The system is a great DVD player, a Good blu-ray player. Has a lot of options I find neat and so far I have 3 games for it. 2 are a lot of fun 1 was given to me because my friend was using the game as a coaster (genji). PS1 games are coming online which rocks and I use it as a media center for my HD TV. It's a pretty nice machine. It was worth it for me. The machine is a good one and well made. There aren't the same "disc read error" problems that plagued the launch PS2/Xbox/360.
"Next generation game design demands the capacity of Blu-ray." Translation: I am a lying sack of shit, since Microsoft is successfully outselling us with next-generation games on DVD.
This one I disagree with you on. While Developers aren't demanding the extra space it does make their lives easier. Most games go through a phase where they need to shrik their assets down to size to fit the media. High res textures, uncompressed audio, multiple channels, bigger models, bump maps, normal maps, lighting maps, The increasingly less common FMV, The increasingly more common NPC audio, etc... Most developers will tell you before the shrikage games are easily 10-30 gigs. They shrink it by lowering texture resolution dropping stuff, compressing stuff etc...
How exactly is this flamebait? BEcause I meantion an isreali firm? because you recognize the situationa nd you work for th efirm in question? Or your the guy who got canned?
I work for a fairly large company. We recently had an upgrade of our frontline order entry software, we contracted out to an off shore firm (Israeli). The parts we made work very well with a few bugs. The parts we sourced out to hardly works. We had to launch it for financial reasons recently and it basically drops 3/4 of the orders into a stuck state. It has 109 known cases that need work around, we expect call center grunts to be aware of all 109... It has one reoccurring error that is so far unfixable and only affects our high value customers. The contractor is condescending, resentful of our questions and $900/h for any personnel they send. As well the whole system is down at least once a day for an hour.
Word from former employees of two other companies that contracted the same contractor, is that we are lucky that it runs at all. Their experience with them is that it had less running at the same point when they had contracted them.
Given that we had people in our company that had bad experiences with this off shore contractor why did we choose them? All we know is that mid way through the project one of the senior decision makers pushing for this particular contractor was fired. Perhaps this firm does the whole kick back thing. It would explain why our final products feels like an alpha build. Perhaps event the ambivalence and contempt from the contractor. If the contract we sign was stupid enough they can show open contempt without fear of being fired. I attended one meeting with one of their reps and the only word I understood was the work the resentful "okay" the lady kept adding to each of her supposedly English sentences.
I think we could have done in house in the same time (2 year overdue) with less money (I have no idea, but the number is large enough that the senior VPS feel nervous). Or even hired an shore and at least be able to yell at them at our leisure and have them reply in something resembling English.
Kids are different. My 13 year old brother is goign to swing it around when Ii'm nto looking and blow a hole through his friends face. The vast majority of those under 16 should not be carrying firarms without direct and constant supervision regaurdless of how mature you think they are. BEcause I'm not that far from under 16 and I know I was a jack ass and so were the majority of my friends.
You are all aware that you can drop any SATA HD into the system right? So making a new unit with nothing but a bigger HD would be counter productive. They'd have to add something like a sony memcard reader and maybe include 3 controllers to make it worth while.
No, I think parents have down in quality. Because they can't help but blame other people for their problems. A kid carrying a gun for you seems like a accident waiting to happen. If you let your kid do this you need to remove both of you from the gene pool asap before you hurt someone. You may not hit your kid so hard that they need medical attention but generally corpral punishment is still legal. I can spank my kid or rap his knuckles but punching him in the face is a bit much.
Parents are too caught up with career and their own vices. They should prioritize their kids and raise them in the same way their parents did. But in the last couple of generations the parents thought they knew better then their parents and have tried such utter bullshit new age parental techniques and trying to be their kids best friend instead of being their parent.
I wonder if it's related to the massacre? I'm sure people like jack thompson would desprately want Cho to be a gamer because in their small little brains it would validate their beliefs. From all accounts the guy didn't play games but the truth has never stopped these people. I think selling M games or R movies to minors should be restricted. Let parents make the choice for their kids.
Would this help explain the apparent causality problem of neuromuscular control (humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)?
What? I have never heard of any causality problems related to human reflexes. There is a measurable delay and no contradiction of fundemental physics in biology like this. I think you might have read one too many flakey new age texts.
Of course. But that's not the point. People want Vonage to win because the system is broken and in serious need of fixing. It's being abused in order to squash competition, which is bad for all of us
I want vonage to lose because of their shady business practices. If Verizon was to somehow also lose It'd be perfect.
You could argue that the human "big brain" is an evolutionary dead end of sorts, because we now respond to environmental pressures by inventing tools and medicines. Humans who would be very "unfit" from a purely physical point of view (and I'm not just talking about/.ers), are very able to survive and pass on their genetic information.
Continual progress isn't needed. We're only a dead end if we all die. Otherwise we're just a branch. Some designs were so good that they persists almost unchanged for a long time (ie. allagator, Coelacanth). So if our design is just so good that we persist then we're not a dead end. progress isn't required, only survival.
Think about it. If you can be an Alpha Male without even being able to stand then genetic features become less relevant in determining who reproduces. Dramatically slowing the process of human evolution.
Your selecting for different genes. Instead of beign faster, stronger, tougher. You get smarter, craftier, less moral, hornier, and better looking. Since these tend to be the features that get you more kids. Although the pressure in those direction would be weaker because you dont' get killed if your below a certain IQ. The pressure is weaker.
Verizon is bound by the rules that bind incumbant telecoms. Vonage is in too many markets, it might be a regulatory nightmare to "buy" their user base. Vonage ussually has a fairly regulation free position as a CLEC. Its business practices would vilify any ILEC but since it's the little guy the stories don't get blown up as big. Hard to cencel, hidden cencel fees, no service garentees, almost impossible to port out of, and so on. It has it's fans but everyone I know who has tried it, hates it.
It's not the service, it's the technology behind the service. You can't patent something like "serving ice cream" but you can patent a particular novel flavor. You can't patent "selling computers" but you could patent an inventory system that helps you assmble them is a timely manner. You can't patent "driving people around" but you can patent a dispatch system that novel. If in any one of these three cases you use someone elses technology the court would insist you cease until they figure out if it truly was novel and legitimate.
There's no debate. Analogue recordings are better. And they keep better too. If you make an analogue recording of something using top of the line equipment, 50 years from now, you'll be able to use superior tools to pull a more accurate representation of the sonic environment than anything we can do now. If you record digital, a bit is a bit is a bit.
Best method, use the highest quality analogue gear you can find to record, then sample it in the highest quality digital you can for editing and distribution, then throw the original analogue in the vault so you can re-sample it again in 5 years.
If you make the data density of the digital recording the same as the analogue then the quality is exactly the same.
Infer informations between gaps in sampling based on local patterns to the gap. Add commonly missing tones. It's likely more marketting then tech since CD and well kept records sound exactly the same to me. In fact high quality MP3's and CD's soudn exactly the same. Only positional audio make smuch of a difference to my ear.
Conversley if you use high quality amps/speakers and a algorithm that fills in the missing frequencies in the digital recordings or simply use HD audio you can get a similiar quality for a similiar price without seeming like a luddite.
One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability, and the error correction is much more robust on Analog.
I don't think so. the abuse a standard CD is subjected to would utterly destroy a record. how many people put a dozen naked Records on top of each other in a care that goe over bumps. 2 bumps and you have yourself a pile of useless plastic. I do the same to CD's and they last about a year with this abuse. Records last a long time now, because those who buy them treat them properly. CD's have finite lifespans because they are small, and versatile and thus often abused.
CD's and Records fail in different ways. A light scratch across the record will render every track with a regular periodic snap/pop or even render it unplayable. A light scratch on a CD may result in a bit of a skip or no data loss. A deep scratch on both results in an unplayable disc. Multiple light scratches on a CD will still often be playable and often without quality loss while the same for a Record renders it unplayable. Repeated play degrades a record, while it doesn't really degrade a CD. And Vinyl is not as mobile.
Also, You can back up a CD. You cannot back up a Record into the same format. Error correction on analog data is not more "robust" it's different. Critical failure on an anologue system is different then on digital. If I introduce random noise to a CD, I can digitally filter it out if I know how. The same type of error on a anologue signal might result in static. cleaning up such a systemic loss is hard on analogue. When the damage is mroe severe the digital may be unrecoverable while the analogue may still cary some of th edata. Digital has a recoverable area/damaged area rate that looks like a inverse log. 0-50% damage = 100% recover 50%+ = 0%. While Anaglogue has a linear decline.
I was reading some info about crime stats and one interestign thing: Victims of crimes who possessed guns/weapons during the incident had a good chance (40%) of having their own weapon used against them.
I'm not a huge fan of Oblivion myself either. However it's a comparable game style to Ultima:underwold. Both are first person perspectives with a complex "Reagent" system, food, and dungeon crawls. Both have stories and could be compeling if your into that sort of story. They're both partly hack and slash. Quality wise, Oblivion has 10 years of graphic polish, controls and much better AI. Although Oblivion is much much glitchier and it's expansiveness comes at the expense of pacing and focus. I chose it because of these facts. I suppose you could compare Ultima under world to WOW would also be appripriate for the same features but WOW is a whole different animal.
By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
I'd agrue the replay value of the top titles can be just as good (Disgea 1&2, FF tactics, Oblivion, or Gods of War) but there is just so many more games out there that we move on instead of completeing each game fully. The hard stuff is now optional and the bosses are easy. See the FF series.
Planescape, Xenogears, Fallout 1&2, FF 4&6&12, Vagrant story, Warcraft III, Starcraft, etc... all kicked the crap out of what passed for a story back in the day, but these are the gems of their respective eras. Looking back thats all we see. It's easy for nostalgia to cloud our thinking. Ultima underworld was interesting and fun, but it pales to games liek oblivion which basically take the same idea and run with it. There is a lot of crap today, but there was back then too. Except we're comparing the 80% of todays games that are crap to the 20% of the games fromt he past that we remember. It isn't a fair comparison. We should compar ethe top 20% now with the top 20% then or the bottom 80% now with the bottom 80% then.
Slashdot Mirror
The system is a great DVD player, a Good blu-ray player. Has a lot of options I find neat and so far I have 3 games for it. 2 are a lot of fun 1 was given to me because my friend was using the game as a coaster (genji). PS1 games are coming online which rocks and I use it as a media center for my HD TV. It's a pretty nice machine. It was worth it for me. The machine is a good one and well made. There aren't the same "disc read error" problems that plagued the launch PS2/Xbox/360.
"Next generation game design demands the capacity of Blu-ray." Translation: I am a lying sack of shit, since Microsoft is successfully outselling us with next-generation games on DVD.
This one I disagree with you on. While Developers aren't demanding the extra space it does make their lives easier. Most games go through a phase where they need to shrik their assets down to size to fit the media. High res textures, uncompressed audio, multiple channels, bigger models, bump maps, normal maps, lighting maps, The increasingly less common FMV, The increasingly more common NPC audio, etc... Most developers will tell you before the shrikage games are easily 10-30 gigs. They shrink it by lowering texture resolution dropping stuff, compressing stuff etc...
How exactly is this flamebait? BEcause I meantion an isreali firm? because you recognize the situationa nd you work for th efirm in question? Or your the guy who got canned?
I work for a fairly large company. We recently had an upgrade of our frontline order entry software, we contracted out to an off shore firm (Israeli). The parts we made work very well with a few bugs. The parts we sourced out to hardly works. We had to launch it for financial reasons recently and it basically drops 3/4 of the orders into a stuck state. It has 109 known cases that need work around, we expect call center grunts to be aware of all 109... It has one reoccurring error that is so far unfixable and only affects our high value customers. The contractor is condescending, resentful of our questions and $900/h for any personnel they send. As well the whole system is down at least once a day for an hour.
Word from former employees of two other companies that contracted the same contractor, is that we are lucky that it runs at all. Their experience with them is that it had less running at the same point when they had contracted them.
Given that we had people in our company that had bad experiences with this off shore contractor why did we choose them? All we know is that mid way through the project one of the senior decision makers pushing for this particular contractor was fired. Perhaps this firm does the whole kick back thing. It would explain why our final products feels like an alpha build. Perhaps event the ambivalence and contempt from the contractor. If the contract we sign was stupid enough they can show open contempt without fear of being fired. I attended one meeting with one of their reps and the only word I understood was the work the resentful "okay" the lady kept adding to each of her supposedly English sentences.
I think we could have done in house in the same time (2 year overdue) with less money (I have no idea, but the number is large enough that the senior VPS feel nervous). Or even hired an shore and at least be able to yell at them at our leisure and have them reply in something resembling English.
Kids are different. My 13 year old brother is goign to swing it around when Ii'm nto looking and blow a hole through his friends face. The vast majority of those under 16 should not be carrying firarms without direct and constant supervision regaurdless of how mature you think they are. BEcause I'm not that far from under 16 and I know I was a jack ass and so were the majority of my friends.
Good thing abortion is legal. It curbs the genetic advantage of being a rapist. Perhaps surgical castration of repeat offenders would also help.
You are all aware that you can drop any SATA HD into the system right? So making a new unit with nothing but a bigger HD would be counter productive. They'd have to add something like a sony memcard reader and maybe include 3 controllers to make it worth while.
No, I think parents have down in quality. Because they can't help but blame other people for their problems. A kid carrying a gun for you seems like a accident waiting to happen. If you let your kid do this you need to remove both of you from the gene pool asap before you hurt someone. You may not hit your kid so hard that they need medical attention but generally corpral punishment is still legal. I can spank my kid or rap his knuckles but punching him in the face is a bit much.
Parents are too caught up with career and their own vices. They should prioritize their kids and raise them in the same way their parents did. But in the last couple of generations the parents thought they knew better then their parents and have tried such utter bullshit new age parental techniques and trying to be their kids best friend instead of being their parent.
I wonder if it's related to the massacre? I'm sure people like jack thompson would desprately want Cho to be a gamer because in their small little brains it would validate their beliefs. From all accounts the guy didn't play games but the truth has never stopped these people. I think selling M games or R movies to minors should be restricted. Let parents make the choice for their kids.
Would this help explain the apparent causality problem of neuromuscular control (humans seem able to send the neural command to catch the ball before our senses could have delivered the signal that it should be caught)?
What? I have never heard of any causality problems related to human reflexes. There is a measurable delay and no contradiction of fundemental physics in biology like this. I think you might have read one too many flakey new age texts.
Of course. But that's not the point. People want Vonage to win because the system is broken and in serious need of fixing. It's being abused in order to squash competition, which is bad for all of us
I want vonage to lose because of their shady business practices. If Verizon was to somehow also lose It'd be perfect.
If the judge thought vonage had a strong chance of being right, then he wouldn't have granted Verizons motion to stop vonage from "infringing".
You could argue that the human "big brain" is an evolutionary dead end of sorts, because we now respond to environmental pressures by inventing tools and medicines. Humans who would be very "unfit" from a purely physical point of view (and I'm not just talking about /.ers), are very able to survive and pass on their genetic information.
Continual progress isn't needed. We're only a dead end if we all die. Otherwise we're just a branch. Some designs were so good that they persists almost unchanged for a long time (ie. allagator, Coelacanth). So if our design is just so good that we persist then we're not a dead end. progress isn't required, only survival.
Better is subjective. Check again in 500,000 years and we can see which one was better.
Think about it. If you can be an Alpha Male without even being able to stand then genetic features become less relevant in determining who reproduces. Dramatically slowing the process of human evolution.
Your selecting for different genes. Instead of beign faster, stronger, tougher. You get smarter, craftier, less moral, hornier, and better looking. Since these tend to be the features that get you more kids. Although the pressure in those direction would be weaker because you dont' get killed if your below a certain IQ. The pressure is weaker.
Verizon is bound by the rules that bind incumbant telecoms. Vonage is in too many markets, it might be a regulatory nightmare to "buy" their user base. Vonage ussually has a fairly regulation free position as a CLEC. Its business practices would vilify any ILEC but since it's the little guy the stories don't get blown up as big. Hard to cencel, hidden cencel fees, no service garentees, almost impossible to port out of, and so on. It has it's fans but everyone I know who has tried it, hates it.
It's not the service, it's the technology behind the service. You can't patent something like "serving ice cream" but you can patent a particular novel flavor. You can't patent "selling computers" but you could patent an inventory system that helps you assmble them is a timely manner. You can't patent "driving people around" but you can patent a dispatch system that novel. If in any one of these three cases you use someone elses technology the court would insist you cease until they figure out if it truly was novel and legitimate.
There's no debate. Analogue recordings are better. And they keep better too. If you make an analogue recording of something using top of the line equipment, 50 years from now, you'll be able to use superior tools to pull a more accurate representation of the sonic environment than anything we can do now. If you record digital, a bit is a bit is a bit.
Best method, use the highest quality analogue gear you can find to record, then sample it in the highest quality digital you can for editing and distribution, then throw the original analogue in the vault so you can re-sample it again in 5 years.
If you make the data density of the digital recording the same as the analogue then the quality is exactly the same.
Infer informations between gaps in sampling based on local patterns to the gap. Add commonly missing tones. It's likely more marketting then tech since CD and well kept records sound exactly the same to me. In fact high quality MP3's and CD's soudn exactly the same. Only positional audio make smuch of a difference to my ear.
Conversley if you use high quality amps/speakers and a algorithm that fills in the missing frequencies in the digital recordings or simply use HD audio you can get a similiar quality for a similiar price without seeming like a luddite.
One thing is true: vinyl will outlast CD in durability, and the error correction is much more robust on Analog.
I don't think so. the abuse a standard CD is subjected to would utterly destroy a record. how many people put a dozen naked Records on top of each other in a care that goe over bumps. 2 bumps and you have yourself a pile of useless plastic. I do the same to CD's and they last about a year with this abuse. Records last a long time now, because those who buy them treat them properly. CD's have finite lifespans because they are small, and versatile and thus often abused.
CD's and Records fail in different ways. A light scratch across the record will render every track with a regular periodic snap/pop or even render it unplayable. A light scratch on a CD may result in a bit of a skip or no data loss. A deep scratch on both results in an unplayable disc. Multiple light scratches on a CD will still often be playable and often without quality loss while the same for a Record renders it unplayable. Repeated play degrades a record, while it doesn't really degrade a CD. And Vinyl is not as mobile.
Also, You can back up a CD. You cannot back up a Record into the same format. Error correction on analog data is not more "robust" it's different. Critical failure on an anologue system is different then on digital. If I introduce random noise to a CD, I can digitally filter it out if I know how. The same type of error on a anologue signal might result in static. cleaning up such a systemic loss is hard on analogue. When the damage is mroe severe the digital may be unrecoverable while the analogue may still cary some of th edata. Digital has a recoverable area/damaged area rate that looks like a inverse log. 0-50% damage = 100% recover 50%+ = 0%. While Anaglogue has a linear decline.
I was reading some info about crime stats and one interestign thing: Victims of crimes who possessed guns/weapons during the incident had a good chance (40%) of having their own weapon used against them.
I'm not a huge fan of Oblivion myself either. However it's a comparable game style to Ultima:underwold. Both are first person perspectives with a complex "Reagent" system, food, and dungeon crawls. Both have stories and could be compeling if your into that sort of story. They're both partly hack and slash. Quality wise, Oblivion has 10 years of graphic polish, controls and much better AI. Although Oblivion is much much glitchier and it's expansiveness comes at the expense of pacing and focus. I chose it because of these facts. I suppose you could compare Ultima under world to WOW would also be appripriate for the same features but WOW is a whole different animal.
By comparison, most games today are play though once, move on to the next.
I'd agrue the replay value of the top titles can be just as good (Disgea 1&2, FF tactics, Oblivion, or Gods of War) but there is just so many more games out there that we move on instead of completeing each game fully. The hard stuff is now optional and the bosses are easy. See the FF series.
Planescape, Xenogears, Fallout 1&2, FF 4&6&12, Vagrant story, Warcraft III, Starcraft, etc ... all kicked the crap out of what passed for a story back in the day, but these are the gems of their respective eras. Looking back thats all we see. It's easy for nostalgia to cloud our thinking. Ultima underworld was interesting and fun, but it pales to games liek oblivion which basically take the same idea and run with it. There is a lot of crap today, but there was back then too. Except we're comparing the 80% of todays games that are crap to the 20% of the games fromt he past that we remember. It isn't a fair comparison. We should compar ethe top 20% now with the top 20% then or the bottom 80% now with the bottom 80% then.