Just think.. if this system was running on my computer, I'd spend at least an hour less each day playing Unreal Tournament and Return To Castle Wolfenstein!
This is a great tool for increasing productivity. In fact, if you ran it on every computer in the world, you could increase productivity by at least 10%!
Frankly, Gates could pluck a few billion from his pocket change, buy Amazon, and have a MAJOR strangehold over much of the commercial world. Not only that, but he gets tons of customer data for Passport.
While Microsoft doesn't appear to want to get into the retail market what-so-ever, Amazon would make a great outlet for their gear.
Re:No, mp3 on headphones is torture
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Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 1
True enough;-) but most people also have crappy speakers. I was disagreeing with the fact that you're more likely to hear compression artefacts with speakers than headphones. Even a pair of $70 headphones produce better sound than $100 loudspeakers.
Mod parent up.. Just got PlusV It's amazing!!
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 1
Wow! Thanks for telling us about PlusV. I was sceptical of your post, and couldn't believe a 64kbps mp3 could sound anything like a 128kbps one.
So I downloaded the stuff (the documentation sucks) and ran a few tests.
Test 1 was Philip Glass' Violin Concerto, Third Movement. A 160kbps lame encoded mp3 versus a 64kbps MP3PlusV. It was good, but not really amazing. The 64kbps MP3PlusV was *way* better than the bog-standard 64kbps comparison MP3 I made though.
Test 2 was Overprotected by Britney Spears. Wow! I could hear the difference, but for general listening it was actually very pleasant. That 64kbps MP3PlusV blew me away. I can be sure that most of my non-audio geek friends wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and the 160kbps one.
So thanks for the tip! I'm going to play with this for some time..
No, mp3 on headphones is torture
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 1
you'll be able to hear comparatively more garbage from lossy compression on your home system (rather than on an earpiece headset or cheapie speakers.)
I disagree. I can hear tons of artefacts in mp3s with my $250 Sennheiser HD590s.. Yet with my $250 Mordaunt Short speakers, it's fine. I'd say that headphones are actually much 'better' at demonstrating the inadequacies of a format.
A lot of people are.. 'So what, Doom is coming out within a year' and 'Q3 is better' etc etc. I guess some people don't realize why UT is a special game.
It's the simple customizations you can do. While Quake 3 is a lot of fun to play, the interface is quite rigid, and there are few options to adjust how the game plays.. unless you want to download giant mod packs of course.
With UT, you have 'mutators'. There's lots built into the game.. things like 'Insta-Gib' (a single shot = death style mode).. 'Rocket Arena' (rocker launchers only), and so on. You can customize every game you play in this way.
Not only that, but you have more modes of play. Now just CTF and deathmatch.. but a 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein' style Assault mode where you have to complete objectives.. a 'Domination' mode where you have to hold several checkpoints.. and even a 'Last Man Standing' mode where the only goal is to die as few times as possible.
It's the way you can constantly refine the games to your own style that makes UT fun.
Another great feature is that you can change the game speed! You can run as low as 50%, or as high as 200%. I always play UT at 120% because then it matches the speed of Q3.. as UT is generally a slower game action-wise.
So.. UT is great because Epic understands that simple tweaking and customization options means you can get far more out of the game!
Are you joking? I just ask because UT is known to be a *major* CPU hog unlike Q3. On my friend's 433Mhz Celeron, UT is about 1/2fps.. Q3 is actually playable.
Of course, on my 1Ghz + GeForce 2.. I can play anything;-) Although UT really does suck up the CPU juice.. whereas Q3 doesn't.
Thanks to September 11th, the first ever incidents of 'terrorism', the UK has some stupid new laws in place.
One of these allows anyone 'suspected' of 'possible terrorist acts' to be jailed 'indefinitely'. The words 'suspected', 'possible' and 'indefinitely' are scary indeed.
And what could be a 'possible act of terrorism'? Yep. Cracking codes or computers or... security systems!
So it's not just Norway and the US with stupid laws that could throw border-line legal people into jail, it's the UK too.
1) Did you notice that near the end of the message there's a map, and a weird symbol right over China?
This seems a little suspicious. Are they suggesting that the aliens dump their weapons or land their ship in China?
2) The people in the picture have no pubic hair, and the guy has a small wang.
3) Both Earth and Jupiter are marked on the map. Why Jupiter? Is this a 2001 thing? Is Jupiter going to turn into a second sun as predicted by Arthur C Clarke?
4) Why does this message look like the average instruction manual you get with motherboards nowadays?
For example, how long is the coastline of Great Britain? A textbook may say 2000km (I have no idea what it really is) but fractal theory says that any answer is wrong. Why?
Pretend there's a large triangle that has all of Great Britain within it.
Then add another side to the triangle to get a more accurate shape.. then add another side.. then another.. and so on, until you've got many millions of 'sides' that accurately map the coast of Great Britain..
The problem is that you can keep going on adding more sides to the 'polygon' around Great Britain. Where do you stop? The perimeter could become so tight that you end up measuring around individual rocks, grains of sand.. then atoms, etc.
Therefore, fractal theory says the coastline of Great Britain is of infinite length. Of course, in the real world it's total BS.
Microsoft use the opposite approach. 'Gainly' compression. It balloons files which should be 10-20k up to 5 megabytes or more. I'm not sure why they do this, but there must be some benefit to it.
Did anyone else notice that when you're running Kazaa, there's often a tiny (approx 5 by 5 pixels) 'button' in the top left of the screen? Even if Kazaa is minimized to the tray.. Anyone know what -that- is? It doesn't do anything when I click on it. Happens on all the computers with Kazaa I've seen so far.
As for people who whine and bitch when they just keep hitting 'Next' in the install program without noticing the screen that lets you turn up all the different crap Kazaa installs, I have no sympathy.. but if they're actually -hiding- stuff in the program that you can't turn off in setup, I wanna know!
Stopping front page being in all italics
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Slashdot Code Update
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How about an update to Slash which means we don't have the entire front page being in italics every week? Even diary scripts can automatically close tags now, why not this amazing system? Easy feature to add...
You said: In many ways the 1992 election was similar to the 2000 US election, the right won an election that on all political calculations they should have lost. But they did so on a minority of the vote and with a very small majority in the Commons.
Initially I thought this was a good way of looking at it, but now I think you're not quite right. The Conservatives won the 1992 election simply because the Labour government of the time (Socialist, blatantly Left Wing) was unpalatable to the majority of the electorate.. many who had made enormous gains in Thatcher's boom period. By 1997, Labour had redefined itself into a more liberal party (with even a touch of right wing values to it) and easily stole the vote.
I wouldn't say this is what happened in the 2000 US election. Infact, almost the opposite. People were becoming sick of a Liberal government that failed to make many changes and the 'conservative' Republicans made enough gains to take them into power.
That said, I think the US government under Clinton was probably one of the best examples of government seen in the West in many many many years, if not ever. They made few changes to laws, and generally kept their nose out of public business (and especially the Internet). Sure, if the government had stuck its nose into the new net economy, perhaps it wouldn't have crashed.. but new industries are rarely formed when the Fed gets too involved.
You're the loser for not grasping the topic at hand.
You said: I've never copied music, movies or programs and feel damn good about it when I read threads like these. Where's your self-respect? If you can't afford to buy it, you don't deserve to have it. Work and earn the money instead of stealing other people's property. Losers.
I dislike CDs because they only contain an hour or so of music. Therefore, I rip them to mp3 and play them on my computer. I've ripped almost all of my CDs, so I can mix and match them in this way.
I take great offense when a record company decides to produce flawed CDs to stop me from listening to my music how I like.
I do not care about the piracy side.. since pirates will always break any scheme. But it pisses me off that in certain situations I might have to rip to mp3 off of a live analog feed, instead of direct from the CD like I do now.
What the record companies are doing is not just copy protection, they're actually stopping you from using the CD in a perfectly legal manner. Many of these copy protected CDs aren't even meant to play in computer CD drives.
Believe it or not, my computer CD drive is the only CD drive I have after I sold my separates system.. I got rid of my separates because I spend 99% of my time listening to mp3s through my computer speakers!!!!
So, get your facts straight before you bitch at us for stealing music.
Yep, just like the good old days of copy protecting software. They will lose time and time again.
The only way they'll win is if they make CDs connect to the Internet and verify with the record company everytime you play it, ala Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Or have some crappy activation featuers, ala Windows XP. Then again someone will work around that too;-)
My point entirely. 2001: A Space Odyssey could be right.
We could simply be a bunch of 'technology' developed by another race (superior to us or not) and dumped on this planet.
If we did the same, we'd become Gods ourselves.
Perhaps that's how the universe lives? Race creates other race, dumps it off somewhere. That new races creates another race, dumps it off somewhere.. ad nauseum.
After all, if we knew that the Earth was going to blow up, perhaps we'd send 'robotic life' to a planet that we couldn't inhabit.. but would carry on our legacy. Who knows that we're not the result of a race that died many eons ago.
All crazy speculation of course, but these possibilities now seem more realistic than ever before.
Thompson's chip was doing its work preternaturally well. But how? Out of 100 logic cells he had assigned to the task, only a third seemed to be critical to the circuit's work.
Isn't this how a regular brain works? Or, at least close. I recall being taught something called the 80/20 rule, that applies to almost anything and everything. Doesn't 20% of the brain do 80% of the work?
This article is pretty interesting though. I'm not sure how much is true (newsobserver is hardly the New Scientist) but these devices look like they could be the way of the future.
Some people will argue that it's merely a computer program running in these chips and that 'real' creatures are actually 'conscious'. How do we know that? How do we know that the mere task of processing is not 'consciousness'?
On the other side, how do we know that animals are self-aware? When I watch ants, I could just as easily be watching SimAnt, for all the intelligence they seem to have. A computer could do pretty much everything as spontaneously and as accurately as an ant could.
I think as the years pass by, we'll see chips pushing the envelope. Soon we'll have chips that can act in *exactly* the same way as a cat or dog brain. Then what will be the different between the 'consciousness' of that chip and the consciousness of an average dog? I say, none.
I don't like to call this Artificial Intelligence. It's real intelligence. Who knows that some sort of 'god' didn't just program us using their own form of electronics based on carbon rather than silicon?
1994 Journey to the Centre of the Brain
Dr. Susan Greenfield
That was, IMHO, the best RI Xmas lecture of them all. Since then, Greenfield has been in the media a lot more (but not in the way Kevin Warwick has) and is certainly a revered expert on matters of the brain.
Much of this lecture contained comparisons of brains and computers, and the way in which they may work together in the future. There were also a lot of practicals.
It's when they're about geology, 'how the earth was formed', plant or human biology that they get mega boring. Who wants to see a plant get cut up? The math and tech ones rock:)
I have the same problem, but not just my hands.. also my feet (in fact, especially my feet). Then again, sitting up for eight hours playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein online is hardly the way to keep your circulation healthy.
The best way to improve circulation? Exercise often. But that sounds like too much hard work to me.
I don't dislike the BBC, but I dislike the practice of every TV owner in the UK being forced (you go to *prison* otherwise) to pay £100 (US $150) a year to go to a company you might even be interested in.
Why should I pay $150 a year just to own a TV if all I use the TV for is to watch DVDs and play Playstation? It's frightfully socialist, and the sooner they scrap the licence fee and allow the BBC to make its money in a decent capitalist way, the better.
(Note for American readers: Once upon a time you had to have a licence to even own a radio in the UK.. and, believe it or not, you had to have a licence to own a dog. The UK will tax you for anything and everything they can get away with.. and we don't even have a constitution to prevent it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Just think.. if this system was running on my computer, I'd spend at least an hour less each day playing Unreal Tournament and Return To Castle Wolfenstein!
This is a great tool for increasing productivity. In fact, if you ran it on every computer in the world, you could increase productivity by at least 10%!
Frankly, Gates could pluck a few billion from his pocket change, buy Amazon, and have a MAJOR strangehold over much of the commercial world. Not only that, but he gets tons of customer data for Passport.
While Microsoft doesn't appear to want to get into the retail market what-so-ever, Amazon would make a great outlet for their gear.
True enough ;-) but most people also have crappy speakers. I was disagreeing with the fact that you're more likely to hear compression artefacts with speakers than headphones. Even a pair of $70 headphones produce better sound than $100 loudspeakers.
Wow! Thanks for telling us about PlusV. I was sceptical of your post, and couldn't believe a 64kbps mp3 could sound anything like a 128kbps one.
So I downloaded the stuff (the documentation sucks) and ran a few tests.
Test 1 was Philip Glass' Violin Concerto, Third Movement. A 160kbps lame encoded mp3 versus a 64kbps MP3PlusV. It was good, but not really amazing. The 64kbps MP3PlusV was *way* better than the bog-standard 64kbps comparison MP3 I made though.
Test 2 was Overprotected by Britney Spears. Wow! I could hear the difference, but for general listening it was actually very pleasant. That 64kbps MP3PlusV blew me away. I can be sure that most of my non-audio geek friends wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and the 160kbps one.
So thanks for the tip! I'm going to play with this for some time..
you'll be able to hear comparatively more garbage from lossy compression on your home system (rather than on an earpiece headset or cheapie speakers.)
I disagree. I can hear tons of artefacts in mp3s with my $250 Sennheiser HD590s.. Yet with my $250 Mordaunt Short speakers, it's fine. I'd say that headphones are actually much 'better' at demonstrating the inadequacies of a format.
Wow, let's not state the obvious here. Yet another slow news day. Move on, move on.
ID needs another Romero? Hahaha. Oh yeah, let's all kick down with that wonderfully packaged game Daikatana!
Why can't we mod down shitty front page stories like this? It'd sure stop morons double-posting stories, or stupid monologues like that of Katz above.
The MaxiMog(TM) Expedition System is a modular high mobility vehicle designed for exploring this (or similar) planets.
There are no planets 'similar' to our own in this solar system.. so aren't these guys getting a little ahead of themselves?
A lot of people are.. 'So what, Doom is coming out within a year' and 'Q3 is better' etc etc. I guess some people don't realize why UT is a special game.
It's the simple customizations you can do. While Quake 3 is a lot of fun to play, the interface is quite rigid, and there are few options to adjust how the game plays.. unless you want to download giant mod packs of course.
With UT, you have 'mutators'. There's lots built into the game.. things like 'Insta-Gib' (a single shot = death style mode).. 'Rocket Arena' (rocker launchers only), and so on. You can customize every game you play in this way.
Not only that, but you have more modes of play. Now just CTF and deathmatch.. but a 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein' style Assault mode where you have to complete objectives.. a 'Domination' mode where you have to hold several checkpoints.. and even a 'Last Man Standing' mode where the only goal is to die as few times as possible.
It's the way you can constantly refine the games to your own style that makes UT fun.
Another great feature is that you can change the game speed! You can run as low as 50%, or as high as 200%. I always play UT at 120% because then it matches the speed of Q3.. as UT is generally a slower game action-wise.
So.. UT is great because Epic understands that simple tweaking and customization options means you can get far more out of the game!
Are you joking? I just ask because UT is known to be a *major* CPU hog unlike Q3. On my friend's 433Mhz Celeron, UT is about 1/2fps.. Q3 is actually playable.
;-) Although UT really does suck up the CPU juice.. whereas Q3 doesn't.
Of course, on my 1Ghz + GeForce 2.. I can play anything
Thanks to September 11th, the first ever incidents of 'terrorism', the UK has some stupid new laws in place.
One of these allows anyone 'suspected' of 'possible terrorist acts' to be jailed 'indefinitely'. The words 'suspected', 'possible' and 'indefinitely' are scary indeed.
And what could be a 'possible act of terrorism'? Yep. Cracking codes or computers or... security systems!
So it's not just Norway and the US with stupid laws that could throw border-line legal people into jail, it's the UK too.
1) Did you notice that near the end of the message there's a map, and a weird symbol right over China?
This seems a little suspicious. Are they suggesting that the aliens dump their weapons or land their ship in China?
2) The people in the picture have no pubic hair, and the guy has a small wang.
3) Both Earth and Jupiter are marked on the map. Why Jupiter? Is this a 2001 thing? Is Jupiter going to turn into a second sun as predicted by Arthur C Clarke?
4) Why does this message look like the average instruction manual you get with motherboards nowadays?
Fractal theory also poses a similar question.
For example, how long is the coastline of Great Britain? A textbook may say 2000km (I have no idea what it really is) but fractal theory says that any answer is wrong. Why?
Pretend there's a large triangle that has all of Great Britain within it.
Then add another side to the triangle to get a more accurate shape.. then add another side.. then another.. and so on, until you've got many millions of 'sides' that accurately map the coast of Great Britain..
The problem is that you can keep going on adding more sides to the 'polygon' around Great Britain. Where do you stop? The perimeter could become so tight that you end up measuring around individual rocks, grains of sand.. then atoms, etc.
Therefore, fractal theory says the coastline of Great Britain is of infinite length. Of course, in the real world it's total BS.
Microsoft use the opposite approach. 'Gainly' compression. It balloons files which should be 10-20k up to 5 megabytes or more. I'm not sure why they do this, but there must be some benefit to it.
Did anyone else notice that when you're running Kazaa, there's often a tiny (approx 5 by 5 pixels) 'button' in the top left of the screen? Even if Kazaa is minimized to the tray.. Anyone know what -that- is? It doesn't do anything when I click on it. Happens on all the computers with Kazaa I've seen so far.
As for people who whine and bitch when they just keep hitting 'Next' in the install program without noticing the screen that lets you turn up all the different crap Kazaa installs, I have no sympathy.. but if they're actually -hiding- stuff in the program that you can't turn off in setup, I wanna know!
How about an update to Slash which means we don't have the entire front page being in italics every week? Even diary scripts can automatically close tags now, why not this amazing system? Easy feature to add...
You said: In many ways the 1992 election was similar to the 2000 US election, the right won an election that on all political calculations they should have lost. But they did so on a minority of the vote and with a very small majority in the Commons.
Initially I thought this was a good way of looking at it, but now I think you're not quite right. The Conservatives won the 1992 election simply because the Labour government of the time (Socialist, blatantly Left Wing) was unpalatable to the majority of the electorate.. many who had made enormous gains in Thatcher's boom period. By 1997, Labour had redefined itself into a more liberal party (with even a touch of right wing values to it) and easily stole the vote.
I wouldn't say this is what happened in the 2000 US election. Infact, almost the opposite. People were becoming sick of a Liberal government that failed to make many changes and the 'conservative' Republicans made enough gains to take them into power.
That said, I think the US government under Clinton was probably one of the best examples of government seen in the West in many many many years, if not ever. They made few changes to laws, and generally kept their nose out of public business (and especially the Internet). Sure, if the government had stuck its nose into the new net economy, perhaps it wouldn't have crashed.. but new industries are rarely formed when the Fed gets too involved.
You're the loser for not grasping the topic at hand.
You said: I've never copied music, movies or programs and feel damn good about it when I read threads like these. Where's your self-respect? If you can't afford to buy it, you don't deserve to have it. Work and earn the money instead of stealing other people's property. Losers.
I dislike CDs because they only contain an hour or so of music. Therefore, I rip them to mp3 and play them on my computer. I've ripped almost all of my CDs, so I can mix and match them in this way.
I take great offense when a record company decides to produce flawed CDs to stop me from listening to my music how I like.
I do not care about the piracy side.. since pirates will always break any scheme. But it pisses me off that in certain situations I might have to rip to mp3 off of a live analog feed, instead of direct from the CD like I do now.
What the record companies are doing is not just copy protection, they're actually stopping you from using the CD in a perfectly legal manner. Many of these copy protected CDs aren't even meant to play in computer CD drives.
Believe it or not, my computer CD drive is the only CD drive I have after I sold my separates system.. I got rid of my separates because I spend 99% of my time listening to mp3s through my computer speakers!!!!
So, get your facts straight before you bitch at us for stealing music.
Yep, just like the good old days of copy protecting software. They will lose time and time again.
;-)
The only way they'll win is if they make CDs connect to the Internet and verify with the record company everytime you play it, ala Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Or have some crappy activation featuers, ala Windows XP. Then again someone will work around that too
Read the classic Copy Protection: A History and Outlook
My point entirely. 2001: A Space Odyssey could be right.
We could simply be a bunch of 'technology' developed by another race (superior to us or not) and dumped on this planet.
If we did the same, we'd become Gods ourselves.
Perhaps that's how the universe lives? Race creates other race, dumps it off somewhere. That new races creates another race, dumps it off somewhere.. ad nauseum.
After all, if we knew that the Earth was going to blow up, perhaps we'd send 'robotic life' to a planet that we couldn't inhabit.. but would carry on our legacy. Who knows that we're not the result of a race that died many eons ago.
All crazy speculation of course, but these possibilities now seem more realistic than ever before.
Thompson's chip was doing its work preternaturally well. But how? Out of 100 logic cells he had assigned to the task, only a third seemed to be critical to the circuit's work.
Isn't this how a regular brain works? Or, at least close. I recall being taught something called the 80/20 rule, that applies to almost anything and everything. Doesn't 20% of the brain do 80% of the work?
This article is pretty interesting though. I'm not sure how much is true (newsobserver is hardly the New Scientist) but these devices look like they could be the way of the future.
Some people will argue that it's merely a computer program running in these chips and that 'real' creatures are actually 'conscious'. How do we know that? How do we know that the mere task of processing is not 'consciousness'?
On the other side, how do we know that animals are self-aware? When I watch ants, I could just as easily be watching SimAnt, for all the intelligence they seem to have. A computer could do pretty much everything as spontaneously and as accurately as an ant could.
I think as the years pass by, we'll see chips pushing the envelope. Soon we'll have chips that can act in *exactly* the same way as a cat or dog brain. Then what will be the different between the 'consciousness' of that chip and the consciousness of an average dog? I say, none.
I don't like to call this Artificial Intelligence. It's real intelligence. Who knows that some sort of 'god' didn't just program us using their own form of electronics based on carbon rather than silicon?
One day we'll reach human level. I can't wait.
1994 Journey to the Centre of the Brain
:)
Dr. Susan Greenfield
That was, IMHO, the best RI Xmas lecture of them all. Since then, Greenfield has been in the media a lot more (but not in the way Kevin Warwick has) and is certainly a revered expert on matters of the brain.
Much of this lecture contained comparisons of brains and computers, and the way in which they may work together in the future. There were also a lot of practicals.
It's when they're about geology, 'how the earth was formed', plant or human biology that they get mega boring. Who wants to see a plant get cut up? The math and tech ones rock
I have the same problem, but not just my hands.. also my feet (in fact, especially my feet). Then again, sitting up for eight hours playing Return To Castle Wolfenstein online is hardly the way to keep your circulation healthy.
The best way to improve circulation? Exercise often. But that sounds like too much hard work to me.
Ew, ew, ew! This is horrible.
I don't dislike the BBC, but I dislike the practice of every TV owner in the UK being forced (you go to *prison* otherwise) to pay £100 (US $150) a year to go to a company you might even be interested in.
Why should I pay $150 a year just to own a TV if all I use the TV for is to watch DVDs and play Playstation? It's frightfully socialist, and the sooner they scrap the licence fee and allow the BBC to make its money in a decent capitalist way, the better.
(Note for American readers: Once upon a time you had to have a licence to even own a radio in the UK.. and, believe it or not, you had to have a licence to own a dog. The UK will tax you for anything and everything they can get away with.. and we don't even have a constitution to prevent it.)