yeah, I seem to recall hearing something along these lines in grade/high school. Something like our bones aren't much different than an elephant's and this is the reason they aren't speed demons. They're so big and heavy that even if their muscles were strong enough to make them run as fast as cheetahs or jump as nimbly as lighter animals their bones wouldn't be able to withstand the forces. It's been a couple decades since I was in school and vaguely paying attention to the elephant talk that day, but it was something along those lines, hehe.
haha, yeah, 7-zip isn't 'weird' at all. I like how you try to make it sound like it's just as pervasive as something like gzip, even though 7-zip's a pretty much unknown format.
I never understood the point of exe compressors, once HDs made it past the megabyte stage, well, there wasn't much point. And it's worse for distribution, since your archiving program will compress it better anyways if you hadn't UPXed it. Whenever I get something that's been UPXed, the first thing I do is decompress it.
I believe DEP is on by default for IE anyways, so I'm not sure this is even necessary. I just tried the proof-of-concept test on my machine, and all it did was bring up some script prompt, didn't launch calc.exe as it should have. This is with the IE7 beta, btw.
not everybody knows what "set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Cdrom\AutoRun to 0" means, so I gave instructions on how to do it with a UI. How is that living in a complicated world? heh.
with the group policy editor: start run gpedit.msc local computer policy computer configuration administrative templates system turn off autoplay enable
or with tweakui: fire up tweakui my computer autoplay types remove checkmark from 'enable autoplay for cd and dvd drives'
everything I've seen lately says otherwise, they're still hitting the hard limiter as much as they can and then nudging the volume a few more steps and clipping it like mad.
backing off? I don't see anyone backing off, it's just getting worse and worse. Pretty much every popular music release I've seen in the last year or so has an absolutely insane amount of clipping on it. They've mashed it as hard as the limiter would let them, and then they simply turned the volume up a few more dB and let it clip like crazy. I run all my music through replaygain, and it's not uncommon to see values of -10, -11, and -12 on new CDs. That's crazy loud, always with crazy clipping. At least with rock music you can easily "fix" it with soundforge's/cooledit's clipping restoration tools, but with other types of music it doesn't seem to work too well. (Yes, I know this doesn't make it sound anything like the pre-clipped audio, but it most definitely sounds better without the clipping.) With rap and electronica this restoration process usually results in horrible clicking sounds on things like kick drums, similar to loud pops you'd hear on mangled records. But for whatever reason it works rather well with rock/metal music. I play music rather loud in my car, and I was burning out tweeters rather regularly for a while, I must have went through 4 or 5 pairs in the space of a year, year and a half. Then once I started doing this clipping restoration process on all my music, bingo, haven't blown a tweeter in about 2-2.5 years now. Obviously not everyone plays their music loud enough to have to worry about the heat limitations in their tweeters, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that's lost tweeters to the insane clipping out there. Although maybe not everyone might realize that it was because of the clipping in the source material that was causing it. You'd think there would be a class-action lawsuit in there somewhere;)
in Snapstream's BeyondTV, if you hit E or have a remote button assigned to E then you get a semi-transparent program guide without having to stop LiveTV/playback. The author of the article was unaware of this apparently, as he thought you had to stop playback of a recorded program or LiveTV to get to the program guide.
BTW, been using BeyondTV for over a year here, and couldn't be more happy with it. Had some trouble at first due to the capture card I was using (software-based) and after getting a pair of hardware encoder (hauppauge pvr-250) cards all was great.
has this guy not shared his new technique with anyone? I've only read this particular article about it, so I only know what it states about it. Which is nothing, it just says that this guy knows a better way to repair it now. Not that the medical community now knows. But that *he* knows. Well, he actually says 'we' but the rest of what's said is stated in a fairly cloaked manner, as if to say he knows and he ain't sharin'. You want it done, pay me 9 zillion dollars, or go get it done the old fashioned way by any of the other multitudes of surgeons that know that old technique. I'm probably just reading too much into the words used, I don't follow the medical community much. Don't they usually share everything?
I believe you meant to say "assembly" and not "assembler," as an assembler is to assembly code what a compiler is to C code. You write assembly code. You use an assembler to get your binaries.
let's see, I paid $45 for Half-Life in 1998...yup, still getting roughly 5 hours a week of gameplay out of that purchase. I'm sure there were times where I was getting about 28 hours a week out of it. Even being conservative and taking the 5 hours a week figure...7 years, 364 weeks, 1820 hours, that's less than 2.5 cents an hour;)
er, but it will still likely be a cold day in hell before I play any game on an on-going basis with a monthly fee involved, even without that initial purchase price. Monthly fees suck.
I will never buy any game that requires me to pay a monthly fee on top of an initial purchase fee. I don't really know if I'll ever play a game that requires a monthly fee, period, even without an initial purchase fee. With no initial purchase fee I might be more persuaded, but it's still unlikely. I don't care how good your game supposedly is, you won't be seeing my money. I've spoken with friends about this in the past, and the vast majority of them feel the same way I do. A monthly fee is bad enough, but also asking for an initial purchase fee, that's just insanity. If I buy a game, I should be able to play it. If I buy a game and can't play it because I can't (say I don't have a CC) pay a monthly fee, wtf sense does that make? You got my $60 or whatever already, but it was for nothing because I can't play the game. Now, if I can pay a monthly fee (say I do have a CC) but I have no idea if the game's going to be any good, well, paying that monthly fee once to see how it is might be a good idea for me. It'll be cheap, and it'll let me decide whether or not I want to continue playing the game. But there's no way in hell I'm going to buy a game for $60 and then pay a $15 fee on top of that just to see if I want to keep paying $15/month. As far as I'm concerned, any company that wants a monthly fee from me to play a game shouldn't be charging me a single cent for the initial purchase. That should be free, since it's useless without paying the monthly fee. If your game is SO good then you should be glad to risk having some people only pay you one monthly fee in hopes of the majority of them sticking around to pay monthly fees on an on-going basis.
creative's EAX and its occlusion and reverberation aren't anywhere near what Aureal/A3D did, sorry to tell you. A3D did very realistic HRTF calculations that actually gave you real 3D positional sound. What creative does is nowhere near the same. Put on some headphones with a good A3D game and you can tell where a sound is coming from along every axis. I remember playing Counter-Strike with my Aureal SuperQuad and the game's A3D 2.0 support and it was just astonishing. You could tell if someone was 160 degrees behind you and up above you on the next level just by how it sounded. If someone was directly below them you could also tell that just from the sound. The HRTF Aureal did, developed with NASA in case you forgot, was just amazing. Creative does NOTHING similar, at all. They've still got a long way to go. They were/are complete morons for not taking the tech they bought and putting it to use in their own sound cards. No matter how good Creative's stuff has been getting over the years, it still doesn't compare to the competitor they destroyed with their bigger marketing budget.
kinda OT, but kinda related - Nvidia did the same thing with 3dfx. No matter how good/bad you thought 3dfx's voodoo5 series was, it still does better antialiasing then every single card out today. In fact, it took until now with PCI Express SLI capability and their new SLI AA method to finally get comparable results to the voodoo5' AA quality. But even that only matches the v5's 2x mode, it still had the much better looking 4x mode. But somehow I doubt you'll ever see a motherboard capable of handling four PCI Express video cards to make it possible. Of course, if nvidia didn't have their heads partway up their asses they'd put the 3dfx technology that they bought to good use.
ok, they're doing instant messaging and voice communication now, but what about transfering files/directories to people? This feature seems to be missing, unless I'm blind. I still prefer to use ICQ since windows/msn messenger doesn't allow you to transfer entire directories of files, not to mention actually (uselessly/annoyingly) blocks certain filetypes. Google's client/service might be good, but until they've got file transfer capability, I'll never know.
actually that is what the power supply, powering the *whole system*, is drawing from the wall. That doesn't tell you much to do with how much the video card is drawing from the power supply. They're power-hungry video cards, no denying that, but they definitely do not draw 244 watts unto themselves.
actually, according to their docs, this new version gives users RSS feeds without the user even having to know wtf RSS is. It automatically sets the stuff up for you. So it isn't just another RSS feed reader, the feature sounds like it'd be rather handy and I don't know of any other doing this.
just use consoles? Sure. Just as soon as all the non-console-type games that are only available/possible on a PC make their way to consoles, along with the keyboards and mice/trackballs, steering wheels, and real joysticks. Unfortunately consoles will likely never be as good of a gaming platform as the PC. They just don't have the controls/controllers. They just don't have the RAM.
For that matter, why would I want to buy dozens of seperate devices to do seperate tasks when I can do them all on one machine? Don't even try to tell me you prefer to write on a typewriter versus using a word processing package on a PC...
Slashdot Mirror
actually, you just need to enter 'area 51' in the search entry box.
yeah, I seem to recall hearing something along these lines in grade/high school. Something like our bones aren't much different than an elephant's and this is the reason they aren't speed demons. They're so big and heavy that even if their muscles were strong enough to make them run as fast as cheetahs or jump as nimbly as lighter animals their bones wouldn't be able to withstand the forces. It's been a couple decades since I was in school and vaguely paying attention to the elephant talk that day, but it was something along those lines, hehe.
seriously, why is it that slashdot's hiring 14-year-old Counter-Strike players for editors now? Towing.
haha, yeah, 7-zip isn't 'weird' at all. I like how you try to make it sound like it's just as pervasive as something like gzip, even though 7-zip's a pretty much unknown format.
I never understood the point of exe compressors, once HDs made it past the megabyte stage, well, there wasn't much point. And it's worse for distribution, since your archiving program will compress it better anyways if you hadn't UPXed it. Whenever I get something that's been UPXed, the first thing I do is decompress it.
I believe DEP is on by default for IE anyways, so I'm not sure this is even necessary. I just tried the proof-of-concept test on my machine, and all it did was bring up some script prompt, didn't launch calc.exe as it should have. This is with the IE7 beta, btw.
I thought urine was sterile? Or does my doctor not know anything about bodily functions?
not everybody knows what "set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Cdrom\AutoRun to 0" means, so I gave instructions on how to do it with a UI. How is that living in a complicated world? heh.
Hold down shift? Just disable autorun.
with the group policy editor:
start
run
gpedit.msc
local computer policy
computer configuration
administrative templates
system
turn off autoplay
enable
or with tweakui:
fire up tweakui
my computer
autoplay
types
remove checkmark from 'enable autoplay for cd and dvd drives'
everything I've seen lately says otherwise, they're still hitting the hard limiter as much as they can and then nudging the volume a few more steps and clipping it like mad.
backing off? I don't see anyone backing off, it's just getting worse and worse. Pretty much every popular music release I've seen in the last year or so has an absolutely insane amount of clipping on it. They've mashed it as hard as the limiter would let them, and then they simply turned the volume up a few more dB and let it clip like crazy. I run all my music through replaygain, and it's not uncommon to see values of -10, -11, and -12 on new CDs. That's crazy loud, always with crazy clipping. At least with rock music you can easily "fix" it with soundforge's/cooledit's clipping restoration tools, but with other types of music it doesn't seem to work too well. (Yes, I know this doesn't make it sound anything like the pre-clipped audio, but it most definitely sounds better without the clipping.) With rap and electronica this restoration process usually results in horrible clicking sounds on things like kick drums, similar to loud pops you'd hear on mangled records. But for whatever reason it works rather well with rock/metal music. I play music rather loud in my car, and I was burning out tweeters rather regularly for a while, I must have went through 4 or 5 pairs in the space of a year, year and a half. Then once I started doing this clipping restoration process on all my music, bingo, haven't blown a tweeter in about 2-2.5 years now. Obviously not everyone plays their music loud enough to have to worry about the heat limitations in their tweeters, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that's lost tweeters to the insane clipping out there. Although maybe not everyone might realize that it was because of the clipping in the source material that was causing it. You'd think there would be a class-action lawsuit in there somewhere ;)
Unpossible! Seriously, stop hiring 15 year olds as editors. Some of us actually paid enough attention in school to learn how to spell.
this is exactly what I was going to respond with, gray to gray is much slower than black to white, etc
in Snapstream's BeyondTV, if you hit E or have a remote button assigned to E then you get a semi-transparent program guide without having to stop LiveTV/playback. The author of the article was unaware of this apparently, as he thought you had to stop playback of a recorded program or LiveTV to get to the program guide. BTW, been using BeyondTV for over a year here, and couldn't be more happy with it. Had some trouble at first due to the capture card I was using (software-based) and after getting a pair of hardware encoder (hauppauge pvr-250) cards all was great.
has this guy not shared his new technique with anyone? I've only read this particular article about it, so I only know what it states about it. Which is nothing, it just says that this guy knows a better way to repair it now. Not that the medical community now knows. But that *he* knows. Well, he actually says 'we' but the rest of what's said is stated in a fairly cloaked manner, as if to say he knows and he ain't sharin'. You want it done, pay me 9 zillion dollars, or go get it done the old fashioned way by any of the other multitudes of surgeons that know that old technique. I'm probably just reading too much into the words used, I don't follow the medical community much. Don't they usually share everything?
I believe you meant to say "assembly" and not "assembler," as an assembler is to assembly code what a compiler is to C code. You write assembly code. You use an assembler to get your binaries.
let's see, I paid $45 for Half-Life in 1998...yup, still getting roughly 5 hours a week of gameplay out of that purchase. I'm sure there were times where I was getting about 28 hours a week out of it. Even being conservative and taking the 5 hours a week figure...7 years, 364 weeks, 1820 hours, that's less than 2.5 cents an hour ;)
er, but it will still likely be a cold day in hell before I play any game on an on-going basis with a monthly fee involved, even without that initial purchase price. Monthly fees suck.
I will never buy any game that requires me to pay a monthly fee on top of an initial purchase fee. I don't really know if I'll ever play a game that requires a monthly fee, period, even without an initial purchase fee. With no initial purchase fee I might be more persuaded, but it's still unlikely. I don't care how good your game supposedly is, you won't be seeing my money. I've spoken with friends about this in the past, and the vast majority of them feel the same way I do. A monthly fee is bad enough, but also asking for an initial purchase fee, that's just insanity. If I buy a game, I should be able to play it. If I buy a game and can't play it because I can't (say I don't have a CC) pay a monthly fee, wtf sense does that make? You got my $60 or whatever already, but it was for nothing because I can't play the game. Now, if I can pay a monthly fee (say I do have a CC) but I have no idea if the game's going to be any good, well, paying that monthly fee once to see how it is might be a good idea for me. It'll be cheap, and it'll let me decide whether or not I want to continue playing the game. But there's no way in hell I'm going to buy a game for $60 and then pay a $15 fee on top of that just to see if I want to keep paying $15/month. As far as I'm concerned, any company that wants a monthly fee from me to play a game shouldn't be charging me a single cent for the initial purchase. That should be free, since it's useless without paying the monthly fee. If your game is SO good then you should be glad to risk having some people only pay you one monthly fee in hopes of the majority of them sticking around to pay monthly fees on an on-going basis.
creative's EAX and its occlusion and reverberation aren't anywhere near what Aureal/A3D did, sorry to tell you. A3D did very realistic HRTF calculations that actually gave you real 3D positional sound. What creative does is nowhere near the same. Put on some headphones with a good A3D game and you can tell where a sound is coming from along every axis. I remember playing Counter-Strike with my Aureal SuperQuad and the game's A3D 2.0 support and it was just astonishing. You could tell if someone was 160 degrees behind you and up above you on the next level just by how it sounded. If someone was directly below them you could also tell that just from the sound. The HRTF Aureal did, developed with NASA in case you forgot, was just amazing. Creative does NOTHING similar, at all. They've still got a long way to go. They were/are complete morons for not taking the tech they bought and putting it to use in their own sound cards. No matter how good Creative's stuff has been getting over the years, it still doesn't compare to the competitor they destroyed with their bigger marketing budget. kinda OT, but kinda related - Nvidia did the same thing with 3dfx. No matter how good/bad you thought 3dfx's voodoo5 series was, it still does better antialiasing then every single card out today. In fact, it took until now with PCI Express SLI capability and their new SLI AA method to finally get comparable results to the voodoo5' AA quality. But even that only matches the v5's 2x mode, it still had the much better looking 4x mode. But somehow I doubt you'll ever see a motherboard capable of handling four PCI Express video cards to make it possible. Of course, if nvidia didn't have their heads partway up their asses they'd put the 3dfx technology that they bought to good use.
The Core: 2003 The article: "assertions first made in 1996" Paying attention: not you
ok, they're doing instant messaging and voice communication now, but what about transfering files/directories to people? This feature seems to be missing, unless I'm blind. I still prefer to use ICQ since windows/msn messenger doesn't allow you to transfer entire directories of files, not to mention actually (uselessly/annoyingly) blocks certain filetypes. Google's client/service might be good, but until they've got file transfer capability, I'll never know.
actually that is what the power supply, powering the *whole system*, is drawing from the wall. That doesn't tell you much to do with how much the video card is drawing from the power supply. They're power-hungry video cards, no denying that, but they definitely do not draw 244 watts unto themselves.
actually, according to their docs, this new version gives users RSS feeds without the user even having to know wtf RSS is. It automatically sets the stuff up for you. So it isn't just another RSS feed reader, the feature sounds like it'd be rather handy and I don't know of any other doing this.
just use consoles? Sure. Just as soon as all the non-console-type games that are only available/possible on a PC make their way to consoles, along with the keyboards and mice/trackballs, steering wheels, and real joysticks. Unfortunately consoles will likely never be as good of a gaming platform as the PC. They just don't have the controls/controllers. They just don't have the RAM. For that matter, why would I want to buy dozens of seperate devices to do seperate tasks when I can do them all on one machine? Don't even try to tell me you prefer to write on a typewriter versus using a word processing package on a PC...