well, I've got friends who generally won't pay the $11 to see a movie at the theatre and would rather pick up the $5 DVD from the mexican lady in the subway. typically, the purchase is an impulse buy... they see Grindhouse sitting there, and since they missed it in the theatres, they'll pick it up, or they'll decide that $5 beats the $44 it would cost to go see it as a group and pick it up.
the problem is that they use such cheap DVDs when making the copies that 3/4 of the time, the movie won't play through. Sometimes the DVD won't even play.
I'm 100% against buying the bootlegs, though. They typically have abhorrent sound quality and the video quality is questionable, at best. Frequently, they also have people standing up in front of the camera and those "ooohs" and "ahhhs" of the crowd.
When MS wants $150 that I don't have to repair the thing, it's worth a shot. It did fix it the first time for about 2 weeks (the unit has been out of the 1-year warranty for about 6 months).
Especially when a friend of mine did it and his 360 has been working fine ever since... it sucks it worked for him, who could've easily afforded fixing the device.
The 360 in my apt has 4 lights lit. It used to be 3, but it's since decided to light the 4th after I attempted the towel trick to fix it (the towel trick worked once, but the second time, it didn't work at all, and shortly after that, the 4th LED lit).
We'll have to call MS when I get home to see if that's covered.
with any luck, they'll cover it and we wont' have to shell out 150$
I too hope it does not have the heros, they're the reason I grew weary of wc3 in a week instead of the 4 years I played sc.
you only played starcraft for 4 years? I still play it relatively frequently.
I agree with you, though. The more things you have to keep track of and manage, the more difficult the game becomes. It starts to be a chore to play rather than fun. That was the main allure of the SC- it was simple to learn and once you understood the upgrade path, it took a lifetime to master. Broodwars ruined it by adding the extra units further complicating the game. You have to worry about so much more (namely invisible units like the lurkers and the dark templars) earlier in the game.
Heroes are fine, if you don't have to worry about building. That's what I liked about Bungie's Myth games. You didn't have to build anything, you went straight into battle, and if you had a unit that made more kills, he'd get faster and more accurate. It kept gameplay simple, yet dynamic enough to stay fun.
well, I was equating fuel consumption to pollution emissions.
I actually know a guy who claims that we've done enough (ie: plant trees, lower polluting emissions, etc) in the last 20 years to reverse global warming and that it really doesn't matter what we do now, we're not going to harm the environment. He backs this up with his claim that he listens to arguments from both sides and reads "peer-reviewed scientific papers."
My point is that I hope no one reads this article and uses it as an excuse to do whatever the hell they want, damage-wise, with regard to the environment.
I've got friends who think that global warming is a big crock of shit and (in a very immature way) bring up Al Gore and say how he thinks he invented the internet as their basis for not believing anything he says.
One of my biggest annoyances with people who question global warming isn't that they think it's not happening or that it isn't us who are contributing to it, but rather the fact that they use these previous statements as an excuse to not do anything about it.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that carbon dioxide emissions really don't have any effect on global warming... does that mean that we should keep driving SUVs and not care about how much pollution we dump into the environment?
Although people who announce that the earth is doomed because of global warming and come across as being panicky appear to be crackpots to all them skeptics, it doesn't mean that we should ignore them. we should do what we can to conserve what we have. It's worth it.
I was a senior in high school during the 1999 Columbine shootings.
Several months before columbine, there was a shooting at some other school and the kid only injured a couple people (I think he killed like 3 and injured like 6) and I called the kid a pussy and if I had done that, I could kill at least 20, assuming I have enough ammo. Saying that prompted some friends of mine to elaborate on my strategy, which I did, and about a month later, the Columbine shooting happened and the next day (or maybe a couple days later) I was greeted in my 1st period class by a pair of policemen who escorted me to the station to talk to a detective.
As I waited while the detective went through my backpack and removed my notebook, he commented on the fact that I was wearing a trenchcoat and he asked me what kind of music I liked and what videogames I played. At the time, I was an avid Quake player and was hooked on KMFDM (and at this meeting, I was wearing a Maralyn Manson shirt). He flipped through my notebook, and saw dozens of drawings of spattered fluids, severed hands and heads, and sketches of bullet casings. It was just what I was into drawing at the time. I go through phases and had he looked at notebooks the month before, he would have seen lots of rope and barbed wire and stitches and electronics sketches.
this whole thing prompted a full investigation into me, I had to see a therapist for a couple days before they let me back in school, every little scrap of paper that they found that was the least bit violent, they questioned me about... I was frequently pulled out of classes (most often, my calculus class; which I wound up failing due to the frequent interruptions) and every little thing I wrote was studied. It really fucked me up and, although I'm not prone to violence at all, it was really pissing me off and I had to hold back to keep from throwing something at my principal.
it was completely stupid that they did that and it really was for absolutely nothing. I understand that if i was caught discussing that stuff and then I DID shoot up the school, if they did nothing about it, there would be serious problems, but at the same time, it was total bullshit. There's no reason to do that to someone just because they wrote a violent story. Look at all the published authors out there. Look at books like Fight Club and American Psycho (now, major motion pictures!). If someone writes that kind of thing for class, they risk expulsion or at the very least, some serious investigation. If someone writes that whilst trying to sell a book, they stand to make some nice money for themselves.
This fear of terrorism and violence and shootings in today's society is really stifling creativity. Literature will be hurt (due to young people being forcibly held back from writing what they want). Violence in movies is moving to a very stylized look, which although not all bad, I really like gore movies with realistic violence (ichi the killer, battle royal, etc). Even videogames are becoming targets and game studios are threatened with lawsuits just because some whackjob killed someone and happened to own a copy of their game. A man obsessed with John Lennon goes out and kills John Lennon. Who's to blame? The guy's psychosis or John Lennon's music? Why not the music? People blame videogames just as readily. A man obsessed with nascar is dragracing and kills 5 pedestrians in the process... why doesn't anyone sue Nascar?
Either that was a typo or you have no right to complain in my book.
not a typo. I'm complaining because we got a letter that said we now get 15mbit down, when in reality I'm still seeing 8mbit speeds. if I read online that we should have 15mbit, but I wasn't told that, it wouldn't' be such a big deal...
Just yesterday my roomate got a notice that he was overusing the campus network - 108 GB in one week. It's hanging on our door now.
oh man, I should post some stats that the netadmin at my school sent me when I was there. They threatened to shut us down and kick us out of the dorms if we kept it up. This is in 99/00, before napster got popular and downloaded movies took 2 full CDs and were mpeg format. my roommate and I both had a 2x burner and I had a 4GB and a 6GB drive in my computer, while he had 2 10GB drives. we were downloading faster than we could burn and by the end of the year we had a collection of over 300 movies.
In the email the netAdmin sent us, we were using the full dorm bandwidth (1MB/sec) sustained, both ways for 14 days straight with only the occasional break (when looking at the graphs, it was the times we ran out to get CDRs or we had to run around to other students and ask to borrow HD space in exchange for a copy of a movie).
THOSE were the days. you kids and your torrent files and your 500GB drives. Hell, I remember when you had to really SEARCH to find a server that had a decent selection AND gave you decent transfer speeds.
You're complaining about a 12 Megabit per second line maxing at 1 MegaByte per second download speed. That's exactly what they told you - 12 Mb/s is 1.5 MB/s, and if you consider protocol overhead......
well, considering that when we were "only" 8mbit before, I was topping out around 1MB/sec (in reality it never hit that but was bouncing around 980-990K/sec), which I still see after this "upgrade" we got.
How many other connections...
I've got 6 computers connected, but minimal network traffic. I know when other people in my place are doing anything, and this is when there's essentially nothing going on. Even if no one's home and only my machine is doing anything (2 computers don't utilize any WAN bandwidth; they're strictly used for LAN testing and serving and live on a separate switch from our router), speed isn't any better.
I've got a Linksys WRT54G for our router. now that I think about it, I'm not sure what that router uses (10mbit or 100mbit). if it's 10, then that'd explain my topping out... I've never transfered files around the LAN through it. I've got a separate gigabit switch that I use for accessing the NAS.
I use speakeasy for usenet access since i got 8 1GB accounts for free with my DSL (different location). they don't have options for selecting a different server and it's through giganews's servers.
I know that TimeWarner is using different modem hardware now than they gave us 2 years ago, so maybe if I call up, they'll send a new modem and maybe that will have higher throughput.
I've gotten 4MB/sec when showing my friend at his workplace (a university in NJ) using my account in the past.
there are also websites where I fetch files on occasion that I'm able to max out my connection while using (namely bangbros.com) and those still top out at 1MB/sec.
Unfortunately, that's the situation with consumer-level internet access.
the AskSlashdot poster really should be asking "why is internet connectivity still so expensive" rather than just "Why is professional grade connectivity so expensive"
decent networking hardware in general is still quite expensive. Now, granted, the price has come down considerably (I remember when a 6 port 100mbit switch was worth of a cooling fan and 19" rackmount and cost over 1000$), but you can't use consumer-level hardware for anything serious. I'm always astonished when I learn that a 300-node network requires hardware that you can't get at CompUSA and how flimsy the sub $100 gigabit switches really are.
Why don't we have affordable gigabit internet access, anyway?
Aside from overselling their capacity (and keeping their fingers crossed that someone doesn't get fed up with the congestion and move to another network), the consumer-level cable/DSL services dont' guarantee any kind of uptime for the connection.
just look at TimeWarner/Verizon/Optimum/Comcast/etc... frequent outages, sometimes for seconds (just a blip) and sometimes for an hour or more. There are absolutely no guarantees of anything; and that includes there's no guarantee they won't drop your ass if they *think* you did something illegal or if they feel you're using it too much.
Currently, I'm seriously ready to give TimeWarner a yell. When we first got them, it was 8mbps downstream and we got a letter in the mail about a month ago telling us they upgraded us (for free) to 12mbps, however, not only am I not seeing ANY increase in speed (usenet still tops out at 1MB/sec) but we're actually seeing an extreme decrease in service. Starting about a month before the "upgrade," I started seeing much higher pings (during Quake3 matches, especially) and such a reduction in overall speed in the evenings. It wouldn't even be so bad if it was just a constant 20K/sec max, but rather, we get timeouts when surfing the web (images fail to load, stylesheets sometimes fail to load) and, when downloading, I'll see 3 seconds of sustained 180K/sec followed by 8 seconds of 2-3K then a couple seconds of nothing.
I'm sure someone in our branch is either running a server or downloading torrents like crazy. About 5 years ago, when I had OptimumOnline, we suddenly saw a max-speed of 2-3K/sec and when I contacted them about it, they blamed us for having multiple computers, but later contacted us about how they shut down someone for downloading a new thing called "BitTorrent" and they warned us against heavy usage of that.
i wish people would consider the impact they have on the network when doing that sort of thing. I typically limit large transfers to off-peak hours for that reason (and my roommate's complain if I'm over-using the network and they can't do what they need to do).
Gabe at penny-arcade mentioned this earlier today. Apparently, Mr Goldman called Dave Kelly a "pedophile" in the same forum that he's trying to sue for slander.
The text of Gabe's post:
You might remember Tycho mentioningTodd Goldman and a story about him stealing some artwork from a web cartoonist. We covered it in a comic and a post and our point of view was essentially “yeah it sucks but you can’t sue the guy for being a douche bag.” I would have left it at that except, well the latest development in the whole ordeal is actually super funny. It’s important to point out that Todd’s initial response to the article about his thievery was to call Dave Kelly a Pedophile. I’m not joking here he actually said “Here’s my inspiration! Every month I paint the works of a pedophile.” The letter goes on and it’s obvious that he’s just being a smart ass and blowing the whole thing off. Honestly I chuckled at the letter when I read it because (being a professional asshole myself) I thought it was a funny way to respond to the accusations. However, if you call someone a pedophile in a public forum you can’t turn around a few weeks later and threaten to sue that same forum for slander.
Todd’s lawyers sent Fleen a mail last week that threatened legal action if they didn’t pull down all the stuff about Todd. The letter actually said “We have acquired articles posted on your website which contain defaming, derogatory and malicious statements about Mr. Goldman.” Yeah no shit, the guy isa thief what the hell do you expect.
This sort of legal bulldogging is especially lame after Todd’s initial reaction to the story. If you want to play the arrogant asshole and call people pedophiles I respect that. I really do. I’ve been overcompensating for my low self esteem by calling people names for twenty years. I know how it works and the only rule is if you can’t take it, don’t fucking dish it out.
I'm a HUGE fan of retro gaming. For me, when I think 'retro,' I think of the NES when it comes to consoles and Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Prince of Persia for computers. The big thing about old computer games (namely the *Quest games) was that they were very clever. They required more thought than simply walking around the border of every room hitting the action button (think: resident evil), and although they had reading involved, it wasn't overly complex or distracting.
The big problem I see with many games today is that very few of them are pick-up-and-play style, and when they are, they either require a investing a significant amount of time to play or they're a puzzle game. I find that my most favourite contemporary games are Geometry Wars (which can take me 35-40 minutes to play a single game), Lumines (which I can play for hours, but I have the advantage where I can just turn off my PSP when I'm done), racing games like Burnout Revenge, and Crackdown. These games are great because they all have a very simple premise, and don't require too much thought from game to game. When I've got a lot going on in life, it's difficult to pick up a game that I haven't played for 3 weeks and remember where I was, what I was doing and how to get everywhere (Final Fantasy XII was like this, that's why I stopped playing it).
What happened to games like Super Mario Brothers 1-3/World, Megaman (the original bunch; namely #2), Q*bert, Centipede, Prince of Persia, etc which had a clearly defined gaming path with clearly defined goals? The original GTA had a feel like that, but it was ruined with all of the sequels.
The elegance of a great game is in its simplicity. We need to get back to those primitive concepts and apply our current technologies to make them better.
I could go on and on about how Nintendo and the Wii is on the right track, but is kinda doing it wrong and how many consumers are blind to shitty and redundant gameplay by spectacular graphics. Surely the industry hasn't run out of ideas!! They've got to be able to come up with new non-gimmicky, non-remake, fresh games.
As a supliment, some additional games that did it right in recent memory: the various Castlevania DS games, Shadow of the Colossus, the original couple Warioware games, Starcraft (when you play a quick zergling rush game, especially), Narutimet Hero (PS2, Japan), Quake3, Counterstrike, and Desktop Tower Defense (handdrawngames.com)
Data centres use power to cool and power the computers in their facilities. Methods vary from centre to centre and one might have a much more efficient way of doing things.
By not disclosing their power usage, they can protect themselves from people (spies) who may want to discover their methods. Although they may want people to know "Hey! we use 1/3 the power of everyone else and have twice the computational power and storage capacity!" they don't want to draw attention to themselves.
Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback.
that's a pretty great feature. While I'm not fond [at all] of the zune, that is a welcome addition. I'm just curious how much smaller the flash-based unit will be, if smaller at all. It would be interesting if they offered a smaller capacity, same-size unit with flash for the same price.
Are there any other flash-based portable devices like this that play video out of the box?
when is someone going to release a device like this that allows for auxiliary storage media? like with a USB port on the side to plug in a drive?
Locations that Developer Day will be held at are: Beijing, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo and of course at Google HQ in Mountain View."
yeah, I first heard of FPGAs when DarkFader was first hacking the NintendoDS to run homebrew code, and my friend would use them as a pass-thru device when hacking roms on various other electronic devices.
It really depends on what kind of work you're doing. Having two monitors enables you to partition your workspaces in ways that a single very large monitor, cannot.
At my primary employer, I've got a single 23" Apple cinema display, which is a quite adequate size for doing pretty much anything. It's really great for doing stuff in illustrator and photoshop because I rarely have to hide my palettes and I can fit large projects on the screen at a large enough size that I can see the detail. I wouldn't want a bigger monitor since I feel that would start to be counter productive due to it being too big for the eyes. However, I'd LOVE to have a second monitor. When making changes to art based on an email, it's a PAIN to switch back and forth between my graphics app(s) and the email window. Also, if I'm downloading new client files in the background, I can't keep an eye on them since the Illustrator window takes up the whole screen, as does a typical session in photoshop.
At home, I've got a 22" (I think that's the size) Dell LCD for my primary display and a 17" CRT for my secondary. I keep stuff that I want to constantly keep an eye on on the second (at home, it's IM, iTunes, irc, terminal sessions with compiling, debugging windows, program output, etc).
The best part of having 2 monitors is the fact that you can move stuff onto #2 without worry that it will get covered by other windows when switching apps. For reference, for status, and for control are the most ideal uses for an extra display.
now 3 displays... I've never tried that, but it sounds intriguing.
since they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market.
AAC is not an Apple-only format. Apple just uses it as the default format for iTunes/iPod. Many mp3 players (both portable and software players) play AAC including the venerable Winamp and it *could* be considered the next-gen mp3 due to it's built-in error correction and more robust features (namely more channels and sampling rates). So I'm not sure how that could "help Apple lock up the hardware market."
While it would be great to have DRM-free OGG files, thereby eliminating licensing fees for players and encoders and bringing costs down across the board. Although I'm not totally sure that would be the best idea since I'm not sure how they match AAC in terms of quality vs filesize and next-gen features.
well, the idea in the book was that you plug in and you experience all 5 senses that the person experienced in the same way. There were methods that people used by re-recording the output of someone experiencing another recording, like recording someone eating a cheeseburger, then have someone who hasn't eaten in a week experience that recording and re-output it, thereby making the cheeseburger so much more enjoyable.
The book goes for pages and pages explaining the process. I believe there's an entire chapter or two on it. You should read the book when it comes out (I had a pre-release copy). I must say it's one of the best I've read.
That reminds me of an article I submitted to slashdot a few years back. A guy had implanted magnets in his fingertips and he could use that to sense other magnets and metallic objects. He said that he was surprised when he was able to detect where the motor was inside an electric can-opener just by putting his fingers close to it.
It seemed like a really interesting concept. Similar to how your sense of direction works by using magnetic north.
This also reminds me of an element of this book I just read (Rant by Chuck Palahniuk). In the future, people have ports that enable them to plug in and experience a recorded neural episode. In the story, you could get a large-breasted girl high on heroin and sit her in a train watching the scenery go by, the whole time playing with herself and output that to a new recording that you could rent and experience yourself without the dangers of actually doing heroin.
...but I know if I had 750 GB for music, I wouldn't be encoding anything in a lossy format.
technically, yeah.
I've got a friend who's got a nice 2TB RAID in his personal fileserver (mostly filled with pr0n, movies and music). He's a big stickler with the quality of his files and everything is either Flac, aiff, or 320kbit mp3s; he accepts no other formats. The problem is that when he wants to transfer his stuff onto his portable player, he's got to re-encode to lower-quality mp3s to fit enough music on the player (I believe he's got a 30GB Zen Touch).
for me, I've got my 500 CDs in 2 binders for emergencies and 192kbit mp3s on my drive for casual listening.
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well, I've got friends who generally won't pay the $11 to see a movie at the theatre and would rather pick up the $5 DVD from the mexican lady in the subway. typically, the purchase is an impulse buy... they see Grindhouse sitting there, and since they missed it in the theatres, they'll pick it up, or they'll decide that $5 beats the $44 it would cost to go see it as a group and pick it up.
the problem is that they use such cheap DVDs when making the copies that 3/4 of the time, the movie won't play through. Sometimes the DVD won't even play.
I'm 100% against buying the bootlegs, though. They typically have abhorrent sound quality and the video quality is questionable, at best. Frequently, they also have people standing up in front of the camera and those "ooohs" and "ahhhs" of the crowd.
Lame.
I know what it does.
When MS wants $150 that I don't have to repair the thing, it's worth a shot. It did fix it the first time for about 2 weeks (the unit has been out of the 1-year warranty for about 6 months).
Especially when a friend of mine did it and his 360 has been working fine ever since... it sucks it worked for him, who could've easily afforded fixing the device.
The 360 in my apt has 4 lights lit. It used to be 3, but it's since decided to light the 4th after I attempted the towel trick to fix it (the towel trick worked once, but the second time, it didn't work at all, and shortly after that, the 4th LED lit).
We'll have to call MS when I get home to see if that's covered.
with any luck, they'll cover it and we wont' have to shell out 150$
I too hope it does not have the heros, they're the reason I grew weary of wc3 in a week instead of the 4 years I played sc.
you only played starcraft for 4 years? I still play it relatively frequently.
I agree with you, though. The more things you have to keep track of and manage, the more difficult the game becomes. It starts to be a chore to play rather than fun. That was the main allure of the SC- it was simple to learn and once you understood the upgrade path, it took a lifetime to master. Broodwars ruined it by adding the extra units further complicating the game. You have to worry about so much more (namely invisible units like the lurkers and the dark templars) earlier in the game.
Heroes are fine, if you don't have to worry about building. That's what I liked about Bungie's Myth games. You didn't have to build anything, you went straight into battle, and if you had a unit that made more kills, he'd get faster and more accurate. It kept gameplay simple, yet dynamic enough to stay fun.
holy crap... I just watched rambo first blood 2... it ended like 5 seconds ago.
well, I was equating fuel consumption to pollution emissions.
I actually know a guy who claims that we've done enough (ie: plant trees, lower polluting emissions, etc) in the last 20 years to reverse global warming and that it really doesn't matter what we do now, we're not going to harm the environment. He backs this up with his claim that he listens to arguments from both sides and reads "peer-reviewed scientific papers."
My point is that I hope no one reads this article and uses it as an excuse to do whatever the hell they want, damage-wise, with regard to the environment.
I've got friends who think that global warming is a big crock of shit and (in a very immature way) bring up Al Gore and say how he thinks he invented the internet as their basis for not believing anything he says.
One of my biggest annoyances with people who question global warming isn't that they think it's not happening or that it isn't us who are contributing to it, but rather the fact that they use these previous statements as an excuse to not do anything about it.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that carbon dioxide emissions really don't have any effect on global warming... does that mean that we should keep driving SUVs and not care about how much pollution we dump into the environment?
Although people who announce that the earth is doomed because of global warming and come across as being panicky appear to be crackpots to all them skeptics, it doesn't mean that we should ignore them. we should do what we can to conserve what we have. It's worth it.
I see you're familiar with Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
I was a senior in high school during the 1999 Columbine shootings.
Several months before columbine, there was a shooting at some other school and the kid only injured a couple people (I think he killed like 3 and injured like 6) and I called the kid a pussy and if I had done that, I could kill at least 20, assuming I have enough ammo. Saying that prompted some friends of mine to elaborate on my strategy, which I did, and about a month later, the Columbine shooting happened and the next day (or maybe a couple days later) I was greeted in my 1st period class by a pair of policemen who escorted me to the station to talk to a detective.
As I waited while the detective went through my backpack and removed my notebook, he commented on the fact that I was wearing a trenchcoat and he asked me what kind of music I liked and what videogames I played. At the time, I was an avid Quake player and was hooked on KMFDM (and at this meeting, I was wearing a Maralyn Manson shirt). He flipped through my notebook, and saw dozens of drawings of spattered fluids, severed hands and heads, and sketches of bullet casings. It was just what I was into drawing at the time. I go through phases and had he looked at notebooks the month before, he would have seen lots of rope and barbed wire and stitches and electronics sketches.
this whole thing prompted a full investigation into me, I had to see a therapist for a couple days before they let me back in school, every little scrap of paper that they found that was the least bit violent, they questioned me about... I was frequently pulled out of classes (most often, my calculus class; which I wound up failing due to the frequent interruptions) and every little thing I wrote was studied. It really fucked me up and, although I'm not prone to violence at all, it was really pissing me off and I had to hold back to keep from throwing something at my principal.
it was completely stupid that they did that and it really was for absolutely nothing. I understand that if i was caught discussing that stuff and then I DID shoot up the school, if they did nothing about it, there would be serious problems, but at the same time, it was total bullshit. There's no reason to do that to someone just because they wrote a violent story. Look at all the published authors out there. Look at books like Fight Club and American Psycho (now, major motion pictures!). If someone writes that kind of thing for class, they risk expulsion or at the very least, some serious investigation. If someone writes that whilst trying to sell a book, they stand to make some nice money for themselves.
This fear of terrorism and violence and shootings in today's society is really stifling creativity. Literature will be hurt (due to young people being forcibly held back from writing what they want). Violence in movies is moving to a very stylized look, which although not all bad, I really like gore movies with realistic violence (ichi the killer, battle royal, etc). Even videogames are becoming targets and game studios are threatened with lawsuits just because some whackjob killed someone and happened to own a copy of their game. A man obsessed with John Lennon goes out and kills John Lennon. Who's to blame? The guy's psychosis or John Lennon's music? Why not the music? People blame videogames just as readily. A man obsessed with nascar is dragracing and kills 5 pedestrians in the process... why doesn't anyone sue Nascar?
Either that was a typo or you have no right to complain in my book.
not a typo. I'm complaining because we got a letter that said we now get 15mbit down, when in reality I'm still seeing 8mbit speeds. if I read online that we should have 15mbit, but I wasn't told that, it wouldn't' be such a big deal...
Just yesterday my roomate got a notice that he was overusing the campus network - 108 GB in one week. It's hanging on our door now.
oh man, I should post some stats that the netadmin at my school sent me when I was there. They threatened to shut us down and kick us out of the dorms if we kept it up. This is in 99/00, before napster got popular and downloaded movies took 2 full CDs and were mpeg format. my roommate and I both had a 2x burner and I had a 4GB and a 6GB drive in my computer, while he had 2 10GB drives. we were downloading faster than we could burn and by the end of the year we had a collection of over 300 movies.
In the email the netAdmin sent us, we were using the full dorm bandwidth (1MB/sec) sustained, both ways for 14 days straight with only the occasional break (when looking at the graphs, it was the times we ran out to get CDRs or we had to run around to other students and ask to borrow HD space in exchange for a copy of a movie).
THOSE were the days. you kids and your torrent files and your 500GB drives. Hell, I remember when you had to really SEARCH to find a server that had a decent selection AND gave you decent transfer speeds.
You're complaining about a 12 Megabit per second line maxing at 1 MegaByte per second download speed. That's exactly what they told you - 12 Mb/s is 1.5 MB/s, and if you consider protocol overhead......
...
well, considering that when we were "only" 8mbit before, I was topping out around 1MB/sec (in reality it never hit that but was bouncing around 980-990K/sec), which I still see after this "upgrade" we got.
How many other connections
I've got 6 computers connected, but minimal network traffic. I know when other people in my place are doing anything, and this is when there's essentially nothing going on. Even if no one's home and only my machine is doing anything (2 computers don't utilize any WAN bandwidth; they're strictly used for LAN testing and serving and live on a separate switch from our router), speed isn't any better.
I've got a Linksys WRT54G for our router. now that I think about it, I'm not sure what that router uses (10mbit or 100mbit). if it's 10, then that'd explain my topping out... I've never transfered files around the LAN through it. I've got a separate gigabit switch that I use for accessing the NAS.
I use speakeasy for usenet access since i got 8 1GB accounts for free with my DSL (different location). they don't have options for selecting a different server and it's through giganews's servers.
I know that TimeWarner is using different modem hardware now than they gave us 2 years ago, so maybe if I call up, they'll send a new modem and maybe that will have higher throughput.
I've got a private usenet account.
I've gotten 4MB/sec when showing my friend at his workplace (a university in NJ) using my account in the past.
there are also websites where I fetch files on occasion that I'm able to max out my connection while using (namely bangbros.com) and those still top out at 1MB/sec.
Unfortunately, that's the situation with consumer-level internet access.
the AskSlashdot poster really should be asking "why is internet connectivity still so expensive" rather than just "Why is professional grade connectivity so expensive"
decent networking hardware in general is still quite expensive. Now, granted, the price has come down considerably (I remember when a 6 port 100mbit switch was worth of a cooling fan and 19" rackmount and cost over 1000$), but you can't use consumer-level hardware for anything serious. I'm always astonished when I learn that a 300-node network requires hardware that you can't get at CompUSA and how flimsy the sub $100 gigabit switches really are.
Why don't we have affordable gigabit internet access, anyway?
Aside from overselling their capacity (and keeping their fingers crossed that someone doesn't get fed up with the congestion and move to another network), the consumer-level cable/DSL services dont' guarantee any kind of uptime for the connection.
just look at TimeWarner/Verizon/Optimum/Comcast/etc... frequent outages, sometimes for seconds (just a blip) and sometimes for an hour or more. There are absolutely no guarantees of anything; and that includes there's no guarantee they won't drop your ass if they *think* you did something illegal or if they feel you're using it too much.
Currently, I'm seriously ready to give TimeWarner a yell. When we first got them, it was 8mbps downstream and we got a letter in the mail about a month ago telling us they upgraded us (for free) to 12mbps, however, not only am I not seeing ANY increase in speed (usenet still tops out at 1MB/sec) but we're actually seeing an extreme decrease in service. Starting about a month before the "upgrade," I started seeing much higher pings (during Quake3 matches, especially) and such a reduction in overall speed in the evenings. It wouldn't even be so bad if it was just a constant 20K/sec max, but rather, we get timeouts when surfing the web (images fail to load, stylesheets sometimes fail to load) and, when downloading, I'll see 3 seconds of sustained 180K/sec followed by 8 seconds of 2-3K then a couple seconds of nothing.
I'm sure someone in our branch is either running a server or downloading torrents like crazy. About 5 years ago, when I had OptimumOnline, we suddenly saw a max-speed of 2-3K/sec and when I contacted them about it, they blamed us for having multiple computers, but later contacted us about how they shut down someone for downloading a new thing called "BitTorrent" and they warned us against heavy usage of that.
i wish people would consider the impact they have on the network when doing that sort of thing. I typically limit large transfers to off-peak hours for that reason (and my roommate's complain if I'm over-using the network and they can't do what they need to do).
The text of Gabe's post:
You might remember Tycho mentioning Todd Goldman and a story about him stealing some artwork from a web cartoonist. We covered it in a comic and a post and our point of view was essentially “yeah it sucks but you can’t sue the guy for being a douche bag.” I would have left it at that except, well the latest development in the whole ordeal is actually super funny. It’s important to point out that Todd’s initial response to the article about his thievery was to call Dave Kelly a Pedophile. I’m not joking here he actually said “Here’s my inspiration! Every month I paint the works of a pedophile.” The letter goes on and it’s obvious that he’s just being a smart ass and blowing the whole thing off. Honestly I chuckled at the letter when I read it because (being a professional asshole myself) I thought it was a funny way to respond to the accusations. However, if you call someone a pedophile in a public forum you can’t turn around a few weeks later and threaten to sue that same forum for slander.
Todd’s lawyers sent Fleen a mail last week that threatened legal action if they didn’t pull down all the stuff about Todd. The letter actually said “We have acquired articles posted on your website which contain defaming, derogatory and malicious statements about Mr. Goldman.” Yeah no shit, the guy isa thief what the hell do you expect.
This sort of legal bulldogging is especially lame after Todd’s initial reaction to the story. If you want to play the arrogant asshole and call people pedophiles I respect that. I really do. I’ve been overcompensating for my low self esteem by calling people names for twenty years. I know how it works and the only rule is if you can’t take it, don’t fucking dish it out.
I'm a HUGE fan of retro gaming. For me, when I think 'retro,' I think of the NES when it comes to consoles and Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Prince of Persia for computers. The big thing about old computer games (namely the *Quest games) was that they were very clever. They required more thought than simply walking around the border of every room hitting the action button (think: resident evil), and although they had reading involved, it wasn't overly complex or distracting.
The big problem I see with many games today is that very few of them are pick-up-and-play style, and when they are, they either require a investing a significant amount of time to play or they're a puzzle game. I find that my most favourite contemporary games are Geometry Wars (which can take me 35-40 minutes to play a single game), Lumines (which I can play for hours, but I have the advantage where I can just turn off my PSP when I'm done), racing games like Burnout Revenge, and Crackdown. These games are great because they all have a very simple premise, and don't require too much thought from game to game. When I've got a lot going on in life, it's difficult to pick up a game that I haven't played for 3 weeks and remember where I was, what I was doing and how to get everywhere (Final Fantasy XII was like this, that's why I stopped playing it).
What happened to games like Super Mario Brothers 1-3/World, Megaman (the original bunch; namely #2), Q*bert, Centipede, Prince of Persia, etc which had a clearly defined gaming path with clearly defined goals? The original GTA had a feel like that, but it was ruined with all of the sequels.
The elegance of a great game is in its simplicity. We need to get back to those primitive concepts and apply our current technologies to make them better.
I could go on and on about how Nintendo and the Wii is on the right track, but is kinda doing it wrong and how many consumers are blind to shitty and redundant gameplay by spectacular graphics. Surely the industry hasn't run out of ideas!! They've got to be able to come up with new non-gimmicky, non-remake, fresh games.
As a supliment, some additional games that did it right in recent memory: the various Castlevania DS games, Shadow of the Colossus, the original couple Warioware games, Starcraft (when you play a quick zergling rush game, especially), Narutimet Hero (PS2, Japan), Quake3, Counterstrike, and Desktop Tower Defense (handdrawngames.com)
Data centres use power to cool and power the computers in their facilities. Methods vary from centre to centre and one might have a much more efficient way of doing things.
By not disclosing their power usage, they can protect themselves from people (spies) who may want to discover their methods. Although they may want people to know "Hey! we use 1/3 the power of everyone else and have twice the computational power and storage capacity!" they don't want to draw attention to themselves.
Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback.
that's a pretty great feature. While I'm not fond [at all] of the zune, that is a welcome addition. I'm just curious how much smaller the flash-based unit will be, if smaller at all. It would be interesting if they offered a smaller capacity, same-size unit with flash for the same price.
Are there any other flash-based portable devices like this that play video out of the box?
when is someone going to release a device like this that allows for auxiliary storage media? like with a USB port on the side to plug in a drive?
Locations that Developer Day will be held at are: Beijing, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo and of course at Google HQ in Mountain View."
what about their offices in New York City?
yeah, I first heard of FPGAs when DarkFader was first hacking the NintendoDS to run homebrew code, and my friend would use them as a pass-thru device when hacking roms on various other electronic devices.
It really depends on what kind of work you're doing. Having two monitors enables you to partition your workspaces in ways that a single very large monitor, cannot.
At my primary employer, I've got a single 23" Apple cinema display, which is a quite adequate size for doing pretty much anything. It's really great for doing stuff in illustrator and photoshop because I rarely have to hide my palettes and I can fit large projects on the screen at a large enough size that I can see the detail. I wouldn't want a bigger monitor since I feel that would start to be counter productive due to it being too big for the eyes. However, I'd LOVE to have a second monitor. When making changes to art based on an email, it's a PAIN to switch back and forth between my graphics app(s) and the email window. Also, if I'm downloading new client files in the background, I can't keep an eye on them since the Illustrator window takes up the whole screen, as does a typical session in photoshop.
At home, I've got a 22" (I think that's the size) Dell LCD for my primary display and a 17" CRT for my secondary. I keep stuff that I want to constantly keep an eye on on the second (at home, it's IM, iTunes, irc, terminal sessions with compiling, debugging windows, program output, etc).
The best part of having 2 monitors is the fact that you can move stuff onto #2 without worry that it will get covered by other windows when switching apps. For reference, for status, and for control are the most ideal uses for an extra display.
now 3 displays... I've never tried that, but it sounds intriguing.
since they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market.
AAC is not an Apple-only format. Apple just uses it as the default format for iTunes/iPod. Many mp3 players (both portable and software players) play AAC including the venerable Winamp and it *could* be considered the next-gen mp3 due to it's built-in error correction and more robust features (namely more channels and sampling rates). So I'm not sure how that could "help Apple lock up the hardware market."
While it would be great to have DRM-free OGG files, thereby eliminating licensing fees for players and encoders and bringing costs down across the board. Although I'm not totally sure that would be the best idea since I'm not sure how they match AAC in terms of quality vs filesize and next-gen features.
well, the idea in the book was that you plug in and you experience all 5 senses that the person experienced in the same way. There were methods that people used by re-recording the output of someone experiencing another recording, like recording someone eating a cheeseburger, then have someone who hasn't eaten in a week experience that recording and re-output it, thereby making the cheeseburger so much more enjoyable.
The book goes for pages and pages explaining the process. I believe there's an entire chapter or two on it. You should read the book when it comes out (I had a pre-release copy). I must say it's one of the best I've read.
That reminds me of an article I submitted to slashdot a few years back. A guy had implanted magnets in his fingertips and he could use that to sense other magnets and metallic objects. He said that he was surprised when he was able to detect where the motor was inside an electric can-opener just by putting his fingers close to it.
It seemed like a really interesting concept. Similar to how your sense of direction works by using magnetic north.
This also reminds me of an element of this book I just read (Rant by Chuck Palahniuk). In the future, people have ports that enable them to plug in and experience a recorded neural episode. In the story, you could get a large-breasted girl high on heroin and sit her in a train watching the scenery go by, the whole time playing with herself and output that to a new recording that you could rent and experience yourself without the dangers of actually doing heroin.
It was quite an amazing concept.
...but I know if I had 750 GB for music, I wouldn't be encoding anything in a lossy format.
technically, yeah.
I've got a friend who's got a nice 2TB RAID in his personal fileserver (mostly filled with pr0n, movies and music). He's a big stickler with the quality of his files and everything is either Flac, aiff, or 320kbit mp3s; he accepts no other formats. The problem is that when he wants to transfer his stuff onto his portable player, he's got to re-encode to lower-quality mp3s to fit enough music on the player (I believe he's got a 30GB Zen Touch).
for me, I've got my 500 CDs in 2 binders for emergencies and 192kbit mp3s on my drive for casual listening.