Almost-Retired: Thanks for the clarification! As I said and you acknowledged, I have a somewhat limited grasp of the NTSC standard in general. I appreciate your taking the time to correct my misconceptions and any misinformation I posted above. Sounds like you've got significant experience in the field! OTOH, while I may have been incorrect with the details, the brunt of my post (that HD is fairly well distinguishable from SD) still remains accurate.
In response to the AC (flame) above regarding my use of the word 'pixel', my apologies for using an (inaccurate for the subject) word that most people (non NTSC video studied folk) could understand to make it less difficult to grasp. Most people can't get the concept of lines of resolution, color burst, sync pulses, multiple guns firing toward a screen, the difference between direct-view and rear-projection, how many dots per inch, etc. Good to see you cleared it up with your informative post. Thanks for taking the time.:)
Your brother, evidently, is either an idiot with poor eyesight _or_ correct about his TV sucking wastewater -- here's why:
Standard Television signal is approximately 480 lines of resolution, meaning there are 480 different pixels in every vertical line on the television, and the signal is interlaced, meaning that the TV displays 1/2 of the lines in the first scan (1st, 3rd, 5th, so on) and then the second half of the lines in the second scan (2nd, 4th, 6th, so on). This means that at any given time, only 240 of the lines of video on your TV are being updated, meaning that you're not getting all 480 lines of solid resolution. They are _there_ but they are not being displayed at the exact same time.
HD Television is either 720 lines of resolution in non-interlaced format or 1080 lines of resolution in interlaced or non-interlaced format. Even with 1080i, you're still getting 540 lines of resolution per scan -- more than double that of standard television. The actual resolution is almost 3 times as high as standard definition television. With 720p, you're getting more than 3 times the detail per frame than on 480i! You'll note if you research that there is a strong following of videophiles who claim that 720p is actually a more detailed picture than 1080i/p, but personally, I like my 1080i just fine.
The moral of the story is that if your brother can't tell the difference between an HD source and a 480i source, he needs a new set of eyeballs or to clean the 3 feet of dust off the television.
I have a Hitachi 51s715 51" HDTV and the difference between standard definition content and HD content is more than apparent, it is _obvious_. Anyone that isn't truly blind can see the amazing difference in clarity, color depth, black reproduction, etc.
I'm not sure if you're making your story up, your brother is a blind moron, or his TV sucks wastewater, but one of the three is true -- an HD signal cannot be mistaken for an SD signal by anyone with eyesight!
Lastly, regarding programming, Comcast offers free HD with any PVR system, DirecTV has a solid lineup of HD channels, Charter offers a good selection for no additional cost (you just have to call for the receiver), Dish Network has a poor selection but also has HD... Anyone saying it's hard or difficult to get HD service in their area must not be in an area serviced by any of those four major providers.
(ps, I'm not a video scholar, and my description of TV resolution is probably far from 100% accurate, but does cover the basics. Correct me on it if you want to, but I'm not claiming to have pioneered the NTSC standard or anything.)
Must be nice to be you! My launch PS2's laser assembly died approximately 6 months after purchase. After much phone calling, tooth pulling, etc., I was able to get someone at Sony to repair the damn thing under warranty.
I'd estimate that was about 4 years ago now? About 8 months after they repaired it, it started doing the dreaded DRE again and I was able to use the laser voltage potentiometer trick to spark it back to life. As it stands currently, the unit *will not* play any DVD video, will barely load PS2 games, but it loads the Swap Magic disc and burned DVDs like butter. Further modifications to the DVD / CD laser voltage potentiometers have been fruitless in resolving the DRE errors.
So, FUD? No. I'll verify that a high percentage of people did experience problems with the PS2 during the lifespan of the console. I don't claim that it is HORRIBLE AND HORRENDOUS like some people do, I mean hell, the console is FOUR years old. The fact that it has worked this long at all is amazing.
I don't get it... I was a WoW player for about 2 weeks, didn't get sucked in like most do. Something about going to Person A who tells me to go kill 10 grue, me going and killing 10 grue, going back to Person A, getting 500 exp and a quest to go kill 15 grue, rinse, repeat... Just didn't do it for me.
Now, you're saying that WoW has a LUA interface (I'm familiar with what LUA is, for the record) that allows you to write plug-ins or to script specific actions in-game. Why the heck would Blizzard have added that interface if they DIDN'T want you to.. well.. use it? It seems very strange to me for them to offer the LUA interface and then say 'you can use it, but not for scripting repetitive tasks'. What else would you script? What would 'acceptable use' be for the LUA script? Is the LUA scripting add-on a 3rd party addition or Blizzard sanctioned?
Can anyone help me understand what function the LUA interface would serve if it ISN'T to help automate simple tasks like run to location X, kill mob, loot mob, run to location Y, wait until healed, repeat?
If the LUA scripting add-on is provided by Blizzard, I have a hard time seeing how they are going to ban accounts because of it. If the LUA scripting add-on is 3rd party, well, then, it makes a lot more sense...
Actually, I could ask you politely to read up on your law, professor. While solely does mean entirely, and I used it improperly, the flash carts violate the DMCA as well as Intellectual Property laws, and even using 'homebrew' is still illegal on the GBA. Exporting a console to a region it was not intended, while possibly illegal (depending on the importing market's law and your exporting market's law), CAN BE LEGAL. You're correct that something illegal is illegal, period. You're correct in saying the law is blind. Using the GBA flash carts to circumvent the GBA's copy protection is wholly illegal on several levels, while it can be legal for companies to export consoles, first party accessories, and software.
So, next time, instead of taking a comment and making it a personal attack, you could get your cheese-crusted hands out of the cheetos bag, move out of your mom's basement, and stop getting your rocks off to trying to look big and bad in front of a keyboard. You remember the parable about personal arguments on the internet right? They're like participating in the special olympics -- even if you win, you're still retarded for being there.
See? Unmerited personal attacks just make people look stupid. Next time, instead of your 'ZOMG ZEALOT LOLS' post, you could post a well thought out and constructive post, instead of three stupid lines about how you don't care if you disagree with law because that doesn't change anything. Because you're wrong on that point. Maybe YOU disagreeing doesn't change things, but the law exists to serve the PEOPLE. If PEOPLE don't like the law, they can LOBBY and PETITION and fight to CHANGE that law. That's the glory of the USA. If we don't like something, and enough of us don't like it, we can get it to change. Unless we adopt your mentality of 'LOLS I don't agree but I'm a puss in momma's basement and won't do anything about it except post with my cheesy hands about some guy I think is a loser lols'.
So, to bring it around full circle -- my post still stands. Stopping a company from selling YOUR 100% LEGAL EQUIPMENT to another market and stopping a company from selling EQUIPMENT MADE SOLELY TO BREAK DMCA LAWS are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
"Hong Kong based Lik-Sang, a mail order company which distributes videogame software and hardware worldwide, has lost a crucial court case brought by Nintendo over the sale of devices which could copy Game Boy software."
That's right. OH GNOHS, Nintendo stopped Lik-Sang from selling devices MADE SOLELY TO PIRATE THEIR SOFTWARE (and run homebrew). Sony, on the other hand, has stopped Lik-Sang from selling their *FIRST PARTY* CONSOLES, SOFTWARE, and ACCESSORIES to other markets. These are not anywhere NEAR the same thing, at all.
Next time, read your article before you spam us with it.
You're all going back to the GP's main point, however. I'm not sure why you keep barking about this because here's the deal -- Spamhaus makes a list. Like it or not, a lot of admins take this list and block e-mail specifically because of it. This is a known fact.
I'm well aware that *you* or *someone you knows* is smart enough to not immediately block e-mail from someone on the Spamhaus list. Great. Glad you know someone like that. Fact of the matter is that I'd estimate that people like that comprise less than 5% of all admins that run mailservers. I'd assume that the rest of them just have it set as an automatic blacklist, kicking e-mails back from any of the known domains.
Your solution (that opposes the solid and innocent-until-proven-guilty method of these mailserver admins actually using a scoring system instead of a solid 'YES/NO' spam system like the blacklists can provide) is to add another section to the list, calling them 'maybe' spammers. Then the same admins that couldn't configure it right to begin with now have another set of information to misuse. Great. Brilliant strategy.
Why don't we just provide easy education as to how these lists SHOULD be used. Blanketing it as a blacklist that is outside of your control is tantamount to letting Hitler into your library to remove books without you specifically seeing them first, only him telling you that the books were found to be bad by his administration. Yes, overblown exaggerated example. Yes, I know it's two different things. Sadly, however, I also know that most idiot net admins will need to see something put into that stupid of terms in order to think that there is something to worry about.
Also, don't misunderstand. If you are a net admin and you specifically use a blacklist, are are completely OK with the fact that the list may or may not be correct, well, then, who am I to tell you you're doing it wrong? If it's OK for you that you may be blacklisting e-mail from people who aren't spammers without even looking at the list firsthand, then fine. Let your mail server be the guiding light for all of those of us who actually CARE if our e-mails get from start to finish without the intervention of 37 competing spamlist companies.
(ps, I think spamhaus is awesome, don't misinterpret this as me disliking them. They provide an awesome service and I've used their blacklist in my spam scoring/filtering for years.)
Exactly! I remember when Norton Utilities for DOS was a set of near-impossible to replace system tools that were undeniably useful to anyone with the inclination to use them.
Now we've got SuperSuite SystemWorks 2007.3 Ultra ++ Premium Platinum Professional Network Edition, and it's great! It loads a piece of shit e-mail scanner that sucks up 24mb of your ram and only works with two e-mail clients (not web based e-mail like most people assume it does!), some sort of 'worm protection' that succeeds only in disallowing you to connect to any remote machine ever, for any reason, you've got their anti-virus protection which incidently takes about 45mb of ram to sit in the background, double that if it's doing a scan, then you've got the heuristic detection, which is about another 5-10 mb of your ram, you've got the 'Symantec System Center' console, that takes about 10mb of ram just so it can tell you you're running SystemWorks 2007.3 Ultra++ Premium Platinum Professional Network Edition every five minutes in a pop-up window. Then there's Goback, which doesn't work, Ghost Personal 10, which I've yet to get to work properly thanks to its inability to properly clone 'msgina.dll', and an out-dated 'update' to checkdisk that the software doesn't allow you to force a manual run of. Don't even get me started on 'Norton Internet Security' which effectively stops you from transmitting *ANY* data unless the user clicks OK about a thousand times, and also does about 10 or 15 other things to your connection that it will never tell you about that impede normal workgroup/domain traffic. Lovely.
And that's just SystemWorks. Don't forget about how Corporate Antivirus 10 has a nasty penchant for destroying corporate systems (as seen on slashdot here.)
Maybe I'm just bitter at having to remove all this shit from client's computers who have bought it and spent their $50 or $100 on this software only to have it completely screw them from top to bottom.
I think that Symantec needs to do one of two things: Either drop out completely, admit that their software is a shadow of what it used to be and that they've lost all ability to write any sort of tight and non-resource hungry code, OR re-write their damn software to be functional and not take an average of 100mb of ram to run. I'm fairly certain that properly written code doesn't need direct kernel access to check whether c:\boot.dat is infected with a virus. 'Course, I'm no programmer, so, I don't know that for fact.
But either way, if they did that, I think their cries would fall on more sympathetic ears.
Don't worry, you were right about FF7:DoC. If that game had tried a little bit harder, I probably would have actually felt Square-Enix sucking on my nuts (instead of just feeling like they were *trying* to suck my nuts), as that game was very obviously made completely as fan-service and really fails to stand on its own with any single merit. If the only allure of the game is that it has Vincent in it.... maybe the game shouldn't have been made?
Actually, I played the same game three years ago without Vincent and with a better combat system and better graphics, it was called 'Devil May Cry'. Oh, and it didn't make this massive sucking sound where I was sitting when I stood up from the couch.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has been announced for the Wii already, see here. It has also been announced for the NintendoDS, along with all of the Final Fantasy remakes that they have previously announced. It seems that Square-Enix is well aware of the potential that the new consoles hold.
I don't understand why so many people here are like 'Oh, well, we'll wait until they enact it and then if it's a problem we'll stop it.' Welcome to the reason you pay Income Tax, morons. It was instated in WWI, then stopped after WWI. Then it was instated for WWII, and then it never stopped. And that's why we pay income tax. Because a bunch of people did the exact same thing -- 'Oh well, it will only be here for the war...'
Let me try and break this down into small, understandable chunks:
Scenario A: The Die Hard Gamer
Johnny plays Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 almost religiously. He has a nice DSL connection and usually sees ping times under 30ms to his favorite servers. His DSL provider contacts him and informs him that due to a restructuring, his $54.95 a month now only allows him 'Standard' service. He notices that his ping time has risen to over 200ms during his gaming sessions, significantly impacting his ability to play online games, but sees no other real latency issues while surfing. Another phone call to his ISP informs him that for the low, low price of $14.95, they will stop prioritizing his gaming packets lower than all other traffic. They would call it the 'Gaming Extreme' package. Now, Johnny is spending $15 more a month, just because his ISP has the ability to prioritize his traffic as they see fit.
THAT SUCKS.
Scenario B: The Mom and Pop Shop ISP
Mom and Pop start an ISP and have a big contract with Concentric, one of the bigger backbones. A high percentage of their customers are in the SW, and a lot of what their customers do involves servers in the NE. In order for the data to get from Customer to End Server, it passes through Mom and Pop, Concentric, Cogent, and Level3. (I know, I know, it wouldn't likely go through that much.) Cogent and Concentric are at odds, because Cogent wants to charge Concentric $1.00 per megabyte for priority speeds. Concentric told Cogent to stuff it, so now every packet going through Cogent has 4x the latency of 'priority' traffic. As Cogent is a bunch of idiots in this example, it's not much of a stretch to assume that Level3 dislikes them as well. Level3 won't pay Cogent for priority traffic, either. So now, Level3 is slowing down Cogent's traffic, and Cogent is slowing down Concentric's traffic. This results in your latency being between 500ms and 750ms, instead of 30ms to 50ms. All because some assface in a suit at some table wants his $1.5M salary pushed up by another $250k/year.
If reading THAT doesn't make you understand that 'waiting to see' is the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, GET THE HELL OFF THE INTERNET. No one wants you here if you don't have the slightest of interest in the longevity and perserverence of the network.
I, being one of the three people on the face of the planet to actually own a LaserDisc player, OWN the THX-Mastered LaserDisc release of the original trilogy. I have watched it many times and am fairly comfortable with its level of clarity and detail -- FOR A LASERDISC.
To see Lucas claim that all of the originals are gone and all of the high-quality rips don't exist is bogus. A quick check on any torrent site or any movie release site shows that there have been several AC3 5.1 rips with DVD quality video of the ORIGINAL THX Remastered movie. Lord knows where they got the source, but in the grand scheme of things, it's better quality than the LaserDiscs I own. Not that I've downloaded them or anything, ever, because that would have been wrong.
I guess what I'm saying is that if the internet community has a higher quality copy of the original trilogy than the original trilogy creator does.... Maybe it's time for George Lucas to admit that the trilogy belongs to the fans more than it belongs to him?
Well, now I'm just sad I've posted in this topic already because I can't give you the +1, Informative that you deserve. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to help explain something very complicated to someone not quite so complex-minded.
Now, I'm not a crypto expert -- but as I recall, the only reason that DeCSS occured was because some idiot company made a player where the stream of data that contained the encryption/decryption key was, in itself, not encrypted.
While I'm not stupid enough to believe that a mistake will never be made again, I don't believe that just because the keys are around means that anyone will be able to crack them. Look at all of the other cryptographically signed things that people use on a regular basis, like the PSP or the X360 or the PS2 -- those keys are sent around inside the unit all the time and people have the code that sends the specific crypto keys, but they still can't crack it because it essentially is still a brute force crack.
What of that is mysteriously different for BR and HD-DVD?
Think for a second about how to you and I, BR and HD-DVD are just another player to pick up and a new set of media to purchase. To the studios investing in these projects, it is MUCH much more. Do you really think that they are going to release a software package (intentionally) that helps someone crack the DRM of their brand new format?
Also, the keys for BR are title specific -- meaning that cracking one BR disc doesn't help crack any others. Also, the keys are encrypted using AES -- I'm not sure if it's 128, 192, or 256-bit keys that their using, but even 128 bit keys would take a top of the line computer *years* to crack. Not very effective.
Of course it's only a matter of time -- but just because playback is going to be enabled on WindowsXP doesn't mean that the 'matter of time' is any longer or shorter.
Right. Because playback of HD-quality video utilizing BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP and cracking the DRM of BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP are exactly the same thing.
Nice logical conclusion there, Sherlock.
Also, nice '+5 Insightful' on a comment that makes absolutely no sense. Welcome to Slashdot, eh?
Odd. I'm a Bellsouth DSL customer with Comcast Cable TV and have faster DSL than most people I know with cable. Comcast is claiming that they offer 8mbps and 12mbps service in my area, but they're full of it. No one I know on Comcast gets more than about 5.0-6.0mbps, and Bellsouth offers me 6.0mbps DSL for about $54.95, plus the $6.95/mo for an alarm line.
Little known interesting fact, for anyone curious -- you can call the phone company and request that they run a dedicated alarm line to your house for a security system -- it doesn't provide you with a phone number or the ability to make outbound calls, but it's only $5.95 and you can get DSL over it. Screw them charging you ~$40 a month for a phone you probably don't use because you have a cell phone.
On top of that, Bellsouth offers me free newsgroup access with 4-6 day retention and 99% completion. Comcast offers you 2GB/mo with Giganews. If you don't know what newsgroups are, well then forget I mentioned it. If you're an avid newsgroup user, this difference alone is worth any speed 'reduction' you may see -- even if I didn't see the same speed reduction.
That amount of storage space for games would be nice to have, but really wont be utilized for a while, and only for certain types of games.
Actually, according to Microsoft (several times) the HD-DVD add-on will never be used for games, period, end of discussion. See reference material here and here and here, just to show a few examples.
Aside from that, I agree with your post. MS isn't doing this to promote a format as much as they're doing it to spur more sales of their console. $600 for an HD-DVD player is still a decent price at the moment, and if you consider that most people considering the add-on will already have the X360 at that point, it looks a lot more like $200 to them. Plus, it's a completely non-requisite component for the system -- as opposed to the PS3, where the BD-drive is so important to Sony that they've delayed the console launch TWICE because of it. I'm all for Sony taking as long as it takes to get it right, but there's a point where their 'top-of-the-line' console starts to look like a very, very expensive way for them to promote their new (and ultimately doomed, like UMD, betamax, and mini-disc) proprietary media format.
This just furthers Microsoft's point of keeping IE's non-compliance as a de-facto standard.
What you just said, in simpler terms is:
Microsoft's browser can't render CSS properly.
Don't complain about it or try to get it to change.
Don't try and get your userbase to upgrade.
Work around it, instead.
So, I write standards compliant code. You're telling me to break my code JUST so it looks good on some toolsack's browser who hasn't updated since IE5.5!? Further proof people should have to take an exam to be allowed on the internet.
PS - Spend the five minutes and get a *REAL* browser! http://www.opera.com/ or http://www.mozilla.com./ I have absolutely no pity for idiots who complain about how this site and that site don't look right on their browser and how they'll browse somewhere else. Tell you what, if you're too lazy to upgrade to a real browser, I don't *want* you to view my website. GTF on.
Karma be damned, people like you who can't spend 30 seconds to make sure their computer is actually running properly shouldn't be able to use them.
The type of brute force cracking you mention would take years and years of CPU power. The following blurb is an excerpt about this type of encryption and the amount of time required to crack it:
Doing the math, you can see that using the same method that was used to break 40-bit encryption in a week, it would take about 72 million weeks (about 1.4 million years) to even break '56-bit medium' encryption and significantly longer than the age of the universe to crack a 128-bit key. Of course the argument is that computers will keep getting faster, about doubling in power every 18 months. That is true, but even when computers are a million times faster than they are now (about 20 years from now if they double in speed every year), it would then still take about 6 thousand, trillion years, which is about a million times longer than the Earth has been around. Plus, simply upgrading to 129-bit encryption would take twice as long, and 130-bit would take twice as long again. As you can see, it's far easier for the encryption to keep well ahead of the technology in this case. Simply put, 128-bit encryption is totally secure.
Brute force cracking isn't like sitting at a desk trying new passwords over and over again. There is no rhyme or reason to the encryption key, unlike passwords and other similar (human created) ciphers. This type of encryption was created specifically so that there would be so many combinations that it would NOT be feasible to do a 'brute force' attempt.
Of course, seeing as how you posted as AC, I'm sure you were aware at the time that you were just talking out of your ass.
OK, seriously. You sound like George Bush. Just stop talking.
Let me explain this as simple as possible so that I'm sure that we're all on the same page:
Someone can duplicate the DATA on a passport and NOT edit it, and you say 'OMFGZ OSAMA BIN LADEN ROFLOL'. Give the Osama argument a rest.
Let us play out this scenario of yours:
Osama Bin Laden finds himself in possession of a stolen/cloned passport for one 'John Smith' of the USA.
This passport, while stolen and cloned, is still digitally signed -- meaning that the information on it cannot be changed.
Osama Bin Laden attempts to enter the USA with this passport.
The electronic scanner reads 'John Smith' and provides a picture of 'John Smith'.
Osama Bin Laden is NOT 'John Smith'.
Osama Bin Laden is taken into custody.
The only way that "Osama could pass through an airport if it used electronic scanning" is if he found a way to re-digitally sign the contents of the passport, OR if he could do enough facial modification that he looked like 'John Smith'.
So, what we're saying is, if he's willing to do the plastic surgery or to spend the time to crack the RSA encryption on the contents of the RFID chip and is able to RE-digitally sign it after he edits it, he can get into the country. Gee. Sounds a lot less secure than our current method of... uh... looking at a piece of paper that could be edited by anyone with enough time and the holograms to make it look right.
Or, the more likely scenario, he'll just waltz across the Mexican border because the USA doesn't seem to give a crap about the fact that thousands of people illegally cross it daily. Without passports. Or extensive facial modification.
On to your second mention that someone could have an electronic device that activates when an RFID chip is within range:
YIPPEE. Anyone could make an electronic device that would activate when your Chase Blink card or your FastPass or your Building Key Card is within range. THIS IS NOT NEW, NOR IS IT EXCITING OR DANGEROUS.
Quit with the FUD posts and actually take a step back to find out that, YES, RFID passports are not perfect. YES, the concept has its inherent flaws. NO, they really aren't (yet) worse than the standard passport flaws. NO, this does not mean that you can just drop a FUD post about Osama getting into the airport because of it without any factual basis behind it, whatsoever.
At least I was up-front about the possibility of being completely full of crap!:)
Thanks for the correction, information and for the wiki link. For the record, it's been that kind of Monday all around for me. I should just shut up and go home and skip Mondays from now on.
Now, I am only going on very hazy -not yet coffee introduced- memories, but as I recall, the P4-Prescott chips use EM64T technology. NOT AMD64 technology. All EM64T technology allows is for the processor to access an amount of ram greater than 4GB. That's it. No 64 bit code capability, just the ability to access >4GB of ram.
Again, I'm still tired and cranky because it's Monday morning, and I could be completely full of crap here, but that's how I remember it.
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Almost-Retired: Thanks for the clarification! As I said and you acknowledged, I have a somewhat limited grasp of the NTSC standard in general. I appreciate your taking the time to correct my misconceptions and any misinformation I posted above. Sounds like you've got significant experience in the field! OTOH, while I may have been incorrect with the details, the brunt of my post (that HD is fairly well distinguishable from SD) still remains accurate.
:)
In response to the AC (flame) above regarding my use of the word 'pixel', my apologies for using an (inaccurate for the subject) word that most people (non NTSC video studied folk) could understand to make it less difficult to grasp. Most people can't get the concept of lines of resolution, color burst, sync pulses, multiple guns firing toward a screen, the difference between direct-view and rear-projection, how many dots per inch, etc. Good to see you cleared it up with your informative post. Thanks for taking the time.
Your brother, evidently, is either an idiot with poor eyesight _or_ correct about his TV sucking wastewater -- here's why:
Standard Television signal is approximately 480 lines of resolution, meaning there are 480 different pixels in every vertical line on the television, and the signal is interlaced, meaning that the TV displays 1/2 of the lines in the first scan (1st, 3rd, 5th, so on) and then the second half of the lines in the second scan (2nd, 4th, 6th, so on). This means that at any given time, only 240 of the lines of video on your TV are being updated, meaning that you're not getting all 480 lines of solid resolution. They are _there_ but they are not being displayed at the exact same time.
HD Television is either 720 lines of resolution in non-interlaced format or 1080 lines of resolution in interlaced or non-interlaced format. Even with 1080i, you're still getting 540 lines of resolution per scan -- more than double that of standard television. The actual resolution is almost 3 times as high as standard definition television. With 720p, you're getting more than 3 times the detail per frame than on 480i! You'll note if you research that there is a strong following of videophiles who claim that 720p is actually a more detailed picture than 1080i/p, but personally, I like my 1080i just fine.
The moral of the story is that if your brother can't tell the difference between an HD source and a 480i source, he needs a new set of eyeballs or to clean the 3 feet of dust off the television.
I have a Hitachi 51s715 51" HDTV and the difference between standard definition content and HD content is more than apparent, it is _obvious_. Anyone that isn't truly blind can see the amazing difference in clarity, color depth, black reproduction, etc.
I'm not sure if you're making your story up, your brother is a blind moron, or his TV sucks wastewater, but one of the three is true -- an HD signal cannot be mistaken for an SD signal by anyone with eyesight!
Lastly, regarding programming, Comcast offers free HD with any PVR system, DirecTV has a solid lineup of HD channels, Charter offers a good selection for no additional cost (you just have to call for the receiver), Dish Network has a poor selection but also has HD... Anyone saying it's hard or difficult to get HD service in their area must not be in an area serviced by any of those four major providers.
(ps, I'm not a video scholar, and my description of TV resolution is probably far from 100% accurate, but does cover the basics. Correct me on it if you want to, but I'm not claiming to have pioneered the NTSC standard or anything.)
Must be nice to be you! My launch PS2's laser assembly died approximately 6 months after purchase. After much phone calling, tooth pulling, etc., I was able to get someone at Sony to repair the damn thing under warranty.
I'd estimate that was about 4 years ago now? About 8 months after they repaired it, it started doing the dreaded DRE again and I was able to use the laser voltage potentiometer trick to spark it back to life. As it stands currently, the unit *will not* play any DVD video, will barely load PS2 games, but it loads the Swap Magic disc and burned DVDs like butter. Further modifications to the DVD / CD laser voltage potentiometers have been fruitless in resolving the DRE errors.
So, FUD? No. I'll verify that a high percentage of people did experience problems with the PS2 during the lifespan of the console. I don't claim that it is HORRIBLE AND HORRENDOUS like some people do, I mean hell, the console is FOUR years old. The fact that it has worked this long at all is amazing.
Got it. Thanks for the info, I wasn't sure how much interaction the LUA script would allow for -- having the % of health and whatnot are sweet.
Thanks for taking the time to answer with good info. Only wish I hadn't posted in this thread so I could give you the +1, Informative that you need.
I don't get it... I was a WoW player for about 2 weeks, didn't get sucked in like most do. Something about going to Person A who tells me to go kill 10 grue, me going and killing 10 grue, going back to Person A, getting 500 exp and a quest to go kill 15 grue, rinse, repeat ... Just didn't do it for me.
.. well .. use it? It seems very strange to me for them to offer the LUA interface and then say 'you can use it, but not for scripting repetitive tasks'. What else would you script? What would 'acceptable use' be for the LUA script? Is the LUA scripting add-on a 3rd party addition or Blizzard sanctioned?
...
Now, you're saying that WoW has a LUA interface (I'm familiar with what LUA is, for the record) that allows you to write plug-ins or to script specific actions in-game. Why the heck would Blizzard have added that interface if they DIDN'T want you to
Can anyone help me understand what function the LUA interface would serve if it ISN'T to help automate simple tasks like run to location X, kill mob, loot mob, run to location Y, wait until healed, repeat?
If the LUA scripting add-on is provided by Blizzard, I have a hard time seeing how they are going to ban accounts because of it. If the LUA scripting add-on is 3rd party, well, then, it makes a lot more sense
Right, because the PS2 wasn't touted as a DVD player when it came out ....
Oh wait, yes it was. And that's right, that boosted the hell out of Sony's sales.
Why the hell are you still talking?
Actually, I could ask you politely to read up on your law, professor. While solely does mean entirely, and I used it improperly, the flash carts violate the DMCA as well as Intellectual Property laws, and even using 'homebrew' is still illegal on the GBA. Exporting a console to a region it was not intended, while possibly illegal (depending on the importing market's law and your exporting market's law), CAN BE LEGAL. You're correct that something illegal is illegal, period. You're correct in saying the law is blind. Using the GBA flash carts to circumvent the GBA's copy protection is wholly illegal on several levels, while it can be legal for companies to export consoles, first party accessories, and software.
So, next time, instead of taking a comment and making it a personal attack, you could get your cheese-crusted hands out of the cheetos bag, move out of your mom's basement, and stop getting your rocks off to trying to look big and bad in front of a keyboard. You remember the parable about personal arguments on the internet right? They're like participating in the special olympics -- even if you win, you're still retarded for being there.
See? Unmerited personal attacks just make people look stupid. Next time, instead of your 'ZOMG ZEALOT LOLS' post, you could post a well thought out and constructive post, instead of three stupid lines about how you don't care if you disagree with law because that doesn't change anything. Because you're wrong on that point. Maybe YOU disagreeing doesn't change things, but the law exists to serve the PEOPLE. If PEOPLE don't like the law, they can LOBBY and PETITION and fight to CHANGE that law. That's the glory of the USA. If we don't like something, and enough of us don't like it, we can get it to change. Unless we adopt your mentality of 'LOLS I don't agree but I'm a puss in momma's basement and won't do anything about it except post with my cheesy hands about some guy I think is a loser lols'.
So, to bring it around full circle -- my post still stands. Stopping a company from selling YOUR 100% LEGAL EQUIPMENT to another market and stopping a company from selling EQUIPMENT MADE SOLELY TO BREAK DMCA LAWS are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
Thanks for playing, have a nice day.
From YFL (your f*ing link):
"Hong Kong based Lik-Sang, a mail order company which distributes videogame software and hardware worldwide, has lost a crucial court case brought by Nintendo over the sale of devices which could copy Game Boy software."
That's right. OH GNOHS, Nintendo stopped Lik-Sang from selling devices MADE SOLELY TO PIRATE THEIR SOFTWARE (and run homebrew). Sony, on the other hand, has stopped Lik-Sang from selling their *FIRST PARTY* CONSOLES, SOFTWARE, and ACCESSORIES to other markets. These are not anywhere NEAR the same thing, at all.
Next time, read your article before you spam us with it.
You're all going back to the GP's main point, however. I'm not sure why you keep barking about this because here's the deal -- Spamhaus makes a list. Like it or not, a lot of admins take this list and block e-mail specifically because of it. This is a known fact.
I'm well aware that *you* or *someone you knows* is smart enough to not immediately block e-mail from someone on the Spamhaus list. Great. Glad you know someone like that. Fact of the matter is that I'd estimate that people like that comprise less than 5% of all admins that run mailservers. I'd assume that the rest of them just have it set as an automatic blacklist, kicking e-mails back from any of the known domains.
Your solution (that opposes the solid and innocent-until-proven-guilty method of these mailserver admins actually using a scoring system instead of a solid 'YES/NO' spam system like the blacklists can provide) is to add another section to the list, calling them 'maybe' spammers. Then the same admins that couldn't configure it right to begin with now have another set of information to misuse. Great. Brilliant strategy.
Why don't we just provide easy education as to how these lists SHOULD be used. Blanketing it as a blacklist that is outside of your control is tantamount to letting Hitler into your library to remove books without you specifically seeing them first, only him telling you that the books were found to be bad by his administration. Yes, overblown exaggerated example. Yes, I know it's two different things. Sadly, however, I also know that most idiot net admins will need to see something put into that stupid of terms in order to think that there is something to worry about.
Also, don't misunderstand. If you are a net admin and you specifically use a blacklist, are are completely OK with the fact that the list may or may not be correct, well, then, who am I to tell you you're doing it wrong? If it's OK for you that you may be blacklisting e-mail from people who aren't spammers without even looking at the list firsthand, then fine. Let your mail server be the guiding light for all of those of us who actually CARE if our e-mails get from start to finish without the intervention of 37 competing spamlist companies.
(ps, I think spamhaus is awesome, don't misinterpret this as me disliking them. They provide an awesome service and I've used their blacklist in my spam scoring/filtering for years.)
Exactly! I remember when Norton Utilities for DOS was a set of near-impossible to replace system tools that were undeniably useful to anyone with the inclination to use them.
Now we've got SuperSuite SystemWorks 2007.3 Ultra ++ Premium Platinum Professional Network Edition, and it's great! It loads a piece of shit e-mail scanner that sucks up 24mb of your ram and only works with two e-mail clients (not web based e-mail like most people assume it does!), some sort of 'worm protection' that succeeds only in disallowing you to connect to any remote machine ever, for any reason, you've got their anti-virus protection which incidently takes about 45mb of ram to sit in the background, double that if it's doing a scan, then you've got the heuristic detection, which is about another 5-10 mb of your ram, you've got the 'Symantec System Center' console, that takes about 10mb of ram just so it can tell you you're running SystemWorks 2007.3 Ultra++ Premium Platinum Professional Network Edition every five minutes in a pop-up window. Then there's Goback, which doesn't work, Ghost Personal 10, which I've yet to get to work properly thanks to its inability to properly clone 'msgina.dll', and an out-dated 'update' to checkdisk that the software doesn't allow you to force a manual run of. Don't even get me started on 'Norton Internet Security' which effectively stops you from transmitting *ANY* data unless the user clicks OK about a thousand times, and also does about 10 or 15 other things to your connection that it will never tell you about that impede normal workgroup/domain traffic. Lovely.
And that's just SystemWorks. Don't forget about how Corporate Antivirus 10 has a nasty penchant for destroying corporate systems (as seen on slashdot here.)
Maybe I'm just bitter at having to remove all this shit from client's computers who have bought it and spent their $50 or $100 on this software only to have it completely screw them from top to bottom.
I think that Symantec needs to do one of two things: Either drop out completely, admit that their software is a shadow of what it used to be and that they've lost all ability to write any sort of tight and non-resource hungry code, OR re-write their damn software to be functional and not take an average of 100mb of ram to run. I'm fairly certain that properly written code doesn't need direct kernel access to check whether c:\boot.dat is infected with a virus. 'Course, I'm no programmer, so, I don't know that for fact.
But either way, if they did that, I think their cries would fall on more sympathetic ears.
Don't worry, you were right about FF7:DoC. If that game had tried a little bit harder, I probably would have actually felt Square-Enix sucking on my nuts (instead of just feeling like they were *trying* to suck my nuts), as that game was very obviously made completely as fan-service and really fails to stand on its own with any single merit. If the only allure of the game is that it has Vincent in it .... maybe the game shouldn't have been made?
Actually, I played the same game three years ago without Vincent and with a better combat system and better graphics, it was called 'Devil May Cry'. Oh, and it didn't make this massive sucking sound where I was sitting when I stood up from the couch.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles has been announced for the Wii already, see here. It has also been announced for the NintendoDS, along with all of the Final Fantasy remakes that they have previously announced. It seems that Square-Enix is well aware of the potential that the new consoles hold.
Hahahahahahaha
Man, oh man. I wish I had some mod points. You'd get +1, Funniest Thing I've Seen On Slashdot In Like Two Weeks.
I don't understand why so many people here are like 'Oh, well, we'll wait until they enact it and then if it's a problem we'll stop it.' Welcome to the reason you pay Income Tax, morons. It was instated in WWI, then stopped after WWI. Then it was instated for WWII, and then it never stopped. And that's why we pay income tax. Because a bunch of people did the exact same thing -- 'Oh well, it will only be here for the war ...'
Let me try and break this down into small, understandable chunks:
Scenario A: The Die Hard Gamer
Johnny plays Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 almost religiously. He has a nice DSL connection and usually sees ping times under 30ms to his favorite servers. His DSL provider contacts him and informs him that due to a restructuring, his $54.95 a month now only allows him 'Standard' service. He notices that his ping time has risen to over 200ms during his gaming sessions, significantly impacting his ability to play online games, but sees no other real latency issues while surfing. Another phone call to his ISP informs him that for the low, low price of $14.95, they will stop prioritizing his gaming packets lower than all other traffic. They would call it the 'Gaming Extreme' package. Now, Johnny is spending $15 more a month, just because his ISP has the ability to prioritize his traffic as they see fit.
THAT SUCKS.
Scenario B: The Mom and Pop Shop ISP
Mom and Pop start an ISP and have a big contract with Concentric, one of the bigger backbones. A high percentage of their customers are in the SW, and a lot of what their customers do involves servers in the NE. In order for the data to get from Customer to End Server, it passes through Mom and Pop, Concentric, Cogent, and Level3. (I know, I know, it wouldn't likely go through that much.) Cogent and Concentric are at odds, because Cogent wants to charge Concentric $1.00 per megabyte for priority speeds. Concentric told Cogent to stuff it, so now every packet going through Cogent has 4x the latency of 'priority' traffic. As Cogent is a bunch of idiots in this example, it's not much of a stretch to assume that Level3 dislikes them as well. Level3 won't pay Cogent for priority traffic, either. So now, Level3 is slowing down Cogent's traffic, and Cogent is slowing down Concentric's traffic. This results in your latency being between 500ms and 750ms, instead of 30ms to 50ms. All because some assface in a suit at some table wants his $1.5M salary pushed up by another $250k/year.
If reading THAT doesn't make you understand that 'waiting to see' is the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, GET THE HELL OFF THE INTERNET. No one wants you here if you don't have the slightest of interest in the longevity and perserverence of the network.
I've got 3 DivX .AVI files that beg to differ.
.... Maybe it's time for George Lucas to admit that the trilogy belongs to the fans more than it belongs to him?
I, being one of the three people on the face of the planet to actually own a LaserDisc player, OWN the THX-Mastered LaserDisc release of the original trilogy. I have watched it many times and am fairly comfortable with its level of clarity and detail -- FOR A LASERDISC.
To see Lucas claim that all of the originals are gone and all of the high-quality rips don't exist is bogus. A quick check on any torrent site or any movie release site shows that there have been several AC3 5.1 rips with DVD quality video of the ORIGINAL THX Remastered movie. Lord knows where they got the source, but in the grand scheme of things, it's better quality than the LaserDiscs I own. Not that I've downloaded them or anything, ever, because that would have been wrong.
I guess what I'm saying is that if the internet community has a higher quality copy of the original trilogy than the original trilogy creator does
Well, now I'm just sad I've posted in this topic already because I can't give you the +1, Informative that you deserve. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to help explain something very complicated to someone not quite so complex-minded.
:)
Now, I'm not a crypto expert -- but as I recall, the only reason that DeCSS occured was because some idiot company made a player where the stream of data that contained the encryption/decryption key was, in itself, not encrypted.
While I'm not stupid enough to believe that a mistake will never be made again, I don't believe that just because the keys are around means that anyone will be able to crack them. Look at all of the other cryptographically signed things that people use on a regular basis, like the PSP or the X360 or the PS2 -- those keys are sent around inside the unit all the time and people have the code that sends the specific crypto keys, but they still can't crack it because it essentially is still a brute force crack.
What of that is mysteriously different for BR and HD-DVD?
Think for a second about how to you and I, BR and HD-DVD are just another player to pick up and a new set of media to purchase. To the studios investing in these projects, it is MUCH much more. Do you really think that they are going to release a software package (intentionally) that helps someone crack the DRM of their brand new format?
Also, the keys for BR are title specific -- meaning that cracking one BR disc doesn't help crack any others. Also, the keys are encrypted using AES -- I'm not sure if it's 128, 192, or 256-bit keys that their using, but even 128 bit keys would take a top of the line computer *years* to crack. Not very effective.
Of course it's only a matter of time -- but just because playback is going to be enabled on WindowsXP doesn't mean that the 'matter of time' is any longer or shorter.
Right. Because playback of HD-quality video utilizing BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP and cracking the DRM of BR Discs or HD-DVDs under Windows XP are exactly the same thing.
Nice logical conclusion there, Sherlock.
Also, nice '+5 Insightful' on a comment that makes absolutely no sense. Welcome to Slashdot, eh?
Odd. I'm a Bellsouth DSL customer with Comcast Cable TV and have faster DSL than most people I know with cable. Comcast is claiming that they offer 8mbps and 12mbps service in my area, but they're full of it. No one I know on Comcast gets more than about 5.0-6.0mbps, and Bellsouth offers me 6.0mbps DSL for about $54.95, plus the $6.95/mo for an alarm line.
Little known interesting fact, for anyone curious -- you can call the phone company and request that they run a dedicated alarm line to your house for a security system -- it doesn't provide you with a phone number or the ability to make outbound calls, but it's only $5.95 and you can get DSL over it. Screw them charging you ~$40 a month for a phone you probably don't use because you have a cell phone.
On top of that, Bellsouth offers me free newsgroup access with 4-6 day retention and 99% completion. Comcast offers you 2GB/mo with Giganews. If you don't know what newsgroups are, well then forget I mentioned it. If you're an avid newsgroup user, this difference alone is worth any speed 'reduction' you may see -- even if I didn't see the same speed reduction.
That amount of storage space for games would be nice to have, but really wont be utilized for a while, and only for certain types of games.
Actually, according to Microsoft (several times) the HD-DVD add-on will never be used for games, period, end of discussion. See reference material here and here and here, just to show a few examples.
Aside from that, I agree with your post. MS isn't doing this to promote a format as much as they're doing it to spur more sales of their console. $600 for an HD-DVD player is still a decent price at the moment, and if you consider that most people considering the add-on will already have the X360 at that point, it looks a lot more like $200 to them. Plus, it's a completely non-requisite component for the system -- as opposed to the PS3, where the BD-drive is so important to Sony that they've delayed the console launch TWICE because of it. I'm all for Sony taking as long as it takes to get it right, but there's a point where their 'top-of-the-line' console starts to look like a very, very expensive way for them to promote their new (and ultimately doomed, like UMD, betamax, and mini-disc) proprietary media format.
This just furthers Microsoft's point of keeping IE's non-compliance as a de-facto standard.
What you just said, in simpler terms is:
Microsoft's browser can't render CSS properly.
Don't complain about it or try to get it to change.
Don't try and get your userbase to upgrade.
Work around it, instead.
So, I write standards compliant code. You're telling me to break my code JUST so it looks good on some toolsack's browser who hasn't updated since IE5.5!? Further proof people should have to take an exam to be allowed on the internet.
PS - Spend the five minutes and get a *REAL* browser! http://www.opera.com/ or http://www.mozilla.com./ I have absolutely no pity for idiots who complain about how this site and that site don't look right on their browser and how they'll browse somewhere else. Tell you what, if you're too lazy to upgrade to a real browser, I don't *want* you to view my website. GTF on.
Karma be damned, people like you who can't spend 30 seconds to make sure their computer is actually running properly shouldn't be able to use them.
Leisure is not really the proper term for this.
The type of brute force cracking you mention would take years and years of CPU power. The following blurb is an excerpt about this type of encryption and the amount of time required to crack it:
Doing the math, you can see that using the same method that was used to break 40-bit encryption in a week, it would take about 72 million weeks (about 1.4 million years) to even break '56-bit medium' encryption and significantly longer than the age of the universe to crack a 128-bit key. Of course the argument is that computers will keep getting faster, about doubling in power every 18 months. That is true, but even when computers are a million times faster than they are now (about 20 years from now if they double in speed every year), it would then still take about 6 thousand, trillion years, which is about a million times longer than the Earth has been around. Plus, simply upgrading to 129-bit encryption would take twice as long, and 130-bit would take twice as long again. As you can see, it's far easier for the encryption to keep well ahead of the technology in this case. Simply put, 128-bit encryption is totally secure.
Brute force cracking isn't like sitting at a desk trying new passwords over and over again. There is no rhyme or reason to the encryption key, unlike passwords and other similar (human created) ciphers. This type of encryption was created specifically so that there would be so many combinations that it would NOT be feasible to do a 'brute force' attempt.
Of course, seeing as how you posted as AC, I'm sure you were aware at the time that you were just talking out of your ass.
OK, seriously. You sound like George Bush. Just stop talking.
... uh ... looking at a piece of paper that could be edited by anyone with enough time and the holograms to make it look right.
Let me explain this as simple as possible so that I'm sure that we're all on the same page:
Someone can duplicate the DATA on a passport and NOT edit it, and you say 'OMFGZ OSAMA BIN LADEN ROFLOL'.
Give the Osama argument a rest.
Let us play out this scenario of yours:
Osama Bin Laden finds himself in possession of a stolen/cloned passport for one 'John Smith' of the USA.
This passport, while stolen and cloned, is still digitally signed -- meaning that the information on it cannot be changed.
Osama Bin Laden attempts to enter the USA with this passport.
The electronic scanner reads 'John Smith' and provides a picture of 'John Smith'.
Osama Bin Laden is NOT 'John Smith'.
Osama Bin Laden is taken into custody.
The only way that "Osama could pass through an airport if it used electronic scanning" is if he found a way to re-digitally sign the contents of the passport, OR if he could do enough facial modification that he looked like 'John Smith'.
So, what we're saying is, if he's willing to do the plastic surgery or to spend the time to crack the RSA encryption on the contents of the RFID chip and is able to RE-digitally sign it after he edits it, he can get into the country. Gee. Sounds a lot less secure than our current method of
Or, the more likely scenario, he'll just waltz across the Mexican border because the USA doesn't seem to give a crap about the fact that thousands of people illegally cross it daily. Without passports. Or extensive facial modification.
On to your second mention that someone could have an electronic device that activates when an RFID chip is within range:
YIPPEE. Anyone could make an electronic device that would activate when your Chase Blink card or your FastPass or your Building Key Card is within range. THIS IS NOT NEW, NOR IS IT EXCITING OR DANGEROUS.
Quit with the FUD posts and actually take a step back to find out that, YES, RFID passports are not perfect. YES, the concept has its inherent flaws. NO, they really aren't (yet) worse than the standard passport flaws. NO, this does not mean that you can just drop a FUD post about Osama getting into the airport because of it without any factual basis behind it, whatsoever.
At least I was up-front about the possibility of being completely full of crap! :)
Thanks for the correction, information and for the wiki link. For the record, it's been that kind of Monday all around for me. I should just shut up and go home and skip Mondays from now on.
Now, I am only going on very hazy -not yet coffee introduced- memories, but as I recall, the P4-Prescott chips use EM64T technology. NOT AMD64 technology. All EM64T technology allows is for the processor to access an amount of ram greater than 4GB. That's it. No 64 bit code capability, just the ability to access >4GB of ram.
Again, I'm still tired and cranky because it's Monday morning, and I could be completely full of crap here, but that's how I remember it.