Unless you think they put lighthouses on rivers or lakes
For starters, theres about 180 lighthouses on the Great Lakes alone (in fact, Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state), but then I suppose those aren't your typical lakes...probably a bit more like small oceans. There are also a half dozen or so navigational lighthouses on the Columbia River (Oregon/Washington border). There are several more individual navigational lighthouse on other various rivers.
But aside from that, there are plenty of lighthouses on rivers and lakes which are fully functional but serve only decorative or memorial purposes, such as the Mariners Memorial Lighthouse near Detroit, Michigan and the Celina lighthouse (built on a manmade lake) in Celina, Ohio.
I seem to remember several dungeons in the game. Were the triforce piece themselves hidden in the dungeons? No. But the dungeons were an integral part of the game. Just because they did things a little untraditional (made the triforce play a smaller part of the overall game and made the other milestones much bigger) you are going to complain that there's no dungeons? If you take the time to explore all the details of the game, it's PLENTY long, too.
Please. Wind Waker was an awesome game. They did an incredible job with the graphics, and an even better job with the game engine and game play. However, a bunch of thick skulled people apparently were feeling a little insecure about their masculinity, and thought they couldn't play something with cartoon graphics (even though the fact that you are portraying a kid in the game fits well with the kid-cartoon style graphics) and some fun/creative puzzle solving (yes...not EVERY "puzzle" requires chopping someone's head off or doing a hooker) made them feely a little too much like girly men.
As a result, Nintendo had to scrap a brand new rendering engine which had just been written from the ground up for Wind Waker. The process of rewriting it from scratch AGAIN probably accounts for a significant portion of the delay of this title.
But OOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!!! This ones going to have realistic look graphics. What a totally new concept. Not like we've ever seen that before. Heck, the coders could take a dump in the box and everyone would love it as long the poo was photorealistic.
So are you entering passwords or making phone calls with your mouse?
Actually, several online banks are useing mouse entry of passwords as a way of thwarting key loggers.
Try ING Direct, for example. They have fields where you type in your account number and a piece of personal info (ex: birth year), and then the pin entry is separate. For the pin entry, in order to circumvent key loggging, they show you a virtual keypad, and each digit on the keypad has a random letter assigned to it (ie: the letters are different every time you reload). They require you to either type the letters corresponding to you pin, or use your mouse to click the digits on the virtual keypad.
HSBC is another one...in order to get into the section where you transfer money in and out of the account, you have an additional password, and they have a virtual keyboard on screen, and for this you are REQUIRED to use your mouse to click the letters of your 2nd password.
Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to be successful.
Clearly, their marketing has been a huge expense, but it seems clear it has increased their exposure (whether you love it or hate it, everyone knows the woo-hoo song). I'd say it very likely is responsible for a large part of their revenue growth.
Now, if you cut off that marketing, they are almost break even. I'm sure they've had huge expenses to add the capacity to handle all those new users, as well as things like rolling out better 911 services everywhere. Once they were caught up on that, I suspect you'd see a sizable net profit.
The thing is, you can't just cut off your marketing and freeze your expansion, or they might just find themselves getting left in the dust. So of course they need to keep up those expenses, but it seems to me that they are on the right track.
They aren't one of those companies with grand ideas but no product or no market to sell to. They have a good product (I've been very happy with them for 10 months) and they definitely have a market. That's 2 gigantic steps beyond the dot-coms you seem to be comparing them to.
But why would you want to? Have you ever seen a nuclear reactor in a game and observed how unealistic the particle reactions were?
I've never seen a shelf full of cans in a game and observed how unrealistic the physics were when I knocked it over, but that certainly hasn't stopped them.
I've never shot at a concrete wall in a game and observed how unrealistic the resulting damage was with it's lack of parallax, but that certainly hasn't stopped them.
More detail doesn't offer that much to the price anyway.
I didn't know those pixel shaded, bump mapped, specular mapped, gloss mapped, displacement-mapped, realistic fur rendering, light diffracting, high-dynamic range rendering, quadratic-surface-self-soft-shadowing from a distance-attenuated-projected-point-light-source rendering graphics engines wrote themselves.
Not to mention the physics engines which are now becoming just as complex. You can't quite yet accurately model the particle reactions in a nuclear reactor, but I'm sure they are working on it...give them a few years.
they occasionally can break winsock when removing some particularly annoying spyware. There's utilities that easily fix the damaged registry keys however.
Yeah, so if it breaks your winsock, you can just go online and download the repair utility, right?
I'm very well versed in Norton Ghost, but I have little experience with Spybot S&D. So, I decided to test out the application."
"Q: How familiar are you with Spybot? A: Very familiar."
So, which is it - do you have "little experience with Spybot" or are you "Very familiar" with Spybot?
He is not very experienced with Spybot. He called 2 manufacturers and asked THEM how familiar they are with spybot, and THEY told him that THEY are very familiar.
something is basically wrong when low end camcorders can compress encode 30FPS in real time and $500 cameras need 2s between shots
Yeah, but take a single frame from that camcorder and you will discover that it is both incredibly low res and it is not very sharp. A camcorder pretty much relies on 2 facts. 1) You will be watching it on a television 2) You will see it in motion, not frame by frame.
Most camcorders cant do anything about the resolution, but they can address the sharpness issue. Switch your camcorder into still photo mode (if it has one)...your pictures should look much better, but see how many frames per second it can capture in this mode.
My Canon DSLR battery and CF card are good for about 500-1000 frames
Outside in the middle of winter? I'd like to see that. My digital rebel battery is good for about that many shots in decent temperatures. But go out for more than an hour in normal Michigan winter weather, and a fully charged battery will be good for only a fraction of that (maybe 100-200).
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?
Looking at that budget page you linked to, I'm coming up with $25K for travel (and $13.4K for office expenses). But still, considering he draws no salary, and his travel itinerary looks (from a quick glance) pretty much Wiki business/promotion related, I wouldn't complain about that.
If the Court approves this settlement, Plaintiff's Counsel will ask the Court to award, and Defendant has agreed to pay, up to $2,528,000 in attorney's fees and costs.
Nothing wrong with [Windows Media Player 10]. But I gotta say, iTunes is even better in this department. You can set it to automatically rip the disc (to codex/bitrate x) when the disc is inserted, and eject automatically when finished
Exactly the same with Windows Media Player 10.
I just ripped my 450 CD collection last weekend. I also decided to make it easier. I wrote a program that can monitor the CD drives. It can detect when a drive is loaded/ejected, and it can issue the load/eject command itself. Took me about an hour to learn how, code it, and debug it, but that was time I considered fun/educational (I love learning how to code new things, even if the knowledge probably isn't very reusable). With the program, you place a CD in each tray (leaving the tray ejected), and press a button in the program. It loads the first tray, waits for it to eject, loads the second tray, waits for it to eject, then plays a wave file when it's all done. I put 2 CD drives in each of 2 computers. Loaded up all 4 trays, clicked the button on each machine, went into the other room, waited until I heard the wave file played twice, went back into the room, and repeated.
I'll probably get modded down for praising a microsoft product, but....
It was that easy for me. I just used Windows Media Player to rip 450 CDs to MP3. For 99% of CDs, it literally was that easy. Set up Media Player to rip on CD insert, eject on completion. All I had to do was insert the CD and wait for it to eject. It ripped the songs, tagged them about 99% accurately, downloaded album art for each CD automatically, and organized them by Artist\Album\track-songname.mp3
Like I said, tagging was almost perfect. I did a quick look at the file system...looking for bands that had 2 folders spelled differently. Merged those into a single folder. Did a recursive grep on the entire tree for any songs with "track" or "untitled" in the filename. Fixed those manually. Loaded my entire collection into MythTV, let it scan the ID3 tags, and then looked through the list for ID3 misspellings/inconsistancies (which show up as the same band listed twice with different spellings). Fixed the 3 CDs where that happened. Browsed through the entire catalog manually, just doing a once-over to make sure everything looked decent. My collection is now very accurately titled with only about 15 minutes of work on fixing up the mistakes. I'm sure there are a few errors left in my collection, but I'm not gonna get all bent out of shape about it. If I didn't notice it already, it's not that significant. I'll just fix them when I find them. The practical approach
Yeah, but a professional/semi-professional would just buy a REAL extention tube (if not a full out macro lens). Extention tubes are cheap. I think they start at $30-40. I bought a set of 3 different sizes for $80. And these are quality engineered parts with full support for aperture and auto-focus control.
I got a Kill A Watt about a month ago. Quite a cool device.
I recently built a MythTV box, and since it is hooked up to the TV, I have no use for a graphics card (except for the fact the system wont boot without one....and the occasional debugging). So I took the Kill A Watt, plugged the computer into it, and swapped every card in one at a time until I found the one that gave me the lowest consumption. Of all the spare graphics cards, the one with the highest consumption was a banshe, at about 20 or 25 watts. The lowest consumption was the ATI Rage Pro Turbo at 2 watts (which makes sense...the Rage Pro Turbo was a very popular laptop chip).
Total combined wattage on my mythbox is 80-85 watts (PIII-450, 256MB+3*128MB, Rage Pro Turbo, Sound Blaser Live, Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-500, two 10/100 NICs, DVD reader, Seagate 80GB drive).
Anything is possible depending on implementation, but the way I'd imagine doing it is as follows. When the system boots, look for a certain file on the CD. If you find that file, then copy all other files on the CD over to the hard disk. Every file would be signed with a private key and verified before copying. Not a whole lot of opportunity to slip in a bad file or some bogus code.
Oh don't worry, you won't be buying it for just one game. There will also be Extreme Animal Crossing 2 (...except that they'll cut the game in half and call the sequal Extreme Animal Crossing 3 and release it for the Revolution 360).
The problem is...The games designed by Nintendo are primarily for kids. We can expect to see more of the cute loveable nintendo icons in many of their titles reincarnated a few thousand times more. These aren't the titles I want out of a console, and this will probably be the only reason I'll get an xbox 360 and skip the revolution all together. To me, price won't be the determining factor. The titles availabale will be.
Oh, don't worry one bit. Nintendo definitely has games for you folks. I heard one of the launch titles for Revolution is going to be "Extreme Animal Crossing". It's the same basic game, but all the character are rendered photorealisticly. After you catch a fish, you get to gut it, and it leaves a giant pool of blood on the ground. In addition to collecting fish and bugs, you now get a rife to go with you net and fishing pole so you can hunt deer and hang them on your cabin wall.
If you manage to get the entire exotic collection in your upstairs bedroom and can get it all setup with the proper Feng Shui orientation, I hear that Huggy stops by for a visit and gives you an exotic dance before going down on you. But if you can't get Huggy to stop by because Tom Nook can't get that exotic bed in stock, just bitch slap and pistol whip him and he'll get your point really fast.
And if Biskit starts mailing you death threats because you moved in on his inter-special relationship with Huggy, just set his house on fire. If that doesn't make him back off, all you need to do is slap a laser scope onto your hunting rifle and wait on top of the museum for him the next time he comes to drop off a new fossil. You can dispose of his body by throwing him in the town well. If Officer Copper's investigation eventually leads to you, just throw him a few insider tips on the turnip market and he'll gladly look the other way.
But I don't want to give away too much. Just suffice it to say, you are going to love it.
Slashdot Mirror
But at the same time, the XBOX 360 is about 4 months old, whereas the GameCube is 4 (or is it 5) YEARS old.
Unless you think they put lighthouses on rivers or lakes
For starters, theres about 180 lighthouses on the Great Lakes alone (in fact, Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state), but then I suppose those aren't your typical lakes...probably a bit more like small oceans. There are also a half dozen or so navigational lighthouses on the Columbia River (Oregon/Washington border). There are several more individual navigational lighthouse on other various rivers.
But aside from that, there are plenty of lighthouses on rivers and lakes which are fully functional but serve only decorative or memorial purposes, such as the Mariners Memorial Lighthouse near Detroit, Michigan and the Celina lighthouse (built on a manmade lake) in Celina, Ohio.
I seem to remember several dungeons in the game. Were the triforce piece themselves hidden in the dungeons? No. But the dungeons were an integral part of the game. Just because they did things a little untraditional (made the triforce play a smaller part of the overall game and made the other milestones much bigger) you are going to complain that there's no dungeons? If you take the time to explore all the details of the game, it's PLENTY long, too.
Please. Wind Waker was an awesome game. They did an incredible job with the graphics, and an even better job with the game engine and game play. However, a bunch of thick skulled people apparently were feeling a little insecure about their masculinity, and thought they couldn't play something with cartoon graphics (even though the fact that you are portraying a kid in the game fits well with the kid-cartoon style graphics) and some fun/creative puzzle solving (yes...not EVERY "puzzle" requires chopping someone's head off or doing a hooker) made them feely a little too much like girly men.
As a result, Nintendo had to scrap a brand new rendering engine which had just been written from the ground up for Wind Waker. The process of rewriting it from scratch AGAIN probably accounts for a significant portion of the delay of this title.
But OOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!!! This ones going to have realistic look graphics. What a totally new concept. Not like we've ever seen that before. Heck, the coders could take a dump in the box and everyone would love it as long the poo was photorealistic.
Read the post I just made about banks using mouse entry of password:= 14705154
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177104&cid
So are you entering passwords or making phone calls with your mouse?
Actually, several online banks are useing mouse entry of passwords as a way of thwarting key loggers.
Try ING Direct, for example. They have fields where you type in your account number and a piece of personal info (ex: birth year), and then the pin entry is separate. For the pin entry, in order to circumvent key loggging, they show you a virtual keypad, and each digit on the keypad has a random letter assigned to it (ie: the letters are different every time you reload). They require you to either type the letters corresponding to you pin, or use your mouse to click the digits on the virtual keypad.
HSBC is another one...in order to get into the section where you transfer money in and out of the account, you have an additional password, and they have a virtual keyboard on screen, and for this you are REQUIRED to use your mouse to click the letters of your 2nd password.
Sometimes you have to make sacrifices to be successful.
Clearly, their marketing has been a huge expense, but it seems clear it has increased their exposure (whether you love it or hate it, everyone knows the woo-hoo song). I'd say it very likely is responsible for a large part of their revenue growth.
Now, if you cut off that marketing, they are almost break even. I'm sure they've had huge expenses to add the capacity to handle all those new users, as well as things like rolling out better 911 services everywhere. Once they were caught up on that, I suspect you'd see a sizable net profit.
The thing is, you can't just cut off your marketing and freeze your expansion, or they might just find themselves getting left in the dust. So of course they need to keep up those expenses, but it seems to me that they are on the right track.
They aren't one of those companies with grand ideas but no product or no market to sell to. They have a good product (I've been very happy with them for 10 months) and they definitely have a market. That's 2 gigantic steps beyond the dot-coms you seem to be comparing them to.
But why would you want to? Have you ever seen a nuclear reactor in a game and observed how unealistic the particle reactions were?
I've never seen a shelf full of cans in a game and observed how unrealistic the physics were when I knocked it over, but that certainly hasn't stopped them.
I've never shot at a concrete wall in a game and observed how unrealistic the resulting damage was with it's lack of parallax, but that certainly hasn't stopped them.
More detail doesn't offer that much to the price anyway.
I didn't know those pixel shaded, bump mapped, specular mapped, gloss mapped, displacement-mapped, realistic fur rendering, light diffracting, high-dynamic range rendering, quadratic-surface-self-soft-shadowing from a distance-attenuated-projected-point-light-source rendering graphics engines wrote themselves.
Not to mention the physics engines which are now becoming just as complex. You can't quite yet accurately model the particle reactions in a nuclear reactor, but I'm sure they are working on it...give them a few years.
Yes, No, No, Yes, and No. How the hell did you get +4 Informative when you only have 40% correct.
they occasionally can break winsock when removing some particularly annoying spyware. There's utilities that easily fix the damaged registry keys however.
Yeah, so if it breaks your winsock, you can just go online and download the repair utility, right?
I'm very well versed in Norton Ghost, but I have little experience with Spybot S&D. So, I decided to test out the application."
"Q: How familiar are you with Spybot?
A: Very familiar."
So, which is it - do you have "little experience with Spybot" or are you "Very familiar" with Spybot?
He is not very experienced with Spybot. He called 2 manufacturers and asked THEM how familiar they are with spybot, and THEY told him that THEY are very familiar.
something is basically wrong when low end camcorders can compress encode 30FPS in real time and $500 cameras need 2s between shots
Yeah, but take a single frame from that camcorder and you will discover that it is both incredibly low res and it is not very sharp. A camcorder pretty much relies on 2 facts.
1) You will be watching it on a television
2) You will see it in motion, not frame by frame.
Most camcorders cant do anything about the resolution, but they can address the sharpness issue. Switch your camcorder into still photo mode (if it has one)...your pictures should look much better, but see how many frames per second it can capture in this mode.
My Canon DSLR battery and CF card are good for about 500-1000 frames
Outside in the middle of winter? I'd like to see that. My digital rebel battery is good for about that many shots in decent temperatures. But go out for more than an hour in normal Michigan winter weather, and a fully charged battery will be good for only a fraction of that (maybe 100-200).
Reread the numbers in that Wiki entry carefully. That's 300 gigabit and 800 gigabit (or 37.5 gigabyte and 100 gigabyte).
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?
Looking at that budget page you linked to, I'm coming up with $25K for travel (and $13.4K for office expenses). But still, considering he draws no salary, and his travel itinerary looks (from a quick glance) pretty much Wiki business/promotion related, I wouldn't complain about that.
Netflix: 1, Lawyers: 0
Lawyers 0? Can't say I agree:
If the Court approves this settlement, Plaintiff's Counsel will ask the Court to award, and Defendant has agreed to pay, up to $2,528,000 in attorney's fees and costs.
Nothing wrong with [Windows Media Player 10]. But I gotta say, iTunes is even better in this department. You can set it to automatically rip the disc (to codex/bitrate x) when the disc is inserted, and eject automatically when finished
Exactly the same with Windows Media Player 10.
I just ripped my 450 CD collection last weekend. I also decided to make it easier. I wrote a program that can monitor the CD drives. It can detect when a drive is loaded/ejected, and it can issue the load/eject command itself. Took me about an hour to learn how, code it, and debug it, but that was time I considered fun/educational (I love learning how to code new things, even if the knowledge probably isn't very reusable). With the program, you place a CD in each tray (leaving the tray ejected), and press a button in the program. It loads the first tray, waits for it to eject, loads the second tray, waits for it to eject, then plays a wave file when it's all done. I put 2 CD drives in each of 2 computers. Loaded up all 4 trays, clicked the button on each machine, went into the other room, waited until I heard the wave file played twice, went back into the room, and repeated.
I'll probably get modded down for praising a microsoft product, but....
It was that easy for me. I just used Windows Media Player to rip 450 CDs to MP3. For 99% of CDs, it literally was that easy. Set up Media Player to rip on CD insert, eject on completion. All I had to do was insert the CD and wait for it to eject. It ripped the songs, tagged them about 99% accurately, downloaded album art for each CD automatically, and organized them by Artist\Album\track-songname.mp3
Like I said, tagging was almost perfect. I did a quick look at the file system...looking for bands that had 2 folders spelled differently. Merged those into a single folder. Did a recursive grep on the entire tree for any songs with "track" or "untitled" in the filename. Fixed those manually. Loaded my entire collection into MythTV, let it scan the ID3 tags, and then looked through the list for ID3 misspellings/inconsistancies (which show up as the same band listed twice with different spellings). Fixed the 3 CDs where that happened. Browsed through the entire catalog manually, just doing a once-over to make sure everything looked decent. My collection is now very accurately titled with only about 15 minutes of work on fixing up the mistakes. I'm sure there are a few errors left in my collection, but I'm not gonna get all bent out of shape about it. If I didn't notice it already, it's not that significant. I'll just fix them when I find them. The practical approach
Yeah, but a professional/semi-professional would just buy a REAL extention tube (if not a full out macro lens). Extention tubes are cheap. I think they start at $30-40. I bought a set of 3 different sizes for $80. And these are quality engineered parts with full support for aperture and auto-focus control.
I got a Kill A Watt about a month ago. Quite a cool device.
I recently built a MythTV box, and since it is hooked up to the TV, I have no use for a graphics card (except for the fact the system wont boot without one....and the occasional debugging). So I took the Kill A Watt, plugged the computer into it, and swapped every card in one at a time until I found the one that gave me the lowest consumption. Of all the spare graphics cards, the one with the highest consumption was a banshe, at about 20 or 25 watts. The lowest consumption was the ATI Rage Pro Turbo at 2 watts (which makes sense...the Rage Pro Turbo was a very popular laptop chip).
Total combined wattage on my mythbox is 80-85 watts (PIII-450, 256MB+3*128MB, Rage Pro Turbo, Sound Blaser Live, Hauppauge PVR-350 and PVR-500, two 10/100 NICs, DVD reader, Seagate 80GB drive).
Anything is possible depending on implementation, but the way I'd imagine doing it is as follows. When the system boots, look for a certain file on the CD. If you find that file, then copy all other files on the CD over to the hard disk. Every file would be signed with a private key and verified before copying. Not a whole lot of opportunity to slip in a bad file or some bogus code.
Oh don't worry, you won't be buying it for just one game. There will also be Extreme Animal Crossing 2 (...except that they'll cut the game in half and call the sequal Extreme Animal Crossing 3 and release it for the Revolution 360).
The problem is...The games designed by Nintendo are primarily for kids. We can expect to see more of the cute loveable nintendo icons in many of their titles reincarnated a few thousand times more. These aren't the titles I want out of a console, and this will probably be the only reason I'll get an xbox 360 and skip the revolution all together. To me, price won't be the determining factor. The titles availabale will be.
Oh, don't worry one bit. Nintendo definitely has games for you folks. I heard one of the launch titles for Revolution is going to be "Extreme Animal Crossing". It's the same basic game, but all the character are rendered photorealisticly. After you catch a fish, you get to gut it, and it leaves a giant pool of blood on the ground. In addition to collecting fish and bugs, you now get a rife to go with you net and fishing pole so you can hunt deer and hang them on your cabin wall.
If you manage to get the entire exotic collection in your upstairs bedroom and can get it all setup with the proper Feng Shui orientation, I hear that Huggy stops by for a visit and gives you an exotic dance before going down on you. But if you can't get Huggy to stop by because Tom Nook can't get that exotic bed in stock, just bitch slap and pistol whip him and he'll get your point really fast.
And if Biskit starts mailing you death threats because you moved in on his inter-special relationship with Huggy, just set his house on fire. If that doesn't make him back off, all you need to do is slap a laser scope onto your hunting rifle and wait on top of the museum for him the next time he comes to drop off a new fossil. You can dispose of his body by throwing him in the town well. If Officer Copper's investigation eventually leads to you, just throw him a few insider tips on the turnip market and he'll gladly look the other way.
But I don't want to give away too much. Just suffice it to say, you are going to love it.
Dont forget the 73-87 GM pickup trucks that had gas tanks which tended to explode in side impacts.