Oh gawd I am tired of this old cliche. Not every complex technique is either an art or a science. Hacking is software engineering, at best. If you have to ask if it is an art or a science, it isn't an art or a science.
No, an unscrupulous buyer is not allowed to buy a $200 TiVo, cash in the $150 rebate, and then sell the unit on eBay for $100, netting $50. That is exactly what they are not allowed to do. Buy a TiVo just to get a rebate and sell it, lose your rebate. The terms couldn't be clearer.
The story is complete misinformation. The 1 year service issues only apply to machines bought now that qualify for a $150 rebate. If you don't keep your TiVo service active for a full year, you get a chargeback for your $150 rebate. All other TiVos use the old monthly service charges or you can buy a lifetime subscription. This is a non-issue.
Since you can buy TiVo units for a cost of $50 now (and for a brief time, you could actually make a $50 PROFIT buying a $100 TiVo on Amazon and getting a $150 rebate) it only makes sense for TiVo to protect themselves from people buying cheap units for the rebate, then dumping them on eBay.
A long time ago, I spoke to one of the top executives at TiVo, he told me that they make no money on hardware sales, they gave all those profits to the hardware manufacturers, they make money only on subscriptions and subsidiary projects like advertising. TiVo is giving up $150, the equivalent of a full year's subscription fees, just to move more hardware. It is a gift to their hardware producing partners. It only makes sense for TiVo to protect themselves from unscrupulous buyers exploiting this project.
I was curious how much this whole project cost after seeing the price links for the ITX motherboard under the article. So I googled around for component prices, and after seeing the prices, I can see why the author didn't include his budget in the article.
$220 ITX mobo, 1Ghz VIA C3 processor $139 Silverstone case $95 OCZ 512Mb DDR RAM $45 Flash Voyager 512Mb pen drive --- $499 Total
Note the project breakdown as listed in the article does not include a hard drive, optical drive, monitor, kbd, mouse, etc. Just the CPU.
That is fuxxing insane. Mac Minis start at $499, come assembled, includes a 1.25Ghz G4 processor, optical drive (CD-R/DVD-ROM), 512Mb RAM, internal modem, and a 40Gb hard drive with OS X and iLife software preinstalled.
Either the ITX project builder is goddam insane for building such a ridiculously expensive, low spec machine, or Apple is goddam insane for selling such a powerful machine for almost nothing. Or both.
Well yeah, that is the obvious move, if I'm at the desktop I'd shut down if the outage was more than 1 minute, to maximize power reserves to the server. I thought this was obvious enough that I didn't bother to say it. But I also leave my desktop CPU running unattended for hours on end doing file compression or downloads, in those cases I'd rather leave it up and running to avoid the loss of hours of work.
I can understand you wanting backup power for your server, but is it really that important that your gaming machine have uninterruptable power? How many times do you get killed in a game and have to go back you your last saved game anyway? Come on..
I have a rig in my office that is sort of like you proposed. I have a Belkin 1100 UPS, I have both my desktop & monitor and my headless server drawing power from it, it's rated to cover both systems for about 15 minutes. Around here there are occasional 2 or 3 second outages, but I live close enough to the power plant that the last outage that lasted more than 10 minutes was a major tornado that cut power to the whole city for 3 days. So consider what kind of power backup requirements you really need to cover. I figure that I can wire my server to the UPS's USB data port, and the server will do a clean shutdown after about 10 minutes, when the battery level signal indicates imminent loss of battery power. If the server gets the signal, it does a clean shutdown, but my desktop doesn't, it has no way to know it's about to lose power. But I figure that is adequate coverage for outages up to about 10 minutes, the server is more important and gets controlled shutdown, the desktop gets some backup but will go down hard after that runs out. Now if you need more serious coverage than that, for multiple CPUs, you need a professional install of a serious power system. Or maybe you should just switch to laptops, which have their own battery backup power.
Holy crap, that is the greatest thing EVER. You have absolutely made my day, maybe my decade. I cannot thank you enough. This is my ultimate retrocomputing experience, PLATO IV was the first serious computer system I ever used.
Yes, Mr. Anonymous Coward, I know what Oracle is. Every Oracle site I ever worked at had a whole shelf full of manuals. Go to their website, Oracle University courses will bury you in manuals.
Now there's a good point. I remember Robert Morgan of the incredible (and now long-gone) Apple Recon website said about Microsoft stock, "I'll start buying when the insiders stop selling."
MT has multilingual support, it even has language packs, so you could change the menus to a different language. Most of the MT blogs I see are English/Mixed lang in UTF-8, or straight Japanese in JP-2022. You can change the templates so web pages are tagged in whatever language encoding you like, you could have separate "topic" pages in different languages. But it seems most common to use one wide encoding format that supports many languages (UTF-8) and just use mixed languages under that encoding.
Market cap means nothing. Apple is also sitting on a huge cash hoard, something like $5.5 billion last time I checked. You'd have to come up with a lot of money to buy a totally debt-free company with cash reserves like that.
I remember seeing a similar theme a long LONG time ago, back when I was a little kid about 12 years old, when I wheedled access to the local university PLATO IV terminal.
The scenario was a little oval track with a train that went around and around, the computer randomly generated 3 numbers, and you would type in an algebraic expression to get the number of spaces you would move. You could go for the longest distance, or you could try to hit special squares, like bonus multiplers, or you could try to land on the computer opponent's train which would send him backwards. I was a pretty young kid back then, but I do recall it really made me think hard about algebra, and it was a lot of fun.
PLATO IV had another educational game I really liked, I think it was MoonWars or something like that. You could play live against online opponents too. You had a screen with a random placement of circles (representing craters, I guess). Then you and your opponent were placed on the playing field. You played in alternating turns, you could either shoot a laser at your opponent, or move. The laser would bounce off the sides of the screen, only stopping when it hit the opponent or a crater. Sometimes if you had a clear field, you could use angles really close to perpendicular or horizontal, yielding crazy shots that went back and forth dozens of times. But mostly you just tried to bank shots off the sides, trying to home in to the opponent until they chickened out and moved. The educational content was pretty good, obviously you learned that angle of incidence = angle of reflection, but it also allowed you to input your shot's angle in algebraic notation, in degrees or radians. I immediately realized it was a lot faster to do algebraic notations in radians.
PLATO IV really was a groundbreaking platform for educational games, someone ought to revive some of their old classics. I made a couple of feeble attempts to write a MoonWars clone but I never got anywhere.
I spent many years doing computer tutoring. I was quite successful with one strategy, sitting down with the client and saying, "Let's start on page 1 of the manual."
Correct. MTBF is not designed as an index of reliability for any one specific drive in use. It is designed as an index for manufacturers and repair facilities to estimate how many spares are required per year for any widescale deployment. So if you have 114 drives deployed in your enterprise, you would need to stock 1 spare drive to replace the estimated failures in one year.
So in other words, yes, the GIMP is a fun program which does all kinds of neat stuff and is worth looking at... if you never have to worry about printing your work in a professional capacity. In other words, if you're NOT A PROFESSIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGNER.
or, IF YOU OWN A COLOR INKJET PRINTER.
Without more-than-rudimentary CMYK capabilities, it is impossible to produce quality color inkjet prints. All modern color inkjets are CMYK (or variants, like 6 color enhanced CMYK). Color Workflow means more than the ability to convert an RGB file to a CMYK file, it means you have control over that conversion, using variable profiles (like GCR or UCR) and the ability to manage color between devices (including the screen and printer). Or maybe you like your snapshot prints to come out with color shifts. That's the sort of attitude that keeps people from adopting amateurish OSS projects like Gimp, they look at the printed output and say "gee that color sucks" and they don't know why. Professionals know why. Amateurs could get pro results if the programmers knew why.
You are precisely right. Gimp not only lacks CMYK ability, it lacks the ability to do ANY calibrated color workflow. This is absolutely crucial for professional markets. There are some people who do nothing but correct color calibrations all day long. I know because that used to be my job at a service bureau, the job is called "color separator." A color separator tends to spend half his day converting RGB files to CMYK, and the other half of the day explaining to customers why their jobs were all fucked up and did not print the way they expected because they designed in RGB and the printer used CMYK. Photoshop absolutely rules the professional market because it has the most comprehensive abilities for color control, it can work in and convert between different color profiles and color spaces. It would take YEARS of full-time effort from a whole crew of programmers, and extensive research with professional prepress users to come even close to providing this level of color ability. But instead, the Gimp programmers are rearranging the GUI. This is what happens when programmers are in control of the software, nobody is listening to customers in pro markets about what features they need.
I'm doing the same thing, scanning piles of my old college papers using an automatic document feeder. I bought an HP 8250 because it does duplexing, so I can just tell it to scan both sides of the sheet. I have lots of mixed double-sided/single-sided documents (like notebooks), it's a lot easier to just scan everything doublesided and go through it in Acrobat and just delete the blank pages. Plus, with the duplexing feeder, I can cut the bindings off old books, drop the whole stack in the feeder, and scan the whole thing. But I haven't quite decided to destroy my old textbooks like that yet. The HP 8250 software was just updated for MacOS X 10.4, which makes me really happy since I bought it just before 10.4 shipped, and they updated it promptly. It works well for bulk scanning on a Mac, and it was pretty hard to find a good Mac ADF duplex scanner. It also does 35mm slides, but it would probably be better to get some better software for that job, something like Silverfast SE. Anyway, lots of my documents are handwritten (and many in Japanese too), so OCR isn't workable. I don't really need machine-readable documents to do text search, but I could always use Acrobat for OCR on some documents. I think there's a way to keep the graphic image intact while the searchable OCR text is on an invisible layer, but I haven't quite figured out that Acrobat function yet.
The article's first paragraph promised juicy discussion of sexuality in gaming. But there wasn't one single mention of sex, it's just a stupid, boring discussion about rendering styles.
Electronic digital computers were first invented to calculate artillery tables for naval guns, which told the gunner what angle to fire the gun so the shell would reach a certain distance. The tables were originally calculated with logarithm tables and slide rules, by hordes of "calculators" (human calculators, that is). Then John Atanasoff invented a method of calculating them electronically with the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Unfortunately, Atanasoff abandoned his project when WWII started and went to work for the Naval Ordinance Laboratory.
I worked at a computer store in a dinky little town in the midwest, back in the days of VisiCalc. I distinctly remember the shift in the public's attitude towards personal computers when VisiCalc hit the shelves. Before VisiCalc, people used to struggle with the whole concept of personal computers, and the most common question I got was "WHY would anyone need a computer?" Then after VisiCalc shipped, I could do demos with immediate obvious applicability to any business. The question shifted to "HOW would I apply this computer to my business?" This was the true start of the personal computer business. Sure, word processing was the killer app for some people, but it offered no real advantages to some people who should have been the core markets, like trained professional secretaries who could bang out a perfect business letter on a Selectric typewriter on the first pass, they saw no speed advantages out of word processing. But when people saw Visicalc instantly add up a column of numbers, and when they saw it instantly recalculate the sums when a number was changed, they GOT it, they immediately saw the advantage over old manual methods. I just loved doing demos, and watching the reactions on peoples' faces. People also forget that VisiCalc was the core of the first integrated office suites (of a sort), I recall VisiPlot, I think there were some other Visi apps, but I mostly used databases like DBMaster to collate data and export to CSV for use in VisiCalc. It seemed like we had all the computer tools we could ever think of a use for.
Slashdot Mirror
Why oh why do people post compressed videos as recompressed files in proprietary platform-specific .exe files?
Oh gawd I am tired of this old cliche. Not every complex technique is either an art or a science. Hacking is software engineering, at best. If you have to ask if it is an art or a science, it isn't an art or a science.
The patent on Disney's Circlevision camera system has expired.
No, an unscrupulous buyer is not allowed to buy a $200 TiVo, cash in the $150 rebate, and then sell the unit on eBay for $100, netting $50. That is exactly what they are not allowed to do. Buy a TiVo just to get a rebate and sell it, lose your rebate. The terms couldn't be clearer.
The story is complete misinformation. The 1 year service issues only apply to machines bought now that qualify for a $150 rebate. If you don't keep your TiVo service active for a full year, you get a chargeback for your $150 rebate. All other TiVos use the old monthly service charges or you can buy a lifetime subscription. This is a non-issue.
Since you can buy TiVo units for a cost of $50 now (and for a brief time, you could actually make a $50 PROFIT buying a $100 TiVo on Amazon and getting a $150 rebate) it only makes sense for TiVo to protect themselves from people buying cheap units for the rebate, then dumping them on eBay.
A long time ago, I spoke to one of the top executives at TiVo, he told me that they make no money on hardware sales, they gave all those profits to the hardware manufacturers, they make money only on subscriptions and subsidiary projects like advertising. TiVo is giving up $150, the equivalent of a full year's subscription fees, just to move more hardware. It is a gift to their hardware producing partners. It only makes sense for TiVo to protect themselves from unscrupulous buyers exploiting this project.
I remember when they used to say that about Macs.
I was curious how much this whole project cost after seeing the price links for the ITX motherboard under the article. So I googled around for component prices, and after seeing the prices, I can see why the author didn't include his budget in the article.
$220 ITX mobo, 1Ghz VIA C3 processor
$139 Silverstone case
$95 OCZ 512Mb DDR RAM
$45 Flash Voyager 512Mb pen drive
---
$499 Total
Note the project breakdown as listed in the article does not include a hard drive, optical drive, monitor, kbd, mouse, etc. Just the CPU.
That is fuxxing insane. Mac Minis start at $499, come assembled, includes a 1.25Ghz G4 processor, optical drive (CD-R/DVD-ROM), 512Mb RAM, internal modem, and a 40Gb hard drive with OS X and iLife software preinstalled.
Either the ITX project builder is goddam insane for building such a ridiculously expensive, low spec machine, or Apple is goddam insane for selling such a powerful machine for almost nothing. Or both.
Darn it, looks like my UPS is unsupported officially, but it probably wouldn't be hard to hack in support. Thanks for the tip.
Well yeah, that is the obvious move, if I'm at the desktop I'd shut down if the outage was more than 1 minute, to maximize power reserves to the server. I thought this was obvious enough that I didn't bother to say it. But I also leave my desktop CPU running unattended for hours on end doing file compression or downloads, in those cases I'd rather leave it up and running to avoid the loss of hours of work.
I can understand you wanting backup power for your server, but is it really that important that your gaming machine have uninterruptable power? How many times do you get killed in a game and have to go back you your last saved game anyway? Come on..
I have a rig in my office that is sort of like you proposed. I have a Belkin 1100 UPS, I have both my desktop & monitor and my headless server drawing power from it, it's rated to cover both systems for about 15 minutes. Around here there are occasional 2 or 3 second outages, but I live close enough to the power plant that the last outage that lasted more than 10 minutes was a major tornado that cut power to the whole city for 3 days. So consider what kind of power backup requirements you really need to cover.
I figure that I can wire my server to the UPS's USB data port, and the server will do a clean shutdown after about 10 minutes, when the battery level signal indicates imminent loss of battery power. If the server gets the signal, it does a clean shutdown, but my desktop doesn't, it has no way to know it's about to lose power. But I figure that is adequate coverage for outages up to about 10 minutes, the server is more important and gets controlled shutdown, the desktop gets some backup but will go down hard after that runs out.
Now if you need more serious coverage than that, for multiple CPUs, you need a professional install of a serious power system. Or maybe you should just switch to laptops, which have their own battery backup power.
Holy crap, that is the greatest thing EVER. You have absolutely made my day, maybe my decade. I cannot thank you enough. This is my ultimate retrocomputing experience, PLATO IV was the first serious computer system I ever used.
Yes, Mr. Anonymous Coward, I know what Oracle is. Every Oracle site I ever worked at had a whole shelf full of manuals. Go to their website, Oracle University courses will bury you in manuals.
Now there's a good point. I remember Robert Morgan of the incredible (and now long-gone) Apple Recon website said about Microsoft stock, "I'll start buying when the insiders stop selling."
MT has multilingual support, it even has language packs, so you could change the menus to a different language. Most of the MT blogs I see are English/Mixed lang in UTF-8, or straight Japanese in JP-2022. You can change the templates so web pages are tagged in whatever language encoding you like, you could have separate "topic" pages in different languages. But it seems most common to use one wide encoding format that supports many languages (UTF-8) and just use mixed languages under that encoding.
Market cap means nothing. Apple is also sitting on a huge cash hoard, something like $5.5 billion last time I checked. You'd have to come up with a lot of money to buy a totally debt-free company with cash reserves like that.
I remember seeing a similar theme a long LONG time ago, back when I was a little kid about 12 years old, when I wheedled access to the local university PLATO IV terminal.
The scenario was a little oval track with a train that went around and around, the computer randomly generated 3 numbers, and you would type in an algebraic expression to get the number of spaces you would move. You could go for the longest distance, or you could try to hit special squares, like bonus multiplers, or you could try to land on the computer opponent's train which would send him backwards. I was a pretty young kid back then, but I do recall it really made me think hard about algebra, and it was a lot of fun.
PLATO IV had another educational game I really liked, I think it was MoonWars or something like that. You could play live against online opponents too. You had a screen with a random placement of circles (representing craters, I guess). Then you and your opponent were placed on the playing field. You played in alternating turns, you could either shoot a laser at your opponent, or move. The laser would bounce off the sides of the screen, only stopping when it hit the opponent or a crater. Sometimes if you had a clear field, you could use angles really close to perpendicular or horizontal, yielding crazy shots that went back and forth dozens of times. But mostly you just tried to bank shots off the sides, trying to home in to the opponent until they chickened out and moved. The educational content was pretty good, obviously you learned that angle of incidence = angle of reflection, but it also allowed you to input your shot's angle in algebraic notation, in degrees or radians. I immediately realized it was a lot faster to do algebraic notations in radians.
PLATO IV really was a groundbreaking platform for educational games, someone ought to revive some of their old classics. I made a couple of feeble attempts to write a MoonWars clone but I never got anywhere.
At the beginning.
I spent many years doing computer tutoring. I was quite successful with one strategy, sitting down with the client and saying, "Let's start on page 1 of the manual."
Your Oracle software came with a manual, right?
Correct. MTBF is not designed as an index of reliability for any one specific drive in use. It is designed as an index for manufacturers and repair facilities to estimate how many spares are required per year for any widescale deployment. So if you have 114 drives deployed in your enterprise, you would need to stock 1 spare drive to replace the estimated failures in one year.
or, IF YOU OWN A COLOR INKJET PRINTER.
Without more-than-rudimentary CMYK capabilities, it is impossible to produce quality color inkjet prints. All modern color inkjets are CMYK (or variants, like 6 color enhanced CMYK). Color Workflow means more than the ability to convert an RGB file to a CMYK file, it means you have control over that conversion, using variable profiles (like GCR or UCR) and the ability to manage color between devices (including the screen and printer).
Or maybe you like your snapshot prints to come out with color shifts. That's the sort of attitude that keeps people from adopting amateurish OSS projects like Gimp, they look at the printed output and say "gee that color sucks" and they don't know why. Professionals know why. Amateurs could get pro results if the programmers knew why.
You are precisely right. Gimp not only lacks CMYK ability, it lacks the ability to do ANY calibrated color workflow. This is absolutely crucial for professional markets.
There are some people who do nothing but correct color calibrations all day long. I know because that used to be my job at a service bureau, the job is called "color separator." A color separator tends to spend half his day converting RGB files to CMYK, and the other half of the day explaining to customers why their jobs were all fucked up and did not print the way they expected because they designed in RGB and the printer used CMYK.
Photoshop absolutely rules the professional market because it has the most comprehensive abilities for color control, it can work in and convert between different color profiles and color spaces. It would take YEARS of full-time effort from a whole crew of programmers, and extensive research with professional prepress users to come even close to providing this level of color ability. But instead, the Gimp programmers are rearranging the GUI. This is what happens when programmers are in control of the software, nobody is listening to customers in pro markets about what features they need.
I'm doing the same thing, scanning piles of my old college papers using an automatic document feeder. I bought an HP 8250 because it does duplexing, so I can just tell it to scan both sides of the sheet. I have lots of mixed double-sided/single-sided documents (like notebooks), it's a lot easier to just scan everything doublesided and go through it in Acrobat and just delete the blank pages. Plus, with the duplexing feeder, I can cut the bindings off old books, drop the whole stack in the feeder, and scan the whole thing. But I haven't quite decided to destroy my old textbooks like that yet.
The HP 8250 software was just updated for MacOS X 10.4, which makes me really happy since I bought it just before 10.4 shipped, and they updated it promptly. It works well for bulk scanning on a Mac, and it was pretty hard to find a good Mac ADF duplex scanner. It also does 35mm slides, but it would probably be better to get some better software for that job, something like Silverfast SE.
Anyway, lots of my documents are handwritten (and many in Japanese too), so OCR isn't workable. I don't really need machine-readable documents to do text search, but I could always use Acrobat for OCR on some documents. I think there's a way to keep the graphic image intact while the searchable OCR text is on an invisible layer, but I haven't quite figured out that Acrobat function yet.
You expect me to fall for that a SECOND time? Yeah right.
The article's first paragraph promised juicy discussion of sexuality in gaming. But there wasn't one single mention of sex, it's just a stupid, boring discussion about rendering styles.
Close, but not quite.
Electronic digital computers were first invented to calculate artillery tables for naval guns, which told the gunner what angle to fire the gun so the shell would reach a certain distance. The tables were originally calculated with logarithm tables and slide rules, by hordes of "calculators" (human calculators, that is). Then John Atanasoff invented a method of calculating them electronically with the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Unfortunately, Atanasoff abandoned his project when WWII started and went to work for the Naval Ordinance Laboratory.
I worked at a computer store in a dinky little town in the midwest, back in the days of VisiCalc. I distinctly remember the shift in the public's attitude towards personal computers when VisiCalc hit the shelves.
Before VisiCalc, people used to struggle with the whole concept of personal computers, and the most common question I got was "WHY would anyone need a computer?" Then after VisiCalc shipped, I could do demos with immediate obvious applicability to any business. The question shifted to "HOW would I apply this computer to my business?"
This was the true start of the personal computer business. Sure, word processing was the killer app for some people, but it offered no real advantages to some people who should have been the core markets, like trained professional secretaries who could bang out a perfect business letter on a Selectric typewriter on the first pass, they saw no speed advantages out of word processing. But when people saw Visicalc instantly add up a column of numbers, and when they saw it instantly recalculate the sums when a number was changed, they GOT it, they immediately saw the advantage over old manual methods. I just loved doing demos, and watching the reactions on peoples' faces.
People also forget that VisiCalc was the core of the first integrated office suites (of a sort), I recall VisiPlot, I think there were some other Visi apps, but I mostly used databases like DBMaster to collate data and export to CSV for use in VisiCalc. It seemed like we had all the computer tools we could ever think of a use for.