Today's Games = Yesterday's POV
on
POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I used to have lots of fun with the DOS versions of POV-Ray.
The graphics of today's games like Unreal Tournament & Quake3 remind me of scenes from the old DOS POV. I'm all into frames per second now, not seconds per frame!:)
I'd still like to see what a modern raytracer can do though.
I never asked to rip CDs in my car. And I never agreed to pay $1,400 for it!
I think the best thing for a geek right now is a hard drive based MP3 player. I bought a Dension DMP3 ( http://www.dension.com ) for around $300 and stuck a 40 GB hard drive in it. It's got a very nice and somewhat customizable satellite display, I've got the unit itself under my driver's seat. Driving down the road with 3,500+ songs at your fingertips is very cool.
I really don't get it. Maybe the rabid spam chasers just get some level of enjoyment out of the detective work, the thrill of the chase, and the retribution against spammers. But I don't think they'll ever really make any significant difference in the amount of spam that travels the Internet, especially now that other countries are getting into it big time. You can reduce the spam in your own mailbox or server by various means, but until something MAJOR changes in the way the Internet mail system works, there will still be terabytes of spam traffic sent all the time. That's eating up YOUR bandwidth when you're trying to read Slashdot or look at nekk!d ch!kz.
I just wonder if eventually spammers will get tired of all the work to keep moving around from server to server to send out these mass mailings. Eventually half of the Internet will be blacklisted. But the spammers are probably just as driven as the anti-spammers. The thing I don't get is often there's not even a way to buy the product in the message.
Me, I'll just sit back and surf and play computer games. Spam is annoying, but to me it's not really worth getting that worked up over. The only mail filter I have is one that colors incoming messages yellow if they're not addressed directly to me. That takes care of most of the spam, although I still scan the subjects to be sure it's not sombody I know Bcc'ing me on something, which it occasionally is.
Hmm, the Belo stats say that 22% of their registered users make $100,000 or more per year. The higest percentage, 23%, makes $75,000-$99,999. Why do I highly doubt that? I know when I'm making up registration information, I usually choose the $100,000+ category. A little wishful thinking since I'm in fantasy mode anyway.
If their advertisers think that mandatory but non-verified information makes a good advertising target, they've got a few things to learn about computers and the Internet. I bet at least hal of their registration data is crap.
And this was priceless, it's a copy of the NYTimes registration form, click the Randomize button:
http://www.robertgraham.com/tools/random-user.ht ml
I would think a hilly area could actually be an advantage; just stick a node on the top of each hill and serve everyone around.
Somebody's gotta do something, I waited on Adelphia for 6 years before I finally got a cable modem a couple months ago. Now Adelphia is in huge financial trouble, figures...
I got a chance to see the beta at a friend's house.
Yes, it's 3d, but compared to a 3d engine like Dungeon Seige, Warcraft 3's engine and it's camera control scheme sucks.
And the gameplay isn't a heck of a lot different than Warcraft 2. You now have heroes, which are pretty cool, and you can queue your production. You can set a rallying point that new units will move to automatically. But the basics of building as much as you can as fast as you can still stand.
You might try calling your TelCo and tell them you can't send faxes on your phone line. Telephone companies don't seem to care about modem speeds but they seem to care about fax machines. Having a tech come out and fix my "fax machine" brought me up from 26.4k to 45k.
I never said 192k. I get at least 10 albums on a CD because I encode at 128k. Why even bring up a 96k rate, other than just to quote a big number for DataPlay capacity? I notice you didn't quote the corresponding CD number.
150MB is a big difference in the wrong direction. That's around 30 less songs per disc. Why downgrade? I sort of expect any new technology to at least double the capacity of the older technology. Or at least give higher quality. Give me *something* other than a tiny disc and copy protection. I haven't read anything that indicates DataPlay is innovative in any way.
We're talking about a disc with 13% less space and intrusive copy protection, plus buying all new playback/burning devices. Why would I do that?
And why would you think you can't you drag and drop to a CD from Explorer? I don't do it, but it can be done if you want to. Adaptec EZ-CD Creator can do it.
If DataPlay discs held 10GB or even 4.7 they might be interesting enough to ignore the "big brother" aspect. I for one don't care much about portability. A 24-cd wallet fits nicely under the armrest in my car and can hold literally 10 full days worth of music.
Obviously Belo owns the copyright to the article in question. They control how the article is distributed. If they wish to only allow the article to be accessed through their home page, that is their right.
Belo certainly has the right to do whatever they want with their article. But if they are serving it on the Internet and it's accessible to anyone, how is it illegal to refer someone to it? Should it be illegal for me to bookmark their article and return directly to it at a later date? I think not.
A better analogy would be "Next week Time Magazine will not allow you to photocopy their magazine, rearrange the page order, then pass it out to people on the street."
What? That's not a good analogy at all. There's no copying going on. A good analogy would be, "Hey George, take a look at page 37 of this month's 'Wired' magazine." Should that be illegal?
Hopefully DataPlay won't succeed on the "5 albums on one disc" fact. Will average consumers realize that for the past few years you've been able to fit 10 or more albums on a MP3 CDR, and select only the songs you want if you wish? A CDR with 200 songs on it is worth buying a special player for. A smaller disc with less capacity is not worth buying a special player for.
There were only 3 of them, Spiderman, Ice Man, and Firestar. Mmm, I remember that skin-tight yellow outfit she wore. She was one hot cartoon chick, no pun intended.:)
As usual the characters were neat but the writing was pretty bad.
I wonder if simulations can deal with events like September 11? That has changed society in many countries.
Do they just count on things leveling out over time?
What about something extremely bad happening, like a large asteriod hitting the Earth? I think as long as nothing major happens, simulations could be accurate. But all it would take is aliens landing on the White House lawn or a widespread plague to totally throw off any mathmatical equation(s).
The space battles are more like WW2 dogfights
on
Star Wars as Pulp Sci-Fi
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't buy a lot of what that Salon article says. Most liteary works are derivative, it's not very often that something truly new comes along.
It seems to me that with the Star Wars trilogy Lucas tied mythology, Eastern religion, and WW2 dogfights together into a great trio of movies.
Who cares where he got his ideas? Nobody else made those movies, does anyone disupute he directed them??
ThinkFree better have some good advertising or word of mouth to topple the MSOffice giant. I don't know if cost is a big issue for businesses that buy MS software the way mainframe people (used to?) buy IBM. The Corel Wordperfect Suite didn't cost much more than ThinkFree and where is it now?
And on a related note I'm proud to say I've never used MSWord, although I will admit to using Excel...
The Mac/PC & BMW/Geo comparison is not valid. A Geo can't compete performance-wise with a BMW, like a PC can with a Mac.
Don't tell me Macs have that much more "quality" than PCs. A PC can have as much quality as you research/shop for. You have a plethora of components to choose from. An iMac has whatever they can fit into the half-circle.
Some people are Mac people, some people are PC people. I've just never seen anything to convince me to pay such high prices for a Mac that can't even run most of my software. That's what it amounts to.
For the last 4 or 5 years I've been calling Adelphia (a cable company based in Florida) to see if cable modem service is available in my area. Every time they say 6 months to a year. I'm starting to get a little skeptical.
Now that they've raised my rate another $5 a month, I'm very tempted to tell them to cancel my cable, and to call me back when they finally get cable modem service in my area. I can get satellite in the meantime, for less money. More channels although I won't get local stations.
It's neat they have an analog guage being controlled by a serial port, but I really don't want to run the software driver. It would be great to have a hardware-only solution.
I remember the old IBM 4381 console keyboard had an amber Wait light on it (and a Big Red Button emergency power off button I only got to push once). The wait light stayed solid when the system was at 0% CPU, and turned off at a rate corresponding to the CPU load. It was fun trying to turn the light off by running several jobs at once.
I'd like to see a hardware CPU tachometer, temperature guage, and activity lights for each slot and port.
I gave up on Netscape when 4.x stopped responding to my mouse clicks. Not just one one machine, on 3 machines with completely different hardware and software. That and the crashing and current bloated state sort of wears you out.
I use Opera to browse now, it's much more powerful and flexible. I use IE if I have to browse a site that's heavy on Java or uses Flash, which isn't very often. The things I love most about Opera: You can completely disable popups, and you can set it to throw all your cookies away on exit. That way you get the best of both worlds, sites that require cookies still work but you're not saving the cookies from one session to the next. Muhahahaha!
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just start a Command Prompt and type:
del big_meanie_spammer
That works...
I guess he wants lots of e-mail.
I used to have lots of fun with the DOS versions of POV-Ray.
The graphics of today's games like Unreal Tournament & Quake3 remind me of scenes from the old DOS POV. I'm all into frames per second now, not seconds per frame!
I'd still like to see what a modern raytracer can do though.
I never asked to rip CDs in my car. And I never agreed to pay $1,400 for it!
I think the best thing for a geek right now is a hard drive based MP3 player. I bought a Dension DMP3 ( http://www.dension.com ) for around $300 and stuck a 40 GB hard drive in it. It's got a very nice and somewhat customizable satellite display, I've got the unit itself under my driver's seat. Driving down the road with 3,500+ songs at your fingertips is very cool.
Obligatory Simpsons quote:
"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that."
I really don't get it. Maybe the rabid spam chasers just get some level of enjoyment out of the detective work, the thrill of the chase, and the retribution against spammers. But I don't think they'll ever really make any significant difference in the amount of spam that travels the Internet, especially now that other countries are getting into it big time. You can reduce the spam in your own mailbox or server by various means, but until something MAJOR changes in the way the Internet mail system works, there will still be terabytes of spam traffic sent all the time. That's eating up YOUR bandwidth when you're trying to read Slashdot or look at nekk!d ch!kz.
I just wonder if eventually spammers will get tired of all the work to keep moving around from server to server to send out these mass mailings. Eventually half of the Internet will be blacklisted. But the spammers are probably just as driven as the anti-spammers. The thing I don't get is often there's not even a way to buy the product in the message.
Me, I'll just sit back and surf and play computer games. Spam is annoying, but to me it's not really worth getting that worked up over. The only mail filter I have is one that colors incoming messages yellow if they're not addressed directly to me. That takes care of most of the spam, although I still scan the subjects to be sure it's not sombody I know Bcc'ing me on something, which it occasionally is.
Hmm, the Belo stats say that 22% of their registered users make $100,000 or more per year. The higest percentage, 23%, makes $75,000-$99,999. Why do I highly doubt that? I know when I'm making up registration information, I usually choose the $100,000+ category. A little wishful thinking since I'm in fantasy mode anyway.
t ml
If their advertisers think that mandatory but non-verified information makes a good advertising target, they've got a few things to learn about computers and the Internet. I bet at least hal of their registration data is crap.
And this was priceless, it's a copy of the NYTimes registration form, click the Randomize button:
http://www.robertgraham.com/tools/random-user.h
I would think a hilly area could actually be an advantage; just stick a node on the top of each hill and serve everyone around.
Somebody's gotta do something, I waited on Adelphia for 6 years before I finally got a cable modem a couple months ago. Now Adelphia is in huge financial trouble, figures...
Are you guys making enough money?
:)
I wish you'd give us some banner ads or something, I feel guilty. I don't want Google to go away.
Seriously, why don't you serve banner ads?
-Dan
Were the robots in literal "battle"? Is a good idea to encourage intelligence and agression at the same time?
I got a chance to see the beta at a friend's house.
Yes, it's 3d, but compared to a 3d engine like Dungeon Seige, Warcraft 3's engine and it's camera control scheme sucks.
And the gameplay isn't a heck of a lot different than Warcraft 2. You now have heroes, which are pretty cool, and you can queue your production. You can set a rallying point that new units will move to automatically. But the basics of building as much as you can as fast as you can still stand.
Maybe I'm just tired of the RTS genre...
Well, Shakira and Jennifer Lopez CDs are also copy protected. That's closer to good music... Just a matter of time.
You might try calling your TelCo and tell them you can't send faxes on your phone line. Telephone companies don't seem to care about modem speeds but they seem to care about fax machines. Having a tech come out and fix my "fax machine" brought me up from 26.4k to 45k.
Um, ok. What is your job title at DataPlay?
I never said 192k. I get at least 10 albums on a CD because I encode at 128k. Why even bring up a 96k rate, other than just to quote a big number for DataPlay capacity? I notice you didn't quote the corresponding CD number.
150MB is a big difference in the wrong direction. That's around 30 less songs per disc. Why downgrade? I sort of expect any new technology to at least double the capacity of the older technology. Or at least give higher quality. Give me *something* other than a tiny disc and copy protection. I haven't read anything that indicates DataPlay is innovative in any way.
We're talking about a disc with 13% less space and intrusive copy protection, plus buying all new playback/burning devices. Why would I do that?
And why would you think you can't you drag and drop to a CD from Explorer? I don't do it, but it can be done if you want to. Adaptec EZ-CD Creator can do it.
If DataPlay discs held 10GB or even 4.7 they might be interesting enough to ignore the "big brother" aspect. I for one don't care much about portability. A 24-cd wallet fits nicely under the armrest in my car and can hold literally 10 full days worth of music.
Belo certainly has the right to do whatever they want with their article. But if they are serving it on the Internet and it's accessible to anyone, how is it illegal to refer someone to it? Should it be illegal for me to bookmark their article and return directly to it at a later date? I think not.
A better analogy would be "Next week Time Magazine will not allow you to photocopy their magazine, rearrange the page order, then pass it out to people on the street."
What? That's not a good analogy at all. There's no copying going on. A good analogy would be, "Hey George, take a look at page 37 of this month's 'Wired' magazine." Should that be illegal?
Hopefully DataPlay won't succeed on the "5 albums on one disc" fact. Will average consumers realize that for the past few years you've been able to fit 10 or more albums on a MP3 CDR, and select only the songs you want if you wish? A CDR with 200 songs on it is worth buying a special player for. A smaller disc with less capacity is not worth buying a special player for.
There were only 3 of them, Spiderman, Ice Man, and Firestar. Mmm, I remember that skin-tight yellow outfit she wore. She was one hot cartoon chick, no pun intended.
As usual the characters were neat but the writing was pretty bad.
I wonder if simulations can deal with events like September 11? That has changed society in many countries.
Do they just count on things leveling out over time?
What about something extremely bad happening, like a large asteriod hitting the Earth? I think as long as nothing major happens, simulations could be accurate. But all it would take is aliens landing on the White House lawn or a widespread plague to totally throw off any mathmatical equation(s).
I don't buy a lot of what that Salon article says. Most liteary works are derivative, it's not very often that something truly new comes along.
It seems to me that with the Star Wars trilogy Lucas tied mythology, Eastern religion, and WW2 dogfights together into a great trio of movies.
Who cares where he got his ideas? Nobody else made those movies, does anyone disupute he directed them??
Ok, we'll give you a fast connection, but you can't use it very much.
Or you can have a slow dial-up connection with unlimited use.
Take your pick. Sheesh. No wonder people are banding together to buy a fast connection and distribute it wirelessly.
ThinkFree better have some good advertising or word of mouth to topple the MSOffice giant. I don't know if cost is a big issue for businesses that buy MS software the way mainframe people (used to?) buy IBM. The Corel Wordperfect Suite didn't cost much more than ThinkFree and where is it now?
And on a related note I'm proud to say I've never used MSWord, although I will admit to using Excel...
The Mac/PC & BMW/Geo comparison is not valid. A Geo can't compete performance-wise with a BMW, like a PC can with a Mac.
Don't tell me Macs have that much more "quality" than PCs. A PC can have as much quality as you research/shop for. You have a plethora of components to choose from. An iMac has whatever they can fit into the half-circle.
Some people are Mac people, some people are PC people. I've just never seen anything to convince me to pay such high prices for a Mac that can't even run most of my software. That's what it amounts to.
For the last 4 or 5 years I've been calling Adelphia (a cable company based in Florida) to see if cable modem service is available in my area. Every time they say 6 months to a year. I'm starting to get a little skeptical.
Now that they've raised my rate another $5 a month, I'm very tempted to tell them to cancel my cable, and to call me back when they finally get cable modem service in my area. I can get satellite in the meantime, for less money. More channels although I won't get local stations.
It's neat they have an analog guage being controlled by a serial port, but I really don't want to run the software driver. It would be great to have a hardware-only solution.
I remember the old IBM 4381 console keyboard had an amber Wait light on it (and a Big Red Button emergency power off button I only got to push once). The wait light stayed solid when the system was at 0% CPU, and turned off at a rate corresponding to the CPU load. It was fun trying to turn the light off by running several jobs at once.
I'd like to see a hardware CPU tachometer, temperature guage, and activity lights for each slot and port.
I gave up on Netscape when 4.x stopped responding to my mouse clicks. Not just one one machine, on 3 machines with completely different hardware and software. That and the crashing and current bloated state sort of wears you out.
I use Opera to browse now, it's much more powerful and flexible. I use IE if I have to browse a site that's heavy on Java or uses Flash, which isn't very often. The things I love most about Opera: You can completely disable popups, and you can set it to throw all your cookies away on exit. That way you get the best of both worlds, sites that require cookies still work but you're not saving the cookies from one session to the next. Muhahahaha!