This was the greatest benefit I got out of my $500 (1981 dollars) Sanyo monitor...seeing those weird off-violet and green shades at the borders of the marching stick-soldiers...
Who was whining? He was making the point that, in the real world, considerably less than 99.8% can be considered "acceptable." The election is a valid case-in-point, whether you agree with the outcome or not.
I don't think anyone claimed you'd see this replacing your Pentium
I called Fry's about this.
"Do you have any of these new DNA Computers?"
"Is that a brand name?"
"No, it's a new type of computer. Do you have any?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Are you sure? You may not have noticed, these DNA things, they're real tiny."
"No." (starting to sound annoyed)
"In fact you might have thrown them out if they arrived in the mail. They're just about indistinguishable from anthrax spores. Have you checked the vacuum cleaner bag? There might be a few in there..."
Katz has been trolled. Or else he's trolling us. Kabul does not have electric power, let alone "Baywatch" or, god forbid, "Temptation Island."
It's ridiculous that Katz should take this at face value, or that/. editors would pass this on without comment. The minor effort required to check even one of the outlandish "facts" in this piece would have been worth some effort.
This is really sad. I've been after Katz to look at his journalistic basics since the day he decided that ABC TV was "wrong" when they used a hidden camera, wielded by a paid undercover operative, to show Red Lion supermarkets selling rotten meat.
He claimed that it was "unethical" to get a job at Red Lion with a falsified job app, even if you already knew potentially lethal poison was being sold to people.
At the time he was celebrating a decision (later overturned) that would have hog-tied such investigative practices.
He doesn't understand the basic debt that a journalist owes his readers, and probably never will. One can only hopes that he takes this embarassment as a lesson.
Ah, but, unlike the Hubbard-Travolta collaboration, Manos doesn't have an army of culties who are required to vote it up. (Manos culties show their love by voting it down.)
The MST3K tapes are released on Rhino's own label. If you buy direct, a larger percentage of the ca$h goes to the people who find MST3K worthy of committing to DVD, with the likely result that MST3K releases will come with more frequency.
Buying through another retailer adds several middlemen to the process. Of course, it's fine to support the local Mom Pop (even encouraged), but Rhino ain't evil. I remember when all they had on their label was retro-rock and "outsider" culture releases like Fred Blassie's "King Of Men."
I appreciate your point, but the numbers still don't add up. Certainly, if a lot of people buy the Xbox just to play DVDs on, that will delay profitability, but not sufficiently to negate the gaming bucks. MS prevented this by putting DVD controls into the (extra $$$) remote control unit.
Gaming is still a much bigger business than the DVD busines, and both still dwarf the numbers of people likely to attempt what is clearly a difficult hack.
The M.A.M.E. emulator is not a "hack," it is a program that runs in the Xbox development kit environment. And it won't work on a standard Xbox -- as the author states:
"Unfortunately, only registered XBox developers can legitimately obtain this software (okay, apart from the fact that only registered XBox developers actually have an XBox that can run the software)"
The Xbox itself will be hacked, but not easily. And how many of the few actually skilled hackers will pay $300 to build their custom box when an Nforce motherboard and a phat Athlon are about as cheap?
Come on, t. The hacker community isn't that large, unless you count hax0rs who couldn't turn a torque screw. The Iopener was a "netpliance," and never has any "netpliance" gotten anywhere. Even the one designed for dumbed-down access to AOL died a messy death -- not because of hackers, but because there was no market. Those things aren't needed or wanted.
Gamers are a huge market, hackers are a drop in the ocean.
If gamers reject the Xbox, and go with GameCube, then hackers might speed Xbox's demise (just a little) by buying boxes without buying games. That scenario seems highly unlikely; Xbox, so far, looks like a success (but then, so did Dreamcast after its intro).
While it's true that MS is losing money on the hardware, any purchase of the hardware will help them achieve the exonomics of scale that will allow them to reach break-even (or even profitability) on Xbox. By the way, this is standard console practice; the Playstation 2 was also a loss leader at its intro:
Driving down production costs will be a determining factor in profitability over the next five years. According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first.
While estimates say MS will lose $2 billion on hardware before break-even, much of that could be recouped in games from Day One, and the hardware should itself become profitable relatively soon.
It doe snot include the presidents motor route. the things we are talking about is simple information, nothing life threatening.
Nor anything essential for you to conduct a full and happy life. Why do you need detailed information about the structure of the Hoover Dam, for crissake?
Any nut with a hijacked airliner can find the Hoover Dam, but it takes detailed knowledge to determine exactly where impact will create the most damage.
Nobody's mentioned the cloistering of any info that I expect to miss. Ir is regrettable the the Freedom of Information Act has been gutted -- if that were the issue that turned Slashotters into crybabies, I'd be wetting my diapers right along with you. But the governemnt recalling data about national infrastructure, making it harder to obtain, makes plenty of sense to me.
I propose a moderation system. When you enter the library you will be granted 20 "mod" points that you can grant to any data to make it one degree more secret or more public...to defend against bad judgement, we could have some folk "meta-moderate" the judgements made by others.
The money will most definitely go to his estate. Generally, authors who have sold a great many books tend to have lawyers work these things out. Adams was not an idiot.
By the same token, Adams certainly knew that the process of writing could be permanently interrupted at any moment. Unless he was not just an idiot, but a moron, he appointed a literary executor who was well-acquainted with his wishes.
Have you viewed the site? Were you confused? For how long? If over a minute, where's your reading comprehension?
It was established some time ago that registering a trademark in order to place a site criticizing the trademark's owner is not "bad faith."
The WTO accused these folks of "harvesting" email addresses, but doesn't say what method they used...according to the site, the only method they used to "harvest" addresses was some "mailto:" links. WTO is annoyed by the mockery and is interpreting the facts to suit themselves.
Computerworld ran an article on this following WTO's party line on this issue so slavishly as to stretch anyone's definition of journalistic ethics. Most interesting is this passage:
The fake WTO site changed its look this afternoon so that it no longer exactly resembles the real WTO Web site.
Even so, the phony site contains so many references to the WTO that some search engines are directing people to it instead of to the official site. A search of AltaVista using the keyword WTO returns www.gatt.org in fifth place.
So, according to the WTO and to an incompetent journalist at Computerworld, establishing an anti-WTO site that shows up fifth in search engines is tantamount to site-jacking!!
Is this the type of reasoning that you wish to defend?
No, the real question is, does any IP holder have enough time to sue everybody who creates a parody site using this sort of automation, assuming a few people cared enough to put a concerted effort behind creating parody-clones?.
The message sent by the creation of this software is that, if IP holders choose to engage in legal harassment, there are ways that the few people who care can make an even bigger nuisance, without recourse to lawyers.
Even if the product of the software is not funny, the concept is both funny (in its ironic justice of web harassment traded for legal harassment) and relevant to the politics of the web.
This is good news, but t doesn't fix a tarnished rep.
It's possible (and I hope true) that the code in the reviewed drivers was a "placeholder" for the actual optimizations that came later, and was accidentallly left in without informing reviewers.
The issue is, if you were to drop the visual quality, which the ATI Drivers do automatically, despite what you've selected in the game, to the same level on an nVidia card, would the ATI card STILL be slightly faster than the nVidia card, I'd guess it wouldn't be, but we'll never know...
I guess you don't know about the quack test, created when it was discovered that the ATI drivers were checking the executable's filename.
The "quackifier" seeks out and renames all references in the Quake executable to "quack." The same is done on Nvidia and ATI systems. Nvidia benchmarks remain the same; ATI benchmarks go down precipitously.
Nvidia's drivers for "Personal Cinema" are no better. If I use "Twinview" to clone my deskop to a 2nd monitor, video capture gets broken until drivers are reinstalled. When I installed Win XP over win 2k, the capture drivers broke, and reinstalling didn't fix it 'till I hunted down and deleted every driver file on the box, then reinstalled the very same drivers.
The problem with both company's drivers, IMO, is less programming skill than it is the moving target that is MS Windows -- and MS's desire to have you use Windows Media Tools exclusively, creating Windows-only content.
Slashdot Mirror
achtung! halt!
I called Fry's about this.
"Do you have any of these new DNA Computers?"
"Is that a brand name?"
"No, it's a new type of computer. Do you have any?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Are you sure? You may not have noticed, these DNA things, they're real tiny."
"No." (starting to sound annoyed)
"In fact you might have thrown them out if they arrived in the mail. They're just about indistinguishable from anthrax spores. Have you checked the vacuum cleaner bag? There might be a few in there..."
{click}
Huh? If it sounds ficticious, it would be because it is implausible. If somethng is implausible, it is very likely to be improbable as well.
A kid downloading movies over the type of connection likely to be had in "a small town 35 miles southwest of Kabul" is impossible.
"Baywatch" being watched in "a small town 35 miles southwest of Kabul" at this time is implausible.
This being anything other than a troll, by Katz or to him, is improbable.
The story is fictitious.
It's ridiculous that Katz should take this at face value, or that /. editors would pass this on without comment. The minor effort required to check even one of the outlandish "facts" in this piece would have been worth some effort.
This is really sad. I've been after Katz to look at his journalistic basics since the day he decided that ABC TV was "wrong" when they used a hidden camera, wielded by a paid undercover operative, to show Red Lion supermarkets selling rotten meat.
He claimed that it was "unethical" to get a job at Red Lion with a falsified job app, even if you already knew potentially lethal poison was being sold to people.
At the time he was celebrating a decision (later overturned) that would have hog-tied such investigative practices.
He doesn't understand the basic debt that a journalist owes his readers, and probably never will. One can only hopes that he takes this embarassment as a lesson.
Buying through another retailer adds several middlemen to the process. Of course, it's fine to support the local Mom Pop (even encouraged), but Rhino ain't evil. I remember when all they had on their label was retro-rock and "outsider" culture releases like Fred Blassie's "King Of Men."
Gaming is still a much bigger business than the DVD busines, and both still dwarf the numbers of people likely to attempt what is clearly a difficult hack.
The M.A.M.E. emulator is not a "hack," it is a program that runs in the Xbox development kit environment. And it won't work on a standard Xbox -- as the author states:
"Unfortunately, only registered XBox developers can legitimately obtain this software (okay, apart from the fact that only registered XBox developers actually have an XBox that can run the software)"
The Xbox itself will be hacked, but not easily. And how many of the few actually skilled hackers will pay $300 to build their custom box when an Nforce motherboard and a phat Athlon are about as cheap?
If Gates meant you to overclock that thing he would have given you a Turbo button.
Dambusters. Damn fine movie. Loved the Deathstar sequence!
Come on, t. The hacker community isn't that large, unless you count hax0rs who couldn't turn a torque screw. The Iopener was a "netpliance," and never has any "netpliance" gotten anywhere. Even the one designed for dumbed-down access to AOL died a messy death -- not because of hackers, but because there was no market. Those things aren't needed or wanted.
Gamers are a huge market, hackers are a drop in the ocean.
If gamers reject the Xbox, and go with GameCube, then hackers might speed Xbox's demise (just a little) by buying boxes without buying games. That scenario seems highly unlikely; Xbox, so far, looks like a success (but then, so did Dreamcast after its intro).
TV is 29.97. Film is 24 fps. Silent film was 18 fps, which is why early transfers gave the impression that everything in the silents is "sped-up."
But there is a discernible difference in quality at rates above 30 fps. That's why Imax comes in two flavors, 24 fps and IMAX-HD®, which is 48 fps.
While it's true that MS is losing money on the hardware, any purchase of the hardware will help them achieve the exonomics of scale that will allow them to reach break-even (or even profitability) on Xbox. By the way, this is standard console practice; the Playstation 2 was also a loss leader at its intro:
Driving down production costs will be a determining factor in profitability over the next five years. According to most estimates, Sony's PlayStation 2 cost the company $450 per unit upon initial production in early 2000. The company had first sold the machine as a loss leader for $360 in Japan and for $300 in the United States and Europe. The strategy paid off with the first Play Station because Sony was able to reduce the product's cost from $480 in 1994 to about $80 now (it was initially priced at $299 and is sold at about $99 today). Meanwhile, the company sold about nine games for every console. That model allowed Sony to make billions of dollars over the life of the PlayStation, even if it lost money at first.
source: Red Herring
While estimates say MS will lose $2 billion on hardware before break-even, much of that could be recouped in games from Day One, and the hardware should itself become profitable relatively soon.
It doe snot include the presidents motor route. the things we are talking about is simple information, nothing life threatening.
Nor anything essential for you to conduct a full and happy life. Why do you need detailed information about the structure of the Hoover Dam, for crissake?
Any nut with a hijacked airliner can find the Hoover Dam, but it takes detailed knowledge to determine exactly where impact will create the most damage.
Nobody's mentioned the cloistering of any info that I expect to miss. Ir is regrettable the the Freedom of Information Act has been gutted -- if that were the issue that turned Slashotters into crybabies, I'd be wetting my diapers right along with you. But the governemnt recalling data about national infrastructure, making it harder to obtain, makes plenty of sense to me.
A friend in NYC tells me that he gets a nauseous feeling whenever he sees the new subway maps, that have a big hole where downtown used to be.
Now, if we had distributed those maps before the hole actually existed....
nah, you're right it wouldn't work.
I propose a moderation system. When you enter the library you will be granted 20 "mod" points that you can grant to any data to make it one degree more secret or more public...to defend against bad judgement, we could have some folk "meta-moderate" the judgements made by others.
Let the will of the people prevail!
OK. But why is Sonic blubbering? Shouldn't he be at the Dreamcast gravesite? Shouldn't that be Crash Bandicoot?
By the same token, Adams certainly knew that the process of writing could be permanently interrupted at any moment. Unless he was not just an idiot, but a moron, he appointed a literary executor who was well-acquainted with his wishes.
Excuse the bad link above, somehow slashcode messed up my well-formed link to gatt.org (yes! slashcode! not me!)
It was established some time ago that registering a trademark in order to place a site criticizing the trademark's owner is not "bad faith."
The WTO accused these folks of "harvesting" email addresses, but doesn't say what method they used...according to the site, the only method they used to "harvest" addresses was some "mailto:" links. WTO is annoyed by the mockery and is interpreting the facts to suit themselves.
Computerworld ran an article on this following WTO's party line on this issue so slavishly as to stretch anyone's definition of journalistic ethics. Most interesting is this passage:
The fake WTO site changed its look this afternoon so that it no longer exactly resembles the real WTO Web site.
Even so, the phony site contains so many references to the WTO that some search engines are directing people to it instead of to the official site. A search of AltaVista using the keyword WTO returns www.gatt.org in fifth place.
So, according to the WTO and to an incompetent journalist at Computerworld, establishing an anti-WTO site that shows up fifth in search engines is tantamount to site-jacking!!
Is this the type of reasoning that you wish to defend?
No, the real question is, does any IP holder have enough time to sue everybody who creates a parody site using this sort of automation, assuming a few people cared enough to put a concerted effort behind creating parody-clones?.
The message sent by the creation of this software is that, if IP holders choose to engage in legal harassment, there are ways that the few people who care can make an even bigger nuisance, without recourse to lawyers.
Even if the product of the software is not funny, the concept is both funny (in its ironic justice of web harassment traded for legal harassment) and relevant to the politics of the web.
Interesting point, but I'd have to see Nvidia's cheat documented (as ATI's is) before I can subscribe.
This is good news, but t doesn't fix a tarnished rep.
It's possible (and I hope true) that the code in the reviewed drivers was a "placeholder" for the actual optimizations that came later, and was accidentallly left in without informing reviewers.
If so, disclosure would have been nice.
The issue is, if you were to drop the visual quality, which the ATI Drivers do automatically, despite what you've selected in the game, to the same level on an nVidia card, would the ATI card STILL be slightly faster than the nVidia card, I'd guess it wouldn't be, but we'll never know...
I guess you don't know about the quack test, created when it was discovered that the ATI drivers were checking the executable's filename.
The "quackifier" seeks out and renames all references in the Quake executable to "quack." The same is done on Nvidia and ATI systems. Nvidia benchmarks remain the same; ATI benchmarks go down precipitously.
Nvidia's drivers for "Personal Cinema" are no better. If I use "Twinview" to clone my deskop to a 2nd monitor, video capture gets broken until drivers are reinstalled. When I installed Win XP over win 2k, the capture drivers broke, and reinstalling didn't fix it 'till I hunted down and deleted every driver file on the box, then reinstalled the very same drivers.
The problem with both company's drivers, IMO, is less programming skill than it is the moving target that is MS Windows -- and MS's desire to have you use Windows Media Tools exclusively, creating Windows-only content.