I can see why you went for XM, since the radio around Tech bites unless you're a big Country music fan. The campus radio is interesting, but you never know what you're going to get (sometimes it's good, sometimes they're playing explicit gay music that is some guy screaming about cornholes:P ).
Yeah, it really sucks how you have to sit by your phone all day to recieve calls. If only there were some way to notify people of incoming calls that would work thoughout the entire domocile. Perhaps an audio alert of some sort?
What's worse is if you're running low on memory (swapping stuff out) and something in Windows decides to play a sound. Windows will literally freeze for 2-3 seconds while it swaps stuff out to swap in the sound to play. I've burnt coasters on a slow 4x burner because the otherwise unloaded 800Mhz Duron running 2k froze up waiting for the sound to load. It's extremely frustrating.
I think the "arbitrary level of worthiness" is "didn't inflict it on themselves". We feel bad for people when bad stuff happens to them, we don't feel nearly as bad when they do it to themselves, especially if it is for some unbelievably stupid reason.
The only problem with ZoneAlarm is that it likes to pop up dialog boxes all of the time. This is extremely irritating when you've switched to something fullscreen, and it decides to freeze the network conneciton while it waits for you to answer it's dialog box (which you can't see).
Granted, this is on a work machine where I'm not allowed to change the settings, so maybe it can be fixed with twiddling, but I find the behavior to be extremely annoying. I much prefer ipfw on my FreeBSD box. Just my $0.02US
Of course just as I hit submit I remember that the units are mAh, not watts. So the capacity is similar, but not spectacular. There aren't a lot of chargers for the 9V NiMHs though.
There are NiMH 9V batteries. They're fairly expensive though. One thing you notice immediatly is how little power a 9V actually supplies. The NiMH ones were good for ~150mAh IIRC. That's something like 1/4 of the total capacity of a single AAA.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
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· Score: 1
This reminds me of an _old_ demo I saw at SGI. It starts with the camers looking out into the desert. The camera slowly pans over and we see a redneck guy with a gun in a little sandbag bunker waving his gun at a flying saucer in the background. When you see the secne, the first thing you say is "oh, the saucer is obviously bad CG, it looks so fake". There is a second film that shows the scene before the rendering, not only is the flying saucer gone, but so is the sandbags. Nobody ever noticed the sandbags were CG in the original film.
You forgot the obvious solution: Become a nudist (sorry, "naturalist").
Remember, a lot of those extreme liberal women are hot, and it shouldn't be too hard to convince them of the evils of the textile industry. Granted, many of them probably already know this and have switched to 100% hemp clothes made by the local hippy, but you will no doubt find plenty who cannot afford those. If you get enough hot women on board, you could really start a movement.
My complaint with just about every PC gamepad I've tried is that they are far too sensitive. You can see this if you pull up the gamepad control panel and windows and notice that the little cross is bouncing around even if the pad is sitting on the ground. That's extremely obnoxous in fighting games where your caracter randomly jumps or ducks at inopportune times.
Is it just me, or does anybody else find TeX hard to compile and get set up? I've spent who knows how long screwing around with metafont trying to get the thing working. Also, I know there must be a way to choose a better font, but everybody who uses TeX seems to use the same set of (butt ugly) fonts for everything. It's rather telling that most tech people can instantly tell when something was typeset in TeX.
Maybe it's not the same, but I got my 1995 Ranger fixed at the Ford dealership a few months ago. Granted, it wasn't the same problem (I had a caliper lock up), but they ceratainly weren't trying to turn away my business.
SHHH! Ixnay on the illipsPhay. You saw what happened when word got out about the secret menu on the APEX right? In my experiance, most of the region free codes are for DVD players that get quickly discontinued. It takes a bit of luck to find a working one sometimes, especially if the manufacturer releases a v2 player with the same box and marking that "fixes" the flaw.
Fortunatly, I watch my DVDs on my computer, and most DVD-ROMs seem to be easily flashable.
I'm willing to bet that the bulk of consumers won't buy movies that aren't in a foreign language with no subtitles. Sure there are niche markets that will buy them, but I don't think they're going to constitute the bulk of the consumers.
Granted, the pirates can add their own subtitle tracks (I'm thinking HK subtitles), but these are almost always of horrendous quality. The pirates who do this aren't going to be slowed by region codes.
It's not like the consumer has a lot of say in this beyond buying a region free DVD player (which retail chains in the US do not sell). They either accept the region code, CSS, Macrovision, forced ad viewing, and all of the other crap the industry forced into DVDs...or they keep their tapes and slowly move into obsoleceance. Tapes are out, studios are going to stop releasing most of their stuff on tape in the near future (it's already becoming increasingly difficult to find tapes).
It's not like the consumers had any say into the design of the DVD spec. The studios have a monopoly (copyright) on pretty much all of the movies made in the past 75 years. If the studios didn't get their way, they could have killed DVDs before they even got started.
What makes you think he's doing TiVO stuff on this? From what I can tell he built the box to show that it could be done and to get the highest clock speed on some ongoing contest. He even said near the end of the article how his normal everyday use computer is much much quieter than this one.
I thought the electricy bill on that computer would make it cost prohibitive to run regularly.
Someone else suggested that you might need to enter your PIN number before you can swipe the phone. I know I don't want to be automatically charged by some guy with a smart card reader in his pocket who just brushes by people in a crowded street.
Another satisfied Radio Shack customer! To be fair, my local RatShack stopped asking for all of my personal information last year. I think when the screen comes up the guy just enters all 0s or something for the zip code and phone number.
Who the heck wants to type in the serial number of every dollar they accept into some remote terminal to a giant government database? Especially given that making bills hard to counterfit also makes them hard on OCR software, and how worn and abused (written on) bills get over the years. Not to mention the logistics of deploying millions of these endpoint terminals and maintaining the database.
Corporations and governments may not care about mistakes, but they certainly care about cost.
I'm not so pumped about Doom3. My prediction is as always id pushes technology but the gameplay is basically the same as the first Doom.
You mean it's going to be a very nice looking first person shooter?
IMHO, the FPS field is a little stale right now. There are basically only two notable twists to the field, and both of them are pretty evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The first is the increase in "stealth" games where you don't shoot everything in sight, but rather try to avoid fighting sometimes. This has been done pretty much to death already. The other type is highly coordinated team action games, where the online component requires a team of 4 or more players on each side to even hope to accomplish anything, but even this is pretty much just an evolution of the team deathmatch concept. Maybe I'm just jaded.
In the case of Doom3, perhaps they went too far in new game engine capabilities and desktop CPU just hasn't caught up yet to what's considered acceptable for engine performance. But it's not like this was totally unprecedented. When Quake came out, it was all but unplayable on my P166 system except at the lowest resolutions. It took a voodoo card to make it even playable.
What? Maybe you're thinking of Quake2. Quake was playable on my P-90 with S3 Trio64 (no 3D acceleration) graphics card. Quake2 is what really upped the ante in the minimum hardware department. I remember even after I upgraded to the PII-400 with Matrox Mystique G200, Quake2 was still a bit of a dog. Granted, the GL support on the G series chips was complete crap in those days (they used some bogus GL to Direct3D translation layer in the drivers). OTOH, Quake3 was surprisingly playable on the G200 under FreeBSD, so who knows.
I figure that Doom3 will require a Geforce 4 (probably even the 4mx guys will get terrible performance) or equivalent to play at any decent resolution. Most likely there will be plenty of knobs you can tweak to get a fast (if crappy looking) game out of more modest hardware.
I wonder if Doom3 is going to be full of 100 meter tall 2 cm thick walls that you have to walk across like Doom2?
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I can see why you went for XM, since the radio around Tech bites unless you're a big Country music fan. The campus radio is interesting, but you never know what you're going to get (sometimes it's good, sometimes they're playing explicit gay music that is some guy screaming about cornholes :P ).
Yeah, it really sucks how you have to sit by your phone all day to recieve calls. If only there were some way to notify people of incoming calls that would work thoughout the entire domocile. Perhaps an audio alert of some sort?
Heck, Crimson Skies started out as a boardgame.
What's worse is if you're running low on memory (swapping stuff out) and something in Windows decides to play a sound. Windows will literally freeze for 2-3 seconds while it swaps stuff out to swap in the sound to play. I've burnt coasters on a slow 4x burner because the otherwise unloaded 800Mhz Duron running 2k froze up waiting for the sound to load. It's extremely frustrating.
I think the "arbitrary level of worthiness" is "didn't inflict it on themselves". We feel bad for people when bad stuff happens to them, we don't feel nearly as bad when they do it to themselves, especially if it is for some unbelievably stupid reason.
The only problem with ZoneAlarm is that it likes to pop up dialog boxes all of the time. This is extremely irritating when you've switched to something fullscreen, and it decides to freeze the network conneciton while it waits for you to answer it's dialog box (which you can't see).
Granted, this is on a work machine where I'm not allowed to change the settings, so maybe it can be fixed with twiddling, but I find the behavior to be extremely annoying. I much prefer ipfw on my FreeBSD box. Just my $0.02US
Of course just as I hit submit I remember that the units are mAh, not watts. So the capacity is similar, but not spectacular. There aren't a lot of chargers for the 9V NiMHs though.
There are NiMH 9V batteries. They're fairly expensive though. One thing you notice immediatly is how little power a 9V actually supplies. The NiMH ones were good for ~150mAh IIRC. That's something like 1/4 of the total capacity of a single AAA.
This reminds me of an _old_ demo I saw at SGI. It starts with the camers looking out into the desert. The camera slowly pans over and we see a redneck guy with a gun in a little sandbag bunker waving his gun at a flying saucer in the background. When you see the secne, the first thing you say is "oh, the saucer is obviously bad CG, it looks so fake". There is a second film that shows the scene before the rendering, not only is the flying saucer gone, but so is the sandbags. Nobody ever noticed the sandbags were CG in the original film.
You forgot the obvious solution: Become a nudist (sorry, "naturalist").
Remember, a lot of those extreme liberal women are hot, and it shouldn't be too hard to convince them of the evils of the textile industry. Granted, many of them probably already know this and have switched to 100% hemp clothes made by the local hippy, but you will no doubt find plenty who cannot afford those. If you get enough hot women on board, you could really start a movement.
My complaint with just about every PC gamepad I've tried is that they are far too sensitive. You can see this if you pull up the gamepad control panel and windows and notice that the little cross is bouncing around even if the pad is sitting on the ground. That's extremely obnoxous in fighting games where your caracter randomly jumps or ducks at inopportune times.
I think fingers predate the abacus, and they're still supported by millions of medical practicioners around the world.
Is it just me, or does anybody else find TeX hard to compile and get set up? I've spent who knows how long screwing around with metafont trying to get the thing working. Also, I know there must be a way to choose a better font, but everybody who uses TeX seems to use the same set of (butt ugly) fonts for everything. It's rather telling that most tech people can instantly tell when something was typeset in TeX.
Maybe it's not the same, but I got my 1995 Ranger fixed at the Ford dealership a few months ago. Granted, it wasn't the same problem (I had a caliper lock up), but they ceratainly weren't trying to turn away my business.
THC == The Hitler Channel
SHHH! Ixnay on the illipsPhay. You saw what happened when word got out about the secret menu on the APEX right? In my experiance, most of the region free codes are for DVD players that get quickly discontinued. It takes a bit of luck to find a working one sometimes, especially if the manufacturer releases a v2 player with the same box and marking that "fixes" the flaw.
Fortunatly, I watch my DVDs on my computer, and most DVD-ROMs seem to be easily flashable.
I'm willing to bet that the bulk of consumers won't buy movies that aren't in a foreign language with no subtitles. Sure there are niche markets that will buy them, but I don't think they're going to constitute the bulk of the consumers.
Granted, the pirates can add their own subtitle tracks (I'm thinking HK subtitles), but these are almost always of horrendous quality. The pirates who do this aren't going to be slowed by region codes.
It's not like the consumer has a lot of say in this beyond buying a region free DVD player (which retail chains in the US do not sell). They either accept the region code, CSS, Macrovision, forced ad viewing, and all of the other crap the industry forced into DVDs...or they keep their tapes and slowly move into obsoleceance. Tapes are out, studios are going to stop releasing most of their stuff on tape in the near future (it's already becoming increasingly difficult to find tapes).
It's not like the consumers had any say into the design of the DVD spec. The studios have a monopoly (copyright) on pretty much all of the movies made in the past 75 years. If the studios didn't get their way, they could have killed DVDs before they even got started.
What makes you think he's doing TiVO stuff on this? From what I can tell he built the box to show that it could be done and to get the highest clock speed on some ongoing contest. He even said near the end of the article how his normal everyday use computer is much much quieter than this one.
I thought the electricy bill on that computer would make it cost prohibitive to run regularly.
Someone else suggested that you might need to enter your PIN number before you can swipe the phone. I know I don't want to be automatically charged by some guy with a smart card reader in his pocket who just brushes by people in a crowded street.
Another satisfied Radio Shack customer! To be fair, my local RatShack stopped asking for all of my personal information last year. I think when the screen comes up the guy just enters all 0s or something for the zip code and phone number.
Who the heck wants to type in the serial number of every dollar they accept into some remote terminal to a giant government database? Especially given that making bills hard to counterfit also makes them hard on OCR software, and how worn and abused (written on) bills get over the years. Not to mention the logistics of deploying millions of these endpoint terminals and maintaining the database.
Corporations and governments may not care about mistakes, but they certainly care about cost.
IMHO, the FPS field is a little stale right now. There are basically only two notable twists to the field, and both of them are pretty evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The first is the increase in "stealth" games where you don't shoot everything in sight, but rather try to avoid fighting sometimes. This has been done pretty much to death already. The other type is highly coordinated team action games, where the online component requires a team of 4 or more players on each side to even hope to accomplish anything, but even this is pretty much just an evolution of the team deathmatch concept. Maybe I'm just jaded.
I figure that Doom3 will require a Geforce 4 (probably even the 4mx guys will get terrible performance) or equivalent to play at any decent resolution. Most likely there will be plenty of knobs you can tweak to get a fast (if crappy looking) game out of more modest hardware.
I wonder if Doom3 is going to be full of 100 meter tall 2 cm thick walls that you have to walk across like Doom2?