You're soo right. Halo helps to re-enforce group theory by placing you at some barrier with another group without any attempt at personifying them in a similar light. In fact, they do such a great job of creating a premise around group theory that you don't even realize that you're a victim of it.
Imagine Halo being Allies vs. Nazi's. Not many gamers (at least in western nations) have a problem with slaughtering endless swarms of Nazi's. Kill some Nazi's, ---every single Nazi you're killing is personally EVIL!---, mwahaha. Then take Criminals killing Police / Citizens, or maybe Oblivion where you can pretty much kill anyone. Now, everyone raises the flag of discrimination because franklythat victim could be you. Its all about the us vs. them and as long as you couldn't be the 'them', you just shut up about it; well guess what? Its all the same. Violence is violence if you're killing a man, or beating your wife, or getting in a fist fight.
Do I want to ban violent content? No. But I don't want weak knee arguments of how killing a completely sentient alien is at all different than killing a human being.
If a large portion of their trade exports to the US are being severed over a trade restriction put up by the US, then I don't think the Antigua gov cares if US copyrights are violated. In fact, I would make it a policy decision to do it. More importantly, the question should really be if these copyrighted works can be resold within the WTO rules to other nations.
As best as I can see XBL, it doesn't host servers at all (then it may be worth some incremental fee) but instead it is simply a dispatcher between someone who's hosting a game and any participants that want to play on that game.
They also have a whole bunch of up sells and useless achievements to piss on your friends about, and maybe some demos that are important enough to people.
The only really sad fact of all of this is that beyond Steam on the PC, nobody's been able to do better than XBL. They don't need to be too fancy. Most people will be quite excited over a fully functional easy to use plug and pray networking interconnection for playing their games with. But instead, we have many many failed attempts to pull this off on consoles with EA the only one who stuck it out long enough to even consider being called competition. Even they finally gave up and moved into the XBL farm and here we are.
If Apple was "effectively a monopoly" operating system which used that leverage to push into new product categories then damn sure they'd be getting the red flag from everyone on Slashdot about how evil they were. You miss the perspective that we're so ridged that we're incapable of seeing change.
Look at Microsoft, well since Slashdot came around, I think everyone's hated MS. Apple went from a lame duck to a star performer. Google went from a tiny and neat search web page to an amazingly large software powerhouse. Be went from really cool OS to absolutely nothing, etc.. and so forth.
Just because everyone loves Apple today doesn't mean that the good will will last 5 min longer than they deserve.
Maybe you should read more about these gospels. There were MANY gospels written at the time, though only four of them are recognized as canonical (part of the religion), which is of course amazingly fishy. I won't be reading these any time soon, but if you're hard up for a religious book to read, why not read what else they said during biblical times =)
Wikipedia has a brief section in the new Testament section in how they determined which books were to be the official religious books that they are today vs. some of the other passages from other authors that often contradicted themselves in their messages.
100,000 full downloads * ~5mb (around size of most mp3's) == 500,000MB or 500GB. I don't know what kind of pipe you have, but if your uploads were 1mb/s (very high for a home internet line) and 90% capacity (once again very high considering p2p overhead) you're still looking at (500000 * 8(bits)) == 4000000(mbits) * 1.11(overhead) == 4440000 seconds or
3083 DAYS of non-stop 100% pipe saturation seeding to come up with the numbers you're pulling out of your butt.
I can't say I read the rest of your post, but the top was great. Yes, if you leave your system running 100% upload for around 8 years, you'll hit that magic 100,000 songs uploaded and prove us all wrong!
My TV's on-screen 720p is actually 1152x648 (Sony 50" LCD/proj) and I know that there are many TV models that are the same. Its possible that the developers didn't spec out native on-screen panel resolutions of 1280x720+. I'm sure that the 640 / 648 difference was just a typo though.
PS: Look into "720p optimized" in Google if you want more background on the issue.
*sigh* I'm still holding a candle to windows 2000 pro. For me its still as good as it always has. The issue now is that video driver manufacturers are dropping support for 2k and that new games are starting to use the very few API's that were only included after XP's release. I agree that win2k was the best MS OS, and frankly probably the best productivity OS ever. If they had taken the OS and incrementally improved the API / driver model ONLY, then we'd be in a much better world now.
Microsoft may make buckets of money off their OS, but that component is the point-man in a larger sales culture.
When MS releases a new version of windows, they will often: 1. Sell new training platforms 2. Buys all the good will to those stupid companies that thought software assurance was a good idea (because OS's change every couple of years, right?) 3. Sells new development tools with the new bells and whistles 4. Charges all hardware vendors for certified driver support on their platform 5. Collect their DRM tax from RIAA, MPAA, etc.. 6. Sell new version of MS Office 7. Sell new version of server platform 8. Sell new versions of the software that runs on the new server platform......
I think you get what I'm saying. If Microsoft pegs the platform at windows XP forever any potential competitor has an easier time to compete directly with them. By keeping Windows and their other product offerings a moving target, they keep a better handle on their market.
What I believe Vista is the result of is a company that lost its ability innovate their OS. Instead of throwing their hands up ceding defeat, they chose to release an OS that nobody wanted. When you hear about useless features like the new file management infrastructure getting dropped on the floor in order to make financial deadlines (6 years in the making) you know this is a company thats lost confidence in its abilities.
Thanks for the comment, I was aware of this one, but all too many of my friends take slurs for granted without even meaning harm. For instance, I worked in web development a while back and I always pronounced W.A.P. as wop, which is apparently a slur against Italians.
On the one hand, its really offensive to the party who you're unintentionally insulting, but on the other if you're truly ignorant of its meaning it means there are people born and raised without racism, etc.. and I'd say thats a healthy ignorance.
FFVII was mostly linear in what it presented. The cut scenes included in each disc were arranged by timing of the event with some data spread over all the discs as needed. This is why (annoyingly) some event could only be triggered on a specific disc even through the area was open to you. If you ever wanted to develop a large sandbox type game with the same richness of content, there'd be no reasonable way of making the content fit.
The sad thing is developers know this and are most likely shearing the design of the game based on content size limitations.
Now before I get modded fan-boy, I don't have any Sony gaming products and I don't own any of their consoles.
Re:got Mono - stay away or risk infection w/MS ger
on
GNOME 2.20 Released
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I guess you should also steer away from every mainstream Linux OS since they're all including mono these days. In fact, you should start wearing your tinfoil hat as well too, because the aliens have patents on Mono technology as well!
All they need is a skin penetrable laxatives. Problem solved! Oh wait, they can save themselves by wearing adult undergarments. We better make those illegal too, and enforce the law by making random spot checks!
At least then, when a cop hits you with these things, they'll have constraint; because really, who wants to haul away a person who's soiled themselves when they don't have to?
All your points are true enough, but after playing Metriod from start to finish and absolutely loving the freedom of control, I don't think I'll ever play another dual analog piece of crap again.
1. I hope you're control interface is on Advanced. It makes a HUGE difference in responsiveness compared to the default controller setup 2. IMHO the control scheme is SO much better that it pretty much makes any dual analogs unusable. Well, I wasn't much of a console FPS fan to begin with, but Metroid 3 is the first game that I can say comes a lot closer to intuitiveness and control that PC keybopard/mouse gamers take for granted.
Well, since Java is more or less 100% backwards compatible they could release a new major version every two weeks and nobody should care. That said, there are some gotcha's to watch out for when upgrading to new versions of the JDK. For the company I work for, the move from 1.4's Metal to 1.5's Metal meant going through every screen to make sure the layout was still consistent. That wasn't fun, but the added features of the release more than compensated for it.
I'm sorry, but I have to call BS on this one. Can you please site a single reference to backup the claim that Directx has anything more than Windows / XBox ports?
OMG's I'm using an X800 GTO as well... At least I know now so that I can save $50 from buying the retail. What a shame, because the online demo walkthrough really did look swank. If you're getting the issues, you may want to hunt down ATI's specially crafted bioshock driver hotfix. Its big, but apparently it fixes all the annoying issues.
1. dbghelp.dll must be downloaded from 'dll download sites' on the internet and dropped into 'Release'
2. You must hex edit xinput1_3.dll in 'Release' and replace the String 'TraceMessage' with 'GetUserNameA'. It simply forces the debug messages to be dropped on the ground, I think anyways.
Thats where I'm at so far. Right now I can load up and start the demo, but I have two issues: 1. The mouse is not drawn 2. When you start the actual plain crash sequence, textures are missing and it looks like a big pile of crap. Since I have really old drivers installed, I'm going to attempt one of the 'non-ati' bundles or maybe the hotfix driver (if it works with 2k) to see if any of them work out for me.
There are many CD/DVDRom's with play buttons on the fronts of them. Most if not all of them have analog output ports which 'play' the audio to the sound card. I'd be hard pressed to peg a line between the function and use of PC CD Roms and off the shelf CD players.
Everyone with a DVD-ROM in their computers can perform a bit-for-bit DVD copy while retaining the CSS encryption. Licensees that bit-for-bit copy CSS enabled movies are not violating the forums rules and are not violating copyright law. This change just means that anyone who IS a licensee of the DVD-forum cannot perform such operations that everyone else is legally entitled to perform.
The problem arises that the only way to re-integrate that legal copy is to burn the image back to disc and leave the disc in a licensed player. I know this is a pain in the f-ing ass because I've been looking into large capacity DVD carousel's lately and the selection is anywhere between bad and insulting. If this is DVD-Forum's solution to on-demand DVD, then they're more than supporting piracy by releasing inferior products.
I just watched Franken's Documentary thinking, wow, this may be a pretty funny look at Al Franken from a new perspective. There were a few jokes, but the majority was pretty dry and the whole movie looked like a put on for his senatorial running, sad.
On another note, I was said good bye to Al Franken and Air America when they decided to take personal swings at Nader. He may not be the same party, but he holds many of the same ideals. To tear him down for political gains cheapened the medium and erased any message they could speak to me.
The Democrats really have to start defining themselves instead of attacking who they're not.
On the first hand we have people paid to basically impersonate police which most can agree is pretty bad, if not illegal (IMHO).
In the second case we have police raiding a flea market which was selling counterfeit goods, which I think most of you should realize is perfectly acceptable. If some jerk off is making money of copyright infringement, I hope they're taken to the ringer. At the -very- least their goods should be confiscated.
Is it just me did anyone else notice that the moderators/posters seem like paid shills on this article? It just -feels- different reading the comments today, like 10,000 MS engineers realized that slashdot wasn't blocked by the corp firewall!
blame them all. They're all out to give you fewer options.
1. Microsoft has drunk this DTV Cool-aid in the hope that this legally sanctioned lockout will finally bury any OS competition, well at least in the living room (they're right. No DTV means everyone else is pushed out)
2. Cable operators want to run your living room like cell carriers want to own your phones. If there's profit to be had, they want it to flow through their pockets or nobody else's. So even if this media PC thing flops, they're not out at all since 'most people' will just overpay for the vendor lock-in machines overprices since they're the only show in town.
My personal story of this issue
I like to think that I LOVE media and I'm probably a nice juicy target for such gadgetry. I've got hundreds of DVD's (legal) and I appreciate spending my money on what I like.
I live up in BC where the sole cable-co is Shaw. I was introduced to Digital TV a few years back when they rented out the boxes for pretty cheap (this was before HD content so the box didn't support it). A couple years later I start seeing that they were going to be broadcasting HD content. I was like: Wow, thats great. I could get an HTPC to do some DVR and the world will be my oyster. How poorly things turn out.
As it turned out, there weren't too many options for me after all. There was a $450 HD receiver that has firewire, but since practically HD all channels have nocopy, I couldn't actually use it as a part of a HDPC/DVR. For $450 it would cost too much to simply watch maybe 10 HD channels. They also released a DVR version of the system. $750. F* you, everyone one of you. I refuse to pay that much for a piece of equipment that can't interoperate with anything or even choose competing product. You get Shaw branded Motorola's or shaw branded Motorola's Wow. thanks, but no thanks.
So after really really wanting to break down and pay the outrageous price just for the tuners (ignoring for the moment how much the actual content would cost), I just decided to drop the whole cable TV thing all together. Instead, for the shrinking number of shows I actually want to watch, I download them illegally. Thanks to all your greed, you've forced me to become a white collar criminal. Bastards!
Slashdot Mirror
You're soo right. Halo helps to re-enforce group theory by placing you at some barrier with another group without any attempt at personifying them in a similar light. In fact, they do such a great job of creating a premise around group theory that you don't even realize that you're a victim of it.
Imagine Halo being Allies vs. Nazi's. Not many gamers (at least in western nations) have a problem with slaughtering endless swarms of Nazi's. Kill some Nazi's, ---every single Nazi you're killing is personally EVIL!---, mwahaha. Then take Criminals killing Police / Citizens, or maybe Oblivion where you can pretty much kill anyone. Now, everyone raises the flag of discrimination because franklythat victim could be you. Its all about the us vs. them and as long as you couldn't be the 'them', you just shut up about it; well guess what? Its all the same. Violence is violence if you're killing a man, or beating your wife, or getting in a fist fight.
Do I want to ban violent content? No. But I don't want weak knee arguments of how killing a completely sentient alien is at all different than killing a human being.
If a large portion of their trade exports to the US are being severed over a trade restriction put up by the US, then I don't think the Antigua gov cares if US copyrights are violated. In fact, I would make it a policy decision to do it. More importantly, the question should really be if these copyrighted works can be resold within the WTO rules to other nations.
As best as I can see XBL, it doesn't host servers at all (then it may be worth some incremental fee) but instead it is simply a dispatcher between someone who's hosting a game and any participants that want to play on that game.
They also have a whole bunch of up sells and useless achievements to piss on your friends about, and maybe some demos that are important enough to people.
The only really sad fact of all of this is that beyond Steam on the PC, nobody's been able to do better than XBL. They don't need to be too fancy. Most people will be quite excited over a fully functional easy to use plug and pray networking interconnection for playing their games with. But instead, we have many many failed attempts to pull this off on consoles with EA the only one who stuck it out long enough to even consider being called competition. Even they finally gave up and moved into the XBL farm and here we are.
If Apple was "effectively a monopoly" operating system which used that leverage to push into new product categories then damn sure they'd be getting the red flag from everyone on Slashdot about how evil they were. You miss the perspective that we're so ridged that we're incapable of seeing change.
Look at Microsoft, well since Slashdot came around, I think everyone's hated MS. Apple went from a lame duck to a star performer. Google went from a tiny and neat search web page to an amazingly large software powerhouse. Be went from really cool OS to absolutely nothing, etc.. and so forth.
Just because everyone loves Apple today doesn't mean that the good will will last 5 min longer than they deserve.
Maybe you should read more about these gospels. There were MANY gospels written at the time, though only four of them are recognized as canonical (part of the religion), which is of course amazingly fishy. I won't be reading these any time soon, but if you're hard up for a religious book to read, why not read what else they said during biblical times =)
Wikipedia has a brief section in the new Testament section in how they determined which books were to be the official religious books that they are today vs. some of the other passages from other authors that often contradicted themselves in their messages.
100,000 full downloads * ~5mb (around size of most mp3's) == 500,000MB or 500GB.
I don't know what kind of pipe you have, but if your uploads were 1mb/s (very high for a home internet line) and 90% capacity (once again very high considering p2p overhead) you're still looking at (500000 * 8(bits)) == 4000000(mbits) * 1.11(overhead) == 4440000 seconds or
3083 DAYS of non-stop 100% pipe saturation seeding to come up with the numbers you're pulling out of your butt.
I can't say I read the rest of your post, but the top was great. Yes, if you leave your system running 100% upload for around 8 years, you'll hit that magic 100,000 songs uploaded and prove us all wrong!
My TV's on-screen 720p is actually 1152x648 (Sony 50" LCD/proj) and I know that there are many TV models that are the same. Its possible that the developers didn't spec out native on-screen panel resolutions of 1280x720+. I'm sure that the 640 / 648 difference was just a typo though.
PS: Look into "720p optimized" in Google if you want more background on the issue.
*sigh* I'm still holding a candle to windows 2000 pro. For me its still as good as it always has. The issue now is that video driver manufacturers are dropping support for 2k and that new games are starting to use the very few API's that were only included after XP's release. I agree that win2k was the best MS OS, and frankly probably the best productivity OS ever. If they had taken the OS and incrementally improved the API / driver model ONLY, then we'd be in a much better world now.
Microsoft may make buckets of money off their OS, but that component is the point-man in a larger sales culture.
... ...
When MS releases a new version of windows, they will often:
1. Sell new training platforms
2. Buys all the good will to those stupid companies that thought software assurance was a good idea (because OS's change every couple of years, right?)
3. Sells new development tools with the new bells and whistles
4. Charges all hardware vendors for certified driver support on their platform
5. Collect their DRM tax from RIAA, MPAA, etc..
6. Sell new version of MS Office
7. Sell new version of server platform
8. Sell new versions of the software that runs on the new server platform
I think you get what I'm saying. If Microsoft pegs the platform at windows XP forever any potential competitor has an easier time to compete directly with them. By keeping Windows and their other product offerings a moving target, they keep a better handle on their market.
What I believe Vista is the result of is a company that lost its ability innovate their OS. Instead of throwing their hands up ceding defeat, they chose to release an OS that nobody wanted. When you hear about useless features like the new file management infrastructure getting dropped on the floor in order to make financial deadlines (6 years in the making) you know this is a company thats lost confidence in its abilities.
Thanks for the comment, I was aware of this one, but all too many of my friends take slurs for granted without even meaning harm. For instance, I worked in web development a while back and I always pronounced W.A.P. as wop, which is apparently a slur against Italians.
On the one hand, its really offensive to the party who you're unintentionally insulting, but on the other if you're truly ignorant of its meaning it means there are people born and raised without racism, etc.. and I'd say thats a healthy ignorance.
FFVII was mostly linear in what it presented. The cut scenes included in each disc were arranged by timing of the event with some data spread over all the discs as needed. This is why (annoyingly) some event could only be triggered on a specific disc even through the area was open to you. If you ever wanted to develop a large sandbox type game with the same richness of content, there'd be no reasonable way of making the content fit.
The sad thing is developers know this and are most likely shearing the design of the game based on content size limitations.
Now before I get modded fan-boy, I don't have any Sony gaming products and I don't own any of their consoles.
I guess you should also steer away from every mainstream Linux OS since they're all including mono these days. In fact, you should start wearing your tinfoil hat as well too, because the aliens have patents on Mono technology as well!
All they need is a skin penetrable laxatives. Problem solved! Oh wait, they can save themselves by wearing adult undergarments. We better make those illegal too, and enforce the law by making random spot checks!
At least then, when a cop hits you with these things, they'll have constraint; because really, who wants to haul away a person who's soiled themselves when they don't have to?
All your points are true enough, but after playing Metriod from start to finish and absolutely loving the freedom of control, I don't think I'll ever play another dual analog piece of crap again.
1. I hope you're control interface is on Advanced. It makes a HUGE difference in responsiveness compared to the default controller setup
2. IMHO the control scheme is SO much better that it pretty much makes any dual analogs unusable. Well, I wasn't much of a console FPS fan to begin with, but Metroid 3 is the first game that I can say comes a lot closer to intuitiveness and control that PC keybopard/mouse gamers take for granted.
Well, since Java is more or less 100% backwards compatible they could release a new major version every two weeks and nobody should care. That said, there are some gotcha's to watch out for when upgrading to new versions of the JDK. For the company I work for, the move from 1.4's Metal to 1.5's Metal meant going through every screen to make sure the layout was still consistent. That wasn't fun, but the added features of the release more than compensated for it.
I'm sorry, but I have to call BS on this one. Can you please site a single reference to backup the claim that Directx has anything more than Windows / XBox ports?
OMG's I'm using an X800 GTO as well... At least I know now so that I can save $50 from buying the retail. What a shame, because the online demo walkthrough really did look swank. If you're getting the issues, you may want to hunt down ATI's specially crafted bioshock driver hotfix. Its big, but apparently it fixes all the annoying issues.
I've been working on getting it run under win2k for a while now:
'Release' folder == Progra~1\Steam\steamapps\common\bioshock demo\Builds\Release
1. dbghelp.dll must be downloaded from 'dll download sites' on the internet and dropped into 'Release'
2. You must hex edit xinput1_3.dll in 'Release' and replace the String 'TraceMessage' with 'GetUserNameA'. It simply forces the debug messages to be dropped on the ground, I think anyways.
Thats where I'm at so far. Right now I can load up and start the demo, but I have two issues:
1. The mouse is not drawn
2. When you start the actual plain crash sequence, textures are missing and it looks like a big pile of crap. Since I have really old drivers installed, I'm going to attempt one of the 'non-ati' bundles or maybe the hotfix driver (if it works with 2k) to see if any of them work out for me.
Good luck
There are many CD/DVDRom's with play buttons on the fronts of them. Most if not all of them have analog output ports which 'play' the audio to the sound card. I'd be hard pressed to peg a line between the function and use of PC CD Roms and off the shelf CD players.
Everyone with a DVD-ROM in their computers can perform a bit-for-bit DVD copy while retaining the CSS encryption. Licensees that bit-for-bit copy CSS enabled movies are not violating the forums rules and are not violating copyright law. This change just means that anyone who IS a licensee of the DVD-forum cannot perform such operations that everyone else is legally entitled to perform.
The problem arises that the only way to re-integrate that legal copy is to burn the image back to disc and leave the disc in a licensed player. I know this is a pain in the f-ing ass because I've been looking into large capacity DVD carousel's lately and the selection is anywhere between bad and insulting. If this is DVD-Forum's solution to on-demand DVD, then they're more than supporting piracy by releasing inferior products.
I just watched Franken's Documentary thinking, wow, this may be a pretty funny look at Al Franken from a new perspective. There were a few jokes, but the majority was pretty dry and the whole movie looked like a put on for his senatorial running, sad.
On another note, I was said good bye to Al Franken and Air America when they decided to take personal swings at Nader. He may not be the same party, but he holds many of the same ideals. To tear him down for political gains cheapened the medium and erased any message they could speak to me.
The Democrats really have to start defining themselves instead of attacking who they're not.
On the first hand we have people paid to basically impersonate police which most can agree is pretty bad, if not illegal (IMHO).
In the second case we have police raiding a flea market which was selling counterfeit goods, which I think most of you should realize is perfectly acceptable. If some jerk off is making money of copyright infringement, I hope they're taken to the ringer. At the -very- least their goods should be confiscated.
Is it just me did anyone else notice that the moderators/posters seem like paid shills on this article? It just -feels- different reading the comments today, like 10,000 MS engineers realized that slashdot wasn't blocked by the corp firewall!
blame them all. They're all out to give you fewer options.
1. Microsoft has drunk this DTV Cool-aid in the hope that this legally sanctioned lockout will finally bury any OS competition, well at least in the living room (they're right. No DTV means everyone else is pushed out)
2. Cable operators want to run your living room like cell carriers want to own your phones. If there's profit to be had, they want it to flow through their pockets or nobody else's. So even if this media PC thing flops, they're not out at all since 'most people' will just overpay for the vendor lock-in machines overprices since they're the only show in town.
My personal story of this issue
I like to think that I LOVE media and I'm probably a nice juicy target for such gadgetry. I've got hundreds of DVD's (legal) and I appreciate spending my money on what I like.
I live up in BC where the sole cable-co is Shaw. I was introduced to Digital TV a few years back when they rented out the boxes for pretty cheap (this was before HD content so the box didn't support it). A couple years later I start seeing that they were going to be broadcasting HD content. I was like: Wow, thats great. I could get an HTPC to do some DVR and the world will be my oyster. How poorly things turn out.
As it turned out, there weren't too many options for me after all. There was a $450 HD receiver that has firewire, but since practically HD all channels have nocopy, I couldn't actually use it as a part of a HDPC/DVR. For $450 it would cost too much to simply watch maybe 10 HD channels. They also released a DVR version of the system. $750. F* you, everyone one of you. I refuse to pay that much for a piece of equipment that can't interoperate with anything or even choose competing product. You get Shaw branded Motorola's or shaw branded Motorola's Wow. thanks, but no thanks.
So after really really wanting to break down and pay the outrageous price just for the tuners (ignoring for the moment how much the actual content would cost), I just decided to drop the whole cable TV thing all together. Instead, for the shrinking number of shows I actually want to watch, I download them illegally. Thanks to all your greed, you've forced me to become a white collar criminal. Bastards!