"Didn't I ride on one of these sort of things at Epcot center a decade ago? It was a recumbent bike with a monitor above my head, showing a "tour" of famous cities + Disney parks, the speed of which varied by the speed I was pedaling."
Yep.
It was about as exciting as the movie Rollerball.
I bet these things would have been a hit if they played porn instead. "If I pedal backwards, she becomes a virgin!"
"this is stupid...go ahead, mod me down. its my honest opinion"
You won't get modded down for having an honest yet harsh opinion. What will get you modded down is a lack of reasoning as to why you think it's stupid.
I agree with you, it is stupid. But at least say what about it bugs ya the most.
Games via the ol excercise bike have been around well over 15 years. Granted, I'm not sure there was ever a mass market product, but it's been done. Nobody cared.
Know what would work? The 'Dance Revolution' game. (I apologize, the name escapes me...) That's already out and in stores. I think I could stand to exercise that way. Riding a bike, unless I'm actually going somewhere, is not fun.
"(I remember a friend not knowing her new 25yr old boyfriend was a virgin when she popped his cherry because he lasted a while. He of course had loads of porn on his machine)."
Popped his? Wow. I bet that hindered his efforts to sit down and browse the porn on his computer.
'But that's my experience. I'm interested to know if your experiments with the Gimp uncovered some other ways in which it's clearly inferior to PS."
I haven't personallh used it in quite a while. It wouldn't be worth mentioning the problems I had then because they've had many many months to improve since then. However, I do have a coworker that plays with it quite a bit. He does more than resizing cropping, but I wouldn't say he comes close to doing what I do. He keeps running into basic little problems that frustrate him, thus turning me off.
To put it simply: I'm not well informed today. Part of the point of my post was that some of my resistance to Gimp is my own zealousy about Photoshop. As a matter of fact, in light of what you said, I'm going to go play with their latest version and give it another shakedown.:)
"Yeah, only that you'll need a card that will compress it. And then it'll pretty much lose the point. I doubt even modern computers can compress 1024x768 video at 60 fps in real time. Decompression is usually much faster than compression, BTW."
Yep, you're right. That's basically what USB devices do today anyway. We'll reach that point eventually.
"Heh, the idea of an USB monitor is really funny. Let's see... 1600 x 1200 x 4 (32bit color) x 75 Hz = 549 MB/s 1024 x 768 x 4 x 75 = 225 MB/s 640 x 480 x 2 (16 bit color) x 75 = 43 MB/s USB2 badwidth: 480Mbps = 60 MB/s Pretty useless I'd say. Besides in USB2 the computer needs to control the data transmission, so the 480Mbps hasn't been reached in practice. Add to that the overhead of the protocol and maybe a device or two on the bus... and then the 133 MB/s limit of the PCI bus which might be saturated with hard disks or a sound card."
It could be done with real-time data compression, like MPEG4. The bandwidth for HDTV is nowhere near as high as you've got listed up there.
"Then why would you be considering hundreds of dollars for a new video card when you can probably get a replacement motherboard for under $50?"
Maybe he doesn't want to void his warranty? I don't know what he's got going, but my gf has an eMachines with a pretty good warranty. If it dies within 3 years of purchase, they'll just replace the machine. Anything they replace it with today is bound to be faster than she has now.
"It's a nice start and definately points out some things developers should be aware of. But how about someone puts together a more specific checklist/tutorial for each point and write it around their favorite development language (PHP, ASP (cough), etc.). Who's not busy?"
"I'm forming a team to identify dead weight in this company. Any volunteers?"
"While this is stuff that matters, it certainly isn't news. Folks have been making the same sloppy mistakes and careless oversights since AOL was trading at $140/share. (And that's a long time ago.)"
I'm gonna haveta defend Slashdot here. It may not be news, but/. babbles on and on about security and rarely goes into detail like this about what we can do about it. I only picked up PHP a year ago and just from reading some of the posts here, I've gone back over code I've written to make sure I didn't make those mistakes.
Just because it's not a new topic doesn't mean it's not new to some people. Frankly, I'd rather read old articles like this than the usual finger pointing at Microsoft.
"I'm faster with Photoshop on my PC than anybody else is with Photoshop on Mac because I'm better at using Photoshop than they are. So nerr."
Well, judging from my flamebait and off-topic moderations I'd say that my point didn't make itself very well. Okay, I guess I have nobody to blame but myself about that.
The point I was making is that processor speed is not my biggest impedement to using Photoshop or any other digital editing package. You could sit me down in front of a P3 550 (as long as it has sufficient RAM) and I'll barely know the difference. The biggest improvements to productivity that I've had were not from computer upgrades, but rather from my knowledge of how the software works.
So yeah, my apologies to the moderators who didn't get my point, but I really wish you'd have asked me questions about what I meant before striking me down.
"Not really.. as great as the GIMP is, it still has a ways to go before it can pry photoshop out of the cold dead hands of the people who use photoshop what it is intended for rather than just for general cropping and resizing."
I can vouch for that. Paying $150 every so often (plus the $600 tag to start) is somewhat painful, but my experiments with Gimp didn't prove fruitful enough for me.
Let me explain some things, though:
a.) I already have PS paid for. So for me to switch to Gimp, it has to be better. Price tag isn't everything.
b.) I already have a well established workflow with PS and no real bottlenecks (that I'm aware of) that Gimp has the opportunity to fix. So, for me to adopt it (or evaluate it) then they'd have to do something Photoshop doesn't do. I guess this makes me a Photoshop zealot. At least I'm honest!
c.) As long as Adobe keeps making really big updates to PS every year or so, they keep my attention. Gimp would have to ride that wave to keep me on board. So far, it feels like they're playing catch up.
I realize my reasons aren't entirely rational, but I can imagine that there's a significant portion of the PS population that shares or would share similar feelings.
Adoption of Gimp may happen in a year or two, particularly when Linux becomes more and more attractive to the digital artist. (Note: I'm not implying Gimp's only on Linux, but rather that Photoshop is not on Linux...) Today, though, it's not all that interesting in any way other than for the visionary. Us artists would just like to get our work done.
Black CDRs are available [cdrplanet.com]. The purpose of that color was to mask the amount of data that was on the CD, as previous reply pointed."
Correction, black CDRs are available... today. They were not when the PS was originally released and not for quite a while after that.
I have absolutely no doubt that you're right about the data masking. However, it has been mentioned, more than once in publications (probably EGM) that they liked the ability to make the CD's distinct to avoid piracy.
Sounds like they had all kinds of reasons to use those and few to not use them. Heh.
"Then don't pay. You TiVo will still work to record live stuff, pause live stuff, etc... without the subscription."
Is that your experience? Do you have one? I'm not challenging you nor accusing you of spreading falsehoods, I'm asking you because when I went shopping for one I was informed that I had to have a landline.
If you're credibly telling me that's not true then I withdraw my complaint. (I apologize in advance, I didn't know a more tactful way to say that.)
Price wasn't part of the debate. Even if it was, that's a one time cost. If Snapstream goes down, you don't suddenly lose your ability too record.
"And it records to your PC, so you would have to get TV-out cables (and possibly a new video card) to go to your TV."
If you really really want to watch it on your TV that bad, spend "Plus, what if your TV is in one room and your PC is in the other?"
That's a flawed and unlikely scenario. If you're willing to sit at your computer and do work on it, then you're willing to watch interesting content on it. Watching it on a TV, at best, is better because you have a couch to sit on.
"Thanks, but I'd rather have a TiVo and not be required to throw a PC into the mix."
Different strokes for different folks. However, I wasn't making the argument to use Snapstream instead of TiVo. Somebody didn't like my comment about wanting better service for that amount of money, and I very specficially answered that person's questions. I wasn't saying one was better than the other. That was a bad presumption you made.
In using Snapstream, though, I've found that there are some subtleties to it that I didn't expect. For one thing, I can capture an entire series and save it. I captured an entire run of Quantum Leap and have it sitting on a Firewire drive right now. At any time I want, I can start watching the show from beginning to end. That's 5 seasons worth. Also, my home is networked. (not wirelessly) Every member of my family has their own computer, plus I have a laptop. I have no trouble hiding in the room that nobody is in and watching my show at my leisure. Tivo does not have any equal to this.
I have an unusual setup at home. I have dual monitors. Sometimes, if I'm trying to catch up on a show, I'll have it going on one monitor while I'm doing my nightly web surfing on my main monitor. It's a nice multitasking use of my time. I can't imagine everybody'd like that, but I personally think it's great.
I may still get a Tivo or similar device as a compliment to my existing. The main reason is that the Snapstream setup, though wonderful for capturing a Series (as opposed to an episode), it's not so good at getting the random "oh I'd like to catch that!" moment that comes up.
I'll tell you something, though: It's damn cool going on a business trip, staying in a hotel, and having a bunch of shows ready to watch on my laptop. Seems like there's never anything good on TV in a hotel.
"All-in-all, I figure if I can spend $12/month to support my Earth And Beyond habit, I can shell out $10/month for Tivo."
That'll all come to a sudden stop if Tivo goes out of business. If Eisner has his way, you'll find one day that you're not paying $12 a month anymore, and you're not recording shows anymore.
If TiVo goes dark, your PVR will too. For the price they want, that tends to scare some people off.
"who has 100,000 jpegs images, thats some collection buddy:*)"
I do. But then again, I'm an IE user and I'm not very good at cleaning out my temp folder. Instead, I just buy a new computer whenever the one I have gets slow.
"It's also lumped in with my DirecTV bill, so I don't get a separate "TiVo bill" that I have to worry about paying. What is the big deal?"
The big deal is that they require the subscription. What if I don't want those features? What if I don't want to (or can't) hook the machine up to a phone line or even the internet?
I almost bought a TiVo a year or two ago, but couldn't because I didn't have a landline in my apartment. Things are different today, but now I'm worried that Tivo will a.) Go out of business or b.) Get sued to the point that their service is restricted, and that $200-$400 lump of metal and plastic I bought is suddenly worthless.
I understand that it's worth $5. I'm not complaining about spending the money, but I am worried about Eisner having his way.
Slashdot Mirror
"Didn't I ride on one of these sort of things at Epcot center a decade ago? It was a recumbent bike with a monitor above my head, showing a
"tour" of famous cities + Disney parks, the speed of which varied by the speed I was pedaling."
Yep.
It was about as exciting as the movie Rollerball.
I bet these things would have been a hit if they played porn instead. "If I pedal backwards, she becomes a virgin!"
"this is stupid...go ahead, mod me down. its my honest opinion"
You won't get modded down for having an honest yet harsh opinion. What will get you modded down is a lack of reasoning as to why you think it's stupid.
I agree with you, it is stupid. But at least say what about it bugs ya the most.
*preach preach preach*
Games via the ol excercise bike have been around well over 15 years. Granted, I'm not sure there was ever a mass market product, but it's been done. Nobody cared.
Know what would work? The 'Dance Revolution' game. (I apologize, the name escapes me...) That's already out and in stores. I think I could stand to exercise that way. Riding a bike, unless I'm actually going somewhere, is not fun.
"(I remember a friend not knowing her new 25yr old boyfriend was a virgin when she popped his cherry because he lasted a while. He of course had loads of porn on his machine)."
Popped his? Wow. I bet that hindered his efforts to sit down and browse the porn on his computer.
"So with one hand I hold my phone, and the other I, er, um, "use" the porn - then what hand do I use to drive the car with?"
Well, place yourself up against the steering wheel properly and you could use it like a Joystick. Just don't rear-end anybody.
"So with one hand I hold my phone, and the other I, er, um, "use" the porn - then what hand do I use to drive the car with?"
You sound like a prime candidate for a hands-free kit.
"Pr0n... is there anything it can't do?"
Get you laid?
"... if only we could all learn to masturbate to our imaginations."
We can, but our imaginations can't keep up with demand.
'But that's my experience. I'm interested to know if your experiments with the Gimp uncovered some other ways in which it's clearly inferior to PS."
:)
I haven't personallh used it in quite a while. It wouldn't be worth mentioning the problems I had then because they've had many many months to improve since then. However, I do have a coworker that plays with it quite a bit. He does more than resizing cropping, but I wouldn't say he comes close to doing what I do. He keeps running into basic little problems that frustrate him, thus turning me off.
To put it simply: I'm not well informed today. Part of the point of my post was that some of my resistance to Gimp is my own zealousy about Photoshop. As a matter of fact, in light of what you said, I'm going to go play with their latest version and give it another shakedown.
"Yeah, only that you'll need a card that will compress it. And then it'll pretty much lose the point. I doubt even modern computers can compress 1024x768 video at 60 fps in real time. Decompression is usually much faster than compression, BTW."
Yep, you're right. That's basically what USB devices do today anyway. We'll reach that point eventually.
It could be done with real-time data compression, like MPEG4. The bandwidth for HDTV is nowhere near as high as you've got listed up there.
"Then why would you be considering hundreds of dollars for a new video card when you can probably get a replacement motherboard for under $50?"
Maybe he doesn't want to void his warranty? I don't know what he's got going, but my gf has an eMachines with a pretty good warranty. If it dies within 3 years of purchase, they'll just replace the machine. Anything they replace it with today is bound to be faster than she has now.
Slashdot's all about choices.
"It's a nice start and definately points out some things developers should be aware of. But how about someone puts together a more specific checklist/tutorial for each point and write it around their favorite development language (PHP, ASP (cough), etc.). Who's not busy?"
"I'm forming a team to identify dead weight in this company. Any volunteers?"
"While this is stuff that matters, it certainly isn't news. Folks have been making the same sloppy mistakes and careless oversights since AOL was trading at $140/share. (And that's a long time ago.)"
/. babbles on and on about security and rarely goes into detail like this about what we can do about it. I only picked up PHP a year ago and just from reading some of the posts here, I've gone back over code I've written to make sure I didn't make those mistakes.
I'm gonna haveta defend Slashdot here. It may not be news, but
Just because it's not a new topic doesn't mean it's not new to some people. Frankly, I'd rather read old articles like this than the usual finger pointing at Microsoft.
"Basically is $theme isn't set then it uses some default theme, but alternate themese can be set in the url e.g."
Dude.. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Thank you.
"I'm faster with Photoshop on my PC than anybody else is with Photoshop on Mac because I'm better at using Photoshop than they are. So nerr."
Well, judging from my flamebait and off-topic moderations I'd say that my point didn't make itself very well. Okay, I guess I have nobody to blame but myself about that.
The point I was making is that processor speed is not my biggest impedement to using Photoshop or any other digital editing package. You could sit me down in front of a P3 550 (as long as it has sufficient RAM) and I'll barely know the difference. The biggest improvements to productivity that I've had were not from computer upgrades, but rather from my knowledge of how the software works.
So yeah, my apologies to the moderators who didn't get my point, but I really wish you'd have asked me questions about what I meant before striking me down.
I'm faster with Photoshop on my PC than anybody else is with Photoshop on Mac because I'm better at using Photoshop than they are. So nerr.
"Not really.. as great as the GIMP is, it still has a ways to go before it can pry photoshop out of the cold dead hands of the people who use photoshop what it is intended for rather than just for general cropping and resizing."
I can vouch for that. Paying $150 every so often (plus the $600 tag to start) is somewhat painful, but my experiments with Gimp didn't prove fruitful enough for me.
Let me explain some things, though:
a.) I already have PS paid for. So for me to switch to Gimp, it has to be better. Price tag isn't everything.
b.) I already have a well established workflow with PS and no real bottlenecks (that I'm aware of) that Gimp has the opportunity to fix. So, for me to adopt it (or evaluate it) then they'd have to do something Photoshop doesn't do. I guess this makes me a Photoshop zealot. At least I'm honest!
c.) As long as Adobe keeps making really big updates to PS every year or so, they keep my attention. Gimp would have to ride that wave to keep me on board. So far, it feels like they're playing catch up.
I realize my reasons aren't entirely rational, but I can imagine that there's a significant portion of the PS population that shares or would share similar feelings.
Adoption of Gimp may happen in a year or two, particularly when Linux becomes more and more attractive to the digital artist. (Note: I'm not implying Gimp's only on Linux, but rather that Photoshop is not on Linux...) Today, though, it's not all that interesting in any way other than for the visionary. Us artists would just like to get our work done.
*BrrrZZZaaaAAAAAaaaaaaaP*
It'll be really cool after it shorts.
"close but no cookie.
Black CDRs are available [cdrplanet.com].
The purpose of that color was to mask the amount of data that was on the CD, as previous reply pointed."
Correction, black CDRs are available... today. They were not when the PS was originally released and not for quite a while after that.
I have absolutely no doubt that you're right about the data masking. However, it has been mentioned, more than once in publications (probably EGM) that they liked the ability to make the CD's distinct to avoid piracy.
Sounds like they had all kinds of reasons to use those and few to not use them. Heh.
Cheers.
"Then don't pay. You TiVo will still work to record live stuff, pause live stuff, etc... without the subscription."
Is that your experience? Do you have one? I'm not challenging you nor accusing you of spreading falsehoods, I'm asking you because when I went shopping for one I was informed that I had to have a landline.
If you're credibly telling me that's not true then I withdraw my complaint. (I apologize in advance, I didn't know a more tactful way to say that.)
"SnapStream isn't free; it's $49."
Price wasn't part of the debate. Even if it was, that's a one time cost. If Snapstream goes down, you don't suddenly lose your ability too record.
"And it records to your PC, so you would have to get TV-out cables (and possibly a new video card) to go to your TV."
If you really really want to watch it on your TV that bad, spend "Plus, what if your TV is in one room and your PC is in the other?"
That's a flawed and unlikely scenario. If you're willing to sit at your computer and do work on it, then you're willing to watch interesting content on it. Watching it on a TV, at best, is better because you have a couch to sit on.
"Thanks, but I'd rather have a TiVo and not be required to throw a PC into the mix."
Different strokes for different folks. However, I wasn't making the argument to use Snapstream instead of TiVo. Somebody didn't like my comment about wanting better service for that amount of money, and I very specficially answered that person's questions. I wasn't saying one was better than the other. That was a bad presumption you made.
In using Snapstream, though, I've found that there are some subtleties to it that I didn't expect. For one thing, I can capture an entire series and save it. I captured an entire run of Quantum Leap and have it sitting on a Firewire drive right now. At any time I want, I can start watching the show from beginning to end. That's 5 seasons worth. Also, my home is networked. (not wirelessly) Every member of my family has their own computer, plus I have a laptop. I have no trouble hiding in the room that nobody is in and watching my show at my leisure. Tivo does not have any equal to this.
I have an unusual setup at home. I have dual monitors. Sometimes, if I'm trying to catch up on a show, I'll have it going on one monitor while I'm doing my nightly web surfing on my main monitor. It's a nice multitasking use of my time. I can't imagine everybody'd like that, but I personally think it's great.
I may still get a Tivo or similar device as a compliment to my existing. The main reason is that the Snapstream setup, though wonderful for capturing a Series (as opposed to an episode), it's not so good at getting the random "oh I'd like to catch that!" moment that comes up.
I'll tell you something, though: It's damn cool going on a business trip, staying in a hotel, and having a bunch of shows ready to watch on my laptop. Seems like there's never anything good on TV in a hotel.
"All-in-all, I figure if I can spend $12/month to support my Earth And Beyond habit, I can shell out $10/month for Tivo."
That'll all come to a sudden stop if Tivo goes out of business. If Eisner has his way, you'll find one day that you're not paying $12 a month anymore, and you're not recording shows anymore.
If TiVo goes dark, your PVR will too. For the price they want, that tends to scare some people off.
"who has 100,000 jpegs images, thats some collection buddy :*)"
I do. But then again, I'm an IE user and I'm not very good at cleaning out my temp folder. Instead, I just buy a new computer whenever the one I have gets slow.
"It's also lumped in with my DirecTV bill, so I don't get a separate "TiVo bill" that I have to worry about paying. What is the big deal?"
The big deal is that they require the subscription. What if I don't want those features? What if I don't want to (or can't) hook the machine up to a phone line or even the internet?
I almost bought a TiVo a year or two ago, but couldn't because I didn't have a landline in my apartment. Things are different today, but now I'm worried that Tivo will a.) Go out of business or b.) Get sued to the point that their service is restricted, and that $200-$400 lump of metal and plastic I bought is suddenly worthless.
I understand that it's worth $5. I'm not complaining about spending the money, but I am worried about Eisner having his way.