So would the situation have been different if he had gone into the cafe and bought a latte, sat down and browsed the web, and then walked out of the store with his laptop *still* connected and sat down in his car to check his email?
The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example and yet another, this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!
I bought a Dell Inspiron with the WUXGA screen (1920x1200) and was suprised to find not a single dead or stuck pixel. I found one that was dimmer than the rest (and on the edge at that), but was plesently suprised to find a nearly perfect screen. Judging by the returns to Dell (i.e. what shows up in their outlet), there aren't many bad panels showing up on these high resolution panels. I don't think the notebook panel makers are sharing their secrets with the desktop guys. How else to explain all the 19" LCD's with 1280x1024 resolutions?
I think they're ignoring the fact that to be the "next big thing" requires being more than just incrementally better than what it replaces. Bittorrent itself is exponentially better than a FTP or HTTP server when demand is high. And Suprnova works quite well as it is, so I think it will be interesting to see whether Suprnova holds tough if people don't switch to the new technology fast enough.
Jerry: "Excuse me I'd like to return this jacket."
Teller: "Certainly. May I ask why?"
Jerry: "........For spite..."
Teller: "Spite?"
Jerry: "That's right. I don't care for the salesman that sold it to me."
Teller: "I don't think you can return an item for spite."
Jerry: "What do you mean?"
Teller: "Well if there was some problem with the garment. If it were unsatisfactory in some way,then we could do it for you, but I'm afraid spite doesn't fit into any of our conditions for a refund"
Jerry: "That's ridiculous, I want to return it. What's the difference what the reason is."
Teller: "Let me speak with the manager...excuse me.............Bob!"
(walks over to the manager and whispers)
Teller "........spite....."(Manager walks over)
Bob: "What seems to be the problem?"
Jerry : "Well I want to return this jacket and she asked me why and I said for spite and now she won't take it back."
Bob: "That's true. You can't return an item based purely on spite."
Jerry:. "Well So fine then..then I don't want it and then that's why I'm returning it"
What ever happened to just not working when a bad S/N is entered? Not producing garbage output or destroying files, but just not working. If you're going to take the approach of pissing off the user, where's the justification in vandalizing the system to do it? Unless the programmer is trying to invite up-close-and-personal criticism.
The s/n was valid though, since the s/n generator had been reverse engineered as mentioned in the story.
If your release is small enough, a better solution is to do what the people that made Savage used, which is to randomly generate each s/n. That way it's nearly impossible to guess a valid s/n and impossible to reverse engineer it. Doesn't work so well if you're microsoft, but works well for a smaller release.
I remember when Golgotha released their code and game data I was sure that somebody would pick up the torch and create a nice game out of it but nothing significant ever came of it. Considering the amount of press it got in the Linux press I'm sure that people knew about it, so that wasn't an excuse. And although it was still very rough around the edges they did include all the needed code,maps,textures,audio to get a good running start. So why did it fail? From what I could tell somebody ported it to run with OpenGL and there was a lot of discussion on licensing terms, but no real usable results. Maybe the code just sucked, but there was something like 1 1/2 years of commercial effort in the game that should have gone to some good use! It would just be instructive to learn why it failed.
If they had read TFM or played the training missions, they wouldn't be so dumb. But they didn't buy the game, so they feel like they can jump right in and nothing bad can happen because if they get banned, oh well, they can just get another CD-key for free.
Want to clue me in on how to get my free CD-key? Although they did give them out for free they stopped and haven't resumed. I've read that the problem is servers overloaded with players, but how big a problem is that? The worst fate for an online multiplayer game is too few players, not too many.
The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.
Amen! Back before dvd+rw tools came out and all there was were some hacks to cdrecord I tried to buy ProDVD but gave up. As far as I could tell there's no way to actually buy it. When searching the newsgroups all I found were several Schilling rants, several people like me trying to buy it without luck, and finally a patch to an old cdrecord version that didn't require a license. If it was an intelligence test you needed to pass to get the damn license I failed miserably.
Cube A group of people awaken in a strange environment that resembes a maze of cubes. Cost something like $200K Canadian to make and has some great acting.
2010 The little known sequel to 2001 about a joint American-Soviet space expedition sent to Jupiter to learn what happened to the Discovery. Directed by the same guy who did "Outland".
Red Planet Like "Pitch Black" except that the characters think their way out of problems rather than kicking some alien whoop ass. Ok, maybe I just like Carrie-Anne Moss.
I think everyone who loved the movie has, without exception, also read the book.
Interesting you say that because I also read the book and thought it was an example of how to make a great movie out of a rather average book. The only thing missing from the movie that I liked was the "message in pi" at the end, but the other changes I thought actually improved the story while reducing it to screenplay length.
The nice thing about Circuit City is that, at least here in Springfield, they will match prices for Best Buy including rebates. So if something is $30 with a $10 rebate at B'Buy, C.C. will sell it to you for $20 (well, actually for $19, since they price-match by 110%) with no wait for mail-sending.
Uh no, they don't. From Circuit City's site
Our policy applies only to advertised prices. It does not apply to special offers or promotions,
including rebates, free-with-purchase offers and special financing
and they never have either.
What you can do is use CC rebates in addition to price matching (PM) to get great deals, but there isn't a store anywhere that will match a competitors rebates.
I've owned both the FusionHDTV II and the MyHD MDP-120. My short review for those interested:
FusionHDTV: low price and nice playback of HD streams. It has a nice FF function that makes skipping commercials easy. There is also a nice included program for converting a HD transport stream (what the card records to your hard drive) into DVD video. The BIG downside to this card is that it's almost impossible to get a perfect recording of shows because of the software decoding regardless of how fast your computer is. Out of a few dozen shows I tried recording, not one had no errors.
MyHD MDP-120: Downside is that it's expensive and you have to spend even more to get DVI output. Also the warranty is vague at best, so you'll likely be out $300 if the thing breaks. The upside is that the card records shows on just about any box flawlessly. It's got good tuner reception and the software is pretty solid now. It has basic PVR functionality for connecting to titantv and choosing shows.
I am hoping someone resolves the issue of whether gravity travels at the speed of light or near it, or whether gravity travels instantly.
The project name should have been a clue. Einstein's general theory of relativity means that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Another feature is that anything that has energy also has mass. So light can be affected by gravity, which is what this project is all about!
Also, I buy used books. They're cheap and have the exact same content.
So do I, primarily because it's much easier today to find the cheap used books I want than it was 10 years ago.
But a books run is determined by it's hb sales, and that's where the profit is made. For most books there is no profit in a paperback printing. The whole point is to gain readers for the next new book.
So more people buying used means lower profits and fewer books get published. That leads to fewer good books to read. Hence we read less! It might also explain why prices rise. If fewer people are buying the new releases, then a publisher has to charge more to the die hards to recoup costs.
And if you don't think that authors are motivated by money, read Heinlein's Grumbles From The Grave some time.
Last year I got a good deal on about a thousand Asus motherboards. I sold all of them on ebay and pretty much figured that I would have quite a few returned because the buyer damaged it and claimed it was broken. Suprisingly, only about half a dozen got returned and of those 4 actually worked and were resold. Of the two others, one had a mark where the screwdriver had slipped and damaged the PCB and the other had a heatsink fall off the bridge.
Of course maybe a lot of people broke the boards and never returned them, or perhaps sent them to Asus for repair instead of back to me for a refund. But I was still amazed at the low return rate and have to conclude that the buyers were smarter than I gave them credit for. Or maybe it was the line in my auctions that said "NO IDIOTS". Hard to say.
What I can say for sure is that they were all smarter than the extremetech writer.
Never said that minnesota spent all of the sum, and I was even nice enough to provide a link with the breakdown (no subscription needed too!).
But your $100m is quite a ways off nevertheless.
And yes the operating costs are far different. Not only does it cost a lot but it's guaranteed to lose money! Brilliant!
And I didn't say there were no bad commutes in the twin cities. All metro areas have some bad commutes. But even a cursory glance at a map of our area will show how our fine highway system.
The Monorail Song
Lyle Lanley: Y'know, a town with money is like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!
(audience laughs) Homer: Heh heh! Mule.
I guess we deserve what we get when we elected a wrestler, but the light rail boondoggle has been an interesting study in how government spends our money.
We've been debating in MN for almost a decade on how to fund the building of a new baseball stadium for the Twins (remember contraction?), which is estimated to cost $438 million. The debate isn't even to fund the whole cost, only part of it.
Instead we build a choo choo train! Current cost is $712 million, although it was only estimated to cost $444 million. For those unfamiliar with Minnesota, we've got some of the best highway infrastructure in the country and we're about as spread out as a metropolitan area can be, so trains aren't exactly an efficient solution to traffic congestion, especially when the train only travels 12 miles.
In our last legislative session the big concern was infrastructure funding for road and bridge repairs. All I could think of was
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken!
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken.
All: Monorail!
The trick is to wait around on FatWallet or Anandtech forums until one of the free subscriptions comes around for Stuff/Maxim/FHM. My Suff and Maxim subscriptions have been paid for until 2009 with nothing more then me filling in my name on a form.
I suggest signing up at freebizmag.com. So far I'm receiving a free year subscription to Dr. Dobbs, CUJ, TV Guide, and Forbes. I signed up a couple months ago and so far the only thing I haven't received is my Simpsons Season 1 DVD set, although I'm still holding out hope!
They send out an email every week or so asking if you'd like to receive a free subscription/dvd/etc and you fill out a questionaire about your occupation and whether or not you'd like some other free offerings (I say no to all the extras). Takes about two minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
I waited too as a protest. If only I could remember what I was protesting. Did Rob ever club baby seals?
So would the situation have been different if he had gone into the cafe and bought a latte, sat down and browsed the web, and then walked out of the store with his laptop *still* connected and sat down in his car to check his email?
I was in the pool: shrinkage.
The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example and yet another, this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!
It's probably about time that /. considered mirroring content they link to. It's already down!
I bought a Dell Inspiron with the WUXGA screen (1920x1200) and was suprised to find not a single dead or stuck pixel. I found one that was dimmer than the rest (and on the edge at that), but was plesently suprised to find a nearly perfect screen. Judging by the returns to Dell (i.e. what shows up in their outlet), there aren't many bad panels showing up on these high resolution panels. I don't think the notebook panel makers are sharing their secrets with the desktop guys. How else to explain all the 19" LCD's with 1280x1024 resolutions?
Your best solution is to rip the DVD with dvdshrink, which is not only the best DVD ripper but FREE.
It's very satisfying to pop in a DVD and have the movie start playing without any ads or previews (or menus if you like).
I think they're ignoring the fact that to be the "next big thing" requires being more than just incrementally better than what it replaces. Bittorrent itself is exponentially better than a FTP or HTTP server when demand is high. And Suprnova works quite well as it is, so I think it will be interesting to see whether Suprnova holds tough if people don't switch to the new technology fast enough.
I actually thought you were going to say
.............Bob!"
..then I don't want it and then that's why I'm returning it"
Jerry: "Excuse me I'd like to return this jacket."
Teller: "Certainly. May I ask why?"
Jerry: "........For spite..."
Teller: "Spite?"
Jerry: "That's right. I don't care for the salesman that sold it to me."
Teller: "I don't think you can return an item for spite."
Jerry: "What do you mean?"
Teller: "Well if there was some problem with the garment. If it were unsatisfactory in some way,then we could do it for you, but I'm afraid spite doesn't fit into any of our conditions for a refund"
Jerry: "That's ridiculous, I want to return it. What's the difference what the reason is."
Teller: "Let me speak with the manager...excuse me
(walks over to the manager and whispers)
Teller "........spite....."(Manager walks over)
Bob: "What seems to be the problem?"
Jerry : "Well I want to return this jacket and she asked me why and I said for spite and now she won't take it back."
Bob: "That's true. You can't return an item based purely on spite."
Jerry:. "Well So fine then
Bob: "Well you already said spite so......"
Jerry: "But I changed my mind.."
Bob: "No...you said spite...Too late."
Yup, I can still mod.
I'll give this a rather bizarre "Informative" to prove it.
The s/n was valid though, since the s/n generator had been reverse engineered as mentioned in the story.
If your release is small enough, a better solution is to do what the people that made Savage used, which is to randomly generate each s/n. That way it's nearly impossible to guess a valid s/n and impossible to reverse engineer it. Doesn't work so well if you're microsoft, but works well for a smaller release.
I remember when Golgotha released their code and game data I was sure that somebody would pick up the torch and create a nice game out of it but nothing significant ever came of it. Considering the amount of press it got in the Linux press I'm sure that people knew about it, so that wasn't an excuse. And although it was still very rough around the edges they did include all the needed code,maps,textures,audio to get a good running start. So why did it fail? From what I could tell somebody ported it to run with OpenGL and there was a lot of discussion on licensing terms, but no real usable results. Maybe the code just sucked, but there was something like 1 1/2 years of commercial effort in the game that should have gone to some good use! It would just be instructive to learn why it failed.
Want to clue me in on how to get my free CD-key? Although they did give them out for free they stopped and haven't resumed. I've read that the problem is servers overloaded with players, but how big a problem is that? The worst fate for an online multiplayer game is too few players, not too many.
The less you have to deal with Schilling the better.
Amen! Back before dvd+rw tools came out and all there was were some hacks to cdrecord I tried to buy ProDVD but gave up. As far as I could tell there's no way to actually buy it. When searching the newsgroups all I found were several Schilling rants, several people like me trying to buy it without luck, and finally a patch to an old cdrecord version that didn't require a license. If it was an intelligence test you needed to pass to get the damn license I failed miserably.
Interesting you say that because I also read the book and thought it was an example of how to make a great movie out of a rather average book. The only thing missing from the movie that I liked was the "message in pi" at the end, but the other changes I thought actually improved the story while reducing it to screenplay length.
Uh no, they don't. From Circuit City's site
and they never have either.What you can do is use CC rebates in addition to price matching (PM) to get great deals, but there isn't a store anywhere that will match a competitors rebates.
I've owned both the FusionHDTV II and the MyHD MDP-120. My short review for those interested:
FusionHDTV: low price and nice playback of HD streams. It has a nice FF function that makes skipping commercials easy. There is also a nice included program for converting a HD transport stream (what the card records to your hard drive) into DVD video. The BIG downside to this card is that it's almost impossible to get a perfect recording of shows because of the software decoding regardless of how fast your computer is. Out of a few dozen shows I tried recording, not one had no errors.
MyHD MDP-120: Downside is that it's expensive and you have to spend even more to get DVI output. Also the warranty is vague at best, so you'll likely be out $300 if the thing breaks. The upside is that the card records shows on just about any box flawlessly. It's got good tuner reception and the software is pretty solid now. It has basic PVR functionality for connecting to titantv and choosing shows.
The project name should have been a clue. Einstein's general theory of relativity means that signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Another feature is that anything that has energy also has mass. So light can be affected by gravity, which is what this project is all about!
So do I, primarily because it's much easier today to find the cheap used books I want than it was 10 years ago.
But a books run is determined by it's hb sales, and that's where the profit is made. For most books there is no profit in a paperback printing. The whole point is to gain readers for the next new book.
So more people buying used means lower profits and fewer books get published. That leads to fewer good books to read. Hence we read less! It might also explain why prices rise. If fewer people are buying the new releases, then a publisher has to charge more to the die hards to recoup costs.
And if you don't think that authors are motivated by money, read Heinlein's Grumbles From The Grave some time.
Last year I got a good deal on about a thousand Asus motherboards. I sold all of them on ebay and pretty much figured that I would have quite a few returned because the buyer damaged it and claimed it was broken. Suprisingly, only about half a dozen got returned and of those 4 actually worked and were resold. Of the two others, one had a mark where the screwdriver had slipped and damaged the PCB and the other had a heatsink fall off the bridge.
Of course maybe a lot of people broke the boards and never returned them, or perhaps sent them to Asus for repair instead of back to me for a refund. But I was still amazed at the low return rate and have to conclude that the buyers were smarter than I gave them credit for. Or maybe it was the line in my auctions that said "NO IDIOTS". Hard to say.
What I can say for sure is that they were all smarter than the extremetech writer.
Wow, and I thought the Fed had inflation under control. Maybe you were thinking of Brazil?
Never said that minnesota spent all of the sum, and I was even nice enough to provide a link with the breakdown (no subscription needed too!).
But your $100m is quite a ways off nevertheless.
And yes the operating costs are far different. Not only does it cost a lot but it's guaranteed to lose money! Brilliant!
And I didn't say there were no bad commutes in the twin cities. All metro areas have some bad commutes. But even a cursory glance at a map of our area will show how our fine highway system.
I guess we deserve what we get when we elected a wrestler, but the light rail boondoggle has been an interesting study in how government spends our money.
We've been debating in MN for almost a decade on how to fund the building of a new baseball stadium for the Twins (remember contraction?), which is estimated to cost $438 million. The debate isn't even to fund the whole cost, only part of it.
Instead we build a choo choo train! Current cost is $712 million, although it was only estimated to cost $444 million. For those unfamiliar with Minnesota, we've got some of the best highway infrastructure in the country and we're about as spread out as a metropolitan area can be, so trains aren't exactly an efficient solution to traffic congestion, especially when the train only travels 12 miles.
In our last legislative session the big concern was infrastructure funding for road and bridge repairs. All I could think of was
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken! Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken. All: Monorail!
I suggest signing up at freebizmag.com. So far I'm receiving a free year subscription to Dr. Dobbs, CUJ, TV Guide, and Forbes. I signed up a couple months ago and so far the only thing I haven't received is my Simpsons Season 1 DVD set, although I'm still holding out hope!
They send out an email every week or so asking if you'd like to receive a free subscription/dvd/etc and you fill out a questionaire about your occupation and whether or not you'd like some other free offerings (I say no to all the extras). Takes about two minutes.