1) As far FF goes, there are 3 speeds. And it will jump back a preset amount of time when you hit play, so it's less likely you'll have to rewind to the point you wanted to watch
2) Say you get home 5-10 mins late for your favorite program. No problem, because your VCR is recording it, right? Well, if you want to watch it, you either have to wait until it's done, or just accept your going to miss the beginning of the show until later. The Tivo lets you start from the beginning, even though it's *STILL RECORDING* the show.
What's interesting about this is that, in a half-hour show, you can actually start watching 5-10 minutes late and, thanks to FF'ing the commercials, catch up to it about the same time it would end anyway
3) Say your watching some special (documentary, news show, movie, etc) on TV. You suddenly decide it'd be useful to have around for later, maybe your friend would like it or something. Just hit "record", and Tivo will instantly start recording it - including the portion you've watched up to this point w/out switching channels. (As long as it doesn't exceed an hour.) With a VCR, you have to find a tape, put it in, hit record, and then you only get to store what's remaining of the program.
4) Most interruptions (phone calls, people knocking on the door, wife/GF/kid coming in to pester you, dog broke something in the kitchen) are no longer a problem. Hit "pause", and Tivo will continue to buffer up to an hour. (It continues after an hour, but then the front of the buffer starts clearing out.) If it's going to take longer, hit "record" (see point 3)
5) Your VCR can only record by channel and day/time. The Tivo can do that, but you can also tell it to record any instance of a certain program on all channels. And it will auto-adjust when schedules change.
6) You can watch older recorded stuff while the Tivo is busy recording new stuff, if you so wish. (Think 2 VCRs, one for recording and one for playing, hooked up to the TV with an input selector)
7) Wish lists. Instead of constantly checking the schedule for when, say, "The Tick" gets put back on whatever channel gets the rights, simply put "The Tick" into a Tivo wishlist, and select "auto record". If/when it ever comes back on again, the Tivo will grab it.
The best coasters in the US are generally considered to be located at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. The same people also own and operate Dorney Park in Pennsylvania.
Oh, certainly. This is obviously *much* more important than, say, the whole EZPass financing and installation mess, or the car inspection stupidity. And there's no reason why the whole "auto insurers are leaving in droves" issue should be a higher priority....
Trust me; all NJ folk realize that NJDOT is run by a bunch of people smoking pot. How else can you explain where 440 South becomes 287 North, even though, at the the time, the road is running *EAST-WEST*???
Of course, that's also near the "Spaghetti Intersection" where 287/440, 1, 9, the TurnPike, the Garden State Parkway, and probably a couple of other minor roads all meet. Take a look at it on a map sometime if you want to know where the name comes from....
The technical reason for the decision being based upon the fact that a game that is run without permission makes a copy of copyright material in memory, this copy is 'infringing' because it is an unauthorized copy argued Sony.
By this logic, then, we're not even allowed to make a physical backup CD of software we legally bought, since there will be a copy in memory whenever it's run on the computer/console/etc.
I don't have a PS2, either. Again, thanks to the price. (I do have a DreamCast, although I bought it well before the price dropped like a rock. But I still only spent $200 on the DC, an extra controller, a VMU, and Crazi Taxi.)
When I buy a game machine, I want to play games on it. That's it. I have a DVD player, a nice one, so I don't want to pay extra to get that functionality. Nor do I want to pay $300 for what is, essentially, a highly-optimized and self-contained PC. I can spend the same amount and get a much better motherboard and CPU for my real PC.
Of course, having said all this, I just discovered that Nintendo is planning on selling the GameCube controllers for $35 a pop. Which is a bit pricey. So maybe all 3 companies are nuts...
Gameplay on a generic PC clone will be substandard at best.
I'm not talking about the $600 generic computers you can buy at a computer show. I'm talking about a gaming computer... 1+ GHz CPU, GeForce2 Ultra (although a GeForce3 would be better for XBox games), *good* soundcard (ie. not the crap that passes for soundchips on motherboards), etc.
Will there still be a drop-off? Yes. Obviously, a vast majority of the XBox functions (decryption, DirectX, memory mgmt, etc) are going to be done either in hardware itself or in on-board firmware. That, by itself, gives the XBox an advantage over any emulator. Not to mention that half of it's RAM won't be wasted by the OS, since MS can strip WinCE (or whatever Windows version they use) down to its most base components.
And, of course, there's the obviously HUGE advantage to developers of being sure *exactly* how a game will look, sound, move, etc. Which means that the programmers and artists can concentrate on the game itself, not the possibility that Bob in Utah is going to complain that it sounds horrible on the $15 sound card he picked up from the local computer surplus place.
Even with all of that said, however, a good PC should have nothing more than minor problems running XBox software. Although some of the resolutions might look funny...
The whole thrust of X-Box is to allow game developers to code tight high performance games for a single platform, using the 'mainstream' Microsoft APIs
Which should make it easier to run on a PC, since the vast majority of those "mainstream" APIs are implemented in Windows. Now, whether they're fully implemented, and implemented the same way, is a completely different question. One to which I would suspect the answer is "Sorta".
And hey, if I'm wrong, I'll probably end up buying an XBox, assuming it has games I really want to play. I'm just trying to be cheap-ass bastard.:)
Anyone who thinks you won't be able to d/l an emulator of some sort to play XBox games on your PC, raise your hands.
I thought so.
In fact, other than a few very system-specific calls, the only reason you'd even *need* an emulator is to decode the disc protection. After all, XBox games are supposed to be almost completely DiretX 8 compat. Since the GeForce3 was based on the XBox chip, that means the only piece of hardware (outside of the controllers, duh) that is "Xbox-specific" is the sound chip.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft themselves were planning on releasing an emulator a year or two after launch... (and charging $150 for it, of course)
Outside of the ridiculous price for the XBox, this is probably the main reason I'm not going to pick one up. I figure it'll take maybe 3 or 4 months before I'm playing the games on my computer, anyway.
Obviously, Nintendo realized that it would be better if people could buy several games within the first week, as opposed to just 2. (Wave Race and Luigi.) So it got pushed back. Again.
I'm not happy about it in the least, but since I think Luigi's Mansion looks far too simplistic for my taste, I suppose I can live with it. (Better than only being able to play "Wave Race" for 2 straight weeks...)
I *so* want Rogue Squadran 2 and Eternal Darkness as soon as they come out...
"What UNIX flavour do you like least/most? Why?"
- If the answer is something like "Linux, because it Eleete and it Rulez" (a real answer my friend received once), say goodbye.
"What part of system adminstration do you like best?"
- Every sysadmin has strengths and weaknesses. For a good sysadmin team, you want to make sure that every member compliments the other people. Having everyone wanting to do mostly programming/scripting, or only network stuff, generally doesn't work.
"How comfortable are you working in a friendly, very informal atmosphere?" (Q may change depending on workplace)
- Some people don't work well with other people coming by to chit-chat during parts of the day. Some are only comfortable wearing dress shirts and ties, and may become annoyed with the more relaxed attitude everyone else might have. Conversely, some people wouldn't be able to handle doing nothing all day but sitting in front of the computer, not talking to anyone.
The ability to fit into the work environment is *just* as important as being able to do the work itself. Sadly enough, most companies (and employees, for that matter) don't seem to grasp this concept.
"Given , how would you go about dealing with it?"
- The process a person takes in troubleshooting, learning a new procedure, etc is very important. You don't want someone who's immediate response is "call tech support" (yes, I've known admins like that). OTOH, you also don't want someone who's simply going to start "playing with stuff to see what it affects" when something is broken, as it tends to make the problem bigger more often than not.
A sysadmin's 2 most important skills, over everything else, are troubleshooting and the ability to learn/adapt on the fly.
More effective in driving people away from the sites displaying the ads, maybe. Certainly more effective in raising one's annoyance level and shortening one's patience.
Look at something like the IGN.com sites, for example. They have so many pop-up, pop-under, pop-on, and pop-replacement (showing an ad instead of the page you want to see) ads, it becomes an exercise in utter frustration to see even half of the pages one wishes to view. I think I spend more time clicking "close window" or hitting reload than I do actually reading any part of the sites.
The best part, though, is when ad people (and webmasters, for that matter) try to justify these annoyances. "Well, it's like a magazine or newspaper... the cheaper it is, the more ads it has." That may very well be true, but last time I checked, magazines ads are rarely put in the middle of an article, and certainly never leap onto the page while you're reading it.
The question now, though, is how long until most websites start forcing you to stare at a rotating banner ad for 30 seconds before allowing you to access stuff? (Like sitting through the 10-15 minutes of commercials now played before the 10-15 minutes of previews before every movie.) How long before sites actually will offer a "non-advertising" subscription fee, knowing there will be lots of people willing to pay, say, $5 or $10 a month just to not have to deal with the constant ad annoyances?
Taking this to the absolute extreme case, how long before ads are no longer part of the webpages, but are instead part of the browser? (While it isn't something I think will happen anytime soon, I'm also not putting it out of the realm of possibility.)
I actually have though of few ways this could get more annoying, but I don't want to give anybody any other ideas...
I think that the real reason MS is dropping Java completely can be found in this paragraph:
For Web-based businesses, Vitek added, "if you want your Web page accessible to the largest number of people, you may want to drop Java" and switch to Microsoft's competing set of products, which is under development and is known as.Net.
Good idea, MicroSquish. I'm sure that most companies will love the fact their web pages are viewable by even *less* people.
Although, given how many pages are 99.9% Flash or IE-only HTML or something else hard to view on Unix and/or Netscape, maybe I'm giving businesses far too much credit here...
Because state DMV's never cared to properly adjust the contrast on their printing equipment.
While that is partially true, a bigger problem is that the person taking the photo tends to give you 0.5 seconds to sit down and get ready for the picture before the button is pushed. I personally think that the DMV people hold contests to see who can take the funniest/ugliest picture each week.
Consider moving to NJ or VT--they still issue non-photo licenses.
The problem with NJ giving out non-photo licenses, of course, is that everything in the state requires you have a photo license. Including all other parts of the gov't.
Also, try using it as ID in any other state, and be prepared to explain (multiple times) that the reason that there's no photo on it is because NJ doesn't require one. (Oh, and bring along 5 other forms of ID, as well, since most places will ask for verification.)
This is why I finally gave up and have been renewing with photo licenses, even though the picture makes me look like I'm drunk and/or on drugs and/or a crazed axe-murderer.
This is what we're talking about. If he didn't sign a form promising not to install third party software, then it wasn't unauthorized.
Assuming the college has a computer policy similiar to the one I used to work at, simply by having an account, he agreed to a whole bunch of stuff. And if he worked for them in some capacity, as it is implied here, that he probably agreed to even more stuff on top of that.
The college I used to work for has an "Accetable Use Policy", which basically covers a whole lot of ground on what is and is not accetable to use one's account for. There's also an overriding clause in there about "abuse of the system" and "denial of service for other users". (Not just DDoS attacks, but anything which uses up large portions of systems resources...)
However, the standard method employed in cases like these was to kill off the offending process, and send a nicely worded "Don't let us catch you doing this again" note the first time or two. Further attempts resulted in account suspensions, talking to by us (the Sysadmins/tech folk), threats by Deans, etc. Or, in the case of an employee (even a student employee), being fired.
Prosecution was generally reserved only for those people who used their accounts to stuff clearly illegal... (and no, I am not allowed to cite any cases)
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It's not the same functionality.
1) As far FF goes, there are 3 speeds. And it will jump back a preset amount of time when you hit play, so it's less likely you'll have to rewind to the point you wanted to watch
2) Say you get home 5-10 mins late for your favorite program. No problem, because your VCR is recording it, right? Well, if you want to watch it, you either have to wait until it's done, or just accept your going to miss the beginning of the show until later. The Tivo lets you start from the beginning, even though it's *STILL RECORDING* the show.
What's interesting about this is that, in a half-hour show, you can actually start watching 5-10 minutes late and, thanks to FF'ing the commercials, catch up to it about the same time it would end anyway
3) Say your watching some special (documentary, news show, movie, etc) on TV. You suddenly decide it'd be useful to have around for later, maybe your friend would like it or something. Just hit "record", and Tivo will instantly start recording it - including the portion you've watched up to this point w/out switching channels. (As long as it doesn't exceed an hour.) With a VCR, you have to find a tape, put it in, hit record, and then you only get to store what's remaining of the program.
4) Most interruptions (phone calls, people knocking on the door, wife/GF/kid coming in to pester you, dog broke something in the kitchen) are no longer a problem. Hit "pause", and Tivo will continue to buffer up to an hour. (It continues after an hour, but then the front of the buffer starts clearing out.) If it's going to take longer, hit "record" (see point 3)
5) Your VCR can only record by channel and day/time. The Tivo can do that, but you can also tell it to record any instance of a certain program on all channels. And it will auto-adjust when schedules change.
6) You can watch older recorded stuff while the Tivo is busy recording new stuff, if you so wish. (Think 2 VCRs, one for recording and one for playing, hooked up to the TV with an input selector)
7) Wish lists. Instead of constantly checking the schedule for when, say, "The Tick" gets put back on whatever channel gets the rights, simply put "The Tick" into a Tivo wishlist, and select "auto record". If/when it ever comes back on again, the Tivo will grab it.
The best coasters in the US are generally considered to be located at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. The same people also own and operate Dorney Park in Pennsylvania.
Oh, certainly. This is obviously *much* more important than, say, the whole EZPass financing and installation mess, or the car inspection stupidity. And there's no reason why the whole "auto insurers are leaving in droves" issue should be a higher priority....
Trust me; all NJ folk realize that NJDOT is run by a bunch of people smoking pot. How else can you explain where 440 South becomes 287 North, even though, at the the time, the road is running *EAST-WEST*???
Of course, that's also near the "Spaghetti Intersection" where 287/440, 1, 9, the TurnPike, the Garden State Parkway, and probably a couple of other minor roads all meet. Take a look at it on a map sometime if you want to know where the name comes from....
The technical reason for the decision being based upon the fact that a game that is run without permission makes a copy of copyright material in memory, this copy is 'infringing' because it is an unauthorized copy argued Sony.
By this logic, then, we're not even allowed to make a physical backup CD of software we legally bought, since there will be a copy in memory whenever it's run on the computer/console/etc.
*Please* don't give them any ideas...
I don't have a PS2, either. Again, thanks to the price. (I do have a DreamCast, although I bought it well before the price dropped like a rock. But I still only spent $200 on the DC, an extra controller, a VMU, and Crazi Taxi.)
When I buy a game machine, I want to play games on it. That's it. I have a DVD player, a nice one, so I don't want to pay extra to get that functionality. Nor do I want to pay $300 for what is, essentially, a highly-optimized and self-contained PC. I can spend the same amount and get a much better motherboard and CPU for my real PC.
Of course, having said all this, I just discovered that Nintendo is planning on selling the GameCube controllers for $35 a pop. Which is a bit pricey. So maybe all 3 companies are nuts...
I'm not talking about the $600 generic computers you can buy at a computer show. I'm talking about a gaming computer... 1+ GHz CPU, GeForce2 Ultra (although a GeForce3 would be better for XBox games), *good* soundcard (ie. not the crap that passes for soundchips on motherboards), etc.
Will there still be a drop-off? Yes. Obviously, a vast majority of the XBox functions (decryption, DirectX, memory mgmt, etc) are going to be done either in hardware itself or in on-board firmware. That, by itself, gives the XBox an advantage over any emulator. Not to mention that half of it's RAM won't be wasted by the OS, since MS can strip WinCE (or whatever Windows version they use) down to its most base components.
And, of course, there's the obviously HUGE advantage to developers of being sure *exactly* how a game will look, sound, move, etc. Which means that the programmers and artists can concentrate on the game itself, not the possibility that Bob in Utah is going to complain that it sounds horrible on the $15 sound card he picked up from the local computer surplus place.
Even with all of that said, however, a good PC should have nothing more than minor problems running XBox software. Although some of the resolutions might look funny...
The whole thrust of X-Box is to allow game developers to code tight high performance games for a single platform, using the 'mainstream' Microsoft APIs
Which should make it easier to run on a PC, since the vast majority of those "mainstream" APIs are implemented in Windows. Now, whether they're fully implemented, and implemented the same way, is a completely different question. One to which I would suspect the answer is "Sorta".
And hey, if I'm wrong, I'll probably end up buying an XBox, assuming it has games I really want to play. I'm just trying to be cheap-ass bastard. :)
Wow, an AC flamed me.
/. community now. I feel so honored.
Guess that means I'm an official part of the
Anyone who thinks you won't be able to d/l an emulator of some sort to play XBox games on your PC, raise your hands.
I thought so.
In fact, other than a few very system-specific calls, the only reason you'd even *need* an emulator is to decode the disc protection. After all, XBox games are supposed to be almost completely DiretX 8 compat. Since the GeForce3 was based on the XBox chip, that means the only piece of hardware (outside of the controllers, duh) that is "Xbox-specific" is the sound chip.
Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft themselves were planning on releasing an emulator a year or two after launch... (and charging $150 for it, of course)
Outside of the ridiculous price for the XBox, this is probably the main reason I'm not going to pick one up. I figure it'll take maybe 3 or 4 months before I'm playing the games on my computer, anyway.
Obviously, Nintendo realized that it would be better if people could buy several games within the first week, as opposed to just 2. (Wave Race and Luigi.) So it got pushed back. Again.
I'm not happy about it in the least, but since I think Luigi's Mansion looks far too simplistic for my taste, I suppose I can live with it. (Better than only being able to play "Wave Race" for 2 straight weeks...)
I *so* want Rogue Squadran 2 and Eternal Darkness as soon as they come out...
"What UNIX flavour do you like least/most? Why?"
- If the answer is something like "Linux, because it Eleete and it Rulez" (a real answer my friend received once), say goodbye.
"What part of system adminstration do you like best?"
- Every sysadmin has strengths and weaknesses. For a good sysadmin team, you want to make sure that every member compliments the other people. Having everyone wanting to do mostly programming/scripting, or only network stuff, generally doesn't work.
"How comfortable are you working in a friendly, very informal atmosphere?" (Q may change depending on workplace)
- Some people don't work well with other people coming by to chit-chat during parts of the day. Some are only comfortable wearing dress shirts and ties, and may become annoyed with the more relaxed attitude everyone else might have. Conversely, some people wouldn't be able to handle doing nothing all day but sitting in front of the computer, not talking to anyone.
The ability to fit into the work environment is *just* as important as being able to do the work itself. Sadly enough, most companies (and employees, for that matter) don't seem to grasp this concept.
"Given , how would you go about dealing with it?"
- The process a person takes in troubleshooting, learning a new procedure, etc is very important. You don't want someone who's immediate response is "call tech support" (yes, I've known admins like that). OTOH, you also don't want someone who's simply going to start "playing with stuff to see what it affects" when something is broken, as it tends to make the problem bigger more often than not.
A sysadmin's 2 most important skills, over everything else, are troubleshooting and the ability to learn/adapt on the fly.
Look at something like the IGN.com sites, for example. They have so many pop-up, pop-under, pop-on, and pop-replacement (showing an ad instead of the page you want to see) ads, it becomes an exercise in utter frustration to see even half of the pages one wishes to view. I think I spend more time clicking "close window" or hitting reload than I do actually reading any part of the sites.
The best part, though, is when ad people (and webmasters, for that matter) try to justify these annoyances. "Well, it's like a magazine or newspaper... the cheaper it is, the more ads it has." That may very well be true, but last time I checked, magazines ads are rarely put in the middle of an article, and certainly never leap onto the page while you're reading it.
The question now, though, is how long until most websites start forcing you to stare at a rotating banner ad for 30 seconds before allowing you to access stuff? (Like sitting through the 10-15 minutes of commercials now played before the 10-15 minutes of previews before every movie.) How long before sites actually will offer a "non-advertising" subscription fee, knowing there will be lots of people willing to pay, say, $5 or $10 a month just to not have to deal with the constant ad annoyances?
Taking this to the absolute extreme case, how long before ads are no longer part of the webpages, but are instead part of the browser? (While it isn't something I think will happen anytime soon, I'm also not putting it out of the realm of possibility.)
I actually have though of few ways this could get more annoying, but I don't want to give anybody any other ideas...
Good idea, MicroSquish. I'm sure that most companies will love the fact their web pages are viewable by even *less* people.
Although, given how many pages are 99.9% Flash or IE-only HTML or something else hard to view on Unix and/or Netscape, maybe I'm giving businesses far too much credit here...
While that is partially true, a bigger problem is that the person taking the photo tends to give you 0.5 seconds to sit down and get ready for the picture before the button is pushed. I personally think that the DMV people hold contests to see who can take the funniest/ugliest picture each week.
Consider moving to NJ or VT--they still issue non-photo licenses.
The problem with NJ giving out non-photo licenses, of course, is that everything in the state requires you have a photo license. Including all other parts of the gov't.
Also, try using it as ID in any other state, and be prepared to explain (multiple times) that the reason that there's no photo on it is because NJ doesn't require one. (Oh, and bring along 5 other forms of ID, as well, since most places will ask for verification.)
This is why I finally gave up and have been renewing with photo licenses, even though the picture makes me look like I'm drunk and/or on drugs and/or a crazed axe-murderer.
Assuming the college has a computer policy similiar to the one I used to work at, simply by having an account, he agreed to a whole bunch of stuff. And if he worked for them in some capacity, as it is implied here, that he probably agreed to even more stuff on top of that.
The college I used to work for has an "Accetable Use Policy", which basically covers a whole lot of ground on what is and is not accetable to use one's account for. There's also an overriding clause in there about "abuse of the system" and "denial of service for other users". (Not just DDoS attacks, but anything which uses up large portions of systems resources...)
However, the standard method employed in cases like these was to kill off the offending process, and send a nicely worded "Don't let us catch you doing this again" note the first time or two. Further attempts resulted in account suspensions, talking to by us (the Sysadmins/tech folk), threats by Deans, etc. Or, in the case of an employee (even a student employee), being fired.
Prosecution was generally reserved only for those people who used their accounts to stuff clearly illegal... (and no, I am not allowed to cite any cases)