As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.
I really wish TNT wouldn't do that. It's not so much the upconversion, as if upconversion is done right, it can be almost watchable. My problem is with their stretching technique to fit 16:9. They do some kind of weird "partial" stretch process, where the center of the picture is left almost normal aspect, but as you approach the edges of the picture, it starts to stretch out more and more. The result, at first glance looks pretty good, as long as your attention is drawn to the center of the frame. But when something covers both the center frame, and reaches out to the edges, it gets REALLY distorted and doesn't look good at all. And it presents a very disorienting fish-eye lens effect when the camera pans over static content.
HBO-HD looks fantastic, however. I've been marveling over Batman Begins lately. The picture quality for that rivals DiscoveryHD.
If you think the launch was bad, you should see the game now.
Overall, even with all the faults that SWG had at launch, it still was really one of the most innovative MMORPGs out there. You really could follow your own path in the game. It appealed to all kinds of people, both male and female. If combat was your thing, there was plenty of choice in that path, and plenty of challenge. If you'd prefer to sit on the sidelines, non-combat professions were a very valued part of the community. Even people who just prefered the social aspects of the MMO world could server a purpose. From a community simulation perspective, it was easily the most flexable game around.
But, there was a serious lack of game content at launch. Promised features like player cities and vehicles were conspiciously missing from the game. Other features like instanced battlefields that could support massive numbers never worked correctly outside of the test lab and were abandoned shortly after launch. Quests would lead nowhere (Vader says, "Go speak to the Emperor." The Emperor says, "Go speak with Vader."). The overall point of the game (the Galactic Civil War) wasn't even really implimented, as PvP battles served no purpose other than virtual chest beating and bragging rights, and had no big-picture impact on the game. The game itself was beautiful, but shallow. Players tried their best to make up their own content, with player-hosted events and pointless (but still fun) battles in NPC cities. But by December of '03, the game was really bleeding subscriptions badly.
Then, some brilliant person at SoE decided that what everyone really wanted was to be a Jedi, and that would magically stop the exodus from the game. So, instead of adding the missing content, they dangled the prospect of unlocking a Jedi character in front of every player (something they had promised would not be the case). And it did keep a certain element from cancelling. Thus was born the Great Holiday Hologrind, which severly damaged the social aspects of the game, and also wrecked havoc on what had been a fairly healthy in-game economy.
Eventually it was passed around that the big, mysterious secret to unlocking it was nothing more than just mastering every profession in the game in turn. Now, Jedi were originally planned to be *extremely* rare, even to the point of being random and only a handful on each server. Since god-mode characters are generally not a good idea in an online game, their power would be offset by the threat of perma-death for the character, forcing you to start all over again. When enough people started unlocking Jedi characters, the ritilan-addicted "power gamer" element whined and complained about perma-death, SoE capitulated, and it was removed. Now, you had high-level Jedi running around one-hit killing everyone with no consequences. Even if by some miracle you took one down, it did little good. PvP battles became nothing more than competitions to see which side could pull out the most Jedi. People who had no interest in playing Jedi (otherwise defined as "subscribers with real long-term potential") were forced into hiding.
SoE made one blunder after another after that. Each modification to game balance seemed to throw the game further and further off-base. This can directly be traced to overpopulation of Jedi and the fact that they were never meant to be a balanced profession in the first place. The type of player who was attracted to playing a Jedi (and who could sit there and grind combat XP for 16 hours a day for a month) seemed to be the type of person who had little to no patience for complex combat systems that required forethought and strategy. So, SoE took their unique "HAM" multi-health-bar system, and turned it into EQ-style combat, dumbing it down to simple hack-and-slash.
Eventually, SoE made the amazing decision to eliminate the profession system altogether, and force everyone into clones of the same 8 "classes" and dub it the "New Game Experience". They completely eliminated
Just as a side note, I've seen it suggested in several places that you turn off or ignore the status display on the Prius. Not for any safety reasons, but because people will tend to fret over the gas mileage and try to manipulate the electric/gas power mix instead of trusting the computer to make that decision for them. You'll almost ALWAYS end up with worse gas mileage, compared to just driving normally.
You mean Leroy Jenkins? That's still sort of an MMORPG-isolated fad. It hasn't spread out to the web at large for the most part. You kind of have to be a MMO gamer to appreciate it, anyway.
If so many Windows developers weren't so utterly lazy, and learned how to code an application that doesn't require administrator rights to run, things would be a lot easier. As it is, there are so many poorly-written apps out there that write to admin-only places in the registry, or dump files that need to be modified into system folders, that in a lot of large companies with a plethora of apps it's almost impossible to switch to a true LUA security model.
Of course, a lot of the blame goes to Microsoft for encouraging the idiotic "everyone's an admin!" mentality.
I would say he's actually a very good storyteller. The movies he's done (with the terrible exception of Howard the Duck) have had very appealing storylines, the themes have spoken to a lot of people. He is, however, not a very good screenwriter. Horrid, stilted dialog, endless cliches, dysmal romance. His directing is suspect as well. Visually, he's an outstanding director, but he doesn't work well with actors, often getting very wooden performances out of them
It's why the most hailed of the Star Wars films was ESB, where he left dialog up to others and let a decent director deal with the actors.
Actually, if you read Paramount's statement carefully, it's worded a little oddly. It basically states that Enterprise on UPN is through. I thought it was strange they specified UPN, especially with all the talk about moving the show to another channel...
The system could be a thousand times better if "broadcasters" and "channels" went the way of the dodo and left us buying our shows directly from the people who make them.
It would be better for consumers, without a doubt. But studios and stations would never go for it. They make a lot of money creating tripe and convincing clueless ad execs that it's worth gold. Which is why you get so many terrible one-season shows which you wonder why anyone ever greenlighted it in the first place. It isn't about longevity and high viewership for those kinds of shows, it's about having a dirt-cheep budget and squeezing as much money as they can out of advertisers before they catch on and start to complain about the numbers.
In the pure on-demand model, they would be forced to produce quality shows, or it would directly affect their bottom-line almost right away. If it's crap, no one watches, meaning no one pays for the show, meaning they can't afford to take the viewership hit on it, even for short term. That's completely foreign to their current business model.
As I recall, a couple years ago Intuit came under fire for their production activation scheme and their draconian copy protection in TurboTax, which secretly installed code in the boot sector of the hard drive to prevent the CD from being copied, but also apparently caused some CD writers drives to stop working properly and was near impossible to get rid of. It turned into a major PR nightmare for them, as word spread quickly across the internet of what TurboTax was doing to people's PCs. A good number of their customers left for TaxCut. Several months later, Intuit was forced to admit publically what a dumb decision it was.
Well, it appears that Intuit did not learn their lesson, as this is likely to turn into another PR nightmare for them. How do companies become so dumb?
And what happens if the machine you're legitimately trying to update can't be put on the internet? I remember during the blaster virus, some of our laptops were getting infected so fast, we had to make sure the remote users did NOT get online, and we had to send them the security update and blaster cleaner on disk.
So, under Microsoft's new model, we wouldn't have been able to fix those machines, because as soon as we let them on the internet to "validate" their copy of Windows and download the patch, they would have been reinfected and rebooted. Lame.
Oracle claims that they will continue to support PeopleSoft products for 10 years, and keep up development commitments. But in reality, Ellison has no interest in PeopleSoft products. He bought it simply to destroy a competetor, nothing more, nothing less.
Look for Oracle's "support" to mean "force you into our inferior product line"
Actually, there already *were* limits, very much like you mentioned, in place. Unfortunatly, Congress under pressure from big media companies, have continued to extend the expiration time of copyrights, so essentially there are no more copyright limitations. Add in to that, that corporations don't die and are treated like people, and you've got infinate copyrights, in direct opposition to the original intent of copyright law.
I've even done an entire RedHat 9 install via iLO on an HP Blade server, using iLO's 'Remote Device' function. It makes use of the client's CD or floppy drive as a local device for the server, including boot capability. You can also attach disk images as local drives.
HP Proliant servers all can make use of Integrated Lights-Out for remote administration, including a remote console through your web browser. I very rarely need a crash cart in the data center since we've started using iLO. A lot nicer to just open a URL, instead of wheeling the cart over to it.
Makes sense. Plasma TVs are not really worth it, money-wise. Beautiful picture, yes, but they have a fairly limited lifespan as the gas starts to lose its charge. I couldn't justify thousands of dollars that I'd have to end up spending again in a few years as the picture fades.
Since Oracle's stated goal was to simply buy PeopleSoft to destroy their product line (something which I still can't believe the judge is letting them get away with), wasn't there a poison pill that if Oracle discontinued their product they'd be liable to refund every customer in full? What happened to that?
Slashdot Mirror
Vader grabs developer by his neck
Vader: Where is the source code you wrote?
Vader lifts him off his feet
Vader: What have you done with those binaries?
As I recall, weren't there multiple "standards" for audio CDs way back when? I seem to remember seeing CDs that were either tagged DDD, DAD, ADD, or AAD - depending on how "digital" the disc really was. I believe DDD meant it was digitally recorded, digitially mixed and digitially transfered, which was the highest quality you could get. That was popular on classical music CDs. But most popular music CDs were of the much lower AAD quality, because they were just reusing the original analog masters.
I really wish TNT wouldn't do that. It's not so much the upconversion, as if upconversion is done right, it can be almost watchable. My problem is with their stretching technique to fit 16:9. They do some kind of weird "partial" stretch process, where the center of the picture is left almost normal aspect, but as you approach the edges of the picture, it starts to stretch out more and more. The result, at first glance looks pretty good, as long as your attention is drawn to the center of the frame. But when something covers both the center frame, and reaches out to the edges, it gets REALLY distorted and doesn't look good at all. And it presents a very disorienting fish-eye lens effect when the camera pans over static content.
HBO-HD looks fantastic, however. I've been marveling over Batman Begins lately. The picture quality for that rivals DiscoveryHD.
Well, this particular carbon-unit infesting the third planet is NOT impressed.
If you think the launch was bad, you should see the game now.
Overall, even with all the faults that SWG had at launch, it still was really one of the most innovative MMORPGs out there. You really could follow your own path in the game. It appealed to all kinds of people, both male and female. If combat was your thing, there was plenty of choice in that path, and plenty of challenge. If you'd prefer to sit on the sidelines, non-combat professions were a very valued part of the community. Even people who just prefered the social aspects of the MMO world could server a purpose. From a community simulation perspective, it was easily the most flexable game around.
But, there was a serious lack of game content at launch. Promised features like player cities and vehicles were conspiciously missing from the game. Other features like instanced battlefields that could support massive numbers never worked correctly outside of the test lab and were abandoned shortly after launch. Quests would lead nowhere (Vader says, "Go speak to the Emperor." The Emperor says, "Go speak with Vader."). The overall point of the game (the Galactic Civil War) wasn't even really implimented, as PvP battles served no purpose other than virtual chest beating and bragging rights, and had no big-picture impact on the game. The game itself was beautiful, but shallow. Players tried their best to make up their own content, with player-hosted events and pointless (but still fun) battles in NPC cities. But by December of '03, the game was really bleeding subscriptions badly.
Then, some brilliant person at SoE decided that what everyone really wanted was to be a Jedi, and that would magically stop the exodus from the game. So, instead of adding the missing content, they dangled the prospect of unlocking a Jedi character in front of every player (something they had promised would not be the case). And it did keep a certain element from cancelling. Thus was born the Great Holiday Hologrind, which severly damaged the social aspects of the game, and also wrecked havoc on what had been a fairly healthy in-game economy.
Eventually it was passed around that the big, mysterious secret to unlocking it was nothing more than just mastering every profession in the game in turn. Now, Jedi were originally planned to be *extremely* rare, even to the point of being random and only a handful on each server. Since god-mode characters are generally not a good idea in an online game, their power would be offset by the threat of perma-death for the character, forcing you to start all over again. When enough people started unlocking Jedi characters, the ritilan-addicted "power gamer" element whined and complained about perma-death, SoE capitulated, and it was removed. Now, you had high-level Jedi running around one-hit killing everyone with no consequences. Even if by some miracle you took one down, it did little good. PvP battles became nothing more than competitions to see which side could pull out the most Jedi. People who had no interest in playing Jedi (otherwise defined as "subscribers with real long-term potential") were forced into hiding.
SoE made one blunder after another after that. Each modification to game balance seemed to throw the game further and further off-base. This can directly be traced to overpopulation of Jedi and the fact that they were never meant to be a balanced profession in the first place. The type of player who was attracted to playing a Jedi (and who could sit there and grind combat XP for 16 hours a day for a month) seemed to be the type of person who had little to no patience for complex combat systems that required forethought and strategy. So, SoE took their unique "HAM" multi-health-bar system, and turned it into EQ-style combat, dumbing it down to simple hack-and-slash.
Eventually, SoE made the amazing decision to eliminate the profession system altogether, and force everyone into clones of the same 8 "classes" and dub it the "New Game Experience". They completely eliminated
This is great to hear. Because, you know... movies based on video games have such a stellar record.
Because there's nothing more exciting than watching a room full of Ritalin-addicted 14-year-olds "pwn" each other at Halo all day.
Just as a side note, I've seen it suggested in several places that you turn off or ignore the status display on the Prius. Not for any safety reasons, but because people will tend to fret over the gas mileage and try to manipulate the electric/gas power mix instead of trusting the computer to make that decision for them. You'll almost ALWAYS end up with worse gas mileage, compared to just driving normally.
It wasn't until later in the series that they discovered that. Originally, they called her an alien.
You mean Leroy Jenkins? That's still sort of an MMORPG-isolated fad. It hasn't spread out to the web at large for the most part. You kind of have to be a MMO gamer to appreciate it, anyway.
If so many Windows developers weren't so utterly lazy, and learned how to code an application that doesn't require administrator rights to run, things would be a lot easier. As it is, there are so many poorly-written apps out there that write to admin-only places in the registry, or dump files that need to be modified into system folders, that in a lot of large companies with a plethora of apps it's almost impossible to switch to a true LUA security model.
Of course, a lot of the blame goes to Microsoft for encouraging the idiotic "everyone's an admin!" mentality.
I would say he's actually a very good storyteller. The movies he's done (with the terrible exception of Howard the Duck) have had very appealing storylines, the themes have spoken to a lot of people. He is, however, not a very good screenwriter. Horrid, stilted dialog, endless cliches, dysmal romance. His directing is suspect as well. Visually, he's an outstanding director, but he doesn't work well with actors, often getting very wooden performances out of them
It's why the most hailed of the Star Wars films was ESB, where he left dialog up to others and let a decent director deal with the actors.
Actually, if you read Paramount's statement carefully, it's worded a little oddly. It basically states that Enterprise on UPN is through. I thought it was strange they specified UPN, especially with all the talk about moving the show to another channel...
"Post-Genomic Era"? What, is Jon Katz back, and ghostwriting this time?
At least, thankfully, Mozilla DOES respond. How many years did it take for IE to finally even get pop-up blocking?
The system could be a thousand times better if "broadcasters" and "channels" went the way of the dodo and left us buying our shows directly from the people who make them.
It would be better for consumers, without a doubt. But studios and stations would never go for it. They make a lot of money creating tripe and convincing clueless ad execs that it's worth gold. Which is why you get so many terrible one-season shows which you wonder why anyone ever greenlighted it in the first place. It isn't about longevity and high viewership for those kinds of shows, it's about having a dirt-cheep budget and squeezing as much money as they can out of advertisers before they catch on and start to complain about the numbers.
In the pure on-demand model, they would be forced to produce quality shows, or it would directly affect their bottom-line almost right away. If it's crap, no one watches, meaning no one pays for the show, meaning they can't afford to take the viewership hit on it, even for short term. That's completely foreign to their current business model.
As I recall, a couple years ago Intuit came under fire for their production activation scheme and their draconian copy protection in TurboTax, which secretly installed code in the boot sector of the hard drive to prevent the CD from being copied, but also apparently caused some CD writers drives to stop working properly and was near impossible to get rid of. It turned into a major PR nightmare for them, as word spread quickly across the internet of what TurboTax was doing to people's PCs. A good number of their customers left for TaxCut. Several months later, Intuit was forced to admit publically what a dumb decision it was.
Well, it appears that Intuit did not learn their lesson, as this is likely to turn into another PR nightmare for them. How do companies become so dumb?
And what happens if the machine you're legitimately trying to update can't be put on the internet? I remember during the blaster virus, some of our laptops were getting infected so fast, we had to make sure the remote users did NOT get online, and we had to send them the security update and blaster cleaner on disk.
So, under Microsoft's new model, we wouldn't have been able to fix those machines, because as soon as we let them on the internet to "validate" their copy of Windows and download the patch, they would have been reinfected and rebooted. Lame.
Oracle claims that they will continue to support PeopleSoft products for 10 years, and keep up development commitments. But in reality, Ellison has no interest in PeopleSoft products. He bought it simply to destroy a competetor, nothing more, nothing less.
Look for Oracle's "support" to mean "force you into our inferior product line"
Actually, there already *were* limits, very much like you mentioned, in place. Unfortunatly, Congress under pressure from big media companies, have continued to extend the expiration time of copyrights, so essentially there are no more copyright limitations. Add in to that, that corporations don't die and are treated like people, and you've got infinate copyrights, in direct opposition to the original intent of copyright law.
I've even done an entire RedHat 9 install via iLO on an HP Blade server, using iLO's 'Remote Device' function. It makes use of the client's CD or floppy drive as a local device for the server, including boot capability. You can also attach disk images as local drives.
HP Proliant servers all can make use of Integrated Lights-Out for remote administration, including a remote console through your web browser. I very rarely need a crash cart in the data center since we've started using iLO. A lot nicer to just open a URL, instead of wheeling the cart over to it.
Makes sense. Plasma TVs are not really worth it, money-wise. Beautiful picture, yes, but they have a fairly limited lifespan as the gas starts to lose its charge. I couldn't justify thousands of dollars that I'd have to end up spending again in a few years as the picture fades.
Since Oracle's stated goal was to simply buy PeopleSoft to destroy their product line (something which I still can't believe the judge is letting them get away with), wasn't there a poison pill that if Oracle discontinued their product they'd be liable to refund every customer in full? What happened to that?
Heh... this is why I had to lay off of watching Law & Order on TNT. Once I watched one all the way to the end, I'd end up watching 2 more.
It's an effective tool to keep viewership.