If Ellen Feiss can tell the difference, then improvements to the product are judged to have been adequately substantial on the basis of testing that the likelihood of any other user on earth causing the system to eat their paper may be considered effectively nil.
Now if only it didn't have a name that looks as if it should be pronounceable only in select African tribal langauges, I could get up the courage to ask a salesperson at the next electronics shop I visit if they're going to carry it.
I mean the least they could do in this day and age of barely literate slashdotters is throw us a hyphen for clarity's sake.
I bet that HardOCP could have let the "lawsuit" slide and an out of court settlement would have happened, if anything. Now there WILL be a messy legal battle.
Well of course they could have settled on this attrocious claim. And that might perhaps be judged the reasonable thing to do, if concessions to outrageous litigiousness simply because it's litigious are to be the expectation of private bodies in our society. But as of now, many of us still value due process of law over concession to threat. And so be it, that due process of law take its course here.
I'm starting to think we need a new version of "first post" relating specifically to the fact of being the first person in any given gaming story to link the appropriate penny arcade comic. The competition is fierce.
would it be possible to make an optical mouse that didn't need any surface. A sensor with a focus of more than 2mm that could make it work like a normal mouse, but in the air... Is this possible or would some sort of auto focus introduce to much lag to make it usable for normal circumstances (not gaming).
Me, I demand to be made able to use the NES light gun for powerpoint presentations.
And even just for everyday use on the desktop, for most people presumably resting their hand on a mouse is generally preferable to having to hold one in mid air.
Penn State University and the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music intend to offer free Napster subscriptions to thousands of students in coming months. These are just pilot programs, and Roxio granted big discounts that will keep profits negligible at best, say insiders. But the hope is that the students will become paying customers for years to come. "Smart," says Kenswill.
A college endorsing and paying for a private entertainment service of this sort? This is a school of music, but billing Napster as academic resource seems a little questionable. Unless I miss my guess, Napster's unlikely to have deals with the world's great bastions of classical music performance. Another example of an academic institution adopting a policy of private endorsement.
I am furthermore of the opinion that creativity has somewhat been drained from video games as realism has taken over as the criterion for quality. Not always, but often. The overall objective "let's make it like real life" doesn't imply the necessity for creative vision in the same way that "let's make it fun" does. Photographic realism doesn't necessitate creativity in the same way that an empty pallete does. And the time of ultra-low resolution pixel-art was the epitome of the empty palette for video game development.
Yes, modern games involve a creative process of many times the scale of original games like space invaders.
But these original games, I think, involved a much more precise attention to the most basic of human aesthetic needs and interface requirements than modern ones. That's because they were working through a much deeper level of abstraction. When control along two dimensions is the sole source of interactivity within the game, the honing of that dynamic to perfection is absolutely critical. When a character consists of only 40 pixels, the significance of each of those pixels becomes tangible.
Also in question is WHY it is that photo-realism is necessary to the gratification involved in video gaming. For whatever reason, whether it can be explained or not, the Dragon Warrior character of Nintendo fame had as great significance to me, at that time, as modern characters do in our time. Even any given higher level enemy ship I'd fight in Parsec on the TI 99/4A would become serious dinner conversation with my fellow players, among family and friends. So I know I'm not at all unique in that. I know that others experienced an appreciable level of immersion in those days. Can that be easily explained? I'm not sure, but there's no question that it was the case.
And so perhaps the classic video games have in retrospect some of the qualities of something like very early film, where every variable in the product's limited resources gained momentus significance, and attention to their refinement perfected their use.
Some level of added insurance would be provided by simply not allowing those selecting a landing side to see the side on which the coin begins. If the flip is being done by a third party, of course, there's the danger that there's collusion between the third party and one of the participants prior to the toss, even for a 1% better chance in the throw, but we still have a better chance of non-tampering and non-bias as a result. And regardless, even in the worst case scenario, where the participants know the side on which the flip is beginning, we only have a 1% statistical advantage to the one side. Furthermore, a non-level, somwhat randomly varied surface onto which the coin is tossed, rather than a plane, will add another randomising factor.
It being their business, they'd like to produce their own online music DRM scheme and get paid royalties for it. At the same time, they are not a manufacturer of devices which will be able to provide a presence for the format on the market or begin its popularisation. Furthermore, the most extremely popular and well liked online music distribution platforms already use existing formats. I doubt Apple is likely to change over to a third party licensed format. Understanding this, how can this possibly be feasible?
Anyone else here not give a crap about self-congratulatory multi-hour commercials? Lord of the Rings was a great movie... as were a number of others that came out this year. I've just got no interest in what a select group of voters thinks about a film.
It's a bit circular, the logic. The Oscars are a valued commodity, whether or not we personally think they mean anything. Because they're valued, we want to see the folks we're interested in receive them. Because we care that the folks we're interested in receive them, they're a valued commodity.
Having said that, I didn't watch the Oscars. But, again, I did wish to see Peter Jackson and LoTR receive them, as Peter Jackson lives in a world where they are valued.
A victory for geeky fantasy culture, some might say. But I think if it really is that, it can only be because high fantasy of this sort just isn't specifically geek anymore at all. Some people still persist in categorising fantasy mythoi and this kind of thing as nerdy, geeky stuff, but I think the term is losing its usefulness. Geek seems to imply something freakish or countercultural, and this just isn't. This is as maintstream as culture gets. It's popular with everyone. Certainly, there's greater attention to it among self-identifying geeks, but the fact is that News For Nerds is in cases like this now really just News For Everyone. There's no meaningful distinction. Being very seriously interested in high fantasy really no longer means anything regarding one's status in society. The pen and paper D&D generation grew up and now are urban professionals. And furthermore, high fantasy is on the screen as possibly the most famously beloved movie of our generation.
The production values of modern commercials have sort of outmoded the other stuff they show between them. Watching the other stuff is kind of nostalgic. But it just isn't impressive enough to be bothered with.
To respond to those who are making the slippery slope contention, I respond, so what. The slippery slope argument seems to be...
"what if in the near future, are new computers boot with an active wifi ap built in!"
That's obviously not dealing with the issue at hand, which is a wifi chipset, but without the necessary hardware built in, but it seems to be popular, so to address that...
There seems to be at least one fairly simple solution to this. So incredibly simple that I feel silly proposing it, but,
Why is it oh so insecure for our new computers, hypothetically, to boot with integrated wifi...by default disabled in the BIOS? What danger is there? If Grandma before booting her computer plays with the jumpers on her motherboard or goes into her BIOS to change the setting, she'll be open to haxors?
Yeah, wifi is in most cases inherently less secure than plain ol' RJ45, but I tend to think disabled but integrated wifi is a pretty slim threat. Your computer's open to hacking if someone gets into your office and changes a setting in your BIOS. If malicious hackers are fiddling around in your BIOS, you've got bigger problems.
I think you're right, I'd rather just buy the DVD than deal with FoxVision
This is a common question regarding musicians, but not as common a one when applied to shows:
Can anyone inform on which better profits the original creators: DVD sales or a station picking up reruns? I realise this is perhaps oversimplistic, and if it is, please expand as necessary on how so.
I'm completely oblivious to how financial compensation and royalties to the artists are paid in each of these cases, and oblivious to finance in general for that matter. But obviously if the various routes to the episodes are all the same to me, I'd like to know which is best for the artists in the end.
The best way to incorporate this technology in a consumer-oriented music distribution would be to enclose it in a larger plastic enclosure with an interface to the player. Something like this [geocities.com], perhaps?
I worked as an Assistant Deputy Returning Officer in the Toronto, Canada Municipal election a few years ago and I think the method used is a good one. Rather than an X, a line is drawn by the voter across a broken arrow pointing to the name of the candidate in a list. It's then processed by a voting machine. Only a complete idiot could fail so badly to complete this line with the provided felt tip writing instrument that the machine can't detect a mark. Hard to screw up, for voter or machine.
As an irrelevant point of interest, in the riding for which I called in the vote to election headquarters, a transvestite candidate, Enza Supermodel, whose slogan was "A Super City Needs a Supermodel" received a non-trivial 3% of the vote. I love Canada.
This is what spurred ATI into developing the Rage Pro and later Rage 128 chipsets in the late 1990's
Given that ATI was already in the 3D chipset biz, I don't think it makes sense to say it was Nvidia or Voodoo who gave them the idea.
I think the first time I remember reading ATI and 3D chips mentioned in the same sentence was in the big chunky December 1995 issue of PC Gamer, reporting on the Rage chip. I never owned one. I later got a Virge, because I'm a moron.
This test and Apple's own are opposite in principle. This one uses some of the most popular dual-platform applications on the market in each software category.
Apple's uses abstract CPU benchmarks.
Which is more worthwhile? Well, if you want to see the performance that Joe MacUser will actually be getting out of the applications he uses (such as can be found on both platforms), the PC World benchmark just makes more sense. Yeah, Premier is at the end of its lifespan. But your average mac user, frankly, does NOT LIKE CHANGE. So it's not unrealistic to include this in a "real world" benchmark, if this is to be considered such.
Apple's test reflects what performance I will get if I use my Mac exclusively to run abstract CPU speed tests. PCWorld's benchmark reflects what performance Joe MacUser will be getting out of some of the most popular apps out there (which, remember, must be dual-platform to be useful for this benchmark).
Slashdot Mirror
Would that be for breakfast, lunch or dinner? Would you serve him with a side salad?
I would not serve him here or there
I would not serve him anywhere
I would not serve the Great I Am
That big bad God of Abraham
Creating a market for tv's imported from countries that don't have the restrictions and a black market for chipping sets.
Right. Next step: region-encoded AV input-output standards compliance for TVs and displays.
I think this sort of thing should demand what I call the Ellen Feiss Comparative Usability Test.
If Ellen Feiss can tell the difference, then improvements to the product are judged to have been adequately substantial on the basis of testing that the likelihood of any other user on earth causing the system to eat their paper may be considered effectively nil.
Now if only it didn't have a name that looks as if it should be pronounceable only in select African tribal langauges, I could get up the courage to ask a salesperson at the next electronics shop I visit if they're going to carry it.
I mean the least they could do in this day and age of barely literate slashdotters is throw us a hyphen for clarity's sake.
Look at their demonstration photo and ask yourself. Lens the size of the tip of its developer's finger?
Or developer with a finger...the size of a camera's lens!
You be the judge.
This is the last time I fall for the grotesquely-oversized-finger demonstration trick. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...
You know what the best thing about Duke Nukem Forever's release will be?
No more Duke Nukem Forever jokes.
Think of the kittens....
I bet that HardOCP could have let the "lawsuit" slide and an out of court settlement would have happened, if anything. Now there WILL be a messy legal battle.
Well of course they could have settled on this attrocious claim. And that might perhaps be judged the reasonable thing to do, if concessions to outrageous litigiousness simply because it's litigious are to be the expectation of private bodies in our society. But as of now, many of us still value due process of law over concession to threat. And so be it, that due process of law take its course here.
I'm starting to think we need a new version of "first post" relating specifically to the fact of being the first person in any given gaming story to link the appropriate penny arcade comic. The competition is fierce.
would it be possible to make an optical mouse that didn't need any surface. A sensor with a focus of more than 2mm that could make it work like a normal mouse, but in the air... Is this possible or would some sort of auto focus introduce to much lag to make it usable for normal circumstances (not gaming).
Me, I demand to be made able to use the NES light gun for powerpoint presentations.
(aim)
*CLICK*
(aim)
*CLICK*
And even just for everyday use on the desktop, for most people presumably resting their hand on a mouse is generally preferable to having to hold one in mid air.
From the article:
Penn State University and the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music intend to offer free Napster subscriptions to thousands of students in coming months. These are just pilot programs, and Roxio granted big discounts that will keep profits negligible at best, say insiders. But the hope is that the students will become paying customers for years to come. "Smart," says Kenswill.
A college endorsing and paying for a private entertainment service of this sort? This is a school of music, but billing Napster as academic resource seems a little questionable. Unless I miss my guess, Napster's unlikely to have deals with the world's great bastions of classical music performance. Another example of an academic institution adopting a policy of private endorsement.
I am furthermore of the opinion that creativity has somewhat been drained from video games as realism has taken over as the criterion for quality. Not always, but often. The overall objective "let's make it like real life" doesn't imply the necessity for creative vision in the same way that "let's make it fun" does. Photographic realism doesn't necessitate creativity in the same way that an empty pallete does. And the time of ultra-low resolution pixel-art was the epitome of the empty palette for video game development.
Yes, modern games involve a creative process of many times the scale of original games like space invaders.
But these original games, I think, involved a much more precise attention to the most basic of human aesthetic needs and interface requirements than modern ones. That's because they were working through a much deeper level of abstraction. When control along two dimensions is the sole source of interactivity within the game, the honing of that dynamic to perfection is absolutely critical. When a character consists of only 40 pixels, the significance of each of those pixels becomes tangible.
Also in question is WHY it is that photo-realism is necessary to the gratification involved in video gaming. For whatever reason, whether it can be explained or not, the Dragon Warrior character of Nintendo fame had as great significance to me, at that time, as modern characters do in our time. Even any given higher level enemy ship I'd fight in Parsec on the TI 99/4A would become serious dinner conversation with my fellow players, among family and friends. So I know I'm not at all unique in that. I know that others experienced an appreciable level of immersion in those days. Can that be easily explained? I'm not sure, but there's no question that it was the case.
And so perhaps the classic video games have in retrospect some of the qualities of something like very early film, where every variable in the product's limited resources gained momentus significance, and attention to their refinement perfected their use.
Some level of added insurance would be provided by simply not allowing those selecting a landing side to see the side on which the coin begins. If the flip is being done by a third party, of course, there's the danger that there's collusion between the third party and one of the participants prior to the toss, even for a 1% better chance in the throw, but we still have a better chance of non-tampering and non-bias as a result. And regardless, even in the worst case scenario, where the participants know the side on which the flip is beginning, we only have a 1% statistical advantage to the one side. Furthermore, a non-level, somwhat randomly varied surface onto which the coin is tossed, rather than a plane, will add another randomising factor.
It being their business, they'd like to produce their own online music DRM scheme and get paid royalties for it. At the same time, they are not a manufacturer of devices which will be able to provide a presence for the format on the market or begin its popularisation. Furthermore, the most extremely popular and well liked online music distribution platforms already use existing formats. I doubt Apple is likely to change over to a third party licensed format. Understanding this, how can this possibly be feasible?
Anyone else here not give a crap about self-congratulatory multi-hour commercials? Lord of the Rings was a great movie ... as were a number of others that came out this year. I've just got no interest in what a select group of voters thinks about a film.
It's a bit circular, the logic. The Oscars are a valued commodity, whether or not we personally think they mean anything. Because they're valued, we want to see the folks we're interested in receive them. Because we care that the folks we're interested in receive them, they're a valued commodity.
Having said that, I didn't watch the Oscars. But, again, I did wish to see Peter Jackson and LoTR receive them, as Peter Jackson lives in a world where they are valued.
A victory for geeky fantasy culture, some might say. But I think if it really is that, it can only be because high fantasy of this sort just isn't specifically geek anymore at all. Some people still persist in categorising fantasy mythoi and this kind of thing as nerdy, geeky stuff, but I think the term is losing its usefulness. Geek seems to imply something freakish or countercultural, and this just isn't. This is as maintstream as culture gets. It's popular with everyone. Certainly, there's greater attention to it among self-identifying geeks, but the fact is that News For Nerds is in cases like this now really just News For Everyone. There's no meaningful distinction. Being very seriously interested in high fantasy really no longer means anything regarding one's status in society. The pen and paper D&D generation grew up and now are urban professionals. And furthermore, high fantasy is on the screen as possibly the most famously beloved movie of our generation.
Whither geek?
The production values of modern commercials have sort of outmoded the other stuff they show between them. Watching the other stuff is kind of nostalgic. But it just isn't impressive enough to be bothered with.
Who won the Superbowl this year?
I think it was Budweiser and Pepsi.
The prototype proves one thing:
They can demonstrate a nice PC case mod.
They have NOT demonstrated the ability to for example produce peripherals. They are using off the shelf logitech peripherals, as demonstrated in their screenshots.
And I could easily be wrong, but the Phantom logo on that logitech keyboard just looks photoshopped on to me.
Well, they refer to it as a "functional parody", so I'm thinking that at least to some extent this isn't supposed to be taken seriously.
To respond to those who are making the slippery slope contention, I respond, so what. The slippery slope argument seems to be...
"what if in the near future, are new computers boot with an active wifi ap built in!"
That's obviously not dealing with the issue at hand, which is a wifi chipset, but without the necessary hardware built in, but it seems to be popular, so to address that...
There seems to be at least one fairly simple solution to this. So incredibly simple that I feel silly proposing it, but,
Why is it oh so insecure for our new computers, hypothetically, to boot with integrated wifi...by default disabled in the BIOS? What danger is there? If Grandma before booting her computer plays with the jumpers on her motherboard or goes into her BIOS to change the setting, she'll be open to haxors?
Yeah, wifi is in most cases inherently less secure than plain ol' RJ45, but I tend to think disabled but integrated wifi is a pretty slim threat. Your computer's open to hacking if someone gets into your office and changes a setting in your BIOS. If malicious hackers are fiddling around in your BIOS, you've got bigger problems.
I think you're right, I'd rather just buy the DVD than deal with FoxVision
This is a common question regarding musicians, but not as common a one when applied to shows:
Can anyone inform on which better profits the original creators: DVD sales or a station picking up reruns? I realise this is perhaps oversimplistic, and if it is, please expand as necessary on how so.
I'm completely oblivious to how financial compensation and royalties to the artists are paid in each of these cases, and oblivious to finance in general for that matter. But obviously if the various routes to the episodes are all the same to me, I'd like to know which is best for the artists in the end.
The best way to incorporate this technology in a consumer-oriented music distribution would be to enclose it in a larger plastic enclosure with an interface to the player. Something like this [geocities.com], perhaps?
Archive.org cache and Google cache of the slashdotted geocities site. Most of the pics are absent, but oh well.
I worked as an Assistant Deputy Returning Officer in the Toronto, Canada Municipal election a few years ago and I think the method used is a good one. Rather than an X, a line is drawn by the voter across a broken arrow pointing to the name of the candidate in a list. It's then processed by a voting machine. Only a complete idiot could fail so badly to complete this line with the provided felt tip writing instrument that the machine can't detect a mark. Hard to screw up, for voter or machine.
As an irrelevant point of interest, in the riding for which I called in the vote to election headquarters, a transvestite candidate, Enza Supermodel, whose slogan was "A Super City Needs a Supermodel" received a non-trivial 3% of the vote. I love Canada.
This is what spurred ATI into developing the Rage Pro and later Rage 128 chipsets in the late 1990's
Given that ATI was already in the 3D chipset biz, I don't think it makes sense to say it was Nvidia or Voodoo who gave them the idea.
I think the first time I remember reading ATI and 3D chips mentioned in the same sentence was in the big chunky December 1995 issue of PC Gamer, reporting on the Rage chip. I never owned one. I later got a Virge, because I'm a moron.
Just to respond to all the virulent rebuttals:
This test and Apple's own are opposite in principle. This one uses some of the most popular dual-platform applications on the market in each software category.
Apple's uses abstract CPU benchmarks.
Which is more worthwhile? Well, if you want to see the performance that Joe MacUser will actually be getting out of the applications he uses (such as can be found on both platforms), the PC World benchmark just makes more sense. Yeah, Premier is at the end of its lifespan. But your average mac user, frankly, does NOT LIKE CHANGE. So it's not unrealistic to include this in a "real world" benchmark, if this is to be considered such.
Apple's test reflects what performance I will get if I use my Mac exclusively to run abstract CPU speed tests. PCWorld's benchmark reflects what performance Joe MacUser will be getting out of some of the most popular apps out there (which, remember, must be dual-platform to be useful for this benchmark).