I think the trick about CGI is much the same as with the old 80's style blue backdrop stuff. If you show too much of it all at once, it looks crappy and fake. But if you just put a little here and there, you'll hardly notice. Of course, everybody's going way over the top these days, and if you're going to do CGI for any substantial length of time you *have* to pay attention to details. No copy/pasting anything, in other words. And don't make everything too shiny and perfect, and no simulating close-up humanoid movement!
On the whole, I think CGI is a useful tool. They used it well in LotR for instance (though even then there's several scenes that don't quite work). But Lucas keeps wanting to use it for EVERYTHING, and its just not a good idea.
Ugh, I *hated* that scene... I know I'm in the minority, but what the hell.
I guess I just felt it was too comical. Yoda's all bouncing around like he's on speed. I always liked Yoda because he was a sage, because he had dignity despite his backwards-talking and other oddities. Yoda was respected for his knowledge and wisdom, not for bouncing off the walls. Kinda killed the character for me.
Well, show me a Linux virus in circulation, because I haven't seen one... Exploits, ok, thats another matter. We have plenty of those. Very few of them are in our email client though.
And about that 3rd party software: if it comes on the RedHat CD (or SuSE, or whoever) its *supported* software. Thats a big difference to a company. Sure you can download Apache and install it on Windows, but Microsoft will promptly tell you to go to hell if something goes wrong. Also, in the case of software included with Linux, you'll get the appropriate security updates through up2date, yast, etc. You'll have to keep track of holes yourself in anything you download.
I always kind of appreciated the Sacred Cow religions. While you may doubt the sanctity they attribute to the cow, you can hardly argue whether or not he exists.
Then agian Science can't explain how life forms(today), Science can't explain out of the billions of permutations that evolution requires why is there only one Intelligent species, Why hasn't another one exsisted? The probalities would say it should of happened.
Indeed? What probabilites are those? You have a sample of types of lifeforms in which a high percentage of them became intelligent over billions of years? Please, share it with the rest of us! Anybody who says he can calculate the probability of intelligent life forming is lying to you, or making bad assumptions.
Frankly, I don't get the whole "clean up the registry" craze. I have yet to see any evidence that having a lot of registry keys is a problem. Having a lot in the Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (or whatever the hell it is) key is one thing, and yeah I clean that out whenever I see weird things in the toolbar. Otherwise though, whats the harm? Windows doesn't become gradually unstable because of the registry. It becomes gradually unstable because you install shitty software onto it, which installs shitty libraries and other things that don't go away even if you uninstall the program. Don't install random crap (hint: this often includes drivers!) and apply security updates (ok, thats sometimes a bitch), and your Windows box will work well for years and years.
Umm, no. Aside from all the bazillion regulatory issues that come up when 100 million people want to fly personal aircraft, flying cars like this are not practical for anyone. Try building one of these designed to haul stuff, even more than 1-2 passengers, and see how far you get before its absurd. The prototype, while really fast, appears to be loud as a train and have less utility than the tiniest Kia you can buy. And its DANGEROUS! Imagine the DUIs, or worse...
Pfft, most SUVs get around 20mpg anyway. Check fueleconomy.gov if you don't believe me. Also the flying car pretty much just flies. It appears to be a two seater, presumably has severe weight limits... in short, it can't DO any of the things SUVs are good for. Heck, I doubt you'd even want to fly it in the snow. If you want a vehicle thats fuel efficient, profoundly unsafe, and doesn't carry a lot, get a freaking motorcycle! Flying cars continue to be a dumb idea.
Re:DRM doesn't happen at the codec level
on
XVID 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
That said, I haven't seen many xvid videos around in the newsgroups or on p2p networks.
Funny, every time I see a torrent for a TV show or something, the file's Xvid encoded.
Why would Gentoo have a RHEL kernel? Gentoo is not RHEL. They could if they wanted to (its GPL), but why would they? SEL? They have at least a couple of SE-patched kernels in portage, take your pick.
Nobody ever said Gentoo is friendly. Its not supposed to be. Its supposed to be maximally customizable, which it does better than any OS I've seen. Using Gentoo falls about halfway between using Debian and rolling your own distro, and a lot of people like that niche. Clearly its not where you want to be, and thats fine too. But don't dismiss it just because you can't compile Gnome.
Thats a statement of the obvious. You can't ever conclude that 'Distro A is faster than Distro B' without some kind of qualifier, unless you can somehow magically test every component of each on every piece of hardware under every conceivable load.
Apparently Infinium have made agreements with AMD and Nvidia to provide the processor and graphics controller. The specs seem very respectable: a 2.5GHz AMD processor, 256MB RAM and a 40GB HDD.
I'm sure something got lost in translation here. We all know AMD doesn't have any 2.5GHz processors. Possibly they meant a 2500+, I dunno.
Regardless, looks like the Phantom is actually just a PC under the hood with some interface for downloading games off the web. Not too terribly different from the ApeXtreme when all is said and done. Except of course that they want you to pay $30/month, which I guess isn't bad if they have a large selection of quality games with no ugly restrictions on play. That being the case, it might compare well in terms of cost/benefit to conventional systems, but I wouldn't bet money on it...
When the client does eventually have to send a few packets to the server, it does so by broadcasting them to all-nodes (just as searches are handled). So, everybody gets them, and everybody but the server involved can just ignore them.
Sounds like a bandwidth nightmare to me... I see what you're saying about huge window sizes, but even then if you lose a packet somewhere you now have to retransmit all of that data again. Between that and everybody broadcasting everything to everybody else, I can't imagine how this is going to scale well.
Furthermore, if you can broadcast to all nodes, doesn't that mean that you can get the IPs of all those nodes? And if you have those, the network's just not anonymous. Harder perhaps, to find out who's sharing what, but definitely not impossible.
I left out some details, like all servers generating a random 32bit Unique ID every hour or so, and sending it instead of their IP address with search results.
But then somebody somewhere has to maintain a relationship between actual IP and unique ID, so you have to have a central server of some sort, which can be taken down legally (if in a nation that supports such action), or otherwise compromised. I guess to be fair thats a problem with pretty much every system out there.
Ok, I'm not sure how the GNOME folks have 'broken' Nautilus. It seems to do precisely what they designed it to do. And frankly, I don't see why they should follow the Windows trend in this case. I read the case for spatial when 2.6 came out, and frankly it makes a lot of sense. For one, it makes drag-and-drop useful for file management again. Its also kind of nice that windows open exactly where you saw them last time. And as far as screen clutter, as long as you're pretty much living in your home directory, whats the big deal? Looking quickly I can't find many directories more than 4-deep in my home dir, and I'm more organized than most. Seems like people are always complaining that GNOME and KDE don't innovate, and when they do everybody gets upset.
The only valid criticism in the article is that its a bit tricky to go back to browser behavior by default, in that you have to get into Gconf (which by the way is no where near as massive and convoluted as the Windows registry). IMO, it would have made sense to put a checkbox for it in File Management Preferences. But come on, dismiss an entire desktop because of the lack of one checkbox? Outrageous!
Whats *really* funny is apparently he can't figure out how to use the "Browse Filesystem" icon thats on the Gnome 2.6 toolbar. Opens up to your home directory in old-school browser mode, just like in 2.4.
Meh, I wasn't actually that impressed with FF:CC. Maybe I just didn't play it long enough, but it seemed kinda pointless really. And maybe it was just the GBA I was using, but I had a lot of trouble dealing with all the menus and maps and whatnot I was supposed to be paying attention to. Combination of the GBA not doing what I tell it to and me not looking at it often enough. And what was the deal with that circle of pain avoidance? Most annoying thing I've seen in a co-op game in forever! Long story short: Square threw a lot of neat gameplay ideas together, slapped a dumb plot around them, and made us spend exorbitant amounts of money to play the game. It wasn't bad really, but not even remotely worth the investment.
*Cough* unless you reverse the OSes. If he'd said he was using the Radeon in Linux I'd have called bullshit right away. The ONLY way you're going to get comparable performance to Windows in Linux is with a Nvidia. That said, UT2004 is quite playable on my 9600 Pro in Linux, and the levels load a good bit faster than in Windows.
Not to mention mountable under Windows... for those of us that still need that. Or rather, EXT2 is mountable under Windows (with a 3rd party daemon), and thus EXT3 can be read as well.
Yeah dude, totally...just like someone who makes a biological weapon to expose the weakness in the current national security infrastructure. They could just leave it out on the street marked "use me to fuck up the entire city."
Holy straw man batman!
FUCK virus writers. They cost people money and time. Money and time is LIFE, just because they take it from you 10 minutes at a time doesn't make it any easier to swallow.
The grandparent's point is that virus writers do not, in fact, cost people money and time. Virus distributers do. Just because the writer and distributer of a virus is usually the same person doesn't mean we should assume thats always the case.
But...wait, that would be POSITIVE. That isn't nearly underground enough for your typical virus writer. Their rhetoric is a fucking smokescreen, they're slimebag criminals and they deserve to be punished just like a CEO who jacks down stock prices. They're both doing MONETARY damage. Money is time and time is life, never forget that.
Hmm... at least a couple more logical fallacies there, though I can't remember the right terms at the moment. Regardless it all sounds like a gross exaggeration, and no, money is not necessarily time or life.
I'm not a big fan of those responsible for all these recent outbreaks, and sure, they should be punished like any other criminals. But really, lets not make absurd generalizations.
I've always wondered about that... why don't they just keep a whitelist of all the valid corporate keys they've actually issued, and deny everybody else? I guess maybe its a matter of the interdepartmental coordination that would be required.
The corporate version of XP only works with WindowsUpdate if you use a CD key Microsoft doesn't know to be invalid. They routinely blacklist many of the common ones. Now, if you can get a real corporation's key, or generate one for yourself that's not posted somewhere...
On updates checking keys, I'm pretty sure XP SP1 did checking on its own initiative, so even if you downloaded the standalone upgrade it would fail if your key is blacklisted.
Of course this is all drawing on other people's experience...
Everybody says "More games, need more games!" How many do you want??? We've got UT2004. We'll be getting Doom3. Return to Castle Wolfenstein? Enemy Territory? Ok, we won't get Half-Life 2, but who knows if even the Windows guys will get that one. Don't like FPS? We've still got NWN, probably some others I can't think of right now. Okay, we don't get *every* game, but we're getting a respectable selection these days, particularly of the graphically-intensive variety. At this point, ATI should want our business. If they don't, well, more power to NVidia.
I've been thinking that way too... but then Comcast goes and ups the download cap to 3Mbit. Suddenly DSL is a huge rate hike for a drop in performance. Webhosting and DNS are nice perks, but for an extra $40? And Comcast seems to have stopped caring how many IPs I take.
Sooner or later they'll probably crack down on my usage, and then I can tell them where to go. But damned if they're still not the best value for the money as long as you don't read the EULA too closely.
Xinerama is not accelerated, which is what I meant. It has fake xinerama big-screen stuff that works alright, but I've had it screw up a few apps royally. The FSAA options are indeed there, but framerate is abhorrent if you use them, so nobody does. I have tried the latest drivers, but they were even less stable for me (and I might add that ATI's behind on their stated release schedule).
Well, power and voltage are directly related, so yeah, a reduction in voltage causes a reduction in power used. Whats your point?
Now, you could theoretically make a high-voltage chip that is still low power. But thats not what they did. They lowered the voltage that the chip needs to be supplied. If anything, calling it a low-power chip makes less sense.
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I think the trick about CGI is much the same as with the old 80's style blue backdrop stuff. If you show too much of it all at once, it looks crappy and fake. But if you just put a little here and there, you'll hardly notice. Of course, everybody's going way over the top these days, and if you're going to do CGI for any substantial length of time you *have* to pay attention to details. No copy/pasting anything, in other words. And don't make everything too shiny and perfect, and no simulating close-up humanoid movement!
On the whole, I think CGI is a useful tool. They used it well in LotR for instance (though even then there's several scenes that don't quite work). But Lucas keeps wanting to use it for EVERYTHING, and its just not a good idea.
Ugh, I *hated* that scene... I know I'm in the minority, but what the hell.
I guess I just felt it was too comical. Yoda's all bouncing around like he's on speed. I always liked Yoda because he was a sage, because he had dignity despite his backwards-talking and other oddities. Yoda was respected for his knowledge and wisdom, not for bouncing off the walls. Kinda killed the character for me.
Well, show me a Linux virus in circulation, because I haven't seen one... Exploits, ok, thats another matter. We have plenty of those. Very few of them are in our email client though.
And about that 3rd party software: if it comes on the RedHat CD (or SuSE, or whoever) its *supported* software. Thats a big difference to a company. Sure you can download Apache and install it on Windows, but Microsoft will promptly tell you to go to hell if something goes wrong. Also, in the case of software included with Linux, you'll get the appropriate security updates through up2date, yast, etc. You'll have to keep track of holes yourself in anything you download.
I always kind of appreciated the Sacred Cow religions. While you may doubt the sanctity they attribute to the cow, you can hardly argue whether or not he exists.
Indeed? What probabilites are those? You have a sample of types of lifeforms in which a high percentage of them became intelligent over billions of years? Please, share it with the rest of us! Anybody who says he can calculate the probability of intelligent life forming is lying to you, or making bad assumptions.
Frankly, I don't get the whole "clean up the registry" craze. I have yet to see any evidence that having a lot of registry keys is a problem. Having a lot in the Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (or whatever the hell it is) key is one thing, and yeah I clean that out whenever I see weird things in the toolbar. Otherwise though, whats the harm? Windows doesn't become gradually unstable because of the registry. It becomes gradually unstable because you install shitty software onto it, which installs shitty libraries and other things that don't go away even if you uninstall the program. Don't install random crap (hint: this often includes drivers!) and apply security updates (ok, thats sometimes a bitch), and your Windows box will work well for years and years.
Umm, no. Aside from all the bazillion regulatory issues that come up when 100 million people want to fly personal aircraft, flying cars like this are not practical for anyone. Try building one of these designed to haul stuff, even more than 1-2 passengers, and see how far you get before its absurd. The prototype, while really fast, appears to be loud as a train and have less utility than the tiniest Kia you can buy. And its DANGEROUS! Imagine the DUIs, or worse...
Pfft, most SUVs get around 20mpg anyway. Check fueleconomy.gov if you don't believe me. Also the flying car pretty much just flies. It appears to be a two seater, presumably has severe weight limits... in short, it can't DO any of the things SUVs are good for. Heck, I doubt you'd even want to fly it in the snow. If you want a vehicle thats fuel efficient, profoundly unsafe, and doesn't carry a lot, get a freaking motorcycle! Flying cars continue to be a dumb idea.
Funny, every time I see a torrent for a TV show or something, the file's Xvid encoded.
Why would Gentoo have a RHEL kernel? Gentoo is not RHEL. They could if they wanted to (its GPL), but why would they? SEL? They have at least a couple of SE-patched kernels in portage, take your pick.
Nobody ever said Gentoo is friendly. Its not supposed to be. Its supposed to be maximally customizable, which it does better than any OS I've seen. Using Gentoo falls about halfway between using Debian and rolling your own distro, and a lot of people like that niche. Clearly its not where you want to be, and thats fine too. But don't dismiss it just because you can't compile Gnome.
Thats a statement of the obvious. You can't ever conclude that 'Distro A is faster than Distro B' without some kind of qualifier, unless you can somehow magically test every component of each on every piece of hardware under every conceivable load.
I'm sure something got lost in translation here. We all know AMD doesn't have any 2.5GHz processors. Possibly they meant a 2500+, I dunno.
Regardless, looks like the Phantom is actually just a PC under the hood with some interface for downloading games off the web. Not too terribly different from the ApeXtreme when all is said and done. Except of course that they want you to pay $30/month, which I guess isn't bad if they have a large selection of quality games with no ugly restrictions on play. That being the case, it might compare well in terms of cost/benefit to conventional systems, but I wouldn't bet money on it...
Sounds like a bandwidth nightmare to me... I see what you're saying about huge window sizes, but even then if you lose a packet somewhere you now have to retransmit all of that data again. Between that and everybody broadcasting everything to everybody else, I can't imagine how this is going to scale well.
Furthermore, if you can broadcast to all nodes, doesn't that mean that you can get the IPs of all those nodes? And if you have those, the network's just not anonymous. Harder perhaps, to find out who's sharing what, but definitely not impossible.
I left out some details, like all servers generating a random 32bit Unique ID every hour or so, and sending it instead of their IP address with search results.But then somebody somewhere has to maintain a relationship between actual IP and unique ID, so you have to have a central server of some sort, which can be taken down legally (if in a nation that supports such action), or otherwise compromised. I guess to be fair thats a problem with pretty much every system out there.
Ok, I'm not sure how the GNOME folks have 'broken' Nautilus. It seems to do precisely what they designed it to do. And frankly, I don't see why they should follow the Windows trend in this case. I read the case for spatial when 2.6 came out, and frankly it makes a lot of sense. For one, it makes drag-and-drop useful for file management again. Its also kind of nice that windows open exactly where you saw them last time. And as far as screen clutter, as long as you're pretty much living in your home directory, whats the big deal? Looking quickly I can't find many directories more than 4-deep in my home dir, and I'm more organized than most. Seems like people are always complaining that GNOME and KDE don't innovate, and when they do everybody gets upset.
The only valid criticism in the article is that its a bit tricky to go back to browser behavior by default, in that you have to get into Gconf (which by the way is no where near as massive and convoluted as the Windows registry). IMO, it would have made sense to put a checkbox for it in File Management Preferences. But come on, dismiss an entire desktop because of the lack of one checkbox? Outrageous!
Whats *really* funny is apparently he can't figure out how to use the "Browse Filesystem" icon thats on the Gnome 2.6 toolbar. Opens up to your home directory in old-school browser mode, just like in 2.4.
Meh, I wasn't actually that impressed with FF:CC. Maybe I just didn't play it long enough, but it seemed kinda pointless really. And maybe it was just the GBA I was using, but I had a lot of trouble dealing with all the menus and maps and whatnot I was supposed to be paying attention to. Combination of the GBA not doing what I tell it to and me not looking at it often enough. And what was the deal with that circle of pain avoidance? Most annoying thing I've seen in a co-op game in forever! Long story short: Square threw a lot of neat gameplay ideas together, slapped a dumb plot around them, and made us spend exorbitant amounts of money to play the game. It wasn't bad really, but not even remotely worth the investment.
*Cough* unless you reverse the OSes. If he'd said he was using the Radeon in Linux I'd have called bullshit right away. The ONLY way you're going to get comparable performance to Windows in Linux is with a Nvidia. That said, UT2004 is quite playable on my 9600 Pro in Linux, and the levels load a good bit faster than in Windows.
Not to mention mountable under Windows... for those of us that still need that. Or rather, EXT2 is mountable under Windows (with a 3rd party daemon), and thus EXT3 can be read as well.
Holy straw man batman!
FUCK virus writers. They cost people money and time. Money and time is LIFE, just because they take it from you 10 minutes at a time doesn't make it any easier to swallow.The grandparent's point is that virus writers do not, in fact, cost people money and time. Virus distributers do. Just because the writer and distributer of a virus is usually the same person doesn't mean we should assume thats always the case.
But...wait, that would be POSITIVE. That isn't nearly underground enough for your typical virus writer. Their rhetoric is a fucking smokescreen, they're slimebag criminals and they deserve to be punished just like a CEO who jacks down stock prices. They're both doing MONETARY damage. Money is time and time is life, never forget that.Hmm... at least a couple more logical fallacies there, though I can't remember the right terms at the moment. Regardless it all sounds like a gross exaggeration, and no, money is not necessarily time or life.
I'm not a big fan of those responsible for all these recent outbreaks, and sure, they should be punished like any other criminals. But really, lets not make absurd generalizations.
I've always wondered about that... why don't they just keep a whitelist of all the valid corporate keys they've actually issued, and deny everybody else? I guess maybe its a matter of the interdepartmental coordination that would be required.
Two corrections:
The corporate version of XP only works with WindowsUpdate if you use a CD key Microsoft doesn't know to be invalid. They routinely blacklist many of the common ones. Now, if you can get a real corporation's key, or generate one for yourself that's not posted somewhere...
On updates checking keys, I'm pretty sure XP SP1 did checking on its own initiative, so even if you downloaded the standalone upgrade it would fail if your key is blacklisted.
Of course this is all drawing on other people's experience...
Everybody says "More games, need more games!" How many do you want??? We've got UT2004. We'll be getting Doom3. Return to Castle Wolfenstein? Enemy Territory? Ok, we won't get Half-Life 2, but who knows if even the Windows guys will get that one. Don't like FPS? We've still got NWN, probably some others I can't think of right now. Okay, we don't get *every* game, but we're getting a respectable selection these days, particularly of the graphically-intensive variety. At this point, ATI should want our business. If they don't, well, more power to NVidia.
I've been thinking that way too... but then Comcast goes and ups the download cap to 3Mbit. Suddenly DSL is a huge rate hike for a drop in performance. Webhosting and DNS are nice perks, but for an extra $40? And Comcast seems to have stopped caring how many IPs I take.
Sooner or later they'll probably crack down on my usage, and then I can tell them where to go. But damned if they're still not the best value for the money as long as you don't read the EULA too closely.
Xinerama is not accelerated, which is what I meant. It has fake xinerama big-screen stuff that works alright, but I've had it screw up a few apps royally. The FSAA options are indeed there, but framerate is abhorrent if you use them, so nobody does. I have tried the latest drivers, but they were even less stable for me (and I might add that ATI's behind on their stated release schedule).
Well, power and voltage are directly related, so yeah, a reduction in voltage causes a reduction in power used. Whats your point?
Now, you could theoretically make a high-voltage chip that is still low power. But thats not what they did. They lowered the voltage that the chip needs to be supplied. If anything, calling it a low-power chip makes less sense.