturers, if my experiences at work are any indication.
If you really do have a 7800 you're giving me away, lemme know and I'll email you my mailing address.
Any husband who would answer otherwise seriously lacks intelligence.
No, just lacks any sense of self-esteem. Keeping a supposedly less intelligent wife around is the favorite ego boost of below average men.
What these geniuses haven't figured out is, most women can pretend to be stupid. Many do it all the time just so they don't intimidate their husbands.
Add to this the Vic20 and Sega Master System. Of course, the connector itself has been used on a whole horde of things (has it really been that long since serial mice? :), but in the case of these game units/early PCs, the PINOUTS are the same - or at least similar enough that you can use them on different machines with little problem.
Off the top of my head, the Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, early Macintosh mice... the list goes on and on for the venerable Dsub9 (or however the hell it's worded).
Tron was a box office bomb.
Most good movies are.
No, but a PS game *is* designed to be read from the platform it's intended to be run on - namely a Playstation. The issue with burning Playstation games has little to do with READING the data, it's with WRITING it.
It takes code written for one set of software and produces a result on an entirely different one. It's all semantics, and to most people (remember, not everyone in the world is a computer expert), this is about as good an explanation as they'll understand. WINE is a perfect example - try to explain to a non-geek just what the acronym stands for, and why. Most people respond to me with 'what's the diff?' :)
The camera needs to be as close to the screen as possible, otherwise when you are talking to a girl, it will look to her like you are looking at her breasts.
I thought this was the normal male method of talking to women.
Same guy who bought an HDTV capable set before there were any HDTV signals (hell, for all I know, there STILL aren't any :)
On a related note, Atari once produced more cartridges for a couple of their games (Pac-Man and E.T.) than existed systems at the time. Can't play a game on a non-existant system, now can we?
Moral is: some people are either very savvy, or very stupid. Corporations only moreso.
With who?
:). Sometimes, they will actually leave the room you're in, and even rarer, will go somewhere like another city, so you can't be in physical contact with them. Hence the use of phone sex by real couples.
They're called 'girlfriends'. These are women who will actually spend time with you WITHOUT you paying them in advance (the bill generally comes later
Call a random girl, say it is a bad number and send the end-of-connection video then black screen, she thinks the call is over, but you're still behind the cam!
Chances are, just like a regular phone, she'd hang up on her end too - or do you know women who, upon hearing a phone go 'click', just put it down whereever they are, thus tying up their phone line?
Check this out.
Basically, it's something along the lines of an emulator that allows the original LucasArts point and click games to run under modern Windows. I've played Sam n Max and Day of the Tentacle for hours, and compared to the 486 sitting next to me, it's identical. Support for other games is in the works.
The absolute coolest part is, it uses your (presumedly) modern sound card's MIDI - the intro to Sam n Max is AMAZING on my SBLive compared to the old SB16 - and it also offers anti-aliased graphics if you so choose. Sure, the jaggies are nice for a nostalgic feel, but these games look simply amazing with the AA effects turned on.
I really can't recommend this enough for anyone who wants to play the old LucasArts games on anything approaching a modern system.
Why do people think that it is possible to make bits uncopyable?
Last I checked, it's STILL impossible for most people (if not all) to copy Playstation games 100%, due to bad/corrupt/whatever data burnt to the CD, which home cd burners can't deal with. Yes, modchipping gets around this little problem, but the fact remains: for all intents and purposes, someone HAS created uncopyable bits - at least as far as consumers are concerned.
Now, as far as doing something like this with bits that a CD-ROM drive can actually read and do something meaningful with... that's a whole nother ball of wax.
Mix and matching units isn't the way to go, for instance, how many times further is the Voyager from the sun than us?... (12 light hours compaired to 8 light mins, is more complecated than 15 uLightYear compaired to 1368uLightYear, where in the latter, it can be seen that it is approx 100 times further.)
.. well, I won't be getting my response back until this time tomorrow. Things like that.
Most people educated past grade 2 these days are taught that there are 60 minutes in an hour, and have no trouble working these sorts of figures out.
The biggest reason *I* like to see light-hours/minutes/etc is that it's actually meaningful. 871 micro-Light Years is some arbitrary figure. 11 light minutes means that light (a really, really fast thing) takes 11 minutes to travel that distance. And if I want to communicate with a spacecraft that's 12 light hours out
That's mah dad's shootin' monitor!
.22 :)
Oddly enough, I've actually done this with an old monitor an a
instead of biology-chemistry-physics, we should teach physics-chemistry-biology.
While I sort of agree with this, and certainly once people are at the University level, there's a big reason why we don't: familiarity.
Most any kid can picture his dog (biology). He can maybe think about what happens when the dog eats (chemistry). There's almost no way he can conceive of what the food is made of, on a level so small it has to be described only with mathematics (physics). Even when talking about classical physics, I don't care how much of a science geek you are - balls rolling down planes are NOT exciting. Physics tends to be either highly math focussed (and a lot of memorization), or so abstract that most people don't even grasp the basics (quantum physics, anyone?).
Biology is an easy course to teach, because it deals with every day occurences. Sure, adding vinegar to baking soda looks cool, but without the biological effects, try explaining to a 10 year old why this should be important to him/her. Why there are so many mosquitoes during rainy years is a lot more relevant, and approachable, to the average student.
Personally, I think we really need to return to a more traditional "Science" type of course, with less division between the fields. I'll never forget the day in chem lab when it occured to me that everything we talked about in physics and bio were all connected - it was an epiphany I'll never be able to top. Yet all through school, it was never really explained that all of this stuff is not only related, but basically THE SAME THING.
Same goes for math (esp. algebra). You simply cannot do physics without it, nor chem, nor bio (unless we're talking the ubiquitous worm disection that really teaches nothing). The worst mistake we ever make in school is the old "this isn't english class, so you can't deduct marks for spelling mistakes". I've seen people get away with horrendous mathematical errors (even in University) because "this isn't a math course".
Abstract concepts like algebra are simply too fundamental for darn near everything, most peope don't even realize they're using it almost every day. Unfortunately, testing understanding of abstracts isn't as easy as checking memorization and regurgitation skills - hence those dozens and hundreds of formulae that almost no one remembers 5 minutes after the final exam.
Strangely enough, I'm *from* Winnipeg, and that's where I was talking about :)
There are still a lot of places that ban minors now to get past the smoking ban, but it's mostly pool halls and such... less public outcry.
Peer pressure is much more effective than legislation.
What's next? Laws banning people from talking during a movie? Cruching on popcorn? Getting up to go to the bathroom?